Kristi Maxwell, Re-, Ahsahta Press, 2012.

http://www.kristimaxwell.blogspot.com/


These poem cycles explore relationships both human and linguistic. Responsive (and responses) to the multiple connections between words, the poems create a narrative where intimacy and sensuality are revealed in the spaces between: “Logic a device that keeps wonder at bay. / The bay where they docked and will dock again.” The repetitions-with-difference of Re- suggest that the seemingly contradictory notions of stability and change are reciprocal.

“Observing the ‘he and she’ of Kristi Maxwell’s Re- at close range is like watching animals mate in the wild; we recognize the patterns of their daily intercourse as universal, such as when, ‘in unison, spoons move to their mouths . . . Like they are tracing intentionally the flight pattern of a bird.’ But also universal to couples is constant flux, the give and take of two people morphing around and into and out of themselves and each other to maintain the balance of what they’ve created together. Maxwell captures this in lines that constantly move and evolve, too: ‘When he is an ox, she alternates / between onyx and field to be tediously / plowed.’ And: ‘in the acre allotted to masculine which is nonetheless a mask / she frisked with her tongue to find the stash / of him who is both and not.’ Maxwell’s is a rich, playfully serious (and seriously playful) language that shape-shifts right in step with ‘him and her,’ leaving us agape at the layered acrobatics of what keeps a couple in sync.” —Laura Sims

The couple that travels through Maxwell’s fourth collection repays the closest attention: their odd interactions may speak to our own. Early in this sequence of short untitled poems, he and she come together in winter: “Wand-like, her touch on his arm pale as innards of gum wrappers/ and folded accordingly.” Later, perhaps during an evening out, their “bright bodies fight brightness with powder and clothes”; as they pack, or unpack, a kitchen, they learn “Fork-speak. Fork-tongued, they were undone/ by need to breach the rivers printed on their skulls,/ and dry.” Other segments (some guesswork is required) take place at a carnival, in a church, on rural travels, perhaps in bed: “When he is an ox, she alternates/ between onyx and field to be tediously/ plowed.” The title suggests that they break up and get back together, or that he and she re-acquaint themselves each day; it also warns, and encourages, us that some re-reading will be required if we are to rewrite our own domestic scripts, rather than emulating “their most precious robot/ he bought for them.” By turns acerbic and affectionate, the man and woman here regard themselves as Maxwell’s eye regards them both: if she is hard to interpret, at times, so are real people in real courtships or marriages. - Publishers Weekly

In her new book, Re-, Kristi Maxwell pursues the “she” and the “he” as the visible and ideological arc of an artfully syntactical language.   Echoed and reinforced by the title, “she” and “he” become generic appropriations of personhood, character, and identity.  These are not narrative poems, but the appeal of a lyrical bend towards language casts away any doubt of being able to appreciate the beauty of these short poems.  Maxwell has written in her author’s statement that she is interested in the “gene”, “the resemblance between the’ generic’ and the ‘generative’…that recalls patterns.”  So, re-what, exactly? Re-call?  Re-do?  Re-discover?  Re-linquish?  It shouldn’t matter in the end, save the knowledge of the prefix’s etymology: “re-“ denotes a before and an after: a once, then maybe a loss, and a once more again.  Perhaps, in the case of any tangible approach to narrative-meaning, a prior “she” and “he” and an after “she” and “he,” in all its supposed iterations. There are hints throughout, but they willingly withhold absolute
conjecture:


This image they know best:
bright light that denotes
the carnival they have yet
to attend. ..

This image of closer,
the closer they close in on
to secure an image of it.

“Closer” reads like “closure,” and nonetheless could be read as either noun or adjective, each way slyly altering the ultimate interpretation of meaning. What is definitive, however, is that “they” are active participants in the transmission of reference between the reader and these lyrics; some placement is possible. On the subsequent page of the sequence (the book is constructed of untitled lyrics in four titled sections), Maxwell writes:
In this undressing they called steam
for its pace and the lightness with which
they moved their feet from sock holes
so where their ankles had been
their ankles appeared still to be…

…they removed their garments,
for unto each other they undid themselves
individually and undulated their stadiums…

Something is obviously happening here, something concrete in the mind of the poet, but its transfer to language presents the problem of knowing. Not a problem of knowing on the reader’s part, but more on the level of linguistic apprehension and conclusion, so that what emerges in these lyrics is more than a focus on the generic; it is a generating of linguistic guiding and massaging.
Associative logic also plays to Maxwell’s strengths as a writer, as the logic never deflates or disregards the reader. In an intimate lyric, Maxwell writes of the pair’s commingling, as the “she” and “he” become more explicitly a formed union of “they”.

Their favorite knot was a kiss. Loose noose of lips and gruesome
tongue like a torn-open neck or one inside out, shirt-like, should they wear
the body to where bawdy bought all ballrooms where any body can rouge up the cheekbone of a chair by lounging just so.

Maxwell has also stated, this time in an interview, “I am a body, language is bodies, writing is bodies, I am bodies, and we are all inside and outside of one another.” The statement in itself is almost a poem, beautiful in its eloquent simplicity. And this section quoted above illustrates her thoughts best, in how the kiss of the “they” moves from a knot in a noose to a tongue to a shirt, which then moves to a ballroom, and finally returning back to the kiss by evoking the cheekbone. But it is the cheekbone of a chair, anthropomorphically lounging as the reader might expect the “they” to be doing. Circular in its logic, but also very associative, like playing a suggestive word game.
The balance of wordplay throughout the collection could easily fall by the way of annoyance, Heather McHugh-like, but the seriousness of tone (perhaps an appreciation or a respect for poetics) keeps the poems from sounding commonplace, balance being superbly achieved in Maxwell’s writing. Though obvious, the wordplay is never distracting. The repetitive sounds, creating close-homonyms, speak to the elusive and debatable constrictions and limits of language itself (and its reception on the eye/ear) which these poems explore. Maxwell’s clever punning, obvious as it is, never feels like her focus, again demonstrating her ability to control language and, by proxy, her abilities as a poet. Hers is not a hybrid-style, fusing the tenets of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and “less difficult, more narrative” poetry, as much as it is an emergent voice in younger American poetics which seeks to illuminate the ever-reductive denotation of words as they bounce off one another. Think of Matthew Henriksen or Brian Teare, who both bend the colloquial in a way which galvanizes contemporary American poetry.
This of course, and thankfully, is not the mode of language in which people speak, therefore Maxwell’s stellar poems draw attention to the importance of the genre’s medium; a particular focus on words is a focus on language (read, syntax) and vice-versa. What emerges, to quote Kristeva on poetry, is “language beyond language,” in part always there waiting to be discovered, and in part waiting to be fashioned. - Richard Scheiwe



A sample poem from the book:


from Cycle: Action/Figure

Gnats deconstruct
their breakfast fastidiously, feast-tediously.
Tiniest black teeth zooming low near the lower jaw
of the manilla folder colored table.
She takes her collection of dolls and he his darkest markers:
Dentist, she pleas, clean, and the doll’s teeth
become beyond the crack in the door
where light diets to a skeleton of light
laying patient as a train station.
It works well,
the platform where they perform
this construction. Vegetables coddled
in the cutting, thus zucchini lives its less remarkable
dream dreamed for it: Periscope with nothing
to spy. In unison, spoons move to their mouths, in unison
in a way more eerie than hunger in common. Like they are
tracing intentionally the flight pattern of a bird
when its wings are most upward.
Like this intentionality facilitates something.


An author’s statement:

 
David Thomas, The Book of Hieroglyphs, Lulu, 2012.


Download a PDF of excerpts. 

There's a blog site dedicated to the book.


The Book of Hieroglyphs is rock and roll. It does not present stories of drug fuelled debauchery. It is without amusing anecdotes of life on the road. There are no details of the deeply engrossing lives of rock musicians.

It is the essence.

"I'm having the pleasure of previewing David (Pere Ubu) Thomas' book of nonpoems called The Book of Hieroglyphs. Thomas refuses to call the pieces in this book poetry, says they are not the songs. I really don't care what you call them, and it's true that they are unlike anything you've ever read before, but what they are are zings, stings, word bullets that tell stories so condensed that your mind changes on every syllable." - Bob Holman








David Thomas, the frontman of the often cryptic and generally electrifying ‘rock band’ Pere Ubu, has moved beyond the aural and released a mesmerizing and bewildering tome of ‘lyrics’ and musings that probe the dark soul of the American Geography of Sound.
This is one of those strange creatures that belies any easy form of categorization. I have long been an admitted fan of the various aural incarnations of David Thomas’ work, from the avant garage surrealism of Pere Ubu to his outings with The Two Pale Boys. Thomas’ lyrics concoct landscapes and narratives from an alternate, bizarro rock world. And here many of those words are set in ink on paper like some gnostic papyrus.

But what, exactly, is The Book of Hieroglyphs (BOH)? It would be far, far too simplistic to describe it as a book of lyrics. For one thing, it is abetted with intense essay-forms alongside strange, surreal narrative musings. There will be an inevitable debate about the precise form(s) of this book, indeed the back cover description clears the runway for interpretation: “This is a poetry book that doesn’t look like a poetry book. It’s a novel that doesn’t look like a novel. It’s a story that doesn’t look like a story. It’s a film that doesn’t look like a film. It’s a song that doesn’t sound out loud.”

David Thomas has always refuted easy categorization. Cultural critic Greil Marcus’ begins his book The Shape of Things to Come – Prophecy and the American Voice with a cornucopia of myriad voices, with quotes from Noam Chomsky and The Reverend Jerry Falwell, Bob Dylan and Herman Melville. He immediately moves into the most lively account of the speeches of Martin Luther King imaginable, a brief but poignant history of the Puritans and the politics of Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, the voices of King and Lincoln, along with Kennedy, Clinton, Presley and Dylan haunt these pages like an unseen and unruly choir. At its core it is a strange grouping indeed. Essentially, and this is simplistic at best, Marcus focuses his discussion on the novelist Philip Roth, the filmmaker David Lynch, the poet Allen Ginsburg and David Thomas. Only Marcus could start a chapter on Pere Ubu with references to a 1953 essay by the historian Edmund Wilson on the American Civil War along with quotes from Moby Dick and Abraham Lincoln. But there can be little doubt that the juxtapositions work. Titling the section ‘Crank Prophet Bestride America’, Marcus raises Thomas’ work into the pantheon of great American voices. The BOH, as a solid, text-based object will either cement this claim or shatter it.

What can be definitively claimed is that The Book of Hieroglyphs is a strange, captivating book; a journey into the lost soul of America with its lipstick-stained coffee cups and perilous future.

“Thomas’ gnostic argument – that art exists to at once reveal secrets and to preserve them – makes sense of a particularly American – or modern – form of storytelling,” Marcus wrote in Double Trouble (Faber And Faber, 2000). “In a big, multifaceted democracy, you’re supposed to be able to communicate directly with everyone, yet many despair of being understood by anyone at all... Out of this comes an American language that means to tell a story no one can turn away from. But this language – identified by D. H. Lawrence in 1923, in Studies in Classic American Literature, as the true modernist voice, the voice of Hawthorne, Poe, Melville – is cryptic before it is anything else. It is all hints and warnings, and the warnings are disguised as non-sequiturs. The secret is told, but nonetheless hidden, in the musings, babblings, or tall tales of people who seem too odd to be like you or me, like us...”

21•C: The River (and bridges) are an ongoing theme in your work. To what extent are Twain and Conrad influences in this regard? What is the significance of the River – most especially the Mississippi (but in terms of American mythos could one consider the Mekong as well)?

DT: I don’t want to start this interview off bad but I’m not going to explain things. Shorn of mystery a musician is a used car salesman. Twain and Conrad are influences certainly. Clearly. The Mekong has no special meaning to me. I don’t live in Vietnam. I don’t cross the Mekong. It has no significance to me. I’m sure it does to others. A war was fought along it. A war was fought along the Mississippi. Neither river can be defined by those events. Each river approaches a state of timelessness. The respective wars are dots on the timeline. The river flows. People come and go. And the river flows.

There will be an inevitable debate about the narrative form of this book. Lyrics/poetry/narrative. By presenting much of this work according to poetic/lyric form you traverse an inevitable trap. I’ve tried to block out the musical element when reading the BOH (a difficult task to say the least). But if you were to eradicate the structural form of Perfume or Prepare For The End so that they read as pure, albeit experimental, narrative they would take on a different flavor altogether – did you consider tinkering with the form in that regard? (I’m thinking here of the more experimental fictions of such contemporary writers as Blake Butler (Scorch Atlas) or Ben Marcus (The Age of Wire and String).

More time was devoted to the form of BOH than any other element. It was a brutal process involving more than one all night/all day session of reworking EVERYTHING. Then throwing it all away and starting again. The effort became so physically draining that I believe it contributed to the illness that hospitalized me for a week in Intensive Care. At the end of the process certain principles prevailed. The overarching one is described in ‘Read Me First’ – you will of course recognize the title from every computer/software manual you’ve ever encountered. There I make it clear that, like a piece of music or a movie, it is meant to be consumed all in one go, in a short space of time, so that all information is processed simultaneously. Of course, this is not the way reading works. Reading is linear and time consuming. Still, that is its unreasonable demand. Hence the use of footnotes, narratives and essays. It is evolved from the hypertext model of Apple’s HyperCard program. As I said, there were many ways of organization that I attempted, including jumbling the whole thing up. I considered turning pieces like ‘Perfume’ or ‘Prepare for the End’ into prose. I considered turning it all into prose. I rejected the approach because it didn’t seem necessary. The stories are there in such a form that they accomplish all that is required from a narrative POV and they pull in the reader, hopefully, and engage the reader so that the reader’s imagination fills in the blanks personally. This has always been my approach to writing music. It comes from a childhood listening to radio dramas. Just the facts, ma'am. Just the facts. Prose encourages bad things like adjectives and adverbs. Gratuitous details and description. Who cares what a character is wearing, or what something looks like, or even what someone is thinking? Who am I to presume what one of my characters is thinking? Once assembled as you read it, it seemed to me to be successful as would be a movie script. The same characters appear throughout in a consistent narrative curve across a series of ‘scenes.’ You get it or you don’t. It’s not my job to spell it all out like I’m talking to children. No, I should rephrase that. If I was talking to children then they would take it as is. It’s not my job to spell it all out like I’m talking to stroppy teenagers or their insolent teachers. Just the facts.

Reading something like Prepare for the End without musical accompaniment is a jarring experience given that in the recorded version the 2PBs complete or help develop the overall narrative. I’m aware that the wording has shifted in this context – are they unrelated in this form?

Well, you put your finger on it there. There is a back story to every song I write. Sometimes it’s nothing more than a scene, a momentary glance out of a window by a character. From that back story I write a set of words and oversee a set of musical ideas and sounds that communicate the sense of the story in a hopefully forceful way. As part of the musical process expressive embellishments intrude, co-workers contribute. The song form itself demands concessions. And sometimes you just gotta fill in space between here and there so that the bridge works. Musical form makes use of repetition in an accumulative way so that the listener has time to process a change of scale or so that he can be placed in a series of recurring and moving POVs that bring into question assumptions he may be making or so that he can ‘see’ the narrative from differing and revealing angles. For BOH I stripped out elements that were musically-derived. I focused on the story and telling the story as succinctly as possible. As the story is shaped one way in a musical presentation, so it is shaped another way in a written presentation. The stuff looks like poetry in the same way that Pere Ubu songs ‘look’ like pop songs. You make use of that similarity for narrative and contextual purposes. I make it clear that I do not see these things as poetry. I do not presume to be a poet. I make up stories and tell them quickly with as little personal intervention as possible. I’m the sort of guy that watches a movie and sees only what’s in front of me. Then after it’s over my wife says, “The Harrison Ford character was a replicant, of course.” “What?!” “You know, the unicorn scenes.” Me, I just thought it was something they put in the movie.

I’ve often thought that ‘poetry’ per se died circa Ginsberg’s Howl to be then gently mutated by the likes of Dylan and Patti Smith – would you essentially agree with that?

I’m not qualified to say. It does seem that ‘poetry’ is of a certain time, a generational window that I feel no part of. Dylan wrote some cool songs. At the time I didn’t think I was supposed to perceive them any differently than Screaming Jay Hawkins, Johnny Cash or Bo Diddley. Naive, I guess. As for Patti Smith, it all left me a bit cold in a ‘gimme a break’ sort of mode. I loved Vachel Lindsay. When I was learning Anglo-Saxon I really liked the lean writing they did. Reminded me of Hemingway. I loved lots of the Beats for the immediacy. Too often the form of poetry obviates immediacy. To quote myself, “Maybe you see further than I can see. Maybe you and I just see things differently.” I am an American of the late 20th Century. Unrepentantly, I want it all and I want it NOW.

In talking about form could one equate the differences between sheer narrative/the essay and poetry to musical forms? eg; if you play ¾ time you get a blues variation, you play 4/4 time you get something along the lines of rock. Could an equivalent breakdown be made for poetry/essay/narrative?

Yes. Good analogy. I'll steal that one.

Yours – and you in fact emphasize this – is a distinctly American voice. What do you think distinguishes the ‘American’ from the ‘English’ or ‘European’ voice?

Since he comes up often, I'll leave that to Greil Marcus. Double Trouble (Faber And Faber, 2000), pgs. 167-168.

In Marcus’ The Shape of Things to Come – Prophecy and the American Voice he begins his book with a cornucopia of myriad voices, with quotes from Dylan, Lincoln and Melville. He raises your work into the pantheon of great American voices. Are you comfortable with these comparisons? Who would you add/subtract?

As regards Greil's book and my place in it I must confess that I have avoided reading it. I enjoy his work and I, naturally, flicked to the chapter on me first. I forced myself through part of the first page and found it impossible to continue. Who the hell is he talking about? Me?!? I do not suffer from false modesty. I am aware of my talents and abilities. But I simply could not face being considered in such exulted company. Abraham Lincoln and David Thomas? Who can read such things about themselves? I am a shlub pop musician with pretensions. Which is not to say that Lincoln was not a shrub county dog catcher with pretensions. Still, there are limits. My job is to keep moving, to keep pushing the boundaries of my field. Greil’s is to analyze. We each get on with our jobs. Greil’s field of vision is society, the Big Out There. My field of vision is my immediate surroundings.

Speaking of American voices – Raymond Chandler and the general sense of a noir sensibility runs through a great deal of your work. Literally the track/story Little Sister and elsewhere (was Bay City from Chandler’s short story Bay City Blues*?). When and how did Chandler impact on you?

The very first Pere Ubu song was ‘Heart of Darkness’ (1975). (‘30 Seconds Over Tokyo’ and ‘Final Solution’ were inherited from RFTT [Rocket From The Tombs, the predecessor of Pere Ubu].) It is a collection of Chandler quotes, paraphrases or derivations. The link to the cheesy horror fiction of Island of Lost Souls is another recurring theme of Pere Ubu songs. The Noir sensibility has been there from the beginning. The references to Bay City are clearly Chandler, and meant to be read that way. As a teenager I devoured all of Chandler. I revisit the books at least once a decade. How did it impact? The loosely drawn demarcation between prose and poetry. The romantic and Noir point of view. The deprecation of plot lines which serves to accentuate the notion of the hidden story – that things are going on beyond the grasp of Marlowe and the reader and the implicit partnership of narrative thereby established. The reader is engaged in the Narrative Voice of the book, drawn into the noble, flawed and possibly doomed pursuit of the Right Thing.

In New Orleans Fuzz Happy Francis tells Billy Two Toes to “Live Free or Die.” In the day and age of No Smoking rules, rules about just about every damn thing, is the notion of ‘freedom’ being utterly eroded. Is this a weird Puritan backlash? The result in part of 9/11? What are your thoughts on bureaucracy?

I like the Puritans. My family through my mother’s line arrived in America in those times. The Puritans have been unfairly stigmatized by Hawthorne and ever since. I am a ‘live free or die’ sorta guy. I do not react well to social engineering and bureaucrats. I do not believe you can pin the obliteration of the notion of personal freedom to the Puritans. It is a purely and wholly left wing imperative in modern times. This is not a political point. It’s simply observational. Anybody is free to do anything they want as long as they are willing to take the consequences. I have made all sorts of possibly disastrous decisions in my life and career. I have been willing to pay the price. I have never asked to be saved from myself and I resent any such attempt.

For an artist whose best work, arguably, is based on the highways of America or the sweaty environs of a place like New Orleans you have moved to England – a fact I find somewhat astonishing. What inspired that move?

Purely personal and family reasons.

Keeping on the road – your work is full of ghost towns, deserted or barely populated diners, loners and misfits. There’s a sense of demise or decline throughout. Do you see America in decline? Has the country lost its soul along with the Wilson Shute? These are stories of localized Armageddon as opposed to Cormac McCarthy’s generalized devastation in The Road, would you agree with that rather bleak view?

I haven’t read McCarthy’s book. As for the substance of the question, my feelings are complicated on this. It depends on what part of the day or what mood I’m in or what I’ve had to eat and how it’s sitting. Marcus paints me as a prophet in the Biblical sense – someone who warns of consequences. Let’s leave it that I warn of consequences. I see the things town away, or abandoned; the things lost there are consequences.

McCarthy’s book, like many other recent fictions from North America tackles the End Times – this would seem to be a particularly American obsession. Does that stem from Puritanical roots? The imbedding of Biblical language? (even the Constitution smacks of the Commandments at times).

I like the Puritans – definitely a people who have gotten the short end of the stick history-wise from self-righteous, self-satisfied and smug revisionists. All men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among them Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness. I know it by heart. I’m an American. I’d say the definition of an American is someone who knows that by heart. BY HEART. Modern democracy, the notion of individual destiny, is solely derived from Christian culture. I see no reason to apologize for it. Yes, there is a sense of End Times in America. In some places it is palpable. It’s a good thing to sense if for no other reason that it focuses the mind.

The words in Electricity; “the city does go mad/whispering in the dark” is particularly apocalyptic. Is the City inevitably the locus of the end?

No. It’s popular to think that – Blake onwards – but I don’t buy it.

In Ghosts you write of “something ancient, Something weary, Something hurt hangs in the air…” This abstract dread reminds me strongly of Lovecraft and, to a slightly lesser extent, Poe. There are hints of horror throughout the book, to what extent (dangerous terrain) would you describe these senses as “supernatural”? You do reference Charles Fort, which opens the floodgates somewhat.

A sense of dread, of something under the surface, lurking, pervades the Pere Ubu catalog. See ‘I Will Wait.’ Even the beginning of the Ubu recording career, ‘Heart of Darkness’ focuses right in on it. Fortean? Yes, but Fort was not about the supernatural in the Lovecraft sense. (Though I was an avid reader of Lovecraft as a teenager.)

The use throughout of footnotes smacks to me of a sneer towards academia. What was your motivation with footnoting certain elements? Obviously in the world of contemporary fiction David Foster Wallace pushed this tactic to extremes – an influence? (I was particularly reminded of DFW’s essay approach in Media Priests of the Big Lie, that ability to focus in on the apparently irrelevant, but in fact highly poignant, minutiae detritus of human life).

I have not read Wallace. I used footnotes as an extension of my approach to music – cram it all in. More info now. All songs I do reference other songs in my catalog, or sometimes iconic songs by other performers. I figured the way to do this in the linear structure of a book was footnotes.

Another literary sidetrack – Golden Surf has, ever since I first heard it and now reading it as prose, reminded me of the writings of Steve Erickson. Do you know his work?

I have not read Erickson. To clarify this point: I often say I don’t watch movies or read books unless a spaceship or baseball is involved. Which is not quite true cuz I read detective stories.

Yet another literary moment – in your discussions of automobiles – most especially the crash, in your case that of the locomotive – I wondered if you’d digested J.G. Ballard’s Crash and his own particular obsession with the automobile?

THAT I’ve read but I’m not aware of much crashing of cars in my work!

There are many references to Brothers and Bones throughout, most especially in the Green River section – who are they?

I hate answering questions like this! Clearly in Green River the bones and brothers are the dinosaurs buried in the hills. ‘Brother’ I usually use to address fellow wanderers as in‘Last of the Mohicans.’

You came up with the title Datapanik in the Year Zero in the mid-’90s which well preceded the fears inspired by the Y2K bug. Was this pure prescience? Similarly your manifesto which includes information as a sedative drug and dataflow as an imperative pre-empts the obsessive day and age of Twitter, Text and Facebook. How accurate does the notion of Datapanik seem now?

Actually John Thompson and I came up with Datapanik theory in 1976. The first release called ‘Datapanik In The Year Zero’ was an EP released in 1978. Datapanik, formulated as it was in the mid ’70s, is unnervingly prescient. I’d say. At that time computers and the internet were barely a gleam in a geek’s eye. We were looking at TV and pop culture. We were fascinated by advertisements and commercials. Loved used car salesmen on the TV. TV weathermen and local TV news techniques were also very influential to the devising of the theory. We studied what was going on and extrapolated.

Your footnote on p. 258 hones down being American as being based around the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence – but given the preceding pages where is Elvis? Or Robert Johnson or perhaps even arguably Iggy Pop in his Stooges years? Let alone the impact of Melville, Twain or Hawthorne? Or Martin Luther King? Or Poe, Chandler and Philip K Dick?

They’re all in there and derive from the Constitution and Declaration.

In your Biography you make the claim to have fixed the Great American novel. All readers love this blarney – Mailer versus Wolfe, Ben Marcus versus Jonathan Franzen. Books like Don DeLillo’s Underworld, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy have all at one stage or another been handed the poison cup… The Book of Hieroglyphs aside, what is in your pantheon of The Great American Novels?

The list begins and ends with Twain’s ‘Life on the Mississippi’ – not because it written better than anybody else but because it’s the one book you need to read to understand America. It’s Ice Nine somehow.

Archival addendum
I last interviewed David Thomas in the year 2000 for disinformation.com. It is reproduced here for die-had fans who haven’t collapsed after the last 3800 words.
 
 pere ubu: datapanik in the year 00

Encounters with the big man. An email discussion, a radio interview, a soundcheck, a dinner, a concert and a drinking session with David Thomas of Pere Ubu.

It all started as a rather odd email encounter when cultural critic Greil Marcus sent me an essay by Pere Ubu’s frontman David Thomas titled The Geography of Sound. At the time I was editing an art magazine. Thomas’ immense, rambling but thoroughly fascinating essay had me enthralled, but it sure didn’t fit an art magazine. Indeed, I’m not sure where it would or will fit, ever. In essence, Thomas' essay, sitting as of writing at around 10,000 words but growing every day, is about place and how that sense of place effects his – and all – creative output.
"Isolation preserves. Isolation clarifies," he writes. "I travel to confirm something I already know, that the sound of musical activity is as much about space and perspective – a geography of sound – as it is about the physics of vibration, or the aesthetics of melody, harmony and rhythm."
We discussed the piece via e-mail, or at least I attempted to discuss it and he grunted, if that’s possible via electronic mail. It didn’t take long to figure that David Thomas, even over the souless medium of email, was one seriously eccentric character. But hey, Pere Ubu remain one of the most influential and seriously ‘alternative’ bands in rock’n‘roll history.
“Culture as understood 100, even 50, years ago no longer exists,” says Thomas. “The only reason Mozart wrote music was to sell Calvin Klein perfume. Voltaire only wrote to sell Gauloises cigarettes. We live in a punk world. Malcolm McLaren said he invented punk music to sell clothes. Everyone laughed at his wit . . . those ironic Englishmen.
“We recognized the horror and truth behind it.
“Punk represented the victory of fashion over substance, of appearance over meaning, of attitude over content,” he says. “It was the tool by which culture was finally done away with, rock music’s evolution into literature short-circuited. Businessmen loved it. It was the victory of Madison Avenue just at the point that rock music was preparing to deliver William Faulkner, Henry James and Herman Melville. Punk and the Sony Corporation rode to the rescue.”
Thomas, of course, speaks from decades of relative obscurity and a position of remarkable influence. The band, formed in 1975 in Cleveland, Ohio, took the jarring discord of punk and gave it a new and poetic form. Thomas’ lyrics, often chilling, but always tongue-in-cheek, had a surreal edge. The band’s early albums, The Modern Dance (1978), Dub Housing (1979) and Datapanik in the Year Zero (1977) became instant classics in any self-respecting ‘avant-gardist’s’ record collection alongside Swans and Suicide, while their first single, 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, preempted many of the nihilistic themes of punk rock.
Their 1980s and early 1990s work was mixed, but their eleventh album, Pennsylvania (1998), suggests a new lease of life.
Pennsylvania's lyrics traverse a strange blend of nostalgia and manifesto-like rants against culture, inspiring Greil Marcus to write in the New York Times: “Pere Ubu may be a better band today than it has ever been; funnier, more doom struck and more passionate. Mr Thomas’s voice is that of a man muttering in a crowd. You think he's talking to himself until you realize he’s talking to you.”
Indeed, at times he has indeed sounded like the guy you try to avoid in the crowd. Thomas is known for his substantial girth and manic stage performances and at times his lyrics have veered into crazed rants; in the 1979 song, Lost in Art, he cries out in a panicked tone “Gimme, gimme, gimme. I want my shoes” over and over until you’re sure what he needs is a straitjacket and a hefty dose of valium. But Thomas’ more extreme moments seem calmed, at least in execution, on the latest record. Pennsylvania is a journey through a remembered landscape speckled with outraged, manifesto-like statements:
“Liars own the words and all the pictures in all the museums in the world are just shell and pea game played by the clever people to bilk the rubes.
“Reality is defined by the needs of the media… Culture is a weapon that’s used against us... culture is a swampland of superstition, ignorance and abuse.”
And David Thomas isn’t joking. In what may be one of the last true punk statements, Thomas happily dismisses almost all forms of culture in a simple broadside. “Visual art only exists to be decorative,” he says. “Nobody with serious ambitions can use the form. The day is past.”
However rock music almost passes muster. On the Pere Ubu Web site Thomas writes: “Rock music as an art is designed to communicate that which is beyond words. It's visionary, nonlinear, nonverbal, non-narrative, inarticulate. We’re dedicated to the art of cohesive, intelligent, nonverbal communication.”
Yet lyrics are an integral element of Pere Ubu's work, most especially on Pennsylvania. “I rarely write lyrics in a linear way,” says Thomas.
“There is a synthesis of vision and sound. The object is to shape sensation. Human consciousness, it seems to me, may exist as a form of complex, hieroglyphic sensation from which we pull the words that we need. Everything that I know seems to be encoded as sensation. I wouldn’t know a thought if it came up and bit me. When you ask a question the answer springs out of nothingness and I flap my gums. If I like the sound of what my voice speaks then I learn it by rote so that I can roll it out like a monkey the next time. The form of the words triggers a recognition of meaning.”
However compared to earlier Pere Ubu, the lyrics on Pennsylvania have more of a narrative quality. “I had a very specific setting in which I wanted the sensations of the art to be presented,” says Thomas. “This required that I use a more narrative approach... I also used [it] for the specific reason that I always say that I don’t use a narrative approach.”
Ironically, for a man who disputes the value of words in linear form, Thomas started out as a rock journalist. “There was an entirely different school of thought 20 or 30 years ago,” he says.
“Each album, believe it or not, was reviewed according to criteria that took into account whether the art of the form was being advanced, whether society and mankind itself was moving forward. I know it sounds bizarre, but it’s true. I was there. That’s a far cry from the current state of journalism. It’s simple why Captain Beefheart didn’t sell as much as Michael Jackson. In a punk world only the surface is saleable. The public is not at fault. The media is at fault. It is, in fact, your fault personally. I’m not speaking metaphorically. If you knew what you were doing there would be no crime or cancer or bad music. Shape up.”
Pennsylvania paints a metaphorical landscape; a roaming away from interstate highways, to places long gone but cherished in hindsight, a world where ‘culture’ is described via diners and bars, a world experienced first hand without the filters of contemporary social expectations.
“Pennsylvania is the space between where you are and where you want to be,” says Thomas. “Look at a map. Consider the breadth of our work. Over and over we set our songs in the spaces between: Montana, the west, the flats, the badlands, wildernesses, both urban and natural.
“Rock music is clearly a reflection of the American geography, both cultural and physical and it hangs as a literary format on the American understanding of space. The language and poetry are parochial, they're not catholic, they’re parochial, it’s a continuity in the nature of folk music fuelled by a core set of values derived from some synthesis of hillbilly, rural black and white middle class sensibilities. Rock music is a refection of American geography, no other geography.”
Despite travelling the world on tour, new continents barely register on the creative process. “Of course not,” he says bluntly. “How can it? If I can read some French and you asked if that affected my use of the American language well, no. Geography is a language. By geography I don’t just mean the rivers and canyons, but how geography changes culture. I understand the language of where I come from and by extension the lands that are attached to it.”
Other geographies remain alien: “I haven’t seen the various ways the sun moves across the bay and the way that this building was built and was torn down and the universal vibration machine shop that was there and has gone. All this stuff I don’t know, I have no grounding.”
One of the key constructs running through Pennsylvania is that the landscape retains more power over memory and mind than culture could ever achieve. However despite the fondness with which the lyrics describe lost terrain, Thomas denies that there is a sense of nostalgia.
“There is no nostalgia,” he states bluntly. “There is only observation. What’s the line about being doomed to repeat the history you don’t bother to learn?
“We all have a sense of living in places that cease to exist. This is what happens when the future destroys where you live. The future destroyed America approximately 25-30 years ago, the future destroyed England about three years ago.
“The media is the future, the media is what destroys nations. At a certain point the media understands the full power that it has and when the media understands that it is the sole creator and arbiter of what is real and true and good and bad, that’s what's called the future and that’s the thing that destroys culture.
“You’re part of the problem. You’re the media. It’s your fault and only you: If only you had made different decisions there would be no cancer or crime or warfare. It’s your fault. It has to do with the media control of reality.
“Where it all stems from is the TV weatherman,” says Thomas. “We did an album in 1977 called Datapanik in the Year Zero and we called it that because it was our impression, our analysis, that information can only act as a sedative-like drug in which the consequences after a period of time is that there can be nothing that’s right and nothing that’s wrong. This was strangely prophetic given the world we live in now, the Internet and the dance culture are both extensions of that data panic situation. It was very clear to us that the tool of this expansion of that idea was the TV weatherman. They are really the ones to blame for everything. In the 20th century there's like Hitler, then, just below Hitler is any TV weatherman, period.”
On Pennsylvania, Thomas states that “culture is a weapon used against us.” He goes even further. “Culture has ceased to exist,” he says. “William Faulkner wrote what he did to sell Fiats, Shakespeare wrote for the sole purpose of having a cigar called Hamlet. It’s all gone. Everything has changed.”
And David Thomas’ writing? “We try to protect ourselves by being as unrealistic as possible. Insanity is a fortification sometimes.” Thomas describes Pere Ubu as the custodians of the avant-garage, although he quickly adds that avant- garage is a joke invented to have something to give journalists when they yelp for a neat sound bite or pigeonhole.
“The only label I recognize is Pere Ubu, rock band.”
Despite their influence, Pere Ubu have essentially sustained 23 years of comparative obscurity, maintaining what Thomas predicted in 1975 as their position in “The Brotherhood of the Unknown.”
“We don’t sit around and say what can we write that nobody will like. It’s not our fault: We’re a mainstream rock band, we define what mainstream rock is in 1999. We’re a folk band. You’re talking to somebody who’s from some tribe in Africa who comes to the big city and you ask ’em why they’re not in Hollywood films. They’re non-sequitur's to me. Rock music is a folk music. We’re a folk band, we come out of the woodwork every so often and make a record and go on tour, we’re not a pop band, we’re not in the commercial world.”
At the sound check the band sounds tired but powerful. Thomas decides, after debate from the lighting operator that he wants working lights only on stage. It’s a bleak setting and few bands would have the courage to even contemplate such a non-show-business approach. No spotlights, no color. Beck would die. The lights operator goes off to the bar muttering, clearly planning to get drunk.
Thomas invites me to join the band for dinner. The conversation is strained.
It’s difficult to imagine what one could say that would not receive an immediate and sarcastic comeback from the big man. In part it is because the rapid-fire assault on Osaka, Tokyo and Sydney has left the whole band ragged. When Robert Wheeler, who plays an ancient looking EML and a very cool theremin and breeds cattle in Ohio, asks politely how I come to be with them at dinner, Thomas jumps in.
“He runs an art magazine and he thought we’d be intellectuals!” he heaves. “We’re not intellectuals, are we? We’re rubes, we’re fools!”
End of conversation.
Unfortunately I had been asked if Thomas would be interested in giving a paper at London’s Tate Museum on Jackson Pollock, so sure enough art comes up again.
“Art doesn’t work for me,” he states, but agrees to deliver a paper regardless. Pere Ubu’s young drummer Steven Mehlman is sitting opposite. I’m told that Thomas rescued Mehlman from an asylum. Mehlman just nods. The rest of the band goes silent. There’s just no knowing. Thomas asks what he’s having for dinner and Mehlman says a burrito. Thomas rears back in horror.
“No, you’re having a steak,” he orders.
“No, a burrito,” says Mehlman bravely.
This goes backwards and forwards for fifteen minutes. Thomas orders a steak and chips and beer and snorts in disgust at Mehlman. The rest of the band orders steak and chips and beer. No beans and salad for the big man.
Politics appears at the table in the form of Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearings. “Any man in power should be allowed to, no must, force a girl to give him a blow job,” Thomas says loudly and thumps the table. Sarcasm? Maybe... there's just no knowing. That’s it for Thomas, he retreats into himself and begins humming the tunes from Pennsylvania over and over, quietly rocking to his own songs.
On stage, David Thomas is ten times more daunting. He appears on the barren stage like Marlon Brando as Kurtz, massively overweight, sweating prodiguously, even donning a black beret along with a black butcher's apron. He is clearly angry as the first song starts, gesticulating aggressively at Wheeler, muttering and cursing at guitarist Tom Herman. I’m reminded of Dennis Hopper surrounded by corpses in Apocalpse Now; “the man's a genius,” and for the first two songs the band are his sacrifices; it’s not hard to imagine them skinned and bleeding in a humid jungle while Thomas strides around swinging a machete.
Something is definitely wrong. Is he having a heart attack? He appears to be in mortal pain, grimacing, frowning, shaking his head like a rabid dog. There’s a sudden silence and he states they are taking a five-minute break. We’ve definitely gone up the river.
Five minutes later the band returns, Thomas wearing a sheepish grin. He launches into a brief speech about being only human and recalls seeing a terrible gig by his friend. Afterwards he went up and congratulated him.
“It was an awful gig,” the friend replied.
“Yes, but watching you struggle through it made it a wonderful gig.”
Thomas then shakes himself, quite literally, out of his bad mood and plays a magnificent gig. And what becomes increasingly apparent is that this performance means everything to the big man.
Despite the manifesto-like rants, despite the inevitable sarcasm and impatience, up on stage he is giving everything. This is no avant-garde game, this is no Beck playing with surrealist matches. Pere Ubu’s strange amalgam of apparently unstructured sound is quite the opposite, every note, every lyric, counts. They are a bizarre sight. The huge Thomas is like a mad conductor, Tom Herman on guitar is a stick figure behind him and beside Herman is the diminuitive Michele Temple on bass. Steven Mehlman on drums comes in for special attention, Thomas dragging him to the fore to squeel on a pipe and rubbing his organge-died hair fondly (Pere, of course, is French for ‘father’ and Mehlman has been adopted). Robert Wheeler on the theremin drags out howling sounds between Thomas’ howling lyrics.
And no sooner has it begun it seems than it is over and, the strangest outcome is that for a band renowned for its nihilism and aggression, the audience is smiling – indeed, grinning idiotically – as one.
Five minutes later Thomas swarms through the remaining crowd like Bill Clinton on heat, shaking hands, welcoming comments, signing everything in sight.
Afterwards we head for last drinks, several hours of last drinks as it transpires. The conversation ranges through geography, travel, art, rock’n’roll and sexual relations. In the same way that Thomas’ lyrics can lodge in the brain, some of his comments hover in memory:
“Where I come from, men don’t talk, they feel.”
“It’s real when I don't talk about it.”
And perhaps the truest statement about Pere Ubu's music:
“It's not performance.”

“Culture’s a weapon that’s used against us. Culture’s a swamp, of superstition, ignorance, and abuse....
The land, and what we add to it, cannot lie.” – David Thomas

Pere Ubu’s David Thomas espouses a new Geography of Sound.
By Greil Marcus 1998

Pere Ubu’s David Thomas. Image Source: Listen.com

As the leader of Pere Ubu, singer David Thomas is a storyteller. Last spring, the band released a sly, cryptic album, Pennsylvania, where Thomas’s voice is that of a man talking in a crowd; you think he’s talking to himself until you realize he’s talking to you.
Thomas and others formed Pere Ubu in 1975, in Cleveland (“in the ancient ruins of the industrial mid-west” as one can read in the notes to Datapanik in the Year Zero, the band’s five-CD box set). As an experimental rock’n’roll combo, the group drew from disparate sources. Among them were the Seeds, a Los Angeles garage band renowned for its 1996 hit “Pushin’ Too Hard,” and Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi, which, premiering in Paris in 1896, sparked the current of absurdist, sardonic, sometimes self-consuming black humor that has run through the 20th century like Groucho Marx on the lam from a lobotomy clinic.
The original idea, Thomas later wrote of his goals for Pere Ubu, “was to record an artifact [that] would gain him entry into the Brotherhood of the Unknown that was gathering in used record bins everywhere.” It worked. Pere Ubu has put out more than a dozen albums since the release of its first single, “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” – a Grand Guignol recreation of a World War 2 American bombing raid – and none has ever made the charts. But despite countless personnel shifts in the group (Thomas is the only remaining founding member), and a late-1980s hiatus during which it seemed the group had given up the ghost, Pere Ubu may be a better band today than it has ever been: funnier, more doomstruck, more questing.
All across Pennsylvania, people turn off the main roads and find themselves in towns whose names they can’t remember. “But I do remember the frozen quality of the hours we stayed there,” Thomas recites in “Perfume”; he might be guiding you back, by means of a 1940s film-noir voiceover, through the wreckage of what seemed like a good idea at the time. That’s the feeling: a loser who’s come to grips with the fact that he’ll never win, but describing paradise. “I remember the waitress and what time we had to eat,” the singer says to you, jostling you on the street to get your attention; the calm in his voice, the certainty that right here is where it all went wrong, makes you keep listening instead of shrugging the guy off. “I remember the faces of the other customers like they were my own family.”
This song, and the others that share its bereft, dream wanderings on Pennsylvania, have their source in Thomas’s notion that today, all towns are becoming ghost towns – a notion Thomas explores as well in “The Geography of Sound in the Magnetic Age,” a lecture he delivered April 4 at his self-named Disasterdrome! festival at the South Bank Centre in London. “Geography has a sound,” Thomas, now 44, said in February from his home in Hove, England, a town near Brighton. “Music of the steppes, the Arctic Circle, the Industrial mid-west; there’s a reason people feel an attachment to a place, and a lot of it has to do with sound.”
Pere Ubu, in the beginning, thought of itself as an avant-garde garage punk folk band, Thomas once wrote. “The whole scene in 1974,” he said, “amounted to not much more than 50 people. It was a small, isolated society living in a space as isolated as any pioneer outpost on the plains of Kansas. And they identified with the land, passionately. Except that the land wasn’t rural.” That tiny society had somehow found its way to a forgotten part of the city, and into a bar where a band was playing; “they had simply stumbled into a lost world where the sun would set, the inhabitants flee and the stones of the bridges, buildings and monuments whisper in the timeless dark, speaking in a dead language.” That was the sound Pere Ubu tried to alchemize with synthesizer and electric guitars. But the sound of a place depends on a place holding its shape, Thomas argues now; as a culturally distinct republic making its way through the politics of its age and in some essential way not changing, not changing its voice.
“Woolie Bullie,” the first song on Pennsylvania, is about the effect such a place can have on a visitor, about how a place can haunt you. It begins with a rough, harsh, loud scratch down the neck of a guitar, a hard beat establishing a relentless momentum, and then Thomas stepping up to the podium: “There’s a diner out on Route 322, in western Pennsylvania. I spent my life there one afternoon.”
It’s a terrific reversal of the old nightclub comedian’s joke about his last gig in a nowhere town, the sort of town that in that sort of comedian’s act usually gets called “Cleveland”: “I spent a week there the other day.” But now, with the music rushing past him like a back projection of the Robert Mitchum film Thunder Road, like footage of bootleggers speeding on mountain roads in the dead of night with their lights out, Thomas is saying he will never get the sound of this place on Route 222 out of his head. And why should he? “I hear it when takin’ a shower, readin’ the paper,” he says in a drawl he probably picked up in that diner. “I look up and see it cross the valley. They tore down the Starlight down at the end of the road and put up a big Days Inn that blocks the view.” He shifts into big, rounded, elegiac tones: “But I know that road’s still there. I can feel it wherever I go, whatever I’m doin’, and it knows that I’m still here.”
“The places we live tend to separate, to come apart,” David Thomas said in February. “America is no longer America. When I’m in Germany, I say to people, Germany is no longer Germany, and they all nod their heads, as if they know exactly what I mean. I wish,” Thomas laughed over the telephone, “I knew exactly what I mean.”
“Cleveland is all gone,” he said. “They’ve taken everything I loved. They took away our Nike missile base, They tore down the Aeronautical Shot Peening Company. They put in puke palaces all down the river, places for teenagers to get drunk on cheap beer: nobody asked me about this. I began to notice that they were taking things away from me without asking me,” he said like a madman, only to speak like a citizen: “The people in control didn’t know what was stunning about Cleveland.” With a fierce vehemence overwhelming all mere nostalgia, on the telephone Thomas matched the rant that ends “Woolie Bullie,” that guy on the street now pulling on your coat and you pulling away and ready to run: “History is being rewritten faster than it can happen; culture’s a weapon that’s used against us. Culture’s a swamp, of superstition, ignorance, and abuse.... The land, and what we add to it, cannot lie.
Part of what is added, Thomas said, is the band’s sound. “That works into the musician’s intentions, and that works into ‘the Great Un’ – the unexpected, the uncontrollable. It introduces the real would into art. It has to do with Elvis – ¬abstract thought was his big thing. Elvis introduced abstract thought into hillbilly music and rural blues: He was going for the sound of the thing. He didn’t even have to write his own words!”

Thomas was reaching for the source of Elvis’s appeal, and for the engine of the musical and social transformations that followed in his wake – among them Pere Ubu, and Thomas’s own life’s work. The sound of a place is fundamentally an abstraction, which is not to say that it isn’t absolutely real: that was what Thomas was getting at. “This business of sexuality and adolescent rebellion has been bolted on to the history of rock’n’roll ex post facto,” Thomas said with indignation. “It’s been grossly exaggerated! It’s abstraction! That’s why people are attracted to Elvis. People are attracted to the inarticulate voice.”
David Thomas had taken off. I was spinning, but he was just warming up. “It’s about sound emerging as a poetic force in its own right,” he said. “Rock music was the force that liberated sound from being merely a handmaiden to musical activity. Rock music is about that which is beyond words. Elvis was the singer as narrative voice. Sinatra was a kind of avatar, but it was with that the singer becomes the priest, the mediator between the secret Masonic cult and the public.”
“The singer is the priest?” I asked. “The secret Masonic cult is the band?” Now I was sure Thomas had gone completely off the map, but he seemed to know exactly where he was. “Culture happens in secret, all art is secret,” he explained patiently. “Ordinary people only see the ashes of art, or the failures, or frozen moments. Only rarely onstage do bands achieve reality; mostly it’s in rehearsals, in lost moments. Nobody ever sees that, or knows anything about it” – but, he said, referring to the great 1960s running back for the Cleveland Browns, later the star of The Dirty Dozen and king of blaxploitation movies, “Jim Brown would understand. I think baseball players and football players would understand the same thing.”
Thomas’ agnostic argument – that art exists to at once reveal secrets and preserve them makes sense when you think of the arguments as a theory of a particularly American – or modern – form of storytelling. In a big, multifaceted democracy, one is supposed to be able to communicate directly with everyone, yet many despair of being understood by anyone at all. Pere Ubu’s original recordings, nearly a quarter-century ago, Thomas has written, were the result and the work of an “inward turning, defiant stance of a beleaguered few who felt themselves to be outside music, beneath media attention, and without hope of an audience.” Many Europeans have felt a similar estrangement, of course, but in Europe elitism is always an answer, one has the privilege of considering oneself above media attention, not beneath it. In America, in the modern, to feel oneself beneath media attention is to doubt that what one has to say is worth anyone’s attention.
Out of this comes the American language that means to tell a story no one can turn away from. But this language – identified by D.H. Lawrence, in 1923, in Studies in Classic American Literature, as the true modernist voice, the voice of Hawthorne, Poe, Melville – ¬is cryptic before it is anything else. It’s all hints and warnings and the warnings are disguised as non sequitur’s. The secret is told, but nonetheless hidden in the musings or adventures of people who seem too odd to be like you or me, like us.
For those people – people like David Thomas, whose history, as tracked by the progress of his voice over the decades, is the history of a wild, expansive, all ¬accepting, yammering private joke – no one can be at home in a place where everyone is presumed to understand everyone else. The whole existence of these people is premised on their attempt to tell a secret, perhaps to discover the secret in the telling, in the stunned, shocked response its telling provokes – but no one can be at home in a place where it is presumed there are no secrets, that all reality is transparent. Thus those who tell this story will likely mistrust even an imaginary audience. If they are like David Thomas on Pere Ubu’s Pennsylvania, they’ll create an aura of portent and unease, but only, as it were, sinstramente, with the left hand; by means of unfinished sentences, dead¬-end monologues, floating images, outmoded phrases, archaic pronunciations, a tone of voice that is blank and addled by turn.
The tenor of all the wistful, vaguely paranoid tales of displacement on Pennsylvania– tales of abandoning the Interstate highways, getting lost, and finding the perfect town when it’s too late to change your life and live in it – is caught in the weirdly menacing way Thomas pronounces “Los Angeles” in the tune “Highwaterville.” It’s the old flophouse way, the way Anjelica Huston’s character speaks the name in The Grifters, with a hard g and a long e at the end, so that the place sounds like a disease. The same sense of the strange, the unacceptable, in the familiar is there in “Mr Wheeler,” which sounds like an old tape of a very old telephone call, a tape that showed up in a box in a room in a house where no one has lived for 20 years. “Uh, Mr Wheeler?” somebody says; as with every bit of talk in the number, it’s followed by a long instrumental passage, as if some great drama is taking shape around a story that will never be put back together. “I have an old light bulb,” the man on the phone is saying, almost embarrassed. “One that you made yourself?” asks Mr. Wheeler, just like a FBI agent; when the first man claims that this lightbulb he’s trying to sell has been in his family for 75 years, it feels like he’s trying to sell you an old atom bomb.
What comes into view is a secret country: Barely recognizable, and undeniable. And it’s a thrill to hear, now, all of David Thomas’s voices swirling around the listener, on the street. Pennsylvania seems to draw out of its own spectral geography and that street can be wherever you find yourself. “It knows I’m still here,” Thomas says of the lost diner “Woolie Bullie”; from his home in England, he might be speaking of Cleveland. Wherever they may live, all the current members of Pere Ubu are Clevelanders; they come together in Cleveland to rehearse, and record in the same studio where Pere Ubu has recorded for almost 25 years. “Cleveland is all gone,” Thomas says again over the telephone, “but I’m like Saddam Hussein. I only trust people from my own village.”
  http://projexpromo3.wordpress.com/








Expressionist avant-garage band Pere Ubu and film-makers The Brothers Quay presentBring Me The Head Of Ubu Roi, an adaptation of Ubu Roi, Alfred Jarry's landmark play that inspired the band's name and is widely seen as the precursor to the Absurdist, Dada and Surrealist art movements.


Written by Pere Ubu's singer, David Thomas, it is as groundbreaking and radical in its intent as the original that sparked riots in a Paris theater in 1896 - a repudiation of common sense and the refined aesthetic at the heart of the Art-Industrial Complex, of which President Eisenhower warned so eloquently... or was that the Military-Industrial Complex? No matter, same sorta thing.
Bring Me The Head Of Ubu Roi premiered at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London's Southbank Centre for a two night run April 24 and 25 2008.
This adaptation approaches theater with the unsettling ethos that Mr Thomas and his comrades have applied to music production since 1975. It incorporates the narrative voices of abstract and concrete sound into musical structure, creates an aural Theater of the Imagination, and facilitates the Intrusive Other - a mechanism by which the telling of a story incorporates Points Of View that run in parallel or at some angle to the central narrative, crossing it, intruding, overlaying, contradicting, deprecating, or even ignoring it.
Bring Me The Head Of Ubu Roi does not promote mayhem. It preserves mayhem. The theatrical production is framed by wide-screen animation from The Brothers Quay which serves as an innovative interpretation of Jarry's staging instructions. David Thomas takes on the role of Père Ubu.
Ex-Communards singer Sarah Jane Morris performs the Mère Ubu role. Band members enact minor cast roles when not performing the 14 songs, or laying down the electronica ambience, that provide the live score to this 100 minute, two part show.
Puppet-like choreographies, chaotic interventions, stark staging, and anti-naturalistic dramatic passages preserve the spirit of Jarry's intentions. Other music groups have ventured into theater but never to the extent that the band itself, as a self-contained unit, undertakes all aspects of the production. Pere Ubu goes to places few others would even dare to dream of. We call it disasto so nothing can go wrong.
Jarry's plays were widely and wildly hated for their vulgarity, brutality, low comedy and complete lack of literary finish. They were seen as the theatrical equivalent of an anarchist attack.
"One reason that Ubu Roi endures is that, like water is the Universal Solvent, Père Ubu is the Universal Monster," Mr Thomas says.
"Whoever you personally think is the Bad Guy - whether you demonize those on the Left or the Right, or everyone In-Between - the Church or the State, Big Business or Big Labor - Père Ubu can supply the face and voice. Ubu is a portrait of the soul of every do-gooder monster."

---

Savage wit. So involving was this piece of music theatre that when someone in the audience was taken ill during the performance, everyone thought it was part of the act, "planted" in the stalls to extend the show, even when a paramedic arrived.

The vivacious Morris is excellent as the plotting queen.

All very anti-theatre and anti-good taste. And what made it all worthwhile? Hearing Thomas in full baritone majesty belching out that one word he was born to deliver: "MERDRE!!!"

Like pantomime without the ghastly television "celebrities," a sort of Carry On Pataphysics. I've rarely left a theatre feeling quite as entertained.

It's hard not to delight in Thomas' frustrated dictatorship of both Poland and the production itself. Deviating from the plot to demand that the scene fade to black (which it always did, of course, by way of someone running past with a sign reading "Fade To Black"), Thomas displays an enthusiasm for the work that quickly spreads to the audience. When two of the characters exclaimed, "I think we're in danger of alienating the audience!", Queen Elizabeth Hall erupted in laughter. It was hilarious because it couldn't have been further from the truth.

March of Greed Animation
The Quays' animation (see below), projected wide-screen, serves to frame the action on stage, which includes performance of the song "March Of Greed," and Puppet Watusi choreography devised by Ubu bass player Michele Temple. The featured singer is Sarah Jane Morris.


Song Of The Grocery Police Animation
The Quays' animation (see below), projected wide-screen, serves to frame the action on stage, which includes performance of the song "Song Of The Grocery Police."

- ubuprojex.net/




Lady From Shanghai

Smash the Hegemony of Dance. Stand still.
The new Pere Ubu album, Lady From Shanghai, is scheduled for release in January 2013, the thirty-fifth anniversary of the group's debut (The Modern Dance).

"The dancer is puppet to the dance," says singer David Thomas. "It's long past time somebody puts an end to this abomination. Lady From Shanghai has fixed the problem.

"What is the problem? Dance encourages the body to move without permission."

Lady From Shanghai is an album of dance music... fixed.
  
 
Pere Ubu Studio Albums
Historical Era:
The Modern Dance (1978)
Dub Housing (1978)
New Picnic Time (1979)
The Art Of Walking (1980)
Song Of The Bailing Man (1982)
Terminal Tower (1975 - 1981)
Datapanik In The Year Zero (Box Set)

Fontana Years:
The Tenement Year (1988)
Cloudland (1989)
Worlds In Collision (1991)
Story Of My Life (1993)

Modern Era:
Raygun Suitcase (1995)
Pennsylvania (1998)
St Arkansas (2002)
Why I Hate Women (2006)
Why I Remix Women (2006)
"Long Live Père Ubu!" (2009)
Lady From Shanghai (Demos)

Pere Ubu Live Albums
* - Denotes download only.
The Shape Of Things (1976)
Manhattan (1977)
Pirate's Cove* (1977)
390° Of Simulated Stereo* (1977 - 79)
U-Men Live At Intersate Mall* (1978)
One Man Drives While The... (1978 - 81)
I Walk The Line (1981)*
The Art Of Talking* (1982)
Waltz Across Texas* (1989)
Waltz By The Sea* (1989)
London Texas (1989)
Paradiso - Part 1* (1991)
Paradiso - Part 2* (1991)
Apocalypse Now (1991)
The Late Show* (1992)
A Ghost Town Goes Where You Want To Go* (2006)
Light It Up!* (2007)
Live at Grant Avenue* (2007)
Oh, Pennsylvania...* (1998 - 02)
The Annotated Modern Dance* (2010)

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David Thomas Albums
* - Denotes download only.
Vocal Performances (1981) *
Winter Comes Home (1982) *
EREWHON (1996)
Monster Box Set
Mirror Man (1999)
Bay City (2000)
Surf's Up! (2001)
18 Monkeys on a Dead Man's Chest (2004)
Brunswick Parking Lot* 2003
A Map Only Tells Me...* (2008)
Mirror Man Act 2* (2009)
Let's Visionate!* (2009)
How's Things In Your Town?* (2005)
I Remember Mars* (1996)
David Thomas and The Holy Soul* (2010)

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Rocket From The Tombs
Barfly (2011)
I Sell Soul / Romeo & Juliet (2010)
The Day The Earth Met... (1975)
Rocket Redux (2004)
When It's Too Late To Die Young (2003)
Extermination Night (1974)

Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love,Punctum Books, 2012.


Download it



“There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory,” writes Lauren Berlant. Yet the ways in which we live sexuality and intimacy have been profoundly shaped by theories — especially psychoanalytic ones, which have helped to place sexuality and desire at the center of the modern story about what a person is and how her history should be read. At the same time, other modes of explanation have been offered by popular and mass culture. In these domains, sexual desire is not deemed the core story of life; it is mixed up with romance, a particular version of the story of love.
In this small theoretical novella-cum-dictionary entry, Lauren Berlant engages love and desire in separate entries. In the first entry, Desire mainly describes the feeling one person has for something else: it is organized by psychoanalytic accounts of attachment, and tells briefly the history of their importance in critical theory and practice. The second entry, on Love, begins with an excursion into fantasy, moving away from the parent-child structure so central to psychoanalysis and looking instead at the centrality of context, environment, and history. The entry on Love describes some workings of romance across personal life and commodity culture, the place where subjects start to think about fantasy on behalf of their actual lives.
Whether viewed psychoanalytically, institutionally, or ideologically, love is deemed always an outcome of fantasy. Without fantasy, there would be no love. Desire/Love takes us on a tour of all of the things that sentence might mean.



The Book of Love is sad and boring, no one can lift the damn thing . . .
Delaminated from week 1 lecture notes, Love Theory (Winter 2012)…

I am a love theorist. I sometimes feel dissociated from all my loves. I sometimes ask them to hold more of an image of me than I can hold. By “sometimes” I mean all the times. The image is the regressed form, not the narrative noise that comes later to try to apply adhesive to the fantasy and its representation in objects, so that I know I am an event that lives in the world. The love and the images available for it are in a Thunderdome death-love match, yet we act as though affect could be held within a steady-state space like meat on a hook, or the image of meat on a hook, since actual meat turns green. Most storage lockers are cold enough to slow down that decay, as we know from narrative and domesticity. Aggressions and tenderness pop around in me without much of a thing on which to project blame steadily or balance an idealization. So it’s just me and  phantasmagoric noise that only sometimes feels like a cover song for a structuring shape or an improv around genre. In love I’m left holding the chaos bag and there is no solution that would make these things into sweet puzzle pieces. See Phillips’ reading of attachment as the drive to return to the taste of another person: the “sweetness” love stands for binds itself to an infinity of objects and plots and strategies for investing the scene with a worthiness matching our intensity of a need for its nourishment.  This is why, perhaps too, Laplanche uses the word “metabolize.”
This is a philosophical “I”. I don’t feel like using “we,” because I fall into the banality pit when I do. (See Derrida on film on love. He should have trusted his first instinct to say nothing, since what he says is nothing, but he was being a good boy, and trying to maintain his availability for the interviewer’s idealization, the death in life of the call and response: he was trying to be loveable.  Maybe the phrases one offers as gifts are the best love because they metarecognize the demand for love in any call: but, in itself, the professor’s discourse is not an opening to the other’s inconvenience, and it is not love if it is not opened to that.)
Detachment on a good day, dissociation during the stressful ones, overwhelmed and awkward on the days that begin flooded, and when it works, a lot of imitative affect mixing optimism and protective coating so that, reliably, while the internal objects are splashing around the external ones are getting the best of it. The heart bursts, Nancy says, and love isn’t dialectical, some stupid unimaginative feedback loop. I find that part almost delightful.
Apostrophe is not only the condition of love but an ideal of self-encounter. Can the addressee make more of it than you can, she you who waits for the sentence of your existence to finish and, inevitably, to miss its mark?  For the addressee, you are willing to make provisional clarities. For the addressee, you are willing to perform an openness that’s an optimistic brokenness. If you’re lucky, you’re a topos in your own world, although without the apostrophic phantom you cannot exist in the world.  I am writing on a short story now in which the protagonist moves from telling his story as “I do x” to saying “you do x” because he is looking for some refuge in the general, a pattern of self-detachment that would feel less lonely than he feels, if language could pull it off, but language can’t pull it off entirely, which doesn’t mean that one should give up trying this or that.  Something might happen and a structure might shift its symbolizations. That is the hope of love, the Eternal Sunshine to which you just have to say “ok” to walking awkwardly and falling down on the ice.  The truth is closer to Amores Perros, in which love wounds so badly that all you can do is walk away.  But if you carry the image with you it will itch you to put it next to other things in an almost return that renews, without repeating, love.
It isn’t an ethical problem, whether one or a population is held in the world as an idealizable image in the minds of others: it’s what’s needed for anyone, to have a world that can hold an image of them more complete than the image they can hold of themselves. We watched a clip cluster from Sex in the City, which was one after another scene of a woman demanding recognition from objects or persons whose job it was to become-objects, and no wonder why having a real doll is a dream, because you can make it say “I love you”,” “I desire you,” “I’m sorry,” “Does that feel good,” and “Why did that bastard say that to you?” in an eternal loop of distant listening, light touch reflection, magnification, and shrinkage, an archive of impacts whose success or failure depends more than anything on the timing of the effort to assimilate to the lie that the statement of love is not merely a proposition. I moved from I to you. Distortion is not falsehood. Blame it on the failure of language to hold perfect phrases for the states that have multiple aims but do not stop communicating regardless.
I have been reading Ariana Reines’ The Cow.  Three students gave me this book within a space of six months, and then I’ve given it to people who I thought could bear it and not a single person has been able to, which I find interesting (I mean, my failed judgment of my intimates is interesting to me). When I gift a book or a film it is personal after all, more than buying clothes for someone: an imagination of someone’s pleasure in relation to a demand for their attention.  Is it the kind of book my students give me because they sense that—actually,  I don’t know. It is as though they perceive frustration beneath my apologetic pedagogic poetics (Oh come on, try, this is hard, I can brainstorm a hundred examples and maybe maybe then you can and maybe you can hear something and surprise yourself later, which is how Bollas describes “the unthought known” in relation to the aesthetic, which doesn’t represent what you know but provides a setting to encounter its impact.)
I am a love theorist, how did that happen? I was doing ideology critique and fell down the rabbit hole, the donut hole, the pipette. I have a book coming out with some older thought about all this, but the examples are all wrong.  Always, the examples are all wrong, which is why love theory tends to be so conservative—ProustProustProustBovaryBovaryBovaryAbelardEloiseCourtly.  It’s not that the classics can’t be wrong, it’s that they won’t be disgusting, and love theorists tend to have an aversion to the disgusting.
I sometimes feel dissociated from all my loves. “I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans.”

No One is Sovereign in Love: A Conversation Between Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt – Heather Davis & Paige Sarlin

On the occasion of the inaugural Research in Culture Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts, “On the Commons; or, Believing-Feeling-Acting Together” in May 2011, we sat down with guest faculty Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt to ask them about their use of love as a political concept. They each use the idiom of love to disrupt political discourse, as a means of thinking through non-sovereign social and subjective formations. Love, for both these thinkers, is transformative, a site for a collective becoming-different, that can help to inform alternate social imaginaries. But their notions about how this happens diverge. In his lecture at Banff, through a close reading of Marx, Michael Hardt proposed that substituting love for money or property as the means for organizing the social can open up new social and political projects. More generally he begins from the position of love as ontologically constitutive, or love as a generative force. Lauren Berlant’s description of love has attended to the ways in which love disorganizes our lives, opening us to move beyond ourselves. And so, for Berlant, the concepts of love and optimism foreground the sort of difficulties and investments involved in creating social change, understood as the construction of an attachment to a world that we don’t know yet, but that we hope will provide the possibility for flourishing. Throughout the interview Berlant and Hardt try on each other’s positions, organizing relationality through models of incoherence and multiplicity. In this, they speak to, reflect, inform and inspire activist projects of social change from queer communities to neo-anarchist organizers. It was breathtaking to watch these two brilliant thinkers engage in conversation with one another given the scenic view of the mountains that was framed in the window behind them. As they rallied back and forth, shifting, clarifying and providing counterpoint to each other, their exchange was a testament to intellectual generosity and the possibilities of dialogue and collective endeavors. What follows is an excerpt from that discussion.

Heather Davis: What is it about love that makes it a compelling or politically interesting concept?
Michael Hardt: One healthy thing love does, which is probably not even the core of it, but at least one healthy thing it does, is it breaks through a variety of conceptions about reason, passion, and the role of affect in politics. There are a number of other ways of doing this, but considering love as central to politics confounds the notion of interest as driving politics. Love makes central the role of affect within the political sphere.
Another thing that interests me is how love designates a transformative, collective power of politics – transformative, collective and also sustained. If it were just a matter of the construction of social bonds and attachments, or rupture and transformation, it would be insufficient. For me it would have to be a necessarily collective, transformative power in duration.
When I get confused about love, or other things in the world, thinking about Spinozian definitions often helps me because of their clarity. Spinoza defines love as the increase of our joy, that is, the increase of our power to act and think, with the recognition of an external cause. You can see why Spinoza says self-love is a nonsense term, since it involves no external cause. Love is thus necessarily collective and expansive in the sense that it increases our power and hence our joy. Here’s one way of thinking about the transformative character of love: we always lose ourselves in love, but we lose ourselves in love in the way that has a duration, and is not simply rupture. To use a limited metaphor, if you think about love as muscles, they require a kind of training and increase with use. Love as a social muscle has to involve a kind of askesis, a kind of training in order to increase its power, but this has to be done in cooperation with many.
Lauren Berlant: Another way to think about your metaphor, Michael, is that in order to make a muscle you have to rip your tendons.
I often talk about love as one of the few places where people actually admit they want to become different. And so it’s like change without trauma, but it’s not change without instability. It’s change without guarantees, without knowing what the other side of it is, because it’s entering into relationality.
The thing I like about love as a concept for the possibility of the social, is that love always means non-sovereignty. Love is always about violating your own attachment to your intentionality, without being anti-intentional. I like that love is greedy. You want incommensurate things and you want them now. And the now part is important.
The question of duration is also important in this regard because there are many places that one holds duration. One holds duration in one’s head, and one holds duration in relation. As a formal relation, love could have continuity, whereas, as an experiential relation it could have discontinuities.
When you plan social change, you have to imagine the world that you could promise, the world that could be seductive, the world you could induce people to want to leap into. But leaps are awkward, they’re not actually that beautiful. When you land you’re probably going to fall, or hurt your ankle or hit someone. When you’re asking for social change, you want to be able to say there will be some kind of cushion when we take the leap. What love does as a seduction for this is, and has done historically for political theory, is to try to imagine some continuity in the affective level. One that isn’t experienced at the historical, social or everyday level, but that still provides a kind of referential anchor, affectively and as a political project.
Michael Hardt: Let me start with the non-sovereign thing. I like that. If one were to think a political project that would be based on or include love as a central motivation, you say notions of sovereignty would be ruptured. That’s very interesting and powerful. I assume we are talking about a variety of scales here simultaneously, where both the self and the social are not sovereign in love.
When we engage in love we abandon at least a certain type of sovereignty. In what ways would sovereignty not be adequate in explaining a social formation that was grounded in love? If we were to think of the sovereign as the one who decides, in the social relation of love there is no one who decides. Which does not mean that there are no decisions but, rather, that there would be a non-one who decides. That seems like a challenging and interesting question: what is a non-sovereign social formation? How is decision-making then arrived at? These are the kinds of things that require modes of organization; that require, if not institutions, customs, or habits, at least certain means of organizing the decision-making process. In a politics of love, one of the interests for me is a non-sovereign politics, or a non-sovereign social formation. By thinking love as political, as somehow centrally involved in a political project, it forces us to think through that non-sovereignty, both conceptually, but also practically, organizationally.
Heather Davis: I’m really intrigued by the ways you both speak of how love is a project of non-sovereignty in terms of both the social and the self. If you’re trying to conceive of each of those layers with a certain consistency, then what is the difference between those formations and sovereignty?
Michael Hardt: I’ll start with some basic things. I think within the tradition of political theory it’s not at all clear what a non-sovereign politics could be. It’s hard to make such grand generalizations. But the tradition of political theory we inherit is fundamentally related to the role and decision making of the one, whether that one be the king, the party, the liberal individual, all of these. Here, decision-making can only be performed by the one, and so I think this is what Toni Negri and I have felt is interestingly challenging about the concept of multitude itself. How can a multiplicity decide? The organization of decision-making is central for me, for thinking politics or political theory. I guess I would apply this to the level of the individual too. How can an individual as multiplicity, and hence as non-sovereign, decide and not be just an incoherent helpless heap? What I think is required for that, now back again at the level of political theory, is understanding how collective structures, or structures of multiplicity, can enable social decision-making. We also have a long tradition of the possibility of the democracy proper – the rule of the many – but it’s a minor tradition, or sometimes a subterranean tradition. That seems to be one way of characterizing what’s at stake, or challenging in this.
Lauren Berlant: I think sovereignty is a bad concept for almost anything. It’s an aspirational concept and, as often happens, aspirational concepts get treated as normative concepts, and then get traded and circulated as realism. And I think that’s what happened with sovereignty. So, in “Slow Death” I say we should throw sovereignty out. But people are so invested in it [so] maybe we can’t because you can’t just decide ghosts don’t exist. You have to find a way to change something from within.
There’s another way of going at this that also has to do with a different relation to incoherence. Part of the reason I think that queer theory and love theory are related to each other as political idioms, is that queer theory presumes the affective incoherence of the subject with respect to the objects that anchor it or to which they’re attached. One thing that is very powerful for me to try and think about is how we could have a political pedagogy that deals with incoherence. Where the taking up of a position won’t be so that an individual can be coherent, intentional, agentive, and encounter themselves through their object, but that there would be a way that situational clarity can be produced without negating the incoherence of the subject. Training in one’s own incoherence, training in the ways in which one’s complexity and contradiction can never be resolved by the political, is a really important part of a political theory of non-sovereignty. But we still have to find a place for adjudication, or working out, or working for, or working over, which requires a pedagogy of attention, of paying attention to the different ways in which we engender different kinds of claims on the world, in our attachments or ways of moving or desires for habituation or aspirations . . .
I always have a phrase that I’ve decided is a placeholder phrase, as phrases often are in my life, which for a long time is a satisfying phrase, and then I realize I haven’t actually had that thought yet. For example, in a crisis culture we’re so excited about gaming the difference between zero and one that flourishing somehow gets bracketed. Survival looks like a triumph, and that’s a terrible thing. I want flourishing. But what do I mean by flourishing anyway? What are all of the synonyms I know for flourishing? There aren’t that many. Isn’t that interesting? The phrase you use is an increase in joy. But an increase of joy might not feel like increase. It might feel like relief, it might feel like I can be a mass of incoherent things and not be defeated by that.
Paige Sarlin: Why turn to this mode of imagining now? Why the idiom of love?
Michael Hardt: For me, with regard to the discourses of today, there seemed to me to be an excessive focus on sovereignty, on the state of exception, even as antagonists, I mean. Those discourses close immediately and unavoidably the vulnerable position of wanting more. The discussions about the enormity of the sovereign that we face, the near impossibility of confronting that power that’s both inside and outside the law, that puts us in the position of bare life, all of that obviates the problem of the vulnerability of wanting, of expressing the desire for the world to be different, almost by saying“of course it can’t be”, by saying “of course you’re powerless so it doesn’t matter what you want.” In that way, talking about love seems a useful challenge to what I perceive as a dominant mode of political theorizing and political discourse today. It also connects up with a series of things emerging today and kinds of political movements or the kinds of theorizing going on in political movements that seems to grasp that well. So the concept of love helps name an undercurrent that seems worth fostering in contrast to what I see as a dominant mode of theorizing.
Lauren Berlant: The discourse of political love has always, or long been, associated with religious idioms of thinking the social. Partly what we’re doing is trying to bring it back into the place of political action, where political action and new social relations happen in time with different types of practices. I think Michael is right that there’s already energy for that in neo-anarchists. And if you have a practice-based model of thinking in relation to other kinds of political work, it’s also saying that it’s not spirit over there and doing the material work of reorganizing life over here, but trying to find a synthetic language for both. In that way, it’s jarring in a good sense, it’s not just a mode of reflection but actually it’s a mode for action and also a description of what it would take for people to take the risk of new relationality -nomorepotlucks.org/




Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Duke University Press, 2011.

 Lauren Berlant wants you to break your New Year’s resolutions. Or at least she wholly understands your impending failure to keep them. So go ahead, smoke another cigarette. Smoke whatever you can find. Down a few more 100-calorie snack packs. Eat a whole goddamn box of 100-calorie snack packs. Fuck 100-calorie snack packs, find some actual cookies and eat all of them. Eat whatever you can find. Don’t give up caffeine. Don’t work harder. Slack off. Don’t get a promotion. Keep drinking. Drink more. Ignore your new gym membership. Pick up new bad habits. Hone your bad habits into an art form. Master the art of sustaining your bad habits, because your bad habits are what sustain you.
After all, bad habits are lifesavers we cling to in the face of the fraying and always already toxic “good-life fantasies” we wallow in, in the face of becoming totally unmoored. Are you really that guilty about your guilty pleasures? What exactly were you hoping for anyway?
In her new book Cruel Optimism, University of Chicago English professor Lauren Berlant describes the titular phrase as “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” We cling to the fantasy that “this time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in just the right way.” This time she’ll really love you. This time you’ll lose the weight. This time you’ll make enough money. This time the candidate’s promises will last after election night. This time the mission will really be accomplished. This time, you will be happy. Except, you know, you won’t. At least not for long.
Happy fucking New Year.
Apropos to the purportedly apocalyptic year stretched out in front of what is apparently the last vestiges of humanity, Cruel Optimism heralds an existing age of swelling precarity. Although the experience is different across economic and social situations, we are, at least the 99 percent of us, the new precariat class. We are frantically digging to keep the tunnel from caving in — digging for air, not treasure. And what’s really hemming us in is an unwillingness to eat dirt, to embrace precarity “as the condition of being and belonging,” instead of clinging desperately to the paradox of predictability and security — “buy this car to go to work, go to work to pay for this car.”
Berlant locates the reader, you and I and herself, in the impasse of the present, the cul-de-sac in which we continue to strive for the “conventional good-life fantasies — say, of enduring reciprocity in couples, families, political systems, institutions, markets, and at work.” We circle ever more desperately, with an increasing awareness of the good life’s farcical nature. Berlant tracks the pain of everyday life — not clock-stopping trauma or crisis that denotes a shift in paradigm but the vague sense of doom we walk around with, the crisis ordinary. This is not apocalypse, more like slow-moving quicksand.
While other temporal interventions in queer theory have primarily focused on futurity — such as the optimistic focus on queerness as aspirational, a yearning for a not-yet-present utopia in José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, or the darker argument against the cult of the child in Lee Edelman’s canonical No Future — Berlant’s Cruel Optimism argues for the centrality of the affective experience of the present. Before being codified as a historical event, she writes, the present is felt as such, even if an “incoherent mash.”

Whatever else it is, and however one enters it, the historical present… is a middle without boundaries, edges, a shape. It is experienced in transitions and transactions. It is the name for the space where the urgencies of livelihood are worked out all over again, without assurances of futurity, but nevertheless proceeding via durable norms of adaptation. People are destroyed in it, or discouraged but maintaining, or happily managing things, or playful and enthralled.

This time-space is the habitat for the precariat as an “affective class” that includes both the lastingly and newly insecure, a group that finds commonality in their inability to believe in social democratic good-life fantasies. Her construction will no doubt draw some scoffs from a few of her less-imaginative fellow professional Marxists, but Berlant’s class construction is in line with the concession that we won’t be getting what we want anyway. Almost none of it, including and especially not an industrial proletariat, robust trade unions, or progressive wealth redistribution.
Berlant thickly describes her close readings of texts that deal with “how best to live on, considering”: such novels as Was by Geoff Ryman, Two Girls Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill, The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead, Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, art films like Gregg Bordowitz’s Habit, Laurent Cantet’s Ressources humaines and L’emploi du temps, and Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s La Promesse and Rosetta. Out of these diverse texts about precarious living, of consumptive dissatisfaction, economic desperation, of the slow death of obesity and the slowing death of HIV — all the things that sustain and destroy us — comes a mirror-like portrait of the precariat. There is a fine and hazy line between occupations and Air Jordan riots. Whether you’re camped out at Zuccotti Park or outside H&M for the new Versace collaboration, here we are, with every present moment slipping into the next, trying not to lose hold. Each adaptation to precarity a foothold in some epic metaphor.
Berlant doesn’t leave us with the instructive “Life sucks, eat some snacks,” but rather urges us to find our way out of the psychological burrow. How do we extricate ourselves from the irreparable and “cramped” fantasy of the good life, toward a “better good life?” How do we get out of relationships of cruel optimism, out of this prolonged sense of crisis, this sustained and boring code red? It is not a cul-de-sac of excess fat, blackened lungs, or wandering eyes but rather the structural impasse of capitalism we must fantasize our way out of. Berlant explicitly fails to offer a revolutionary program, opting instead to examine the habit of living in spite of everything that suggests one ought not. Potentiality is expressed in these times “in regimes of exhausted practical sovereignty, lateral agency, and sometimes, counterabsorption in episodic refreshment, for example in sex, or spacing out, or food that is not for thought.” If we stop projecting toward the future, then we can plan for the present that is already here and still coming tomorrow, even if we can’t quite make sense of it except in ways we can say. - Jenna Brager


“Even Adorno, the great belittler of popular pleasures, can be aghast at the ease with which intellectuals shit on people who hold on to a dream.”
Lauren Berlant is not shitting on you or your dream. OK, yes, her latest book is called Cruel Optimism and begins with a damning introductory explanation, “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” Yes, the University of Chicago professor will break down everything you hold dear: food, love, politics, family, virtuous New Year’s resolutions. And yes, within a few pages, there’s that creeping sensation that, whatever makes you tick, it’s got you on the fast track to ruin and disappointment.
Nevertheless, a trip to Bluestockings and a few Sunday afternoons of heavy reading will reveal a surprisingly tender survey of the things people do and the attachments they form to get themselves through life's inadequacies. Cruel Optimism is less brutal analysis than a dark, lush still-life of American fantasies and our Quixotic lunges toward them. An affective portrait of the 99%.
In Berlant’s account, the 99% or precariat, eats, buys and loves not to build the future, but to mark the present with holding patterns of predictability and security. This despite increasing evidence that contemporary life is precarious, tumbling along with a “pacing of death,” where the majority of workers are nothing more than fleshy machines, jobs are fleeting, and quick-stepping entrepreneurialism is a new moral imperative.
We cope in this century by looking forward, by creating attachments and desiring, mechanisms of optimism which Berlant traces through texts like The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead, Two Girls Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill, and films Ressources humaines by Laurent Cantet, La Promesse, and Rosetta by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne.
Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill is now on my required reading list. Berlant uses Gaitskill's novel to elaborate how food, sex, and intellect (smarts) permit a sense of agency despite crippling individual traumas for protagonists Justine and Dorothy. The girls self-harm in order to interfere with the female lives imposed upon them, but “even if one risks self-negation through such tendencies, not to be that [ordinary, failed person with that history] is an amazing thing” writes Berlant.
One of the few positive, programmatic initiatives of Cruel Optimism is to argue to “desubjectivize queerness and to see it in practices that feel out alternative routes for living” in opposition to the traumatic “heterofamilial, upwardly-mobile good-life fantasy.” But there is no larger, revolutionary call-to-action. Cruel Optimism’s work is mostly in its witnessing: “To admit your surprising attachments, to trace your transformation over the course of a long life sentence, is sentience.” - Caitlin Hu

Lauren Berlant

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In a nutshell

Cruel Optimismis a book about living within crisis, and about the destruction of our collective genres of what a “life” is; it is about dramas of adjustment to the pressures that wear people out in the everyday and the longue durée; it is about the blow of discovering that the world can no longer sustain one’s organizing fantasies of the good life.
I’ll focus here on three matters.  The first is the concept of cruel optimism (what’s optimism, what’s cruel about it).  The second is on a particular scene—the end of the postwar good life fantasy and the rise of neoliberalism in the U.S. and Europe—in which the consequences of cruel optimism are lived collectively.  The third is about the need for a realism that embeds trauma and suffering in the ordinary rather than in a space of exception, given that the crises of exhaustion and knowing how to live are problems saturating ordinary life.
I define “cruel optimism” as a kind of relation in which one depends on objects that block the very thriving that motivates our attachment in the first place.
All attachment is optimistic.  But what makes it cruel is different than what makes something merely disappointing. When your pen breaks, you don’t think, “This is the end of writing.”  But if a relation in which you’ve invested fantasies of your own coherence and potential breaks down, the world itself feels endangered.
A destructive love affair is my favorite example: if I leave you I am not only leaving you (which would be a good thing if your love destroys my confidence) but also I leaving an anchor for my optimism about life (which is why I want to stay with you even though I’m unhappy, because I am afraid of losing the scene of my fantasy itself).
So this double bind produces conflicts in how to proceed, because massive loss is inevitable if you stay or if you go.
Cruel Optimism asks: Why is it so hard to leave those forms of life that don’t work?  Why is it that, when precariousness is spread throughout the world, people fear giving up on the institutions that have worn out their confidence in living?
This is why I am interested in seeing optimism operate in all kinds of attachment: from intimacy and sexuality to things like voting, or the belief that capitalism is a meritocracy that rewards active competence.
In all of these scenes of “the good life,” the object that you thought would bring happiness becomes an object that deteriorates the conditions for happiness.  But its presence represents the possibility of happiness as such.  And so losing the bad object might be deemed worse than being destroyed by it.  That’s a relation of cruel optimism.

The wide angle

My big question is: Why do people stay with lives, forms, and fantasies of life that don’t work?
How do we learn to associate certain things with our fantasies of the good life?  Shouldn’t there be more and better forms of life to attach to?  What makes so many people desperate to live conventionally rather than experimentally, when the prevailing norms generate so much noise and evidence of their failure to sustain life? How do conventional ideas of the good life get implanted in our viscera, and how do we go about enabling changes in our visceral understanding of our objects and our potential flourishing?
So I think of Cruel Optimism fundamentally as a book about affect and unconscious fantasies in relation to ideologies of the good life that were made available for optimism in the post-war economic bubble.  I am therefore interested in practices of democracy, labor, love and intimacy that sustain and diminish us at the same time.
A number of kinds of studying provide the context for this work.  I’ll focus on three here:  Marxist critical theory, queer theory, and critical theory in the Frankfurt School tradition that, to explain personal and collective desire, uses resources from psychoanalysis, philosophy, and mass society theory and phenomenologies of embodied existence via feminism, trauma studies, etc.
Elliptically, then:  my training as an affect theorist really derived from Marxist critical theory, from Raymond Williams through Georg Lukács and Fredric Jameson, especially: and then reading Frantz Fanon blew my mind.
Most people think of Marxism as antithetical to any sensitivity to affect, as a mode of analysis focusing on capitalist processes of value extraction and exploitation.  At the same time, though, Marxist thought has also provided a powerful account of fantasy:  of how our senses and intuitions are transformed in relation to property, to labor, to presumptions about being deserving, and to enjoying the world.
The theorists I responded to see art as a place that clarifies the subjective and visceral aspects of structural social relations.  We read artworks as a space where a variety of forces converge and become visible, including the fantasy resolutions we make to be able to live within contradiction. Fanon wrote about the ways bodies and minds under colonialism were “colonized”—broken and formed by having to find their ways in life amidst negating images and potentially defeating contradictions of power.
So I learned from the start to think that distinctions like public/private, impersonal/personal, structure/agency were false representations of how the world works.  Feminism’s “personal is political” helped too, to develop a way of thinking that sees power infusing our very gestures and fantasies, our attachments to others as well as to our labor and our connection to the world.
Queer theory was a crucial development in this process.  For those readers who are unfamiliar, queer theory is not a program for claiming that non-heterosexual identities are cooler, better, richer, or deserve special accommodations.
The point is double: to seek to open up understanding the relation between conventional patterns of desire and the way they are managed by norms, and to focus on patterns of attachment we hadn’t even yet known to notice, patterns in which sexuality and intimacy are enacted in a broad field of social relations that anchor us to life.  Being a friend, a regular, a neighbor, a part-time lover, an ex-lover, an intimate; being gender dysphoric, or just plain gay or straight—all of it is seen as an effect of many causes and a complex, intimate practice of world-building. Its theorists include Judith Butler, Michael Warner, Eve Sedgwick, Gayle Rubin, Jack Halberstam, Elspeth Probyn, Jose Muñoz, Jasbir Puar, and many others.
Another way to encapsulate this is that queer theory sees sexuality as a process rather than a foreclosing identity.  This meant that one constantly has to be attending to the action and development of one’s patterns of attachment.  What is this object of desire standing for?  A straight woman, for example, doesn’t want all men, just some:  so why not rethink sexuality as the history of a patterning or style that develops over time, in relation to law, norms, and the accidents and incidents of ordinary life?
I came to all this working interdisciplinarily: across fields from anthropology, European sociology, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and aesthetics; and also from feminist and queer activism.
All of this is background knowledge in Cruel Optimism: elaborating it is not its focus.

A close-up

Sometimes a book like mine makes people feel that, if they don’t know the films or novels or cases written about, they can’t read a given chapter or judge its claims.
This is a theoretical book, but it floats its ideas by way of processes that are everywhere around us—processes of dependency, labor, fantasy, and intimacy—and then it uses political and aesthetic cases to exemplify their impacts.
I hope my storytelling is good enough that you can imagine the scene or situation that compels thought: often people read my work slowly and dreamily and puzzle over things.
I aim for the scene I’m describing to open up a question for you.  If the questions become more vital and interesting in the reading, then I’ve done my job.  If readers then encounter these questions in the world, they might have a different way to think and act in relation to them.
Changing the dynamic within relation might actually change things significantly, that’s my hope about the impact of a way of seeing world-building.  We live in an emotionally charged time:  seeing how the work of relational emotion shapes our very sinews might clarify a lot about what’s going on, what’s stuck, and what’s possible.
One example of the book’s challenge is its discussion of “normativity.”  Some people think of norms and conventions as the unfair discipline of free people’s desires or as unimaginative clichés.  Often norms are, and often conventions reduce complexity to simplicity.  At the same time, though, norms and conventions are not maps toward an easy way of life:  they’re aspirational anchors: especially for so many people whose tethers to the world are loose or unreliable.
Plus, the book argues that objects of desire are placeholders for a desire to more-than-survive.  Being hooked to a norm or a convention is also an attempt to maintain a stable enough orientation so that life might be moved through flourishingly.  See pp. 166-169, for example, the Rosetta chapter, although the whole chapter is about this, as are many others.
How to interrupt one’s reliance on toxic norms?  The Two Girls, Fat and Thin chapter and the Intuitionists chapter engage how habits are formed and relied on and interrupted (through food, through conversation, through cruising, and so on).
Another thing I learned from the book is to think about optimism as noisy and often unbearable.  The intro, the title chapter, and the final chapter on “Desire for the Political” are about art and political techniques of bearing optimism, and also about the racial, sexual, and economic distribution of affects of belonging.
For people not so art-inclined, the “Slow Death” chapter works through the obesity epidemic in terms of sovereignty and responsibility.  How much does the pressure of contemporary capitalist working life put pressure on the small pleasures to sustain our survival?  What is the relation between physical health and mental health in the process of moving through life?

Lastly

Many people read my books to find a language for the affective dimensions of structural inequality: in Cruel Optimism this is performed as a crisis in optimism about the prospects of living on.
I am actually pretty lame at imagining a repaired world.  What I provide best are depictions of what makes people stuck in the face of the ordinary pulsations of a fraying crisis.  People have called the book the affective register of the 99%:  and I think there’s something to that, as I am looking for what Raymond Williams called the “structure of feeling” of the historical present that that moves across individual, collective, and political life.
So Cruel Optimism tracks the rise of a precarious public sphere.  It sees the world as in an impasse and a situation beyond the normative good life structures, where people have a hard time imagining a genre that makes sense of life while they’re in the middle of it.  I’m saying that intense personal emotions about the shape and fraying of life are also collective, and have to do with an economic crisis meeting up with a crisis in the reproduction of fantasy.  I talk about this as a waning of the “good life” genres.
These concepts matter to me because I want better objects for better optimism (there’s a slogan!).  But to achieve this we need to move our analyses of the historical present into the exploratory mode that crisis, regardless, forces us to occupy.  This is not a time for assurance but for experiment—to have patience with failure, with trying things out, to try new forms of life that also might not work—which doesn’t make them worse than what’s there now.  It is a time for using the impasse that we’re in to learn something about how to imagine better economies of intimacy and labor.
Capitalist crisis has tightened up the time of the world: all over, people are in sync in their sense of contingency and social fragility, even if they might have wildly different accounts of it.  Sometimes this recognition is unbearable and produces violence: because we know the change and the loss has already happened,and yet it is unbelievable and unbearable, while being borne.  Cruel Optimism attempts to chronicle the dramas of adjustment—the dramas of consciousness and of mediated life—that force into being new recognitions of what a life is and ought to be.

Earl McCabe

Depressive Realism: An Interview with Lauren Berlant

In our moment of economic crisis, austerity, and unemployment, it seems especially important to be realistic about the objective constraints on life in our world. Lauren Berlant's¹ attempts to engage these constraints through the lens of affect, sensibility, and consciousness open novel and refreshing ways of getting to know our present. These modes of engagement in turn demand an encounter with forms of political practice and the quest for practical forms of getting un-stuck, getting beyond the present. In other words, this process of getting to know our present is also a process of asking what to do about it. How can we fantasize a new reality? How can we overcome our attachments to lives that don't work? And how can we build a pathway to something new and better?
*              *              *Earl McCabe: You wrote in “Starved” that you were writing from a position of “depressive realism,” whereby you attempted to sit “around a thing” for a while instead of moving beyond it. Can you elaborate on what you mean by depressive realism? Are you still writing from this position?
Lauren Berlant: Is this the beginning of our interview? We need some context, I think. I’ve spent my career thinking about collective life as a sensed scene of affective projection and attachment, tracking how there comes to be such a sense across political, aesthetic, and everyday life registers. I’ve been interested in how being-in-common has developed, affected, and been stamped by normative and juridical activity while also generating affective infrastructures on the ground that take up quite a different shape than, and come to accompany and sometimes interfere with, the official and the normative.
This is what I mean by “sentimentality” when I say that I’ve written a “national sentimentality” trilogy. Sentimentality is not just the mawkish, nostalgic, and simpleminded mode with which it’s conventionally associated, where people identify with wounds of saturated longing and suffering, and it’s not just a synonym for a theatre of empathy: it is a mode of relationality in which people take emotions to express something authentic about themselves that they think the world should welcome and respect; a mode constituted by affective and emotional intelligibility and a kind of generosity, recognition, and solidarity among strangers. Another way to say this is that I am interested in a realist account of fantasy, insofar as the political and the social are floated by complex and historically specific affective investments. How do we learn to attach to (to identify the very sinews of our self-continuity with) abstractions like the nation form, the law, sexual identity, capitalism, and so on?
The essay “Starved” is about why people, including sexuality theorists, have tended to talk about relationality and kinship rather than remaining in the room with the idealization/perturbation/aversion for which sex itself inevitably and so complexly stands. “Depressive realism” is a phrase from psychoanalysis. I learned it from Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon, which is an account of his depression in relation to other people’s accounts of it and theories of it. Solomon writes there that most people self-idealize, imagining themselves to be more beautiful and more efficacious than they are: and he says that this kind of self-optimism is genuinely adaptive. Depressive realists, in contrast, are more accurate: their sense of realism isn’t dark or tragic, but less defended against taking in the awkwardness and difficulty of living on in the world. So when I said I write as a depressive realist, I meant that I see awkwardness, incoherence, and the difficulty of staying in sync with the world at the heart of what also binds people to the social. What doesn’t work, makes no sense, or is ungainly always accompanies fantasies of the good life, and other clarifying genres of optimism, and the question of fantasy is centrally about how it helps people remain attached to worlds and situations (and find ways of thriving within them) that are also quite toxic, difficult, infelicitous, or just messy. I look at the ways people bear how life proceeds without guarantees. This positioning—as my blog and my next book, Cruel Optimism (2011), argue—asks “Why do people stay attached to lives that don’t work?” There, I am not interested centrally in asking how they could work, first; I am interested in how fantasies of belonging clash with the conditions of belonging in particular historical moments.
Depressive realism allows for an account of the utility of fantasy in maintaining but also imagining alternative modes of life. Cruel Optimism tells some pretty difficult stories about how people maintain their footing in worlds that are not there for them.
EM: I find your focus on affect as a force of reproducing present ways of life very exciting. There are however many other ways of thinking about this reproduction, the orthodox Marxist perspective looks for agentive domination by the bourgeois class (this quest for an intentional class seems to be shared by many on the right as well), an economistic perspective would ground the stability of the contemporary upon objective constraints on possibility determined by economic forms (i.e. people can’t stop working because then they can’t eat), or there could be a naturalistic account based on evolutionary psychological research on basic human nature (altruism is inherently limited because some Stanford students behaved badly on camera). Why do you think that investigating affective and emotional rhythms of attachment is such an important, if not superior, way to tell the story of the persistence of the present?
LB: I learned my affect theory first not from psychoanalysis or aesthetics but from Marx and Lukács and Raymond Williams, etc., so I don’t think your version of these alternative materialist or organicist explanations (I know you were being efficient) tells the whole story of any of them insofar as the dynamics they highlight here seem unrelated to each other as reifications of cause and effect. I am always interested in a methodology that tracks the overdetermination of an object/scene/relation that appears to us: so my tendency is to read widely and across disciplines.
In any case, Marxist cultural theory argues that the historical sense, the collective sense of the historical present, presents itself first affectively and then through mediations that help or induce people to navigate worlds whose materiality is overdetermined by many processes (means of production, social relations of production, normative traditions, etc.). Mediation shapes experience and imaginaries. For me, the focus on mediation links the aesthetic and the normatively social. The investment in certain forms for providing the continuity of life goes some way to explaining the stickiness of some kinds of injustice, inequality, and energy-siphoning that structure so much of the reproduction of life. It’s not a project about the ways feeling bad (tired from work, disaffected from being exploited, alienated from most strangers and intimates) is distracted from by feel-good fantasy, but the ways that fantasies of the good life themselves remediate (contribute new forms to) realist accounts of causality and of the social. I argue that affect theory, in this sense, is another phase in the history of ideology theory.
But there are other motives too. I have long been engaged in sexuality studies, which I have seen as bound up in material ways with comprehending the work of the nation form and capital at the point of production and consumption. Subjectification, subjectivization: how are the infrastructural activities of capital expressed in practice, experience, and subjectivity? How do the instabilities of sexual non-sovereignty work in proximity to the social, economic, and political ones? How does normative labor-related subjectivity (see the neoliberal entrepreneurial subject who sees gaming the system as freedom and autonomy; see the social democratic model of limited collective upward mobility) relate to the reproduction of heteronormativity in its molecular forms?
Finally, you mention the history of the present. Marxist historians tend to disrespect the present because political, social, and economic complexities are masked by appearance, and everyone disrespects “presentism” as a kind of shallow parochialism. I became an Americanist partly because, while teaching American literature in the United States, I discovered that my students thought they were learning something ontological about the United States—so I had to alienate the object, show it in its complexity as a magnet both of practices and fantasies, and think about the relation of those. The same goes for the historical present. It needs to find genres that enable its inhabitants to assess the relation of event to effect, of domination to creative life practices, of normativity to social imaginaries. I take that to be a central function of critical theory, art, and whatever work understands itself to be making a present from within it.

Illustration by Tom TianEM: Could you elaborate a little more on the concept of “normativity?” Where did it come from, and why do you think it has such analytic purchase? How does it relate to the “realist accounts of causality and of the social” that fantasy remediates?
LB: It comes to queer theory through Foucault by way of Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological. Its importance to me and Michael Warner was to think not just about the statistical norm or the moral/conventional norm but the practices on which conventional modes of social intelligibility rest that become naturalized and moralized. Judith Butler calls them regulative norms. They govern by standing for common sense, by providing a tacit or seemingly foundational sense of scale and appropriateness for collective life. We wanted to call the regime of sexuality under which we currently live heteronormativity rather than heterosexuality, in “Sex in Public,” because the point wasn’t to attack people with a particular pattern of object choice but the whole social regime propped on that pattern, which saturates the fantasy of the good life so thoroughly and in so many domains of social existence that its very robustness seemed to atrophy the skills for imagining alternative social and economic relations and institutions of intimacy, let alone what it means when we identify with any pattern of desire.
In those days, as now, people tended to see sexuality as cordoned off from the infrastructure of nationality and capitalism; they tended to see its appearance in those contexts as a scandal rather than as a revelation of an ongoing situation. Suturing normativity to heterosexuality was an attempt to remedy that, as well as an attempt to continue integrating radical political critique with a sex positivity that was not pastoral, that did not subtract the dangerousness and strangeness of sex.
I am seriously opposed to the reproduction of erotophobia; I am seriously for dismantling heteronormative economic and legal hegemony. But the aim is not to blast heterosexuality out of existence; it is to make it merely one patterning among many. But as there is no collective life without norms, the question isn’t how to become post-normative as such but how to respond to the urgency to engender other kinds of anchors or magnets for new social relations and modes of life. The psychoanalysts talk about the inevitability of “taking up a position” within a normative structure but in my view the project of detaching from toxic norms that bind the social to itself in its dominant mode reveals how dynamic the normative reproduction of life is both in subjective and structural terms. Bifo Berardi talks about neoliberalism as a response to increasingly powerful demands by workers for social equality and democracy (and there is no equality in capitalist terms); likewise the “culture wars” are responses to the emancipatory activity of people of color, migrants, and sexualized subjects. All of those responses have had serious structural consequences politically and economically and in the sensoriums of the beings affected by them. So it matters to fight for better normative representations of the social, not just because they provide the affective satisfaction of being-in-common but because they affect the very infrastructure that organizes time, health, care, intimacy...
EM: Going back to my alternative materialist and organicist explanations, I appreciate your criticism and I meant them to only be caricatures. I was trying to bring out a difficulty, or at least unfamiliarity, that many have with your emphasis on politics in the symbolic realm as opposed to material concerns. For example, discussions around the labor movement today predominantly focus on the ways that unions impact wages, benefits, and financial flexibility, and less on the production of solidarity or class consciousness. In contrast to this you stated in your interview with Variant magazine that, “Developing symbolic practical infrastructures for alternativity is the task of progressive praxis.” Why do you (or in fact do you) think that the notion of “symbolic practical infrastructures” is so alien to dominant discourse? To what extent do you think your emphasis changes the forms of political practices you endorse? Are there any recent developments in Left practice you find particularly promising?
LB: This question is too big for me really to respond to fully here. What I’m gesturing toward is this: what is the purpose of critically engaged thought and practice that emerges not in a reformist mode—e.g. is trying to make the currently dominant relational infrastructures less bad for more people—but in a radical one, with the aim of providing what Deleuze would call genuinely new “planes of consistency,” modes of movement that shift the terms and therefore social and subjective potentialities. Now, I’m more vulgar and materialist, in that I don’t distinguish as much as some people do between conceptual models of being in common and the work of staying in sync that sociality involves, work that includes the syncope, the falling away from being bound to the social and sensing one’s belonging. So a “symbolic practical infrastructure” straddles the conceptual and material organization of life: It tracks what the impact of a concept (any field of relation that looks like an object would count here) could have on the work of living, which is simultaneously material (the reproduction of life as the struggles of politics) and fantasmatic (ideas of the political and the collective in relation to fantasies of agency, sociality and life-making).
I would want it to be our critical work to make alternativity imaginable, which includes livable; to induce glitches in the reproduction of the relation of effect to event, of cause to effect, of value to labor of all kinds. I would want to aim to remediate equality as a radically alive contingent relation and not just a process of authoritarian inversion (the story of who’s on top and who’s dominated). I don’t want to presume that x relation leads to y or is expressed in y; my aim is not to conclude that the totality has this shape or that; I want to see what’s to be made of the dynamic relation between the predictable and unpredictable (capitalism has its own genres of instability, after all, which is what makes it such a powerful inducer of existence, because it can absorb its own contradictions—until it can’t, as at the present moment). I would want our work to refigure the relation of prehension (grabbing history) and apprehension (organizing the potential for new developments) by attending both to the variations that “manage the situation” and the variations that open up other ways to carve out modes of sociality.
My analogy is often to return to the socialist feminism of the second wave: it wasn’t just a scene of solidarity based on critique of the political economy of the family or patriarchy, but was a genuine effort at imagining other living forms of relation and value transecting economy and intimacy. The autonomists are now doing this work of material/visceral organization, as are the queer activists, and the anarchists too, and it’s all really exciting, the amount of genre-transgression and genre-invention that’s going on behalf of reinventing what it means to have a life. This distinguishes them from the parts of the labor movement that were imagining expanding the middle class in such a way that reproduced the poor as the outside of democracy (which is what happens when people misrecognize capitalist modes of entrepreneurial subjectivity that’s trying to game the system as practices of equality and evidence of freedom). But the new social movements are not presuming prosperity, property, accumulation, and kinship as the grounds for making life. Reinventing work and care, they’re also attempting to change the affective resonance around dependency. In neoliberal normativity, to be dependent is to be non-sovereign: but in the era of austerity, it is the first step to solidarity.

Patrick Lawler, Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds, Fiction Collective 2, 2012.

Read it at Google Books

When you step inside Patrick Lawler’s Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds, you will find yourself hovering in the clouds, among a family and a town, and in the world of one of fiction’s most inventive writers.
Patrick Lawler’s novel is about resonance, echoes, and naming; about hiding inside of names; about standing completely still; and about the fractalization of family. Connect the dots. Connect the secrets. Mother. Father. Sisters. Brother. Every character wears a variety of masks, and every place is also someplace else.
Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds is a reconfiguring of narrative—how stories exist inside stories, how place exists inside self, how self exists inside others, and how parachutists exist inside clouds.

 “I love Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds. Domestic myth, fairy tale, troubled and clear—this novel moves me to tears.”--Kate Bernheimer

“Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds in its headlong descent into the atomistic atmosphere of language never attains a terminal velocity, or more exactly, it creates a velocity that terminates the notion of termination. The book is unstoppable in its amazing folds of folds, its pleats and pleas, its Mobius confabulation and textual texture. It falls and floats. It levitates longingly. Patrick Lawler’s book pulls an infinite load of G’s and just as many gees!”—Michael Martone

Patrick Lawler, Feeding the Fear of the Earth, Many Mountains Moving Press, 2006.

FEEDING THE FEAR OF THE EARTH is an outrageously original collection," Susan Terris writes of the Many Mountains Moving Poetry Book Contest winner. "Reaching across time and space and cultures and genders, Patrick Lawler gathers characters as diverse as Christopher Smart, Ed McMahon, and Rosa Parks. Ecological and ethereal, political and historical, philosophical and physical, this astonishing book is a place where anyone who has walked the earth can rub up against anyone else" - Linda Tomol

 

Patrick Lawler, Underground (Notes Toward an Autobiography), Many Mountains Moving Press, 2011.



"Patrick Lawler's new book UNDERGROUND (NOTES TOWARD AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY) is a unique and fascinating volume: part interview, part poetry, part elegy for his father, part examination of how a son with this particular father became a writer and a poet. You will be in awe at how Lawler, a boy who spent seven years living with his family in a cellar with no books—just a magic word box—transformed himself and came to terms with his father's idiosynchrasies as well as his own. 'At One of my Father's Funerals, I was Humphrey Bogart' is a knockout piece! Read this, read it all. Find out how Lawler discovers that an ending 'blossoms into multiple beginnings.'"—Susan Terris


Underground was published by a small press called Many Mountain Moving Press, which seems to be the one-man operation of Jeffrey Ethan Lee. Unexpectedly, I found myself quite affected by the book, which is, indeed, a sort of memoir, or more precisely, the account of a father rendered by a son. Unexpectedly, since generally I am quite suspicious of any rendering of world or word into binaries, such as dark/light; interior/exterior; above/beneath; shadow/sun, etc. For some reason, I accepted such tropes in the context of this book, a fact that I am still mulling over. Underground is structured as an alternation between an interview with the author by Paul B. Roth that appeared in Bitter Oleander in 2009 and selections of Lawler's poetry (these seem to date from the 1990s to the present). Although Underground is already a hybrid-genre text (poems, interview, a few photos, bio of father, bio of author), strangely enough, I felt myself wanting it to go even further in that direction. I found the alternation between interview sections and poems a bit too predictable.

When the author chose the title Underground, he was not using a metaphor. For, as he states at the beginning of the interview with Paul Roth: "As a child I lived in a cellar for seven years. We had intended to live in a house like everyone else, but my father broke his back and only the cellar was finished." (5) The cellar (the beneath) and the father (broken) are the two primary concerns or motifs of the book.
There's much language in Underground that I found appealing & evocative. The following is but a sample:
"but my destiny was to be a root."
"I'd take out/ the thin insides of pens for veins."
"I leave the rivers running all night."
"I watched things die around my father's hands."

"The ashtray crisscrossed with songlines" - P. Koneazny



Patrick Lawler, (reading a burning book), BASFAL Books, 1994.

This, Patrick Lawler's second book-length collection, is his follow-up to the critically praised A Drowning Man Is Never Tall Enough, and affirmation that he is truly one of the up and coming poets of his generation. Restricted by nothing, he lives on the edge without hesitation or fear. He is a poet for our time.


How lovely, to find poetry where I should never have thought to find anything of the kind. Imagine a book with a tarnished title, further soiled by the parenthesis in which it appears. Imagine, in the same vein, that this book is issued by a publisher with the unlucky designation Basfal Books. Now you have what I had when I first laid eyes on (reading a burning book), words already weary unto death with their preening in the lower case. But then one has oneself a look inside at what Mr. Patrick Lawler has wrought -- and sees, blasing back, very life, burning and burning, the mind prudently, but never anxiously, watchful in the shade. Thank God, thank God -- here is a poet. - Gordon Lish

Leaving "the mystery intact in every clue," Lawler's first book exposes, shocks and stirs us. - Newsday

In the case of Patrick Lawler, however, verbal brilliance is put in the service of deep philosophic probing...- Booklist

[A Drowning Man Is Never Tall Enough] is the genuine thing, not imitative but full of its own humilities and hubris, as all great literature is. The book is a wonder. - Bin Ramke

I'm given all sorts of pleasure by such immediate poems as "The Front," such skills as inform "Is (Is Not)," such structural accomplishments as "Stone Music," and -- clearly -- the progressions of the whole final section. - Philip Booth

Halvor Aakhus, Book of Knut: A Novel by Knut Knudson, Jaded Ibis Press, 2012.


Excerpt

Excerpt 2

Fiction, life – in the end, what’s the difference?” Halvor Aakhus’s vibrant debut novel reminds us that both tragedy and comedy meet at the intersection between the real and invented. In this wildly original story, a mathematician finds a novel (Book of Knut, a novel by Knut Knudson) written by her dead lover who transforms it into an annotated mathematical textbook, complete with homework problems. Winner of the Henfield Prize for Fiction, the book combines text with paintings, musical scores, and mathematical graphs — all created by Aakhus – to seamlessly weave a tale of love and hate and again love.


“Halvor Aakhus is the smartest and most wildly inventive young writer to come around since David Foster Wallace. Knut rules!” – David Leavitt
“Behold, the bastard child—thrice removed—of Padgett Powell, Barry Hannah, and Samuel Beckett. There’s something very wrong and very right about the wires crossed in his head.” – Benjamin Percy
“I once saw an extravagant castle in the wilds of Colorado, constructed from various materials over many years by one odd guy with a vision. This novel reminds me of that castle. It also reminds me of E.L. Doctorow’s claim that excess in literature is its own justification. This wonderful novel is excessive—beautifully and humanely and ecstatically excessive. I urge you to give yourself up to it.” – Chris Bachelder
“Halvor Aakhus should be paralyzed from depression and knowing too much. He has two or three doctoral dissertations, never consummated, in his head. The truly arcane stuff in Book of Knut is from his memory. This book won a prize getting to this point, and the judge said it was so outrageously complicated he could not not give it the prize. The reader should gird his or her loins if loins can be in one’s head.” – Padgett Powell
I recently inhaled Halvor Aakhus’s BOOK OF KNUT: A NOVEL BY KNUT KNUDSON, and admittedly—considering the galleys I received are technically in PDF form and I simply couldn’t help myself—I also began by listening to that DJ Exotic Sage Presents: Blood Orange Home Recordings Mixtape and watching Jiri Barta’s ‘The Club of the Laid Off,’ and interestingly enough had no real problem paying proper attention to the book; it’s that fucking hilarious.

I sat on my couch letting my focus shift more and more into the novel, letting each corresponding media fall ever quieter as I tore deeper into the strange tale of a mathematician reading through the aptly-named Book of her now-deceased former-lover (he left her for her mother, as I understood it) Knut Knudson; and with every passing page I’d belt out another howl of laughter at the sheer brilliance and magnitude of this absolutely fucking insane narrative.
The actual book—Book—for all its strangeness and insane devotion to detail, is equally as enticing and, I daresay sentimental involving characters like Johnny Potseed, a guy who’s walked around the town of Napoleon, Indiana for 10-plus years throwing potseeds “to no avail…thus far,” and a fired mathematician (representing the cuckolded daughter’s cuckolding mother) named Slob—Slobodon—who organizes a late-night Christmas Tree planting to spite the university from which he’s been fired. The entire scene essentially thriving on minute details in weather and each participant’s academic pursuits, and ever-present cans of Keystone. Other irreplaceable namesakes include Mop, and Wolfer. This dude (who, by the way, looks like a Norwegian metal head that just walked off the set of Deliverance) is definitely onto something.

Moving on. 1.0

Something entirely eloquent happens in Aakhus’s prose that balances both the mathematically-totally-fucked (think David Foster Wallace takes a copy of Ratner’s Star into the woods and masturbates incessantly all over it while howling at the moon a la Anton Lavey’s ‘Devil’s Notebook,’ and I guess you’re getting there) and the jilted romantic observations taking place outside Book that—not even mentioning the sheer hilarious genius of everything therein—has me ready to stand by other reviewers, such as David Leavitt who called him “the smartest and most wildly inventive young writer to come around since David Foster Wallace,” which, while in the thick of the actual book, seems a vast understatement. While its mathematical style (which, in turn, is a definite understatement considering the crux of this narrative is supposed to be an unfinished novel converted into a mathematical textbook—I’m serious) will certainly perplex the generally unversed (ME) reader; it isn’t exactly imperative that you understand logic or the higher echelons of calculation to read this book, for within its brilliant forays into humorous episodes and nonsensical passages there is also a generosity put forth by the author that leaves me feeling comfortably educated without in turn questioning whether I’ve just been insulted or treated like an asshole. Asshole.

Moving on 1.1

I’m going to admit fairly candidly—and perhaps to the demise of this critique—that there are sections of this book that I couldn’t help but gloss over (the some three pages of simple numbers illustrating what Slob might potentially have referred to his cohorts as, for instance). This isn’t because I felt myself slipping away from the narrative—quite the opposite, in fact; I felt these pieces were added for some sort of effect in the author’s mind that wasn’t necessarily integral to the relatively-interesting story being told and I wanted to move beyond them as quickly as possible to get back to the guts. I will also admit that there was something so curious about the numbers that I felt myself tempted to read every single one or attempt to calculate just what the simplified word would be for a number that big (eons more than a trillion, something far out of the reaches of my feeble mind) but in deference to the fact that this is a novel—I think—I moved forward and ignored this humorous, though perhaps useless insertion of a footnote. It adds pages, I guess, and I did admit a curiosity that wouldn’t have existed without the insertion of said note, but this is one of the moments I did feel myself pulled away from the hilarity of the book on the whole. There’s brilliance-through-pushing-the-fucking-envelope, and then there’s hurling paint and hoping hard for something important; and I can’t help but speculate that this book has touches of both throughout.

Moving on 1.2 (Apologetically, I guess)

I change then from Blood Orange to Abbey Simon playing Chopin and am fairly certain you can hear him breathing/humming along throughout the recordings which seems an attempt to be connected with Glenn Gould but then again Simon’s been playing a bit longer than Gould (now dead) and the recording could’ve been made before any of Gould’s. I dunno, I hope neither ripped the other off. I hope that both played entirely of their own accord while humming along and breathing heavily because in my opinion that’s what makes classical piano recordings something worthwhile; the very guts and ephemera felt along the way that brings you closer not only to the person playing but to the composer himself.
It’s mentioned in Aakhus’s bio that for him “The first decade of the new millennium is a blur,” and although there’s that age-old adage about looking to the art, not the artist, I can’t imagine maintaining this level of interest in this book (a substantial amount, I enjoyed myself, as mentioned, there were lulls—mostly due to large piles of numbers interposed between bits of text and narrative—but by-and-large this novel is compelling and something new that I’m quite fascinated by) if it weren’t for knowing that little tidbit about the man and having seen that picture of him. It’s a good book, very contemporary, and necessarily strange, I just couldn’t wholeheartedly recommend it to the people of earth without in turn acknowledging that IT’S FUCKING FINE TO LOOK TO THE ARTIST AS WELL, and IF READING ABOUT VLADIMIR NABOKOV’S OBSESSION WITH BUTTERFLIES IN TURN MAKES YOU PICK UP LOLITA BECAUSE YOU’VE ALWAYS FANCIED YOURSELF A BUDDING LEPIDOPTEROLOGIST THEN DO IT BECAUSE WHO CARES?

Moving on 2.0

Vehemence: First, an aside, the paintings in this book are actually insanely fucking rad, and the landscape created by the graph paper/red-stained sheets is something (of course) unprecedented for me and I’m really enjoying myself. More authors should have the courage to embrace the more visual inclinations they feel when creating a book. Perhaps changing font-size or color along the way will give your book something previously unknown to you and that fucking matters. In a generation essentially smudged with the question of the survival of the novel, courageous souls like Aakhus—and his publisher, Jaded Ibis—deserve both sincere credit and applause for their efforts.
The juxtaposition of the corresponding critiques of the Book and the actual related passages creates a love story that nobody until the publication of this novel thought to create, which is interesting and quite worth noting. Imagine it: you’ve a dead man’s novel, about characters taken from his real life but characterized as other people, and the dead man’s jilted lover is able to figure out which character is which and comment on either the praise or defamation seen within each. It’s something special, something that makes the arithmetical lunacy in corresponding passages quite worth it and even slightly touching when looked at as though the author attempted to evade his true feelings with numerical order, etc. But probably not. (Section B. heretofore also known as “Who gives a shit, guy?”)
TORBJORN as Knut. Shortly into the novel a character appears in a tree named Torbjorn who—it’s revealed through annotation—is Knut Knudson’s characterization of himself; and he is fucking awesome! The previous characters have their necessity moving forward, but this—aside from perhaps the girlfriend who’s annotating things (Characterized as “Claire” in Book)—guy is the lifeblood of this novel as far as I’m concerned, and he’s completely fucking hilarious. “The gin’s shit and he hates the moon.” Is one of the early ways we’re shown how Torbjorn relates to the world around him.
What if Ulysses were written by an American mathematician with no cause for concern over whether this were a “literary” work or something that piqued the interests of collegiate types with messenger bags and awful tattoos and though he went on as an unsung hero for awhile a few devoted followers of his work started a cult and read every page of his work (playing as well the musical notes as they came up, singing when possible) while all he did was sit there looking like Euronymous-blonde smoking cigarettes and being casual. That would be this book. That would be this book, guys.

Moved on 1.0

Later on, and much deeper into the book I felt myself reeling a bit either from staring at the screen so long or from the actual story being told and its inherent lunacy. Sometimes I wondered whether this book is a critique of writing books itself, or perhaps an exploration of simple events as they transpired before the author and hence it’s all quite harmless and human but then long passages and tables come up littered with information and I can’t help but thinking humanity might be the furthest or closest thing to this author’s intention. I don’t know that I care. I know that it’s entertaining, I know that although Section 2/3 of the book begins with a preface that “the chapter is over 200 pages long and nothing happens,” it’s quite possibly my favorite portion of the novel and the most compelling. I know that, as previously stated, something new is being done here and that’s important. But I can’t stop thinking about something I read once about a man reading Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night on a single train ride and getting off the train feeling nauseous and tormented by that which he’d just endured.
This novel’s a strange fucking picaresque that hovers just above ground for 270 pages and I think I love/hate it.
These characters are actually rather cute and touching even considering the author’s assigning of things like “exploding head syndrome,” to some or the characterization of others as menial gas station workers with nothing much to offer the world aside from strange and seemingly useless utterances related to numbers, numbers, numbers.
The paintings continue to FUCKING AMAZE ME and although I wouldn’t feign to have a distinct reason for there presence throughout I can say with strict confidence that they mattered as I read, and provided a deeper glance into an already brain-melting book.
The passages written in a daily-journal format are probably my favorite, the most entertaining; but I can’t tell if that’s because they seem to combine all the already-present elements of the book (mathematical insanity, deeply-personal character studies, the importance of strictness, music, etc.) or because I simply like them. I must look into this when this book gives me back a few of my mental faculties.

Final treatise/Appendix

I should not have read this book so fast, but the difficulty of reading on the screen made me rush through it and after several albums (Blood Orange, Abbey Simon plays Chopin, several records by Antidote) had played out on my iTunes it was over and I was sweating and tasting coffee on my lips and wondering what the fuck just happened. This is a love story, this is a story of a man who’s left the world but along the way completely defiled or blew the mind of almost everyone he came across. This is a fucked up book similar to none and all of the strange and avant-garde literature you’ve already read and although it gave me a massive headache to read it so fast I get the impression that tomorrow I’ll be waking up fondly reminiscing over the misadventures of these fucking lunatics and their opinions of one another.

Grant Maierhofer

Emine Sevgi Özdamar, The Bridge of the Golden Horn, Trans. by Martin Chalmers, Serpent’s Tail, 2009.

Read it at Google Books

In 1966, a sixteen-year-old girl leaves Istanbul and signs up as a migrant worker in Germany. The Bridge of the Golden Horn is a witty, picaresque account of a precocious teenager refusing to become wise and the story of a young woman who is obsessed with theater, poetry, and left-wing politics.


“There is something about the way she tells a story that would make her words sparkle under any circumstances, and in any tongue.”—Financial Times

Perhaps the complicated lineage of Ozdamar’s prose — written in German by a native Turkish speaker and translated into English (by Martin Chalmers) — has a part to play in this striking novel’s distinctive rhythm and style. The protagonist (unnamed, but I’ll call her by one of her nicknames, Sugar) is a middle-class 16-year-old Turk on her way to a job as a guest worker at a radio factory in West Berlin in the mid-1960s. “I will go to Germany, work for a year, then I’ll go to theater school.” Which is what she does, more or less. Like Ozdamar’s writing, Sugar’s journey crosses all kinds of divides — cultural, linguistic, political, even sexual. Drawn to left-wing politics by a communist hostel warden in Berlin, who gives her texts by Engels and Gorky, Sugar moves back and forth between East and West as the leftist causes of the 1960s and ’70s swirl around her — protests against the Vietnam War, the Shah, the pro-American leadership of the governing Turkish Justice Party and the Greek military junta. Sugar, much to the chagrin of her parents, is bold and determined, rather like this book. “To make you learn something,” her father tells her, “is harder than getting a camel to jump.” - Alison McCulloch



  Consider Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s The Bridge of the Golden Horn a kind of bildungsroman, a portrait of the artist as a young migrant worker as it were. The plot threads are familiar: discontented young woman leaves home to seek her fortune; she encounters resistance; she overcomes obstacles; she is transformed. In this case, the unnamed narrator, with dreams of becoming an actor, lies about her age to get a job so she can pay for drama school. At sixteen she leaves Turkey for Germany where she works on an assembly line installing radio valves. The novel goes on to detail four topsy-turvy years of the young woman’s ping-ponging back and forth between Berlin and Istanbul. In Berlin, she and her coworkers “lived in a single picture: fingers, the neon light, the tweezers, the little radio valves and their spider legs. The picture had its own voices, detached selves from the voices of the world and from own bodies. The spine disappeared, the breasts disappeared, the hair on one’s head disappeared.”
Though The Bridge is certainly set in sundry dreary places, it is not the usual catalog of critiques against mindless work, oppressive government, and dehumanizing bureaucracy (although it succeeds in doing that, if inadvertently). It is instead a collection of often obtuse reveries about self, family, friends, work, and everything around. The book’s often desultory settings are enlivened by a cast of vividly drawn characters and the hero’s own skewed perception of things, a perception marked by childlike free-association that later gives way to a kind of buoyant satire.
The Bridge of the Golden Horn’s thinly veiled autobiography concentrates on the intellectual, the artistic, and, particularly, the sexual awakening of the young protagonist. It follows her peripatetic life, one preoccupied with sexuality, theater, literature, and radical politics. Shadowing Özdamar’s own life, the protagonist travels from Istanbul to work in a factory in Berlin, and, like Özdamar, she returns to Turkey to study Brechtian theater. The hero wants to “live poetically . . . to awaken the passive life of [her] intelligence.” She believes that her virginity is one obstacle to that awakening. The hero’s slow, often ambivalent, and at turns almost methodical approach toward losing her “diamond,” her “maidenhead,” is usually depicted at a remove, with cool, tempered prose. At other times, Özdamar’s novel brims with rapturous flights and sometimes veers toward fabulist heights, but ironically, these moments are usually reserved for mundane observations and events.
The Bridge of the Golden Horn is built of densely packed paragraphs where sentences slither and writhe; often taking time to develop, these sentences are congested with repetitive words and phrases, and they unspool just short of unraveling completely from within Özdamar’s long, sprawling paragraphs. Özdamar’s prose resists quoting, and it defies a reviewer’s efforts to encapsulate her style. Here is a representative passage:
The snow had made the city a little more merciful... It fell softly, so softly that the time, when one was writing a letter or sewing on a button, also became softer. The holes of the button, the thread and the needle, the pencil in a hand moving across a white sheet of paper, always promised silence when it was snowing outside. The steam of boiling water or of the hot water that splashed on a body in the bathroom formed a bond with the snow. One saw the snow, one saw the objects, pans, pots, soap, the tables, the quilts, the shoes, a book on the bed. The snow said that we are born with it and will live only with it. We will rinse the pans in the room, it will be snowing outside, we will pull back the quilts, it will be snowing outside, we will sleep, and it will be snowing outside, and when we wake up, it will be the first thing we see. We will see it from the bus, from the factory window, the snow will fall into the black canals, make the heads of the ducks white. We could leave our footprints in it. . . . The snow could embrace one and create spaces in which silence could expand. Now it was gone.
Reading such prose feels like being inside of a snow globe, that feeling of breathless serenity and overwhelming encasement under a dome. One feels the power of Özdamar’s prose as coming from its thick and cascading accumulation of sentences. Indeed, like the snow that the narrator indelibly describes, Özdamar’s passages “embrace one and create spaces in which silence could expand.” But even within this silence the characters are surrounded by so much city static and industrial noise. The hero’s attempts at learning German from newspaper headlines sounds like clack clack clack. A couple’s “kiss voices” slurp slurp, punched-in timecards tink tink tink, a pocket watch goes tick tack tick tack, a faucet drips into a sink tip tip tip, church bells dong dong dong.
In his introductory essay to The Bridge John Berger writes that “since their beginning, stories have pretended to take place far away. Faraway and once-upon-a-time are code words for Here and Now. Just as information is the opposite of stories, informers are the opposite of storytellers. When a story is being retold every word becomes a code-word describing a Here and Now.” Stripped of its dense meditations and tangential, extended asides (but why would anyone want to cut these out?), The Bridge is, at heart, a fairy tale. In Özdamar’s novel, its “once-upon-a-time” is the age of a young woman’s innocence, the “faraway” is a long lost Istanbul. Germany is its “here” peopled with a wide and colorful cast that includes two sisters who wear “pale blue dressing gowns of electrified material,” an opera singer, a girl saving up for a breast reduction operation, a plainclothes policewoman, a Baudelaire-quoting engineering student, a Communist hostel warden, her crazed drama teachers, an exile from Greece’s Fascist dictatorship, and assorted lovers, pseudo-intellectuals, activists, and artists. Every encounter leads toward increasing the protagonist’s emotional, political, and cultural awareness. The novel’s “now” is a desultory time of war, political upheaval, economic uncertainty. It is the tumultuous late 1960s. The Vietnam War is on everyone’s minds. It is a “now” of trying to bring order to the chaos through books, in this case, pocket-sized copies of works by Baudelaire, Brecht, Marx, Engels, Shakespeare, and Lorca.
The namesake bridge of the novel’s title refers to the The Galata Bridge that spans Istanbul’s Golden Horn. Özdamar’s novel is part of a rich artistic legacy honoring the bridge, one that includes engravings, paintings, poetry, and theater. It was first built in the sixth century and as great an artist as Leonardo da Vinci was solicited for a redesign by Sultan Bayezid II. (His design was rejected.) The bridge in Özdamar’s novel is the fourth Galata Bridge, and throughout the novel Özdamar draws on the vast symbolic legacy of this marvel that bridges two disparate cultures. She writes:
I walked towards the Bridge of the Golden Horn, which links the two European parts of Istanbul. . . . The many ships beside the bridge gleamed in the sun. The long shadows of the people walking across the Bridge . . . fell on to the ships from both sides of the bridge and walked along their white bodies. Sometimes the shadow of a street dog or donkey also fell there, black on white. After the last ship the shadows of people and animals fell on to the sea and kept walking there. Across these shadows flew the seagulls with their white wings, their shadows also fell on the water, and their cries mingled with the ships’ sirens and the cries of the street sellers. As I walked across the bridge, it seemed to me as if I had to push the air ahead of me with my hands. Everything moved very slowly, as in an overexposed, old slow-motion film.
The Bridge of the Golden Horn was selected as part of English PEN’s “Writers in Translation” series and was awarded a grant because of its “clear link” to PEN’s aims; namely, to “explore a freedom of expression or human rights issue” and “contribute in some way toward inter-cultural understanding through illuminating an aspect of another country or culture.” Such links are forged in passages like the above—filled with lyrical assonances and soft repetition detailing shadow-play on the sea—as well as the often picaresque narrative as a whole. The book, like the bridge, fosters cultural reciprocity and understanding, ultimately leading toward understanding the tension between separation and intimacy, confusion and discovery, mystery and awareness. The wonderful and confident translation from the German is yet another bridge, one that ultimately brings reader and writer that much closer, and makes this reader yearn for the final installment in the trilogy, with hopes that it too is translated by Martin Chalmers. - John Madera

This picaresque account of a young girl's intellectual and sexual coming of age from the mid-Sixties to the mid-Seventies, through her adventures in Berlin, Istanbul and Paris, enacts multiple acts of translation and transmutation. Emine Sevgi Ozdamar's enunciation of an identity that begins in Turkish and moves into a bold, re-forged and enriched German is accessible and entertaining. The heroine's various incarnations as immigrant factory worker, language student and chambermaid in Berlin, then as a drama student and actress in Turkey, challenge the tired stereotypes that haunt too many literary representations of migration.
Ozdamar has a Dickensian talent for creating vivid portraits of ordinary people as complex and individual. The immigrants we meet are not simply pitiable victims; they include an opera singer and a secret policewoman, both fleeing unhappy love affairs, a girl saving up for a breast reduction operation, a lesbian couple and an engineering student who quotes Baudelaire. Vasif, the Communist warden at the hostel in Berlin and later a director at the Ankara Ensemble, and Madame Gutsio, an exile from the Fascist dictatorship in Greece, feed the teenager's prodigious appetite for revolutionary theatre, film, politics and literature.
Identity seems multiplied and enriched rather than compromised by translocation. As the heroine's mother remarks: "a language is like a person, two languages are like two people". Her father observes that she left Istanbul as a (Turkish) nightingale and returns as a (German) parrot, but this isn't quite right. Ozdamar's writing is subversively literal: when Turkish adjectives are transposed to German, they attain a fresh political and poetic force. The "diamond" of virginity becomes dubious wealth the protagonist is keen to be rid of rather than hoard, so that she can be free to "pursue the beauty of men". The urban ruin the factory girls skulk around after work becomes the "offended" station, the locus of homesickness.
Cultural ignorance, too, is used to make a political point. The intellectuals at the Turkish Workers' Association speak so often of Nietzsche that the factory girls presume that he's the German prime minister.
Ozdamar's novel is an act of literary transubstantiation between languages, cultures, and the flux and intensity of lived experience. Martin Chalmers's English translation from the German retains the rich strangeness of her writing, in all its demotic and lyrical variety. The novel reminds us that literature is a transforming energy at the heart of life. Book vendors in Istanbul lay out their wares, wind leafing through the pages. "Poverty ran in the streets, and the people who in their lives had wanted to do something about it and had been killed as a result now lay down in the street as books. One only had to bend down to them, buy them". Hence many of those killed "entered homes, gathered on the bookshelves next to the pillows and lived in the houses". - Alev Adil

In a foreword to this novel, John Berger says the author's voice "changes age from sentence to sentence". She talks about dreams like a child, Berger writes, while conveying the "cruelty of the existent like a grandparent". It is partly this combination of an acutely observant ingenuousness and a satirical worldliness that gives The Bridge of the Golden Horn its mesmerising power and charm.
The novel is the second in a semi-autobiographical trilogy by the Turkish- German writer, actor and director Emine Sevgi Ozdamar. The first, whose lengthy German title translates as Life Is a Caravanserai With Two Doors; I Came In One and Left By the Other (1992), retraced the author's childhood in a politically turbulent Turkey in the 1950s and early 60s. The Bridge of the Golden Horn (1998), written when Ozdamar was in her early 50s, takes up the story from its teenage narrator's arrival as a "guest worker" in West Berlin in 1966. Like the author, the would-be actor learns German from scratch as a young adult, working on a factory assembly line making radios to earn money for drama school in Istanbul. The scene shifts between Germany and Turkey, before political events in Turkey drive her away in the mid-70s, to work in Brechtian theatre in East Berlin. Yet the bridge of the title also spans the interlinked worlds of its narrator, as events in Europe and the US, from Vietnam to May 1968, trigger reactions within Turkey.
The wide-eyed 16-year-old, who has lied about her age to join the tide of Turkish gastarbeiter, at first views Berlin as a film in which "I didn't have a part". But her world, as a cloistered middle-class Turkish girl, gradually expands beyond the women's "hossel" in which she lives opposite the Hebbel theatre, through contact with the Turkish Workers' Association and an avuncular communist and his wife. While the girl initially thinks Nietzsche must be the German prime minister, she builds on her knowledge of Shakespeare with borrowed volumes of Gorky and Engels, Brecht and Büchner.
Alongside growing political awareness, the novel details her sentimental education, as she and the other girls master the "fear of brothers and fathers" that weaves a "spider's web that covered the whole room and our bodies". While older women warn against losing "your maidenhead, that is your diamond", a friend tells her: "You must sleep with men. Free yourself of your diamond, if you want to be a good actress. Only art is important, not the diamond."
Returning to study theatre in Istanbul, the narrator is taken to be a "modern girl" because she chooses, and pays, her own way. Returnees from Germany are deferred to: "Europe was a club with which we smashed each other's heads - European shoes never wore out. European dogs had all studied at European dog schools. European women were natural blondes." She learns acting partly from movies - as her mother learns how to answer the phone stylishly by copying Liz Taylor - while encouraged by her drama teacher to imitate the peasant street-sellers who cross the wobbly, low-slung Bridge of the Golden Horn, and become versed in the "oratorio of Istanbul".
Yet as her political commitment grows, divisions in the country ossify, from Grey Wolves and Ataturk Youth, to the 15 deputies of her own Workers' party, who "often wore bandages on their noses, mouths and cheeks, because the rightwing deputies beat them up in Parliament". After a military coup brings a clampdown on students and leftwingers, as volumes of Marx are thrown into the Sea of Marmara, and toilets across the city become blocked with leftwing sons' and daughters' incriminating leaflets and letters, the drama student is arrested, partly accused of aiding the Kurds after a journey to the east of the country. Finally released, she resolves to leave Turkey.
Ozdamar directs an insistently mischievous, deadpan irony at a range of targets, not least the self-important - usually male - political idealists of her day. The narrator explains to a hard-working prostitute that her lover "doesn't work, because he's a theorist", while members of a film commune "went out into the streets and with an eight-millimetre camera filmed people they thought were being exploited". Moments of unexpected lyricism further leaven the novel. A girl sitting uncomprehending with two men speaking German is "like a lonely person looking for foreign stations on his radio at night", while men flirting with a group of young women "both smoked cigars. When one spoke the other stretched his head up and blew a couple of rings in the air, and we, the three girls at the table, tried to get our wedding fingers inside these rings and hold on to them."
At first learning German from newspaper headlines, the fledgling actor returns home with two languages, as both a "Turkish nightingale" and a "German parrot". Or as her earthier aunt puts it: "The chicken who walks around a lot returns home with lots of shit under its feet." It is this complex, troubled, enriching accretion of languages and worlds that the novel - in Martin Chalmers's assured translation - so persuasively captures. - Maya Jaggi


If someone had asked me a week ago to imagine something impossible about a writer I greatly admire, I might have said “Janet Frame writing as brilliantly about politics and sex as she does about anguish and language.” Well, let me talk now of someone who comes very close to doing that. And as with those elaborate, exquisite fictions by Frame, I puzzled in reading The Bridge on the Golden Horn as to whether what I read was a novel, or an autobiography, or a narrative that deftly eluded conventional markers. I’ve deliberately avoided finding out more than the book’s brief note tells you about Emine Sevgi Özdamar, actor, author and film director, who grew up in Turkey and now lives in Berlin. My not tracking down other reviews nor quarrying Google was the first of my tributes to her. For if ever a work can carry itself in terms of its writing alone, this is it. I know few books that penetrate political values so adroitly, or stake out the eternal chess game of sex with such tolerant insight. It offers love scenes which are cameos of sharp wit as well as—to use that old word we have grown so cagey with—rare beauty.
Özdamar’s story begins with a young Gastarbeiterin arriving in Germany in 1966, wide-eyed, shrewd, virginal, soon to be stagestruck. It concludes eight years later, the narrator initiated into the cauldron of contemporary politics and sexual expansiveness, leaving Istanbul for Germany yet again. In terms of so much that the book establishes as decent and worthwhile, the fact that she leaves on the day Franco dies in Spain must be taken as a kind of earnest for a new world.
There are different ways you might be drawn to the story. You would be pushed to find a better account of what it was like to live as an intelligent but fairly much untutored young woman in the heady events of the late 1960s, as the tectonic plates of both youth and politics massively shifted. Or you might read it with equal insistence as a Turkish girl’s efforts to “modernise” as her country laboured at the same challenge, with the United States as its insistent mentor. And how well it brings home the disparateness between “European” and “Asiatic” Istanbul, the adventure and the risk in shuttling between the two. It is as though that ancient, seething city effortlessly serves as allegory for Özdamar’s time, as the twentieth century plays out how the privileged and the exploited draw their lines. The fabled bridge of the title, substantial and hallucinatory, timeless and in daily use, is never anything so reductive as “symbol”. But what it carries is the weight of its country’s history, the constantly thwarted move towards a just community, the sense of “connection” that the story’s ideals strain towards.
For all Özdamar’s unravelling of the ineptness and confusion of the Left, and the awful force that prevails against those who stand up to oppression, part of her story’s persistent attraction is its marvellously quirky optimism. In a few masterly paragraphs, she will catch the intellectual buoyancy and the individual decency of those—whatever their peripheral sillinesses—who will not submit, who believe against the odds that the “good society” is there for the making. We believe her. Another of her gifts is so convincingly to interweave politics and theatre, sexual adventure and ideals, and to do so at times with splendid comic effect. Her account of Turkish drama students taking method acting into their bedrooms, their assessing satisfaction by the dramatic clamour accompanying their performance, is hilarious. As too is the Marxist narrator, having attained true “political consciousness”, discussing “orgazum” with peasant women on the Iraqi border.
So often, as Özdamar’s strange eventful country became familiar, I thought how much more entertaining, more serious, this displaying of Istanbul’s human intricacy manages to be than the much-praised account of it in Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul. There is so much more liveliness to the city she portrays, more interest in other people and diverse ways of thinking, than in the fine but narrow tracing out of how a middle-class boy grew into the winner of Big Prizes. Although she too touches on that almost syrupy melancholy that pervades the educated Istanbuli sensibility. The Leftists, as much as their opposition, have an insatiable fascination with the Ottoman past, the life-in-death presence of an ageless city, so insistently beautiful and decayed, so inevitably stirring hüzün in those who love her and despair.
What rescues Özdamar from anything quite like that is her reckless, engaging involvement with what goes on day by day; her embracing social commitment; even more, her obsession with the swirls and currents of where language takes her. Personality—as much as in Frame’s three-volume autobiography—at every point is defined by the kind of language one opts for or submits to, and by the clarification when imagery is let loose. This is why questions about genre and labelling hardly matter, whether we think of the work as fictionalised memoir of highly wrought autobiography. It is a work freighted with brilliant, evocative writing, the insight that we are the language we use. At random, you know you are reading a compelling talent. Take this as the sole sample space allows, as the narrator watches Turks in Berlin.
The snow covered their moustaches. Three moustaches covered in snow make more headway against the snow than one moustache covered in snow. So each man, when he was with others, found his father, his grandfather, and it was good to be walking beside father or beside grandfather feet, when one was on a path whose end one couldn’t see. Then men walked together along the Berlin streets and spoke their language loudly, it looked as if they were walking along behind their words, which they spoke loudly, as if their loud language cleared the way for them. When they crossed a street, they didn’t cross it in order to get to another street, but because their loud words went in front of them. So they walked behind their words and to the people who didn’t understand these words it looked as if they were walking through another country with their donkeys or chickens. The men walked behind their words until they reached the Turkish Workers’ Association, there they smoked and drank tea. They didn’t say: “I’m going,” instead one stood up and said “We’re going.” When one poured tea into a glass, he said, “We’re drinking tea.” When a newspaper lay on a table, one said: “We’re going to read a newspaper.” Each “I” sewed itself on to the next “I” and made a “We”.
Language is as much the subject and the liberator in Özdamar’s evolution as it was in Joyce or Frame. She does not suffer by comparison with either. Her “portrait” too is of how a young woman becomes an international artist, and an open and admirable human being. If I seem a little over the top in my enthusiasm, that’s fine. To have been on the golden bridge of Özdamar’s prose—even in translation—for two hundred and fifty pages, quite makes its case. - Vincent O’Sullivan


“Since their beginning, stories have pretended to take place far away. Faraway and once-upon-a-time are code words for Here and Now.” When these words from John Berger’s introduction are applied to this moving novel by Turkish playwright and actress Emine Sevgi Ozdamar, they ring inordinately true. The Bridge of the Golden Horn opens with the most well-known plotline: Once upon a time there was a young girl who sought more out of life than she currently possessed. So she left home, traveled to a faraway land, and along the way encountered a myriad of obstacles, found herself in both silly and impossible situations, all of which taught her valuable lessons by the novel’s conclusion. The end. Yet in the case of The Bridge of the Golden Horn, this familiar narrative device takes the reader along on a surprising and wholly satisfying journey with a quirky and complicated narrator. This unnamed narrator is a sixteen-year-old girl who dreams of being an actress, and so she forsakes her native Istanbul for Berlin—lying about her age in order to obtain a job as a migrant worker in a factory—in the hopes that she’ll accumulate enough money to send herself to drama school. As is usually the case in such stories, all does not go according to plan, and the novel chronicles the four year span—beginning in 1966—during which the heroine acquaints herself with love, sex, communism, and foreign languages. So she says herself: “I wanted to learn German, and then rid myself of my diamond in order to become a good actress. Here [Istanbul] I would have to come home every evening and look in my parents’ eyes. Not in Germany.”
Written in a fluid stream-of-consciousness style, Emine Sevgi Ozdamar’s semi-autobiographical novel propels the reader through the narrative with its long chapters and quick pacing; it feels like you’re straddling a cantering horse, powerless to slow down. The novel’s tone forces the reader to feel what the narrator feels at any given moment, whether it be about her family, home, sexuality, politics, or theatrical aspirations. With its clipped and direct prose, the narrative pulls you in without being sentimental or melancholy: “Every cigarette we smoked that night showed us that we had made a mistake. We had run away from the herd and now we wept for the herd. This was Berlin. This Berlin had not existed for us yet. We had our hossel [sic], and the hossel was not Berlin.”
While Ozdamar’s lyrical writing technique contains shades of Postmodernists who have especially favored a stream of consciousness style (such as Joyce and Woolf), her writing is wholly her own:
Berlin had been like a street to me. As a child I had stayed in the street until midnight, in Berlin, I had found my street again. From Berlin I had returned to my parents’ house, but now it was like a hotel, I wanted to go back on the street again. On the ship the men took the newspapers down from their faces and looked at me. Every evening a shipful of people would come to see me on the stage as an actress. The men would fall in love with me. I suddenly realized that I was very curious about what these men who would fall in love with me would look like. I wanted to die onstage like Moliere, in the middle of the set. I saw myself onstage, other actors carried me in their arms, I bled from my mouth, died and left behind no children who had to weep after my death. The ship was just in the middle between Asian and European Istanbul. The actress came out of my body, she pushed a man and child in front of her and threw them into the Sea of Marmara. Then she came back and entered me again. When the ship reached the Asian side, I knew that I never ever wanted to get married. I could hardly wait to get home. Before I got on the bus, I called my mother. ‘I don’t want to marry, I want to go to drama school.’
In addition to being the author of The Bridge of the Golden Horn, Emine Sevgi Ozdamar has also written plays, and is a trained actress. With this experience, Ozdamar has clearly gained a masterful understanding of the nuances of language, and sheutilizes literary devices found in playwriting to push the novel’s plot towards its conclusion, a technique that works brilliantly throughout the entire novel.
At its core, though, The Bridge of the Golden Horn is a modern-day fairy tale. While few would consider 1966 “long ago”, or Istanbul and Berlin “a far away land” (in the traditional fairy-tale sense; both are pretty far away from where I sit in Phoenix), the novel contains a colorful cast of characters, heartbreaking and hilarious events, a teenage girl on the verge of womanhood, and all of this takes place in a dramatically shifting modern world – a densely wooded forest of life, iconic of a fairy tale. In his introduction, John Berger states, “perhaps story-tellers have always been listened to because they fill a lack.” Luckily for readers, Emine Sevgi Ozdamar’s profound, illuminating, and ultimately lovely novel, The Bridge of the Golden Horn is a powerful story that can fill in for whatever may be lacking. - Jessica LeTourneur


In her autobiographical novel The Bridge of the Golden Horn Emine Sevgi Ozdamar writes with wisdom and humor about the artistic political and sexual adventures of a young woman coming of age in 1960s Germany and Turkey. Driven by her desire to assert her independence and become an actress Ozdamars sixteen-year-old protagonist leaves a comfortable middle-class life in Istanbul and takes a factory job in Berlin. On her arrival she doesnt speak a word of German and knows next to nothing about how to manage life in a foreign country. But thanks to her irrepressible curiosity and fearless hunger for new experiences she soon transforms herself into a sophisticated and worldly political activist and actress. Ozdamar herself moved from Turkey to Berlin in her youth and she draws on her firsthand knowledge of both places in order to imbue her novel with a wealth of realistic detail. She packs the books opening section with fascinating observations about working life in a Berlin radio tube factory noting for example that the workers always saw their forewoman in a distorted perspective because of the magnifying glasses they wore over their right eyes on the job.
Throughout the novel Ozdamar uses lively and lyrical prose to create an appealing voice for her nameless first-person narrator. She treats her protagonists sexual awakening with both sensuality and sensitivity and writes passionately about the great power that literature and theatre have to broaden ones understanding of the world. Ozdamars book is also often quite funny: in one passage she gently pokes fun at her protagonists naive political idealism by recounting an incident in which a peasants donkey eats her copy of Lenins State and Revolution. But for all its warmhearted humor the novel also does not shy away from forthrightly depicting the tragedies of poverty and political violence in 1960s Turkey.
As an actress playwright and fiction writer Ozdamar has received widespread acclaim for her work. With The Bridge of the Golden Horn Ozdamar has spun an appealing tale about a young immigrant who discovers herself through politics sex and the arts. - www.forewordreviews.com

The award winning Bridge of the Golden Horn was published in German in 1998 and fortunately for English readers has recently been translated with a wonderful introduction from John Berger.




Özdamar often uses her own life as a canvas for her narrative and there are many parallels here – arriving in Germany as a young woman in the 1960s from Turkey without a word of German and trudging back between the workers’ hostel and a radio valve factory. Her descriptions of learning German from the sounds of words and reading captions in newspapers have such a sharp authenticity.
Her German writing has been noted for its “Turkish” style in the patterns of thought and speech. It is hard to know how much has survived translation, but there is unfamiliarity to the way the sentences run from one another smoothly and swirl around the scenes and the characters. The feeling of being a young woman surrounded by an unfamiliar world while at the same time discovering her social, political and sexual liberation is captured superbly.
While many of the people populating the novel are described in a nuanced manner, not through physical description but through their peculiar actions or mannerisms, other familiar characters appear. Salvador Allende and Richard Nixon hover in the background, Lenin’s State and Revolution makes its mark and the communist hostel warden introduces Dostoyevsky, Gorky, Jack London, Tolstoy, Joyce, Sartre and a woman, Rosa Luxemburg.
The Vietnam War provides a focus for discovering the vileness of US imperialism as our nameless protagonist takes part in protests in Berlin and Paris. She discovers the political debates taking place in the Workers’ Association and begins to take acting lessons too.
The acting takes us away from Germany on a freedom fling with a drama troupe into Turkish delight and delirium, where the next coup d’état is always just around the corner. Learning the necessity to lie low, the journey is made through Kurdish mountain villages to the Marmarasea.
A deft storyteller, Özdamar immerses you in these tales, reminding you how it feels when everything is new and everything is possible. - roamingwithintent

German-Turkish Literature: an Analysis of Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s The Bridge of the Golden Horn by Mediha Göbenli (pdf)

While this book was interesting, I’m not sure it was my cup of tea. I think “hectic” is a fantastic way to start off describing it. We breeze through quite a bit of the narrator’s life and it’s hard to be sure what it meant. Despite the quick pace of events, the book felt very, very slow. Since it was a memoir (or a semi-autobiographical novel, as I see elsewhere), I expected to feel some sort of attachment for the main character, but it was surprisingly difficult. I certainly thought her journey was interesting. How many stories take place within a Cold War-era Berlin factory? Or in Istanbul? Not very many, at least not many that I read.
Sevgi’s goal in life is to become an actress. She’s willing to do more or less anything to get there. Saving money for theatre school is the purpose of her time in Berlin, but she also does plenty of other things in order to fit the image of actress. This includes many attempts at giving up her virginity, which she calls her “diamond”. Several men tell her that she is too young for sex, but she persists in thinking that her diamond is holding her back. This is just one of the occurrences which made me struggle to relate to her. When she does give up that diamond, she sleeps with men indiscriminately, often practicing her acting skills by faking her pleasure.
Something I did enjoy here was the book’s focus on literature, although not necessarily the political outcome of Sevgi’s learning. Sevgi is determined to educate herself, beginning with a book received from the communist hostel warden and continuing throughout her life. Books are treasures. By the end of the novel, however, it seemed that all of Sevgi’s learning, in fact her whole journey, was centered on teaching her to become a communist. While communism at its core is an interesting ideology, I found it hard to sympathize with someone who ignored the fact that communist countries regularly turn into dictatorships and continued following an idealized belief which has little to no real world value.
I suspect that were I older, I would have found more to enjoy in this book. If I’d lived through the events referenced in the USA, I would perhaps have been better able to draw connections and enjoy the allusions sprinkled throughout. As it stands, though, I found this book difficult to get through and at times, very much over my head. I can’t recommend it.- medievalbookworm.com/

Language without a childhood
A tribute to the writing of Emine Sevgi Özdamar, whose novels have made Berlin greater, more expansive, warmer. By Harald Jähner
It's not necessarily boring to watch a film in a language you don't understand. You concentrate all the more on other elements of the film, gestures, body language, the landscapes, extras. Someone who doesn't understand the language is not necessarily watching the wrong film but sees more of the film than others. Putting this added experience into the right words is an art that few have mastered better than Emine Sevgi Özdamar.

She came to Germany from Istanbul for the first time in 1965 and she understood – nothing. She once related that her first German word was "Haltestelle" (bus stop). She memorised it in order to make sure that she would get out at the right street on her way back. Of course this didn't work; in Berlin there were just too many placed called "Haltestelle".
In her novel "Die Brücke vom goldenen Horn" (bridge from the Golden Horn) she instead tells about her first German words as sounding like "shak, shak, eee and gak gak." When she and her roommates from the rooming house went to buy eggs they had wiggled their bottoms and said "gak, gak" to the saleswoman. Much distance lies between this German and Özdamar's novels. These books are wonderful, because they convey the magic of learning a language. She writes in German, a language which holds no childhood for her. In contrast to Turkish, which still retains the enchanting power of early comfort, the lullabies and also the first triumph of saying "I", "I want". In contrast, life in Berlin gave her the opportunity to linguistically start from scratch as an adult. She learned German in a strange way, by memorising the headlines of the newspapers that hung in kiosks – without understanding a word. When someone asked her "Niye böyle gürültüyle yürüyorsun?" (why do you make so much noise when you walk?), she would answer, for example with the memorised headline "Wenn aus Hausrat Unrat wird" (when belongings become trash).
Admittedly, her father later paid for a course at the Goethe Institute, where she learned German in the classical manner. However, one can readily assume that her own original learning method honed her sense of the language. For her, words have a body, a form, not only in terms of letters but also as spoken words, and especially as words that never reach those to whom they were addressed. In "Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn" she describes how Turkish men walked through wintery Berlin: "It looked as if they were walking behind the words that they spoke aloud. (...) They walked this way with their words, and to people who did not understand them, the men looked like people walking with a donkey or chicken through another country."
Also in her book "Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde" (strange stars stare at the earth) the spoken word is not only heard but also seen. A passage describes a memory of a winter in an unheated shared apartment in Berlin, where breath condensed in the air: "When two of us stood in the doorways of two opposite rooms and talked to one another in the cold, I saw two breaths speaking with one another in the corridor. (...) When we all sat in the kitchen at the big round table and ate while talking with one another, I saw seven streams of breath form over the table, like the beams of light from seven pocket torches on a dark night."
For Emine Sevgi Özdamar language and loneliness go hand in hand. Language does not dispel loneliness but casts it in a strong light. She waves words about as you would a torch when searching for someone or something that might catch the light, she runs after words like men on snowy streets, aching with homesickness. When words take on a life of their own in an argument, when one word leads to the next, as the wonderful phrase goes, then the words around the kitchen table slice the air like scissors gone wild.
This author enables us to experience what a boon for literature a late-learned language can be, a "language without a childhood", without fully automated reflexes. If you can see and imagine as clearly as she does, then you are always somehow out of place. You see the foreign, regardless of where and when you became naturalised.
Whoever has read her "Die Brücke vom goldenen Horn" will never again be able to pass by the ruins of Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin without recalling the words "insulted train station". This is what the women from the rooming house also call it, because the Turkish word for "broken" also means "insulted". The magnificent thing about the art of Özdamar is that she relishes in these unstable realms of language; she is anything but a hesitant, brooding wordsmith. She is fearless, willing to pick every apple from the tree of knowledge out of pure curiosity and zest for life.
Her magnificent books about her time in Berlin in the 1960s and 1970s describe the conquest of life, not only the mastery of a city. They are stories of a slow process of arriving, of landing, of wondering around in unfamiliar territory, of taking in the entire city. She virtually devours German theatre, her beloved Bert Brecht, whose plays she had already performed as a schoolgirl in Istanbul. Astounding how this young woman manages to overcome the inner border of the city, living in West Berlin while working at the Volksbühne in East Berlin with Benno Besson and Heiner Müller. She trumped all of us who considered the Wall to be an insurmountable obstacle. She would never have been satisfied with only half a city.
Berlin has taken on greater dimensions for me through the books of Emine Sevgi Özdamar; it has become more expansive, warmer. It is now all the more my home. For this I thank her.






Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Life Is a Caravanserai, Trans. by Luise von Flotow,  Middlesex University Press, 2000.



Emine Sevgi Ozdamar’s Life is a Caravanserai should be read by anyone interested in migrant literature, if only for its dense and unruly condensation of the genre—a primer in zwittertext estrangement and difference. And how strange it is! Caravanserai subverts the migrant bildungsroman by situating the narrative in the homeland, Turkey, from memories in utero to just before the girl-protagonist’s moment of departure. Until the final train-scene where she rides to Deutschland amongst aging prostitutes, our teenaged heroine’s tapestry of myth and history, remembrance and insanity, is largely untouched by the foreign Other. True enough, “Erol Flayn” and “Humprey Pockart”—Americans who don’t have to eat, they just take pills—slip through the cracks, but what occupies her stream-of-consciousness is the contradictions rife in Turkish society. She is, all at once, a Kurd stricken by war and poverty, a devout Muslim woman who revels in ribald sensuality, a child whose thoughts are shaped by wars new and old and unending. Despite the grim memories evoked by historical retellings—from Anatolian marginalization to the oiled rise of Ataturk—Ozdamar brandishes wonderfully irreverent humor, or glosses over the characters’ pain altogether. After a semester’s worth of “writing from the margins”, this is unbelievably refreshing. Ozdamar manages to narrate Turkey without a whit of sentimentality, and at the same time, explores the Turkish gastarbeiter’s source culture without us-versus-Them hostility vis-à-vis Germany. It is through language that confrontation occurs: a German mutilated by halting grammar, its wounds filled with Turkish aphorisms and syntactic structures underlying a Kurdish core.
It must be said, however, that this review is inspired by Luise von Flotow’s English translation and this writer can only hope that it conveys half the nuances available to German/Turkish readers. As it stands, the language von Flotow uses is clipped, angular, plagued with a lack of articles, unruly prepositions and strange transliterated metaphors (ie. shaking out worms meant going for a walk), comprising a narrative completely devoid of chapter breaks. This makes for novel that is exhausting to read, but whose inner rhythms make strangely compelling. (One must mourn all that is lost in translation: several online articles state that “Cotton Aunt”, to Turkishborn, is a fond reference to a madame of a brothel.) The general consensus is that Caravanserai is impenetrable. Not completely so. What strikes me is the sense of prescience that dominates the narrative and, upon reflection, seems to dictate the strangeness of the language involved. As stated by her own mother, the protagonist “opens her eyes wide, like the insane.” Her eyes unjudgingly record all that is in front of her, a calm acceptance of truth that within society’s dictates is deemed madness. (Indeed, madness, particularly the politicized madness of women, is as crucial here as in many migrant texts.) This may be read as yet another transgression committed by Ozdamar: unlike many postcolonial heroines, the persona of Caravanserai has no issues with identity. She knows who she is, a surety that springs from the history of Turkey (but remains unfettered to it), one free to exist in the migrant land of Germany yet unknown. - icafernandez   



Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Mother Tongue, Trans. by Craig Thomas, Coach House Press, 1994.



In 1965, the author of this extraordinary volume left Turkey for Germany to work as a Gastarbeiter (guest-worker), beginning first as a cleaning lady in a factory, then becoming a stage hand in Berlin, an actress, a playwright, a director and eventually a prize-winning German author. This collection of pieces evokes the hazy hell of a displaced person trying to make it in an unfamiliar, often hostile culture, learning a tongue-twistingly forbidding language. Eventually, all cultural forms and norms--inherited as well as adopted--seem increasingly strange. "Stay behind. Stay crazy." is a sing-song saying on one segment of the book ("Blackeye in Germany"), written originally as a theater piece, in which a Turkish donkey recounts stories of his farmer's adventures as a Gastarbeiter . A fusion of wildly fantastical Scheherazade stories with the nightmarish surrealism of Franz Kafka suggests the book's overall tone. In the original, Ozdamar plays with the German language as with a dangerous weapon, using words like a circus performer juggles knives. Although not much of that wordplay comes through in the translation, it does retain the mesmerizing quality of the original. And that flowing, jarring word stream propels readers into the world of an outsider, forcing them to hear and see with the ears and eyes of a stranger. - Publishers Weekly

Caught between her adopted country, Germany, and her homeland, Turkey, and constantly shuttling back and forth between them, Ozdamar's heroine finds that she cannot fit into either place. She bemoans the loss of her mother tongue and desperately catalogs Turkish words and their meaning so that she will not forget her roots. Her plight is a real one, but Ozdamar adds some surreal touches: donkeys speak, and people inhabit the bodies of others. Unfortunately, these touches don't really work. While the xenophobia experienced by Germany's guest workers is as glaring as today's headlines, this is a confusing and ultimately unsatisfying narrative. - Peggy Partello

free download (pdf)


I can’t not smirk even when I look at the cover: how tongue-in-cheek the design is, recalling something like the 1870-whatever edition of Paradise Lost I found in my hometown library in high school, This is what a distinguished piece of literature looks like. There’s even a multitude of date stamps on the inside cover’s checkout card.
I think that’s why I find this collection so endearing, not just for the quality of writing but how through so many details the Anthology of Etiquette and Terrifying Angels With Many Heads, the new free e-chapbook from NAP, calls attention to its own unlikeliness of existing, and the absurdity that it actually does, reveling in it with total sincerity one second then riffing on its own ridiculousness the next. And please don’t think by “ridiculousness” I mean “stupid.” This thing is smart. I just mean the kind of ridiculousness James Tadd Adcox mentions in his Editor’s Note:
I want to thank as well all of the writers who were willing to contribute work to this anthology, taking it on faith that such a strange book would ever exist.
Matt Bell’s “When Taking a Terrifying Angel With Many Heads As Your Lover” reads like a sex ed manual for Mormon teenagers from an alternate universe, or a flawlessly proper yet strangely sensually comfortable governess administering a heavenly rite of passage into adulthood, at times boxing your ears for your gross impertinence. It’s kind of brutal and totally hilarious. The reader gets constantly reminded of their own childish inexperience and insignificance before their lover:
If asked where you would like to sit at the pre-coital dinner, do not reply smartly: “At the right hand.” But if you do say this, do not also giggle and try to slide the terrifying angel’s own right hand into the drop of your lap. The terrifying angel with many heads is deadly serious about his duties, and will not enjoy your casual nature.
Another one of my favorites here is Joseph Scapellato’s “Thomas Jefferson,” in which said president lives through some dream-within-a-dream mash-up of one of Aesop’s fables and Jesus’ forty days of temptation in the wilderness. Throughout the story, Jefferson repeatedly “wakes up” from a progression of dreams in which he is taking part in typically Jeffersonian pursuits—reading books on a variety of subjects, inventing new machines, etc.—hoping to meet the morning as he does every day, only to find the morning absent:
Always they had shared an understanding, matching roles they donned each dawn like masquerade halfmasks, costumes that enhanced rather than concealed their character. Always he had woken into morning and met it with patience, contemplation, and productivity, qualities that came from and were homage to the morning, qualities that when given returned threefold. He headed for the highest hill, his beaded moccasins turning water, the trim of his smoking robe sweeping tips of grass, his ivory hair-queue loosening with every step. Behind their old clear understanding he began to sense a darker and still older etiquette, artfully opaque, something like a dream that the morning had woken the world into, a dream thatfor however senseless it seemed was shackled to its own chilly iron logic.
Eventually Jefferson encounters a series of surreal temptations to betray his faith, not in any god but man’s ability and desire for fairness and enlightenment. He repeatedly rebuffs his tempter, the Redcoat, but their exchanges become surreal and unhinged to the point that it seems hard to think that even Jefferson’s genuine love of reason and orderliness could ever overcome the increasingly nightmarish world around him. Disorder claws at him, including in the form of a terrifying angel with many heads of his lovers, and we pretty much get that Thomas Jefferson is screwed. Here, absurdity is not out for laughs, it’s trying to kill the third U.S. President. Scapellato handles this fucked up morality tale or Bible story or whatever you want to call it with clarity and efficient description—there are just enough monsters present to imagine how many more might be lurking around the corner.
Also check out Vouched contributor Amber Sparks’ reflection about being a terrifying angel with many heads’ long-term platonic, silent companion waiting eons to hear it speak, and Colin Winnette’s story about a terrifying angel with many heads who is also the mother of an uneasy child with rumbling blood, and this chapbook’s many other lovely and unsettling and terrifying heads, - vouchedbooks.com/

 
James Tadd Adcox does not nap. Throughout the night, for many nights he was visited by ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Future. Since he didn’t learn about the meaning of Christmas a couple of polite but firm ghosts met him. When this failed to teach James anything a couple of terrifying angels visited him and scared the hell out of him. For thanks (and to avoid retribution) James created this collection based off of those experiences. Each piece, whether poem, story, or illustration, uses proper etiquette and pays respects to terrifying angels with many heads.
Megan M. Garr orbits a foreign city, taking samples. Her life as an internet angel is admirable. Plucking people from obscurity and analyzing them is a beautiful, wonderful thing to do. From afar one can see everything. Up close vision can be obscured.
Caroline Crew instructs one how to live. Rather than end days, she extends them. God is the light, angel believe this strong. Some get touched by angels. Everyone is holy precisely once in life. When that happens varies from person to person.
Russ Woods paints the portrait of a terrifying angel as a sad employee of a combination Dunkin’ Donuts/Baskin Robbins. There is a reason Das Racist never wrote a song about that place. People who go there go there to ease pain. Here the terrifying angel is sad, hating its job, hating its life. At least it is blessed; at least it is an angel with a car.
Matt Rowan stays in a law firm. This law firm protects him from evil. One side etiquette, the other side terrifying angels with many heads, the two work together. For some reason etiquette took him to an amusement park. Both sides have worked together since 1976 to prevent further evil from befalling the world.
Colin Winnette has an unusual family. On one hand there is the thoughtful, caring father who loves gravy. The other parent is a multi-headed, heat-bearing beast known as ‘mother’ to Colin. Unfortunately family eating time is ruined by a need to see. Poor Colin doesn’t want to see his lovely, hideous, caring terrifying mother.
Poncho Peligroso slows down time to the pace of molasses. An entire moment takes three single seconds. Yet everything happens in those three seconds. Baklava gets ripped a new asshole in this highly riveting tale. Too bad Baklava has no outlet to defend itself, condemned to be consumed by a girl with little interest in it.
Michael Czyzniejewski recalls a life of the sick and twisted angels. There they wait for something to happen. A note has been sent. Nobody ever reads the note. Rather they decide to eat pieces of wood with a blond haired man. Eventually they are totally doomed due to their ability to consume and process wood.
Joseph Scapellato knows a lot about Thomas Jefferson. The guy did a lot for America. Chilling down in Virginia he read all these books and built chairs. Often objects transformed into naked ladies for Jefferson. That’s because he was so eloquent. Much of the story deals with Jefferson trying and failing to grasp onto reality, onto the morning, to believe in something, anything.
Davis Schneiderman explains etiquette the only way he can: through the wisdom George Washington referred to in his greatest days. Here Washington’s copy is occasionally changed or edited to Terrifying Angels with Many Heads. This deconstruction of civility appears to be most foul and impolite. Whatever though, Davis is no George Washington.
M Kitchell wants a love, a love beyond nostalgia, of the here and now. Here he lies next to someone on a bed, on a beach, for some people the two are one of the same. Sadly the angel no longer flies. Up does not exist for fallen angels. To soar is no longer an option for those who want to stay here on Earth with the beloved living. Zero holds everything and holds nothing. Used latex condoms are the new balloon animals thanks to the recession.
Matt Bell discusses the proper etiquette is wooing terrifying, multi-headed angels. Apparently they are not the best of lovers. However they are trying. They still have time. Perhaps before all that is known and unknown ends they may make sufficient sweet lovers.
Prepare for the finale, the heavens on high to fall upon the Earth in a dramatic, literary fashion for this overwhelming spectacle. - beachsloth.blogspot.com/

“Megachurch” brings to mind the erotic limitations of Mormonism, a religion whose members have sworn off all drugs, including alcohol and caffeine. Mormons typically marry while still teens. The unnamed speaker recounts, “I’m sandwiched between my mom and sister Bethany as per usual / and all I can think of is Elliot Fisher, my hopefully future and forever bf, / just one of 4,500 bodies filling the pews.” Adolescent sexuality mixes with the unreality of reality. The speaker texts her friends in church and recounts that one time she rejected a suitor “even though we shared an extra-sensory connection and enhanced / cognitive abilities due to the in vitro modifications made to our DNA.” The adolescent speaker matter-of-factly recounts her in-vitro fertilization, a slightly menacing variation on the Virgin Mary’s “immaculate conception.” “Megachurch” is religion mixed with science fiction, where we are “all of us spliced together and projected out onto a single massive screen / hanging over the stage like a sheet of stained glass.”
Following “Megachurch” is the second and final section of Omegachurch, The Godbots. Godbots are those who have ascended through the galactic caste system that seems to be based on intelligence or sexual desirability. The Godbots are basically fragmented god forms who “contort the impossible into being.” These are shards of the demiurge, the intergalactic patriarch obsessed with petty displays of power and prone to pathological outbursts of jealousy and rage. The demiurge is forever “testing” his children and inventing new rules and stipulations that allow Him to inflict greater and more barbarous forms of punishment. This is a predatory universe that Omegachurch unveils. Gods are vicariously experiencing our suffering and delight as we’re thrown into the crucible. This is the Old Testament mixed with the distant future, and it encapsulates a perception that is both futuristic, or speculative, and hopelessly dated, which is awesome.
The characters that populate Hoy’s Omegachurch live under the demiurge, a lawmaker and fence-builder. As demiurge, Jehovah is not a creator, merely an organizer. A god who has perverted his own function and made us slaves to belief. It’s important to note that Jehovah, like any transhuman entity, cannot be seen as “evil” in this regard, only as unqualified for the omnipotence granted Him. Enlightenment is the ultimate form of pain relief. Our pain comes from mostly trying to avoid pain, until we “contort the impossible” and fragment and the fragment fragments ad infinitum. These ghost people that are like shadow people stuck like in a spider’s web and bleeding into reality’s grid. They are as powerless as those Nostromo passengers cocooned up by the alien in order to be used as a host or vessel for more alien-demon entities to be birthed.
Hoy is no longer in thrall to the corpse of reality, the great psychic cauldron from which the Godbots or other transhuman entities siphon their power. Hoy’s poetry in Omegachurch is distinctly cinematic and seems to owe more to science fiction movies of the past thirty years than it does contemporary poetry. This poetry is also full of paranoid awareness. Paranoid awareness is the unshakeable feeling that personal identity is impossible, consensus reality is a hoax, and the future cannot help us. Despite the countless technological innovations the human race is still collectively ensnared by an aura of doom, secretly awaiting an alien invasion or an asteroid strike just to see what comes after that. The cover image of Omegachurch is asteroid 433 Eros. Like the poems in this collection, it is otherworldly and massive. - Chris Moran


Polaroid (Legacy Pictures, August 2010)

 

Glory Hole, with Jon Leon’s The Hot Tub (Mal-O-Mar Editions, 2009)



“Post-sex, post-American Apparel, but pre-ordained and vampiric. It’s unclear if this is God or, like, Dracula.” - Bomb

“Rains down invectives and disenchantment with the force of moral imperative… Hilarious, staccato blasts of contempt and pain.” - Sink Review

“Proudly defiant poems of obscene opulence and opulent obscenity.” - HTML Giant


Glory Hole, whose promotional video features a man falling and burning, reads like a life flashing before someone’s eyes. The voice, unlike Leon’s, is post-sex, post-American Apparel, but preordained (“I like faces that take my thoughts and make them better”) and vampiric (“after nine thousand years, pretty much everything is a waste of time”). It’s unclear if this is God or, like, Dracula. Either way, these are the frank admissions of someone, possibly eternal, bending over his own reflection and watching himself see-an image of Narcissus that brings us, naturally, to Baudelaire: M-O-M’s next edition will be a much needed new translation of My Heart Laid Bare. - Rachel Kushner


Dan Hoy’s Glory Hole rains down invectives and disenchantment with the force of moral imperative, while Jon Leon’s The Hot Tub perambulates through scenes seemingly from a lost Bret Easton Ellis novel in a haze of drugged out languor. But both are basically about Awesomeness. Actions and utterances are always taken to the nth degree: “I feel like the circle circumscribing everything.” (Hoy) “Listening to the songs that make my life rule and thinking about how much fun it was.” (Leon) “I have so much / power I end up vomiting space.” (Hoy) “This is what they said writing was all about. I’ve managed to extend its apparition to infinity.” (Leon). The lack of depth masquerading as lack of depth in this split chapbook release from Mal-O-Mar Editions gradually reveals a psychological exhaustion (emphasis on psyche = soul) that both poets implicitly acknowledge, even channel, but cannot or choose not to confront directly, glorying instead in the specter of grandeur and decadence.
The hilarious, staccato blasts of contempt and pain that are Dan Hoy’s poems gradually bring to mind the Dennis Cooper poem “Elliott Smith at 14″, quoted in part here:

I hug my friends until
we're bruised. I won't
quit hugging them,
not if they scream
at me to stop. Every-

thing's a machine.
Snort it. Everyone's
a ride. I won't stop
riding us until the barf
backs up in my throat.

Everyone's fantastic
every second. Suddenly
one of us is torn apart
by a machine, but I'm too
real to care. Fuck you.

Cooper, in his mid-fifties, is canny enough to position this rant into the articulate inarticulateness of a teen fuckup destined for greatness. This makes “Fuck you” acceptable. While the tone of Hoy’s poems are similar, there is no suggestion that the poems come from anyone besides the persona of a totally jaded adult staring down mediocrity. This at once makes Hoy’s persona less endearing, less vulnerable, and the poems themselves more vulnerable (to criticism). “I spent a whole season once without / a drop of water and so did the dirt / I slept with” does not play so well in more high-minded circles.
The almost vampiric malice of the poems are little-guarded by pyrotechnic wordplay or syntax manipulation. Poems launch, punch your gut, and peace out. “I Won’t Stop Ever” in its entirety:

What I want is
tucked away in the small of your back
like a tapeworm. I'd give my firstborn
for a tool calibrated to waste
no energy and no measurable amount of time. The needle
will sedate them first, if you're scared.
My life saves lives.

The poems’ simple declarative sentences sometimes get extra torque with a combination of creative enjambment and seeming non sequitur that either clips a sentence before we expect:

I make out with oracles or
what's the point.

or extends its scope further:

I teach the kids with shit for brains
and the illest aracana mundi in the world.

Speaking of aracana mundi, Glory Hole displays a strange fascination with spirituality and mysticism couched in poems generally concerned with work and play: “Tetragrammatron”, “Mediums”, are tossed out there; a poem is called “I Can Feel My Brain Already in the Christ Grid”; and once the speaker remarks: “O resplendent Angel Gabriel, I’m sure it was / technically the opposite of black magick / but come on.” What is this gesturing to? When exactly does posturing gets confused with sincerity? “I feed on plasma and cry a lot / and suck at feelings.”
Glory Hole is like the emotional version of Irving Kristol’s definition of neoconservative as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” The poetry is like a wound that grew a nasty scar which inspires a combination of fear, awe, and disgust. Going into its motivations feels futile and is actively discouraged: “History is for kids. Tomorrow / is full of horror, stupidity and death.”
While Glory Hole‘s jadedness has a take-on-all-comers jitteriness, The Hot Tub languidly moves through time and space. The time and space of Jon Leon’s poems is much more specific than Hoy’s (read Los Angeles). Like Ellis, the speaker describes excess and indulgence matter-of-factly, as if none of it is a big deal. “I dunk my waist into a hot tub at Sundance. Some babes arrive in white bikinis with Ketel One. They are like snowflakes in tangerine boots eating Doritos.”
The Hot Tub‘s untitled opening poem sets the stage, and is actually at an emotional pitch above the sequence that follows it. While the rest of the poems are narrated by the protagonist in a clinical, novelistic fashion, the opening poem is directed at a specific, unnamed person in a voice that is gushing, intimate, druggy, and hyper-sincere, “I’m so glad you’re here. I love you. I was listening to The Barclay Hour. It’s the only thing that makes me feel good. I wrote this vignette for you. I need you to listen to me and make me feel good and party with me…At the museum I was looking at The Abduction of Europa. All I could think about was how real it is to be alive…Listening to the songs that make my life rule and thinking about how much fun it was.”
The poems move like compressed scenes from Less Than Zero, and it is easy to forget that this is apparently supposed to be contemporary, replete with Facebook, mp3s, American Apparel, and Cory Kennedy eating a slice. Leon encourages this confusion with continuous 80s references to Michael Kors, “99 Luftballons”, Time-Life cassettes. Leon even writes scenes with things that are downright anachronistic, such as when the speaker calls his broker from “a wall of payphones.”
The broker says “the open market is drowning,” but in the context our current economic waste land, the mixture of cheesy excess and eighties iconography gradually exposes the ridiculousness of virtually everything the speaker says, does, and feels. This sense of the ridiculousness is what separates The Hot Tub from the deadpan tone of Ellis. This might suggest that The Hot Tub is mere materialistic critique or satire, but there is more to it than that. “Sike, I’m at home, my life is a warzone, wondering where the people are.”
Another anachronism is telling. After typical Hot Tub activity (“I pinch my crotch as a limo rolls past.”), the speaker describes how, “I go into a vacant building that’s empty, pop some batteries into my Walkman, and dance myself to tears.” Why is the speaker fooling with a Walkman? Nostalgia, certainly. Earlier in the poem (“California”) he says “In my head, I’m rolling back the years.” The Hot Tub is the work of nostalgia for certain kinds of aspirations that the poet rationally knows 1). cannot happen and 2). are dumb. It is like when David Thomson, describing The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant says it “still has no equal in its simultaneous delight in ‘style’ while pouring acid over the image.”  To put it another way, The Hot Tub is emotional kitsch somewhere between Nicki Rose and Yacht Rock.
Hoy and Leon both embody this reaching for emotion without pretending they are not doing so, and in so doing, sometimes say exactly what they mean, and both chapbooks are Awesome because of that. In some quarters this strategy of irony may be scorn-worthy, but this slick veneer is maybe not so much more removed than an earnestness veiled behind a wall of water and tree metaphors. Somehow it may even be more vulnerable. That is not to say that Hoy and Leon cannot or should not strive for less posturing to articulate feelings and ideas. Both seem to have such an ability. Or else they can just go irony forevz.— Dan Magers

I recently read a really awesome split book by Dan Hoy and Jon Leon called  "GLORY HOLE | THE HOT TUB," published by Mal-O-Mar.  
The book is a beautiful square, pleasing to hold with simple (how you say....?) colored line art on each side for each author's half of the book.   Think of a 45 rpm record, but each side is a hit, and each side is by a different artist.   Lennon/McCartney if you will, only these two guys don't have to write in the same house with the other guy's wife hanging around caterwauling..... Though that would be kind of a fun experiment... But I digress.
Most poets' egos would not allow them to split a book.  The man may want it but the ego wouldn't allow it, but these two poets are above that. Hell they're in their own worlds.  Jon Leon's work reminded me of Frederick Seidel's masterpiece "Ooga Booga" (which you have to read if you haven't already) in the best of ways.  No, it didn't cop Seidel's vibe. No it didn't steal Seidel's essence, but it served me with such a high MPH of personality and West Coast-ery, I lost my breath half way in.  Leon lives in California. No, not that one! The one in the Carolinas.   Get it, McFly?  It's called LIVING IN CALIFORNIA IN YOUR MIND.
And no, I'm not high. But I wish I were.
Here's a piece from "The Hot Tub" that explicates my point, daddy.  Lazy as I am, I chose the one aptly titled "CALIFORNIA":

CALIFORNIA
I'm standing on the corner of Martin and McDowell. I pinch
my crotch as a limo rolls past.  A bank of fluorescent lights
accentuates the whole thing.  In my head I'm rolling back the
years. I go into a vacant building that's empty, pop some
batteries into my Walkman, and dance myself to tears. When I
walk outside there's a train. I get on it.


See? This guy literally can be anywhere in the world and he's in California. Masterful.

Flip this bitch over and it's just as good!  A glory hole is when a guy is in a bathroom and there's a hole in the stall and he..... Oh [blushing], you know that already.  Dan Hoy is the guy who came up with the phrase "hate on life" and you've been following his work since 2004.  I know that's a lot to take in, so just think about that over the weekend.   Dan is intensely best friends with personae poems.  The personae of Dan Hoy.  I thought there was a difference between the narrator in his poems and Dan Hoy the man, until I became friends with him and realized how intensely honest these poems are.   Dan's poems will make you STOP hating on life, and that's the point.  Here's the titular poem from his debut book.

GLORY HOLE

I eat steak every day because
it's them or me. The masterpiece
is the frame I hang around my neck
and shove my face in. I wake up
like the night is impossible. My name
in lights and the arms of the jerk
I feel the most.  Every time I think
This is a blast and completely fucked.

If you want to know more (which you do), these two poets interviewed each other (WHO DOES THAT?) on a blog. Read it here.
Oh and here's where you order it.
And here are two promo videos for the book.  They'll make your body interested as well as your mind. -Amy Lawless


Did you follow that headline? New from Mal-o-Mar Editions is a poetry split– Jon Leon’s The Hot Tub and Dan Hoy’s Glory Hole, together in one spine. You might remember Jon from Hit Wave, the wonderful chapbook he did for Kitchen Press, and Dan Hoy is of course the co-editor of Soft Targets, the journal that did one (two?) legendary issue(s) before apparently winking out of existence, though it, like Jesus, may yet one day return. Anyway, to celebrate the Leon-Hoy Pact (it’s like the Glass-Steagall act, kind of) I thought it would be nice to pair some of their poems together, in little flights. We were doing this the other night at my house–me and some friends, getting slowly loaded on asscheap bourbon and reading these proudly defiant poems of obscene opulence and opulent obscenity aloud to one another. Fun starts after you click the button.

FOR KICKS (Hoy)
I throw down miracles
because I’m a coward. The sky
is exactly how I feel all the time.
I like fire and blood and being
fucked with or called forth.
I might as well jerk my own face.

PAGEANT PARADE (Leon)
I wake up in a vortex near The Raleigh. Stumble out into a blitzkrieg of heat. I think I’m near an ocean. I go up to a local aquaria and order a Cuervo and lime twist. It’s morning I think. So I left 3 days ago on The Crescent. Several hot teenagers walk by in red bikinis. My suit is sort of wrinkled. I follow the length of an unholy green wall, watch some fish scuttle by, nearly trip on a puppy. Some books and then rollerblading.

KILL THE LIGHTS (Hoy)
My problem is I dream the entire world
is everything. Instead
of stars and bad forms of God
I drive like an asshole because it’s the truth.

CALIFORNIA (Leon)
I’m standing on the corner of Martin and McDowell. I pinch my crotch as a limo rolls past. A bank of fluorescent lights accentuates the whole thing. In my head I’m rolling back the years. I go into a vacant building that’s empty, pop some batteries into my Walkman, and dance myself to tears. When I walk outside there’s a train. I get on it.

Since the reaction to yesterday’s Hoy-Leon extravaganza, I figured the best–perhaps the only–thing we could do is double down. Here, then, are some more selections from The Hot Tub (Leon)and Glory Hole (Hoy), the new split poetry collection out from Mal-o-Mar Editions.

THE UNIVERSE IS A PIECE OF SOMETHING EVEN WORSE (Hoy)
I feel at home when I forget
life. I phone it in because
this shit is real. My world
is made of systems and worlds. I give up
nothing and make no mistakes.
I try to be awesome because I can.

ESTATES (Leon)
Pumping iron at Club Emme. So it’s sort of dope. And then I take a private car to the studio. Visk meets me at the studio and we shoot some beautiful agonies. I’d like to thank my connect for this pure moment. I pull a Nikon zoom to my crotch and laugh like a little institutional. So I was an orphan. Now I moved to Malibu. People end up dead. Then we are like in Spain. Or at the Bar Lubitsch being photographed in 80s Michael Kors.

MY DREAMS ARE THE GREATEST (Hoy)
I would sacrifice everything
worthless in my life and call it a day. People
are what happen to good ideas.

OBSESSION (Leon)
Better collars. The shape of the sky above The Beverly Hills hotel. Red lights. I look at my shoes in the lobby of another hotel. Sitting there thinking lucite thoughts on wooden ships. Replicate the hook in me. Skip the mall for Inside Edition. I’m with Tatiana buzzed staring at wood paneling in a basement somewhere. 111 to Palm Canyon Drive. Cory Kennedy eats a pizza. My whole life I’ve lived here. Playing with bamboo. - Justin Taylor

Basic Instinct: Poems (Triple Canopy, 2008)


 
 














Outtakes (Lame House Press, 2007)

• Esque Issue 2: North Carolina, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Arkansas, New York, Minnesota, Missouri, Michigan, Iowa, New Mexico, Hawaii
• Triple Canopy Issue 15, “Call & Response”: selections from The Portable Atlas
• Impossible Void: Night Vision
• Barrelhouse Online: Waterfront, Freestyle, Afterlife
• Supermachine #4: Sugarcane, Political, Hologram, Caracas
• The Broome Street Review: The Baseline
• Sous Les Pavés V/VI: Red Rock
• Novembre Magazine Issue 2: Selections from Glory Hole
• Lamination Colony: My Dreams Are the Greatest, Nikole Is Rad, For Kicks, Cake Holes in Waiting
• Sink Review 6: Celluloid, Private Resort, Paparazzi, Empire
• Esque: The Neurologist
• Press Body Press: Life
• Sixth Finch: The Last Golden Hour
• Agriculture Reader: When We Were Smalltime, Rogue Agent Montgomery
• Ekleksographia 2: I Can Feel My Brain Already in the Christ Grid, Glory Hole, Thankfully I Have No Borders
• Ocho 25: Arizona or Florida
• Boog Portable Reader 3: Are You Alive
• Harp & Altar 4: I Am Full of Blood & Biofuel, Thanks to Your Binding Spell, Counter Clockwise
• Fou 1: Polyptych by Default, Ocean View, Terms of Use
• Octopus 10: Opening Act, Megachurch, Last Light of Boscador
• Action Yes: Jane Is There No More Frontier, The End of the Line of Apsides
• Now Culture: Last Time I Was Here I Was Obstructed, From the Neck Up, The White Man in the Sky, The End of Synergy, I Like to Take It Easy
• Big Bell: DJ 01010010, Moore’s Law
• EOAGH 4: The Burnrate of Markarian 421
• PFS Post: The Electroplating of All My Friends
• Coconut 9: Being Drunk Helps, Shot Reverse Shot, Because You’re a Former Child Actor
• 3am Magazine: Event Horizon
• Cannibal 1.2: Gardening
• H_NGM_N 6: Love before Talkies
• absent magazine 1: [#1654 $77.00 Anon. Memory Is Bunk]
• Agriculture Reader: Gaffer, Phoenix, This Is My Favorite Rifle
• Effing Magazine 5: You Make Me Sick, About This Dyspeptic Look on My Face, Husk, We Didn’t Come Here to Play Craps
• MiPOesias (w/ audio recordings): Former Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce, The Buffalo, Don’t Forget the Cocaine
• CUE: A Journal of Prose Poetry 4: Patrick Lives
• the tiny 2: Very Important Scene, Peer Review, On Location: South Beach
• Fascicle 2 (collaborative poems w/ Anastasia Baille): Operations in Shady Moisture, N I N E T I M E S, The New Vince, 101 Love Letter Templates
• The Highest Number: There’s Always an Audience, On the Inside of the Outside, Safe Harbor
• Octopus Magazine 7: Dinner with Megan
• jubilat 10: Let Me Tell You about My Dancefloor Experience, For the Birds
• Kulture Vulture 2: June near the Everglades, For the Record

• Invalid Format: An Anthology of Triple Canopy, Volume 1
• The Day Lady Gaga Died: An Anthology of NYC Poetry of the 21st Century in Serbian 
• The Harp & Altar Anthology: I Am Full of Blood & Biofuel, Thanks to Your Binding Spell, Counter Clockwise
• Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock & Roll: Variation on a Theme by Whitesnake

• The So and So Series and Rope-a-Dope Press: To Sleep in Narcotic, Peaceful Apathy

• Octopus 11: The Now Wave: Jon Leon and the Poetry of Forever
• Octopus 9: My Sleep Is Fitful and Disturbed: The Post-Millennial Poetry of Katie Degentesh
• CUE Issue 5: Commentary on Also, with My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords: Araki Yasusada’s Letters in English by Tosa Motokiyu
• Jacket 29: The Virtual Dependency of the Post-Avant and the Problematics of Flarf: What Happens when Poets Spend Too Much Time Fucking Around on the Internet

as EDITOR

• SOFT TARGETS

Glory Holes and Hot Tubs: Dan Hoy and Jon Leon in Conversation

Dan Hoy lives in Brooklyn and is co-founder of SOFT TARGETS, a magazine of art, literature, and philosophy. His publications include Glory Hole, published with Jon Leon’s The Hot Tub (Mal-O-Mar, 2009), Basic Instinct: Poems (Triple Canopy, 2008), and Outtakes (Lame House Press, 2007). His essays and poetry have appeared in Octopus, Jubilat, 3:AM, Action Yes, and elsewhere.
Jon Leon: So, I just read Glory Hole again for the first time in a while. Why the title Glory Hole when there are no actual glory holes in the book, unless the "masterpiece" that is "the frame I hang around my neck / and shove my face in" (from "Glory Hole") is a glory hole? What does the glory hole or the idea of a glory hole symbolize or represent for you?
Dan Hoy: The masterpiece is a play off of that image from one of your poems in Right Now the Music and the Life Rule, “Her hair is framing her face like it is a masterpiece”, with the face defined as a fidelity to a beauty that’s impossible. The masterpiece is always a miracle. But I’m exploiting the syntactical ambiguity to shift the masterpiece from the face to the frame, or the act of framing, of becoming the frame. To me there’s no real difference. But yeah it’s also a glory hole. The poems function as a glory hole. They act as both portal and partition, so a site of entry but also a barrier. Like if Dante’s entire human comedy was physically contained within the sign at the door that says “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” There is no space, just direct address, with a relentless antagonizing of the wall that divides intimacy and anonymity. They strip all context and speak to you in the face. But really I just decided one day I wanted to write a book called Glory Hole. This is mid-way through writing the book. It seemed like the perfect title, the words glory and hole crystallizing into this image of the glorious and the bottomless. The image as divine trauma, a kind of supreme ambivalence. I don’t mean just the concept of glory hole as an image, but the image as a concept in general. The first image is always the universe or the image of nothingness. All images are a reflection of the first image. In Glory Hole it’s called God.
I see these books as flipsides of infinity in orbit around each other but I know we haven’t really talked about it. For me the framing image of both Glory Hole and The Hot Tub is a circle, except one is empty and the other is filled with water. It’s like the difference between the void and the abyss. I’m wondering what the hot tub means to you as an image. For example does the circle function as a site of infinity, with water as the substance of life but also the way of life? I’m thinking of lines like “this world is totally liquid” but also specifically “He slowly parts with the cloud of immersed bodies” from the titular poem, where bodies move like water through a body of water made of bodies.
JL: The hot tub to me is a site of luxury and abandon. It’s a place that people go when they are just that drunk enough. It’s the first poem I wrote from the book. The title came to me after viewing a photo taken at Sundance of models in white bikinis sitting in a hot tub surrounded by the whitest snow. That it’s filled with water and human bodies is a financial concept in my mind. The idea of flows, money flows, and that money truly moves like water and is accessible easily even when one doesn’t have any money – one must simply place oneself between a transaction. The idea that the world is totally liquid is the idea of pure possibility, where everything is permitted and everything is within one’s reach. The vignettes in The Hot Tub are people coming together in a transaction. It’s like a ledger itemizing human interactions rather than financial transactions. The sun is always shining on these characters because "Solar energy is the source of life’s exuberant development." When people or a society have developed sufficiently they’ve created time. Austrian School economist Henry Hazlitt refers to it in Economics in One Lesson when he describes that a certain amount of unemployment is a good thing, because it means an advancement in productivity. Full employment, according to Hazlitt, is reserved for the countries that are most retarded. Time is for exudation, waste, as all profits are inevitably. Bataille turns rational economics on its head when he writes "that energy, which constitutes wealth, must ultimately be spent lavishly (without return), and that a series of profitable operations has absolutely no other effect than the squandering of profits." The Hot Tub is that reverie reserved for those advanced enough, immersed enough in the license of the market, to understand that waste is a condition of success. I relate this fact without a critical objective.

DH: I don’t know Hazlitt but I remember reading Bataille talking about the practice of potlatch among Native American tribes, where the objective is to humiliate and defy rivals through the spectacular destruction of your own wealth. Sometimes this entails slaughtering your own slaves. This seems apropos of waste as a condition of success. He uses the term “expenditure” for what he calls unproductive forms, or activities with no end beyond themselves. Things like luxury and war, mourning, art, etc. These are all characterized by a loss that must be as great as possible for the activity to take on its true meaning. So it’s about maximizing the opposite of return, attaining the most negative ROI possible. What’s interesting is he singles out poetry as being synonymous with expenditure. I’d say this explicit equating of expenditure and poetry is, if not the heart of your poetics, something at the heart of it. In Kasmir especially expenditure creates a field in order to perforate itself, so there are these moments of ecstatic infinity bursting through. But Bataille I think takes it in a different direction. For him poetry is a symbolic expenditure that does real damage to the poet. You end up becoming a reprobate or you renounce it and do something mediocre instead. Rimbaud kind of does both at once. A Season in Hell is basically its own announcement and renunciation. Blanchot’s take is that Rimbaud murdered poetry so it could survive, and Mallarmé says something similar: “He operated on himself alive for poetry.” It’s a strategic decision, and a poetic expenditure to the nth degree in that it expends itself to the last drop. There is nothing more to be lost. This idea of Rimbaud is like the first step. What Glory Hole tries to do is push the limit of negative return, or expand the opportunity beyond what can be lost, by taking this gesture of defiance and multiplying it against itself. In other words, what if Rimbaud felt the way he did, with a force strong enough to abandon poetry forever, and then kept writing anyway? But you could say this is exactly what Baudelaire is doing. It’s like the act of poetry as expenditure is a closed loop between the two: The next step after Baudelaire is Rimbaud, and the next step after Rimbaud is Baudelaire. But at the same time I view the excess of your work, especially Hit Wave, as very Whitmanian, like a French Whitman, rooted in a kind of cosmic exuberance and autoeroticism and fuck it nonchalance. I wanted to ask you about the prologue poem in The Hot Tub, how it relates to the rest of the book. Is it the same speaker? It reads kind of like a dedication to the reader, since it’s untitled and the only piece to use the 2nd person address, unlike Glory Hole, which is punctured throughout with “you”.
JL: I understood intuitively Rimbaud’s refutation of poetry and subsequent activities almost before I began to write poetry. So from the beginning of my practice I’ve courted the idea that poetry is something to be left behind, abandoned. With each successive book I’ve produced I’m getting further from poetry. My practice is a deliberate expenditure, or waste, of talent, in an effort to absolve myself of what I consider a pathogen. I want everyone to stop writing poetry. My prologue to The Hot Tub is indeed an attempt to speak directly to the reader. It’s the only way I know how to relate to the reader that poetry is not it. Poetry is not why you come to poetry. That prologue isn’t a creative work. It’s meant to say exactly what it says: love, music, being "on booze together," quite simply, life, is more important than this. Mediated by art and other forms of sublimation life is reduced to our perception of life. As far as my previous books are concerned I only know that there is a character named Brian Paul, the same throughout, who’s only aim is a draining away of excess energy by any means possible until the energy is finally dissipated and involuntary death occurs. If the things he does or builds or destroys are increasingly excessive it is because it requires more energy to do these things and hence brings him closer to a total liquidation of energy. He achieves this in Kasmir.
If you can talk about why "Everyday is Forever," I might feel like talking about sunlight and sand.
DH: Because it’s always today. Whatever day it is it’s today when you die. This is an instantaneous continuity that’s difficult to experience as fact. Agamben calls our consciousness of our experience of time “operational time”, or “messianic time.” This is the time it takes time to end, or the time between the announcement of the apocalypse and the apocalypse. To me this is really just the circumference of the moment: Right now is happening right now. “The kingdom of God is at hand” is just another way of saying “It is today today.” Paul in Hit Wave captures this experience perfectly when he says “My God I’m really here I say to myself.” The comprehension that life is the impossibility of life. This is what forever is. When I talk about the Now Wave this is really what I’m getting at. There are two nightclubs in Hit Wave: Kasmir and The Embassy. You wrote a novella called Kasmir. Are you going to write anything called The Embassy?

JL: I wasn’t planning on it but now that you mention it maybe I will. I think if I saw a different tone of light I would write The Embassy. The Embassy is under ground, or sand rather, and so I feel like it would be difficult to situate it within the parameters I typically work. Which is usually a response to ratios of ambient light in movies. I mean, that’s usually my jumping off point.
From a macro standpoint, I get the theoretical framework of Glory Hole. I wonder if we could talk about the details. Stuff like "I don’t mean to be a black box" from "Arizona or Florida," and the general attitude of Glory Hole. Like, you mention The Hot Tub as having a fuck-it-all attitude. I’d say Glory Hole has a who-gives-a-fuck attitude. What do you think? What were you reading a lot of while writing it? And also, how do you think these two books relate to this time and culture generally? We could talk about surface culture like fashion etc. or deeper shifts in the way people think and communicate maybe.
DH: I basically quit reading. I could stomach Agamben and one or two others and that’s about it. Mostly I watched serial TV on the internet and listened to the most brazen pop music I could find. I worked 10-15 hours a day, sometimes more. I was anemic as fuck and had been for years. The bright spot of my week was going to the oncologist to get tanked up on intravenous iron. I felt like a fraud sitting there with the chemo patients but I was basically the walking dead so whatever. I had no patience anymore for the kind of poems I’d written for a collection called Power Ballad, these long, wandering persona pieces, mostly dancefloors and celebrity, political conspiracy, sci-fi, ruined love. It’s like they were pop but not pop enough. I wanted something no bullshit. If the poems in Power Ballad are a critique of the world, Glory Hole is against even the concept of a world. So like the cruelest poems possible, but at the same time pop songs. Every line is a hook. It’s like some b-boy doing nothing but power moves. Only assholes do that. But it’s also the truth, like that line from “Kill the Lights”, “I drive like an asshole because it’s the truth.” I’m only speaking the truth from here on out. I think the line you quote from “Arizona or Florida” speaks to that also: “I don’t mean to be a black box / but I’m also not apologizing.” You could read that as the poems asserting themselves as emergent little death mechanisms. They’re not afraid to be a recording of the voice of God pulled from the wreckage. I’d say most poets are afraid to swing for the fences, if we’re allowed to use sports metaphors here. They risk nothing, when really you have to risk everything. Every poem is your last chance. I’ve talked with Ariana Reines about this in relation to Mal-O-Mar and I know you feel the same way: I’m interested in masterpieces, or miracles, and that’s it. I don’t have time for anything else.
I don’t know if I’m answering the entirety of your question, but my question for you is similar: I’m wondering if you could talk about how the surface referents of your work operate relative to the essence they evoke. I feel like the tactical strategy of your poetry and also Glory Hole is similar to advertising in its understanding of an image’s capacity to evoke a state of being or way of life, and how that reflects back on the actual thing attached to the image. Like the title of your poem “A Beverly Hills of the Mind”: it’s about the idea of Beverly Hills, not Beverly Hills – but there’s an implication that this idea of Beverly Hills is more Beverly Hills than Beverly Hills is. Badiou has this great quote in regard to Deleuze, a kind of conciliatory eulogy, that consolidates Deleuze’s thought down to one negative prescription, “Fight the spirit of finitude,” along with the affirmation “Trust only in the infinite.” I feel like your poetry is similarly aligned, and that to ask how the image functions is really to ask how reality functions, but that’s high level – I want you to talk brass tacks. What are you drawing from? What do you respect? I feel like a lot of the poems in your recent book Drain You and also Right Now the Musicand the Life Rule are reminiscent of user-generated content, specifically online product reviews. I’m guessing this is because product reviews are all about trying to get at the experience of a thing, or its essence, to be truthful, to the point, and useful. The review itself is a product. I have a fascination with reviews of movie theaters on sites like Citysearch. There’s a lot of crazy class and race shit that comes into play, where the review mutates into a review of the audience. The audience as product. But I’m getting off track – What are you drawing from? What do you respect? How does it all come together?
JL: I was lounging in Beverly Hills very recently and I felt like it was kind of like the inside of my hot tub, which is like shapely and wishful, but I thought simultaneously that right now you can’t be inside of anything. We live in a borderless society. It is the deep mix of externalities that one communicates with, and the external: the people, the places, the objects, the feelings, and the desires are indeed comprised within the product, they are the "core product" — what you want it to do for you, so all writing that’s about external things or images is about how reality functions, the right now reality that isn’t ruled by the past.
I like to perceive going beyond the frontier of production. In economics, the transformation curve presents a defined limit based on the factors of production available. I think art expands the production possibility frontier to an indeterminate and possibly limitless rate. There is no end to the replication of feelings and their consequence. I believe in miracles as well, and to trip the boundary of the transformation curve would be an authentic "miracle," scientifically impossible, though a metric could be formed to account for the effect. This correlates, tangentially, with what you see as the user-generated aesthetic of Drain You and Right Now the Music and the Life Rule. User-generated content gives the audience focus and high control, it is also viewed as entertaining. Consequently sites that have these user-generated qualities have the fastest rates of growth, therefore accelerating the breakout from the production possibility frontier, and bringing us all closer to miracles.
DH: I don’t think reality functioning as an image is something specific to right now or the age of “the spectacle”. It’s fundamental. The universe is the image of nothingness. The world is the image of the universe. It’s the world we’re talking about here when we talk about macro-trends and the way we live. I think the shift toward user-generated content is part of a larger evolution. In marketing what’s happening is the brand and customer are becoming one. People create word-of-mouth campaigns at no cost to the brand. They beta-test and give feedback. They create actual marketing campaigns (like with video contests) and development code in the form of crowd-sourcing. This is all free labor that would normally cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in billable time. And they do it because they want a better product, a better user experience. It’s an inclination toward efficiency, and it’s the primary drive of the world in its current incarnation. It spills over into the relationship between the state and citizen, or the media and consumer, with the phenomenon of self-surveillance and monitoring your image online. You carry a GPS device so you know where you are at all times. You leave digital traces of yourself everywhere so you know what you’ve done and can forecast what you want to do next. Everything is connected. What this means is that all regulation is internalized. The state has effectively been replaced by the individual. This is an ironic, endgame scenario way beyond the New World Order of conspiracy theorists. It’s like what Debord says about how exile is impossible in a unified world. What’s terrifying is “We are the world.” But at the same time it’s not terrifying, or not any more than life itself. The impossible is always terrifying, and that’s what life is: its own impossibility. The challenge is always to embrace this impossibility, that is, to live life.

The hip, youngish art/lit throng attending Tuesday’s launch party for Soft Targets—a new “handheld journal of poetry, artwork, criticism, short fiction, found images, sound, and other ephemera”—was surely feeling softer than usual due to the evening’s exceedingly swampy weather, which Soft Targets contributor and coeditrix Rachel Kushner called “velveteen,” but I call viscous. Like her beau Jason Smith, the de facto “intellectual godfather” of the journal, however, Kushner lives in LA, where inorganic swamp gas (and its attendant street-corner puddles of urban “milk”) is an option, not a feature. All I know is that I was not alone in conducting my own personal wet T-shirt contest before the first reader approached the mic.
The Paula Cooper Gallery offered ample space for the lively audience, but inadequate air conditioning, lending the affair an earthy funk. Even the generous supply of chilled Chardonnay and Bud couldn’t stanch the generalized effluvia, so after half an hour of air kisses and slick handshakes, the sweaty crowd—including author Lynne Tillman, avant-turntablist Christian Marclay, musicians/publishers Damon & Naomi, hepcat literary agent Chris Calhoun, Times columnist Bob Morris, and former Spinane Rebecca Gates—seated themselves on the floor to let the readers wash over them.
First up are the two Dans—Daniel Feinberg and Dan Hoy—the young superbrights who constitute the Soft Targets“Front Office.” One of them is poetry Dan, responsible for the high verse quotient of the journal; the other is art/theory Dan, who was a student of Smith’s at Occidental College. After offering some celebratory comments, they thank Smith for his inspiration, mentoring, and, most important, his ability to rein in their impulse toward creating “a conflation of Teen Beat and Soldier of Fortune.” Second is Smith himself, a charming, affable Florida native who studied under Derrida and is too boyishly fresh faced to come off as the intellectual godfather of anything. Nevertheless, he’s got theory chops, and his introductory remarks cheekily work the vaguely paramilitary vibe of Soft Targets—phrases like “pattern of flight,” “mode of retreat,” “new geometry of hostility,” and “taken from behind” drift by as the crowd collectively melts on the floor, fight/flight instincts thoroughly deactivated by the heat.

Smith leaves the mic to rousing applause, but not before introducing Kushner, his co-conspirator in Soft Targets’ “Office of Special Plans.” (Note: The real Office of Special Plans was a short-lived Pentagon “shadow CIA” run by former undersecretary of defense Douglas Feith, and was partly responsible for the “slam dunk” case for the existence of WMDs in Iraq. In general, if the word special appears on any government body or document, it likely denotes some type of sleazy, illegal black op.) Kushner reads her short story “The Tale of Rachel K,” which, despite its eponymous title, seems to take place sometime just after WWII. It is lovely and odd, with frequent descriptions of baroque, outmoded lingerie, but perhaps a stitch too long for this particular evening at the Paula Cooper Steam Baths.
Next up is Damon Krukowski, poet, publisher (Exact Change), and musician (Galaxie 500, Damon & Naomi), who reads a moving prose poem that questions the legitimacy of the creative act and jibes nicely with Smith’s failure/retreat metaphors. Its length is just right. Krukowski then introduces the diminutive, ultrastylish professor-poet-critic Wayne Koestenbaum, formerly known during his professorial stint at Yale as the Prince (Purple, not Tudor) of academia. Tricked out in a hot-pink oxford shirt, impeccably white pants, and matching two-tone sneakers, Koestenbaum reads from a work in progress called Hotel Theory, a split-column book: one column a theoretical meditation on hotel rooms; the other a cheeky novel, starring Lana Turner and Liberace, among others, centered on the fictional Hotel Women in LA. A potentially disastrous formula, to be sure, but like all of Koestenbaum’s work, it gracefully balances hard-won philosophical concepts with a genuinely funny camp wit. Also, Koestenbaum doesn’t seem to sweat. I’m doubly impressed.

The sound/video presentation by teleseen was unfairly abandoned by most of the crowd as they quickly flowed outside in search of fresh air. A loose, postgame dinner party convened at the sprawling, convivial Markt, a Meatpacking District Belgian eatery. Over mussels and margaritas I met longtime Artforum contributors Lisa Liebmann and Brooks Adams and chatted with Smith and Kushner about Soft Targets, Echo Park, Marxism, and electoral politics. They possess that effortless blend of hipness and high theory particular to California cities and university towns. Soft Targets is similarly impressive, substantial, and wide-ranging. Let’s hope they don’t take their “failure fetishism” too far and succumb to an aesthetics of disappearance.— Andrew Hultkrans





www.montevidayo.com/author/dan-hoy/

• FREE DRUNK
• POWER BALLAD

Mitsuse Ryu, Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights, Trans. by Alexander O. Smith and Elyse J. Alexander, Haikasoru, 2012. [1967./1973.]






Ten billion days—that is how long it will take the philosopher Plato to determine the true systems of the world. One hundred billion nights—that is how far into the future Jesus of Nazareth, Siddhartha, and the demigod Asura will travel to witness the end of all worlds. Named the greatest Japanese science fiction novel of all time, Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights is an epic eons in the making. Originally published in 1967, the novel was revised by the author in later years and republished in 1973.


As the title suggests, Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights thinks big. Very big. While a good chunk of the novel takes place during the early civilized era on earth, it also extends much, much further -- in both time and place.
A Prologue and first chapter begin to set the scene -- of world-creation, including the biological foundations of life on earth -- but by the second chapter a familiar face -- Plato -- pops up. And in the following chapters Mitsuse brings in several other larger-than-life historical figures -- Siddhārtha, the big Buddha himself, and Jesus Christ. They are introduced in circumstances that at first seem fairly familiar: Mitsuse offers a take on Jesus' last days, while Siddhārtha and Plato set out on other sorts of journeys and quests. Sure, Plato is looking for Atlantis, but for the most part Mitsuse doesn't rewrite history and legend too much -- at least not in the parts that have his characters setting out on their journeys. But soon enough .....
Plato certainly finds more than he bargained and could have hoped for (including the new moniker 'Lord Orionae'). Never mind Atlantis being real, or shadows in caves -- there's a whole lot more to this entire universe than his philosophy had conceived. And he finds himself asking -- rather desperately -- why humans had been kept in such misguided ignorance:
Why did you tell them there were gods and not tell them about the Planetary Development Committee ?
Yes, Mitsuse is proposing a very different universal story than the ones familiar from myth, religion -- and even most current science.
The historic characters come with their own ideas about where things are headed: Jesus is selling that whole 'final judgment'-concept ("an interesting one", Pontius Pilate admits, though he is not convinced) and Siddhārtha had been taught that a mere 5,670,000,000 years in the future the being Maitreya: "would save humanity by opening the way to a perfect world". It seems there's more to all of this, however, and they find themselves transported across time and space -- far beyond what is soon failed earth (time flies on the cosmic scale, and even Tokyo -- "Capital of the Inner Planetary Alliance" -- is a mess already by 3905) -- in a cosmic chase and puzzle.
There may be a guiding Planetary Development Committee out there, but, as is so often the case with committees, they apparently don't have an adequately strong grasp on this whole universe-controlling and stabilizing idea. With the occasional hell-in-a-handbasket conflagrations -- "There was an overall trend toward destruction and ruin in all that he had seen", Siddhārtha notes, and that's an observation that can repeatedly be made by several of the characters -- it's nevertheless also often hard to tell where exactly things are going right, so different are these various realities they encounter from life on earth as they knew it. But these varieties of brave new worlds out there are nicely (and creatively) conceived by Mitsuse, even as in the mad rush through time and catastrophes there's rarely opportunity for much more than incidental description.
Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights is an ambitious novel of and for the ages. What American science fiction tradition would likely plump up into a multi-volume space saga, Mitsuse compresses into a relatively short novel that nevertheless manages to take things slowly in part as well -- Jesus' end, for example, is presented in conventional leisurely style. The pace is unusual -- ranging from the slow and casual to the vertiginous, truly a roller-coaster read -- and in keeping with the repeated radical transformations the worlds that are presented undergo. There is little stability in Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights -- which is also part of the point. Mitsuse mixes philosophical, scientific, and theological speculation into a vey heady brew -- and it's no wonder the characters repeatedly voice uncertainty about what exactly they're dealing with; readers at times face a similar problem. Yet it's also a very impressively presented Gedankenexperiment, as Mitsuse really is trying (and largely succeeding) to convey a whole vision of nothing less than the entire universe, from conception to end (two terms that take on much looser meanings in his picture). One might regret that parts are underdeveloped -- there are some ingenious ideas here that could be spun out in far greater detail -- but the novel still works well. Mitsuse does heap on a bit much after a while, ambition complicating his ambitions, but it is an intriguing work, and even if it is ultimately too restless to completely satisfy, there's a lot here that is very well done. - M.A.Orthofer
  Siddhartha paused, unsure of what to say. In truth, he had no real purpose in coming here. He had jumped onto the spaceway in pursuit of Jesus of Nazareth. Yet he still didn’t know why he even had to fight Jesus. The only thing he knew were those words: “Yellow 17 in the New Galactic Age, the Planetary Development Committee on Astarta 50 received a directive…” and a vague sense that this curious, shielded city was somehow connected to the Kingdom of Atlantis where Orionae claimed to hail from, and to the barren flats and ruined city that Siddhartha had found upon emerging from the sea. There was an overall trend toward destruction and ruin in all that he had seen, and lately Siddhartha had begun to think that some power had placed him here for the sole purpose of investigating that trend and possibly divining its cause and origin.
***
Check it out: Jesus as an energy weapon-wielding badass going up against Plato, the Buddha Siddhartha, and the war-waging demigod Asura, in an endless battle for survival through the cycle of history—from our humble origins to our destruction by the inescapable hand of fate.
What’s not to love, right? I mean Jesus isn’t just Jesus here. He’s the man from Nazareth. He’s Clint Eastwood rocking an end-of-days speech, and he isn’t fucking around.
Somewhat hyperbolically billed as the greatest Japanese science fiction novel of all time, Ryu Mitsuse’s 10 Billion Days and 100 Billion Nights is nothing if not ambitious. In a scant 284 pages, Mitsuse introduces curiosity and conflict in equal measures, documenting the path to spiritual and intellectual enlightenment through the origin of all life, the existence and fall of Atlantis, and the crucifixion of Christ, through to the 3900 A.D. and beyond, all the way to the heat death of the universe.
Mitsuse’s science-meets-spiritualism epic skips through history in giant leaps, as Asura, Siddhartha, and Jesus Christ meet, do battle, and ruminate on their existence—on the purpose behind all existence, and the question of their impending judgement. That’s judgement with a capital J—as in, our days our numbered, decided long before we even had the brains to know right from wrong and up from down. Touching upon certain events with a wide brush allows Mitsuse to cover an expanse few science fiction novels would ever attempt. He employs a predominantly eastern philosophical approach to the events that bring the principle characters in conflict with one another. Though the first few chapters are a bit slow off the mark, the latter half of the book brings the many threads together in intriguing ways that swiftly bridge the scientific and the philosophical.
Two caveats: without at least a passing understanding of the myths and legends surrounding the primary cast of spiritual and philosophical superfriends, it’s likely a lot of the book’s narrative weight will be lost; and if the idea of technologically primed warrior deities doesn’t tickle the hairs on the back of your neck, you might struggle to accept any part of this premise. Those details aside, Mitsuse’s 10 Billion Days and 100 Billion Nights is a fascinating take on the battle between existence and the concepts of fate and pre-determined universal extinction. - backlisted.wordpress.com/

My relationship with science fiction—at least in literary form—was fairly brief. Although I don’t remember how or why, I picked up a copy of Dune in the sixth grade and just loved it. It lead to a few other sci-fi classics, including Brave New World and an aborted attempt at A Stranger in a Strange Land, but by the end of middle school it was pretty much over. I had discovered manga, which had the same crazy adventures, but also pictures, and could be read in one sitting, and reading actual books of any kind took a back seat for a couple of years. Basically, my exposure to sci-fi is limited. But I found after finishing Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights that this novel sort of suits me perfectly in what I expect and want out of science fiction—and even literature in general. Not like a glove, so much, but after a long, long absence, I found myself sliding right into it.
Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights quite literally spans billions of years. Opening with the creation of the universe, and quite possibly ending at its close, the novel is ultimately an audacious attempt at trying to find meaning—the literal “meaning of life” as we often think of it—in a three hundred-page novel.
If that sounds like too much, too heavy, too ponderous a thing to try and read, well, it isn’t. The most wonderful and ambitious aspect about Mitsuse’s magnum opus is how it’s able to blend serious and inquisitive “hard” sci-fi with the fun, goofy, Saturday morning cartoon kind of sci-fi. Yes, reading Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights requires knowledge of actual science-y things like Dirac’s sea and Eastern theological conceptions of the “asura” and “Maitreya,” but you’re also rewarded with particle cannons, huge explosions, and insane, Dragon Ball Z style one-on-one fighting.
I hate to spoil some of the surprises of reading this book, since I went in knowing nothing and found it to be a book of fun discovery, but it does tie Plato, Siddhartha, Jesus, Atlantis, post-apocalyptic Tokyo, aliens, robots, cyborgs, and other elements together into one surprisingly cohesive narrative.
At least, “cohesive” depending on your perspective. Although I would hesitate to call it a “problem,” Mitsuse is a demanding and unmerciful writer. Not only does he constantly introduce strange technologies and terminologies with no explanation (their use and meaning inferable only by context), he also writes for an audience that has a very thorough understanding of Western and Eastern theology. It might make your first reading of the novel either very difficult, or will cause you to Wikipedia a lot of things. It is certainly a work that needs to be read more than once for things to start making any real sense.
But science fiction is all about metaphor. What does Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights have to tell us about ourselves, here in the present? What are we left with, when this ambitiously grand and complex novel is over? Well, that’s a good question, and you might have your own answers when you get there. For me, Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights illustrates that man will never fully understand the workings of the universe, and by extension, God. One of the strengths of Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights is the way science and religion coexists, not peacefully, but dynamically, and organically. I feel like the way religion plays out in this novel is how a scientist might see God, if God was a “being” with whom we could somehow communicate—ultimately unknowable, merciless, and too easily misunderstood. And that misunderstanding is what leads to violence and our own self-destruction (not that we need a book to tell us that either I suppose, when it’s apparent in the newspaper every day).
But again, for all these heavy conceptual themes and lofty philosophical arguments, this is still a fun adventure story that has cyborgs and explosions. No matter how you might try to describe Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights, it is certainly unique, ambitious, and well written (I am sure this was a difficult translation for Mr. Smith and Ms. Alexander, but they certainly rose to the challenge). It might not be the most well constructed novel—in a way it feels like the first two-thirds of the novel is really just the set-up for the “real” plot of the last third—but it is certainly one of the most thought-provoking and unabashedly fun novels I’ve read in a while. - www.junbungaku.com/
  According to its cover, this book is “the greatest Japanese science fiction novel of all time.” They didn’t attribute that quote to a source, but it’s impressive sounding nonetheless. Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights by Ryu Mitsuse is a bizarre book. It covers a huge amount of ground in just under 300 pages. Starting from the origins of the universe and the formation of our planet, the novel takes us through major philosophical and religious milestones of our species: after describing the evolution of life, we’re introduced to Plato, then Siddhartha, then Jesus. The book continues well beyond that, ending up near the heat death of the universe.
Mitsuse isn’t content with simply blasting through history. The main hook of this novel is the mixture of religion with razor-sharp hard science fiction. Without giving too much of the plot away, the novel tells a story of an alien influence on the growth and development of humanity, and how it has manifested itself in different religions and philosophies throughout history. These are the parts of the novel in which Mitsuse is at his best. The writing for each time period resembles the religious and philosophical texts of the time, and the reactions of the characters to the science fiction elements of the plot are interesting and revealing. It brings to mind one a famous quote from Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Perhaps we could substitute out “magic” for “divine intervention.”
Such breakneck pacing is hard to pull off without feeling forced or rushed, but if anything the problem of Mitsuse’s novel is that it is, at times, far too deliberate. I’m willing to grant that most of the awkward writing is likely due to the translation — I’ve heard that a translation can be either beautiful or true, never both — but the science-heavy portions of the book are sometimes convoluted. It doesn’t help that the science is noticeably outdated (the novel was originally published in the 1960s). It’s the rapid pace and gigantic scope of this book that save it from being occasionally boring and painful to follow.
As an example, one of the few action-heavy scenes in the novel is a laser gun fight with Plato, and Siddartha, and the goddess Asura on one side, and Jesus on the other. As inherently ridiculous (and awesome) as this sounds, it’s a testament to Mitsuse’s storytelling ability that it fit well into the story and didn’t cause me to lose my suspension of disbelief. Actually, the real complaint I had was the focus on unnecessary detail in the description of the scene on things like robotic sensory mechanisms. Paragraphs and paragraphs were spent detailing the robot’s re-routing of power to different operations and extending or retracting different types sensors (yes, one of the characters in the scene is a robot).
These problems end up being relatively minor, and a couple of absolutely brilliant passages more than make up for it. In one scene, Siddartha visits a city divided into upper and lower classes. He enters the tower where the upper class citizens supposedly live, and sees only rows and rows of metal cabinets, with a crab-like robot suspended above. He talks to the robot, which identifies itself as a god. In each cabinet, the robot explains, there is a single chip which contains all the necessary information to create an individual human (while that human’s body has long since died and rotted away). The robot runs a network that connects all these chips together in a vast simulation, allowing them to live forever. Siddartha objects, arguing that the citizens are no longer alive. The crab responds by asking Siddartha how sure he is that the planet on which he was born, the objects in his life, and the events he has witnessed have all been objectively real and not aspects of some grand illusion.
“Physical phenomena are not an emergent property of reality. No technology or means of observation can prove that they are.”
“Strange to hear an agnostic argument from a god,” Siddartha said.

“To call something unknowable is to assume that anything can be known,” the crab replied.
Siddartha smiled. “What happens to the self when you’re on one of those cards?”
“What happens to the self when you’re asleep?” the crab rejoined.
I very much enjoyed this book. It’s ambitious and earnest, in ways that many novels these days aren’t. It assumes quite a lot of prior knowledge about both physics and metaphysics, and it moves so quickly it can sometimes be confusing, but in my opinion it was well worth the effort to read. - recurial.com/reviews/
Just for fun, I went to the SF community on Mixi (Japan’s largest social network) and asked, “Is this book really the greatest Japanese SF novel ever? Because the publisher here says it is.” I failed to kick up a hornet’s nest, but did get a general admission that, “Greatest” or not, it’s certainly one of the most revered and influential SF books to come out of the country. (The ensuing discussion also inexplicably prompted someone to call me, roughly, an “ill-mannered poser.”) In that sense, 10 Billion Days is rather like Japan’s Dune or Foundation, which makes reviewing it slightly intimidating. It also means that, as a self appointed ambassador of Japanese fiction, I’m under that much more pressure to deliver a profound and life-altering review.
The basis of any claim that 10 Billion Days is the greatest anything is this poll from 2006, where the readers of SF Magazine (a Japanese publication) voted on the best stuff. My Japanese sources countered with the 1998 poll, which swapped numbers one and two. This is an annual poll, but our assumption is that 10 Billion Days is going to feature in the top five or so every year, much the way there is a general consensus here on the “best” five or ten SFF novels. It’s also one of only a few in the top twenty that have been translated into English, other high ranking books including Japan Sinks and Yukikaze.
10 Billion Days defies easy description. It begins with the emergence of life on Earth and sprints in 250 pages to the end of the universe, with a cast consisting almost entirely of prophets and deities. Plato and Pilate are the main exceptions here, but mostly we’re dealing with Jesus, Siddhartha, Maitreya, and Asura. (The latter two are Buddhist and Hindu divinities, respectively.) One should not expect a strict historical reconstruction of any of these, nor any sort of reverence toward the religions they are associated with. I can’t say anything about Hindus or Buddhists, but I’m pretty sure a large number of Christians would be angry about Mitsuse’s Jesus. This is not to accuse Mitsuse of writing an atheist hatchet piece, because I don’t think that’s his purpose. His story requires giants striding across the landscape, so these are the characters he chooses. That they are also cyborgs is entirely beside the point.
To summarize the plot would basically spoil the book. Suffice it to say that it involves the above mentioned characters, something called The Planetary Development Committee, Atlantis, Andromeda and the Milky Way crashing into each other, extinct civilizations, warring Hindu gods, Jesus as a killer cyborg, and the end of the universe. After finishing the book, I had to just sit there for awhile, trying to make sense of it all. 10 Billion Days demands reflection and leisurely consumption, rather than frantic page turning. It reminds me somewhat of reading the Old Testament, with its cold and distant narrative voice, the sudden and jarring leaps through time and space, and the patchy sense of history and myth. Likewise it is dense prose, with each sentence crafted for maximum economy and impact, and multiple meanings packed into each phrase. I’m going to have to read this again someday, because I am certain that I missed plenty the first time through.
Reading early on, I thought that 10 Billion Days didn’t feel much like a Japanese book, or at least not compared to a lot of the contemporary stuff that Haikasoru publishes. It lacks the distinct character interaction that immediately identifies Japanese human relations and gives no nod to anime culture. (To be fair, there wasn’t anime culture as we know it when this was originally published.) By the end though, it was very clear that this is not a book that could have been written in the West. Without rampant spoilage (I hope), I want to point out the differences. I periodically refer here to the David Brin theory of SF and Fantasy, which is that they are basically extensions of the Enlightenment and the Romantic Movement, respectively. The first looks to a brighter future, brought about through Science, while the second looks toward an idealized past, which we must return to for redemption. (That’s a bit oversimplified.) The key to both of these is our effort, which brings about one or another form of salvation.
What we don’t see here in the West is a third way of looking at things, an idea that comes from, among others, Buddhism and the Yoga Sutra. These philosophies stress the lack of action, of finding peace through acceptance of things as they are. “Desire is the root of unhappiness” is the most often seen aphorism in these Eastern traditions, so the focus is not on improving things through one’s own efforts, but on sidestepping unhappiness through the elimination of the appetites that bring dissatisfaction. Max Weber’s striving Protestants would find this incomprehensible. 10 Billion Days is suffused with this ethic, especially as the book ends. [Some spoilers to follow, in as vague a way as I can.]
I don’t think that a Western author, especially an American, could write the end of 10 Billion Days. An American would most likely set up one side as Evil, or at least as a clear antagonist, and provide the viewpoint character some way to overcome that Evil. There would be a resolution, there would be an improvement of the character’s situation, and there would be effort expended in some way for people to help themselves. Mitsuse thinks not. There is a Japanese term, shikata ga nai, that poorly translates to “it can’t be helped.” We don’t have good words for it in English, because it is a mindset with which we are unfamiliar. To say shikata ga nai means to accept that something can’t be changed and to move forward by mutual agreement, with the understanding that whatever unchanging thing it is will be accepted as a given. This is not just things like gravity, or the Earth’s rotation, or other such inevitability, but it extends to places that we Americans might say, “Wait, let’s not accept that, let’s improve it!” The end of 10 Billion Days is an end-of-the-universe-sized shikata ga nai. It is the ultimate expression of acceptance and resignation, of denying desire in an attempt to find peace. I suspect that it would be wildly unsatisfying for a reader who can’t wrap his head around this way of seeing the world.
What about those of us who are somewhat accustomed to this worldview? I almost feel like I won’t be qualified to pass judgment on this one until I’ve read it a couple more times, pondered deeply its truths, and emerged a much older, wiser man. Still, there are a few things I can say. The book’s narrative tone is somewhat standoffish, as though Mitsuse is keeping us at bay while he recites his tale. He gives us hints of the characters and their worlds, occasional flashes of intense action or vivid description, and stretches of frigid mystery. The outlines are sharp, but scarce, leaving fleeting impressions of forces and personalities beyond our comprehension. Even the viewpoint characters are finally unknowable, to say nothing of grander forces manipulating them. With some authors, this would be a flaw, a mark of poorly thought out or executed writing, but with Mitsuse, this seems to be exactly what he intended. We are left at the end with a sense of mystery and wonder intact, knowing that something amazing is happening, but not grasping it completely.
This may be because Mitsuse understands that the payoff in these things rarely matches our expectations. This is a wise dodge, but the overall effect leaves 10 Billion Days similar to The Book of Judges, or perhaps 1st Samuel. For a final, pithy summation of the book, I’m torn between the mystery and philosophy on one hand, and the lack of engagement on the other. It was a haunting read, one that will no doubt hover in the darker corners of my mind, but it wasn’t very much fun while I read it. One can’t go wrong though, with a book that contains the line, “Siddhartha was acutely aware that as long as Jesus of Nazareth was alive, this could be a trap.”
Rating: This is a massive reach, but perhaps Leeds United? The universe ends in 10 Billion Days, Leeds taking their top ranked form and nosediving into League One was pretty much like the end of the universe for them. Not that 10 Billion Days has anything in common with a despicable club like Leeds.
http://twodudesff.wordpress.com/2012/04/22/10-billion-days-100-billion-nights/


http://www.bulletreviews.com/10-billion-days-100-billion-nights-2011/      Excerpt   Siddhārtha lay half buried in sand, still as a lump of stone. His tri-D antenna opened slightly, shedding a tiny stream of dust.

He could sense his enemy nearby—everywhere, it seemed.

No—there he was, not more than a hundred meters away, moving from left to right across Siddhārtha’s field of vision.

I wonder what he’s up to?

He resisted the temptation to fully extend his antenna. In the quiet that now reigned, even the slightest movement could draw attention from a considerable distance. The release of kinetic energy was one of the easiest to detect. It would be far too dangerous to reveal himself; the last attack had proved beyond the shadow of a doubt his enemy’s hideous strength.

So what is he doing?

Unable to restrain his desire to know, he let his antenna push another ten centimeters above the top of the sand.

Unthinkingly, Siddhārtha tensed every muscle in his body.

A thousand meters ahead of where his enemy slowly made his way across the flats was his destination—a small black shadow atop a dune. Asura.

Jesus of Nazareth was moving slowly, leaving footprints in the sand. The flames and explosions had singed his already tan skin to such a brownness that he threatened to disappear into the desert landscape altogether.



Jesus was almost out of Siddhārtha’s range when his path began to curve as he headed directly toward the top of the dune where Asura was standing.

The sky and land were lit with scarlet for a moment. Then as Jesus began to climb the dune, the world faded again to its former monotone, and an icy wind blew in between the swirling flames. The brightness of the flames waxed and ebbed. Even the rapid energy shifts and massive discharges generated by the Nazarene’s weapon lost much of their power in this world near death.

Siddhārtha searched around for any sign of Orionae, but could not detect him anywhere. Finally, he fully extended his antennae, reasoning that his enemy’s attention would be fixed on the far-off dune where Asura was standing.

As he did so, he felt a terrible and urgent need to act. I have to distract him!

Siddhārtha struggled out of the sand to stand. “Hold! Jesus of Nazareth!” he cried, yet his voice only traveled from the top of his throat back down his neck into his own body, reverberating up into his ears, but never reaching the outside air. Siddhārtha panicked, realizing that if he did not draw at least half of his enemy’s firepower in his own direction, Asura would not be able to withstand another of Jesus’s attacks.

Jesus of Nazareth stopped abruptly, then slowly lifted his right hand.

Suddenly, the far edges of the flats erupted toward the sky without a sound. Higher and higher they rose into the gray atmosphere, creating a valley with impossibly steep sides, while at the same time the edges of the sky plunged toward the ground. At the limits of Siddhārtha’s field of vision, sky and land joined together, fusing into a single curved wall. Lighter than shadow, more indefinite even than the void, the flats and the gray sky formed a giant cylinder, as if the very laws of geometry had broken. Far out in that vertiginous space, like a fragile image in a kaleidoscope, he could see Asura looking very small.

The howling of the wind had ceased entirely, leaving a sickening emptiness in its place.

“Stop! Do not do this!”

Siddhārtha sprinted through the deathlike silence, lacking the time to consider why Jesus of Nazareth grew no nearer no matter how much he ran.

As Siddhārtha sped across the sand, the battle structures in his body prepared for combat. Palisade tissues—resembling those in a plant, but more closely akin to the electroplaques of an eel—linked his processors and his core reactor to his weapons units; discharge panels on his shoulders opened like unfolding leaves. Automatically, his metabolizer revved up to maximum capacity as the circuit from the reactor connected to the roots of the panels. In an instant the leaves were ready to unleash their deadly stores.

Siddhārtha did not hesitate. Still sprinting, he released the high voltage inside his condensers in a single blast.

With a flash sky and land turned ghostly pale. The electromagnetic waves pulsed toward their target, tracing a circle of pure blue ions around Jesus of Nazareth.

Less than a breath later, Siddhārtha struck again. This time, the gray sky turned a dark leaden color. Seen from within, all the objects inside the great cylinder lost their individual colors, becoming translucent. Then, a circle of ultramarine light began to spread, enveloping all.

Siddhārtha watched as his attack ran its course.

The shining ring of the electromagnetic wave was rapidly spreading in all directions, losing its coloration as it went. It dispersed like a broken circlet of chain links, some sections clinging together, others severing completely until all had disappeared. Siddhārtha spotted Jesus’s emaciated back standing just beyond the fading circle of light.

He shook his head and resumed his mad dash across the sand. While he ran, the gray sky and the vast desert ground into motion, moving with increasing speed until all was rotating around him. Gaping vortices formed in the sky, while the flats transformed into a faded spiral that spun at a frightening velocity. The only things not carried by their motion were Siddhārtha and the man from Nazareth.

Siddhārtha’s thoughts raced. Why, when everything around us is spinning at such a furious rate, am I and Jesus alone still able to stand? He felt cold sweat trickling down his back as understanding slipped from his grasp.

Then suddenly he understood: he had been pushed into a separate space from the one where Jesus and Asura stood—a fold in space-time, or a separate plane entirely.

“Let me out!” he shouted with all his strength. “Let me out of here!” But all his voice accomplished was to vibrate the air that closed around him.

Stealing Things by Keegan Crawford

read it here


Other writing available here

       Stealing Things is the shortest title Keegan’s ever had. Keegan ‘the vegan’ Crawford loves long titles. Somebody must have told him to ‘chill out with the paragraph long titles’. This is a good thing. Here Keegan dives headfirst into one of the most popular forms in alt lit: kleptomania. Many alt lit books glorify shoplifting and stealing. In Keegan’s world more than basic objects are stolen: time is stolen at work in exchange for a pre-determined amount of money, words are stolen replaced by meows, and a couple of explosions happen.

Richard Chiem, You Private Person, Scrambler Books, 2012.


“Considering how much I love Richard Chiem’s writing, and given how its uncanny snare and sweep of life’s especially agile, prompt, messed, lithe, sharp, and heartbreaking things leaves me stiffed of summarizing words, I think I’ll just nominate his work for immortality.” —Dennis Cooper


“Richard Chiem writes of all the weirdness and ooziness and tenderness of young love, with such lucid specificity. Like some beautiful film from the 70s, but also distinctly now. Because I also love how in this book he documents the tremors of contemporary existence, of living and working in a city, measuring days not in coffee spoons but in cigarettes and Simpsons episodes.”—Kate Zambreno

“Richard Chiem’s YOU PRIVATE PERSON is a bustling prism of a thing, full of passages that actually lead somewhere off of the paper. His words have brains that have bodies that wake you up in the way waking can be the best thing, like into a warm room full of good calm remembered things that feel both like relics and new inside the day. Here rings a wise and bravely sculpted book packed full of stunning thankful color.”—Blake Butler

This is Chiem's first published book, he has two e-book's out and approximately one hundred million short stories published online. He obviously went hard for You Private Person: it's heart is beating and it is drenched in sweat.
The organization of this book is nebulous, there are two major story lines which are formed by numerous connected shorts: sociopaths and animals. There are a number of short stories inserted which may or may not be related to the greater story lines. Potentially your call. The erotic is in every nook and cranny then spread blanket like over the whole. Here it is the worthless drug while love is a distant memory, if that. Life and work: a chronic ache, some nagging beast with its bilious claws dug in. Chiem's world is real. Hyperreal. The colors ring through the pages, even a glance at the angles and edges will mar your eyes. There is humor but it is a blown leaf.
Sociopaths, the first series of stories, is simple in its conception yet complex in its acrobatics. The events revolve around two characters in a relationship, plus three others which act as catalysts of action. The action here is portrayed bluntly; there is little suspense in the plot. It is the feelings, movements, relationships and various ideas however which carry the story. The subtleties and small motions of the character are able to betray deep pasts, cogitations et c. The characters flesh out a little more than just simple abstractions yet exist in a half world of personality. As such we are left to determine the motives of some of their actions; Chiem never lets us know them deeply. This might be a flaw in another writer but Chiem effectively uses this to form a sort of mystery in them. The characters are in certain ways vary familiar and yet unhuman. They could be us even, or perhaps twisted shadows of ourselves. As with the people around us we often think we know them, have their traits pinned, yet come to find that circumstances will push them to extreme actions and unthinkable reactions. Notable in Chiem's writing is the ambiguity which serves to write much of the story off the page. He throws us bits and pieces which we may use to determine for ourselves whole other stories which lie behind the one in the book. Sociopaths is also notable for a number of winding extended sentences and while a few are clumsy, others are deftly pulled off.
A second series of stories titled Animal is even bleaker than Sociopaths. We find the boxer River and his girlfriend Sam entwined in a relationship with Mary. Time is a manipulated variable here, Chiem slowing it down or speeding it up at his will. Often River and Sam will be engaged in a low stakes, every day activity then for no apparent reason break into hysterical fighting. Again Chiem provides us with only the barest of clues as to the history of these three but it is evidently fraught with drama. Writing this way, writing the spaces between the letters, illustrating the events that precede or follow the action as Chiem does here is a tricky endeavor. If executed well the reader is left with a lofty and magical story which engages the imagination long after the book has been closed. This is extremely difficult however and if done without the required grace it can be confusing. Chiem seems to utilize the method in both of these stories and is very close to nailing it. Both Sociopaths and Animals are enjoyable stories but the "writing off the page" doesn't always connect. I do hope however that this is a method which Chiem continues to employ as he seems to have a good grasp of it and could certainly make it shine in future writing.
Chiem's shorter, less traditional stories are his strong suit. He nails it in his gripping second person account of a car accident How to Survive a Car Accident. Baby is Going to Die Tonight portrays a nameless ageless dreamy love, the missing details causing us to beg for more. Cutty depicts a relationship at the heart of which is an unequal power struggle. Told partially in texts these poetic missives often communicate more than the characters are able to convey verbally. They offer a beautiful release, the last one holds a key which turns the story after it is read. Planet B Boy holds some of my favorite lines in the book. This story describes a masterful b boy practicing and competing. It heavily references a movie which I haven't seen and I suspect that understanding the movie would illuminate certain part of the story. Regardless there are two lines here which demonstrate perfectly Chiems sparkling, head cocking ability for description:
"He says: I am going to see what's happening. He says, I can dance so symmetrically for so long it feels like nihilism. I can make my body a catastrophe" and
"He has danced every day for the past few years with a signature presence. All the muscles in his arms glow in open tension"

He takes the ordinary and presents it to us in a new way which feel strange yet strangely fits, bends our synapses into new configurations, opens up rooms which are illuminated in a benthic light.
While there are a number of themes touched upon in YPP the recurring meditation is young love which is seen from every facet: the ache of desire, the ease of long term, the burn of long distance, the rut of forgetting. Good, bad, ambivalent, apathetic. It is all here. Many of Chiem's character have different surfaces but similar cores. We see different angles of love from roughly the same subject. Thus YPP is something of a monograph, a comprehensive study of the subject. His view is dark, and in the world we live in one could hardly find fault with this. But he conveys the darkness beautifully, and with heart. This is a book in which you will find lines which will stymie you for hours, weeks, until one day, in the midst of personal tragedy it will click, it's meaning suddenly revealed. This will be a book that you find more beautiful every time you read it, that you will keep beside your bed in order to open in the middle of the night to read, at random, one line. - Sam Moss






http://theopenend.com/2012/11/25/book-review-you-private-person-by-richard-chiem/

Luna Miguel, Blubird and Other Tattoos/Bluebird y Otros Tattoos, Trans. by Jeremy Spencer, Scrambler Books, 2012.

www.lunamiguel.com/

animalitoinexpresivo.tumblr.com/


Luna Miguel is a poet who can make me cry. Her passion for life and for poetry is uncommon. She makes language concise, supple, and exciting again. Recurring images: of birds, disease, spit, and blood, integral to a mortal, embodied poetry that reminds us ‘Death cannot be experienced neither for the living nor the dead but for the sick.’ Luna writes a poem, ‘The Beautiful World Gives Me Disgust.’ She writes, ‘I exist, therefore, / then I tremble.’ She writes of the suicidal poets, she writes of all women, she writes of the young. She writes knowing it’s a lie, she lives in the shadow of death. Luna writes of her ‘unprotected life,’ her ‘unprotected diary.’ There is no comfort in this poetry, there is hard beauty. ‘The wind was this. Being born was this. Dying without dying and without a disease was this. To tell you the truth: I am here and I need you.’ Luna. - Stephen Tully Dierks



15 Years


I detested since birth.

I hated throughout my childhood.

At the age of 15,
I began to make love.


Monogamy


Marriage is this mouth
that stinks like affection
and MDMA.


Diabetic Coma


You gave me a mouth.

My mother gave me this pancreas.

Science gave me insulin.

God did not give me anything except fear
   in a handful of sugar.


Lady Bird


Before being a woman
I was a bird
and I was a girl.

Before the evenings of sex.

The mornings of sex.

Before the adulterous days

and adolescents
open to others
that were not you.

I was a bird without acné.
I was a sparrow and blackbird.
I hated seagulls.

Only whispered.

Today, the color of my wings

is that of all women.

For my chest and my hips.
Because I have grown and mutated.
Because I was a girl,
I was a girl:
and forgot that the blood was not
garnet
but white.

And then I forgot my childhood.

As all women.

(translated into English by Jeremy Spencer)



waking up in raval boulevard


translated from spanish by Gonzalo del Puerto

I don’t know if you knew that the entrance to our block smells of meat, that chicken piles up on the pavement in plastic boxes by the container for glass, and that cows and lambs wait lying on the floor whilst some seagull pecks the sockets of their seemingly dead eyes.

- I can tell you as it does not upset me anymore

I`m not afraid of that place where

small flies

swirl dancing

colliding

in celebration of spilled milk

flyes move towards waste

towards excrements

but dance on meat, too

nest on it

forever lingering

in the clotted cavity of their blood.

I don’t know if you knew that cats are hunting beasts, that dogs believe they are men’s equals, only more miserable. I don’t know if you knew that men despise the living and dare to adore invisible icons. the question …

the question …

the question is not what do I do here

But

What do I do now that I have been brought to this place

There are threads creeping along the pavement

- I’m telling you because It cannot be helped



Two poems @ Pop Serial


An interview with Luna Miguel by SJ Fowler.

Though not an orthodoxy, one of the aims of the Maintenant series is to present poets who are truly representative of the next generation of poets emerging across the continent, that is poets who will shape the future of poetry and should be recognised as they begin to reach ascendancy in the English speaking poetry community, as they are developing, and not only when they have reached the acceptance that seems to come with a dampened middle age. So we present Luna Miguel, not yet 20 years of age and already creating a rich and vivid body of work. Ebullient, direct yet lyrical, instinctual, unapologetically youthful and explicit, she is widely regarded across Spain for her remarkable talent and unyielding presence. Undoubtedly she will be a force in European poetry for many years to come and as such, we are pleased to introduce her into the Maintenant series.


3:AM: What seems inevitable is a discussion about your age. It seems in poetry being ‘young’ is relative to other fields, in the sense a poet is still ‘young’ in their late 30s. At 20 are you becoming defined by the unusual nature of your age? Do people focus on your youth, and do you embrace or reject such temporal notions as the poets years on the planet being central to your poetry?

Luna Miguel: I think I’m not able to define myself in these terms. Many people don’t trust me since they believe that the stuff I have achieved are only related with my age. My only way to prove the opposite is working on and trying to do it as best as possible, always looking for being comfortable and doing what I want. I accept this notion about youth although I see it more and more distant because I have been publishing on magazines since I was fifteen. Moreover, now there are many people that are the same age and who write in a very interesting way. And this is the reason I don’t feel bad because I’m not alone: Enrique Morarales, Laura Rosal, David Leo García, Ruth Llana, Cristian Alcaraz, Javier Gato, Natalia Litvinova, Marina Ramón-Borja, María Simó, Bárbara Butragueño, Álvaro Guijarro… all of them are under 24. I gain a lot of hope from them and I trust their poetry. Young, yes. And so what?

3:AM: Releasing your debut collection at 18, in anyway do you think your notoriety, your reputation is sold on this fact, the unusual combination of youth and ability? Do you think it might allow you to have a uniquely long presence in Spanish poetic life or do you think people want to attach this label to you that might become permanent in some fashion.

LM: I agree it will be difficult to get rid of it, although every day I try to do it. A lot of people compare me with a sort of Lolita mixed with Rimbaud (and this can happen with good or bad intentions). I hate this kind of comparison, mainly because, as I said before, I am not fifteen. I am a little worried about all this because there are other authors the same age (for example, Elena Medel) who have also suffered this same situation. The most important thing in their work (and I hope it will be so in mine) is not the age but the quality, their ambitions and everything that’s expected from them. Youth is only an added value.

3:AM: Do you imagine your poetry will radically change over and again as your become older?

LM: I think so because it has already happened. If my poems were shorter and more cryptic in the past, right now they are longer, more narrative and in some way fascinated by the body. They will change, but in the mean time they might maintain a particular voice, I believe. Everything depends on my human experiences and, above that, my influences. When I was 16, I read Baudelaire but three years I read David Foster Wallace, a circumstance that obviously means some changes to understand and write literature.

3:AM: How does living and studying in Madrid affect your poetry? Are you a poet of the city?

LM: Madrid has become a very important influence on both my life and poetry. Before this, I lived in Almería, an Andalusian city at South of the South, and indeed I have lived in Nice, France. It’s is possible that in the time I lived in these coastal cities, my poems were more natural and open. Now I place them with closed and urban spaces, public transports and outskirts: absolutely urban, yes, but with some references to my previous contexts.

3:AM: What is your feeling to being a female poet in Spain? Is there a great tradition of poetry from women in the country, or are the figures of Spanish poetic history primarily male, for it might appear this way on the outside? Is there ever a sense of having to establish yourself in a way men would not have to.

LM: I’m afraid that being a woman and a writer is more difficult that being a man and a writer. It seems that readers expect different things according to your gender. Although a big tradition exists, it seems to be hidden, and I don’t know the reasons. For example, if you review the poets from the Generation of ’27 (Lorca, Cernuda, Aleixandre, Alberti…), you might ask yourself where the women are. Yet I haven’t read them because even in the University they are not studied. I can tell you some names of contemporary female authors such as Chantal Maillard, Clara Janés or even Julia Uceda. There are many more, but their books tend to go unnoticed. On top of that, anthologies of “Woman poetry” are always been published, but I don’t think it’s a different genre. But, sincerely, I read more poets from the USA and South America, for example, Denise Duhamel, Blanca Varela, Pizarnik…

3:AM: Do you feel the nature of the internet, the ability for anyone of our generation to access and proliferate material, is central to the future of poetry? Do you think poetry has begun to catch up with other media by using the net?

LM: I would say that poetry will be always marginal until it breaks with its forms and its more ancient references; however, I think too that despite its marginal personality, it goes further thanks to the Internet. The user can see the poet as a current person, and this familiarity makes the reader go with some kind of fascination to the work published on the net. It’s impossible to support today the idea of the author as a divine entity… If we want people to approach poetry, it would be better to delete the myths.

3:AM: You clearly engage in the utilising of a contemporary, perhaps postmodern poetic. Your work appears sparse but vitriolic. Are you writing from instinct, or are you deliberately trying to overturn the idea of a precious, ‘poetic’ language by utilising sexual and contemporary media references?

LM: I would say both things. I like writing from instinct. An instinct marked by ambition, corporal expression, reconstructed places and intertexts. I trust the evocation’s power of quote. All of us are made by quotes. Why poetry might be so pure?

3:AM: Where do you influences lie? In poetry, or in music – punk etc…?

LM: My influences come from my own experience and own poetry; also from music, narrative, movies and comics. But mainly narrative. I’m interested on fitting narrative scenes to the poem. Maybe my clearest influences would be Depeche Mode, Alejandra Pizarnik, Lhasa, Daniel Clowes, Trainspotting, Rimbaud, Anais Nin, Betty Blue, Antonio J. Rodríguez, Daft Punk, The Zombie Club, Cinque, Mallarmé, Disney… Everything. Everything that surrounds me is influence.
3:AM: Your poetry seems to combine elements which are truly both elliptical and metaphorical, and beautiful, and harsh, brash, immediate language. Are you attempting a synthesis of the two?
LM: It’s possible. As I said before, I come from a very lyric tradition: Baudelaire, Lorca, Paul Eluard… And later I discovered other works more contemporary but not necessarily from poetry. Eloy Fernández Porta, David Foster Wallace, Tao Lin… I’m also interested in literature of gender, and there are Virginie Despentes, Maite Dono… All this mixing helps me to join form and contents in a way sometimes calm, othertimes surly, depressed, but always trying to search for rhythms and the word’s strength.


Poetry is not dead: An interview with Luna Miguel.


by Ani Smith
http://wewhoareabouttodie.com/2011/07/18/poetry-is-not-dead-an-interview-with-luna-miguel/
.

Alec Niedenthal
Excess of bad poetry: an interview with Luna Miguel
http://htmlgiant.com/author-spotlight/excess-of-bad-poetry-an-interview-with-luna-miguel/

Matthew Battles, The Sovereignties of Invention, Red Lemonade, 2012.

Matthew Battles does not write stories that move, develop or unfold. He creates worlds that hiss, snap, and rattle, and decorates them with objects that brood in black, glassine silence, or crumble into dusty revelation. Characters are left to grab at scraps of reality sent whipping about them at hurricane force. Ideas "run faster than memory can sieve them from the flow," leaving vaporous reverie to fill the vacuum - dogs populate trees, demolition men bear holy forgeries, and a slick dark box siphons off synaptic vibrations.
In "The Dogs in the Trees," man's best friends deliver an enigmatic rebuke. The protagonist of "The Sovereignties of Invention" is enthralled by a gadget that plumbs the depths of the stream of consciousness. In "The Manuscript of Belz," a librarian ponders the glamor of the book and the bloody limits of cultural experience. And "The Gnomon" seeks in Internet culture the same dark energies limned by Poe. Each story within waits, still, dark and deep, to yield its unique shock of uncanny truth.






 Matthew Battles brings such an unlikely collision of influences together in these stories that it is amazing they survive the impact, but again and again they do, emerging whole and strong. I will return to The Sovereignties of Invention for the multifold pleasures of its sentences, each one a bold painting in its own little frame of words, and for the quality of exploration in its pages, as adventurous as they are cerebral, as nimble as they are exact. — Kevin Brockmeier

 “My middle-aged memories of the house by the sea, like the photographs my family took there, are caught up in the frothy state of betwixt-and-between that gave the place its grain: sharp grass and velvet mud, rush of water and crunch of shell, placid exteriors and rough-planked rooms.” So begins one story in Matthew Battles’s first collection, The Sovereignties of Invention. As one might expect from the author of Library: An Unquiet History, Battles owes a debt to Borges—but it’s the right kind of debt. His fables unfold against a hi-res real world, with close attention to everyday detail, in a prose that is precise, concise, musical, and alive. —Lorin Stein

Matthew Battles’s 11 “tales,” as they are called on the title page of “The Sovereignties of Invention,” cover the range of literary parable and fantasy. Several echo the tone — observant, factual, elegant — of our greatest living practitioner of this genre, Steven Millhauser. For instance, here is the opening of “The Dogs in the Trees”:
Best known as the author of “Library: An Unquiet History,” Battles is currently a program fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. On the one hand, he’s obviously bookish, his work readily calling to mind not just the fables of Millhauser and Borges but also the prose-poems of W.S. Merwin’s “The Miner’s Pale Children,” the imaginative miniatures of Helen Phillips’s recently published “And Yet They Were Happy,” various forms of literary experiment and even old episodes of “The Twilight Zone.” Yet at the same time, Battles can set a story at a computer conference that features an expert on “crowdsourcing distributed libraries of emotional solidarity.” “The Gnomon,” appropriately enough, then neatly builds to a terrifying representation of “emotional solidarity.”
While he can write simple and evocative sentences, Battles pushes hard for hipness (“quoz”) and even harder for an Updikean specificity that sometimes gives the impression of a young man trying too hard: “Close by the fieldstone break, a small sailboat lay hauled out on a hump of long grass, its sail and rigging furled and wound like some forgotten aegis.” All is well until that final word, which sounds odd and pretentious. What’s more, an “aegis” isn’t some kind of banner or flag, it’s a shield.
That sentence appears in “Camera Lucida,” in which a family discovers that an old Polaroid camera produces photographs of scenes from elsewhere or elsewhen. This is an old trope in fantasy and sf, but here Battles uses it to examine the marital tensions between the narrator’s parents. In “I After the Cloudy Doubly Beautifully,” he ingeniously, if wearyingly, mixes Walter Benjamin’s reflections on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” with the aesthetics of machine translation. In “Time Capsules,” the narrator acquires a bag of pills that can reverse the temporal flow: Pop a capsule and you go back one minute in time. Unfortunately, the pills are addictive. - Michael Dirda

While he can write simple and evocative sentences, Battles pushes hard for hipness (“quoz”) and even harder for an Updikean specificity that sometimes gives the impression of a young man trying too hard: “Close by the fieldstone break, a small sailboat lay hauled out on a hump of long grass, its sail and rigging furled and wound like some forgotten aegis.” All is well until that final word, which sounds odd and pretentious. What’s more, an “aegis” isn’t some kind of banner or flag, it’s a shield.
That sentence appears in “Camera Lucida,” in which a family discovers that an old Polaroid camera produces photographs of scenes from elsewhere or elsewhen. This is an old trope in fantasy and sf, but here Battles uses it to examine the marital tensions between the narrator’s parents. In “I After the Cloudy Doubly Beautifully,” he ingeniously, if wearyingly, mixes Walter Benjamin’s reflections on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” with the aesthetics of machine translation. In “Time Capsules,” the narrator acquires a bag of pills that can reverse the temporal flow: Pop a capsule and you go back one minute in time. Unfortunately, the pills are addictive.
“The Sovereignties of Invention” is published as “a Red Lemonade book, available in all reasonably possible formats — in limited artisanal editions, in a trade paperback edition, and in all current digital editions, as well as online at the Red Lemonade publishing community at http://redlemona.de.” Such is multiplatform book production in the early 21st century. Nonetheless, Red Lemonade, like so many other publishers these days, needs to hire some good proofreaders. “The Sovereignties of Invention” is occasionally marred by the kind of unnecessary grammatical errors and phrase duplications generated by overreliance on computers: “a grove of trees that following a low narrow bourne” (instead of “that followed”); “tapping at keys arrayed on neatly on a long tablet.”
While Matthew Battles isn’t wholly successful throughout “The Sovereignties of Invention,” let me emphasize that his “tales” are still greatly entertaining. After all, the wonder story is — as it has always been — the most perennially appealing of all the forms of fiction. - www.washingtonpost.com/

Matthew Battles does not write stories that move, develop or unfold. He creates worlds that hiss, snap, and rattle, and decorates them with objects that brood in black, glassine silence, or crumble into dusty revelation. Characters are left to grab at scraps of reality sent whipping about them at hurricane force. Ideas “run faster than memory can sieve them from the flow,” leaving vaporous reverie to fill the vacuum– dogs populate trees, demolition men bear holy forgeries, and a slick dark box siphons off synaptic vibrations.
The thrill and anxiety of the Uncanny is the engine of this debut collection by rare book librarian and cultural critic Matthew Battles. He invents a new Creole, one that combines the baroque grandiosity of 19th century industrialist with the sleek grandiosity of the 21st technologist. Traversing musty libraries and austere technology conferences, Battles quietly but ruthlessly discloses the beauty and grotesquerie of our present times, our infatuation with the New and our nostalgia for the Old both lovingly depicted and then slowly roasted on the spit.
In “The Dogs in the Trees,” man’s best friends deliver an enigmatic rebuke. The protagonist of “The Sovereignties of Invention” is enthralled by a gadget that plumbs the depths of the stream of consciousness. In “The Manuscript of Belz,” a librarian ponders the glamor of the book and the bloody limits of cultural experience. And “the Gnomon” seeks in Internet culture the same dark energies limned by Poe. Each story within “The Sovereignties of Invention” waits, still, dark and deep, to yield its unique shock of uncanny truth – the only choice is to dive in. - frogenyozurt.com/


 Table of Contents

• The Dogs In the Trees
• The Sovereignties of Invention
• The Gnomon
• The Manuscript of Belz
• Time Capsules
• Camera Lucida
• For Provisional Description of Superficial Features
• I After the Cloudy Doubly Beautifully
• Three Parables
• The Unicorn
• The World & the Tree

Patricia Lockwood, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, Octopus Books, 2012.




Patricia's blog

Patricia's twitter




"A voice like Julia Child mixed with Zelda Fitzgerald." - The Stranger



“The year is 1960 and I am Cary Grant. Kinetic typography sneaks up and fingers me. It writes STARRING CARY GRANT all up in my guts”



Patricia Lockwood, whose “Love Poem Like We Used to Write It” appeared in the November 28 issue of the magazine, has close to four thousand followers on Twitter. That’s peanuts if you’re a pop star (@ladygaga has eighteen million and climbing), but for a poet, it’s pretty impressive. At the digital-art Web site Rhizome, Brian Droitcour has collected the best of Lockwood’s “sext” tweets, a genre she conceived in the wake of the Anthony Weiner scandal. Lockwood, who once told a reporter that she was ten years old when she wrote her first haiku, is a natural-born tweeter. A trio of examples below:
I am a mushroom in a forest. There are drops of dew all over my tip. Nabokov reaches down a hand to pick me.

You are miniature, and I put you in the bell of a saxophone and play a long soulful B-flat

I am a living male turtleneck. You are an art teacher in winter. You put your whole head through me. - www.newyorker.com/

Patricia Lockwood's Sext Poems Will Make You LOL

Once the love letter dominated the scene for writing your lover. But these days, nothing gets the blood pumping like a good sext. Like "Come over baby" ... or "I need you tonight" ... or "I am a living male turtleneck..." (Don't you dare judge us!)
Poet Patricia Lockwood, whose work has been published in the New Yorker and The Awl creates poems that operate with the shocking and true bizzarre revelations of a genius joke.
And then she discovered Twitter. As you will soon see, magic happened as a result of this fortuitous encounter. Her 'sexts' are X-rated scenarios that bring cartoon characters, inanimate objects, rappers and politicians into the love den. If you were looking for an entertaining entrance into the realm of sweet prose, we urge you to start here.
via Rhizome, who has a whole different but equally LOLworthy collection of sexy and weird texts.
www.huffingtonpost.com/

 

Patricia Lockwood is my Poetry Hero.
I don’t normally read poetry. I have a few favourite poems (Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck” and Al Purdy’s “On Being Human”) that I read when I need them.
I believe that poetry’s mostly subjective; it’s about a mood. I don’t really know how to talk about this book, so I’m just going to write a bunch of lines down that I appreciated. Sometimes it’s because of the way that the lines sound, and sometimes it’s because of what I want them to mean.

On drawing Popeye:    ”The Body: Think of your paper as a pan of milk. A pan of milk will form a skin.”
“Any piece of paper on which ‘popeye’ is printed counts as a Will, as it contains his signature, his witness, proof of his death, a list of all the property he owns, and the name of his inheritor.”
“Inseparable things are easily separated, she knows. The name of the tea at one end of the string, the tea itself at the other.”
“As her idea of hair grows longer, she starts stacking it higher every day, first to make room for bird wings, then to make room for whole birds, then to make room for their cages.”
“and ends on a semicolon, and a gibbous pause rises into the sky and hangs there instead of a moon.”- Matthew Stepanic

“Aaliyah would have been on Twitter. It is fucked up that she is dead.”: An Interview with Patricia Lockwood, Poet Laureate of Twitter Matthew Simmons

Patricia Lockwood is a poet. (A poet. A very good poet.) She also uses Twitter in interesting ways. Earlier this year, her series of SEXTS got attention from Rhizome, and then The Huffington Post& The New Yorker.
And I look at those tweets and I wonder, “How does someone do that?” Not get attention, though. I mean write those. How? So I asked.
***
So, I was initially pretty dismissive of Twitter. And then, at some point, I noticed how funny it could be and found it to be a mostly worthwhile distraction. And then—probably while reading the fake Christopher Walken feed—I began to think there could be something kind of poetic about Twitter. That each little update could be a joke, a persona poem, a zen koan.
Did you sense the “poetic” potential in the Twitter post from the beginning or did your approach to Twitter change?
It took me about ten years to join Twitter because, like old men everywhere, I “did not get it.” What is the … where are your mentions … what is hashtag … who is a belieber? When I did join, I spent my first week livetweeting the movie Bambi, focusing specifically on the puberty of Bambi and Thumper, and was subsequently unfollowed with extreme prejudice by the few poets who had charitably followed me in the first place. (This still happens! A real writer will follow me and then four days later be like “what the freak is this” and it is goodbye. CAN’T believe you wrote a tweet about Jesus jelqing.)
OK, so scrolling back, I see that one of my earliest tweets was “I want to see the Beethoven movie where Beethoven finally manages to tear his way out of the dog’s body and play something good on the piano.” About two weeks later I sexted for the first time, like a teen. So it wasn’t so much that I saw the possibilities right away as that … Twitter is the perfect way to disseminate the kind of writing that comes most naturally to me.

When I first signed up, I was aware of a few accounts that I thought were really funny, like @gregerskine and @extranapkins. I followed them, and discovered a bunch of other people who were writing what could only be described as Literature. There was no doubt in my mind. Subjects were: toads, bogs, jorts, gender, Animorphs, Chingy, wasps, “im gay,” Kate Bush, crieing, and pizza; but the tweets themselves were Literature. I was writing in a separate aesthetic, but it dovetailed so prettily with what they were doing that it was easy to enter into conversation with these people, and begin writing the Communal Book of Twit.
You say that they are producing “literature.” Would you call it a kind of “poetry?” Or is that form a little too well-defined at this point? Does the tweet get its own category? (And, heck, is it the tweet that is the achievement, or the whole of the gathered up and examined feed that deserves the title?
WHAT IS POETRY. CAN SOMETHING THAT IS NOT POETRY … BE POETRY. IF IT IS POETRY, CAN IT NOT BE POETRY? In this interview I will answer the question so good that no one needs to answer it ever again! We will lay it to rest like a little baby … who … is dead.
I have no problem thinking of tweets as poetry, because the really great ones function in the same way that poetry does to me. They are clear and cubic thinking, and they repay obsessive thinking-about. 140 characters is just about the right length to get inside your head, so if I walk around all day chanting “apnews: an girl go back in time to shhot cow that start gret chicago fire . cow say “i expect you” shoot her an start fire with i’ts cigaret” to myself the same way I walk around chanting “The milkman came in the moonlight and the moonlight was less than moonlight,” I see no reason to make a distinction, because I’m not some sort of taxonomy psycho. Honestly, when I think of the question “what is poetry” I picture Linnaeus and David Lehman absolutely making out, hands up each other’s shirts, while everyone who participates in modern American poetry watches.
BUT at the same time, I like to call them tweets because otherwise it’s a big waste of the stupidest term that has ever been invented for anything. If we don’t call them tweets then what are we gonna call a tweet, a bird’s sound? Please. Let’s be reasonable.
(taxonomy psycho. heh.)
I understand the SEXT series came out of the Anthony Weiner situation. Did you see someone else post one? Or did you see a void and fill it? (The fact that that question appears to sound like a sext is purely coincidental.)
TAXONOMY PSYCHO, COMING SOON TO A THEATER NEAR YOU, STARRING SOME GUY WHOSE NAME I DON’T KNOW
I wasn’t specifically thinking of Anthony Weiner when I first started sexting (no one, I hope, is specifically thinking of Anthony Weiner when they first start sexting.) I had a long-standing fascination with the media panic about SEXTING TEENS and MARRIED SEXTING and ARE THE OLD SEXTING, IN HOMES? Newsweek was losing its mind with terror. Stock photos depicted crazed sexual geezers* leaning against trees. Headlines were all things like: “Majority of Americans Now Getting Turned On by Misspellings of the Word “Pprenis?” Anyway, so one day I was on a long, long car trip to Key West and I was bored as hell, so I asked people on Twitter to send me sexts, “physically impossible sexts preferred.” I posted a few to start that established an absurd precedent –
Sext: You ask for oral. I get between your legs and whisper the alphabet repeatedly until you scream
Sext: I insert myself into a fog and thrust back and forth until I eject a small area of denser fog
– and then @gregerskine sent me some, including the incomparable “I HAND U A PANINI AND U OPEN IT UP 2 SEE THE COMMAND ‘ORGASM’ WRITTEN IN THOUSAND ISLAND” sext. From that moment forward the form seemed to be set, and other people took it up — it was simple, it was empty, it was elastic.
So yeah I stuffed that huge sucking void.
..
*Please note that if you like “shocked senior man gets a racy, sexy text message from his wife,” Shutterstock also recommends “shocked senior woman with a towel,” and “mature burned electrician.”
Do you draft your tweets or are they spontaneous? I’m curious about how much deliberation goes into them and if there’s a certain headspace one gets into to create, say, your Sext series.
I’ve noticed there is a certain dark, surreal tone that runs through your tweets and the ones of some of the other folks you follow and promote. DogBoner, say. Or FamousCrab. SPERGERS. Fart. Is there a certain Tweet Wiring in your brain? A path you follow? Is it a similar path to the Poetry Wiring?
I draft like crazy, because: I do most of my tweeting with my phone, and it is so so different to write with your thumbs. Have you noticed this? I often enter Thumb Fantasias where I just move my thumbs around for ten minutes, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, rearranging elements of joke and text and scenario with my stupid thumbs. It is a part of you that should never be writing — eight elegant fingers? Yes. A pencil in your mouth, or between your toes? Good job. Dictation? You are rich, and rich people are known for being good writers. But thumbs? No. Writing with thumbs means all rules about content are out the window; it’s such an unnatural physical act that it requires an unnatural vernacular. It is enormously freeing and enormously frightening, to be a modern thumb writer of the cyber age.
(I made all this up just now but it actually does seem plausible.)
Why the darkness? My eras are the 17th century and the apocalypse. So, elaborate conceits full of burning tires. Everyone is having sex, but so are their fleas? What a magnificent chestnut horse, let’s eat him. Ahhhhh, the gorgeous colors of the sunset are killing us. I believe that any skill that serves in the writing of poetry can serve also in the writing of jokes — the path is the same, but the vocabulary is different. The impulse too is the same: to create something symmetrical, something that shuts to or clicks closed, to make parallel forms with unparallel lines. To make the hugely unlike lie down together, as they must at the end of the world.
Why bring them together — the poem and the joke, or the joke and the prophecy? The hybrid is compelling, always and perennially. It’s the desire to make fucked-up dog breeds that live longer than either of their incest parents. Or if they don’t live longer, they breathe weird and are illegal. Both outcomes are interesting.
Do you have a favorite joke? Is it better than your favorite poem? Do you have a favorite poem? Is it better than your favorite joke? Do you have a favorite tweet? Is it the better than your favorite prayer?
Favorite joke is THE ARISTOCATS, a very funny movie about jazz kittens in France, they are a family and they do the FILTHIEST things to each other, it is almost too much to be believed.
Which is to say, I don’t like most traditional jokes because they seem calcified to me. I like jokes that present a form you can work within or distort or turn inside out. When people tell me jokes I tend to look at them like where the hell do you get your hair cut, Shear Genius? This is a failing on my part. I remember directing such withering looks at uncles who told me knock-knock jokes that I’m surprised they didn’t die.
I go back to “The Glass Essay” a lot. I go back to the Holy Sonnets. I go back to “Fresh Air” and “The Boiling Water.” They’re not better or worse than anything. They’re rocks, and stones, and trees.
This is the closest thing we have to a canonical tweet, and it’s probably the one I think about the most:
YO AALIYAH DONT FILL UP ON ALL DAT BREAD GIRL…..GOT A BIG MEAL COMING WHEN WE LAND Really makes ya think. Eat the bread everyone. Namaste.
When I think of this tweet my thoughts go like this:
Aaliyah is dead and that is fucked up. I loved her voice a lot, I love the light-touch singers best and she was the lightest light-touch singer. She had the ability to just barely land and still feel the note — she was Princess and the Pea with the note 8 mattresses under her! I think of her technique as being trusting, but I think of it that way in retrospect.
If you don’t want to look at tender huge graffiti of her face on big walls all day every day then I don’t even know how to talk to you.
The quieter, the sweeter, the especially intimate voices — is it natural to feel that they are more ours? That the people who own them have more to do with us? Is that why we feel the way we do about Aaliyah?
Why do I feel the way I do about Aaliyah, and if I feel that way about her then why do I laugh at this tweet?
Well, “laughing” is not exactly what I do. More like, “sit staring at it with a sort of appalled reverence, wondering what kind of person I am.”
The reason people like @graeyalien are funnier than “twitter comedians” is because their tweets operate in two more dimensions. They consider who is speaking the tweet, and they consider whether the tweet looks funny. They create a character, and they apply small systematic derangements of punctuation, spelling, and capitalization appropriate to that character.
The recognizable speaker of this tweet is … a white aunt in Manitou Springs?
It makes you picture an Olive Garden moment on a plane that has entered into myth. The dishonesty of myth is that it makes you forget that the Olive Garden moments ever took place — not on that plane, not on that day, not between those two people.
If I think of the people in my life who have told me not to fill up on bread, it is an intimate circle of people. In my life only the people who cared a great deal for me have told me not to fill up on the bread.
Who is speaking? Who is telling her not to eat the bread? The voice is … paternalistic, which seems right because that’s how I remember people treating her even when she was alive. She seemed to arouse more than usual feelings of protectiveness. Protectiveness, paternalism are complicated. But somehow it always sounded nice when Timbaland called her “baby girl.”
But Timbaland would’ve told her to eat as much bread as she wanted. Oh my God. Timbaland would have baked bread for her himself.
She didn’t seem like the type who would eat all the bread. Maybe she really loved the bread! Maybe her handlers didn’t want her to eat it! Maybe she didn’t want to eat too much of it because her stomach had gotten so famous at that point.
Remember when we were all showing our stomachs, and wearing like enormous cargo pants and sports bras outside in the daytime? What the hell was that?
Actually that was awesome and I wish that it would happen again.
But not at the cost of eating the bread.
At some point she got abs? Which because I am visual always made me think of her breath pouring and tumbling down inside her like a cataract of water, over and past the boulders of abs, and the notes having to climb up over them on the way out.
Wikipedia: “In 1998, she hired a personal trainer to keep in shape, and exercised five days a week and ate diet foods.”
I was not allowed to show my stomach, at that time. I probably wouldn’t have showed it even if I HAD been allowed, because stomachs seemed so vulnerable to me.
It is tempting to view a person who died in a plane crash as being entirely vulnerable, even in her lifetime.
Neither was I allowed to listen to hip-hop. Well, it wasn’t so much that I wasn’t allowed as that — hip-hop was seen to be somehow ridiculous, and as having nothing to do with us.
But that is what I loved the best. I could give a fuck about an electric guitar.
I was 18 years old, and she was 22, and for years her music had been everywhere, and I didn’t mind at all.
Not all of this information is present in the tweet, but the tweet walks arm-in-arm with all this information.
The art we like the best is generally the art that has the greatest access to us. So. This tweet has tremendous access to my feelings about Aaliyah. Aaliyah’s voice had tremendous access to me.
Aaliyah would have been on Twitter. It is fucked up that she is dead.
Eat the bread everyone.
Namaste.

Verbal Paintings of Cartoon Dogs Sexting

Patricia Lockwood has a brain seemingly designed to blow up Twitter. Her feed is full of cartoon tween j/o bait and hyper-fantasy sexy stuff like “I am a living male turtleneck. You are an art teacher in winter. You put your whole head through me,” and “I go up to heaven and open God's Bible. It contains only a single sext: ‘Im hard.’” From the same brain now erupts her first book, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, which is covered in nude Popeye dogs walking calmly in a blue horde. The book is equally rigorous and insane, squashing deep into the squishy curves of the unconscious, where all that childhood cartoon sound and whale-sized dreams of death are housed. It invokes something nameless about why we try to create things, how those things we create feel about us, and the bizarre architectures in between.
Here’s some more about Patricia:
Blake: Favorite cartoon/show as a child?
Patricia:GUMMI BEARS, which I watch to this day. What you have to do is get the reddest juice you can find and put it in a salad cruet and then GULP IT at the exact moment the Gummi Bears drink the Gummiberry juice and then you get a great feeling like you have done something exactly right for once in your life.
Favorite cartoon/show now?
DuckTails, because even though I do not like money I want to touch millions of a thing at once and be touched by millions of a thing at once and only Scrooge McDuck in his little bathing suit seems to need that as much as I do.
What did you want to be when you grew up?
Always a writer. Though at one point I got the idea that that was impractical and decided to be “a voice actor” instead, which lasted until I realized what a truly terrible saxophone I had for a voice.
What is your favorite part of anatomy?
Cowlicks are the most textual to me.
What is your favorite planet?
Trick question? The moon, idiot.
What position do you sleep in?
Completely facedown like I'm trying to sink into the center of the Earth.
Song you remember for a particular reason?
“Knees Up Mother Brown,” by Raffi. What's going on? Is Mother Brown a prostitute? I just have no idea.
Do you like candy?
I do NOT like candy and the people who eat it deserve their sticky nasty hands. And I hate them.
What book have you read the most?
I've read The Berenstain Bears' Trouble at School probably 100 times because there's this really mysterious moment in it where Brother Bear walks into the woods with his grandpa and his grandpa shows him a wagon that he pushed into a swamp a long time ago because he "made a bad decision." It makes no sense. Why would he push a wagon into a swamp? Little tiny Swamp Thing fingers are drawn all over the wagon grabbing every part of it and refusing to let go and gothic slime is hanging everywhere and it doesn't even LOOK like a wagon anymore because it's been transformed by the horrifying hug of the swamp. Brother Bear looks at it and somehow learns a lesson about how he shouldn't make bad decisions. It's so good. I read it again and again because to me there is no other moment in books that is so completely closed to my understanding.
Do you have a recurring dream?
I DO. I have a dream every month where I'm trapped in a mansion with all my high school friends and a serial killer in a leather jacket with fringe is picking us off one by one. The fringe swings. He shoots us. I've had that dream since I was 15 years old. It gave me a strange sense of houses. - Blake Butler


Excerpt from Balloon Pop Outlaw Black:

It is the house of your childhood: rooms hide, merge, relocate, paint themselves during the night. The same route never works twice—you are the force that sends a live hallway shooting out of another hallway. There is a never-ending bowl of oranges in the kitchen, always the same oranges and never the same oranges; the oranges section and eat the weeks. The dog’s markings—black on white ground—change whenever we want them to. Some seasons the lawn disappears out from under you like a tablecloth, and you’re replaced so fast you hardly feel it. And it is the house of your childhood because she lives here.
In the kitchen, one cupboard refuses to open. It thinks it is another place, it thinks it is the land of spices.
A house in Kansas is made of Kansas. A house in the jungle is made of the jungle. The house here is made of there, is made of the air that a house displaces.
Her garden flourishes: a row of little signs that say pumpkin, a row of little signs that say lettuce, a row of little signs that say radish.
When she wants to pick one, she gets down on her knees and grasps the name with both hands, and tugs, and it will not come, and tugs, and it will not come, and in the other world her son cries “Carrot!” and she feels the taproot go tense and then snap.
It is a good place to grow things; the thermometer on the front porch registers always a human temperature.
----
Last thing she knew he lived in the west. When his name appears in her mind, it is written in lasso.
He always liked a good lie about storms, so here, when it thunders, a stampede of horses is flattening her son.
And in the morning her trails are washed away. The ground here is a dapple animal, it won’t stand still long enough to let her pull a bridle path over its head.
And where is the west now? She tugs down the map to look and it flies up again like a windowshade.
At the edge of the desert, she discovers a rich vein of Detroitite—a “stone” made of the layered paint that streams away from car factories. She takes a pickaxe and a shovel and begins to dig. She dynamites the color deeper and deeper. She lives away from home, she rides a gray donkey down, she eats sandwiches in the mine at night. It is her Grand Canyon, and she sleeps in a long silver river at the bottom. Above her, new layers keep arriving; they will run here from the other world as long as there is somewhere to go. Then the vein is inside out, and she wakes up one morning in her own bed again. The house is suddenly one floor deeper, she feels a room of basement rocks below her.
----
One shop appears when she needs it: a model train store. It sells everything a town needs, from portable tunnels to instant road, but she lingers most over the miniature “You Are Now Entering             ” signs. They have one for every city you can think of, piled together in a clear glass jar. She slips one in her pocket and lets it burn a hole there. When she wants to travel, she sits on a bench in the middle of nowhere. The scenery train pulls out. The scenery train pulls in. When her ticket is right, she will leave on it, and ride to the end of the line.
She is always on the lookout for lines here; the line is her only natural predator. If she let it, a line would swallow her whole and then lick the corner of her lip, and lay in a black earthquake on her floor, and draw itself in black boxes all over her calendar. It would ride out to her yard and draw a tree full of grasshoppers until there was not a leaf left, and still not be full. The line says, “When I draw a stomach around all of it, then I will have eaten.”
Her son keeps a line, she remembers, and feeds it a mouse once a month. As soon as the mouse is fully digested, it appears here in her house, a long tail snaking behind it. Sometimes a line disguises himself, and goes house to house with a paper and pen asking for signatures. She refuses to answer. He raps, then knocks, then threatens to put a shoulder through her door.
----
She sends her son a book, with her pop-up house between the pages. He sets it aside and lets it gather dust. She raps, then knocks, then threatens to put her shoulder through the door, but still he does not open it.
She brought all her books with her, too many books. She makes bookends to hold rows of them together: geodes the size of her head, sawed exactly in half, all gray crystals on display.

Expect Anything Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere, Ed. by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen, Half Letter Press, 2012.

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This volume is the first English-language presentation of the Scandinavian Situationists and their role in the Situationist movement. The Situationist movement was an international movement of artists, writers and thinkers that in the 1950s and 1960s tried to revolutionize the world through rejecting bourgeois art and critiquing the post-World War Two capitalist consumer society.

The book contains articles, conversations and statements by former members of the Situationists’ organisations as well as contemporary artists, activists, scholars and writers. While previous publications about the Situationist movement almost exclusively have focused on the contribution of the French section and in particular on the role of the Guy Debord this book aims to shed light on the activities of the Situationists active in places like Denmark, Sweden and Holland. The themes and stories chronicled include: The anarchist undertakings of the Drakabygget movement led by the rebel artists Jørgen Nash, Hardy Strid and Jens Jørgen Thorsen, the exhibition by the Situationist International “Destruction of RSG-6” in 1963 in Odense organised by the painter J.V. Martin in collaboration with Guy Debord, the journal The Situationist Times edited by Jacqueline de Jong, Asger Jorn's political critique of natural science and the films of the Drakabygget movement.

Contributors: Peter Laugesen, Carl Nørrested, Fabian Tompsett, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Jacqueline de Jong, Gordon Fazakerley, Hardy Strid, Karen Kurczynski, Stewart Home, Jakob Jakobsen.

“For too long now books about the Situationist International have been blighted by a persistent blind spot. Although often mentioned and just a summarily dismissed, the Scandinavian Situationists have been left to moulder away in unexplored territory for far too long. Now, with the publication of Expect Anything Fear Nothing, the full story of the Scandinavian Situationists can finally be told. And with this, the first full account of the fascinating characters involved and the presentation of new research into their significant contribution to art and contestation, that particular blind spot is about to become nothing more than a peculiarity of the past.”– Simon Ford

“Join the partisans against oblivion. The North will rise again. Read about knots, and what's not, fashionable nonsense and ostracized acumen, smelly herrings and Camembert. Not just in culinary terms, the Germanic and the French tribes battle it out: farmers, self-deluders, underground heroes, ladies. Freedom is not for sale, but this book is. With pictures too.”– Esther Leslie

“The Situationist project was always much bigger than Paris. This book returns Jacqueline De Jong's Situationist Times and the Scandinavian wing of the movement to their rightful place in the story. It is full of resources for the ongoing challenge of contesting everything, everywhere.”– McKenzie Wark
“An indispensible work of historical retrieval. In this homage without hagiography, the landscape of the situationist project is forever changed - and enlarged. Bolt Rasmussen and Jakobsen have produced a myth-busting corrective to Francocentric orthodoxy; above all, they bring the artists back in from the cold. Expect Anything Fear Nothing is a brilliant blend of archival sleuthing, visual ethnography, fascinating memoir from unbowed survivors, and lucid analysis with an eye to unfinished revolutionary business.”– Iain Boal


Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen is an art historian and political theorist. He is associate professor at the University of Copenhagen and has published books and articles on the revolutionary tradition and modern art.

Jakob Jakobsen is an artist, organizer and activist. He ran the Copenhagen Free University, cofounded the artist run TV-station tvtv and has participated in exhibitions and projects all over the world.






                       

Penny Goring, The Zoom Zoom,Eight Cuts Gallery Press,2011.



I’m not sure where to start with this review.

Maybe here. Cities across England are descending into chaos; the world is making little sense as riots break out and smoke darkens the skyline. As such, I feel I can’t give this book my full attention – my brain is processing Twitter and news feeds faster than it can process what I am simultaneously typing.
But then, Penny Goring’s The Zoom Zoom doesn’t make sense. It revels in chaotic tumbles of clashing words and disjointed structures, disenchanted and disturbing characters. Apologies if that seems like an opportunistic segue from serious social disorder to a book. It’s not opportunism; it’s about wanting to focus on something that is black and white, tangible and comprehensible, in order to understand the world: a book.
But The Zoom Zoom is not a nicely packaged narrative, nor is it filled with familiar structures, and for that reason, my night has descended into absurdity as I flick back over notes about lecherous, tentacled men and trios of neon wigs whilst breaking news reports broken glass and fire in all my regular haunts. Penny Goring has a fearless approach to creating text, throwing words at the page, making collages from half-remembered experiences of dark tunnels – both physical and metaphorical – and the seaside. And dolls. In talking about her approach, she explains how she moved away from painting – which “became stifling” – to writing which presents her with endless possibilities.
The Zoom Zoom is published by the “brave, bold and innovative” Eight Cuts, who also brought us The Dead Beat by Cody James. Founder Dan Holloway described Goring’s work to DJ Eratic:
As a writer, Penny uses language in the same way a stick of dynamite can blast open a mine. There will be shards and slivers, but a perfect opening and then, a gloriously dark, incandescent space in which to lose yourself among rubble and bones and diamonds.
The simple take on The Zoom Zoom is that, yes, it is a collection of short stories and poems, but they only resemble the classic forms if you live in a sensory deprivation tank.
And this, dear reader, is another reason I feel I’d be selling the book short if I were to try and give you a synopsis of each story, a critique of the poetic styles used. It’s honestly like nothing I’ve ever read before. My criticisms lie in how I’d have done it differently, had I tried to paint those characters and encounters with words. But this is Goring’s show and she steals it with sweet, sleazy, salacious and sometimes sickening turns of phrase combined with a beautifully playful approach to rhythm and structure. My advice is pick it up, be blinded by the shocking pink cover and let the wave wash over you. I typed notes into my phone whilst reading this and the first section says: “T Rex, candy pink wig, trashy-sleaze-sci-fi, incestuous, rhythmic, bold and garish, Bowie, slurping daisy chain, grotesque, frenetic, raw, Gregg Araki, Samuel Beckett…”
Whatever else The Zoom Zoom may be, it’s honest and it’s powerful and it makes me giddy to think there are publishers and writers working together to explore the possibilities of language.
And to return, almost, to the beginning of this review, I’m tipping my hat to Eight Cuts. Not just for taking a chance and publishing exciting, raw and honest new writing, but also for offering up their stock, their site and their ideas to save Afflecks Palace, a place where I misspent my youth. Last night it was one of many victims of looting and destruction in Manchester. It has survived before, it can again. As words can, and do, in all their many beautiful and sometimes disorienting forms.- Alex Herod


“Reading Penny Goring’s poetry and prose and prose/poetry, is so refreshing and startling an experience, that it makes me think writing is going to be ok in the 21st century. Hers is a voice so fresh and so honest that it is very difficult not to make comparisons with some of the ‘greats’, especially poets. But she is unique and so I will just urge you to read her words for yourself.” Quiet Riot Girl


“This book of poems or stories or whatever they are – but what do the niceties of form and genre matter here? – sings and swears and screams, raises welts and cicatrices of violent torments, shits tears of fury and frustration, hums with the heartbeat of witchy womanhood and big big universe-love. It laughs a lot, throatily, tossing its head back like a barroom babe encircled by admirers all agog.” - Jim Zovich

“precisely and exquisitely controlled…It has the trappings of dark fantasy, but it is also uncompromisingly true. It is about love, the way it can distort as well as ennoble, twist us from delirious joy to monstrous jealousy with the randomness of a hanged body in the wind. What Penny Goring writes about is difficult, awkward and uncomfortable. It is also essential and she writes about it damn well.” - Words With Jam



The Zoom Zoom by Penny Goring

Under the massive mossy wings of a praying angel we hold hands and dance around the graves. When we are dizzy we lie flat on our backs amongst the toppled urns and dead flowers.
The other girls kneel down and place their skinny forefingers at strategic points beneath us, and with their eyes screwed up, concentrating really hard, they sing the songs we taught them.
We know the right words – we know exactly what we are doing, and it works, every time.
We rise vertically and bob unsupported high above the tombstones. Drifting upwards on the cobwebbed breeze, hair and skirts a-swishing, we look for all the world like three flying rag-dolls.
ZOOM! ZOOM! Darkling girls.
Aloof and rare, we soar.


http://pennygoring.wordpress.com/


 
 

One of the most exciting things about your work is that you’re not afraid of language. A lot of writers would be terrified of putting the words together that you do. Do you think people have had their imagination scared out of them?

- I don’t know about other people. I had my imagination scared INTO me! I get self-destructive if I’m not making things that give me a buzz. To get that buzz I have to be pushing the envelope. For example, if I’m writing a story and it starts making too much straight-forward narrative sense – it scares me. It scares me because it won’t hold me on the seat. I might fly off the handle instead. Relapse for the buzz. Go jump under a bus. To escape the predictable and mundane. It’s fucking everywhere. I don’t need to be making it. I need to keep my arse on the seat and try to entertain my brain.
I’ve never read quite such a glorious celebration of language as your work. It’s like you fill the page with great big mouthfilling globs of word, and I can’t think of metaphors for it that aren’t about painting. Would I be right?
- Painting became stifling – it felt like everything worth doing had already been done – so I started writing instead. Writing is wide open, more exciting, has possibilities. Painting was heavy – writing is a relief. You can make anything with words – I love that. If I can visualise my story I know I can write it. I might see a red plastic shiny spiral spinning fast in a grey sky – that will be my way forward. For Hexing the Sexing, for example, I saw a scrap of organza gorgeously embroidered to death and smothered in pretty applique – that’s how I wrote it.
Dolls. And the sea.
- I used to make rag dolls – dolls are small and mysterious and you can love them and mutate them and play with them and they can be made out of anything you fancy, as abstract or realistic as you like, and they are good listeners, good at keeping secrets, they always understand. If they get damaged you can mend them. They never go anywhere without you.
I grew up by the river Thames and I’ve lived by the sea. I live by the Thames now. I love the river. I love the sea – but seaside towns, well, the ones I’ve lived in, are dreadful: Hastings, which is a cursed place, strange and evil. And Weston-super-Mare I loathe because I spent six months in a brutal rehab there – it’s one of the toughest in Europe. With Shame Dolls.
OK, I found one. A metaphor, that is, but it’s still crafty. Looking at your writing as a whole, it feels like a glorious patchwork quilt where some of the seams have been picked apart. Like there are gaps, and islands of experience and memory. Do you invite the reader to fill the gaps, or is that how you imagine your life, as patches of colour some of which are islands.
I don’t ever want to bore people – or myself. I only write the parts that interest me. And when I re-write I cut huge chunks. Then I’m always disappointed my pieces are so short!
I see my life as a dark underground tube station tunnel receding behind and before me. I’m standing at the station, which is NOW, and I shunt up and down the tracks, shining my torch on different stops. Darklings is where I looked at my life when I was 9 – 10 years old – way down the end of the tunnel. House – that’s much closer, that’s 1997. Bone Dust Disco is 2020 – my future – up the other end of the dark tunnel.
But sewing, by hand, is something I’ve always done. Not by machine, that kills it for me. I used to make sculptures from fabric. I love what one of my favourite sculptors Louise Bourgeois said, something like – some days you want to MAKE AND MEND, stitch, stitch, some days you want to DESTROY, cut, snip, unpick.
Same with paper and scissors and glue. I spent a few years happily buried in stacks of old magazines – Vogue, I-D, The Face – I was addicted to magazines (and Kit-Kat Chunkies) – making intricate A3 collages. Cutting up – sticking back together in new ways: making skies out of curtains and lips, houses out of jumpers and hair, faces out of glass and jewels… Very absorbing, totally satisfying.
Tell me about the three-part structure of King Size. It feels less like a triptych and more like an architect’s drawing – the same view from three projections.
I never thought of King Size as a triptych. I might write some more King Size. There could be twenty one day! I was thinking about music, the way songs, dance tunes get re-mixed. Like, King Size – the Flamenco mix, King Size – the Rave Mix… How we see things from different angles in different moods. Mood swing stories!
But the architect’s drawing is close too – my Dad used to have his drawing board set up on the end of the snooker table that dominated our livingroom, doing architect’s drawings at home for extra cash – I loved watching him. And those drawings stayed with me. I like to imagine living in an upside-down house. If you look at technical drawings of rooms the wrong way up, it wouldn’t be too hard to live in them – you’d be climbing over the walls at the bottom of the doors, kneeling to look out of the windows and walking on the ceilings…
What was it like being another artist’s muse? Has it helped your work?
Everything you experience can eventually ‘help’ your work – if you manage to survive it!
When I was at art college and up until I got sober and stopped socialising five years ago, it seemed like I was everybody’s muse. I was painted, photographed, written about, filmed, had clothes designed for me and so on… Basically, I attracted all sorts of attention.
But you see, I was labelled ‘ugly’ and ‘weird’ at school and beaten up really badly, I mean broken nose, two black eyes, my spine was damaged – and then I was completely ostracised for two years – so when the tables turned – it was simply another extreme and baffling reaction I was getting from those eternal ‘other people.’
I’m always looking for intense communication, intense connections – and people who idealise you and use you for their work don’t really want anything from you but the perpetuation of their own myths. If you spoil their fantasies by being real – they don’t like it. It got lonely, confusing and distracting.
I need to be rooted down deep inside my real self to work properly – not outside it, not surface me, not Disco me! I like to be scruffy, unwashed, and talking as much bloody nonsense and gibberish as I want, being as uncool or angry or idiotic or ungainly as I feel, with people who accept me as I am. I need lots of time alone, too. Then I can get on with it – make things that might keep me safe.
http://eightcuts.com/2011/05/09/penny-goring-the-zoom-zoom/

 

SEAFOOD SALADS by Penny Goring. Illustrations Georgie Patterson


  Penny Goring has produced a strange little cookbook that is also a hotel guide, a book of Poetry and a short history of some of the Royal National Lifeboat Institute, The Hotel guide is what it says on the cover and gives a list of the Pride of Britain Hotels that the chefs who provided the recipes work for. Some of the recipes I think are written by chefs who have their heads a little to close to their own exhaust pipe, and are in my humble opinion a waste of good fish. But, then, suddenly, there are recipes that bring back memories of childhood, sitting on the beach at Sker, eating fresh Lobster cooked in newspaper on a fire on the beach, so I gave the rest of the book a second chance and with over forty mouthwatering seafood dishes I am glad that I did as there are some superb recipes.
The Poems and Limericks are very amusing, and all have a nautical theme and the artwork is very good, but the history of the Royal National Lifeboat Stations make this a very interesting little book giving details of some of the heroic rescues that have taken place around the country in the past.
This is a quirky little book that I really like and would make a nice gift for any fisherman or boat owner that I would buy. - tropper66


  Temporary Passport by Penny Goring
It is late in the twentieth century and I'm on my hands and knees for you. Down on the boards of this stationary freight train, it's dark and your coat is our tent. Toulon: too long ago to clearly remember your hands or the feel of your mouth.
On a speeding train I took off my knickers and the open window grabbed them from my hands. We were glugging red wine from plastic flagons, going to Nice to beg on the beach.
Those sand-blasted beggars were feral, stole your knife as we slept under sheets of damp chipboard. You forced me to shop-lift a tin of sardines, if it wasn't for you we would starve.
Busking in Brussels was futile, me screaming and you on the bongos, all you'd accept from your father, before he returned to New York. Plastic flowers bunched in my carrier bag, eyebrows unplucked, hair greasily grasping the wind.
Marseilles with a flimsy message propped at my feet, slumped against a wall trying to look hungry, my puppy fat making it difficult. You always watching from a distance, making sure I was safe.
Poverty was too much for me. You said I was too much for you.
At Bettina's expecting a welcome, we weren't wanted at all, but she fed us and took us to the nightclub where her boyfriend was a DJ. Our contest to see who could pull first, you seemed gleeful when I won hands down. All I did was stick my head out, under the lights at the bar.
He was a good-looking Belgian, singer in a band he said, and he wanted to buy me a dress. He came round the next day so I had a shower and he took us all out for coffee and chocolates, then dined and seduced me alone. You were angry I didn't bring a doggy bag back, I was numb with cocaine.
Eating raw cabbage in Oxford watching lots of uppity yahs, we danced with exuberance at their party, heathens, wild for them all. You shagged some girl on the staircase, I nicked a tenner from her dressing-table drawer. It was then you knew I was yours.
I was relieved we lost her before Paris, even though the guards beat you up. I stood frozen, train jolting, as they took turns to punch you and called you ‘roast beef', your teeth flashing broken and whiter against your open mouth slashed with red.
They threw us from their cells early morning, we walked silent streets swigging milk from the doorsteps and I loved you, your beauty coagulated in blood.
I drew you for three days in Calais, my pencil recording your fantastic face, I should have held onto those drawings, I'd have something left of you now.
You never answer my letters but you still come looking for me. You find me at night when I'm trying to sleep and tell me all about why you can't stay.


http://fictionaut.com/users/penny-goring


Ornamental Onion (Atomic Tangerine)


colour me atomic tangerine

*

i imagined myself & i was phlox saxifrage pompom ranunculus

poppy anemone ornamental onion rattlesnake red ribbon nerine

& i loved the painted tongue

& i wore the rattlesnake

at poppy anemone ceremonies & across myrtle mimosa until morning

i worshipped the ornamental onion

in calla lily seizures

& i bled achillea

& i wished phlox

& i kissed wysteria

my mouth a red wet saxifrage

*
i want to stand where no shadows fall


insert the knife an inch below the ear and twist by Penny Goring

Seven Parrots

The Parrot series, published by Insert Blanc Press, was much like its imprint started in a mess of pleasant confusion—my understanding is Insert was at first largely a fake press, that slowly became real—in that prior to the actual writing of each Parrot chapbook, they were simply descriptions of (fake) books by (real) authors to include in the entire fiction that is Insert Blanc; however, after a time, the authors of the (fake) descriptions of the Parrot books were asked to actually write them. What the real story is exactly I’m not particularly concerned. I received seven of the Parrot chapbooks—8-14—and for the past few weeks I’ve carried them around in my backpack, taking one out at random when a moment presented itself for a brief dose of whimsy and entertainment, and what follows will be my perceptions of each of them commingled with anything else I have inside my head upon reading.
Also, I’d like to note as an aside the mere pleasure of a well-made chapbook brought along with your other essentials day-to-day. These Parrots are very well-made, pleasing to look at, to hold, to flip through or to sit down mulling over as seriously as your favorite paperbacks. They call to mind not the muddled shelf of desperate/overwhelmingly-similar zines at any record store on the planet, but a sturdy, comfortable nook in a café where people actually give a shit about reading and are curious about the potentialities of language. Anyway, I digress, but really, I like these books a whole lot.



PARROT 8 ‘I Fell in Love With a Monster Truck by Amanda Ackerman’

As I was reading this, I began seeing a hunched decrepit figure in the periphery of my right eye, and it was terrifying so I stuck to the narrative at hand and by the time I was done the figure was gone, so that was good. I don’t want to use the phrase “prose poem” for as long as I live—quotations aside, I guess—so I’m not going to do that here but that’s kind of what this one is. These are chapbooks of poetry, in so many words, but this one reads like a brief Beckettian memoir of a young person who’s constantly being given workout advice at very inopportune moments and cannot fit through doors and constantly refers—as a Bartleby, of sorts—back to the phrase ‘I WILL NOT PROFIT FROM THE SUFFERING OF OTHERS’—and as a person on a couch reading this I realized that the title mattered in an indirect way but the guts and the language of the thing were compelling and confusing and intriguing and I kept reading—I like to think at the pace of the author while writing it, altogether manic and piling atop itself in fits of hilarity—and by the time it was done I knew I’d read a portrait of some life somewhere and that was good, too. Also, the Keith Haring-esque drawings throughout complimented the work better than most drawings throughout poems/stories tend to do; which is to say, they often don’t (do not) and perhaps only work 23% of the time…


PARROT 9 ‘Politicized Pretty Picture by Stan Apps’

I’m interested in the potential hinted at by the structure of this poem. Basically it’s an essay, a list, describing the societal considerations and community strictures/benefits related to “prettiness” in our world. For a minute I believed the author had tapped into something entirely new and unprecedented and though examples came shortly thereafter to counteract this theory—Gibran, Lao and Sun Tzu, etc.—I still believe that the exact method employed here—numeration, academic language balanced against personal/poetic reflection, etc.—does hearken to something new and I’m interested in this. The subject of prettiness may be an interesting thing to most readers, and I think the words used here to describe it do just as good a job as any formal essay you’re likely to find, but the structure of this work is what I find most striking.

PARROT 10 ‘I Can Feel by Teresa Carmody’

This book begins with nods to Hemingway in the form of a man and woman sitting around talking about the hills that look like white elephants and having beer in a café waiting for a train.  The use of dialogue is particularly effective and though a following segue strikes the reader like said oncoming train the mood of Hem’s early stories is captured nearly perfectly. The aforementioned segue into very mechanical descriptions of certain chemical compounds—anti-psychotics, I believe, depression medication et cetera—is quite abrupt, and though for me this broke the story up so distinctly that I found things hard to follow there was a certain comfort when, later, we came back to the two characters sitting around anticipating their train. I wonder about the effectiveness of things like this, or how the world will read this story; we begin in the style of a man who made a great many concessions to the reader, and suddenly the endnotes of Wallace are staring us in the face relentlessly and for me a brief headache arose; yet this story does remain one of the more curious in the bunch. I wonder.

PARROT 11 ‘Forcible Oral Copulation by Vanessa Place’

Oddly enough I kept thinking about DeLillo during this reading, his mention in his Paris Review interview of reading The Warren Report during the writing of Libra and referring to it as a sort of Joycean novel; and while the lines in this book are more akin to Markson’s later stuff—no indentation, flat language, the phrase “oral copulation” or some variation therein is used so many times I had to stop counting—it’s that dry, courtroom language that gives this book its humor, and its substance. I feel strange admitting that the first book in this series that made me laugh out loud was one titled Forcible Oral Copulation but I should be honest and say that it is even though you’re now operating under the impression I’m a bastard/pervert/savage/bye.

PARROT 12 ‘Fried Chicken Dinner by Janice Lee’
 
Consider this now and forever the final treatise on fried chicken dinners for this, or any world. Another structural flair shown here with the words largely taking place on the bottom of the printed page and only inching their way up to create lists of known fried chicken dinner fast food joints or give an actual recipe for your very own fried chicken (this, by itself, makes it all worth it). At first I was tempted to decipher three major voices at play in this book: an academic citing the histories of fried chicken dinners back to Darwin, a local sort who argues vehemently about the provenance of good fried chicken and emphatically calls the world “dawg” in the proper use of the word, and a maternal character dropping hints throughout and finally giving that recipe for “Cornflake Fried Chicken”. However, at a second glance I realized this is more a compendium of thoughts on fried chicken and does not in fact limit itself to three souls and their expertise on good poultry. All the same, I laughed out loud again and I’m starving.

PARROT 13 ‘Tramps Everywhere by Amina Cain’
 
This is the story of Mary Lebyatkin, told in a screenwriting format, and while Mary does herself make a brilliant little mini-tragedy I’m again taken with the format of the story told and would prefer to focus on that. I think the first time I experienced a novel writing sections of a book in an alternate format—i.e. poetry, playwriting, screenwriting, etc.—was in Scott Fitzgerald’s Beautiful and the Damned where he employs playwriting in certain sections with great talent. I immediately thought of this while reading the story of Mary and her search and plight with the very characteristically-tragic Nikolai and couldn’t really shake this the rest of the way through. I like this fucking idea. I like the idea of an entire novel written in the form of a screenplay that could never possibly be filmed for some such reason throughout. I dunno, maybe I missed something along the way about the guts of the story because of the style in which it was written and maybe that’s a problem but I let myself veer off tangentially to a very pleasant place and was extremely happy with Cain to have gotten there. Finally, I should say that taken as a poem the language used here is actually quite beautiful, and not the dry stuff of run-of-the-mill screenplays.

PARROT 14 ‘Fur Birds by Michelle Detorie’
 
I’ve tried very hard time and again to assert my views of poetry—and it is this book that I’d most comfortably characterize as poetry, poetry, poetry—that, at its best, is closer to abstract expressionism than any of the other arts, not exactly representative, and yet there are plenty of abstract expressionists who utilize perfectly realistic imagery surrounded by nonsense to illustrate a point. Anyway, it’s this assertion that I felt reflected perfectly in this book; the focus here is not a story, but a portrait, a work of artful rendering of language on each page to illustrate something beyond the words themselves and yet it’s only through those words that we might discover something. Images like a young girl feeling lost, a comb, gray lights and various odd quotations serve to give these poems a grounding in our reality and convey that these are most certainly written by someone of this planet, and yet the shifting structures on each page and the attention to a new set of details—one not already exhausted by notions of prose, or story, or rhythm—presents itself. Certainly one of my favorites in this collection, though each of them without question have their indelible merits. - Grant Maierhofer 

Mark Tursi, Brutal Synecdoche, Astrophil Press, 2013.

 “‘I am here to hustle you,’ writes Mark Tursi in his terrific second book, BRUTAL SYNECDOCHE. In his meditations on culture, identity, religion, language (which one cannot avoid any more than one can avoid piss in a swimming pool, according to the first poem of the book), Tursi writes in a very casual tone, but the imagery is incredibly intensive. The result is a kind of ‘hustling’: the poems not only tug the reader along, but are already hustling themselves, already at conflict. As in most of these poems, there is an obscene humor at work as well in this line—the slang connotations of ‘hustling’ have to do with seduction and prostitution. But these unresolved conflicts, such as the prominent one between the sacred and profane, become the key to Tursi’s vision: ‘But hell, who cares, we’ll have a wild time later at the crematorium. Listening to the murmr and hust of dust to dust, ashes to ashes… Look there’s God’s grandeur…right underneath the lid of that coffin.’ Perhaps Tursi is a great religious poet after all. No pervert. No visionary.”—Johannes Göransson