Alfredo Bryce Echenique - In this postmodern novel author incisively charts the decline of an influential, centuries-old aristocratic family faced with the invasion of foreign capital in the 1950s

December 28, 2017, 11:53 pm

≫ Next: D. Keith Mano - It is as if Joyce, for his sins, had been forced to grow up in Queens; as if Beckett had been mugged by Godot in a Flushing comfort station; as if Sid Caesar played the part of Moby-Dick in a Roman Polanski movie shot underwater in Long Island City; as if Heidegger had gone into vaudeville and... never mind

≪ Previous: Lawrence Sutin - Spanning over two centuries, this inventive novel follows fictional writer Hector de Saint-Aureole and his novel, and includes imaginary responses from his imaginary readers. It is an intrepid, whimsical read that delights with its sense of play and twisting narrative

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Alfredo Bryce Echenique, A World for Julius: A Novel,University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.
read it at Google Books

Julius was born in a mansion on Salaverry Avenue, directly across from the old San Felipe Hippodrome. Life-size Disney characters and cowboy movie heroes romp across the walls of his nursery. Out in the carriage house, his great-grandfather’s ornate, moldering carriage takes him on imaginary adventures. But Julius’s father is dead, and his beautiful young mother passes through her children’s lives like an ephemeral shooting star. Despite the soft shelter of family and money, hard realities overshadow Julius’s expanding world, just as the rugged Andes loom over his home in Lima.
This lyrical, richly textured novel, first published in 1970 as Un mundo para Julius, opens new territory in Latin American literature with its focus on the social elite of Peru. In this postmodern novel Bryce Echenique incisively charts the decline of an influential, centuries-old aristocratic family faced with the invasion of foreign capital in the 1950s.
Winner of the Outstanding Translation Award of the American Literary Translators Association and the Columbia University Translation Center Award.

Up next in the Month of a Thousand Forests series is Alfredo Bryce Echenique, whose entry in A Thousand Forests includes a bit from his novel A World for Julius and a previously untranslated story, “Manzanas.”
One of the most intriguing things about Echenique’s life is the plagiarism case that he was involved in. Here’s a bit from Valerie’s intro that makes me think there’s a lot more to this story:

In 2007, Alfredo Bryce was embroiled in a bizarre accusation of multiple plagarisms. The episode, itself with the coloring of a spy novel, carried with it a certain enmity, but also the unconditional support of those who, like Enrique Vila-Matas and Mario Vargas Llosa, have been uncompromising in defending their faith in the writer, who continues to steer his literary course between suffering and laughter.

And remember, you can only get Echenique’s previously untranslated story by purchasing this collection. And if you buy it before the end of the month, use the code FORESTS and it’ll only be $15.

Above all I like the pages I picked from Un mundo para Julius for their efficiency. Let’s not forget that they’re the first pages in the book and, in a condensed way, although not lacking in subtleties, they contain a lot of information about the novel’s central characters, with the exception of Juan Lucas—Julius’s stepfather and the novel’s antagonist—whose presence is implied in the nocturnal outings of Susan, Julius’s frivolous, widowed mother. But in addition to introducing the book’s main characters, these pages also introduce the book’s principal settings. The boy’s house is a microcosm of Peru, with borders that he crosses for the first time when he goes from the elegant part of the large mansion where he lives into the so-called “servants’ quarters,” an accurate reflection of a whole country that is profoundly and cruelly divided between the very rich and the very poor, and into distinct regions such as the coast, the world of the Andes, and the Amazon. From these immense and varied regions of Peru come the so-called servants of this wealthy family who, instead of taking interest in their own country, live with their eyes fixed principally on Europe and secondarily on the United States. And so Julius and his siblings attend British and American schools, where the few Peruvian teachers working there come off as deeply pretentious in the eyes of their students.

“Manzanas” is the long monologue of a young and beautiful nymphomaniac who competes with any good-looking girl who crosses her path, and who, at the same time, maintains a romantic relationship with an important musician who is much older, and is able to see her in a good light, even to overlook her infidelities. The tension comes from her admiration for the refined, cultured, and respectable man combined with her desire to surpass him in some way, petty as it may be. She doesn’t say any of this. She just suggests it. A murder, although only symbolic, might be the only way for the guilt-ridden girl to escape from her constant and spiteful obsessions and contradictions.

Julius was born in a mansion on Salaverry Avenue, directly across from the old San Felipe Hippodrome. The mansion had carriage houses, gardens, a swimming pool, and a small orchard into which two-year-old Julius would wander and then be found later, his back turned, perhaps bending over a flower. The mansion had servants’ quarters that were like a blemish on the most beautiful face. There was even a carriage that your great-grandfather used, Julius, when he was President of the Republic, be careful, don’t touch! it’s covered with cobwebs, and turning away from his mother, who was lovely, Julius tried to reach the door handle. The carriage and the servants’ quarters always held a strange fascination for Julius, that fascination of “don’t touch, honey, don’t go around there, darling.” By then his father had already died.

Julius was a year and a half old at the time. For some months he just walked about the mansion, wandering off by himself whenever possible.
Secretly he would head for the servants’ quarters of the mansion that, as we’ve said, were like a blemish on a most beautiful face, a pity, really, but he still did not dare to go there. What is certain is that when his father was dying of cancer, everything in Versailles revolved around the dying man’s bedroom: only his children were not supposed to see him. Julius was an exception because he was too young to comprehend fear but young enough to appear just when least expected, wearing silk pajamas, turning his back to the drowsy nurse and watching his father die, that is, he watched how an elegant, rich, handsome man dies. And Julius has never forgotten that night—three o’clock in the morning, a lit candle in offering to Santa Rosa, the nurse knitting to ward off sleep—when his father opened an eye and said to him poor thing, and by the time the nurse ran out to call for his mother, who was lovely and cried every night in an adjoining bedroom—if anything, to get a bit of rest—it was all over.
Daddy died when the last of Julius’ siblings, who were always asking when he would return from his trip, stopped asking; when Mommy stopped crying and went out one night; when the visitors, who had entered quietly and walked straight to the darkest room of the mansion (the architect had thought of everything), stopped coming; when the servants recovered their normal tone of voice; and when someone turned on the radio one day, Daddy had died.
No one could keep Julius from practically living in the carriage that had belonged to his great-grandfather/president. He would spend the entire day in it, sitting on the worn blue velvet, once gold-trimmed seats, shooting at the butlers and maids who always tumbled down dead by the carriage, soiling their smocks that the Señora had ordered them to buy in pairs so that they would not appear worn when they fell dead each time Julius took to riddling them with bullets from the carriage. No one prevented him from spending all day long in the carriage, but when it would get dark at about six o’clock, a young maid would come looking for him, one that his mother, who was lovely, called the beautiful Chola, probably a descendant of some noble Indian, an Inca for all we know.
The Chola, who could well have been a descendant of an Inca, would lift Julius from the carriage, press him firmly against her probably marvelous breasts beneath her uniform, and not let go until they reached the bathroom in the mansion, the one that was reserved for the younger children and now belonged exclusively to Julius. Often the Chola stumbled over the butlers or the gardener who lay dead around the carriage so that Julius, Jesse James, or Gary Cooper, depending on the occasion, could depart happily for his bath.
And there in the bathroom, two years after his father’s death, his mother had begun to say good-bye. She always found him with his back to her, standing naked in front of the tub, pee pee exposed, but she never saw it, as he contemplated the rising tide in that enormous, porcelainlike, baby-blue tub, which was full of swans, geese, and ducks. His mother would call him darling, but he never turned around, so she would kiss him on the nape of his neck and leave very lovely, while the beautiful Chola assumed the most uncomfortable postures in order to stick her elbow in the water and test the temperature without falling in what could have been a swimming pool in Beverly Hills.
And about six-thirty every afternoon, the beautiful Chola took hold of Julius by his underarms, raised him up and eased him little by little into the water. Seeming to genuflect, the swans, geese, and ducks bobbed up and down happily in the warm, clean water. He took them by the neck and gently pushed them along and away from his body, while the beautiful Chola, armed with soapy washcloths and perfumed baby soap, began to scrub gently—ever so gently and lovingly—his chest, shoulders, back, arms, and legs. Julius looked up smiling at her, always asking the same questions, such as: “And where are you from?” and he listened attentively as she would tell him about Puquio, a village of mud houses near Nasca, on the way up to the mountains. She would tell him stories about the mayor or sometimes about medicine men, but she always laughed as if she no longer believed in those things; besides, it had been a long time since she had been up there. Julius looked at her attentively and waited for her to finish talking so he could ask another question, and another, and another. And it was like that every afternoon while his two brothers and one sister finished their homework downstairs and got ready for dinner. (Translated by Dick Gerdes)
- http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=12692

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Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Tarzan's Tonsillitis: A Novel, Trans. by Alfred MacAdam, Pantheon, 2001.

From the internationally acclaimed Peruvian writer—winner of the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious literary award in the Spanish-speaking world—a tragicomic story of improbable, inevitable love.
At the center: a couple in love, in exile together and apart. He is Juan Manuel Carpio, a second-generation Peruvian of Native American origins, a middle-class singer-composer. She is Fernanda María de la Trinidad del Monte Montes, a polyglot and cultured Salvadoran. Through the mostly epistolary narrative set in 1960s Paris, revolutionary El Salvador, Chile, 1980s California, and London, we follow the thirty-year arc of their relationship.
At once cheerful, hopeful, and informed by a serene lack of sentimentality, the narrative—rich with the delights of paradox and hyperbole—sees the couple through disastrous and traumatic marriages to other people; the ups and downs of their respective careers; the inexorable effects of politics on their personal lives; their shifting passions and gradual realization that the truest bond between lovers is a tender, abiding, and respectful friendship.

IN 1970, the Peruvian novelist Alfredo Bryce Echenique published a fictionalized portrait of his Lima childhood. Richly detailed and full of subtle scorn for his country's ruling class, ''A World for Julius'' is an exile's novel. It could only have been written in a seat of alienation like Paris, where the author lived and taught in the 1960's and 70's.

''Tarzan's Tonsillitis,'' Bryce Echenique's 14th published work, is something rather different -- an expatriate's novel, a rueful retrospective tribute to the heroic survivors of decades of rebellions and coups and dirty wars. The encomium takes the graceful form of a love story between a hyperarticulate Peruvian singer and composer, leading a charmed life in Europe, and the beautiful Salvadoran woman he worships from afar.

The star-crossed lovers meet in Paris in 1967, when Latin liberation movements and Latin ''boom'' novelists are all the rage. Fernanda María de la Trinidad del Monte Montes, a beautiful red-haired, green-eyed daughter of the oligarchy, arrives in town to occupy a sinecure at Unesco. She has an Alfa Romeo and great connections. Her exclusive Swiss finishing school has even taught her the correct posture to assume while hailing a taxi. Juan Manuel Carpio, the grandson of Quechua-speaking Indians, is at the beginning of his career, performing in the Métro with a Che Guevara poster as a backdrop to increase his tips. This unlikely couple fall in love, quarrel and separate, knowing right away that they have missed their great opportunity.

She goes off to Chile to study architecture and marries a photographer, who is forced to flee after being mistaken for a leftist by the Pinochet regime. They wander from Paris to Caracas to San Salvador, where it's Fernanda's turn to flee, this time after being mistaken for a right-wing sympathizer. In California, she toils bravely to support her abusive alcoholic husband and two children. The novel's only vivid character, she evolves from a Latina Holly Golightly into a woman of courage and stature. She's also the Tarzan of the cutesy title, her lover's pet name for her.

The tone throughout is resolutely cheerful and end-of-millennium mellow. Lines from so many famous tangos and boleros and ranchero ballads lace the text that it could be sold with an accompanying CD. To capture an era through its hit songs is a fine comic approach that has worked for other Latin novelists, but once he leaves the Paris of his youth, Bryce Echenique's writing turns disappointingly generic.

In fact, the trouble starts on Page 5, where Fernanda reports that she has been mugged in Oakland, Calif. In the original Spanish, she describes her attackers as ''terrifying gorillas (in size and color, I mean)'' and ''three huge, horrible black guys.'' These and other racial remarks are presumably meant as amusing signs of Fernanda's irrepressible Tarzan-of-the-jungle fighting spirit. Alfred MacAdam has the good grace to omit such slurs from his translation, but some of the novel's stereotypical assumptions are impossible to lose. If Oakland equals black street crime, Berkeley equals white male stolidity. Bryce Echenique's gringos are ''laconic'' when they're not ''monosyllabic.'' There's a pattern here: other men may compete for Fernanda's affections, but with Juan Manuel around no other male is allowed to get a word in edgewise.

Or is the author merely spoofing his own relentless volubility? The advantage of a long-distance love affair, after all, is that it's mostly verbal and imaginary -- like the work of writing a novel. - SUZANNE RUTA http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/17/books/latin-lovers.html

Poke around in the heap of ashes of a failed relationship, and you might find this charred phrase: "We can still be friends, can't we?" Is it ever realistic to expect two people, once so emotionally and physically involved, to be capable of returning to the neutral ground of friendship where they started?
In most cases, the answer would be no. But Alfredo Bryce Echenique's superb novel "Tarzan's Tonsillitis" shows us a man and woman who manage to be soul mates for 30 years, despite the husbands, wives and great distances that often keep them apart. This ground is hardly neutral. In fact, some of their most intense, most passionate exchanges come years after the breakup via the postman, who delivers the letters that keep them connected."Something extremely valuable and beautiful always existed between us," says Juan Manuel Carpio, a 60-ish poet-songwriter. "Fernanda Maria and I were always first-class passengers each time one of us made a stopover in the reality of the other."
Fernanda is the red-haired, green-eyed beauty Fernanda Maria de la Trinidad del Monte Montes, one of the angelic, Swiss boarding school-educated belles of an elite Salvadoran family. She is the partner of Juan's life, if not always his bed. He calls her a female version of Tarzan; brave, fearless, restlessly globe-trotting, her jungle yell sometimes loud, sometimes muted by circumstances.
Juan and Fernanda started as conventional lovers, but an older and wiser Juan, who narrates "Tarzan's Tonsillitis," admits that "when everything is said and done we were better by letter." They met in 1967 at a Parisian Christmas party for a glittery set of Latin American exiles; drawn by each other's sensitivity, they set up house together. But his self-consciousness and Fernanda's social status clashed; affection strained. Juan seemed obsessed with Luisa, the wife who left him, even though it was some idea of love that obsessed him, not the real woman (she's an ungrateful shrew). He and Fernanda drifted apart.
As the novel opens, the aging musician receives a letter from Fernanda, who's in Oakland, where her purse was stolen--the purse in which she carried all of his correspondence as if it were too precious to leave at home. That loss spurs Juan to recall the rich, bittersweet years that he's known her, spanning several countries from the 1960s to the '90s. He and Fernanda missed many chances to reunite as a couple, and yet, rather than ditch the whole thing, a special love grew that withstood everything. Their love is star-crossed, minus the tragedy that sent Romeo and Juliet to the cemetery.
"The blame for all this, as usual, rests with our 'Estimated Time of Arrival,'" Fernanda writes in one letter, using a travel metaphor to explain their fate, "which you and I obey with such discipline, and which always makes us arrive at different times, if not different places."
That's a nice poetic expression, but if two people are so deeply connected, why can't they get the timing right? One of Peru's best novelists ("A World for Julius") and short story writers, Echenique answers that question with more questions: Why must it work out? In the end, does love always lead to a platinum wedding band and a reservation for the honeymoon suite?
After that Parisian breakup, a couple of years passed and they met again. This time Fernanda was married and had a child; she was struggling to find work and her husband Enrique, an abusive drunk, was no help. Yet friendship arose among the three of them and Juan and Fernanda began to exchange letters, full of yearning and ideals, thus renewing a relationship that always worked best at a distance, when oceans separated them.
Why do this? Why would two educated people, whose conversations range from Hemingway to D.H. Lawrence to Dante, willingly agree to be divided lovers, continuously apart? Echenique subtly shows how their relationship evolved into a special form of consolation as each faced disappointments and sorrows.
Juan wandered far and wide, lonely, playing gigs while Fernanda returned to her violent Salvadoran homeland to find work. His letters comforted her and kept her sane in the madness of military executions and upheavals ("I love you and depend on you" she told him), and she consoled him, late in the novel, when his inability to love a psychologically fragile young woman had a tragic result. The reality of love really seems strange, less knowable after reading Echenique's novel. For some people, love is based on specific commitments; for Fernanda, it's something much simpler.
"At every turn in the road, and now in this damn mezzo of the road in the sometimes extremely dark forest," she wrote Juan, "the quality of your friendship has been a light."
Echenique skillfully captures the emotional changes as they travel that road. Because he's a Latin American, Echenique might get labeled with the overused term "magical realism" and, on the surface, that instinct initially seems right. Echenique's writing is magical. Only it's not the sort of magic that Gabriel Garcia Marquez and company are known for--beggars with angel wings, women who float into the clouds and disappear, circular narratives or paranoid dictators.
Echenique's magic is his graceful, stylistic way of touching his wand to a platitude about love and turning it to gold. When Juan and Fernanda meet again at the story's end, happy though not reunited like lovers in a typical happy ending story, Echenique convinces us of the cliche that true love, in some form, conquers after all, even if it doesn't result in a ride off into the sunset together. - NICK OWCHAR http://articles.latimes.com/2001/dec/27/news/lv-books27

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D. Keith Mano - It is as if Joyce, for his sins, had been forced to grow up in Queens; as if Beckett had been mugged by Godot in a Flushing comfort station; as if Sid Caesar played the part of Moby-Dick in a Roman Polanski movie shot underwater in Long Island City; as if Heidegger had gone into vaudeville and... never mind

December 29, 2017, 12:21 am

≫ Next: Benjamin Zucker takes his form from the Talmud—a central text surrounded by commentaries, with each page accompanied by a photo or artwork on the opposite side. The novel's main character, Abraham Tal, is (like Blue's author) a gem merchant in New York City

≪ Previous: Alfredo Bryce Echenique - In this postmodern novel author incisively charts the decline of an influential, centuries-old aristocratic family faced with the invasion of foreign capital in the 1950s

D. Keith Mano, Take Five, Dalkey Archive Press, 1998.

Welcome to the world of Simon Lynxx and to one of the great overlooked novels of the 1980s. Con-man, filmmaker (currently working on producing “Jesus 2001″, what he calls the religious equivalent of The Godfather, best known for his movie “The Clap That Took Over the World”), descendent of a wealthy and prestigious New York family whose wealth and prestige are on a sharp decline, racist and anti-Semite (though Simon dislikes all ethnic groups equally), possessor of never-satisfied appetites (food, women, drink, but most of all, money and more money), and the fastest talker since Falstaff, Simon is on a quest that goes backwards.
Through the course of this 600-page novel, Simon loses, one by one, all of his senses (taste is lost when trying to siphon off gasoline for his roving, broken-down production van), ending in a state of complete debilitation in which he is being made ready for eternity and salvation.
As energy packed as a William Gaddis novel and as rich in language as a Shakespearean play, Take Five is a modern masterpiece that is at once a celebration of life and a morality play on excess, as though anticipating the self-indulgent “me generation” of the decade.

Mano (The Death and Life of Harry Goth, Horn) still hasn't really found a steady focus for his exuberant, caustic verballismo; this very long, very dense novel repeats itself, sags periodically, and never lives up to its grandiose blueprint. But. . . it's funny, laugh-out-loud funny a lot of the time--and that's nothing to sneeze at, even if Mano-vian humor continues to be off-limits for those unsettled by sex-jokes, Jesus jokes, ethnic jokes, or scatology. The source of all this hilarious foulness is Simon Lynxx, a non-original but grandly cumulative creation: the total sum of every abusive, narcissistic, selfish creep in comedy--from Volpone to Sheridan Whiteside to Don Rickles. Simon, you see, is a filmmaker (The Clap That Took Over the World, Diner), and he's broke again, without the funds needed to continue work on Jesus 2001. (""I have something in mind like Truffaut's Day for Night, but without the frog mannerisms. Get it? Huh? Or am I talking to a piece of wallboard?"") So Mano follows Simon's picaresque pursuit of cash--a pursuit which causes him to lose each of his five senses, one by one, in slapsticky accidents (the novel, by the way, is paginated backwards); and since Simon travels, in his film-co, van, with a female/Jewish/homosexual production team, there's lots of bigot-buffa to fill in between adventures. Some samples of Simon's fund-raising schemes: he returns to loot his ancestral manse--Van Lynxx Manor in Bayside, Queens--but finds that it's been donated to the Landmarks Commission (15 black schoolkids on a tour encounter the naked Simon in the Martha Washington bedroom); he becomes a courtesan, dressing up as a tango-dancer to service an elderly, addled matron; he renames his film Jesus 3X, puts on blackface, and tries to get Minority Incentive funding (""I gonna need more than six tits an' a clean sheet. Jesus 3X is a major minority flick""); he hires two black pals to mug old movie-titan Herman Wolff, so that Simon can save Wolff and cash in on gratitude. (Wolff comes across, but Simon has to dish up a new scenario: ""I've just ransacked North Banality for a four-Kleenex screen treatment. . . Dogs and little boys. Crippled little boys."") And when Simon also tries to seduce an heiress--""you, my tiny side order of spaetzle, you have a great face""--it's a case of mistaken identity that leads him, slowly, to true-love Merry, a wearisome philosophy major. Heard enough? Well, there's lots more: Simon's trysting with van groupie Mrs. Minnie Fischer, she of the bronze bas-relief-cum-chastity-belt; the sexual fate of Minnie's teenage son; Simon's memories of his grotesque parents, with family secrets to be revealed; send-ups of the media, artsy and otherwise; etc. And, throughout, there's that loss-of-the-senses framework--which, though never leaned on pretentiously, does eventually take on some (if not enough) resonance: Simon is left a zombie/vegetable, loved by Merry but otherwise destroyed by his dubious art-quest. As a parable of the artist's fate? Half-baked. As a bravura mega-fiction? Richly uneven. But as a showcase for Mano's comedy--the allusive lancings, the verbal vaudeville, the thesaurus of insults, the scenic invention--this is just fine: if you're not easily offended, you'll be easily, repeatedly blasted into fits of shamefaced laughter. - Kirkus Reviews

IT is as if James Joyce, for his sins, had been forced to grow up in Queens; as if Sam Beckett had been mugged by Godot in a Flushing comfort station; as if Sid Caesar played the part of Moby-Dick in a Roman Polanski movie shot underwater in Long Island City; as if Martin Heidegger had gone into vaudeville and ... never mind. Just boggle.

D. Keith Mano used to show up with a novel almost as often as the children come home with report cards. ''Take Five,'' however, took him nine years. It is long enough for three ordinary novels and seems even longer because, second of all, it is paginated backward, and, firstly, every bone of it is scrimshawed. There isn't a word that hasn't been tattooed. It weighs on the eyes. And it seems to be trying to offend every race, color and creed.

Meet Simon Linxx. He is 6 feet 3, sometimes in a burnoose, sometimes in a gorilla suit, and believes himself to be descended from the Dutch who inexplicably decided to squat in surprising Bayside. His father had a radio program, his mother sucked his blood, and he wants to make a movie, ''Jesus 2001,'' in which the Three Wise Men get off the D train and Christ is either an epileptic or a drug addict or ''lead guitar with a group called the Gadarene Swine.''

Making movies is expensive. For most of ''Take Five,'' Simon tries to raise money. He will be, variously, black and Jewish and Spanish Republican. He will talk incessantly about sex and not get any. He will lose, one by one, all five of his senses, beginning with ''the fire in your mouth.'' When he falls, too late, in love, she will be a priest, and the cross she wears will be abstract, ''Jesus crucified, expressing Cubist pain.''

Simon despises abstractions. Nor does he believe in history: ''He hasn't seen it.'' He can't understand stillness: ''It is, to him, not viable.'' He is fast, ''but he has never yet been spontaneous.'' He hates laws and fears madness and treats everyone like a Polish joke. ''I don't have many friends, but my enemies are very careful.'' Not even Sweden is safe: ''The gross national product is hypocrisy and nudist volleyball.'' He thinks of himself as ''the fullness of time,''''a sweeping generalization,''''the eye of America'' and ''the origin of the species.'' He is, we will learn, ''dying of perception,'' of a ''cancer of the impressions.'' A woman who loves him asks, ''Who writes your material, Sophocles?''

A novel as demanding and resonant as ''Take Five'' needs explaining, and the explaining will use up too much space. But before we get at it, this should be said: More than half of ''Take Five'' is hilarious, even when it is vile. Mr. Mano speaks in many tongues, all of them vipers. What he tells us about Hollywood, the art world, Episcopalianism, homosexuality, Jewish motherhood, black huckstering, Eastern religion, Queens night life, Freud - ''a Viennese fortune cookie'' - and white dwarves is savage, but it is also very, very funny. You will laugh, and then feel guilty about it.

In this particular gear, Mr. Mano is Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson and Henderson the Rain King. He dances to scourge. Of course, Simon as a boy will have a dog and of course the dog will be a paranoid German shepherd whose name is Von Ribbentrop. Of course, the name of the priest he loves is Merry, and he will call her ''Lamb Chop of God.'' Of course, God will call off his game with Isaac: ''Whistle. Time out. Coach Yahweh wants to make a substitution: Abraham in foul trouble.'' Such humor is black, like the holes in the universe.

But Mr. Mano will do more than dance on our heads. ''Take Five'' is a novel of identity: Who is Simon, and why do his parents hate him? (Alert readers are reminded of the Gospel according to St. Luke.) It is a novel about 300 years of American history, a low-budget movie singing the song of assimilation. It is a novel about art, especially modernist art; its many parodies, puns and anagrams serve as a thesis on the nature of metaphor and play.

Not by accident does young Simon find speaking difficult; his tongue will need a knife; he will become a child again. Not by accident is the primitive Alf tattooed as a bestiary: ''Eagle, lion, bull, snake, griffin, toad, shark, mosquito: The magic of pleistocene hunters: No human picture here.'' The games Mr. Mano plays with names and point of view, with contact lenses, are quite serious. (I don't, I admit, understand his obsession with umbrellas.)

Finally, though, ''Take Five'' is a novel about grace. Simon has sinned enough to be a saint. His very excess is a kind of innocence. He is passionate enough to deserve God. His changes of personality and identity -as though Melville and Thomas Mann had collaborated on a confidence man - are conversions and purifications according to the script written by Christian mystics. In losing his senses he gains his soul. His Uncle Arthur, the most likable character in the book, speaks of ''the terrible attempt to silence the sensual faculties and drop into an absolute blackness of knowing. A total letting go.''

The last 40 pages of ''Take Five,'' as we fall toward zero, depict salvation as persuasively as Joyce did damnation in ''Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.'' That is Mr. Mano's reversible point. Art is not enough. This is a difficult, astonishing, almost wicked gospel. - John Leonard http://www.nytimes.com/1982/04/30/books/books-of-the-times-100419.html

I met Keith Mano at a writers workshop when he was about to launch this book. I sat at a reading he gave and was blown away by the sheer genius and power of his writing. I was at a week-long writers workshop held at the University of Rochester in 1981. Mano was the other author there to hold fiction workshops — I was in the fiction workshop held by Helen Iglesias.
Mano quickly got a rep for being “arrogant” and difficult in his workshop — challenging the fledgling writers, being sarcastic at times, direct, giving them homework. The first time I saw him, he marched through an afternoon talk being given by one of the founders of the workshop, an editor from a NYC publisher, interrupting to address some problem (I think he felt his workshop was overcrowded). What a jerk, I thought.
At the end-of-day cocktail hour held each day, I sat with one of my fellow workshop members; both of us shared the rumors we’d heard about D. Keith Mano. He ended up wandering over to where we were sitting and struck up a conversation with Edie, my new writer friend. I listened to him talking about the pain of writing. “It’s like vomiting blood for me,” he said. I snickered. He noticed.
He turned and smiled at me, like a snake ready to strike. “And what is writing for you?” he asked. “A HOBBY?”
Although I was a grown woman with four children, I reacted to this in a way that surprised both of us. I stuck my tongue out at him, like I was in grammar school. But before I could feel embarrassed for being a dork, he burst out laughing. “OH my god — that was so cute! Do that again!” — And we three had a great time talking. He wasn’t an ogre after all.
Every evening of the 5-day workshop, one of the participating authors would give a reading from their work. I couldn’t miss the one by Mano — a group of us (all women) sat in the front row. Most of them were loaded for bear, ready to dislike him. (The Playboy aspect of his career had a bit to do with it, I suspect.)
I’ll never forget that evening. In his reading, I heard a voice like no other. The energy in the writing made my head spin. The comedic parts were brilliant and hilarious. It was outrageous. Raw and inappropriate. But I was seduced by Simon, the main character – a man raging against life and God, yet as vulnerable as a broken arm with a compound fracture.
Some women walked out of the reading, feeling his book was misogynistic and crude. I stayed for the whole thing. The room cleared when he finished, leaving just Edie and I to go up to Mano to comment. And this author (and senior writer for Playboy, and columnist for National Review, and author of 6 other novels) was feeling as rejected as a first-timer. The three of us ended up going out for drinks and having a fantastic time, talking and laughing.
Take Five is not an easy read — the fact that it is paginated backward, the loss of senses of his main character in fairly gruesome ways, and the particular style Mano used in using serial colons. At the end of it, you are left to wonder — if a man loses all five senses, how does he know if he still exists inthis world?
I loved this book. A work of genius. - Marci Diehl
http://marcidiehlauthor.com/take-five-d-keith-mano-goodreads-review/

The hero as foulmouth is evidently a side effect of the new American middle-class puritanism, which thrives on being nonjudgmental verbally and is prissy on every topic except sex. So appalling is the unctuous discourse of everyday life, it is no wonder the novelists turn, through their protagonists, toward a vocabulary of obscenity and insult. The problem is once you’ve set up your profane and blasphemous hero, what do you do with him? An apparent solution—not particularly happy, but perhaps the best available—is to discover beneath his rough and bristling exterior that old cornball standby, the heart of gold. One is half ashamed even to mention it. Here we are creeping up on the twenty-first century, and we have nothing to fall back on except a convention that was hackneyed in the sixteenth.

Take Five by D. Keith Mano presents an unusual set of imbalances. It is painfully hard to get into and much too easy to get out of. The reader will be fore-warned to expect a certain number of infantile tricks from the fact that the book’s pages are numbered backward and the book’s chapters in reverse order; i.e., one begins at Book V, Chapter 7, and works remorselessly down the numerical scale. The “hero” also degenerates from a blustering, rambunctious, brutal exhibitionist to an insensible, impotent, incontinent bundle of infirmities. We are supposed to find him a good deal more attractive in his later stages than in his earlier ones; but it will be someone more patient than the average reader who puts up with the improbable antics of his prime long enough to appreciate the eloquent account of the last stages of his decline.

Simon Van Lynxx (the name alone warns us to expect a novel of caricature) is set before us as a genius movie producer with two award-winning shorts and a number of turkeys to his credit; surrounded by a menagerie of pickup associates, he inhabits a large van parked somewhere in the outskirts of New York City. His current project, for which he hasn’t bothered to write a script (or, in the cant of his trade, a “treatment”) is a pop-satiric version of the Gospels, Jesus 2001. Perhaps fortunately, filming of this epic never gets any further than a few pictures of a recalcitrant donkey carrying a more than dubious virgin and child down a garden path. For Simon is too much of a genius to bother with getting anything organized, and too busy with his own noisy, zany buffoonery to give anyone else the benefit of half a sentence. If he is an artist at all, he is a put-down artist; his loud mouth is stored with a rich assortment of racist and sexist slurs, plus an unfailing plethora of miscellaneous abuse for special occasions. He is a one-man Cloaca Maxima, Don Rickles with delusions of grandeur; and discharging all this contempt in a steady stream of one-liners leaves him little chance to display anything like the metaphorical genius that is… - Robert M. Adams http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1982/06/10/shyster-saints/

I knew D. Keith Mano long before I met him. My family first subscribed to National Review in 1969. Mano’s regular column, “The Gimlet Eye,” appeared in 1972. His mandate, described by WFB, was “to go about seeking strange and remarkable things.” This he did, for 17 years, writing a thousand words in every issue — two or three columns in a row, punctuated by a book review. He was, I would argue, the best writer to appear regularly in NR. WFB at his best was unbeatable, but his ubiquity pulled at his batting average. James J. Kilpatrick’s presidential-campaign pieces, beautiful and wise, came and went like comets. Garry Wills and Florence King (this must be the first sentence in history to include them both) shone. But for sustained energy, issue after issue, Mano won the gold. Journalism tracks change, for every day brings something new. But journalism also relies on the familiarity of repeating frameworks, or features, whether they be columns, cartoons, or centerfolds. Mano thrived on the push/pull of this regimen. I took a bound volume from NR’s library shelf, 1975, and read (reread) every one of his pieces. The book reviews come closest to being dutiful, but even they sparkle. Myron, by Gore Vidal: “Gore Vidal is such a bitch” (Mano liked a strong lede). Humboldt’s Gift, by Saul Bellow, “gets its talkative, awkward form from its genre: It belongs, with Crockett’s or Franklin’s autobiography, to confessional not novelistic literature.” Of The Connoisseur, by Evan S. Connell, Mano asks, Why do we collect? “To share the thing’s strength, its age, its creator’s talents, as cannibals collect brave human hearts?” Mano could listen. Here is Robert, a 15-year-old street magician. “A blind man approaches,” Mano writes, “and I aim two dimes at his cup. Robert intercepts my throw. ‘He sees better than I do. You can tell when they’re faking, with their pupils all rolled up.’” Here is an executive for public-access television, on those who make use of his service: “One man took a record of Ezio Pinza singing ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ and lip-synched himself to it. The whole business is frustrating and silly and sad.” Occasionally Mano did impressions; his favorite fake voice was a ruder version of himself, talking Queens. Outer-borough Mano buys a card that identifies him as a Talent Scout, and reads the accompanying packet. “‘If you are a red blooded male’ (me for sure) ‘or female and are eager to make money and have fun meeting beautiful women and photographing them . . . even in the Nude.’ That kept coming up. And I liked the way they put a capital N on it, like it was Peoria, or Des Moines, made it seem even Nuder.” Over and over, he described. A crowd at an Upper West Side synagogue, waiting to hear Abba Eban. “You’ve seen them before: From park benches on a sunlit afternoon they captain those squat, barge-prowed islands in the middle of Broadway.” Bella Abzug, a raucous far-left congresswoman. “Grossness is a tool, used as Belle Barth [a Sixties comedienne] used grossness. To shock. After all, what you can’t cosmetize must be made a virtue.” Mano visits Miami Beach. “Beaches are a savage hoax. . . . Read? Pages snowblind, one might as well read the wattage on a lit bulb. Sleep? The sheets are never changed. Cigarette butts bristle, filter end up. Beaches are sand-filled marble ashtrays from some gigantic hotel lobby.” Divorce. “Out my way a male black-widow spider has better odds of survival in marriage. I can count eight couples uncoupled or uncoupling in 1974, about a third of our acquaintance. When they visit us by halves, we sterilize the glasses afterward. It’s a virus, I think: Gauze masks are recommended.” Transcendental meditation. “They pass around a pamphlet full of bar graphs, where TM initiates stand out like the World Trade Center next to a Greenwich Village brownstone on scientific skylines.” Marian visions in Bayside. “For more than five years now, two or three times a month, the Virgin Mary has been visiting Mrs. Veronica Lueken. That’s pretty good: I don’t even have friends who visit me that often.” Republicans in Manhattan. “I thought they got stored away with the Christmas balls: those rapt, secure faces you see fox-trotting to Guy Lombardo on New Year’s Eve. They look most at home in cardboard hats, all webbed up with paper streamers like Laocoön and his immediate family.” Overeaters. “Obesity makes drug addiction look like thumb-sucking. A trifle. You can give up heroin cold, but you can’t give up food. Every third TV commercial is a pusher.” Pre-season football workouts. “This is the awful time, windsprint time. Some scream while they run, getting a jump on their agony. Nostrils shear with inbreath; throat linings come apart.” Church bingo. “The numbers come, come. Women of seventy shame me. There’s a cortisone in bingo that frees arthritic joints. One old woman who can hardly walk plays five dozen cards at once, broadcasting chips, dabbing with her marker bottle, fast, sure as a Benihana chef.” Pornography. Mano was cast in a 16mm skin flick once. “Then the director put me on a hard-boiled-egg diet to lose ten pounds in ten days. It was only after the 15th hard-boiled egg that morality asserted itself. I quit and had three club sandwiches on the way home.” And finally, in 1975’s 20th-anniversary issue, there was an inserted parody of NR, edited by Mano. One of the bogus letters to the editor scolded “The Gimlet Eye.” “D. Keith Mano’s Gimlet Eye, ‘Chickie on the LIRR,’ was a shameless outrage,” wrote Betty Prole. “The teenagers of Baldwin, L.I., do not — repeat, do not — stand on railroad tracks to see who will ‘chicken out’ first. The sordid fact is that Mr. Mano paid my son, John, and his friend Peter five dollars apiece to stand in front of the 6:15 express from Penn Station.” Mano ran a family business in Queens, which made expandable cement, but his vocation was art. He went to Columbia and Cambridge, studying with Lionel Trilling and F. R. Leavis (a path also trod by Norman Podhoretz). He wrote a string of novels, culminating in Take Five (1982), a 600-page showpiece. The book had an intimidating reputation. NR gave it to the critic Hugh Kenner to review. Kenner, who read Pound’s Cantos with ease, was late with his copy. What had Mano done? When I took the plunge, years later, I found it, after two gnarly opening pages, to be easy reading, in the best sense: lively, fresh, flowing. The picaresque hero is Simon Lynxx, an indie filmmaker from Queens (almost-Mano again) who is trying to fund a movie about Jesus’ sex life. He encounters a plethora of mishaps and characters (two of them based on real New Yorkers: Andy Warhol and Bishop Paul Moore, a once-prominent liberal Episcopalian). A deeper plot gradually takes over as Lynxx loses his senses one by one, finally left only with grace. Mano wrote a lighter, late novel, Topless, about an Episcopal priest inheriting a topless bar. He sold it to Hollywood as a one-sentence treatment, with the hook that Tom Cruise play the priest. The movie never got made, but Mano made a nice payday. For the book party he hired a strip club at the foot of the Empire State Building and stood at the door, giving guests dollar bills to tip the dancers. Mano was as interested in sex as Donald Trump is, and far more interesting about it. Late in life, he experienced a shift: He told me he prayed every night for the women who worked in bars and clubs: “They lead a hard life.” Keith was warm, generous, and funny; his marriage to actress Laurie Kennedy blessed them both. He had a hard life writing, though. Talent often comes accompanied by anxiety, which is why so many writers drink, smoke, or practice magic. Kipling had to have certain knick-knacks on his desk, arranged just so, before he could produce. Keith produced systems that relieved stress by limiting choice. He had a set of rules for writing, which he never fully explained to me; the point was to avoid similar constructions in adjacent sentences. He did explain his rules for reading: He pulled books blindly from a bag. One source for the bag was the Strand, the great used-book store below Union Square. Keith would visit it with a pair of dice; the first throw picked the aisle, the second the shelf, the third the order in from the end of the book he would buy. You must have got some odd ones, I said. An Indian five-year plan from 1959, he answered. You read the whole thing? I asked. There were lots of charts, he said. Keith, Keith, you could have begun every sentence with “I think that . . .” and they still would have flashed. And I will never have to roll dice to come back to your wonderful words. - Richard Brookhiser https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2016-11-07-0000/d-keith-mano-national-review

D. Keith Mano, a onetime Shakespearean actor and self-described “Christian pornographer” who wrote provocative novels about the struggle for faith and who was a popular columnist for National Review, died Sept. 14 at a New York City hospital. He was 74.
He had complications from Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Laurie Kennedy.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Mr. Mano (pronounced MANN-oh) was considered one of the country’s most promising young writers, publishing six novels in as many years, each filled with vivid writing and heady ideas.

He wrote from an avowedly conservative Christian perspective as a practicing Episcopalian before growing disenchanted and abandoning the faith, in part because he refused to take communion from a female priest. From 1972 to 1989, he also wrote a column of wide-ranging cultural commentary, “The Gimlet Eye,” for National Review, the conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley Jr.

“Week in, week out, Mano was the best writer this, or any American magazine has had, for the last 50 years,” Richard Brookhiser, a senior editor of National Review, wrote in 2005.

Mr. Mano was long captivated by the battle between good and evil that is a central element of Christianity. He addressed weighty subjects such as war and peace, but he also wrote in explicit terms about sexuality, body functions, pornography, strip clubs and other subjects not typically featured in the Christian literary canon.
“I have the honor of being the one person that [Dr.] Ruth Westheimer says is too dirty for her to talk to,” he said in a 1994 interview with the now-defunct magazine the Wittenburg Door.
In Mr. Mano’s 1969 novel “Horn,” a pudgy white Episcopal priest is placed in all kinds of compromising positions while serving as the pastor of a predominantly African American church in Harlem during the height of the black power movement. In “The Proselytizer” (1972), Mr. Mano examined the hypocrisy of a sexually ravenous television evangelist in graphic detail.
The dystopian 1973 novel “The Bridge” is set largely in the 21st century, when environmental laws have forbidden killing of any kind — leading the human race into a form of voluntary suicide. (Reviewers for the New York Times and the Jesuit publication America both called it “repellent.”)
Mr. Mano spent nine years writing his next novel, “Take Five” (1982), a political and religious satire in which the 583 pages are numbered backward. During the course of the ambitious novel, the central character, a would-be filmmaker, loses all five of his senses.
Mr. Mano “seems to be trying to offend every race, color and creed,” critic John Leonard wrote in the Times. “It is as if James Joyce, for his sins, had been forced to grow up in Queens; as if Sam Beckett had been mugged by Godot in a Flushing comfort station; as if Sid Caesar played the part of Moby-Dick in a Roman Polanski movie shot underwater in Long Island City; as if Martin Heidegger had gone into vaudeville and . . . never mind. Just boggle.”
It was also, Leonard noted, “hilarious, even when it is vile.”

David Keith Mano was born Feb. 12, 1942, in New York. His father ran a family business, X-Pando Corp., which manufactures building materials.
As a student at Columbia University, Mr. Mano rebelled against what he saw as the prevailing secular liberalism of the intellectual world. After one class, he told the Columbia Daily Spectator in 1976, “I went over to St. Paul’s Chapel, and said, ‘If that’s the way the world is, I’d better turn to God.’ ”
After graduating in 1963, Mr. Mano studied at the University of Cambridge in England, where he began acting. He spent a year in the mid-1960s touring the United States with a Shakespearean theater company and worked for several years at his family’s company.
From 1968 to 1973, Mr. Mano published a novel each year, inviting comparison to Joyce Carol Oates and other rising literary stars of the time. After “Take Five,” he published only one other novel, “Topless,” in 1990. In that book, an Episcopal priest leaves his suburban church in Nebraska to take over a New York strip club managed by his brother, who has disappeared.
“My occupation hasn’t changed,” the priest says at one point, describing his relationship with the women in his employ. “I am still a pastor, still an authority figure. I still have a congregation that comes to me for advice. In fact, it’s the same stupid confessions, hassles, pretty much.”
From the 1960s to the 1990s, when he developed Parkinson’s disease, Mr. Mano attended almost every Columbia football game, home and away, even though the team seldom won a game. He sometimes tried to rally the hapless troops by reciting stirring passages from Shakespeare.
His first marriage, to Jo McArthur, ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of 36 years, actress Laurie Kennedy, who had recurring roles in the TV series “Homicide: Life on the Street” and “Law & Order,” of New York; two sons from his first marriage; and four grandchildren.
Over the years, as a freelance journalist, Mr. Mano said he interviewed people who practiced incest and others who may have been cannibals. He underwent hypnosis, pretended to be an alcoholic, entered a mental institution as a patient and lived briefly as a cross-dresser.
For a classically trained actor with staunch religious beliefs — he eventually joined the Eastern Orthodox church — Mr. Mano adapted easily to the high-octane writing style of Playboy, Oui and other men’s magazines to which he often contributed.
“When your prose is in direct visual competition with soft, nubile young women all set for some antic hay,” he wrote, “you better talk loud, brother.” - Matt Schudel https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/d-keith-mano-christian-novelist-who-explored-extremes-of-sex-and-faith-dies-at-74/2016/09/21/87979fd0-7f5e-11e6-9070-5c4905bf40dc_story.html?utm_term=.00df1210538b

D. Keith Mano, Novelist Who Tackled Christianity, Sex and More,

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Benjamin Zucker takes his form from the Talmud—a central text surrounded by commentaries, with each page accompanied by a photo or artwork on the opposite side. The novel's main character, Abraham Tal, is (like Blue's author) a gem merchant in New York City

December 29, 2017, 12:35 am

≫ Next: Héctor Abad Faciolince - Saint or sinner? Moralist or scoundrel? Ascetic or voluptuary? This aging memoirist and protagonist, offers up for scrutiny the events of his checkered life and the substance of his diverse opinions

≪ Previous: D. Keith Mano - It is as if Joyce, for his sins, had been forced to grow up in Queens; as if Beckett had been mugged by Godot in a Flushing comfort station; as if Sid Caesar played the part of Moby-Dick in a Roman Polanski movie shot underwater in Long Island City; as if Heidegger had gone into vaudeville and... never mind

Benjamin Zucker, Blue, The Overlook Press, 2000.

Modeled after the Talmud, this uniquely constructed novel introduces Abraham Tal, a New York diamond merchant who spends his days counseling friends and neighbors from his shop. A first novel.

An imaginative, unusual layout inflates Zucker's novel into a true novelty as well as a detailed, heartfelt love story. Modeling his book on the Talmud, Zucker places a brief chapter of the tale in the center of each odd-numbered page, surrounded by commentary on the passage by such figures as Kafka, Vermeer, Monet, Joyce, Bob Dylan, Bobby Fischer, an assortment of ancient Greek and Jewish scholars and the central character's family and loved ones. Photographs and paintings on facing pages reference images from the text. In the core story, a young artist named Dosha seeks counsel from Abraham Tal, a New York diamond merchant whose avocation is dispensing advice: for $1 he counsels how to change your life; for $2 he tells you how to change it back. Dosha wants to know how to get her lover, Raphael Fisher, to marry her. Abraham, who has not proposed to his own girlfriend, Rachel, sees Fisher on Dosha's behalf, and in the meantime confronts his own family and Joycean memories. From this simple encounter a universe unfolds. Like all the novel's commentators, Joyce chimes in with advice and personal perspectives, riffing off the main story in quotes from published works or works of Zucker's imagination. Reproductions and details from the artistic creations of Vermeer and Modigliani, and from ancient Jewish texts, are extraordinarily beautiful. Antique jewelry is featured, too: a Venetian wedding ring is portrayed through photographs and in Abraham's mother's and grandmother's stories, as a symbol of cultural, religious and personal heritage. While cleverly presented, the descriptions sometimes grow tedious, however. Zucker himself is an established jewelry expert, the author of several books on gems and culture (Cameos in Context) and he treats this slight but multifaceted story like a precious jewel, looking at it from all directions, holding it up to the light, under the microscope, defining its color and shades, detailing its beauty and imperfections. - Publishers Weekly

The author of several nonfiction books on gems and jewelry draws on his expertise for an ambitious first novel of challenging design.
Zucker takes his form from the Talmud—a central text surrounded by commentaries, with each page accompanied by a photo or artwork on the opposite side—but the format looks denser than it is. In essence, the author simply embellishes a mundane core story with lots of modernist gestures, a hodgepodge of quotation and imagination that draws on everyone from Kafka to Derrida. His gallery of images is mostly a hall-of-culture heroes: Bob Dylan, Jackson Pollock, van Gogh, Vermeer, assorted rabbis and yeshiva students. At the heart of this collage is the tale of New York City diamond merchant Abraham Tal, who serves as a counselor to his Hudson Street neighbors, doling out advice for two dollars a session. Dismissed by his jewelry-dealing older bother as a pathetic loner, Abraham blames this same brother for all his worldly troubles. A long-ago thwarted marriage in Antwerp obsesses Abraham to the end, which eventually comes in an Israeli synagogue attended by his faithful nephew Isaac. Before that, though, Abraham smartly advises Dosha, a local painter, on how to win in marriage her Yalie boyfriend, Fisher, an aspiring author hoping to write The Great American Novel. The final scene finds Isaac’s son, years later, in the Israeli desert, fulfilling the dream of his great-uncle in a moment of transcendent blueness. Zucker’s “guide to the reader” invokes Joyce and Fitzgerald, but these references are unmerited conceits; his commentators are mostly idle kibitzers who rarely add anything essential to the simple text, and his quotations are often quite commonplace.
The various materials assembled here might add up to a novel, but not without greater authorial inventiveness. - Kirkus Reviews

Blue, a wildly original first novel by Benjamin Zucker, is a richly illustrated, multilayered story about aesthetics, love, brotherhood, and tradition. The novel's main character, Abraham Tal, is (like Blue's author) a gem merchant in New York City. Tal's treasure is a Venetian Jewish wedding ring, a mysterious link to the traditions of his family and his culture; his search for the ring's origins and significance drive the book's main plot. Blue's design is highly unusual and worth close attention. The text of the main story, about Tal and the ring, appears at the center of every other page in the book (each page of text faces a full-page illustration, meant to shed light on the story--subjects range from a photograph of the Taj Mahal to a self-portrait by Claude Monet). This central text is surrounded by commentaries in the margins, which are written in the voices of historical characters such as Vermeer, Crazy Horse, Bob Dylan, Proust, and Kafka, as well as the voices of Tal's mother, father, and girlfriend. The commentaries, like Talmudic writings, play with, build upon, and illuminate the primary story. Blue moves fluidly through time, offering its reader countless opportunities to discover the harmonies and beauty that, over the course of this story, its main character gradually learns to see. --Michael Joseph Gross

'Blue' is a multifaceted work that has no beginning and no end, no straight lines, and where the past and present intersect. In that sense, it is a design fabricated to evoke the experience of Kabbalah. At the same time it is constructed like pages of Talmud with a central text that contain the modern story but vaguely evoke relationships and events in the Torah, and with parallel commentaries/stories on the margins, the story spins off in many directions, sometimes off on its own tangents and sometimes bending back on itself to illuminate and elucidate the text. These parellel stories are a comingling on each page of famous Jewish mystics such as Luria, numerous Rabbis of old, with Kafka, Bob Dylan, Vermeer, a Native American chief, and the fictional Tal's parents, taking the form of direct quotes, actual and imagined lives which can be read in any order along with or without the main text. In yet another dimension, this is also a great art book of past and present, combining masters like Van Gogh and Vermeer with photographs of Kafka and Bob Dylan, and of Jewish scholars and students in Poland prior to World War II. The art work, too, also intended as a commentary to interact with the various texts.
The central story, which reads like an allegory belongs to Abraham Tal, a New York gem merchant and advice giver, who can't solve his own problems. Among other concerns, he is torn with indecision and regret about whether to marry Rachel Heller. Eventually this leads him on a journey to Safed, the center of ancient Jewish mysticism, presumably to track down the origins of a 16th century Venetian wedding ring, which of course contains a sapphire, but also as a personal quest for spiritual answers.
Blue holds many meanings. The most obvious is the blue sapphire gem which narrator, Abraham Tal, is using to make a suite of jewelry. Tal connects the word sapphire to "sefer" which means "book" in Hebrew, and to the giving of the book, the story of Moses finding a blue sapphire at the burning bush and the continuity of a people commemorated in the blue thread of the tallis. There is much more. Almost every page refers to a blue stone, blue in someone's clothing, blue walls, blue light.
I found Mr. Zucker's notes at the beginning and end of the book a good source as well as a help to confused readers. One cannot help but be confused (it even seems intentional), but at the same time delighted with this highly imaginative and light-hearted multimedia feast. - Lynn Adler @ amazon.com

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Benjamin Zucker, Green, Overlook Books, 2001.

A richly-textured novel, filled with paintings, illustrations, and photographs, details Abraham Tal, a New York gem merchant and advice-giver to his friends and neighbors in Greenwich Village, who has inherited a spectacular realm of voices, including Borges, Breton, Monet, and Melville - all of whom vie for his attention in order to dispense important information.

Picking up where he left off in the remarkable Blue, Zucker once again mixes art, history and narrative to examine the fate of a young Jewish man in New York. Using the same Talmudic style, in which the main story is placed in the center of the page and surrounded by blocks of running commentary, Zucker introduces the plight of Raphael Fisher, a writer at Time Inc., who finds himself unable to make a decision abut his relationship with Dosha Jerusha. Fisher's confidant is the same gadfly gem dealer who starred in Blue, Abraham Tal: he steers Fisher in a variety of philosophical and artistic directions for guidance as the writer pens the proposal for Green and tries to get some attention for the project from Time mogul Henry Luce. The inevitable movement toward the wedding is almost an afterthought as Fisher journeys along his unique path, accompanied by real and imagined commentary from the likes of Fisher's parents, Vermeer, Bob Dylan and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Given the ambitious but somewhat fragmented concept, the beauty of Zucker's book will rest in the eye of the beholder: fiction fans who prefer a straightforward narrative will tend to see it as a coffee-table art book containing a rather disjointed story, while art devotees looking for something more than a coffee-table book should be entertained by the inventive combination of gorgeous visuals and intriguing commentary. - Publishers Weekly

Green continues the story that began with Zucker's previous novel, Blue, about a New York gem merchant named Abraham Tal who offers advice to friends and family from his shop in Greenwich Village. Here Abraham guides Raphael Fisher, a young writer unable to make up his mind about a relationship, as he takes on a series of artistic and spiritual endeavors. Like its predecessor, Green combines an ingenious use of graphics and layout (each page is faced with color reproductions of, for example, Czanne and Vermeer paintings, as well as images of jewels and calligraphy) with an exuberant intersection of voices that jostle one another across the pages. The novel is laid out in a manner similar to the Talmud, with a main narrative passage occupying a block in the center of the page and surrounded on all sides by passages from other authors, among them Bob Dylan and Marcel Proust as well as Abraham's own ancestors, who offer their commentary on the story as it develops. This beautifully produced and inventive second novel by Zucker, himself a New York gem merchant, is recommended for all literary collections. - Philip Santo

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Benjamin Zucker, White: A Novel, The Overlook Press, 2008.

Talmudic in form, sui generis in conception, this novel completes the story of the Tal family, a New York City family in the gem business, begun in Blue and Green. The story is juxtaposed against marvelous images, among them paintings from Mary Cassatt and Vermeer and a collection of photographs, ranging from Bob Dylan, to the Wild West days, to moving works by Roman Vishniac. An extraordinary novel that is at once broad in its outlook and deftly self-referential, White concludes a remarkable family saga.

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Héctor Abad Faciolince - Saint or sinner? Moralist or scoundrel? Ascetic or voluptuary? This aging memoirist and protagonist, offers up for scrutiny the events of his checkered life and the substance of his diverse opinions

December 29, 2017, 12:47 am

≫ Next: Donald Hall and Pat Corrington Wykes undertook the work of excerpting the most arresting, enlivening, depressing, odious and/or inexplicable stories from a vast array of texts on the lives and creative practices of modern artists

≪ Previous: Benjamin Zucker takes his form from the Talmud—a central text surrounded by commentaries, with each page accompanied by a photo or artwork on the opposite side. The novel's main character, Abraham Tal, is (like Blue's author) a gem merchant in New York City

Image result for Héctor Abad Faciolince, Joy of Being Awake

Héctor Abad Faciolince, Joy of Being Awake, Brookline Books/Lumen Editions, 1996.

Saint or sinner? Moralist or scoundrel? Ascetic or voluptuary? The reader must draw his or her own conclusions as Don Gregorio Benjamin Gaspar de Medina, aging memoirist and protagonist, offers up for scrutiny the events of his checkered life and the substance of his diverse opinions. His narrative begins at the age of 15 at his family's Colombian countryside villa, when he simultaneously discovers that he is wealthy and that kisses are not shared only with the lips. Six decades later in Vienna, the story culminates with his marriage to the delectable Cunegonde Bonaventura, his erstwhile secretary and transcriber of his memoirs.

Héctor Abad, Oblivion: A Memoir, Trans. by Anne McLean and Rosalind Harvey. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.

Colombian author Abad (The Joy of Being Awake) dedicates this loving and sentimental memoir to his father, Héctor Abad Gómez, a professor and doctor devoted to his family, "moved to tears…by poetry and music," and committed to a better Colombia. The latter aspiration cost him his life when he was assassinated in 1987, and his son began writing this book five years later. Abad spends much of the book expressing his love for his father, but it is his discussion of Gómez's public health and human rights projects—such as founding "the Colombian Institute of Family Wellbeing, which built aqueducts and sewer systems in villages, rural districts, and cities"—that reveals what a remarkable educator, reformer, and activist the senior Abad was, and how his assassination (most likely ordered by Colombia's political leadership at the time) was a tragedy for a family and a nation. Those unfamiliar with Abad's and Gómez's writings will nevertheless find this timely memoir moving and informative. - Publishers Weekly

Oblivion: A memoir by Hector Abad Faciolince – review | Books | The ...

'Oblivion,' a Memoir by Héctor Abad - The New York Times

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Donald Hall and Pat Corrington Wykes undertook the work of excerpting the most arresting, enlivening, depressing, odious and/or inexplicable stories from a vast array of texts on the lives and creative practices of modern artists

December 29, 2017, 12:51 am

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≪ Previous: Héctor Abad Faciolince - Saint or sinner? Moralist or scoundrel? Ascetic or voluptuary? This aging memoirist and protagonist, offers up for scrutiny the events of his checkered life and the substance of his diverse opinions

Image result for Donald Hall and Pat Corrington Wykes, Anecdotes of Modern Art: From Rousseau to Warhol,

Donald Hall and Pat Corrington Wykes, Anecdotes of Modern Art: From Rousseau to Warhol, Oxford University Press, 1990.

From the hilarity of Picasso's legendary banquet for Le Douanier Rousseau to the grotesque atmosphere of Andy Warhol's "Factory," Anecdotes of Modern Art moves through the modern era surveying the triumphs, miseries, and peculiarities of the world of art. Perhaps no epoch has witnessed more variety and experimentation than ours, with movements such as Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism radically reshaping the visual arts--and the artists connected with these revolutions are often as striking and occasionally as startling as the works they created. The anecdotes presented here--touching on almost 200 painters and sculptors--show what these artists were like, how they responded to the world, and how their work is a reflection of themselves.
Here is the fabled romantic life of Belle Epoch Paris, with Picasso and Braque ("Almost every evening, either I went to Braque's studio or Braque came to mine....A painting wasn't finished unless both of us felt it was"), Suzanne Valadon parading the streets of Paris with a nosegay of lettuce and live snails, and Yves Tanguy's wife hurling a forkful of fish at her husband's mistress, Peggy Guggenheim. And there are the stories of the Cedar Bar crowd--Pollock's legendary drinking, the famous softball games in East Hampton, and de Kooning's working method ("I think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape"). The dark side of the creative life is represented by a number of poignant tales, such as the death of Egon Schiele: Bereft at the thought of his wife's dying, he spent her last night trying to capture her in a portrait, and in so doing contracted the flu himself and died three days later. Other tales are more disturbing, from Soutine's blue, decaying chickens ("I'm going to hang it up by the neck with a nail. In a few days it should be perfect") to Rothko's tragic suicide. And the notorious eccentricities of artists are all here too: Kokoschka's lifesize doll which he took for drives in his carriage, and Dali's obsessive routines (every day he ate the same food in the same restaurants and took the same walks, carrying a little piece of driftwood to ward off evil spirits).
But most of all, Hall and Wykes have brought together some of the most revealing insights into the artistic process itself. From Dufy's theory ("Nature, my dear sir, is only a hypothesis") and Picasso's wisdom ("You can't escape your own period. Whether you takes sides for or against it, you're always inside it"), to Sargent's reflection on the genre for which he is famous ("A portrait is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth"), Anecdotes of Modern Art offers a unique glimpse into the private and working lives of many of the best-known artists of the modern era.

If I tell you a book is an encyclopedic and fast-paced tour of the interrelationship of making art and being in pain, need I say more? Anecdotes of Modern Art, which hit the shelves in 1990, was a joint project by Donald Hall and Pat Corrington Wykes. The two of them undertook the work of excerpting the most arresting, enlivening, depressing, odious and/or inexplicable stories from a vast array of texts on the lives and creative practices of artists from (as the subtitle states) Rousseau to Warhol. Hall is a poet, and the book’s organization tracks with a poet’s sensibility; topics listed in the index include Accidents, Agony at parting with work, Children, Dirtiness, Fears, Inability to work, Love affairs, Misanthropy, Physical Strength, Precocity, Rivalry, Shyness, Suicide, Trains and War. Topics with the highest number of citations are Animals, Death, Drinking, Money and Portraits.
Within the book’s individual sections, Hall and Wykes assemble and contextualize the anecdotes with brief introductions such as, ‘The more artist he became, the less snob’, or ‘When she was older her paintings became fashionable and she grew rich; she adopted bourgeois taste but not bourgeois manners’, or ‘As a good Communist, he knew that he should be expelled from the Party’, or ‘Duchamp gave him a glue carton labeled “gimme strength” ’. Many of the stories that follow traffic in either the cultivation or the rejection of an identity – as an artist, as a consumer of culture, as a creature of politics, as a member of an economic class. While a portion of the stories’ appeal comes from their easily extractable one-liners (Ad Reinhardt’s tidy ‘The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist’; Suzanne Valadon’s anti-bathing slogan ‘Washing is for pigs. I am a monkey, I am a cat’), it’s ultimately a much deeper tribute to the beauty of bohemia, as well as an invitation to the thorny exploration of how artists weigh the pros and cons of capitulating to the institutions they rely on for their survival.
I’m particularly partial to two mural-related anecdotes. The section on Diego Rivera discusses how he ‘accepted the challenge, early in the Depression, to paint a mural for the ultra-capitalist Rockefeller Center’. Rivera went on to drag his feet on the project and, when the Rockefellers appeared on-site with their friends, pretended he didn’t understand English. Ultimately, ‘Rivera could not resist adding the head of Lenin, which had not formed part of the plan he submitted to the Rockefellers. In 1933 the mural was destroyed.’
And the Mark Rothko section includes the following, quoted from Lee Seldes’s The Legacy of Mark Rothko:
‘The culturally enlightened whiskey heiress Phyllis Bronfman Lambert persuaded her father to commission Rothko to paint a series of murals for the new House of Seagram Building designed by Mies van der Rohe on Park Avenue . . . The huge hall, he became aware, was intended to be an expensive restaurant, “a place where the richest bastards in New York will come to feed and show off.” Rothko told [the art dealer] Fischer that he had taken the Seagram job with “strictly malicious intentions. I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room.” - Natalie Shapero https://granta.com/best-book-1990-anecdotes-modern-art/

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Chris Eaton has created a novel based on his namesakes (and himself) found on the Internet

December 29, 2017, 12:58 am

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Chris Eaton, Chris Eaton, a Biography, Book Thug, 2013.

CHRIS EATON, A BIOGRAPHY is a novel that arises from the idea that we have all been driven, at some point, to Google ourselves. And if you did, what did you find? That there are people out there who seem to have something in common with you? Dates, places, interests? How coincidental are these connections? And what are the factors that define a human life? We are the sum of our stories: Anecdotal constructs. We remember moments in our pasts the way we remember television episodes. In pieces. And we realize that our own memories are no more valid in the construction of our identities than stories we've heard from others. CHRIS EATON, A BIOGRAPHY constructs a life by using, as building blocks, the lives of dozens of other people who share nothing more than a name, identities that blur into each other with the idea that, in the end, we all live the same life, deal with the same hopes and fears, experience the same joys and tragedies. Only the specifics are different. From birth to death and everything in between, the narratives we share bring us closer to a truth about what it means to be alive. To be you.

Everyone ego surfs. The act of putting one’s name into a search engine is a measure of self-worth—proof you are important enough to be carved out of the Internet’s chaos by way of a Google algorithm. Blessed with a common name, Chris Eaton (the New Brunswick-born author and musician who does a pretty trippy version of Justin Timberlake’s SexyBack) uses the lives of other very real Chris Eatons as narrative fodder for a novel about his many namesakes.
There’s Chris Eaton the politician, the maker of Star Wars figurines, the tortured experimental musician, the Cure-obsessed weird kid, the 18th-century orphan, the wrestler. Chris Eaton is gay, straight, male, female, dead, alive, an enduring success at life, an abject failure. They are tied together only by name and by Chris Eaton’s beautifully overstuffed prose.
Nabokov could write about his back porch and make it interesting; Chris Eaton does much the same with his fellow Chris Eatons. On Chris Eaton, the portrait artist: “He could not picture being the only one wearing a seat belt and Tony being tossed neatly out the window as the van did its first flip, as if God had just reached in and yanked him out like a tissue, couldn’t recall Conrad’s head striking the passenger headrest, his nose driven sideways across his face, snapping like one of those plastic cases that kept cassette tapes high enough to see in the stacks previously made for LPs, couldn’t even fathom the steering wheel meeting Phil’s ribs, driving them into his bladder and eventually causing an infection that would prevent him from having kids and ruin his first marriage.”

Nestled in these marvelous, car-crash-worthy run-ons are dead-stop morsels of succinctness: “Sports, especially televised sports, were the lotteries of the chronically poor, on that level of social strata that exists beneath hope.” Ahh. You don’t read Chris Eaton: A Biography so much as surrender yourself to Chris Eaton’s barrage of effortless digression. - Martin Patriquin
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/chris-eaton-a-biography/

We’ve all done it — Googled ourselves to find out what the Internet has to offer in our name. If you’re like me, you discover you’re the end of the line, that the only person who shares even your last name is your partner, and your universe ends there. Chris Eaton has a lot more to work with.
This pseudo-biographical novel is divided into nine parts, beginning with the roots of the Chris Eatons presented here, and continuing through childhood, adolescence, university years, and so on, right to their various ends. The Chris Eatons (and various anagrammatic permutations) who populate this novel are women, men, straight, gay, and other, and they kaleidoscope through various occupations and creative passions. The narrative is fractured, each story told in brief vignettes, often with long digressions into the minutiae and obsessions that direct the thrust of their lives.
Born in New Brunswick, the Chris Eaton who is the author of the present book, is a novelist and musician. He now lives in Toronto, where he plays with the indie rock band Rock Plaza Central. If you Google him, you’ll find Chris Eatons who share similar biographic details; for instance, there’s the Chris Eaton who writes books on missionary work, and the Chris Eaton who plays Christian rock. Since this novel’s author lacks a website of his own to distinguish himself from the other Chris Eatons, it can get very confusing.
But then, perhaps that’s the point. These real and fictional Chris Eatons meld all distinctions and a composite Chris Eaton emerges. To underscore this, the novel offers various metaphors on the theme that these stories and people do intersect — in drops of water, in mathematics, in painting.
In the end, Chris Eaton is both obsessed with identity, and challenges the notion of identity itself. Innovative meta-story or extreme narcissism? Either way it’s a hell of a read, and a lot of fun. - Nico Mara-McKay www.brokenpencil.com/reviews/chris-eaton-a-biography

The Internet didn’t invent narcissism, but it has had the effect of amplifying already powerful cultural trends taking us in that direction. Social networking, after all, has nothing social about it, but just provides a way for us to spend more time alone. The Internet is a mirror in which we endlessly examine ourselves, analyzing not just our own identities but the way others see (and evaluate) us. Or, taking the metaphor of the network, the Internet is a web that always has us at the centre.
Who, for example, hasn’t Googled him or herself? And when we find all of our name’s secret sharers, haven’t we wondered if there might be some mystical connection between us and that legion of virtual avatars and digital selves peeking out from behind the Cloud?
Such a sense of connection is the inspiration for Chris Eaton’s Chris Eaton: A Biography. Notably, it is not an autobiography. Chris Eaton has little to do with the Chris Eaton who is a Canadian musician (recording as Rock Plaza Central), and currently one of this country’s best under-the-radar writers. Instead what we have here is a composite portrait of a number of Chris Eatons: men and women, gay and straight, young and old. After a while it becomes hard to tell some of them apart, but that’s the point. The life you’re reading about might be your own.
The book’s loosely biographical structure follows Chris Eaton (all of them) from cradle to grave. But Eaton (the author) isn’t interested in telling a story in the traditional way, unless the tradition you’re referring to is that of the experimental “new novel” or magic realism. Within those terms of reference one can recognize a number of familiar elements, as we are constantly being sidetracked into rambling lists, historical background, flashy displays of esoteric research, and complex digressions dealing with obscure (and often imaginary) subcultures and secret societies.
It’s information overload, and it poses the question of just how all of this information — and we are all bits of information now — adds up to a life: that is, something coherent and meaningful with a beginning, middle and end. Your Facebook and MySpace pages, your LinkedIn profile and Twitter account, your personal homepage and network of friends, your genealogy, cache of Google searches and other digital spoor . . . you can package all of this together into an identity that can be sold to advertisers, but the whole will be less than the sum of the parts, and has little relation to your life as you experience it.

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What is it about us that is un-Googleable and most real? Nothing that can be captured between the covers of a standard biography, but rather those spots of time and flights of the imagination that defy the dry realism of data. In rendering these, the author Chris Eaton, like the painter Chris Eaton (one of his subjects), has as his goal “not to depict just one moment in the life of a person, nor even the complete biography . . . but to capture life itself in its entirety.”

All of this may make Chris Eaton (the book) sound a bit high-minded and programmatic, but that’s not how it plays. In the first place, the writing is alive with an energetic use of language and wit. Eaton’s similes are a particular delight. Take, for example, this description of a young Chris Eaton learning to swim:

“He was just a child, a spastic three-year-old with wet towels for feet, head like an overgrown ape’s paw, his legs like welded bows, too fast for his body, so they just bounced up and down like the limbs of some delicate, drunken ostrich.”

That’s perfect, both at capturing in a jumble of discordant analogies how an awkward three-year-old moves, and how those movements feel.

What’s even more impressive, however, is the way Eaton puts heart into his personal brand of magic realism, a self-consciously literary genre all too often taken over by intellectual gamesmanship and superficial cleverness. One of the Chris Eatons we meet is an experimental musician who finds his work falling in-between the derivative pop platitudes that provide ear candy for the masses (“music for people who hated music”) and the “equally frustrating” efforts of the avant-garde “who seemed to praise so-called ingenuity, but at the expense of true beauty or feeling.”

This is the same, frankly non-commercial middle-ground Eaton’s fiction occupies: exciting and experimental writing with intelligence and soul. - Alex Good www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2013/05/16/chris_eaton_a_biography_is_really_a_novel_by_chris_eaton_review.html

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Lee Henderson - an oddly comic, often grotesque panorama of city life like something out of Bosch – or Pynchon

December 29, 2017, 1:38 am

≫ Next: Gordon Sheppard - A "documentary fiction", a seminal work that reinvents the audio-visual revolution of the last century. Interweaving photographs, documents, and images with testimonies

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Lee Henderson, The Man Game, Penguin Canada, 2009.
leehenderson.com/

On a recent Sunday afternoon in Vancouver, a young man stumbles upon a secret sport invented more than a century before, at the birth of his city. Thus begins The Man Game, Lee Henderson's epic tale of love, requited and not, that crosses the contemporary and historical in an extravagant, anarchistic retelling of the early days of a pioneer town on the edge of the known world. In 1886, out of the smouldering ashes of the great fire that destroyed much of the city, Molly Erwagen—former vaudeville performer—arrives from Toronto with her beloved husband, Samuel, to start a new life. Meanwhile, Litz and Pisk, two lumberjacks exiled after the fire and blamed for having started it, are trying to clear their names. Before long, they've teamed up with Molly to invent a new sport that will change the course of that fledgling city's history.

“In its ambition, iconoclasm, and accomplishment The Man Game is reminiscent of Mordecai Richler’s great, ribald epic Solomon Gursky Was Here. Lee Henderson invents a history of Vancouver, Canada, and frontier life that satisfies and defies expectations as only the best fiction can. The Man Game is an extraordinary book written by a young writer who possesses remarkable powers of observation, description, and empathy. ” - David Bezmozgis

Readers familiar with the grim suburban landscape of Lee Henderson’s 2002 short-story collection The Broken Record Technique may be surprised to discover that the Saskatoon-born, Vancouver-dwelling author’s debut novel digs deep into the hoary ground of Canadian history. Set mostly during Vancouver’s early years – when the city, awaiting a CPR hookup to the rest of the country, was still a rowdy Wild West outpost – The Man Game is indeed a historical novel, but one that operates according to its own cracked logic, conjuring a city peopled by gruff woodsmen, indentured Chinese labourers, corrupt city officials, and rapacious, opium-addicted industrialists.
The invisible thread that connects all these people is the raunchy, subversive “man game.” Invented by 17-year-old ex-vaudeville actor Molly Erwagen, who arrives in Vancouver with her crippled husband Sammy amidst the great fire of 1886, the game combines the violence and histrionics of professional wrestling with the graceful acrobatics of ballroom dancing – “a waltz with a clap in the face.” Performed in the nude, the game becomes a wildly popular spectator sport among the city’s downtrodden – which is to say, nearly everyone.
Henderson’s tale skips among a myriad of characters, painting an oddly comic, often grotesque panorama of city life like something out of Bosch – or Pynchon, for that matter. Inevitably, just like one of the performers of the man game, Henderson does at times swing wide of the mark, faltering on the novel’s ambitious narrative sweep. Sammy’s ward, for example, a Snauq Indian who speaks in a wooden patois (“A deer go to hide in the water”), is about as subtle as the cigar-store variety. And Vancouver’s mythic past never really connects to the humdrum reality of the novel’s present-day narrator, who stumbles upon a cache of man game memorabilia in an east side basement.
But as pure spectacle, The Man Game is as brilliant and twisted as a funhouse mirror, and Henderson is a wildly seductive ringmaster. - Quill & Quire https://quillandquire.com/review/the-man-game/

“As a work of speculative historical fiction, as a study in the nature of unrequited love, as a song of praise to the power the objects of our affections wield, The Man Game becomes more than a ripping good yarn; it’s a stunning achievement.” –Winnipeg Free Press

“This is not your mom’s historical novel… It’s clear that Lee Henderson is very clever and immensely talented.” –The Vancouver Sun

“The Man Game is one of the most entertaining, rollicking and original Canadian novels I've ever read.” - Toronto Star

“Lee Henderson has written an audacious, inventive, genre-bending debut novel." - Chronicle Herald

“One of the strangest, strongest and most fascinating pieces of fiction to come around in some time...Totally captivating and terrifically different, this is a novel filled with action, tension and magic.” - Owen Sound Sun Times

Most recent draft of the cover art for the book

Lee Henderson's comic world novel a powerful look at often-forgotten time

Lee Henderson, The Road Narrows As You Go, Hamish Hamilton, 2014.

All Wendy Ashbubble has ever wanted is to draw comics as well as Charles Schultz’s Peanuts—and to one day see her creations grace the pages of a major daily newspaper. Growing up in Victoria in the 1970s, Wendy dreams of getting out, getting away … and getting recognition for her talent. And there’s another, never-whispered motivation that prompts her to seek her fortune: a deeply buried memory and unshakeable belief that her unknown father is Ronald Reagan, the fortieth president of the United States.
A chance meeting in Victoria with an attractive-but-mysterious travelling artist inspires Wendy to take the plunge, and she runs away to live in a dilapidated artists’ commune in San Francisco. There, amid the haze of top-quality weed, unbridled creativity, and unfettered sex, her dream begins to take tangible shape. With the aid of Frank Fleecen, an up-and-coming bonds trader and agent, Wendy’s Strays are soon competing for newsprint space against the likes of Berkeley Breathed, Jim Davis, and Bill Watterston … even against Wendy’s beloved Charles Schultz himself.
But there are darker shades on the pencilled horizon: the spectre of AIDS, unexplained disappearances, bad therapy, junk bonds, demonology, and SEC agents investigating Frank’s business protocols.
The Road Narrows As You Go is simultaneously the portrait of a young woman struggling to find her place and a bright, rollicking, unflinching depiction of the 1980s. It embodies all the brash optimism and ruthless amoralism of the decade, as well as its preoccupation with repressed memories, and fully captures the flavour of an uncertain but deeply vibrant era.

I can't say that it's a universal reaction, but in my experience it's a fairly common one: at a certain point in the revision process - often upon receipt of an editor's notes - a writer will be inclined to scrap everything and start over.
Most writers resist this urge. Not so for Victoria writer and creative writing teacher Lee Henderson who, upon receiving the editorial letter for his most recent manuscript last September, decided, after six drafts, to start again. He wrote a new version of his novel between January and May of this year; The Road Narrows As You Go was published in September.
"I finished it in mid-May, and we went straight into editing," the 40-year-old writer says, when we meet for a mid-afternoon pint at the Bent Mast, a pub near his home in Victoria's James Bay neighbourhood. The editorial notes served as a guide for the last draft. "My one task for this was to keep on focus, to tell the essential bits of this very weird story and not the other stuff."
The experiment - "a really nerve-racking experience" - was a success; the novel is a delightfully immersive, ramshackle read, moving and ludicrous by turns, steeped in and faithful to its setting, the early 1980s world of cartoonists living and working in San Francisco. Henderson, a lifelong fan of daily comic strips and other graphic storytelling who once wanted to be a fulltime cartoonist, throws himself wholly into the project.

Wendy Ashbubble, the focal character of the novel, is a secret Canadian, raised in Victoria although she claims to be from Cleveland. Convinced that President Reagan is her father (her mother was an actress), she is devoted, almost to a fault, to her comic strip Strays. Throughout the novel, Henderson creates examples of the strip, which features a cast of animals living in a vacant lot near the crumbling mansion Ashbubble lives in with a motley crew of other comic writers and illustrators.
The house itself has a reputation, cemented early on by a wake held for one of its most famous inhabitants, one of the first victims of the then-unnamed AIDS epidemic. Ashbubble is drawn into the sketchy family of comic strip creators, her world growing to include both fictional characters and real-life figures, including Maus-scribe Art Spiegelman, Peanuts-eminence Charles Schulz and, later, upstart purist and Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson. The use of real-life figures is both effective and, as Henderson confides, unavoidable.
"That was a little strange," he says, with perhaps a deliberate understatement. "It was meant to be an opportunity to pay a little homage to them in the middle of the book." The appearances, however, go beyond mere cameos.
"I couldn't figure out how you do a book about the comic world and not include these people. It starts to feel like you're avoiding it because you don't know how to deal with it."
Wendy's world sprawls outward to include junk bond impresarios, fledgling media moguls and investigators for the SEC.
Henderson, it turns out, isn't just writing about a cartoonist, but creating a vivid portrait of the early 1980s itself, a society in the shadow of Reaganomics and the White House's denial of AIDS, of free-flowing drugs and sex, and the costs of both. It's an effective and powerful piece, a historical novel of a time which most of us lived through, but have likely forgotten.

While the historical nature of the novel isn't much of a surprise - Henderson's much lauded last novel, The Man Game, was set in a slightly off-kilter historical rendering of Vancouver, where the writer lived from the time he was 19 - the geographical setting might be.
"If you're going to do a book about comic strips, (San Francisco is) the ultimate city. That's where they all flocked. Starting with the Robert Crumb era, but even before that ... It's always been a graphic designers' and illustrators' city. The 'Girl Friday' in Vertigo, that Hitchcock movie, is a cartoonist. It's always had this notoriety as being the place for cartoonists."
The city itself was familiar to Henderson from frequent family vacations from his childhood home in Calgary.
"That was our road trip, we would drive down the coast to San Francisco, so I have really powerful memories associated with the same years that I loved comics."
Although memories of the city loom large in Henderson's adult consciousness, the novel avoids any sort of nostalgic glow: San Francisco, in The Road Narrows As You Go, is a grungy, edgy city, steeped in drugs, betrayal, and sex. There is, for example, a description of a bathhouse so unflinching it can't be quoted in a daily newspaper. This is entirely appropriate, emblematic of the novel as a whole: firmly rooted in the sordid, heartbreaking world inhabited by the creators of works typically consumed with one's morning bowl of cereal. It is to Henderson's considerable credit that he is able to bring both aspects to life so convincingly.
Robert J. Wiersema's new novel, Black Feathers, will be published next year. He has never been the subject of a comic before. - Robert J. Wiersema www.vancouversun.com/news/Henderson+comic+world+novel+powerful+look+often+forgotten+time/10324802/story.html

The world behind the funny pages, as imagined by Lee Henderson in his sophomore novel The Road Narrows As You Go, is one rife with sex, drugs and complicated financial scheming as it follows the arc of a young cartoonist’s meteoric rise and catastrophic fall, sketching a vivid picture of the 1980s along the way.
In the beginning, Wendy Ashbubble’s strip, Strays, is a modest success syndicated in a handful of community papers and beloved by the other residents of No Manors, the once-home of legendary artist Hick Elmdales and a temporary home for other cartoonists.
The novel opens with Elmdales’ death from AIDS-related illness, which throws the whole house into disarray. While Hick is on his deathbed, Wendy inks a deal with Frank Fleecen, a toupeed Wall Street wizard who takes a liking to Strays and its creator. The two events create the chaos that lies at the heart of Henderson’s work. Elmdales’ death becomes a pivotal event not just for Wendy but for the entire art world.
Jonjay, an ephemeral artist who is perpetually successful, returns to the house on the eve of Hick’s funeral and serves to inject notes of chaos throughout the story. He stages a mock ceremony where the cartoonists gathered — from legends like Art Spiegelman to unknowns — eat pieces of “Elmdales’ flesh.” The ceremony reverberates throughout the book as a mysterious ritual, sending up the hysteria over Satanic ritual abuse throughout the 1980s.

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As the residents of No Manors grapple with Hick’s death, Wendy’s career begins to take off. The characters of Strays spread to more newspapers across the country and Fleecen hooks up marketing deals galore. Toys based on her characters are produced. Newspapers from coast to coast snap up the comic. But it’s all for naught — Fleecen’s manipulation of junk bonds catches the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Henderson tells the story of the rise and fall of Strays through the eyes of Wendy’s four assistants, creating a kind of motion sickness as the reader struggles with a hydra-like narrator’s voice, never quite sure of which perspective the tale is being told from.
Periodically, Henderson falls into bouts of esoteric history lectures on comics and art. He waxes on about newspaper strips and ink-stained legends, crafting excellent prose for the appropriately educated reader. But, unfortunately, for the uninitiated it is alienating, distracts from the otherwise compelling commentary and drama in the book and adds considerable length. - Tim Alamenciak

www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2014/10/25/the_road_narrows_as_you_go_by_lee_henderson_review.html

The heroine of Lee Henderson’s sprawling novel about art and commerce in the 1980s is Wendy Ashbubble, an ambitious young cartoonist who flees her Victoria home for San Francisco, where she sets up shop in a dilapidated hilltop mansion and artist commune dubbed No Manors. She authors a comic strip featuring pithy anthropomorphized animals entitled Strays, which rapidly transcends the underground status of her friends’ comics, becoming nearly as ubiquitous a cultural fixture as her beloved Peanuts. Wendy’s professional pursuits, romantic entanglements and adventures in cities and deserts over the course of several years supply The Road Narrows As You Go with its busy story, which is narrated in the first-person-plural by Wendy’s quartet of housemate-assistants, none of whom are particularly well-drawn. Our supernumerary narrators’ paucity of personality is symptomatic of this novel’s peculiar imbalance of character or incident or ideas, which it holds in abundance, and nuance or urgency or fresh insight, of which there is less than one might hope for.
Not that there’s any lack of data on our heroine. Wendy eats chocolate cereal and French toast for breakfast, constantly smokes weed, and always chooses the funnies over the news. She takes her work very seriously and, early in The Road Narrows As You Go, chooses Lucifer’s fast-track to mainstream success. Wendy’s defining characteristic, what makes her emblematic of the transition from the ’70s to the ’80s, is the blatant contradiction between the bohemian persona she adopts and the fundamentally bourgeois nature of her goals.
She becomes a client of Frank Fleecen, a millionaire junk bond titan and early cellular phone devotee permanently topped with an invincible toupée. Fleecen is older, married, energetic, obnoxious, sinister: the Faustian nature of his pact with Wendy is implied in the first mention of his Pynchonian surname. The overwhelming erotic allure Fleecen holds for our heroine would be baffling were it not for the way he’s carefully designed to fulfill her psychic need. Something in Wendy longs for legitimacy and commercial acceptance: seeing her creations transformed into sundry forms of lucrative merchandise seems as fulfilling for her as her peers’ approval or Strays’ ever-burgeoning syndication. Frank promises her maximum exposure and toy store displays with the same breath he uses to declare his love for her and for Strays, so by the novel’s emotional arithmetic she will inevitably become his lover. Or moll.

The history-laden passages are certainly among the strongest in the book. Yet at times they read an awful lot like a showcase for years of diligent research

But as much as this novel is about anything, it’s about an era and various milieux. The AIDS epidemic, Satanic Ritual Abuse, the Iran-Contra affair, the Challenger disaster, VHS vs. Betamax: There’s nary a major headline from the 1980s that doesn’t receive at least marginal acknowledgment in Henderson’s portrait of a decade. Meanwhile counterculture and comic-strip icons come out of the woodwork: H.R. Giger, Ralph Steadman and Hunter S. Thompson drop by, there’s a visit to Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey, a dinner with Maus author Art Spiegelman (who is, of course, a big fan of Wendy’s), a friendly encounter with Calvin & Hobbes author Bill Watterson (also a big fan) and a glimpse of Far Side author Gary Larson picking his nose at a public event (cause for a libel suit?). There is an entire chapter on a Macy’s parade, and a compelling, if totally fantastical, lunch with President Reagan, whom Wendy believes to be her biological father. I suppose all this captures the spirit of a fraught age. The history-laden passages are certainly among the strongest in the book. Yet at times they read an awful lot like a showcase for years of diligent research. (Though I’m fairly sure Henderson confuses Christopher Plummer with Christopher Lee).

This sweeping cultural survey aligns The Road Narrows As You Go with several recent novels, such as Zachary Lazar’s Sway, just about anything by Jonathan Lethem, or, most especially, Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, which roughly overlaps with The Road Narrows As You Go historically and shares with it a largely passive young female protagonist under the sway of older, authoritarian men, and an interest in critiquing the shallowness of the art world. But it’s in this critique that Henderson’s characters are, well, at their most cartoonish. He creates, for example, a gallery owner whose pretentious abbreviated declarations read like a godawful parody of DeLillo-speak: “My field is contemporary art, Justine sniffed. Autonomous radical ideas pushing the envelope et cetera. The artists I represent make demands. Conceptual. Found objects. Minimal. Postmodern.”
To be sure, Henderson, whose acclaimed previous works include the novel The Man Game and the short story collection The Broken Record Technique, is just as ambitious as his heroine — and he has more integrity. No one’s going to accuse Henderson of trying to sell out with The Road Narrows As You Go. Indeed, given its length and admirable resistance to synopsis or generic categorization, it’s a bit of a tough sell. But what made it a bit of a tough read is the fact that it’s teeming with observations about compromise, careerism and unchecked capitalism, yet little of it feels invested with a sense of lived experience or surprise. Until it reaches its genuinely moving and poetic denouement (a good reason to stick with it!), there are feelings described but little emotion, plenty of sex but little that’s sexy, lots of jokes but no robust sense of humour. It’s something of a rise-and-fall narrative with countless micro-undulations and I do believe that Henderson put everything he had into it. I wonder how it might have been had he opted to leave a few things out, if the road were a little more narrow to begin with. - José Teodoro
nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/book-reviews/the-road-narrows-as-you-go-by-lee-henderson-review

Lee Henderson’s The Road Narrows as You Go plays out a life the author didn’t choose

Click here to read a short story called Gnomes With Knives

Image result for Lee Henderson, The Broken Record Technique,

Lee Henderson, The Broken Record Technique, Viking/Penguin, 2002.

Adolescent boys lost in sumo wrestler costumes battle it out in a suburban yard as their parents stake the odds. A boy disappears from his home, lured by a man who looks exactly like his father. A young man spends a potentially heroic day with his wife at the new wave pool, while trying to save his marriage. These are quirky, engaging stories both afflicted and inspired by the profound isolation and psychic drift that are inherent in a world of talk show television, mega-malls, and suburban sprawl. In his stunning and critically acclaimed debut collection, Lee Henderson evokes a world both utterly strange, yet eerily familiar.

“Vancouverite Lee Henderson has 10 word-perfect stories of suburban satire that will confirm all your most bitter memories." - - The Georgia Straight

“…Fans of literary texture and depth will undoubtedly love losing themselves in Broken Record’s labyrinth of language.” - - EYE weekly

“It’s a strange and disquieting world and one that we are privileged to visit though the 10 stories in this inaugural collection.” - - Vancouver Sun

Lee Henderson's debut collection of short fiction is an eccentric, mostly scintillating affair, packed with oddities and graced with an emotional pitch that warbles between ennui and outright heartbreak. The Broken Record Technique seems like the kind of writing that is usually pegged as suburban, but Henderson's eyes and ears are capable of looking outside of the strip malls, and a few of his stories bring an eerily urbanized view of farm life to the page.
Henderson's best stories are wholly unforgettable. The finale of The Broken Record Technique, the enigmatically titled "W," seems like the stuff of a bizarre TV movie: a young boy is abducted from his family's small-town home by a man who looks exactly like his father. The only witness to the crime is a remarkable toy, an electronic talking marmot blessed with formidable artificial intelligence. As the police haplessly search for clues to the case, the marmot gradually starves to death like a plush tamagotchi, losing its recorded evidence. Other highlights include "Spines a Length of Velcro," the tale of two suburban preteens forced to don plastic suits and sumo-wrestle for the delight of their betting, flirting, and inebriated parents; and "The Unfortunate," the touching tale of a doomed little boy born with a head the shape of a football who grows up in a rural home and eventually takes a job killing chickens.
A few of these stories feel like filler--postmodernism by the numbers that could have come from the pen of any young North American male writer. Nonetheless, the best stories in The Broken Record Technique far outshine the weak ones, and this is a formidable (and entertaining) first collection. --Jack Illingworth

In the west there was a massive stand of cumulus cloud so like a city seen from a distance – from the bow of an approaching ship – that it might have had a name.” That elegant sentence comes from the late John Cheever’s most famous short story, “The Swimmer,” a satire about a man who swims a relay of suburban pools to his empty home. Like all great writers, Cheever had a talent analogous to that of a virtuoso musician, bearing his tremendous understanding of musical form (rhythm, melody, tone) with humility.
Lee Henderson’s story “The Runner,” one of nine in his first collection, The Broken Record Technique, bears the subheading “after John Cheever.” The story of a man who jogs a relay of fitness-club treadmills across Vancouver, “The Runner” so offends the legacy of Cheever that, if the writing weren’t so bad, one would suspect a parody.
Henderson joins writers like Sheila Heti, Hal Niedzviecki, and Judy MacDonald in adopting a trendy “faux naive” style. Treating language like playdough, he twists and stretches it beyond breaking, forming weird, often gratuitously impenetrable stories about suffering children, evil and forlorn adults, and talking inanimate objects. Rare moments of cleverness, even beauty, seem the product of chance rather than control.
Heralded by some as experimental, the style is invariably undermined by technical ineptitude. Henderson struggles with such basics as character and setting, pronoun usage, dialogue, and avoiding clichés. Gaffes abound, and while they may be naive, they certainly aren’t faux. Henderson’s writing abandons humility, placing itself condemningly above its subjects, sneering with petty irony, often denying characters even the dignity of a name – proving that a great gulf lies between experimentation and learning to write. - quillandquire.com/review/the-broken-record-technique/

Lee Henderson is the award-winning author of The Broken Record Technique and The Man Game. His writing appears in the PEN Canada anthology Finding the Words and the speculative fiction anthology Darwin’s Bastards. For a decade he has written about contemporary Canadian artists for Border Crossings magazine. He has exhibited artwork in Vancouver, Toronto, and elsewhere, and curated shows of contemporary art and experimental music, including the inaugural selection for Hamish Hamilton Canada’s online gallery, The Looking Glass. He has led workshops for UBC and the Summer Literary Seminar and mentored at the Banff Centre for the Arts, and he currently teaches creative writing at the University of Victoria. His new novel, The Road Narrows As You Go, will be published by Hamish Hamilton in September 2014.

Interview by Anita Bedell

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Gordon Sheppard - A "documentary fiction", a seminal work that reinvents the audio-visual revolution of the last century. Interweaving photographs, documents, and images with testimonies

December 29, 2017, 1:46 am

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Gordon Sheppard, HA!: A Self-Murder Mystery, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003.

On 15 March 1977, with his wife's consent, celebrated writer and former terrorist Hubert Aquin blew his brains out on the grounds of a Montreal convent school. Shocked by this self-murder, a filmmaker friend feels compelled to understand why Aquin killed himself - and discovers, at the heart of the tragedy, an unforgettable love story. A "documentary fiction" - a category which includes In Cold Blood and The Executioner's Song - HA! is a seminal work that reinvents the audio-visual revolution of the last century. Interweaving photographs, documents, and images with testimony from Aquin's friends and contemporaries, Aquin himself, and the writers and artists who influenced him, this intriguing novel takes the reader on a Joycean tour of a metropolis in the midst of political and cultural turmoil.

Why doesn't our prize-infested world offer an award for the quirkiest, thickest, most infuriating book of the year? It's the one prize Gordon Sheppard would surely win for HA! A Self-Murder Mystery (McGill-Queen's University Press, 870 pages, $39.95).
HA! concerns the death of Hubert Aquin (1929-1977), the avant-garde novelist, whose suicide was a trauma for intellectual Quebec. At a glance it resembles other longish academic books, but the content is far from ordinary. It's a biographical stew, more dossier than narrative, crammed with interviews, letters, photos and maps. It sounds like a recipe for literary disaster but turns out to be the strangely enlivening story of a chronic depressive and at the same time a sympathetic treatise on suicide that inadvertently provides excellent reasons for staying alive (one reason: eventually you get to read about grotesque culture heroes like Aquin). Sheppard spent more than two decades studying that famous death, interviewing everyone from Aquin's intimate women friends (naturally, each of them thought she was the one who understood him) to his cleaning lady. Perhaps few will read this ungainly tome, but those who do are unlikely to regret it. I began it almost on a whim and found myself incapable of stopping. Sheppard takes us deep into an exotic world, now mainly forgotten even by those who lived it, where romantic nationalism became a generation's mad obsession, where poets and singers were suddenly society's heroes, and where otherwise sensible Montrealers spoke of revolution as if it were likely to happen at any minute. Aquin, who was drunk on revolution when not drunk on alcohol, was close to that world's centre. At times, in fact, he seemed to be the centre, particularly when critics called him both the greatest Quebec writer of the day and the most potent figure in Quebec culture. He was a handsome intellectual with a genius for recasting his daily existence as melodrama. "It is my life that will turn out to have been my super-masterpiece," he declared. Somehow he transmuted the petty failures of his work into an approximation of tragedy. He taught a little but didn't like it. He was a Radio-Canada and National Film Board producer who found the work unsatisfying. He yearned for a career in business, dreamt of being a banker, even tried being a stockbroker. He nursed fantasies of driving in the Grand Prix. He lost his job with a book publishing company owned by Power Corporation, mainly because he publicly accused his boss, Roger Lemelin, of being a colonialist. Though Aquin's luck was never good (when a newspaper hired him as editor, it folded three days later), he collaborated with misfortune. He sought rejection as if it were the Holy Grail. Some friends considered his entire working life a succession of suicides. Money, of course, was always short. From time to time he dodged writs of seizure from his first wife, whose child-support payments he had trouble maintaining, and at his death he left his second wife $10,000 in debt. His books were more admired than read; in his last year the royalties from his four novels amounted to $1,698.34. He was no more successful in another career choice -- freedom fighter. In 1964 he announced he was going "underground" to promote a free Quebec through terrorist acts. (Do revolutionaries normally announce they are going underground? Listen, it was Quebec in the '60s -- what can I tell you?) Instead he spent four months in a psychiatric clinic. That was where he wrote his first novel, Prochain épisode (1965), about an imprisoned revolutionary. Aquin scripted and starred in his own death. As with many suicides, it had out-of-town tryouts. In his own mind it ran in previews for many years: "Since the age of 15 I have not ceased wishing for a beautiful suicide." He was compulsively literary, so naturally, when he made an early attempt to commit suicide in a room at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, he registered under the name of one of his fictional protagonists, a character who commits suicide. Naturally he never paid the bill because no such person existed. He often discussed the inevitability of his suicide with Andrée Yanacopoula, the Tunisian-born doctor of Greek-French parentage who shared his last 12 years, became the mother of his third son and provides Sheppard's best material. Hubert let Andrée know when he was about to shoot himself, and after it happened she said she understood. His friend Gerald Godin, the poet and politician, wrote: "I think Hubert made a complete success of his suicide. Hubert's only masterpiece is his suicide." His first wife was less enthusiastic. She saw him as a selfish scoundrel who left her and their two boys penniless. "I can only speak ill of him," she said. It angered her that he killed himself outside the Villa Maria convent, the location of her happy schoolgirl memories. "It was no doubt a way for him to have his revenge." Sheppard loads on to the Aquin story his own sexual-political theories (he thinks the Conquest of 1759 emasculated the Quebec male, which in turn "led to the conquest of the Quebec male by the Quebec female") and discusses his own problems with his mom. He lards his book with quotes from many historic figures and lists famous suicides, casually mixing the fictional with the historical, so that Sylvia Plath, Socrates and Kurt Cobain appear alongside Juliet and Emma Bovary. If Aquin speaks of science, Sheppard throws in photos of Francis Crick and James D. Watson. Sheppard also finds several occasions to mention the feature film he produced in 1975, Eliza's Horoscope, which is seldom mentioned by anyone else. Pasted into the book we find an envelope that contains Hubert's last letter to Andrée, reproduced right down to the yellow lined paper he used. In another envelope there's a reproduction of his last postcard to his son. It all seems too much, a frantic waving for attention. And yet the core of the material, Aquin's astonishing story and the still more astonishing Montreal of the 1970s, come through clearly and unforgettably. Despite himself, despite his taste for self-display, Sheppard has made an exceptional book. His description of a moment in history has become in itself a bizarre literary event. - Robert Fulford http://www.robertfulford.com/HubertAquin.html

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John McGreal - a tragic-comic account of a modern man who has sadly lost it altogether. Unsure of who or what it is that he has lost

December 29, 2017, 1:55 am

≫ Next: 'Fiction as Method' brings authors into dialogue with artists, technologists, theorists and filmmakers in order to explore the diverse ways in which fiction manifests

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Image result for John McGreal, Book of It,

John McGreal, Book of It, Matador, 2009.

The narrative of The Book of It is a tragic-comic account of a modern man who has sadly lost it altogether. Unsure of who or what it is that he has lost, in the company of an unforgettable cast of idiosyncratic characters with whom he shares many trials, he nevertheless undertakes a remarkable journey in search of it into the unknown realm of terra incognita.

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'Fiction as Method' brings authors into dialogue with artists, technologists, theorists and filmmakers in order to explore the diverse ways in which fiction manifests

December 29, 2017, 1:58 am

≫ Next: Heriberto Yépez is a forceful antipoet, a technician of the boundaries, a split-form borderzone nagualist. He is at the forefront of a generation of writers who are questioning notions of fluidity and synthesis, a generation that has seen those same categories veil the advent of global neoliberalism

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Fiction as Method, Sternberg Press, 2017.

A Conference on Counterfactuals and Virtualities in Art and Culture
I am an artist, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. ~ Ursula LeGuin
It seems to me that I am walking about in my sleep, as though fiction and life were blended. ~ August Strindberg

When Thomas More’s Utopia was first published in 1516 it was taken so seriously by some members of the church that the possibility of sending missionaries to convert the godless population of the imaginary island was discussed. Even if no missionary set sail, the incident reveals how a fiction might have real and unexpected effects on a world it seemed to distance itself from.
Perhaps the effect most readily associated with fiction is a feeling of escape, a flight from this world into another. Yet beyond escapism, fictions are an operative part of everyday life, whether it be in the dark foundations of currencies and nations, or as the founding gesture of movements to freedom, lucidity and the creation of alternatives to what “is”.
Approaching fiction as a method allows us to investigate these myths, tricks, possibilities and futures as they manifest in a wide variety of forms – including but not limited to the written word. As such, Fiction as Method will bring authors into dialogue with artists, technologists, theorists and filmmakers in order to explore the diverse ways in which fiction manifests. The aim is to explore the concept through direct and indirect means, ultimately considering how fictions proliferate, take on flesh and come to act in the world.
Organised by Jon K. Shaw and Theo Reeves-Evison. Generously supported by the Centre for Cultural Studies, the Department of Visual Culture, and the Graduate School Goldsmiths.https://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=8977

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Heriberto Yépez is a forceful antipoet, a technician of the boundaries, a split-form borderzone nagualist. He is at the forefront of a generation of writers who are questioning notions of fluidity and synthesis, a generation that has seen those same categories veil the advent of global neoliberalism

January 5, 2018, 3:56 am

≫ Next: Chris Scott - an endlessly inventive comic masterpiece, and the finest continuation of Tristram Shandy ever written. The novel contains copious interruptions and digressions, parodies of the picaresque, Dickensian grotesques, sensationally outré wordplay, an abundance of lists, wildly unhinged improvisation

≪ Previous: 'Fiction as Method' brings authors into dialogue with artists, technologists, theorists and filmmakers in order to explore the diverse ways in which fiction manifests

Image result for Heriberto Yépez, Transnational Battle Field,

Heriberto Yépez, Transnational Battle Field, Commune Editions, 2017.
borderdestroyer.com

"Heriberto Yepez is one of the most active and protean writers of his generation."— Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas

"A forceful antipoet, a technician of the boundaries."—Los Angeles Review of Books

Famous for picking fights with a range of writers, both living and dead, Tijuana author Heriberto Yépez is in full provocateur-mode in this collection of work written in English over the last fifteen years. An explosive, genre-bending Molotov cocktail of poetic critique.

~~Yépez~~ is at the forefront of a generation of writers who are questioning notions of fluidity and synthesis, a generation that has seen those same categories veil the advent of global neoliberalism… ~~Yépez~~ is a forceful antipoet, a technician of the boundaries, a split-form borderzone nagualist.- EDGAR GARCIA more here
wickedly irreverent —RODRIGO TOSCANO

His litanies of despair and the depths of human misery provide an ominous view of Tijuana at crisis point. —JASON WEISS

About Me: In English

I am possessed by the most powerful
Revolutionary force in the world today:
The Anti-American spirit.
But I am written and I write in English
I too sing America’s shit.
I am inhabited by imperial feelings
Which arise in my mind as images
Of pre-industrial rivers
Or take some technocratic screen-form.
My hopes are these wounds
Are also weapons. But they may be undead
Scholarly jargon.
I am colonized. I dream of decolonizing
Myself and others. The images of the dream
Do not match up. I am the body
And the archive.
A bomb is ticking in my old soul.
And the life of the bomb
Trembles in the hands of my new voice.
I am a professor in the Third World.
What do I know? Libraries in the North
Do not open their doors. I laugh at myself
Imagining what the newer books state.
Writing is counter
-insurgent. But the counter
-insurgency
Leaders want our body
Believing writing is freedom.
This is as far as my English goes.

Image result for Heriberto Yépez, The Empire of Neomemory,

Heriberto Yépez, The Empire of Neomemory, Trans. by Jen Hofer, Christian Nagler, and Brian Whitener, Chain Links, 2013.
download it here

In 1951, Charles Olson set out to spend some time in Mexico. He was only there for five months and he didn't learn much, but this time in Mexico would come to define all the poetry he was yet to write. Yepez begins with Olson in Mexico, with the possibility that he might be writing a study of Olson, a study of Olson's Mexico-philia. But what he writes instead is a breathtaking investigation of the relation between USAmerican poetry and Empire that careens idiosyncratically through the great men of empire--not just Olson, but those many other men who also traveled to Mexico, such as William Burroughs, Antonin Artaud, D. H. Lawrence, Herman Melville, and Ray Bradbury. This work is a dismantling of Olson, and of empire, and yet it is also clearly an inside job, a book that could only be written by someone who had spent hours thinking with and through--and beyond--Olson.

excerpt:
There are Laws: Taking Down the Pantopia
“There are laws,” begins Olson’s essay “Human Universe” written in Mexico. How does one create the illusion that there are general laws? The foundation of time reduced to space is, precisely, the supposition that there exist laws that function in the same way (homogeneously) across all (heterogeneous) times. If different times are united by the same laws, then, these times are not separated and thus form a single space.
This belief is the basis of totalitarian thought, in all its forms. Television fabricates images—and society fabricates images for television—and the spectacular relations between these fragments produce the fallacy of a commonly held reality: the space of a “nation,” a “territory,” an “epoch.” The takeover of the center of Oaxaca by striking teachers, the flooding in Ciudad Juarez, and civil resistance in Mexico City, in co-existence with the war between Libya and Israel, the state of maximum alert in the United States and England—these events are represented in discourse and the news as symptoms of the same phenomenon, as events related to each other. The pantopia has penetrated deeply into our semi-consciousness and is situated at the border between the unconscious and conscious, in such a way that it permeates, in both directions, human thought. It is thus the Interzone or semi-consciousness that has become the key site in our present-day psyche. Pantopia seems so “natural” to us that doubting that its events are related and even considering that each event might obey its own laws in the space-time in which it is realized, as distinct from other space-times, can only appear a strange or at least very unusual idea. more here

[NOTE. Over he last two decades Heriberto Yépez has emerged as a new & provocative voice in Mexican letters & as a thinker about writing, art & performance, & a range of literary, philosophical and social issues. Over that same span he has published in a wide variety of genres – fiction, poetry, essays, translation, criticism, & theory, & has proven to be a controversial literary artist & critic in Mexico, while the range of his critical interests covers both Latin American & North American issues, extending into works of experimental & political interest on both sides of the border & beyond. His innovative writing & his critical essays have won him – at latest count – some fourteen awards in Mexico, including four national literary awards over the last decade, & he has received increasing recognition among experimental & younger writers in the United States. With all of this in mind the distinguished Mexican critic Evodio Escalante has written that “there is no question that Heriberto Yépez is one of the most powerful literary intelligences now active in our country.”
The Empire of Neomemory begins as a sometimes harsh critique of Olson’s experience of Mexico but expands into what the Chain editors describe as “a breathtaking investigation of the relation between USAmerican poetry and Empire that careens idiosyncratically through the great men of empire—not just Olson, but those many other men who also traveled to Mexico, such as William Burroughs, Antonin Artaud, D. H. Lawrence, Herman Melville, and Ray Bradbury.” Writes Yépez himself in summary: “Olson is part of the American dream, the dream of expansionism in all its variants. It is with the purpose of understanding this empire that I have written this book. Olson in and of himself does not interest me; I am interested in his character as a microanalogy for decoding the psychopoetics of Empire. Philosophy tries to comprehend reality through a discussion of abstract concepts produced by floating masculine heads (decapitalisms); in contrast, what I want to understand is the present via concrete bodies, historical microanalysis via the hunt for biosymbols. Using the text, I want to see through it to glimpse the substructure and the superstructure.” And the Chain editors again: “This work is a dismantling of Olson, and of empire, and yet it is also clearly an inside job, a book that could only be written by someone who had spent hours thinking with and through—and beyond—Olson.” (J.R.)] - jacket2.org/commentary/heriberto-y%C3%A9pez-empire-neomemory

There's an interesting back-and-forth going on at Jacket2 at the moment regarding Heriberto Yépez's ChainLinks book, The Empire of Neomemory, published in Spanish in 2007 and recently translated by by Jen Hofer, Christian Nagler, and Brian Whitener for this edition. Yépez--called "one of the best writers and chroniclers of contemporary Mexico and one of the two most important literary minds writing in Mexico right now"--set out originally to investigate Charles Olson's time in Mexico, but eventually wrote of his project: "Olson in and of himself does not interest me; I am interested in his character as a microanalogy for decoding the psychopoetics of Empire."
In the spring, Jerome Rothenberg posted excerpts from the book on his Jacket2 Commentary page, which drew attention from a member of Il Gruppo, Benjamin Hollander, who now responds to Yépez's suggestion (as Hollander puts it) that "Olson and his poetry and prose reflect the impulses of a totalitarian and imperialist servant of empire." Hollander writes: "But now, inexplicably, fantastically, [Olson] has been morphed into the imperialist emissary of empire. Why has this happened?" More:

Members of Il Gruppo (Amiri Baraka, Jack Hirschman, Ammiel Alcalay, Carlos b. Carlos Suarès, Benjamin Hollander, and others) intend to respond in a place and form where such a debate — usually sublimated into one or another mode of theoretical double-speak, political correctness, or “fair and balanced” flattening of positions — might actually be forced out into the open. We will point to commentaries diametrically opposed to Yépez’s claims about Olson. For example, we would point to Diane di Prima’s lecture on Olson in which she recalls asking Olson
“When did America go bad? Was it after Jefferson? Was it late as Andrew Jackson and the stuff with a national bank?” Charles answered me instantly. Conspiratorially. Leaning close to my ear, he half-whispered in that gruff voice he used when he particularly wanted to underscore what he was saying: Rotten from the very beginning. Constitution written by a bunch of gangsters to exploit a continent.
Or we would point to comments by Olson’s Japanese translator, Yorio Hirano, who writes that Olson’s
Maximus Poems is a book of quest. Maximus, who wishes to find innocence in the beginning of America, finds the fact that the beginning has already been contaminated by the filth of commercialism and nascent capitalism brought there by Pilgrim Fathers.
As with any response to a revisionist historian’s subject, it is not so much the subject — in this case, Olson — which needs to be defended: his poetry and the facts of his life will do just fine in speaking for themselves. This is why it is difficult for Il Gruppo to buy into defending Olson as if we were presenting just another perspective in order to have a fair and balanced counter to Yépez’s so-called history. This move would mock the facts of Olson’s life. Are astronomers in the name of “fairness and balance” asked to present “the other side” to those who believe the moon is made of green cheese?
Rather, Il Gruppo intends to directly address Yépez’s claims, most importantly why they are being made, why and by whom they are seriously being entertained, their purported basis, and how they fall into a pattern of attacks on Olson. The space and form where such issues will be forced into the open is still under discussion.

We're looking for more information on Il Gruppo in general, and are keen to see them really wrestle with this work and literary history. Rumors circulate that they're looking to publish a small book on the matter. We'll keep you posted. - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2013/09/il-gruppo-surfaces-to-respond-to-heriberto-yepezs-complicated-book-on-charles-olsons-time-in-mexico

Up until a few years ago, I’d only read bits of Charles Olson’s writing, but I’d never really fallen for him. He’d always been one of those dead white men who I knew was important, a classic with whom I thought I should spend time. Since I first fell in love with James Baldwin as a teen or Gloria Anzaldúa as a college student, something about these older, straight, white male writers just didn’t register for me. I couldn’t get access to them, and they felt removed, irrevocably of the past. And yet in the last few years, I’ve come back around to a number of them, now including Olson. To spend time with him, and his lifelong projective poetic project based in and around Gloucester, Massachusetts.
El imperio de la neomemoria by Heriberto Yépez brought me back to Olson: first when it came out in 2007 in Spanish from Almadía, an indie press based in Oaxaca, México. Yépez—a writer from the border city of Tijuana—has a long list of books published in Spanish that includes poetry, fiction and critical prose, as well as a a few books of experimental poetry in English. I’ve read Yépez for years, but recently I’ve had the pleasure of (re)reading him in English, as The Empire of Neomemory has been released in English from ChainLinks: the result of a careful, painstaking translation by Jen Hofer, Christian Nagler, Brian Whitener (and partially by Yépez himself as a vital conversant for the translation project.)

Yépez’s book made me want to delve deeper into Olson’s magnum opus, TheMaximus Poems; he made the book feel incredibly relevant. In his book, Yépez pulls Olson off his pedestal, making his poetics and his mission more human, no longer the project of some god on the literary hill. In The Empire of Neomemory, Olson becomes a young, fallible striver, a man-boy who wants more and more and sometimes in a wheedling kind of way. He’s not powerful or mighty; he’s a bit base, a little prone to overstatement, needy and defensive. Yépez psychoanalyzes Olson, investigating his Oedipal complex and his relationship with his father, thus bringing him back down to earth. Like any complicated, prickly personality, his vulnerability made me want to get to know him better.
Yépez also concentrates much of his analysis on Olson’s travels in Mexico, his search for Mayan authenticity and Quetzalcóatl, the plumed serpant god of the Aztec. Yépez argues that, unlike Pound, Olson wants to let in “the indigenous and the oral contemporary.” It is an investigation into what Yépez calls variously the “co-Oxident” and “kinh time,” “pantopia” and “neomemory.” As a USAmerican* who has spent a lot of time in Mexico, I’m obsessed with the transnational relationships between our two countries; I’ve been fascinated with Yépez’s critique of Olson’s relationship with Mexico, stealing from the country while simultaneously rejecting and undervaluing it and its people, this complicated brew of rejection, prejudice and longing for the Other.
In all of Yépez’s writing, he is always contradictory and complicated, yet also wont to use grand, polemical statements. It’s a strange mix, often uncomfortable and frustrating, yet revelatory and stimulating at his best. As usual, Yépez delights in hyperbole in this book: “What Romanticism was for Modernity, the 50s will be for the North American Empire. And they will be its Middle Ages—its Middle Ages express, fast food classics!” and “Fascism is remix.” He’s a master of the pointed turn of phrase.
In The Empire of Neomemory (as opposed to some of his other, older critical work), Yépez achieves a writing that multiplicates and renegotiates its own relationship with itself. At every turn, it appears to be a critical text that doesn’t want to be just criticism or critique, but something different, something bigger. This book starts off as a biographical exploration of Charles Olson, his life in Gloucester, his biography and his work, but it is also effort to grapple with imperialist logic itself. As Yépez says, “Olson in and of himself does not interest me; I am interested in his character as a microanalogy for decoding the psychopoetics of Empire.”
What Yépez posits is: an indictment of an imperial sense of time that converts itself into space, into landscape. An indictment of the self as the foundation for conceptions of that time. A series of postulations that desnap. Desnapping. An evisceration of the idea of remixing and appropriation and fragmentation as resistant poetics. Yépez wants us, as experimental readers and writers, to think more deeply about our own complicity and our incapacity to free ourselves from a damaging loop of colonialism and empire. He uses grand, polemical statements to force us to rethink the grand, polemical statement. Yépez (and experimental writing more generally) incarnates the very contradictions he sets out to untangle.
And for Yépez, the roots of these contradictions can be traced back to Olson, not as the foundational moment, but rather as a particularly transparent distillation of the links between imperialism and USAmerican avant-garde poetics. If we go back to Olson’s ideas on Projective Verse, perhaps his most well known poetic statement: “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION. It means exactly what it says, is a matter of, at all points (even, I should say, of our management of daily reality as of the daily work) get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen. And if you also set up as a poet, USE USE USE the process at all points, in any given poem always, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER!”
In this quote, we see how Olson’s sense of speed (and time) becomes spatial. It’s interesting that he makes this poetic “call to arms” at this particular moment in 1950. 1950 being the year that the Cold War (and the nuclear arms race) begins to gather steam as Truman orders the development of the hydrogen bomb. Also the year that the Korean War begins as North Korean troops march South. Olson lauds a poetics based on the “projectile” and the “percussive” just as bombs begin to drop on the Korean peninsula. As Yépez points out, these terms and others like “prospective” are instantly and inherantly suspicious, linked to Cold War politics.
As I worked on this short essay, I listened to recordings of Charles Olson and a 2010 Poem Talk on Pennsound with Charles Bernstein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Bob Perelman. As the best of the Poem Talks do, this discussion helped me to think about how Olson is regarded within the world of contemporary, experimental USAmerican poetics. I love the coversation and I am happy it is online, yet it also reminded me why I have often kept my distance from poets like Charles Olson; each one of the interlocutors mentioned a field of references that often felt foreign or overly expansive; the depth of their knowledge made Olson seem unapproachable and difficult, the realm of those with advanced degrees and books already written on the subject. For example, Bernstein refers to his first books on Olson and his thinking then as opposed to his thinking now. There is a sense of the history of thinking about Olson, his importance within the field that makes me hesitate to opine.
And yet, the discussion was also helpful to think about how Yépez’s project is so necessary at this particular moment. Bob Perelman says, “I’d love to desacralize our heroes. Olson is a heroic figure. Sacralization is always a problem: a lessoning as opposed to a lesson.” Perelman helped me to understand one of the joys of Yépez’s project: he pulls Olson out of the stratosphere, he trounces him, psychoanalyzes him and sends him off on a sad, lonely trip to the Yucatán, putting him on a grimy, fallible level. Like the kids say, he becomes relatable.
Rachel Blau du Plessis talks about how Olson’s epistolary poems in Maximus link zones: the body, the city, the world-historical, and she argues that there are no impediments to the linking of those zones. She notes that while Olson clearly pursues a mission connected to ideas of rootedness, place and geography, he also falls for the tropes of American exceptionalism and westward conquest, and yet she limits herself, saying: “I don’t want to be too reductive.” Yépez is not scared to be seen as reductive; polemicism is at the core of this project.

I also think Yépez undercuts analyses of Olson that would posit him as a counter-hegemonic hero. For example, in the Poem Talk, Al Filreas sees Olson as arguing against American mercantilism. Charles Bernstein sees Olson arguing that we are not beholden to the past and to tradition, that it does not define us entirely, though our words come from that past. Quoting Olson “I no longer am, yet am, / the slow westward motion.” Bernstein argues that we need Olson, that we need his assertion that: “An American / is a complex of occasions, / themselves a geometry / of spatial nature.” He sees this line as an argument against USAmerican fundamentalisms, a radical attack and critique on the idea of an American as one thing or an essential Americanness.
Yépez’s Empire takes apart this counter-hegemonic grandeur, not only of Olson but of USAmerican literary experimentalism more generally. It forces us to recognize the Olson in all of “us,” even to question that very “us.” Olson pushes for a radical new poetics and at the same time embodies empire in a new appropriative, totalizing poetics of the new. As Yépez says, “[Olson’s] U.S. readers flagrantly ignore the relationship between USAmerican canonical writing and imperialism, a reflex typical of USAmerican hegemonical intellectuals, but in this case one that includes the USAmerican experimental literary left, in need of a radical re-reading of the ideological foundations of its current poetics.”
Yépez continues: “From the work of Olson to the parody (a la Woody Allen) that Charles Bernstein makes of “projective verse,” from the investigative poetry of Ed Sanders constructed with monads of information to the cut ups of Burroughs that sampler of the body-of-reorgans, from the “plagiarisms” of Kathy Acker and her intense prose made of blocks to the techniques of the post-Language poets, USAmerican poetry, in its dream of a symposium of the Whole, as in the “new sentence,” has been a critical poetry, a pantopic poetry, based in displacement and parataxis, based in neomemory.” But this indictment is not just for the U.S. experimental poets, but it extends out to critique everyone, everyone whose culture is based on memory. All of us are conservative, Yépez argues, and he includes himself.
At the end of the ChainLinks volume, there is a fascinating translators’ note written in the first-person plural, a “we” that includes the three translators and Yépez. The note does amazing work thinking through the perils of translation at this particular historical moment, delving into the complicated array of issues that emerge out of attempting to translate this resolutely anti-imperial book into the imperial tongue that it is rallying to undermine. The translators also remind the reader to continue to resist (and riot) and yet to also “allow the moment of complicity back in again and again” as Empire of Neomemory does so often: “what I have said of Charles Olson is the method by which I recognize myself.”
As I think most experimental writers would, I found myself identifying and dis-identifying with Yépez’s critique of Charles Olson throughout the text. Moments where I felt my own work and my own aims as a writer were made manifest and then shred to pieces. Moments when Yépez seemed to be tearing into my own practice as a writer. And I think this is an incredible gift (if we want to talk about poetry or criticism as gift).
In the book, Yépez attacks the concept of the post-anything, positing it as another progress-oriented mistake that recreates a linear, spatial sense of time. As he says, “the idea of the post attempts to persuade us that there has been a confrontation, a collision of forces, in which either a parricide or overcoming occurred, a moving beyond this conflict, a resolution or a passage to another site.”
The book is not saying that there is another world beyond this one, a better way of doing things (for which Yépez could become the master). Rather, it embodies the complicities and failures of experimental literature, while pushing the reader (especially the USAmerican reader) to recognize her own inextricability from these webs. Perhaps, the book signals, it is time to think about forgetting the grand, totalizing dream of neomemory.
* Thanks to Jen Hofer for working to popularize this term USAmerican, which so clearly resists the erroneous definition of America as the U.S. of A. - John Pluecker
http://outwardfromnothingness.com/how-could-we-forget-thinking-about-heriberto-yepezs-the-empire-of-neomemory/

On September 16, 2014, “post-Mexican” writer, critic, psychotherapist, and literary provocateur Heriberto Yépez announced to the world that, after twenty years of work on his “writing project,” “it can be said that Heriberto Yépez’s oeuvre has concluded” and that the “young man” who was Heriberto Yépez has “gone” forever. Such a grand gesture may seem self-indulgent posturing if viewed from the US side of the frontera, the borderlands between the US and Mexico, where Yépez’s work is not widely known. Yet al otro lado, in his native Mexico—he was born in Tijuana in 1974—Yépez has established his reputation with an extensive and varied body of work that is impressive given his young age. Yépez has won several important national awards and, according to literary critic Evodio Escalante, he is one of “the two most powerful literary intellects” currently active in Mexico. The late celebrated poet and journalist Daniel Sada considered him “the most assured of [Sada’s] literary critics” and praised Yépez’s novel Al Otro Lado for being “the best in that genre called ‘narco literature.’” Over the course of his two-decade long “writing project,” Yépez has employed his art to transgress the artificial boundaries erected by what he and his translators term the “USAmerican Empire” that imposes its own version of reality on those individuals who have had the misfortune to be living in the sphere of its American Dream, which, according to the writer, is “the dream of expansionism in all its variants.”
Like Tijuana, the border town that shaped his consciousness, Yépez—his work and identity—resists being pinned down, especially by USAmerican narratives about race, culture and language. His extensive bibliography embraces a wide range of genres and disciplines—from experimental novels and poetry to cultural and literary criticism and translations, written in both Spanish and English or a mixture of both. Yépez also frequently collaborates with scholars and writers in Mexico and the US, forging new connections that defy boundaries fixed by external authority. Independent multicultural collaborations like these can do much to subvert the myopic worldview that, when it comes to culture, Mexico is the poor stepchild to the US’s Big Daddy and the western tradition. As Yépez’s criticism of US cultural imperialism rightly reveals, any true appraisal of the record must account for, as Yépez puts it, the droning “homochrony” of the American Dream and its towering fortress of forgetting.
Yépez’s ambition to expose the fortress’s “substructure and superstructure” sounds laudable in theory. Yet when it comes down to reading Yépez in practice, one feels that, in trying to right the record, he has fallen prey to the very same fallacy of which he accuses USAmerica—reducing a complex relationship to that of unequals—which again fails to do justice to either nation’s cultural tradition or the historical record.
Yépez’s ambition to liberate Mexico from USAmerican imperialism is especially evident in the critical work The Empire of Neomemory for which Yépez was awarded the prestigious Premio Nacional de Ensayo “Carlos Echánove Trujillo.” Ostensibly, Neomemory serves as Yépez’s exploration of poet Charles Olson’s 1951 trip to Lerma, Mexico, and the significant impact this journey to Mexico had on Olson’s career. Yet the study, first published in 2007 and translated into English in 2013, serves less as conventional literary study and more as the chronicle of Yépez’s quest to rescue Mexico’s rich cultural heritage from agents of the “Oxident” (a neologism which, we are told by the volume’s translators, signifies “a combination of Occidental and oxidized”) who have hijacked it. According to Yépez, many of the great figures of the modern and postmodern Western literary traditions may be counted among their numbers. In fact, Yépez emphasizes that Neomemory is not to be taken as a traditional critical study of Olson and Mexico within the context of American postmodernism, but as a “dismantling” of the poet and, by extension, the Empire he served. As Yépez writes, “Olson in and of himself does not interest me”; instead, he employs the book as a blade to cut the poet—who, at 6’8” was literally a giant of a man—down to size. To borrow Yépez’s own pun, Neomemory is his decapitalism of Empire’s “decapitalisms,” a 250-page beheading of Olson, one of the biggest “floating masculine heads” in the USAmerican literary pantheon. Whether Yépez’s guillotine is as sharp as his ambitions is another issue altogether.
There is no doubt that Neomemory is a daring work on many levels; as Yépez, according to the editors, “careens idiosyncratically” through time and space, he showcases his erudition through dazzling flights of free association, neologisms and puns woven into the fabric of his criticism. He begins by “Going Postal,” the pop-culture term for “rampaging violently”: Yépez creates riffs on all things postal to frame his psychoanalytic investigation of Olson’s childhood in the house of Karl, Olson’s alcoholic postman father, and Mary, a religious Catholic. According to Yépez, Olson’s family life in Gloucester was marked by discord and distance. Olson grew up among “phantoms,” living in the shadow of his failed Big Daddy Karl Joseph who projected all his hopes and aspirations on his young son after he’d been fired from his position at the post office. Like a modern Bartleby, Olson refused to show up to work after his bosses vindictively canceled his leave to take Charles to the three-hundredth anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth Rock because of the elder Olson’s efforts to organize his fellow postal workers; and in the “abyss” Mother Mary “sowed” by teaching her son to loathe his body and love only ideas. Cut off from the “co-body,” from feminine intimacy, Yépez’s Olson finds he can only connect to the world through letters, the artifacts of patriarchy, like “a wounded Hermes” whose existence boils down “to remittance and postal hope.” According to Yépez, Olson expresses and receives his “best ideas” through the mail (or, should I say male, although the pun only works in English), making the poet the empire’s “desperate mailbox.” From this portrait, it’s no wonder that Olson felt more comfortable communing with dead Sumerians, Ancient Greeks, and Ancient Mayans, whose tongues had been metaphorically torn out by the zealous Catholic priest centuries past, than with living breathing humans.
And so, in Neomemory, Yépez leads us from Olson’s Freudian nightmare of a childhood, through the critic’s encounters with Melville, Pound, Rimbaud, Borges, and the other dramatis personae of western modernism and postmodernism. Then he arrives at his destination, Lerma, Mexico, where Olson, the self-professed “archeologist of morning,” had journeyed on his private expedition to decode the Mayan hieroglyphs. Yet, according to Yépez, Olson was not, in fact, acting on his own accord; he casts Olson almost as if he were an antagonist in a Graham Greene novel, an agent in the service of USAmerica complicit in the Empire’s co-opting of Mexico’s cultural memory. This dark portrait also resonates with the handiwork of Friar Diego de Landa Calderón, bishop of the Yucatán, who had immolated the Mayan record after the Spanish conquest, leaving the world a record of fragments with incomprehensible glyphs.
Yet by the book’s end, it doesn’t really feel like Yépez has made new incursions across the border to conquer those he accuses of being conquerors. One major weakness is that for Yépez to succeed he must discredit Olson the man to elevate his own prestige as a critic. After all, Yépez frankly admits that Neomemory isn’t about Olson at all; it’s about Yépez attempting to decapitate Olson, whom he considers to be, at least in the field of literature, USAmerica’s primary agent in the cultural co-opting of Mexico. However, for the final execution to work, Yépez must convince us that
Olson represents all of what there is in each one of us in the Co-Oxident, all of what is there and, at the same time, all of what cannot be in us of this Whole, which is in itself impossible. All of us are Olson. Each one of us constitutes an avatar of the United States.
And “Olson’s tracks . . . lead us to the avatars of empire.” Everything in his analysis hinges on this inflated portrait of Olson, even when he himself admits that no man “can really represent an entire culture.” But Olson’s been dead since 1970. Just three years after his death, critic Marjorie Perloff, in her “Charles Olson and the Inferior Predecessors: ‘Projective Verse’ Revisited,” argued that for all Olson’s pretentions about originality, his acclaimed essay was “essentially a scissors-and-paste job, a clever but confused collage made up of bits and pieces of Pound, Fenollosa, Gaudier-Brzeska, Williams and Creeley.” Even during his lifetime, not everyone was on the Olson bandwagon. In his review of “Projective Verse,” poet Thom Gunn wrote that the writing in the essay “was the worst prose since Democratic Vistas.” Yépez’s portrait of Olson as some USAmerican conquistador rings hollow based on these inflated claims. It’s as if Yépez believes that if he blows enough theoretical hot air into Olson’s effigy, the long-dead writer will be grand enough to become the lead float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade—a big target and, thus, easy to shoot down. But given too much air, the balloon will burst. Olson was a giant of a man, but his life in death reads like the dust on Ozymandias.
After reading The Empire of Neomemory, sadly, I’m not sure I’ve learned much about Olson, the impact his trip to Mexico had on his development as a writer, or the contradictions inherent in the US’s appropriation of Mexico’s cultural heritage. And that’s a shame. I kept wanting more than all the abstract talk about bodies, time, space and imperial amnesia. Yépez’s neologisms, the lingua franca of his criticism—with hyphens and cos, neos, metas, bios, geos and posts tacked on in front—feel like the fossilized tropes of the Freudian and post-colonial lit crit of some thirty years ago. As a result, the reader often stumbles over the self-conscious prose, as is the case in one particularly impenetrable passage in “Moses of the Yucatán”:
Unfaithful, erotically split, divided, labyrinthized by his mythomania, fantasizing vacillating between his totemic petriotic loyalty of the United States and his compulsion toward a knowledge of the clandestine cultures of the world, ubiquitous, bifurcated, deformed out of pure interbelittled disfragments, polyphonic excisions, and Janusian self-throat-slittings, Olson desperately hunted down a principle that might unite it all.
How to make it all cohere. How to build a co-here where everything existing is united. Olson’s “will to cohere” has only been understood in the dimension of coherence, of Apollonian integration: that is, of logic, of meta-recounting of atypical junctures, yet not in its dimension as a site, as pantopia as co-space, co-here or co-where.
One might argue the fault lies with the translators, but they collaborated closely with Yépez and provide scrupulous evidence in the form of footnotes that they have remained as faithful as possible to his voice. Yet paradoxically, the fault does, essentially, lie in translation—that is, a portrait of Olson cherry-picked to suit the critic’s teleological purposes and his attempts at channeling Olson’s mercurial style. To carry out his analysis, Yépez must distance himself from the very thing that makes the late poet, in my view, so original, memorable and worth writing about: the flesh and blood human being, filled with contradictions, who searched for new means of expression in the post-war world where “man [had been] reduced to so much fat for soap, superphosphate for soil, fillings and shoes for sale.” Olson resisted the consumer world and its end-stopped poets. Still, Yépez is right. Olson was no archeologist; yet he wasn’t much of a conqueror either. After spending less than a year in Mexico, Olson threw in the shovel. The locals and the official archeologists annoyed him. They got in the way of his dream of finding the Mayan Rosetta Stone. Olson the archeologist, like Yépez the writer, had moved on. While Yépez vanishes into No-Man’s Land between frontiers, after Lerma, Olson returns to his native land. The prodigal son goes back to his roots: his post-office father, the sailors, Ishmael and Gloucester, the whaling village and the Sea that had so informed his artistic vision. For twenty years until his own death, Olson, the poet-sexton, worked feverishly excavating the dead in Dogtown’s graveyard, Maximus’s voice scrimshawing exquisite poems on their forgotten bones. Ironically, many of the joys in Neomemory are in Yépez making us want to return to Olson and his genius, which are precisely what he would like us to forget. - Deborah Garfinkle
https://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2015-fall/selections/the-empire-of-neomemory-by-heriberto-yepez-738439/

The Empire Of Neomemory By Heriberto Yepez - Dark-dev
The Empire Of Neomemory By Heriberto Yepez - Pardon-maman
Jose-Luis Moctezuma on Heriberto Yepez - Chicago Review

Image result for Heriberto Yépez, Wars. Threesomes. Drafts. & Mothersm,

Heriberto Yépez, Wars. Threesomes. Drafts. & Mothersm, Factory School, 2007.

WARS. THREESOMES. DRAFTS. & MOTHERS, by Heriberto Yépez, plays with September 11th. It's a book on war. A book of hate toward the United States. A book of love toward ghosts. Several stories are triggered around the war against Iraq, among them the story of a couple of brothers involved in several love triangles. This is a love-drug-passion-esquizophrenic experiment that involves you till the end. This is a book made of orgasms and quotes. This is a book on writing in the age of Empire. This is a book on the deep meaning of 'United-States'.

Heriberto Yépez, a Tijuana writer and Gestalt psychotherapist who has been showing up in the US scene a lot during the last few years, writes so as to push buttons. I remember hearing him read a few years ago at a small liberal arts college. He read a piece that had a man fucking a pregnant woman and the fetus, his son, giving the man a blow job as he did it. I remember squirming as I listened with feminist anxiety to Yépez read this. At the end of the story, it became clear that the man is George Bush and the fetus is George W. Bush and I had that ah ha moment where I realized that my desire for gender decorum had me protecting all sorts of imperial male lineages. Or another story: at UCSC a few years ago Yépez gave a paper in which he claimed “I am Bush” and then, moving from “I” to “we,” he said “Bush is our way to hide we are Bush” (this talk is posted at mexperimental.blogspot.com). If these examples are not enough to prove his provocations, then check out his video “Voice Exchange Rates” (available on youtube) where he has a cartoon image of Gertrude Stein with a swastika carved into her forehead Charles Manson style asking “why do Americans rule the world?”
The Bush as fetus reading really pointed out to me how distinctive Yépez’s work is. It manages to hide provocatively conceptual, decorum defying work behind the mask of conventional and well written realist fiction. His work often appears at first to be one thing (an off color story about fucking) and then he turns it into something else (a pointed story about political lineage). Reading his work I frequently realize that he has got me; he has played with my politesse and made a joke of it.
Wars. Threesomes. Drafts. & Mothers, Yépez’s first single author book in English (he has oodles in Spanish), is similarly provocative. In terms of genre, it is probably a short novel. It mainly has three characters: two twin brothers and a woman. And the story starts in Tijuana with an attempt by one of the twins and the woman to pickup a failed romance. But really, not much beyond conversation and self-reflection happens in the book and there is much talk about drugs (is the brother using or not?), sex and sexuality, jealousy, and parental abandonment. As the book proceeds, the frame keeps shifting and the narrative is interjected with things like writing exercises, something that might be authorial commentary (“This story I’m reading now was written for a reading.”), and Michael Palmer, Don De Lillo, and Reinaldo Arenas quotes. The novel comments frequently on how it is written in English.
But it isn’t just that Wars. Threesomes. Drafts. & Mothers is mainly a novel, it also seems to be a romance. But an exploded romance. It starts, as the romance usually does, with the couple meeting up again. And like many romances, which often feature lovers from opposite sides of border disputes, their union is used as a way to talk about relations between nations. At moments the couple represents the north and the south. At other moments it is the US and Iraq: “In every couple there’s a United States and there’s an Iraq. ‘United States’ is the so-called-victimizer. The master that ejects violence. The psy-ops, the war-words, the troops he sends (The Kids!). And then—on the other side—the so-called-victim. The so called poor-little-you. The one that doesn’t deserve the treatment you’re getting, your bad-bad luck, the you-know-who. ‘Iraq.’”
But because Yépez is primarily a provocateur, not a reconcileur, the romance plot keeps going astray and mutating into something that suggests there are no easy and conventional answers to the political questions of today. The woman, in addition to being a former girlfriend of one of the twins, is also part of a threesome in Toluca. The twins, at moments are twin brothers and at other moments the narrative voice suggests that they are an invention of the writer: “I felt like I was two different men, and I started to call that situation <>.” At other moments it is suggested that the whole story, threesomes and all, has been fabricated by one of the twins so he might “have something else in life.” Or the twins really are twins and they, similar to father and son Bush, have sex in the womb and outside it also. In other words, Yépez refuses to restablish the couple, to end with the conventional marriages of the romance.
It might be stretching things a little to read Wars. Threesomes. Drafts. & Mothers as a romance. So perhaps another way to think of this book is as an equivalent to the “I am Bush” statement. I remember a friend angrily claiming that he was not Bush, that he had not started the war and neither had Yépez, after Yépez’s talk. But Yépez’s point was more subtle and multiple. It suggested that involvement in the oil wars extends beyond individuals and nations. It rejected lefty narratives of US exceptionalism (the sort of assumption that the US is so exceptional that it does horrible things all on its own; that other nations have no involvement) and first world passive guilt. It pointed to the ties between the US and Mexican government, the complicity of US and Mexican citizens. It rejected the idea that anyone could be innocent of anything. Wars. Threesomes. Drafts. & Mothers does similar work as it suggests that our personal romantic relationships carry wars in them. (This is a diversion but it is also striking how this book does not fit easily into US definitions of “border literature”; yes, Yépez, like many writers of the border, moves between Spanish and English but the book is fascinatingly devoid of “local” markers and descriptions, ethnic exceptionalism, nationalism, etc.)
Although part of me wants to keep returning to the romance genre because the book does end with a collapsing and exploding couple of sorts for Yépez ends with 9-11 and the twin towers: “The two planes not only announced the end of an era, but they also showed what was happening inside our lives. I read 9-11 as the crumbling of two people together, as the failure to stay next to each other, standing. And one tower was Emily, and I was the other tower, the first to fall. And then one tower was my brother and the other tower was me, and we both were destroyed by the world. And one tower was my father, and he became dust, and other tower, my mother, and she became a scream. And the two towers were love.” - jms http://swoonrocket.blogspot.hr/2007/07/forthcoming-poetry-project-newsletter.html

I am not experimental

By Will.

English is not my mother

I cannot be but experimental

Inside Empire.

— “2001”

If an interview is a polite conversation wherein the interviewer thoughtfully poses questions and the interviewee eagerly answers, not unlike a racquet sports match, a (counter)interview is closer to an audacious conversation in which words are thrown like knives at a spinning reader.
A regular interview won’t do, especially if the knife-thrower is none other than Heriberto Yépez. Yes, his name is struck out, indicating recently deleted information, in this case, traditional authorship.
Yépez was born in Tijuana, the world’s busiest land border crossing, in 1974. During his teens, he worked in a maquiladora and later studied under German philosopher Horst Matthai Quelle. Since the early 90s, Yépez has been on the frontline of experimental writing and radical politics on both sides of the border.
His ruthless criticism has brought him admirers and detractors in English and Spanish. Controversies include the Olson Affair, in which Il Gruppo (Benjamin Hollander, Amiel Alcalay, et. al.) accused him of deliberately misreading Charles Olson in The Empire of Neomemory (ChainLinks, 2013), and regular Twitter-based confrontation with members of the American and Mexican cultural establishments.
When his weekly column of cultural journalism, Archivo Hache, was shut down, he finished off by saying: “I was critical in all directions. If I did not critique someone, I apologize for the oversight.” Ever since, Heriberto has favored blogs, social media, and other alternative options to traditional publishing. Last year, he worked on Mexiconceptual, a month-long project that involved him posting a different poem reflecting on the museum as an institution every day on a website. The texts would disappear 24 hours after being displayed and could only be read afterward through links shared on social media. It is now available in book form.

The works of ~~Heriberto Yépez~~ are numerous and multiform—fiction, visual art, translation—and are preoccupied with topics such as decolonialism, psychoanalysis, poetics, and the border. Among his most recent writings are a series of cultural essays (borderdestroyer.com), a prologue to the Nahuatl translation of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (Ediciones RM, 2017), and, most recently, Transnational Battle Field (Commune, 2017).
The counter-interview was conducted by email.
Sergio Sarano (S): Heriberto, English is not your mother, and it isn’t mine either. And since we are doing this in English, we cannot be but experimental. Hence, I will be calling this operation a (counter)interview. It is one thing to read and speak English, even to translate from it, but to write experimental texts in it is quite a different, politically-charged action. Transnational Battle Field collects a good portion of your writings in English. Is the Heriberto writing in Spanish and the Heriberto in English two different poets? And if so, is there a border between these two writers?
~~Heriberto Yépez~~ (HY): Yes, there is always a border. When I write in these two languages, I do feel a difference. At the level of thought, I think readers wouldn’t entirely get my writing in translation (in either direction). At the level of form, I enjoy writing in two different languages and for two sets of readers, so I do feel that I am two different poets. And this is very exciting; there is a new field opening. The neoliberal market “translates,” but what I like to do is to struggle with two languages I find uncomfortable. Living in Tijuana gave me that opportunity. One of my first jobs was to talk to American tourists on the street and bring them down to the dance floor where they could experience and unsettle their “desires” (dance, drink, do the after-hours, break racial and cultural barriers). When I write, this position between Spanish and English is always on my mind. I feel border writing is critical today, even more than in the 90s. “Literature” is still too nation-based.
SS: Now that you mention the current opening of the field, the Transnational Battle Field, such post-national spaces of insurgency demand us to become wholly new readers and writers, and to change our lives. In “Ethopoetics,” your new book’s second section, you disarm given (neoliberal, colonial) assumptions many of us not only have, but perpetuate through our work (it was not an easy read). Jerome Rothenberg—whom you have translated and edited—developed the term ethnopoetics in the 60s. Ethopoetics is a coinage of yours. How does ethopoetics as a concept/practice differ from ethnopoetics? Is it a move away from the center towards the borders?
HY: Ethopoetics was kind of an accident in my work and thinking, something that happened to me on the way. What kind of poet are we meant to become? What do national literatures or even university programs or publishing houses or reading series, want from us? What kinds of subjects do these systems need to perpetuate themselves? And then, on the other hand, what kinds of poets can we become to change our lives and the world? These questions have determined different histories of poetics in very different traditions, and not only non-Western ones but also very canonical Western legacies such as Rimbaud’s and Pessoa’s in their desire to become “an/other.” That has been from the start on my radar, the transformation of the poet as a production of new subjectivities, something which includes shamanisms, Marxisms, feminisms and decolonial movements as part of the discussion, my very concrete formal training as a therapist, and my Latin American and North American contexts with their radical differences. Ethopoetics for me became a space inside writing to keep asking: how has poetics contributed to the actual transformation of the human? And how can we continue transforming the poet-human through writing? These are broad questions, so ethopoetics is not a question of offering a style or a literary movement, but an actual problem that guides my writing, and I hope can be a possible or virtual collective endeavor.
SS: Your training as a therapist is particularly sharp in “Bad Tripping the White Dream Poem,” a fierce psycho-poetic critique of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Beatitudes Visuales Mexicanas,” a piece published in Poetry in June 2015. Mexico has long been a place for North Americans to play out their colonial fantasies, be it in the form of literary retreats, spring break vacations, you name it. You mention “imperial nostalgia,” and “Being Larger than Others,” as emotions at the root of the imperial gaze, going all the way back to Walt Whitman. “Neomemory,” a psychoanalytic concept you have developed and notoriously applied to Charles Olson, comes to mind. You even get a shout-out in the Spanish translation of Olson’s The Maximus Poems; Ammiel Alcalay writes: “In a context in which Olson has been caricatured in Mexico as a representative of North American Imperialism…” What is neomemory and why has it caused such contempt among different literary groups on both sides of the border?
HY: We share a patriarchal subject-formation at the heart of poetics North and South and across the oceans in what should be called Planet Water instead of the anthropocentric “Planet Earth.” Alcalay and Il Gruppo, as they named themselves to oppose my 2007 book (and even wrote a book against me), reacted violently to my critique of their daddy figure. It’s a question of the fragility of the predominantly white patriarchal poetic figure. It was also a very racist move by them, as the visual imagery they deployed against me showed on the websites they used. I think the translation of my book took some members of the North-American experimental community by surprise, they weren’t expecting a critique, in the form of poetic theory, by a Mexican, on one of the experimental holy fathers.
Neomemory is the state of fascist appropriation and re-mixing of cross-cultural images to maintain white supremacy, and it involves the spatialization of time. My book was a kind of bomb right in the middle of that fascist poetic regime. And that is why the Olsonian boys literally screamed once they were able to read it in English in 2013. It is probably the first time a Mexican book on poetics shook the core values and paradigms of North-American experimental poetics.
The process of decolonization, according to Fanon, necessarily involves some level of violence. In this case, the violence of critique was necessary to identify North American nationalism and inferiorization of the Southern-other as still very active ingredients in experimentalism today. This question was collectively and very efficiently brought up by the Mongrel Coalition in 2015, which I think was the moment when conceptual writing finally faded-out as hegemonic experimentalism.
I don’t belong to a single tradition. My book on neomemory and Olson as a case in point about broader issues of experimentalism and imperialism appeared too early for the Mexican poetry scene. At that point, they were just barely recovering from the death of their own daddy figure, Octavio Paz, and starting to inform themselves about Language poetry. By 2011, that scene became fascinated with the colonial figure of Kenneth Goldsmith.
My book was basically a radical critique on experimentalism when most of my colleagues were not familiar with North-American experimentalism at all. While in the USA most of my colleagues first lacked a transnational capability to read Spanish and then just were not “comfortable” enough, as they say in liberal lingo, to “deal” with this “weird” book by a Mexican poet who isn’t easy to pin down.
SS: In the Americas, despite repressive governments and hateful nationalisms throughout the continent, there is a growing number of decolonial writers and texts. The poems of Humberto Ak’abal in Ki’che’ Mayan or Frankétienne in Haitin Creole; the new Pedro Páramo Nahuatl translation; the works of Cecilia Vicuña; the performances of Guillermo Gómez-Peña; the writings of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Claudia Rankine, they all point towards an ongoing process of moving from the national to the transnational, of opening the battlefield to new bodies and subjectivities. In a time where NAFTA is in crisis, where new states are fighting to be born, and journalists are being murdered, what is the role of electronic publishing, social media and translation in this process of decolonizing literature?
HY: In the last piece of Transnational Battle Field, I address the role of a decolonial-revolutionary writing versus not only mainstream colonial literature but also the colonial-revolutionary inertia very much in place inside newer avant-gardes. I am not sure “literature” as such can be decolonized or even if the agency of decolonization is human. It could well be that the planet, animals or even plants will be the ultimate agencies of a decolonial future, that is, we need to challenge the assumption that decolonization is still an anthropocentric project. And at the human intellectual level, this is a fight on several fronts, including the Internet, where we can spread ideas and dispositions, help organize ourselves as collectivities, and as writers put out there what publishing houses and magazines censor or simply co-opt very quickly. In respect to writing, struggle and not “experiment” will probably be the leading force of change. We are now entering a post-experimental phase. I believe this will be a transnational fight from which new poetics, thinking, and narratives will arise. Social struggle will affect aesthetic form. And a new aesthetic form will participate in energizing radical social transformation. I am very optimistic at this level, writing pieces on my website, borderdestroyer.com. An online one-month project I did last year, called “Mexiconceptual” (a series of posts/poems on the conflictive histories of Mexican conceptualisms in art and literature) is now a printed book in Spanish. I very much like using the Internet, but I also love printed books. I am currently also working on a big anthology with Jerome Rothenberg that will cover poetries from the different Americas. I keep busy, and enjoy working on a daily decolonial project with others. It’s sometimes a slow process, and sometimes violent ruptures can occur. - Sergio Sarano

https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2018/01/04/a-counterinterview-with-heriberto-yepez/

POETRY IN A TIME OF CRISIS
“Mutating Producers: Tijuana’s Border Art Laboratory (1992-2014)”
“Two poems by Heriberto Yepez” (2017)

“SILENCIO & the Southern Devil” (2013, 2016)

“Against Leukotropic Poetics” (2015)

“A Poetics of Networks vs. Traditions” (2015)
“Uncertain Confession” (2015)
Confession and Testimony: On the New Berkeley Poetry Conference (2015)
“The boundary Poem” (2015)
“Capital” (2015)
“Against Telephysics” (2007 & 2015)
“Language Confesses” (2015)
“On Imperial Poetics: Baraka’s Defense of Olson” (2014)
“Tripartite Post-Conceptual Confession” (2014-2015)
“Confession As Such” (2015)
“Confession at 41” (2015)
“The Theoretical Selfies (Series)” (2015)
“On the New Retro=Conceptualists” (2015)
“Against the Police-Concept of Art” (2015)
“A New Song for Our Master: We Are Vanessa Place!” (2015)
“We Are Kenneth Goldsmith” (2015)
“We Are The 90% Vanessa Place Movement” (2015)
“A Song From and To The Native Informant” (2013)
A Note
“Voice Exchange Rates” (video-poem, 2002)
“What About the Mexican Poetry Scene?” (essay, 2002)
“Rereading María Sabina” (2003 & 2017)
“on character” (essay on experimental narrative, 2004)
“A Brochure on Futureless Science-Fiction Poetics” (experimental, 2005 & 2006)
Wars. Threesomes. Drafts. & Mother (book, experimental nouvelle, 2007)
“What Are The United States and Why Are There So Many Of Them” (poetics, 2008 & 2010)
“The Post-Borderzone” (2010)
“Ethopoetics. What is it?” (2009) (Part 1 and Part 2)

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Chris Scott - an endlessly inventive comic masterpiece, and the finest continuation of Tristram Shandy ever written. The novel contains copious interruptions and digressions, parodies of the picaresque, Dickensian grotesques, sensationally outré wordplay, an abundance of lists, wildly unhinged improvisation

January 8, 2018, 12:14 am

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≪ Previous: Heriberto Yépez is a forceful antipoet, a technician of the boundaries, a split-form borderzone nagualist. He is at the forefront of a generation of writers who are questioning notions of fluidity and synthesis, a generation that has seen those same categories veil the advent of global neoliberalism

Chris Scott, Bartleby, Anansi, 1971., Reissued: Verbivoracious Press, 2016.

Bartleby is an endlessly inventive comic masterpiece, and the finest continuation of Tristram Shandy ever written. The novel contains copious interruptions and digressions, parodies of the picaresque, Dickensian grotesques, sensationally outré wordplay, an abundance of lists, wildly unhinged improvisation, obsessive riffs on authorship, and characters cribbed from Beckett, Vidal, and Melville. All rise to salute the triumphant return of Bartlebyto print!

“The end of all this flamboyance is not merely to bewail the rigidity of the straightforward narrative process of modern realistic fiction but also to affirm the joyful, invigorating spontaneity of the spoken/written word—and not merely to berate the categorising impulses of the modern society that are epitomised by the realistic novel, but also to insist on the continuing human capacity to utter the idiosyncracies, potentialities, aspirations, and unpredictable forays of the creatuve mind.” — W.H. New

“What Mr. Scott is doing, in fact, is to explore the ambiguous quality of both fiction and reality, and in places he does it with stunning effect.” — Margaret Lawrence

Novelist Chris Scott was born in Hull, England in 1945. He studied at the University of Hull (B.A., 1966), Manchester University (M.A., 1967), and in 1968-1969 he was a Fulbright Scholar at Pennsylvania State. After teaching for several years at York University in Toronto, he settled in a small town north of Kingston. His literary activities include teaching creative writing, freelance broadcasting for the CBC and writing reviews for Books in Canada (1972-1982). Scott is best known as a writer of experimental fiction. He has written thriller, spy and crime novels. His first published novel, Bartleby (1971) launched his literary career, followed by To Catch a Spy (1978), Antichthon (1982), Hitler's Bomb (1984), and Jack (1997). Scott won the Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award for Jack, about Jack the Ripper. His latest work, Quabe's World satirizes the scientific way of looking at man in the 20th century. Scott was writer-in-residence in Cumberland Township libraries in 1990 and makes his home in the Ottawa Valley.

Chris Scott Interviewed by Grant Loewen
“That’s an intestine with no asshole,” said Chris when I asked him why he didn’t write more Bartlebies. There were already thirty-three billion little boys named Bartleby (one with red socks), equivalent to the microbiome count in the average gut which explains why we swallow literary excess with such ease. I try to sympathize.

In order to cluster-bomb the literary landscape, however, it makes sense to concentrate a lot of authors, characters and plots in one place; under the stage in a town square or a churchyard cemetery or, more conveniently, in a desk drawer. Whether this author be young or hopelessly narcissistic, a prerequisite one might think, the brutal consequences of such an act would be too gruesome to premeditate. Otherwise, it would take some monstrous courage to sustain, and that with great gobs of good humour. Fortunately, in his twenties, Chis Scott wrote his Bartleby with both courage and wit to spare.

Now I’m thinking that every few hundred years, an English or Spanish novelist must inevitably, or should, reproduce a Tristram Shandy or Quixote. With the republication of Bartleby, Verbivoracious has brought the best English example from the twentieth century into the twenty-first. Not a random choice. I too think that Bartleby is a rare work that both respects the tradition and exploits it’s power to explode the literary pretensions of the present, a sordid business, a continuous necessity. Here are several more questions I posed to Chris.

What were you thinking when you opened that drawer and found the boy, Bartleby?

In my room in Toronto, I had a small writing desk and used to bang my knees on the drawer. I could hear things rattling round in there. (In those days we had fountain pens and ink bottles in desks.) I’d done a bibliography course at Manchester and came across the term “ffoule papers,” which described a writer’s discarded drafts. Every time I hit my knees on that drawer, I’d wonder what my ffoule papers were getting up to.

Whence the impulse to flood pages with sprawling literary reference (British, American) and linguistic excess, hardly toilet-trained?

I’ve always disliked social realism and/or writing that proclaims a social, political or ideological agenda — or any agenda, religious or metaphysical, that neglects form and tradition. Bartleby lampooned writers who wore their agendas, ah, inguinally. That was the sixties that was, to paraphrase David Frost. It was very brave of Margaret Lawrence to write such a glowing review of the book in Canada.

Why the Scrivener? What of the Melville passages quoted? “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!”

Loved Melville as a writer and often wondered if Kafka read him (he read Dickens). Even the early novels Omoo and Typee had a symbolic freight. (How stupid of Brigid Brophy to list Moby Dick as one the most overrated books of all time. (In Bartleby it got her got her transmogrified to Frigid Trophy — sophomoric maybe, but. . . .) I admired Bartleby’s “I’d prefer not to.” (The original dropout!) A scrivener was a clerk, and the word clerisy was around at the time — and, speaking of political agendas and the nationalism of the day, I thought of Julien Benda’s La trahison des clercs, about intellectuals on the eve of World War I. I preferred not to write social realism at a time when everybody and their pet iguana was doing it.

In your subsequent work you not only reign in the exuberance of Sterne-inspired structural demolition, but switch entirely to other narrative conventions. Is that partly true? If so, why?

There was no future in Bartleby, only many pasts. (Rabelais, Chaucer, Langland, the Quixote,and, of course, Tristram Shandy, were some of the “authorities” against which I measured the fiction of the day.) In Antichthon, my novel about the life, trial and execution of Giordano Bruno, everyone has a story to tell — and they’re all liars. It was a story of many voices about one man. (Watergate was unfolding as I wrote the book, so I guess there may be some truth to the old saw that historical novels are really about the present.) In Jack, my novel about the life and crimes of Jack the Ripper, the central character is what Northrop Frye, in an interview given shortly before his death, described as “a disintegrating phantasmagoria” — he was referring to the twentieth century. A multiple personality, my Jack does not know who he is, which seems to me a modern disorder. The two spy books were conventional narratives, though To Catch A Spy was conceived as a parody of Le Carré. (It must have succeeded because one reviewer complained I was an epigone of Le Carré.)

Open-endedness. Infused with grotesque death as it is, the Bartleverse is matched corpse by corpse with equally foul resuscitations. Why does nothing die, disappear or end? The book itself, for instance.

The “Bartleverse,” as you call it, is a closed system, subject to increasing textual entropy. De’Ath knows this, but the Narrator — who is from outside the cosmic book (or drawer) injects new energy of sorts into the old, with comico-catastrophic results. The book falls into a black hole, so to speak — as do we all, I think.

Why the severed hands and arms, and the prosthetic typewriter?

I was taking Sterne’s blank and black pages and my longitudinally split pages to their logical or illogical conclusion. “Literature” may be the ultimate reality prosthesis. - www.verbivoraciouspress.org/chris-scott-interviewed-by-grant-loewen/

To Catch a Spy, 1978, Viking.

Antichthon, 1982, Quadrant Editions. (Published as The Heretic in the UK).

Hitler’s Bomb, 1983, McClelland & Stewart.

Jack, 1988, Macmillan.

Quabe's World, 2002, is listed in his biblio, but has no publisher info or ISBN.

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Al-Shirbini Yusuf - An unusual mini-masterwork from the canon of bawdy, naughty, and perverted Arabic literature from the 18th century, featuring more pissing, shitting, romping, and violation of young boys than a hen night in Ancient Rome

January 8, 2018, 3:09 am

≫ Next: J. F. Mamjjasond & Fafnir Finklemeyer - Plotless, absurd, nonsensical, arbitrary, silly, mad, ribald, noisy, violent, despairing, obscene, drug–addled, revolting, and hilarious. Both an insult to the very idea of a novel and an uncanny magnification of it.

≪ Previous: Chris Scott - an endlessly inventive comic masterpiece, and the finest continuation of Tristram Shandy ever written. The novel contains copious interruptions and digressions, parodies of the picaresque, Dickensian grotesques, sensationally outré wordplay, an abundance of lists, wildly unhinged improvisation

Image result for Al-Shirbini Yusuf, Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded:

Al-Shirbini Yusuf, Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded: Volume One, Ed. and trans. by Humphrey Davies, NYU Press; Bilingual ed., 2016. [1686.]
excerpt

Unique in pre-20th-century Arabic literature for taking the countryside as its central theme, Yusuf al-Shirbini’s Brains Confounded combines a mordant satire on seventeenth-century Egyptian rural society with a hilarious parody of the verse-and-commentary genre so beloved by scholars of his day.

In Volume One, Al-Shirbini describes the three rural “types”—peasant cultivator, village man-of-religion and rural dervish—offering numerous anecdotes testifying to the ignorance, dirtiness, illiteracy, lack of proper religious understanding, and criminality of each. He follows it in Volume Two with a 47-line poem supposedly written by a peasant named Abu Shaduf, who charts the rise and fall of his fortunes and bewails, above all, the lack of access to delicious foods to which his poverty has condemned him. Wielding the scholarly tools of elite literature, al-Shirbini responds to the poem with derision and ridicule, dotting his satire of the ignorant rustic with numerous digressions into love, food, and flatulence.

Witty, bawdy, and vicious, Brains Confounded belongs to an unrecognized genre from an understudied period in Egypt’s Ottoman history, and is a work of outstanding importance for the study of pre-modern colloquial Egyptian Arabic, pitting the “coarse” rural masses against the “refined” and urbane in a contest for cultural and religious primacy, with a heavy emphasis on the writing of verse as a yardstick of social acceptability.

An unusual mini-masterwork from the canon of bawdy, naughty, and perverted Arabic literature from the 18th century, featuring more pissing, shitting, romping, and violation of young boys than a hen night in Ancient Rome. The first volume contains a series of merciless excoriations of the peasantry, who were simpletons and morons worthy of contempt from the upper orders (forget about the satire “punching up” here), featuring anecdotal depictions of their escapades, their bumbling rustic ill-manners, their dervishes, their pastors, and most importantly, the slack nature of their poets’ scansion, which is comprehensively trounced as slipshod. These episodes are mostly hilarious, and slap-bang in the Rabelaisian tradition. The second volume allows me to wheel out the overused term that no one uses, “pre-postmodern”, containing a long and semi-spurious expounding of the titular ode, Pale Fire-like, although much funnier, including enough scatological nicknames and digressive tales to lead one through a section less readable for its puns and plays on Arabic grammar (a lot of which loses its chuckledom en route to the koine—translator Humphrey Davis’s efforts are to be applauded, for he wrings as much merriment as he can from the most pedantic parts). These two volumes are packed with violently meticulous endnotes, making these releases a triumph for the scholar and the new reader alike. [Note: NYU Press have also released Al-Sanhuri’s Risible Rhymes, an earlier work that performs similar poetic expounding with less amusing results]. http://www.verbivoraciouspress.org/our-year-in-books-2017/

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J. F. Mamjjasond & Fafnir Finklemeyer - Plotless, absurd, nonsensical, arbitrary, silly, mad, ribald, noisy, violent, despairing, obscene, drug–addled, revolting, and hilarious. Both an insult to the very idea of a novel and an uncanny magnification of it.

January 8, 2018, 3:20 am

≫ Next: Jeff Nuttall - Never preoccupied with well-wrought description and dialogue that attempted to simulate real events, his objective was far more provocative: to lure readers into original experiences, from the carnal to the cerebral, from high art to low down and dirty humour

≪ Previous: Al-Shirbini Yusuf - An unusual mini-masterwork from the canon of bawdy, naughty, and perverted Arabic literature from the 18th century, featuring more pissing, shitting, romping, and violation of young boys than a hen night in Ancient Rome

Image result for J. F. Mamjjasond & Fafnir Finklemeyer, Hoptime

J. F. Mamjjasond & Fafnir Finklemeyer, Hoptime, Sagging Meniscus, 2017.

Hoptime is what happens when sentences stretched to the end of their lexical tethers snap and collide, whipping up a brutal cyclone of flailing vowels and consonants, clauses and pauses, spaces and punctuation. The result is an irrepressible whirligig of manic comic nonsense, vibrantly warped, lovingly perverse, and heartwarmingly bonkers, in three wholly unnecessarily separate parts for your maddening pleasure. To summarise: the first section ‘Silt Waffles’ handles the spindled oligopoly in the ever-thickening pigpen of tomorrow, with extra marshmellows and pomegrante gumdrips to accommodate your wimples. The section second, ‘Unidentified Signal’, copes with your loosened trews on a winter’s clay, and somewhere in the thicket a tarantula escapes across a broad-shoed hobonanny. And finally, ‘Idylls of the Chicken’, which is there. Like me, read a little Hoptime between books, and the pleasure of words in permanent splatter will improve your mood twentyninefold.

Plotless, absurd, nonsensical, arbitrary, silly, mad, ribald, noisy, violent, despairing, obscene, drug–addled, revolting, and hilarious, J. F. Mamjjasond and Fafnir Finkelmeyer's HOPTIME is both an insult to the very idea of a novel and an uncanny magnification of it. In the words of Finkelmeyer, it was for its authors a "kind of scripture" and "something fateful and necessary"; "it was a way," he writes in the Foreword to this edition, "for the two of us to love each other in the only way we could, willingly and totally entwined in each other's foolish, ugly, wise and beautiful fantasies, which we heard, supported and forgave." In the end, this colorful romp of two outrageous souls lost together in a sort of infinite poetic and imaginative wilderness is not only explosively funny, but moving; the reader, too, is freed into the intimacy and deep silence of a vast inner space, and finds in that solitude one is not alone.

“In the tag-team double play of Hoptime, language is a virus, all the world’s a plague, and what doesn’t kill you makes you stranger.”—Doug Nufer

“Plotless, depraved and mostly incoherent, Hoptime is inherently impossible to characterize, but I’ll give it a shot: imagine cramming Finnegans Wake, Naked Lunch and the collected works of Monty Python into a paper shredder, and then hiring two stoned grad students to transcribe the result. Chapter after chapter oozes with smug literary allusion, compulsive wordplay, pop culture irreverencies, Swiftian obsessions with excreta and orifices, and deranged syntactical constructions that squirm and flail like a bucket of live eels unceremoniously dumped into a deep fryer. Perhaps most unsettling of all are the crystalline fragments of beauty and hilarity that momentarily float to the oily surface only to be sucked back down into this churning cesspool of Rabelaisian logorrhea. What’s it about? I have no idea. I think there’s a bunny in there somewhere. I sincerely hope that Hoptime will one day be required reading for high school students across the nation.”–Tyler C. Gore

Foreword

Although J. F. Mamjjasond and I began work on Hoptime in a square-lined composition book which contains on its first page another unrelated Krinstian fragment, it was viewed by us almost immediately as a “work of some length” with a place outside of, if aligned with, the traditional Krinstian canon. For us, its truest and perhaps only appropriate audience, it had and required no title; it was called simply, and as much reverently as mockingly, The Book. When it was time to unveil a part of it on the Institute of Krinst Studies website, the name Hoptime was chosen (from Frog’s line in Chapter XI, “It’s hop time for yours truly"). As I think we were both well aware, giving it a name was in some sense an act of desecration, as for us The Book was a living thing and not an object: intensely profane, horrifying, unrelentingly sophmoric, a work of folly and vice for which no apology or justification could ever suffice, but still a kind of scripture. And yet the temptation to reify it and name it, to present it as if it were a literary accomplishment, as I am now doing, was strong and also an inherent part of its frame. That the book utterly fails to meet the criteria necessary to be any adequate or coherent thing, and yet must be something regardless, is an essential part of its identity, and part of why it could play such a vital and intimate role for its creators.
For a period of several years, we met every few days, and for some intensive periods, daily, sometimes in motels while travelling, to write together in the graph paper notebook, printing in block letters with ink. The paper was thin and the pages took on a palimpsestic appearance as writing from the other side shone through. Despite writing in capital letters, our handwritings were distinct enough that I can still tell who wrote what, although that can usually be determined by the content and style as well.
The rules for composition were simple but strict. Intoxication with marijuana was de rigeur (despite a brief dalliance with sobriety towards the end of the second notebook, which did not really feel right). After smoking, we sat in silence near each other in intense, if narcotically altered, concentration, and took turns continuing what had just been written by the other, passing the book back and forth often without looking at each other. Sometimes we would come out of a reverie to notice that the book and a pen were held outstretched by the other’s hand towards us, the other’s face looking away into the distance. We were not allowed to change what the other had written, and could only append new text at the end, of any length, long or short. Sometimes in a turn one of us might add just a single word or a character (a period, say), or he might add half a page. A typical entry would be three or four lines. Whether to finish a chapter was likewise a decision made by whomever held the pen at that moment. Very often the book would be handed back with the text ending in the middle of a sentence that demanded completion; equally often it would be returned with a continuation that changed the direction implied by what preceded it. Part of the process was accepting the frustration of the mischievousness of the other.
When the evening was complete, two or three pages may have been filled in, and they would be read aloud. Then we would part.
I don’t know exactly when we started the project. Neither of us thought to date the manuscript at the beginning; towards the end of the second volume, when we met irregularly, we did begin that useful but self-conscious practice. But work must have begun in 1990 or 1991, and most of the first volume was written in the first couple of years, before I moved from New Jersey, where we both had lived, to Upper Manhattan. By 1994, most of the second volume was done, but from now on the pressures of life and work made our meetings increasingly infrequent. The last dated entry in the second volume is April 8th, 2000, shortly before J. F. moved to San Diego. We met only once after that, in California in 2001, but were not able to write on that occasion. For a brief period we did pick up writing in a similar way online, but it was a less satisfying experience and not much was done. I include that document here as a kind of postlude.
For the two of us, I feel that the Book was a kind of imaginary life we had together. It was a life of great intimacy and a kind of chromatic and emotional repleteness, even if it consisted primarily of childish play. That this intimacy was predicated on something absurd and impossible did not make it any less precious. I know that we both took it seriously as something fateful and necessary. And so, despite everything about the artifact that resulted that is unacceptable and embarrassing – the repudiation of form and sense, the sexual violence, the forced vandalizing purplization of any poetic impulse – I claim for Hoptime a special place in the world, not only because it has in fact some inherent virtues in the small – its poetics sometimes strikes home, and I can never read it without laughing uncontrollably – but more importantly, because it was a way for the two of us to love each other in the only way we could, willingly and totally entwined in each other’s foolish, ugly, wise and beautiful words and fantasies, which we heard, supported and forgave. Perhaps the sympathetic reader will feel the spirit of this rapport beneath the noisy surface of this cast-off part of a living thing, this enormous and dreadful basilisk skin.
J. F. Mamjjasond died of pancreatic cancer in 2014 at the age of forty-nine. None of his old friends knew that he was dying; only one knew that he was sick, but he did not know how seriously. Neither did J. F., it seems; when a doctor finally explained that he could not hope to recover, he became so upset that he had to be physically restrained. A few hours later, he was gone.
We spoke rarely after he moved and I had not spoken to him for months when he died. We were both rather depressed and unsatisfied with life, and reluctant to make each other feel worse. Having shared a pipe and a quill with him, twenty years and more ago, leaving these traces behind, is not one of my regrets. Fafnir Finkelmeyer, December 29, 2014 - www.saggingmeniscus.com/catalog/hoptime/foreword/

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Jeff Nuttall - Never preoccupied with well-wrought description and dialogue that attempted to simulate real events, his objective was far more provocative: to lure readers into original experiences, from the carnal to the cerebral, from high art to low down and dirty humour

January 8, 2018, 4:08 am

≫ Next: Ole Robert Sunde - This is a total novel which wants to contain the whole world, and the structure it follows needs to be as complicated as everyday life. It is a Norwegian Ulysses in the strictest sense of this outworn characterization

≪ Previous: J. F. Mamjjasond & Fafnir Finklemeyer - Plotless, absurd, nonsensical, arbitrary, silly, mad, ribald, noisy, violent, despairing, obscene, drug–addled, revolting, and hilarious. Both an insult to the very idea of a novel and an uncanny magnification of it.

Jeff Nuttall, An Aesthetic of Obscenity: Five Novels, VerbivoraciousPress, 2016.
www.jeff-nuttall.co.uk/

Jeff Nuttall’s fiction displays an impatience with the constraints of words and language; the predictable course of a line carrying a thought across a page. The conventional order of narrative traditions were beneath his initial ambition. Never preoccupied with well-wrought description and dialogue that attempted to simulate real events, his objective was far more provocative: to lure readers into original experiences, from the carnal to the cerebral, from high art to low down and dirty humour. His strategy included the prospecting of biological intimacy, through conduits and chambers, tactile immersions in flesh, fluids, viscose matter; resurfacing where instincts manifest through swelling, dilation, tumescence; changes in hue, temperature, scent and flavour. He was a shameless chronicler of the body, as labyrinth and topography. His commitment to his material was intense and sustained. This anthology collects five novels published between 1975 and 1994: Snipe’s Spinster, The House Party, The Gold Hole, The Patriarchs, Teeth.

“We are left with a handful of novelists preoccupied with purifying their own means and materials . . . Jeff Nuttall has pushed this situation towards one of its most interesting ends and, in doing so . . . has given the novel a whole new voice to work with.” — John Calder

It is good to see Jeff Nuttall returning as Jeff Nuttall. Those who care should brace themselves for a whole wave of Nuttall nonsense to come. Papers already exist that link him to Deleuze and Guattari, missing the way Jeff hated them, outlined with little ambuguity in Art and the Degradation of Awareness, one of his best books.
Jeff hating them doesn’t mean those links can’t be made, but those links are very weak. There are theorists attempting to push the cumbersome Nuttall body into genderless Bataillean theorising, which itself arrives largely via Allan Stoekl’s flawed Marxist readings of Bataille. Nuttall was phallocentric if he was anything, performing with his cock and balls out often.
‘The subversive thread of the imagination’ currently being claimed for Jeff, is now the most re-directable force for capital there is, on the planet. ‘Social’ labour on the internet is all surplus value for others who know how to profit from the processes.
‘Happening assemblages’ are supposedly all unconscious intensities, but Nuttall hated what happened to the experiments of Allan Kaprow. The ultimate end of those were U2s Zoo Tour. They were absorbed into Neoliberal Europolitics, the Rock ‘n’ Roll dome of Blair and a Stratocaster in number ten, a rebound from Clinton, the first black man in the white house, with his saxophone.
Nuttall hated rock music, he once told me it was ‘stand up wanks using somebody elses’s fist.’ I’d like to propose that Nuttall is a radical materialist, something that has been and will be overlooked. These collected novels give me ballast.
In them, Nuttall tries to use words, often to describe sex, that will wake our switched off bodies to their anaesthetised conditions, conditions he thought were injected by the presence of the nuclear bomb.
Nuttall’s small press poetry was put out by tiny outfits like Arc, struggling for years and then selling the remainders as rare luxuries. I have never seen the novels and so hats off to Douglas Field and Jay Jones for collecting them in all their profane glory. They have done a marvellous job here.
These novels should be read by all the academics preparing to chop Nuttall’s body up even further to use as fuel in the Higher Education novelty race. Snipe’s Spinster proves what they all conveniently forget, that Nuttall was ANTI-COUNTERCULTURE. Bomb Culture was a way of distancing himself from it all, rather than pulling himself further in.
This does not mean that Nuttall was some kind of conservative, far from it, he saw the counterculture commodified and he disaffiliated immediately. For Nuttall, the counterculture was not radical enough.
There’s lots of fucking of the non-transgender sort. Cocks and fannies. Very British, and the novel writing in between the mad nutty riffs is so very British too. Kingsley Amis sticking two fingers up then getting his wanger out. This isn’t Joyce or Burroughs, no matter how much people want to claim him for ‘non-linearity’.
There’s a clear lineage of music hall smut, stand-up comedian, jazz riffer and scat singer. These novels are a whole lot of fun and they are an antidote to the pretentious radical posturing being performed around Nuttall’s corpse, which oddly makes them a whole lot more radical than they were before, somehow.
I can’t imagine that this collection exists in vast numbers or that they will hang around for long. Get one from verbivoraciouspress.org - manchestereviewofbooks.wordpress.com/2016/11/26/the-no-longer-sacred-profane/

Jeff Nuttall’s professional life started and ended in relative normality, first as schoolteacher and latterly mainstream film and television actor, but the dynamic central thrust of his work as writer, performer and innovator strained the belts of convention, as tightly as his notable girth. This new release by the VP Reprint Series of a quintet of seminal works by Nuttall, written between 1975 and 1994, shows not only how expert their author was as a stylist and storyteller but also how important he was as a thinker and spokesman for writing with a capital W, art with a capital A, and response with a suitably big R. He raged WAR on convention, first directly and then I am sure, in repose.
In editors Douglas Field and Jeff Jay Jones’ introduction, Nuttall is reported as formerly telling IT, that ‘I paint poems, sing sculptures and draw novels’ and so he does here, blending the forms in these effortlessly successful experiments and playgrounds for prose. The creamy heft of the paperback brings something of Nuttall’s silky corpulence to the hand and one is reminded instantly of his presence and voice on reading. The Gold Hole and Snipe’s Spinster are perhaps the most well known of the five books collected here but each is vital. For instance, the much neglected and shortest book, Teeth, written in a day after a booze infused challenge at The Groucho Club, shows how the most shallow of prompts can allow for the most profound and entertaining of speeches; Chapter Sixteen’s
‘Day spread itself apologetically, the way they sometimes do.’
echoes the opening lines of Beckett’s Murphy beautifully.
As the writer of one of the most famous books on sixties’ counter culture, Bomb Culture, Nuttall knew what to exploit and how to seek and advance renewal. His easeful control of all areas of literary, artistic and musical innovation were in many ways more impressive than his contemporary BS Johnson’s insistence on his somewhat stringent ideas for reforms to the style and content of the modern (or postmodern) novel. This is evidenced in specific details, such as references to the Edinburgh haircut received, marked and celebrated in the opening pages of Snipe’s Spinster. The prose sings due to its careful power and clarity and transmutes images upwards to the air, with the grace of cigar smoke, curling and coiling fresh thought. Written in first person, Snipe himself is a thinly disguised Nuttall who leads us through the remains of the society he signposted in Bomb Culture towards an acid tinged dawn. Pot (no pun intended) shots at various figures occur, most notably old IT associate, Mick Farren, but there is in the spite and subsequent drug struck languor, both an invective and charge at and for the pivotal forces of change. Sublime sentences drift past;
‘The acid wore off around half past eight and I went home, clip-clop down the mountain…lights of Leith winking like dropped glass..’
Or
‘..the rich, bright light that had shot across the city into my time-warps, swam in browns:’
Snipe, after his embibements of Guinness, light suppers of Ryvita and Cheese, experiments in homosexuality and desk tested erections thanks to female student Janet, resulting in ejaculations
‘that feel like a ‘bullet being drawn from a wound..delicately, carefully and with endless subsequent happiness’
meets up with associate and road manager Crane who after briefly swapping conspiracy stories tries to inveigle Snipe into the kidnapping of a Government minister’s daughter. The ensuing romp is ripe with the fruits of invention as Snipe’s Spinster, an aspect of the first person narrator’s own personality is endlessly subdued and challenged in 83 of modern literature’s most entertaining and subversive pages.
The House Party is even more revolutionary. It does what the aforementioned BS Johnson attempted with more brio than even he achieved in the Shandy-esque Travelling People, as form and layout, footnote, marginalia and illustration are blended into the thrust of the text to truly create the idea of novel as sculpture, as work of art in and of itself. This, then, is writing as its own lysergic. Rather than something that has resulted from the indulgence of substance, this is the substance itself. As Nuttall says in his introduction to the text, the book exists as an attempt to extend the possibilities of the blown mind and to see what that can really achieve. Full realisation at any cost. The House Party as a force for change and experiment, attempts to build on Joyce’s intentions in Finnegan’s wake which as quoted in the introduction was written ‘about dream, in the language of dream and about a dreaming man.’ and succeeds admirably. A parody of the country house novel it speaks through the experience of its four main characters and the sheer exuberance of its prose to the voice in the head of each reader that none of us can quite discern but which we each perhaps suspect is not entirely our own;
‘I could nudge you their nature, the lilyblow daffodils set in reverse, the childslace cupcakes turned in their cream, the swell and the suck-swell.’
‘Lay in the wet, in the swim, in the fishes and kippers that float up her fuck-tunnel,’ said George.
The mind shouts and flings its dream-paint over the drab confines of the skull, re-ordering it in an instant and teaching us that behind words and language itself is the vibrant desire to express every facet of existence and experience. All of Nuttall’s writing in this edition and what I know of his work through the beginnings of The People Show and the Performance Art Scripts are excavations of language and its possibilities. Indeed, they become challenges to the accepted and acceptable modes of expression that are often clogged or truncated by the pedestrian demands of common discourse. If you don’t have an appetitie for Hippo pudding by page 100, than sir, madam, you have no soul to speak of. And that is no something you will find in Robert Harris, or young master Amis.
As Field and Jones relay in their introduction The Gold Hole explores the ‘psychosexual landscapes of a methedrine fuelled poet, Sam’ and his declining relationship with former paramour, Jaz, set against the backdrop of the Moors Murders. In one chapter the aborted foetus of their lovechild speaks in eerie counterpoint to the novel’s setting, an innovation that certainly puts Ian McEwan’s latest novel Nutshell, to shame with its cursory retelling of Hamlet. Here is real tragedy writ large, and with a stunning level of precision and skill:
’During the first weeks I suppose you could have described me as an impulse of air. I was a small crisis of energy…’
‘At eight weeks I had something of the fish, something of the plant and something of the human…’
‘Sometimes the voice was like cocoa. I was often brown..’
The revelations drift past like shudders in the amniotic fluid, making us all mothers to our deeper and perhaps deepest levels of response. What strikes you by reaching the third book collected here is just how rich and strange Nuttall’s work and that of his contemporaries was and continues to be, whether living or dead. Modernist and the finest examples of post modernist thought and practise from Johnson to Paul Ableman, Laura Mulvey, Jane Arden and Helene Cixous and all points inbetween, exists beyond the constraints of their original forms and approaches. There is no dichotomy when I state that this child of Nuttall’s labours literally infuses death with a new form of life. Writing must transcend the page while still being of it and while contemporary performance, conceptualism and music often achieves this in isolated or singular examples, it is in someone like Jeff Nuttall that we see a sustained search for renewal of thought and response in every means possible.
Obscenity, if handled correctly as it is here on many of this volume’s seductive pages, is a weapon that flies with the grace of a bird. All of Nuttall’s writing chimes and resounds with that grace as he aims his flight in our direction. He wants us to celebrate and elevate the only true things we can draw on, where a ‘handattheheavingocean’ can bid the deep oyster to suck. The body’s lowest forms of function are consummations of experience in Nuttall’s worldview and sperm is mere paint in his hands. Piss revives as blood fuels. Shit affirms an intention. A kiss leads to clashes. A fuck makes the soul levitate.
In The Patriarchs, Nuttall explores his own writerly predicament as one of the successors to the previous literary generation though a canny exploration of the poet Jack Roberts, a figure bearing an uncanny resemblance to Ted Hughes. A symposium at a location that strongly sisters the Arvon foundation allows for responses to ebb and flow between writer and reader as the celebrity of the word is expunged. The limits and reaches of poetry and poetic definition are explored and commented on by Nuttall as unammed narrator, again by placing himself at the centre of the text. This once again fuses the forms as the density of the poetry on offer swirls around us;
‘Dancelocks lopped to the stubble by slums, /She scrabbles in refuse, can’t kiss or sing/ But thrashes on mattresses straddled by starvelings,’
and makes the novelist a conductor for and of the storm and to extend the metaphor, orchestra of response and intention. Nuttall as narrator comes not to praise or to bury Jack Roberts’ Caeser, but rather to examine his laurel wreath, the golden crown of achievement afforded to him and all of the other great voices of linguistic pursuit;
Beneath your voice, sticky flies play, choral over the filth of your dominion.
This truly is writing as Art. An aesthetic on beauty as well as obscenity in which the sound cloud (meant in the poetic sense and nothing to do with the interweb) created by words and their inherent meanings and intentions teleports the reader into higher levels of consciousness. One is struck by how useful the book is and how appealing because of the extent to which it provokes and elevates both engagement and response in the reader. You, we, I become active participants not just in and because of content as it is relates to us, but to the act of what encountering text is and can be, along with the potential of transcendence.
This collection is a riot of words formed by the decimations of convention won and raged by writers like Nuttall, BS Johnson, Sinclair Beiles, Heathcote Williams, Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs et al in the long decades before. It is both sharply observed and as adventurously surrealist as David Gascoyne in his prime or as coruscating as the poetry and poetics of George Barker, WS Graham, or latterly Iain Sinclair, Alan Moore or Brian Catling. Nuttall’s own court of miracles – to quote Catling’s recent poetry collection – is also one informed by the virtues of the entertainer he indubitably was. His work in the 1970’s with The People Show and other theatrical endeavours such as A Nice Quiet Night and The Railings in the Park, can still be glimpsed in the pleasantly familiar realism of Teeth, whose study of marital infidelity finds greater relevance through the feral fury of its female protagonists.
Jeff Nuttall was a teacher right to the end of his life, instructing us all on the potentials of our own efforts and showing how one could still throw the same sort of signal flares that Be-bop Jazz once fashioned, and that the theatrical Avant Garde developed across the other artistic forms in which it found fruition. He shimmered and glowed through all of his pursuits, cometing in from the basement of Better Books in 1967, to the old Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in 1971, all the way through to Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books and bizarrely, ITV’s Kavanagh QC in the nineties. He was a star who shaped the sky to his own image and who allowed the song of art to attain the highest scale. This new reprint by the Verbivoracious Press re-introduces a master to his hopefully willing pupils and quickly and effectively re-orders the house of study into a new and thrilling combination. It is no stretch to say that the works collected in this volume are what Sterne would have grown into if he had an inch of Methusaleh’s reach.
The furthest branches of the tree are where the bird is now singing of forgotten stories and books strong enough to resist the fires of enveloping time. Amongst and above those spires of nature I am certain that the spirit of Jeff Nuttall capers nimbly beside the divine Ken Campbell and a chorus of other great ghosts and voices, from Chaucer to Charlie Parker, that are still responsible for our acceptance and understanding of what an idea is and can be. Nuttall’s house party is large enough to contain all of our efforts and the lives that surround them. As stated in marginalia on page 163:
‘Hack at the curtains. Hurl the stair rods at the windows in the front door. Slash the silken ankles’
And walk,
and as you do so, sing with this book as your guide. - David Erdos http://internationaltimes.it/of-thee-i-sing-an-overview-of-an-aesthetic-of-obscenity-5-novels-by-jeff-nuttall/

Image result for Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture,

Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture,HarperCollins, 1970.

Jeff Nuttall was born in 1933 in Lancashire. Prolific in many disciplines, Nuttall trained as a painter before taking up poetry, fiction, and acting. His 1960s publication My Own Mag was among the most significant underground venues for experimental writing. Nuttall published copious volumes of poetry, fiction, cultural criticism, auto/biography, and illustrated chapbooks across his career, acted in many notable films, and worked in various academic capacities at Leeds Polytechnic. He died in Abergavenny in 2004.

Jeff Nuttall was the polymath – poet, artist, jazz-cornetist, anarchist, and sculptor who wrote the insurrectionary tome that defined the 1960’s counter-culture, ‘Bomb Culture’…

Jeff Nuttall, manic polymath – poet, artist, and jazz-cornetist is dead, he’s joined the horn-section invisible. Which is tough. Because I always intended getting around to an interview-piece with him, at some time, when I located space-and-time to do it. Now it’s too late. I did bump into him on several odd occasions, always respecting his fiercely diverse energies. First time was probably the ‘Ilkley Literature Festival’ event way back in the early-1970’s where he does an esoteric lecture-thing about aspects of Aleister Crowley-groupies. I was just starting out, baffled, and totally in awe of him. Afterwards, I stammer out how much I love his book ‘Bomb Culture’ (1968) – which I did, and still do, and he peers down imperiously at me from the podium and utters ‘oh yes?’ A solid very corporeal presence, tousled Dylan Thomas Celtic hair flared up against the light. Challenging, provoking more. So I venture that I admire the ‘Early Lobster’ graphic-strip he was doing for the ‘Styng’ counterculture newspaper at the time, and he looks down at me from the podium and says ‘oh yes?’ And I slink away completely defeated, deflated. He was intimidating. I was intimidated…
The Nutt’s‘Bomb Culture’ is still here on my shelf, it provided an art-anti-art ideological A-to-Z and brain napalm to me circa 1971. His exploded visceral black-ink straight-razor cartoons were essential cultural programming for the time. I saw his gigs, encountered him slumped-drunk one Tuesday in ‘The Cobourg’, a now-torched and vanished trad-jazz Leeds pub, while he was senior Fine Arts lecturer at the Polytechnic. He pursued life merrily and to the full, and drank with not always discreet dedication.
‘Bomb Culture’ is incendiary. A path through art’s subversive parallel universes. Both psycho-autobiography, manifesto, and exercise in style. The cover of the Paladin paperback edition has a ‘Sgt Pepper’-style collage cover, centred around a naked Allen Ginsberg. Behind him, fanning in an arc, are Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, Marilyn Monroe, Brian Jones, Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, Spike Milligan, Timothy Leary, Jack Kerouac, John & Yoko, Jimi Hendrix, Vivian Stanshall. The essential, if unintentional shapers of the culture Nuttall defines. To strum the pages takes you through counter-culture history like clicking through a particularly hip search-engine. His range of references is impressively wide, each one fiercely opinionated.
For example, the Marquis De Sade anticipates dismemberments that the avant-garde will inflict onto formal classical art, annihilating the European aesthetic traditions. And it keeps doing it. Its conduits are the Futurists – ‘the strenuous pantheism of technology’, the Dadaists, Fauves, Bebop, Abstract Expressionists. Nuttall’s heroes are Picasso, Tristan Tzara, ‘the psychopathic genius of Charlie Parker’, Lenny Bruce, William Burroughs. Art is the spirit of perpetual revolution, ‘an explosive planted straight into the human subconscious to blow it off course.’ He notes, with approval, an anonymous 1968 Sorbonne graffiti proclaiming ‘Imagination Has Seized Power’, feeding the spirit of this continuity into ‘my own constructions’ of Action Painting, found-objects and ready-mades shot through with ‘overtones of social comment.’
In his flaring visionary perception, art is the wild-mercury force of perpetual opposition. Because art is ‘irrational in its nature, it can only be irrationally understood.’ He argues that ‘the economic structure works towards stasis centred around the static needs of man,’ but ‘culture, being the broad effect of art, is rootedly irrational and as such is perpetually operating against the economic workaday structure of society.’ Investigating origins, he writes that ‘morality was the province of church and hierarchy, the prime weapons of control and power,’ but ‘at the end of the eighteenth-century religion got caught out.’ It was around that time that ecclesiastical ritual was identified as ‘authoritarian hierarchies which defended exploitation and oppression in terms of the divinity of the social order. For man to be free, god, king, and the pope had to be dethroned.’
Yes, no argument there, but wait, if all morality is the province of the church, must all morality be dethroned too? Must all morality be extinguished in exactly the way that the ‘heads of the French divine authorities dropped into the basket?’ That’s probably too literate an interpretation. Can’t a form of morality exist without the superstructure of religion to enforce it? Surely, a more human morality can be rationally constructed without the superstitious imposition of cosmic deities – can’t it? Maybe back then in revolutionary France, the likes of the Marquis De Sade – newly liberated from divine totalitarianism, had an excuse, but not now after generations of free-thinking enlightenment. Nuttall would say that’s to argue logic and reason. Which is counter to his intuition. Art does not flow that way. To be pure, like jazz, it must be extemporised at the moment of creation, without precedent or consequence. That, too, is a kind of morality. But for Nuttall, it’s more about fierce gesture than parsing minutiae.

Nuttall. Memoirs of The People Show, plus original scripts in two volumes (Calder). He includes a Rose McGuire drawing of a train of cartoon elephants and two dripping penises with the legend ‘piddly biddly boo who are yoo’, which was sketched ‘to spur the author’s imagination’, he interprets it by ‘walking stiffly along the kerb on tiptoe with my cheeks full of milk. Every few yards I spurted a splash of milk out onto the pavement’ - Andrew Darlington

read more here

Jeff Nuttall, who has died aged 70 was a catalyst, perpetrator and champion of rebellion and experiment in the arts and society. Bomb Culture, his 1968 chronicle of the emergence of internationalist counter-culture in Britain, remains a primary source and manifesto for the post-Hiroshima generation.

The vision of Jeff's youth was grounded in "a faith that, given liberation, the human spirit would predominate. I imagined some kind of stone age village. People would build their own houses imaginatively and live there sophisticatedly and in a literate way and they would live with their hands and their minds and they would not be dictated to by anybody selling them anything. People would have the opportunity of coming into their true self, which was generous and creative and permissive".

He was born in Clitheroe, Lancashire, but most of his childhood and teens were spent in Orcop near Herefordshire's Welsh border. His father was the village headmaster but the most formative years of Jeff's education were at Hereford and Bath art schools (1949-53). In 1954 he married Jane Louch, the painter who had taught him at Hereford, with whom he reared a daughter and three sons. They stayed more or less together for the next two decades.

From the late 1970s to 1984 Jeff drove around Britain, Australia and Portugal with Amanda Porter, as svelte as he was chubby, with whom he had another two boys. The rest of his life was shared with Jill Richards, a diminutive Welsh actor as hard-drinking and sharp-witted as himself.

From 1956-68 Jeff was a secondary school art master, and for the following 16 years he worked at art colleges, in Bradford, Leeds, and then as Liverpool polytechnic's head of fine art. But while bringing a transformative zest to those jobs, he was also getting on with his mission.

From 1964-67 he edited and circulated My Own Mag, a bran tub of anarchic texts and images, with William Burroughs lavishly featured in most issues. In 1966 International Times, the first London-based "underground" newspaper, was set up. Jeff contributed articles and cartoons to IT and other underground publications which emerged in its wake.

Central to the burgeoning oral verse, jazz poetry, happenings and performance art movements, he also played effervescent jazz piano and scalding cornet in the Red Allen-Roy Eldridge idioms, and sang infectiously genial vocals. The humours of Fats Waller were recreated in Jeff's persona, yet he struck some on a brief encounter as a show-off. For many more he was an outstandingly original artist also possessed of a gift for helping others appreciate their own potential.

Other precursors whose legacies he extended were the dadaists, surrealists and beats, Dylan Thomas, John Bratby and kitchen sink painting, McGill postcards, bebop and northern music hall. In 1967 he co-founded the People Show, an improvising theatre troupe with which Jeff travelled, wrote and acted for five years.

From the mid-1980s he took cameo roles in films and television. Throughout his days he made and exhibited hundreds of lyrical-threatful-polemical artworks.

He was the Guardian's incisive poetry critic (1979-81) and during the last 40 years he published some 40 books. There were poetry, plays, fiction, memoirs, essays, and verbal portraits of kindred spirits like Blackpool's star mid-20th century comedian Frank Randle (King Twist, 1978) and the free jazz virtuoso Lol Coxhill (The Bald Soprano, 1989). Jeff's Selected Poems has just appeared (Salt Publications).

In 1990 Jeff summarised his artistic approach:"I make a line out of a rhythmic figure. The previous figure suggests the subsequent one. The rhythmic figures owe much to Charlie Parker's saxophone phrasing." Thus a characteristic Nuttall poem opens:

So brightly blisters the great regurgitating ribbon of the Thames.
Sculls skim through like springtime swallows.
Keels kiss tidal scum, lancing the stolen sun - boils or bops to a stop, as in
The bee on wheels has laments on a stick
Wags weepy banners with gypsy ribbons...
The tiny wheeled bee has the sky on a stick
Idly waves as she buzzes through the afternoon
Kicking the tears around like bean tins.

Two defining moments for Jeff - and for the future he considered crucial for human survival - were the beginnings of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the late 1950s, with its anti-H-bomb marches and the first grand scale cosmopolitan poet-meet that filled the Albert Hall in June 1965. Jeff felt confirmed in that "all our separate audiences came to one place at the same time, a frisson for us all to savour as there had been at the first Aldermaston, and the underground was suddenly there on the surface, in open ground with a following of thousands".

Nuttall and John Latham had planned a happening for that gig which encaked them both top-to-toe in blue paint, but this blocked their pores, and Latham passed out. A hot bath was needed fast but the only bath in the building was in Sir Malcolm Sargent's dressing-room. The dazed duo tumbled gratefully in, to be discovered, reviving, by a caretaker, who assumed that unimaginable beatnik outrages were being enacted beneath his eyes.

In Jonathon Green's Days In The Life: Voices From The English Underground (1988), Jeff recalled "a shift between 1966 and 1967 from poetry and art and jazz and anti-nuclear politics to just sex and drugs, the arrival of capitalism. The market saw that these revolutionaries could be put in a safe pen and given their consumer goods. What we misjudged was the power and complexity of the media, which dismantled the whole thing. It bought it up. And this happened in 67, just as it seemed that we'd won".

Nuttall lived to see that spirit rekindled 35 years later, with wise children again marching, speaking, and acting out their hearts and minds against the philistines, profiteers, and warmongers who go on ruling the west.

He died on a Sunday, leaving the Hen and Chicks pub in Abergavenny, where his trad band's lunchtime gig had been the highspot of his week for 10 years. At his soul's incarnation in Elysium it will surely come to pass, as Jeff once dreamed, that "Spifflicate water-buffalo drunk on rainbow fish will snore beside the oval father where he basks". For the rest of us, as long as "global politics" fester in lies and pea-brained Hollywooden mega-violence, it is bollocks to them, and long live Jeff Nuttall. - Michael Horovitz https://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/jan/12/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries



	A comprehensive selection of obituaries, critical appreciations and short memoirs.

		Newspaper Articles The Times The Guardian The Independent Glasgow Herald

		Friends Writings Keith Musgrove Ray Gosling Molly Parkin Michael Horovitz Nuttall on Paintings Eric Mottram Lawrence Upton Roy Fisher

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Ole Robert Sunde - This is a total novel which wants to contain the whole world, and the structure it follows needs to be as complicated as everyday life. It is a Norwegian Ulysses in the strictest sense of this outworn characterization

January 8, 2018, 11:44 pm

≫ Next: Guillermo Saccomanno - Abounding with shady characters, all seemingly competing for worst resident on earth, Gesell Dome becomes a chorus of corruption and greed, of savagery and ruthlessness. It’s both vicious and unforgettable. Think Louis-Ferdinand Céline on vacation in South America

≪ Previous: Jeff Nuttall - Never preoccupied with well-wrought description and dialogue that attempted to simulate real events, his objective was far more provocative: to lure readers into original experiences, from the carnal to the cerebral, from high art to low down and dirty humour

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Ole Robert Sunde, Naturligvis måtte hun ringe [Of course she had to call], 1992.

This is a novel which hasn’t been re-issued since its original publication in 1992. Fredrik Wandrup, critic of the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet, wrote that it didn’t “generate any suspense, any associations, any entertainment, […], any laughter, any tears” – just because he had expected a novel which would build a “clearly arranged system in a chaotic world”. Wandrup deemed Sunde’s book as unreadable; it “thundered down literary dead ends, defying death”. His scathing critique was titled “Literary root canal therapy” – of all things, the novel begins with a dentist’s call to the first-person narrator. Wandrup had delivered a witty characterization which began to haunt him: even twenty years after his review, the critic was constantly reminded of what he had done to Sunde. According to Eivind Røssaak, he had favoured a conventional, realistic plot over a text which was unclassifiable, even hostile in its difficulty. Thus, Wandrup contributed to the image that Sunde was an unenjoyable and elitist writer who didn’t care about his readers’ expectations. Another critic stated that Of course she had to call was more difficult than the theories which were designed to deconstruct it; this is clearly a book which must be approached in small, hesitant steps. “Read slowly, word for word”: This advice, given by Dag Solstad at the very beginning of his Telemark-novel, is an appropriate guideline for every Barthesian aristocratic reader intending to tackle this behemoth of a book.
Titles are crucial for Sunde. They seem to live a life of their own. Take these gems: the long text history. short novel; An ordinary height; The dust’s applause; Fourth person singular; The sleeping voice; I am a wild notion; War was my family’s history. In the anthology Som fra mange ulike verdener(Like from many different worlds), edited by Audun Lindholm and published by Gyldendal, Svein Jarvoll wrote about his long and strenuous friendship with Sunde – incorporating every single of his succinct book titles and thus demonstrating their comic potential. Certainly also Of course she had to call: This is laconic. This is self-sufficient. This is hopeless in the sense that the reader isn’t expected to expect anything. So, what is the book about? Does it have a plot? “No!” –“Yes, but …?” A double hesitation: The novel’s protagonist, a first-person narrator, stays in an apartment in Oslo; he moves from one room to another; he remembers his childhood, his early youth, and books he has read (without referring explicitly to them); his dentist calls him. The sudden pinging of his telephone is the novel’s starting point. The narrator has forgotten his appointment, his dentist prompts him to come to her. But he doesn’t want to. A situation everyone at least once in his life has experienced: dental anxiety and the way how (not) to overcome it. Instead, the narrator concentrates on a stream-of-consciousness-like musing on everything in his world. He sees; he listens; he records. The result is a kaleidoscopic text which can be described, in Wandrup’s words, as “exhaustive”. This characterization is a double entendre: First, Of course she had to call creates a world of its own; second, the reader can easily get lost in the splintered and rearranged narration. The novel isn’t complex because of its plot: it’s complex because it consists of a single run-on sentence of about 400 pages, a sentence which itself is divided into many subsections, subclauses, sub-subordinate clauses, sub-sub-subordinate clauses, parentheses, semicolons, commas. Paal Bjelke Andersen, who also contributed to Lindholm’s anthology, accepted the dodgy syntax as a grammatical challenge: He took page seven and effaced every word of it; the punctuation marks remained, demonstrating the novel’s symphonic mechanism. The text has many different layers: it begins with the dentist’s phone call; it switches over to a description of the so-called Alexander mosaic; it continues with something else which seems to be another ekphrasis, this time of a photograph. There are many other layers, and they have in common that none of them appears only once. They replace each other; they follow an apparently impenetrable plan; nevertheless, they seem to be part of a composition. “Composition” is the right term for that which is managed here: Expressions like “huff og huff”, an irritated and malcontent interjection, occur frequently throughout the text; there are also epithets, such as “kalkunmannen” (“the turkey cock man”). The whole novel seems to be structured like a musical piece: Elements are repeated and follow a kind of ‘plot’, and they’re varied (they’re wearied as well – until the reader dies of fatigue).
The cover of the novel consists of a so-called “structure map”: In the first instance, it is just an array of caskets, lines and connections which seem to indicate a secret architecture, but which are too detailed for an illuminating suggestion of the whole composition. Throughout the novel, the card reveals its mysterious sense: It is not to be read as a plan which has to be strictly followed; it is rather an organized entanglement which intends to give the reader a rough impression of what is waiting for her. This is a total novel which wants to contain the whole world, and the structure it follows needs to be as complicated as everyday life. It is a Norwegian Ulysses in the strictest sense of this outworn characterization: It centres on one man who is a modern wanderer; but unlike Leopold Bloom, he doesn’t leave the house. He embarks on a mind journey which takes him everywhere: to his neurotic mother; to the family’s connection with World War II; to other wars, especially to the battle between Alexander the Great and the Persian king Darius III. The whole novel demonstrates a strenuous effort to capture the fleeing time; writing is the only possibility to catch the ringlet of Kairos; therefore, it offers an opportunity to heal the wounds left by all the conflicts with war, family and death.
As a work of art, the Alexander mosaic is exemplary for the poetics displayed in Of course she had to call. Discovered in 1831, it dates from circa 100 BC. It is a so-called opus vermiculatum. This term, usually translated as “worm-like work”, describes a complicated technique where the mosaic’s stones are arranged in undulating circles. Such a procedure allows a finer coloration; furthermore, the artist can contour the figures and details very precisely. The mosaic evokes the impression of regarding an accurate, nearly three-dimensional and tightly woven picture. It has a textual, tactile quality; but in case of the work of art which was found in the casa del fauno in Pompeii, vermiculatum also has another meaning as the mosaic isn’t wholly conserved. The technical term hints at death, at decomposition, caused by worms and maggots, and at the viewer’s gaze desperately trying to combine the scattered pieces. This is impossible; Of course she had to call is a novel which is always aware of history’s complexity. It reiterates the top-down method of the Alexander mosaic; it induces a fragmentation by solely including crooked and broken plot lines; the text is an eroded corpse, eaten by the worms. It is a form to speak about death in a language which is damaged, broken, traumatized.
In an iconic passage, Sunde describes a picture of Marcel Proust’s, a photograph: The novelist “is unfettered by every form of hope”; his “accurate middle parting”, his “ringlet, formed like a procumbent s – this hair, greased with pomade, which avoided the daylight (because of the two societies he frequented – one of them in the memories (and which he called forth in a soundproof room at night) and the other (society) in the break of dawn in dark sheds where men search for other men’s company)”. Sunde evokes the key passage of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu where a madeleine, dipped in lime blossom tea, provokes a circle of memories, stating that Proust lived in an age of transition where one epoch was replaced by another; his heritage “was inescapably going under”, “decomposing”. Later, Sunde writes that “the physical envelope we have been placed in (as well carnally as geographically) is eaten away by ageing, but time itself (whatever it might be on a physical level, however it might exist in a metaphorical way) is without any age and escapes from the finale – death”. Of course she had to call tries to recapture the body as a sensing and palpable entity which has been consumed by history’s rage and greed. The body has a somatic record; it has wounds; it has been marked by death and failure. It speaks hesitantly. Sometimes, the pauses between the enunciations become unbearable. Nevertheless, it refuses to become silent. It shapes itself in spite of the negativity which threatens it.
In an interview with Dagsavisen, Ole Robert Sunde said that Of course she had to call had been an attempt to kill his darlings, such as Joyce and Faulkner; but he has also been especially interested in Claude Simon whose ultra-fractured plot lines and extraordinarily long sentences had provided a poetical means to transform history’s complexity into a literary form. The novel is part of an autobiographical project, begun in the mid of the 80s and completed in 2012 with Krigen var min families historie (War was my family’s history). In another interview, this time with Dagbladet, Sunde stated that his dentist refused to treat as well him as his wife, his children and his neighbour after she had read Of course she had to call; Sunde had described his fictionalized dentist as money-grubbing, malicious and outwardly unsympathetic. His novel is a precursor of Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle in the sense that the text is grounded in seemingly authentic experiences; but it differs radically from the glittering spectacle we call ‘reality’ because it re-enacts the self’s development in a fragmented and distorted text which also influences the author’s environment. But unlike Knausgård, Sunde didn’t need to worry about being sued by his family members; he just had to look after a new dentist. - Matthias Friedrich https://theothermodernbreakthrough.wordpress.com/2018/01/05/sunde-series-part-one-naturligvis-matte-hun-ringe-of-course-she-had-to-call-1992/

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Guillermo Saccomanno - Abounding with shady characters, all seemingly competing for worst resident on earth, Gesell Dome becomes a chorus of corruption and greed, of savagery and ruthlessness. It’s both vicious and unforgettable. Think Louis-Ferdinand Céline on vacation in South America

January 8, 2018, 11:46 pm

≫ Next: Olav H. Hauge - During those years when I lived a truly spiritual life, they called me sick and locked me up

≪ Previous: Ole Robert Sunde - This is a total novel which wants to contain the whole world, and the structure it follows needs to be as complicated as everyday life. It is a Norwegian Ulysses in the strictest sense of this outworn characterization

Image result for Guillermo Saccomanno, Gesell Dome,

Guillermo Saccomanno, Gesell Dome, Trans. by Andrea G. Labinger, Open Letter, 2016.

Like True Detective through the lenses of William Faulkner and John Dos Passos, Gesell Dome is a mosaic of misery, a page-turner that will keep you enthralled until its shocking conclusion.
This incisive, unflinching exposé of the inequities of contemporary life weaves its way through dozens of sordid storylines and characters, including an elementary school abuse scandal, a dark Nazi past, corrupt politicians, and shady real-estate moguls. An exquisitely crafted novel by Argentina’s foremost noir writer, Gesell Dome reveals the seedy underbelly of a popular resort town tensely awaiting the return of tourist season.

Read an Excerpt

Never was there a cityscape as immersive, or a populace as rife with iniquity, as in Argentinian writer Saccomanno’s noirish Gesell Dome, his first novel to be translated into English. The Argentinian town referred to as Villa is a seaside summer resort spot—but when the tourists leave and only the locals remain, a tangle of outlandish corruption, violence, and dark histories are unveiled. To begin with, there’s the suicide of a pregnant middle schooler, a sexual abuse scandal at a kindergarten, and a devastating real estate development known as the Twin Towers that divides the town. But this turns out to be nothing compared to the secret lives of the three Quiroses brothers: crooked lawyer Alejo, Braulio, and Julián, the Villa’s so-called Kennedys, who do their best to control their constituents. These include the mayor’s unruly son, Gonzalo, whose attempt to blackmail Alejo backfires miserably; Julián’s wife, Adrian (willing to go to absurd lengths for her Pilates studio); and Dante, editor and sole contributor to El Vocero, who, with the help of limo driver Rimigio, chronicles his township’s ills. Tales range from the story of El Muertito, the monster who stalks the forests at night, to whispers of the Villa’s Nazi diaspora. Then there are oddballs such as the loan shark called the Duchess, and cursed painter Claude Fournier, who all have a part to play in the Villa’s mounting intrigues. Like Twin Peaks reimagined by Roberto Bolaño, Gesell Dome is a teeming microcosm in which voices combine into a rich, engrossing symphony of human depravity. - Publishers Weekly

An unrelenting trip to the Inferno (with Dante as our tour guide, cast here as a discerning hack), featuring a revue of crooked businessmen, politicians, lawyers, and powermakers, stomping on the bedraggled masses in the most violent and messed-up Argentine villa to ever set itself up as a utopian tourist beach resort. Opening with a case of child molestation known as los abusaditos, a foul stench that permates the novel, the pages proceed to pile up with one shooting, suicide, murder, corrupt activity, gruesome child killing after another, most of the citizens of the town depicted as crazed sex maniacs on the steal and shoot and stab, with Dante the lone sane voice, writing emotionless reports in the villa newspaper fed to him by evil mastermind Alejo Quiros. Far from becoming intolerable, the novel piles up the carnage to the point the reader is no longer shocked and appalled (barring several extreme acts), cranking up the pain to comic-book levels of hurt (the author is a former comic writer). As an exploration of modern violence, the novel is less certain—is the writer revelling in the carnage? is he forcing us to confront the animal within?—however, there are moments of reflection and a sombre tone to reassure us that the moral compass is pointing in the right direction.

www.verbivoraciouspress.org/our-year-in-books-2016/

“He was swollen, deformed, nibbled by fish.” And that’s one of the luckier residents of Argentine novelist Saccomanno’s infernal seaside-resort city, where not much good ever happens.
A Gesell dome is a one-way mirror that allows researchers to observe subjects without their being aware of it. So it is with this omnisciently noirish novel, which allows readers to hover over Villa Gesell in the off-season and see the odd doings of the year-round inhabitants. The resort (an actual place), the translator tells us in a helpful introduction, was named after another Gesell, the descendant of German immigrants, but no matter: all kinds of people end up in the beach town for the same sorts of exigencies and accidental reasons as the Europeans who have landed on the Rio de la Plata for the past half-millennium, among them an escapee from the military terror of the 1970s whose daughter, after affairs with drug dealers and sessions in rehab, pleads for her own daughter to find a place in the relative safety of Villa Gesell. “Trabuco kept a jealous eye on her,” the narrator tells us, making revelations in fits and starts, “told her that a sinner never gets rid of the vice in her soul and that the Lord must have had some reason for infecting her, because let’s not forget that Vicky has AIDS.” Vicky isn’t the only denizen of the city who’s sick, and everyone seems altogether grumpy, perhaps because, under the orderly surface, the whole place is tainted with graft, corruption, and nepotism, all of which run through the city like the sewer line that, the narrator assures us, will never be built, “streets and boulevards gutted with no signs of a single pipe.” Moving from character to character, Saccomanno writes with dark lyricism of the shady dealmakers, old-school Nazis, youngsters “with their hormones raging,” prostitutes, and other types whom you might expect to find in a grim place and a grim time.
Cynical and funny: a yarn worthy of a place alongside Cortázar and Donoso. - Kirkus Reviews

““The first two pages of Gesell Dome, the first novel from Argentine author Guillermo Saccomanno to be translated into English, are enough to seduce any reader and a testament to the vitality of international fiction. Dark, daring and epic in scope, Gesell Dome is a damning verdict of contemporary life and human nature. The novel reveals the corrupt underbelly of a resort town when the tourists leave. Abounding with shady characters, all seemingly competing for worst resident on earth, Gesell Dome becomes a chorus of corruption and greed, of savagery and ruthlessness. It’s both vicious and unforgettable. Think Louis-Ferdinand Céline on vacation in South America.”—Mark Haber, Brazos Bookstore

A Gesell dome is that setup, familiar from American cop shows, where a one-way mirror separates two rooms, facilitating observation for one side. A long series of polyphonous vignettes, Gesell Dome is the testimony/confession of the 40,000 denizens of Villa Gesell, a seaside resort town 325 kilometres southeast of Buenos Aires. For two months of the year, Villa Gesell makes its living off tourism. The other 10 months it turns on itself. Gesell Dome is literary noir, and like all noir, it resists the claim that crime is singular. In Villa Gesell it is a bath. Guillermo Saccomanno's Villa is a pit of racism, despair, passion, jealousy, violence and corruption – hell itself – with momentary tenderness. For the reader, who might encounter the same story 10 different ways, truth is elusive: 600 pages is enough for one book, but not enough for the Villa. Saccomanno requires no introduction in Argentine lit; for English-language readers, this is his startling, epic debut. - JADE COLBERT www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/review-new-works-from-alexandra-risen-guillermo-saccomanno-and-alexander-weinstein/article32020232/

Gesell Dome is set in Villa Gesell, commonly called 'the Villa', a resort town on the Argentine coast with some 51,068 residents that blossoms with activity for the short summer season, when there is an influx of tourists -- annually, "nearly a million tourists pass through the Villa" (or, elsewhere: "In summer, between December and March, over two million human beings will pass through here") -- while the rest of the year it festers in its own (human) filth. The Villa is not a happy place: as one of the locals notes: "The Villa is perdition. We're all lost here".
       As explained in the novel -- and also in the translator's Introduction -- the title refers to an invention of American psychologist Arnold Lucius Gesell. As Saccomanno describes it:
The Gesell Dome consists of two rooms with a dividing wall in between in which a large, one-way mirror allows an observer in one room to see what is happening in the other, but not vice-versa.
       This set-up -- familiar from countless police-interrogation-room scenes in movies and on TV -- isn't nearly as creepy as the actual 'Gesell Dome', which was an actual dome-shaped observation room:

A Gesell Dome

       In either case, the idea was to be able to look in and observe essentially unnoticed, and Saccomanno's novel similarly places a dome and one-way mirror over and around the Villa, and records the doings of those trapped inside (and they certainly come across as trapped, even though some do make their escapes or flee ...) -- who themselves are forced to confront their actions in the mirror this book is holding up. (Not that the locals necessarily mind being observed and described like lab rats: One passage of the novel laughs at the suggestion: "You think you're going to get kicked out of town for writing this novel. Like hell you are. [...] [E]ven when the shit splashes on them, nobody will want to be left out".)
       The cast of characters isn't so much colorful as dark -- from gray to pitch-black. The town is under the control of a corrupt triumvirate, and two crime- (or thug-) clans see to it that proerty and life aren't safe. On top of that, all the local juveniles appear to be delinquent. Throw in the fact that (far too) many of the locals have guns and that all of them have short tempers and a sense of honor that demands vengeance -- preferably of the bloodiest sort -- for even the slightest slight, and you have an explosive mix. Adultery and rape are also widespread, and illegitimate children abound.
       The Villa was basically founded by a Nazi who had fled when things went south in Europe, and that legacy lives on, in everything from the general moral corruption to the lingering widespread use of German. Never having escaped the past -- except fugitively (and fugitives, from one thing and another, flock to Villa) -- the townspeople seem condemned to be stuck in that ugly mire to this day.
       Gesell Dome is an off-season novel, the main action covering the dark times between two summer seasons. The off-season is the dead season: of course there's the low-level activity of any town -- school; basic everyday commerce -- but really it's only in the summer season that the town comes to life and everyone tries to grab as much as possible. In between seasons, they can only grab from each other (which, of course, they do -- theft and robbery run rampant, though it's not just property and possessions that they take from each other -- trying, somehow, to last until the next summer).
       While the main action covers less than a year, the novel packs much more in. The story is related in relatively short sections, rarely more than two pages in length, and often only a paragraph or two. The presentation, even the voice, is not uniform: an omniscient narrator presents the majority of the material, but there are also passages in a variety of first-person-voices, as well as brief articles from the town's weekly newspaper, El Vocero, which comes out every Friday, a variety of brief infomercial-type advertising (for forms of self-help therapy and the like, for the most part), and even summaries of chapters from the TV soap opera, My Neighbors' Drama.
       As the year slowly moves forward, Saccomanno weaves a complex tapestry of present-day and back-story, focusing in on -- though often not exclusively -- specific characters and incidents for several sections before these end -- almost invariably in tragedy, often in death. Significant characters play larger roles along the way -- most notably guide Dante, the: "publisher and only reporter for El Vocero" (and: "the editor of our dirty laundry"), who more or less accompanies readers through these circles of the Villa-hell -- but this is also a novel packed with incidental characters from all walks of life (and their life- (and death-)stories) whose fates are typical and representative (and, generally, horrific).
       It takes a while -- maybe even a few hundred pages -- to warm to the novel's odd rhythm, but there's no question that Saccomanno's writing packs a punch. Eventually, the reader rolls with the punches -- necessary, in a novel packed with them, along with beatings, stabbings, shootings.
       What arc the story has begins with two tragedies: an abuse-scandal at the local kindergarten, Nuestra Señora del Mar, where eleven children were supposedly abused, and the suicide of Melina, a student, "barely fifteen and three months pregnant" (not an unusual combination in the Villa ...), who shot herself (and her unborn child) twice in the belly. The kindergarten scandal leads to a hysterical overreaction -- some lynching, and driving out of town -- even as it remains unclear exactly how many (indeed, if any) kids were abused, and by whom. Even as the police investigation doesn't really dig too deep, Dante keeps returning to the subject in his newspaper; so too the girl's suicide won't let him go: even near the very end of the book, and just as the summer season starts, he asks: "Didn't you ever wonder why that girl might've put two bullets into her belly ?"
       The airing of dirty laundry is problematic in the Villa -- they don't want to scare off the tourists, after all. So there's a tendency -- presumably well-learned from their Nazi forefathers -- of sweeping things under the rug. Given what happens over the course of the novel, those are some very big mounds under that rug, eventually.
       There's shocking, numbing violence in Gesell Dome -- numbing, too, because it's pretty much all readers come to expect. There are very few episodes here with anything resembling happy endings. Lives ruined -- and death -- are the expected outcomes, time after time after time. And there are a lot of such ruined-life-stories here.
       This is also a place where the adults shrug:
But you know what kids are like. They never learn till there's a tragedy.
       That doesn't seem to make all that much of an impression either: there are countless tragedies in Gesell Dome, and nobody ever seems to learn anything from them. "We're all mutants from a Philip K. Dick historical novel", one local suggests, and that's as good a summary as any.
       There are hints and suggestions of greater connections -- and sometimes these are even spelled out:
     Everybody shrugs when you ask about the Villa's Nazi past. The same as when you ask about the abuses at Nuestra Señora. And don't you find it suspicious, I ask you. Isn't it possible that the two situations are connected. We ought to analyze the relationship between these two issues.
       Indeed -- but note that the two questions that are posed here don't even merit a question mark, a stark, clear reminder of the futility of the exercise in the Villa.
       Gesell Dome is ultimately a vast, panoramic novel of a place and its people -- a really seedy (at its essence) sort of place -- that disappoints slightly in not building more with all its pieces: as vivid as the picture we get is, it's ultimately just a picture. Piece for piece, Gesell Dome impresses -- Saccomanno writers very well -- but all the impressive, multi-dimensional pieces still don't quite make more than a two-dimensional picture. (Note also that the soon-predictable end of nearly every episode or incident in horrific violence and, generally, death can be very wearing; Saccomanno mixes things up a bit, by mixing other things in, but it's not really enough to keep Gesell Dome from becoming a near-crushing weight).
       Gesell Dome is an often absorbing but ultimately not entirely satisfying read. - M.A.Orthofer

In the mid-20th century, Yale psychologist Arnold Gesell invented a dome-shaped one-way mirror that now bears his name. As Dante, editor of the left-wing El Vocero, explains in one of the newspaper excerpts that appear throughout Argentinian writer Guillermo Saccomanno’s ambitious novel “Gesell Dome,” Gesell designed his mirror “for observing children’s behavior without their being disturbed by the presence of strangers.”
One can assume that Gesell’s definition of stranger didn’t include tourists to a resort town along the Rio de la Plata. And Gesell probably witnessed nothing like the often-lurid offseason activities exhibited by the residents of the Villa, the resort town in this novel, when the tourists are away.
Saccomanno uses the concept of the dome to invite us to observe the denizens of this 600-page exercise in literary noir. “Gesell Dome” is a bizarro Robert Altman film in book form: hundreds of characters and storylines that paint a portrait of a community, but with events far stranger than anything Altman created.
If the novel has a central character, it’s the Villa, which, like other cities in Argentina, accepted Nazi war criminals as residents after World War II. Now it is home to more than 50,000 people, many of whom drive around in 4x4s and harbor prejudices against “half-breeds” and other foreigners.
These residents give Dante many stories to cover, including the scandal that opens the novel: Eleven kindergartners referred to as los abusaditos are abused at Nuestra Señoradel Mar, a religious school “where the snobs send their progeny.” Parents are rightfully horrified, but other residents don’t want the media to cover the story for fear of the effect the news will have on tourism.
That’s just the start of the Villa’s many problems. Atila Dobroslav, a Croatian builder, destroys the Villa’s beloved forest to erect skyscrapers. He isn’t bothered by trivialities such as ecological disaster or beams striking construction workers in the head. Helping him is Cachito, the Villa’s mayor, a good ’ol politician with a drug dealer for a son; and a trio of young men who call themselves the Kennedys, the “Godfather”-obsessed leader of whom likes to make residents offers they can’t refuse.
Some of the more memorable of the novel’s characters are Moure, the veterinarian known as “the Mengele of the pet world”; Deborah Miller, the town psychologist, whose unconventional method of treating patients includes oil and Mayan massages; and Claude Fournier, a landscape painter who showers outside when it rains and spits at chapels he cycles past. And hovering over the action is the mystery of El Muertito, thought to be the “anguished scream of a child” heard late at night. No one really knows what El Muertito is. Some think it’s a bird with a little boy’s head. Others feel that, whatever form it inhabits, its cry is a call for justice.
Saccomanno shifts rapidly among narrative voices throughout “Gesell Dome,” and plot lines don’t play out neatly. Fans of straightforward narratives aren’t the target audience. And because of the novel’s repetitive elements — there’s a lot of adultery, bigotry and murder here — the tension sometimes sags, especially in the book’s midsection.
But if you enjoy lyrical depictions of iniquity and a sprinkling of philosophy mixed in with your noir fiction, then you’ll like “Gesell Dome.” Saccomanno writes midway through the novel, “The only way to show the wind is through its effect on things.” In other words, you can’t reach conclusions about human behavior unless you know its origins. As Arnold Gesell knew, the key is to observe and learn. - Michael Magras   http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Gesell-Dome-by-Guillermo-Saccomanno-10784366.php

Guillermo Saccomanno is the author of numerous novels and story collections, including El buen dolor. He is the winner of the Premio Nacional de Literatura and a two-time Dashiell Hammett Prize recipient for 77 and Gesell Dome. He also received Seix Barral’s Premio Biblioteca Breve de Novela for El oficinista, and his book Un maestro won the Rodolfo Walsh Prize for nonfiction.

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Olav H. Hauge - During those years when I lived a truly spiritual life, they called me sick and locked me up

January 9, 2018, 12:17 am

≫ Next: Sydney Goodsir Smith - Scottish 'Finnegans Wake': a mock-Joycean cum Rabelaisian caper where every word you read is Smith’s own coinage – it makes narrative sense, but the words are also redolent of other things, often innuendos

≪ Previous: Guillermo Saccomanno - Abounding with shady characters, all seemingly competing for worst resident on earth, Gesell Dome becomes a chorus of corruption and greed, of savagery and ruthlessness. It’s both vicious and unforgettable. Think Louis-Ferdinand Céline on vacation in South America

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Olav H. Hauge, Luminous Spaces: Olav H. Hauge: Selected Poems & Journals, Trans. by Olav Grinde, White Pine Press, 2016.

"'During those years when I lived a truly spiritual life, they called me sick and locked me up.' Intense forces are in play in the writings of Norwegian poet and diarist Olav H. Hauge. His Luminous Spaces is the life work of a restless mind and a troubled heart seeking insight into the spiritual, alert to the bleakness and beauties of nature, and intimate with philosophy and literature. His prose is rich, his poetry finely cut. Here is writing born of the need to know and the will to survive. Like the conch of which he wrote, his writings record the building of a soul to speak from solitude."—Marvin Bell

Luminous Spaces spans seventy years of Olav H. Hauge's poetry with over three hundred poems, a third of which have never appeared in English. It also includes a generous selection from his four thousand pages of journals, previously unpublished in translation, and an intimate forward by his widow, Bodil Cappelen.

"Ocean"
This is the ocean.
All serious,
vast and grey.
Yet just as the mind
in solitary moments
suddenly opens its
shifting reflections
to secret depths
– so the ocean, too,
one blue morning
may open itself
to sky and solitude.
Look, says the gleaming ocean,
I too have stars
and blue depths.

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Olav H. Hauge, The Dream We Carry: Selected and Last Poems of Olav Hauge, Trans. by Robert Bly, Copper Canyon Press; Bilingual ed., 2008.

"...spare, psalmlike poems....Together, the poems in this beautifully translated selection... provide us with the autobiography of a poet who felt most at home during winter, in solitude. Hauge deserves a larger American readership, and this book may summon it."—Publishers Weekly

"(Hauge's) poetry is miniaturist, pictorial, and ruminative; personal in that his experience, cognitive and sensual observations, and intentions are everywhere in it. Yet it isn't at all confessional or self-assertive.... He is a man who knows where he is and helps us feel that we can know where we are, too."—Booklist

“If you have a tiny farm, you need to love poetry more than the farm. If you sell apples, you need to love poetry more than the apples.”—Robert Bly, from the introduction
Olav H. Hauge, one of Norway’s most beloved poets, is a major figure of twentieth-century European poetry. This generous bilingual edition—introduced by Robert Bly—includes the best poems from each of Hauge’s seven books, as well as a gathering of his last poems.
Ever sage and plainspoken—and bearing resemblance to Chinese poetry—Hauge’s compact and classically restrained poems are rooted in his training as an orchardist, his deep reading in world literatures, and a lifetime of careful attention to the beauties and rigors of the western fjordland. His spare imagery and unpretentious tone ranges from bleak to unabashedly joyous, an intricate interplay between head and heart and hand.

The rose has been sung about.
I want to sing of the thorns,
and the root—how it grips
the rock hard, hard
as a thin girl’s hand.
During a writing career that spanned nearly fifty years, Olav H. Hauge produced seven books of poetry, numerous translations, and several volumes of correspondence. A largely self-educated man, he earned his living as a farmer, orchardist, and gardener on a small plot in the fjord region of western Norway.

Hauge (1908–1994) worked as a farmer and gardener in the fjord region of his native western Norway—his spare, psalmlike poems seem to be made by someone used to working with his lands, like maker of the houses of branches we built/ when we were children. These are also poems infused with a wry, modernist perspective: Today I saw/ two moons,/ one new/ and one old./ I have a lot of faith in the new moon./ But its probably just the old. Hand in hand with that sensibility comes an allegiance to Japanese haiku—Hauge delivers odes to Basho in addition to Brecht—and readers may be reminded of Kenneth Rexroth. Together, the poems in this beautifully translated selection (the book contains the Norwegian en face) provide us with the autobiography of a poet who felt most at home during winter, in solitude. Hauge deserves a larger American readership, and this book may summon it. - Publishers Weekly

“There is nothing so scary/ about grasshoppers sharpening scythes./ But when the troll’s flea whispers,/ be careful.”
Oh, Olav Hauge, sometimes I get bored when I read lovely lines made in and reflect insistently beautiful pastoral setting. Sometimes, I am tired of simple meat and the breath of seasons. But when I see within a line the gaping horror of the existential abyss, rendered miniature by a poet’s loving handling of language, well, then... I can buy that. Word.
Olav Hauge was a Norwegian farmer and gardener. He had an orchard in the town in which he was born, Ulvik. He read hungrily many types and tones of poetry. He translated. He labored on a small bit of land. In translator Robert Bly’s simple and respectful introduction, Hauge is portrayed as a man of gentle stuff:

During his late twenties, he spent some time in a mental institution. At sixty-five, he married the Norwegian artist Bodil Cappelen, whom he met at one of his rare poetry readings... He died in the old way; no real evidence of disease was present. He simply did not eat for ten days, and so he died... A horse-drawn wagon carried his body back up the mountain after the service. Everyone noticed a small colt that ran happily alongside its mother and the coffin all the way.

From here, the book begins. Bly is actually a co-translator with Robert Hedin, and they both have interesting stylistic idiosyncrasies -- part of the endless conversation about translation and creation and documentation. Can we simply jump languages? No. Do languages shape the way we perceive reality? Of course. Does this complicated mess have something to do with the insides of Hauge’s brain? Yes, yes.
This nice edition (bilingual, cleanly designed, soothingly severe) makes much ado about the connection between Hauge and the Chinese poetry he read and translated (i.e. “wrote”). I think this connection makes a lot of sense, but there are things here that are so distinct that the comparison slights both parties. Another notion that, to me, seems very useful is to consider the artwork of Andrew Goldsworthy (see some work here) who plays with the passing of time in pastoral setting, the knowing of place through its patterns, and a luxurious kind of minimalism.
Still, though, I struggle with this poetry. I feel like I haven’t read anything truly shattering in months. I worry that poetry is too easily turned into pillow-covers and crappy gift books. And I think our culture just loves to misinterpret the work of people like Hauge. We like his plainspoken, good horse-sense. “I, too, have stars/ and blue depths.” “These poems don’t amount/ to much, just/ some words thrown together/ at random.” “I stock firewood,/ keep my poem short.” See? It’s a little boring.
But, then, I think of these poems in a context. You can read Hauge’s work as a kind of guidebook, a manifesto. His life seems so tender in its thoughtful and excess-less trajectory. Bly’s introduction stresses this warm, pre-commercial lifestyle, this wonderful sense of the world as it truly is -- and the poems sit on that shelf. I don’t think there is any American season quite as vile as November to February, with our holidays and gout-like consumption, our ugly packaging, and our self-entitled pleasure-seeking. I would like to think that poets like Hauge gift us something a little better, something with troll fleas. I read this book, actually, on a holiday flight, unnaturally floating above the lower Midwest. I thought it was kind of hilarious to do such a thing. “One’s warmth/ collects/ in a small pocket.” I don’t know why humans haven’t progressed in the direction of the gift economy. Why don’t we use friends like Olav Hauge -- and Emily Dickinson and Lorine Niedecker and bower birds and wind -- to negotiate the abyss? Why do we accept false realities? Why don’t we barter with arts & crafts and song?

This is the dream we carry through the world
that something fantastic will happen
that it has to happen
that time will open by itself
that doors shall open by themselves
that the heart will find itself open
that mountain springs will jump up
that the dream will open by itself
that we one early morning
will slip into a harbor
that we have never known.

Well, shit, I just don’t know. While “[l]ife is merciful,” blinding us and “provid[ing] illusions,” it is still, for all of us and for Hauge, a hunting for the grave. The grave “has no small window to the stars” and “a deer hoof/ would barely/ trip over it.” So, what we’re left with is probably just the need to mark things. Writers are part-Kilroy, part-storm; they show us how language and existence violently and hopelessly twist around one another. “Let us slip into/ sleep [Lat oss glida inn/ i svevnen], into/ the calm dream [i den logne draumen],/ just slip in [glida inn].” Can you hear all that? That’s Olav Hauge knocking at your door. He’ll turn your sleep into a loaf of bread, and he’ll arm the moon with a bloody blade. - Olivia Cronk http://www.bookslut.com/poetry/2009_01_013870.php

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Olav H. Hauge, Leaf-Huts and Snow-Houses, Trans. by Robin Fulton,Carcanet Press, 2004.

In this generous selection of nearly half of Hauge's poetic work, Robin Fulton displays the range, variety and distinctive qualities of his poetry. Though deeply rooted in the West Norwegian landscape which he evokes so memorably, Hauge's poetry has a kinship in background and temperament with that of Robert Frost, while also sharing the wry humour and cool economy of William Carlos Williams and Brecht, whom he translated. Often epigrammatic, yet lyrical in impulse, his poems have a serenity which makes them unusually rewarding.

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Olav H. Hauge, Selected Poems, Trans. by Robin Fulton,White Pine Press, 1990.

Hague, born in 1908, is one of Norway's outstanding poets. He has spent his life in Ulvik, a small town in the Hardanger area of Western Norway, and has made a living off the apple crop from his orchard, an acre in size. This large and diverse selection is drawn from all phases of his work. His poems, though deeply rooted in his western Norwegian landscape, are universal in their everyday subject matter, wry humour and an economy of language reminiscent of W C Williams or Robert Francis.

Image result for Olav H. Hauge, Don't Give Me the Whole Truth,

Olav H. Hauge, Don't Give Me the Whole Truth, Trans. by James Greene,‎ Robin Fulton and Siv Hennum, Anvil Press Poetry, 1985.

Olav H. Hauge, born in 1908, is one of Norway's most highly regarded contemporary poets. This extensive selection of his poems is the first to appear in English translation. Though deeply rooted in his own West Norwegian landscape, which he evokes memorably, his poems are of universal not merely local appeal. In their everyday subject-matter, their wry humour and their cool economy, his poems are comparable to those of William Carlos Williams or Brecht, some of whose work he has translated. Hauge's sharpness is that of precise observation and insight, not of metaphorical extravagance. Epigrammatic in their concision yet lyrical in their impulse, his poems have a serenity which makes them unusually rewarding.

Poetry Month 2016: Olav H. Hauge

Olav H. Hauge (1908–1994) is one of the main poets of twentieth-century Norwegian literature.

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Sydney Goodsir Smith - Scottish 'Finnegans Wake': a mock-Joycean cum Rabelaisian caper where every word you read is Smith’s own coinage – it makes narrative sense, but the words are also redolent of other things, often innuendos

January 9, 2018, 1:03 am

≫ Next: Sinclair Beiles - the sad, mad and bruised old mind that was Sinclair Beiles was at root the mind of a natural ecstatic, a luftmensch, of the kind that society is always inclined to punish for one reason or another, which is why unreason is sometimes such an attractive escape route

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Sydney Goodsir Smith, Carotid Cornucopius, M. Macdonald, 1947.

Although best-known as a poet, Sydney Goodsir Smith is also celebrated as the author of the experimental novel Carotid Cornucopius (1947), one of the few prose works in Scots published during the Renaissance period. Its exuberant linguistic wordplay has drawn comparison with both Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Sir Thomas Urquhart’s 17th-century translation of Rabelais. Characters from Carotid Cornucopius reappear in Smith’s play The Rout of Spring (or Colickie Meg) (1950). - http://ourhistory.is.ed.ac.uk/index.php/Sydney_Goodsir_Smith_(1915-1975)

I’ve been pondering recently about what to write a blog on and then yesterday, three things related to the Scottish poet Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915-1975) happened. Firstly, I sent off a book proposal for an edited collection of essays on his work – the first of its kind, if it gets the green light. Secondly, the poet Harry Giles began to sing the praises on Facebook of Goodsir Smith’s word-play tour-de-force only novel Carotid Cornucopius – a mock-Joycean cum Rabelaisian caper where every word you read is Smith’s own coinage – it makes narrative sense, but the words are also redolent of other things, often innuendos – it takes a good few pages to get used to the style, but once you have it, it’s readable believe it or not. Finally, I read a fascinating interview with Alex Neish, by Graham Rae at ‘Reality Studio’. Neish was one of the student editors of the Edinburgh University literary magazine Jabberwock which ran from the 1940s through to the late 1950s and published a great name names from the Scottish Literary Renaissance.
When this publication wound up, Neish, disillusioned with what he saw as an increasingly outdated and cliquish Scottish literary scene, started Sidewalk which promoted writing from younger Scottish and UK writers / poets as well as leaning strongly towards Beatnik and Black Mountain Poets coming from America. Its big buzz-word was ‘anti-parochialism’ and it was opposed to the Hugh MacDiarmid cult. The magazine lasted only two issues, when Neish left Scotland to pursue his fortune in the South American business world. Sidewalk published work by writers such as William Burroughs, Charles Olson and Allen Ginsberg and its, perhaps less nationalist and more internationalist outlook, served as a precursor for the divisive Scottish International which ran until the early 1970s.
I thought it might be interesting to show you now an item from my Scottish Literature / Sydney Goodsir Smith collection – Goodsir Smith’s personal, annotated copy of Sidewalk 1 which I found in a bookshop in Edinburgh many moons ago:

What I have been unable to ascertain is whether Goodsir Smith annotated this copy in his own leisure or if this was done for the sake of a review somewhere – it would be fascinating to know for sure. However, you can be sure if a review did appear, it was scathing, judging by the tone of Goodsir Smith’s marginalia. The picture below shows the contents page, covered in pencil scrawl. I’m not sure about Goodsir Smith’s secret code running down the left-hand side, but what can clearly be seen is his comments on the pieces involved. For instance, Ian Hamilton Finlay, who contributes a poem called ‘Orkney Interior’, is dismissed as a ‘jokey surrealist’ (see picture below).

Now, ‘jokey surrealist’ might be a positive appellation, but I doubt it – Allen Ginsberg’s work is written off as ‘Dada’ and Charles Olson’s as ‘transition Dada’. Goodsir Smith seems to be insinuating that, for him, this work is not challenging and new, but slightly derivative of a literary movement of three decades beforehand. He also adds that the overall ethos of the magazine is captured on page 81. If you turn to that page you find a little pencil squiggle by this line: ‘But remember, things have been moving so fast in the States that by and large it’s already dated’. The only poets / writers who come off lightly are the Scottish poets of around Smith’s generation, such as Morley Jamieson and Iain Crichton Smith (although ten years younger than Smith, identified roughly as part of Smith’s circle). And this picture below shows the extent of Goodsir Smith’s frustration with the writing in the magazine.

I’m fully aware numerous doctoral theses could be written about the clash of cultures and values in Scottish writing at this time and I don’t really want to get into that here in any length. When Sidewalk first appeared, the first round of ‘folksong flytings’ had appeared in the pages of the Scotsman and the disastrous, or resoundingly successful (depending on how you see it) 1962 International Writers Conference was just around the corner. The usual attitude people take away from this time is one of two diametrically opposed camps – the old guard, Scottish Literary Renaissance poets, like Goodsir Smith and MacDiarmid, who gathered every Saturday in the Abbotsford and went on a pub crawl down Rose Street and the newer, more experimental, more outward-looking (or more explicitly folk culture identifying) writers who often took their ques from literatures outside of Scotland, or overlooked aspects of Scottish culture, such as the poet and folk-song scholar Hamish Henderson.
This is all symbolically typified in the spat, at the 1962 conference, between Alexander Trocchi and Hugh MacDiarmid, where MacDiarmid was dismissed as a dinosaur and Trocchi as ‘cosmopolitan scum’. These camps still seem to remain in academic discussion and criticism – the concrete poets vs. the Rose Street bunch, but I’m more with Hamish Henderson, who, while being involved in these arguments, said it was fundamentally a ‘false antithesis’ – that both camps were often drawing from very similar places or influences (Edwin Morgan was a good lynchpin in this regard). It is certainly true that the ‘old guard’ were a bit of a boozy gentleman’s club and they were, and felt, more entitled and the younger poets, like Ian Hamilton Finlay, were fighting for a platform for their work. But isn’t that exactly the same today, with the exception that the third wave writers of the Scottish Literary Renaissance included figures like Liz Lochhead, whose work in turn paved way for more women poets.
Where does Goodsir Smith’s copy of Sidewalk fit into all this? Well, it certainly shows that cavalier and entitled attitude that I’ve been talking about. But, then again, does it really? I look at Goodsir Smith’s annotations and see a man who felt insecure about his non-Scottish upbringing (he was born in New Zealand) and very defensive of the Scottish Literary Renaissance – it had provided him with a voice and a clear identity and he wasn’t about to betray that with what he saw as a diversion of focus away from Scottish writing to the more attention grabbing Beatnik writers from America. It’s well known that most Scottish writers of this period were not at each other’s throats, unless in public or in print (such as the 1962 conference) where any attention was good if it lead to exposure for the writers involved. For instance, the obloquious exchange between MacDiarmid and Trocchi was effectively stage managed – there are very friendly letters that exist from both that show their fight was really a bit of theatre to hijack attention from more famous writers from across the world who were attending the conference. Of course, with all of these things, it is always a matter of who is telling the story – it was a fascinating, turbulent era in Scottish literature.
Speaking of which, I would just like to quickly draw attention to one glaring fallacy in Alex Neish’s interview I began by talking about – he states that Sorley MacLean was ‘not recognised in Scottish Renaissance circles which just about sums up their vision’. I take great exception to this – when Douglas Young (a major Scottish Renaissance figure in his lifetime) was imprisoned during WW2 for refusing military and industrial conscription, he devoted his energies to translating into Scots and ensuring the publication of Dain Du Eimhir by MacLean. If you have ever seen a copy of the original 1943 edition of this book you will know that MacLean’s Gaelic takes centre stage and Young’s Scots translations lurk at the back of the book, the book (decorated by George Bain) being one of publisher William MacLellan’s finest, with perhaps the exception of MacDiarmid’s In Memoriam James Joyce (decorated by J. D. Fergusson). Also, I think with the exception of Robert Garioch, MacLean was one of the first younger poets to meet and get to know Hugh MacDiarmid – MacLean visited MacDiarmid on Whalsay shortly before MacDiarmid’s mental breakdown in the mid-1930s and he often saw MacLean as his equal, but writing in Gaelic and acting as his Gaelic correspondent and translator, providing English cribs for MacDiarmid’s translation of The Birlinn of Clanranald.
As I’ve already said, all of this is a question of interpretation, but I know what I believe.- http://www.copy-cats.be/blog/alex-neish-sydney-goodsir-smith-and-sidewalk/

In 1928, the New Zealand forensic scientist Sydney (later Sir) Alfred Smith took up the post of professor of forensic medicine at the University of Edinburgh, bringing with him his wife and their son Sydney. The boy’s subsequent domicile in Scotland provided the background for his development into a writer in Scots and a prominent figure in the second wave of the Scottish Literary Renaissance.

Sydney Goodsir Smith was born on 26 October 1915 in Wellington, New Zealand; his mother, Catherine Goodsir Gelenick, was of Scottish origin. He was educated in England and began studying medicine at Edinburgh University, but left to read history at Oriel College, Oxford, where he gained a third-class degree in 1937. Due to chronic asthma he was turned down for active service in the Second World War, so worked instead with the War Office, and taught English to Polish troops. He was at one time employed by the British Council, and was Art Critic for The Scotsman, as well as a freelance journalist and broadcaster. In 1938 Smith married Marion Elise Welsh, a doctor, with whom he had a family of two children. After her death in 1966, he married schoolteacher Hazel Williamson.
Although at school in England, during the holidays Smith absorbed the language and Scottishness of rural Scotland when he stayed with his prep school teacher in Heriot, and his sister’s nanny in Moniaive. It was a gradual absorption which intensified in adulthood, as Tom Hubbard summarises in his entry on Smith in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:

Although he was not a native speaker of Scots, Smith succeeded in developing a convincing idiom based on the speech which he heard in the pubs and in the streets, enriched by his absorption of the great medieval Scots makars (makers, poets). The consequent range of registers, from the vernacular to the highly ornamented and stylized, was an invaluable resource for a poet concerned with sudden and contrasting changes of mood and feeling.

While studying in Edinburgh he had begun writing poetry, in English, but according to Norman MacCaig in For Sydney Goodsir Smith:

With the suddenness of a conversion he seceded from English, adopted Scots, and never wrote a poem in English again …. An extraordinary fact which is worth recording only because in that at first almost foreign tongue he went on to write poetry in Scots of a quality hardly equalled in this century …

In Language, Poetry and Nationhood (2000), J. Derrick McClure traces the development of Smith’s sureness in handling Scots: ‘It is in The Deevil’s Waltz (1946), however, that Smith emerges as both a poet of unchallengeable stature and one of the great synthesisers of Scots.’
Though there were some who thought Smith merely substituted Scots words for English, the skill of his use of the language is surely borne out by the fact that in 1951 he was one of the prizewinners in the Scots section of the Festival of Britain poetry competition, alongside native Scots Olive Fraser and Alexander Scott.
The sequence Under the Eildon Tree (1948) is generally agreed to be Smith’s masterpiece, making full use of his lyrical talents and exuberant energy. It comprises twenty-five poems on great lovers of history and legend, interspersed with reflections on the poet’s own love life; the poet/lover veers between the highs of passion and the lows of disappointment, and the sublime and the ridiculous are interwoven.
Smith’s love of language meant he looked furth of Scotland and delighted in taking inspiration from Europe, like so many Scottish poets, as Tom Hubbard has pointed out:

He translated poems by Tristan Corbière and Aleksandr Blok into Scots, and his celebrated ‘The Grace of God and the Meth-Drinker’ is the Edinburgh Grassmarket's equivalent of the tatterdemalion grotesqueries of a Villon or a Baudelaire:
There ye gang, ye daft
And doitit dotterel, ye saft
Crazed outland skalrag saul
In your bits and ends o winnockie duds
Your fyled and fozie-fousome clouts
As fou's a fish ...

The 1950s was a prodigious decade for Smith; he published six books of poetry, followed shortly after in 1960 by his most successful play, The Wallace. It was performed in the Assembly Hall at the Edinburgh Festival that year and inspired some in the audience to rise to their feet and sing ‘Scots Wha Hae’ as the curtain went down.
Known as ‘the kilted kiwi’ or ‘The Auk’, Smith earned his place in the thriving Scottish literary scene in the 1950s and 1960s, centred as it was in Edinburgh. In 1959 Smith, Hugh MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig were installed as the ‘club bards’ of the newly founded 200 Burns Club.
Smith found his true home in Edinburgh, and became a poet of his adopted city in all its different moods. His long poem 'Kynd Kittock’s Land', commissioned by the BBC and televised in 1964, celebrates the two sides of the city, ‘The hauf o’t smug, complacent … the tither wild and rouch as ever …’. He was most at home in the Old Town, as it was then, a place more of pubs and real life than of tourist shops: ‘A queerlike canyon is the Canongate, / That murmurs yet wi the names / O’ lang deid bards …’.
He died suddenly on 15 January 1975 at the age of 59. In the Scotsman obituary, George Bruce wrote ‘The name Sydney Goodsir Smith, especially at this moment, invokes such affection as to make evaluation of the poet’s brilliant talent difficult.’ Many others have attested to his ‘kindly, good-humoured, witty and charitable nature’, and his passing was widely mourned. He is buried in the Dean Cemetery, and a bronze plaque, bearing his likeness in profile, is affixed to the wall of his former residence, 25 Drummond Place, Edinburgh. - http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poets/sydney-goodsir-smith

Poems by Sydney Goodsir Smith:

Cokkils

Largo

from Under the Eildon Tree

'Some dreams are sleepin in the bottom o' a glass,
some ride in the freezing winds of space,
some snore in the dampest oxter o' a tree'
('Kynd Kittock's Land')

Sydney Goodsir Smith (26 October 1915 – 15 January 1975) was a Scottish poet, artist, dramatist and novelist. He wrote poetry in literary Scots often referred to as Lallans (Lowlands dialect), and was a major figure of the Scottish Renaissance.
He was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and moved to Edinburgh with his family in 1928.^[1] He was at school at Malvern College. He went to Edinburgh University to study medicine, but abandoned that, and started to read history at Oriel College, Oxford; whence he was expelled, but managed to complete a degree. He also claimed to have studied art in Italy, wine in France and mountains in Bavaria.
His first poetry collection of many, Skail Wind, was published in 1941. Carotid Cornucopius (1947) was a comic novel about Edinburgh. His A Short Introduction to Scottish Literature, based on four broadcast talks, was published in 1951. His play The Wallace formed part of the 1960 Edinburgh Festival.
Smith was also associated with the editorial board for the Lines Review magazine.
Under the Eildon tree (1948), a long poem in 24 parts, is considered by many his finest work; The Grace of God and the Meth-Drinker is a much-anthologised poem. Kynd Kittock's land (1964) was a commission of a poem to be televised by the BBC.
He died in the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh after a heart attack outside a newsagents on Dundas Street in Edinburgh and was buried in Dean Cemetery in the northern 20th century section, towards the north-west. His wife, Hazel Williamson, lies with him. - wikipedia

Sydney Goodsir Smith was a significant figure in the 20th-century revival of poetry in Scots. His masterpiece, 'Under the Eildon Tree' (1948), comprising 23 variations on the subject of love, draws parallels between his personal experience and that of great lovers in history and mythology. It is one of the great love poems in Scots. Sydney Goodsir Smith spent his first years in New Zealand, then in 1928 moved with his family to Edinburgh. From the outset he chose Scots as the language for his poetry. Three collections appeared in the 1940s: 'Skail Wind' (1941), 'The Wanderer' (1944) and 'The Deevil's Waltz' (1946). A humorous novel, 'Carotid Cornucopius', followed in 1947. In the 1950s, with the publication of 'So Late Into the Night' (1952) 'Orpheus and Eurydice' (1955), and 'Figs and Thistles' (1959), he was hailed as the best Lallans poet after MacDiarmid. His play, 'The Wallace', was staged at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival. 'Kynd Kittock's Land' (1965) gives an affectionate portrait of Edinburgh. - http://digital.nls.uk/writestuff/smith.html

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Sinclair Beiles - the sad, mad and bruised old mind that was Sinclair Beiles was at root the mind of a natural ecstatic, a luftmensch, of the kind that society is always inclined to punish for one reason or another, which is why unreason is sometimes such an attractive escape route

January 9, 2018, 1:47 am

≫ Next: Muhammed Afifi - dreamy contemplations of the creatures inhabiting his garden (the dog, a frog, his wife, etc.) by an old man sitting under a tree; cult classic in the making

≪ Previous: Sydney Goodsir Smith - Scottish 'Finnegans Wake': a mock-Joycean cum Rabelaisian caper where every word you read is Smith’s own coinage – it makes narrative sense, but the words are also redolent of other things, often innuendos

Sinclair Beiles, A South African Abroad, Lapis Press, 1991.

I first came across Sinclair Beiles’s name one drunken night in 1991 outside a bookshop in Yeoville’s Rockey Street. A newspaper clipping reviewing Sinclair’s selected poems A South African Abroad, published by Lapis Press in California, was pinned up in the bookshop window with a handwritten message ‘Soon available in South Africa’ scrawled at the bottom. In a few short paragraphs I learned that Beiles had mixed with the Beat poets, collaborated with William Burroughs on Minutes to Go, was influenced by surrealism and was virtually ignored in South Africa.
I was immediately excited by what seemed akin to the surrealist marvellous exploding into my dull mediocre existence of restricted and frustrated desires. I couldn’t believe that a South African poet had been out there in the avant-garde European literary scene.
I formed a picture of Sinclair in my mind that was to prove worlds apart from what he actually was. I saw him as a lean, calm pipe-smoking poet who had lounged around on placid Greek beaches contemplating sunsets and occasionally churning out fragile yet fascinating poetry.
Over the next year or two I picked up more information and hints about what Sinclair was really all about. I borrowed a copy of A South African Abroad and apart from the selection from his initial collection — Ashes of Experience — I found most of the poems weak. This I found was almost a trademark of Sinclair — flashes of excellent poetry punctuated by collections of dubious quality, some of which seemed no better than doggerel. A young man in a bookshop told me that the handful of collections sampled for the selected volume were misleading. Sinclair was in fact a prolific writer, churning out masses of poems and plays in frantic bursts of activity. He was also, a woman informed me, ‘not well in the head’. He roamed the streets of Yeoville — where he lived — in a similar fashion to how he had roamed the streets of Paris. An article about him in the Mail & Guardian at the time referred to him as ‘The Wandering Poet of Paris and Yeoville’.
Two years later I read that Sinclair’s play about Lorca, My Brother Federico, was being performed at the experimental Black Sun Theatre. Shortly after that, I obtained Sinclair’s home telephone number from poet Roy Blumenthal, who had until recently been quite close with him. Roy had endured enough of Sinclair’s paranoid behaviour, and had suffered the displeasure of having Sinclair yelling at him in the street, threatening to ram his typewriter down Roy’s throat and challenging him to a boxing match.
A few weeks later I had succeeded in setting up a meeting with Sinclair at his house. I was stunned to find that his house looked onto the back of a block of flats that I had been staying in only a couple of years previously. On arriving at his door — he had invited me round for Sunday afternoon tea — I was greeted by his wife, Marta Proctor. - Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska read more here

Sinclair Beiles, Houses of Joy, The Olympia Press, 1958.

One of the funniest moments in the history of Olympia came when the South African poet Sinclair Beiles entered Girodias' office with sheets of paper adorned by Chinese characters. Telling Girodias a story about youth spent among missionaries in China, Beiles indicated his reams of parchment, and stated that they were unique erotic writings from that nation, and all he'd need to translate this phenomenal document would be some money each week for a new chapter... As it turns out, Beiles was working from an earlier translation of the 15th century erotic classic Jin Ping Mei, a work about Hsi Men (Ximen Qing) and his six wives that, with its graphic descriptions and instructions, is said to have inspired the Kama Sutra, among other books. The Jin, Ping and Mei in the title are the later three wives, and the most interesting ones for our purposes. One of those later spouses, whose name translates as Golden Lotus, is a character from the classic "Outlaws of the Marsh," delightful woman lady who poisons her ugly, smelly, not-getting-it-done first husband to marry the libertine Hsi Men, and is punished for this crime by the tiger-slaying, heroic brother of husband one. In Jin Ping Mei, Hsi Men is able to take advantage of the corrupt regime and have that heroic brother sent far, far away, while he continues to enjoy his wives and lifestyle. Beiles simplified and improved upon his translation, removing tedious interviews with court officials and drawing out some of the more intimate scenes. The work is also known, in English, as "Golden Lotus,""The Love Pagoda,""The Six Wives of Hsi Men," etc...

Sinclair Beiles, Sacred Fix, Cold Turkey Press, 1975.

Sinclair Beiles was a South African beat poet and editor for Maurice Girodias at the Olympia Press in Paris. He developed along with William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin the cut-up technique of writing poetry and literature.Beiles was involved with American beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Brion Gysin, and Burroughs at the legendary Beat Hotel in Paris. The photographer Harold Chapman recorded this period in his book "The Beat Hotel" (Gris Banal, 1984). He co-authored "Minutes to Go with Burroughs, Gysin and Corso" (Two Cities Editions, 1960). Beiles helped edit Burroughs'"Naked Lunch."

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Sinclair Beiles, Ashes of Experience, Wurm Publication, 1969.

Sinclair Beiles worked in Paris as chief editor for publisher Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press. He established links with the American beat generation of writers, particularly Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs, and they collaborated on the legendary collection of Dadaist cut-ups, Minutes to go. When the Paris scene fell apart in the early sixties, he left for Greece. In 1969 Beiles published a volume of poetry, Ashes of experience. This volume, largely written during his stay in Greece, was his first substantial publication.

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Classic asylum repertoire, containing a variety of notes, verses, letters and itineraries, written, according to Beiles, in a two-week manic episode and only the surviving notes of his original manuscript, which Beiles explains in the Preface.

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In a limited first edition of only 36 copies, Bone Hebrew contains poems, letters, and drawings by Sinclair Beiles, tributes to and memories of Beiles by Heathcote Williams, Lilliane Lijn, and Yannis Livadas, photographs and artwork, all lovingly compiled and edited by Beiles’s friend Gerard Bellaart. Bone Hebrew is a beautiful tribute to the mad and lost poet from South Africa.

“But, despite all this, the sad, mad and bruised old mind that was Sinclair Beiles was at root the mind of a natural ecstatic, a luftmensch, of the kind that society is always inclined to punish for one reason or another, which is why unreason is sometimes such an attractive escape route…” (Heathcote Williams)

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In The Idiot’s Voice Cold Turkey Press brings together poems, artwork, and a letter by Beiles from the Cold Turkey Press archives. In this selection of works, to which a couple of photos were added, Gerard Bellaart pays tribute to his friend Sinclair Beiles.

“…it’s tempting to think, as just intimated, that Sinclair was perhaps also privately haunted by some dark demons buried deep in his DNA, the dybbuks and golems of the shtetl which no one would ever be able to do anything about (and Sinclair must certainly have tried – he ran through psychiatrists like boxes of Kleenex).” –Heathcote Williams.

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In 1972 Skotnes illustrated Tales by Sinclair Beiles. This was his first attempt at book illustration – followed in 1975 by the illustration of Mhudi by Sol Plaatje.
Poems by Sinclair Beiles; foreword by Stephen Gray; with six woodcuts printed from the original blocks by Cecil Skotnes.

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Sinclair Beiles: A Man Apart

Who Was Sinclair Beiles?
The following is an excerpt from Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska, Who Was Sinclair Beiles?, published in 2009 by Dye Hard Press. The book contains interviews and essays that create a portrait of Sinclair Beiles, the South African poet who worked for Olympia Press, helped to editNaked Lunch, and collaborated with William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Gregory Corso on the first cut-up book,Minutes to Go.

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