jack-adellefoley.com/
Jack Foley’s autobiography begins, “What is a life but stories?” The stories collected here are not his life but a fantastic consciousness in which he is as lost as anyone. Foley writes what he does not know; he writes what he can imagine. The dead sprout up here as easily as leaves of grass. These stories manifest “the strangeness and the power of poetry":
“His friend had gone. They had embraced, exchanged good-byes. Michael had said, You know, the trouble with me is that I can only be certain I’m alive when I’m in the midst of a crisis. I manufacture them, I suppose. The words stayed in Abraham’s mind: certain I’m alive. It was then that he remembered. Michael was not alive. He had been dead for several weeks. He remembered the letter, Dear Abraham, it is with great pain that we tell you…. Michael had been buried in six feet of ground, he had been at the funeral himself. How could he have forgotten that?”
Stylistically the stories range widely—some are comic, some bring tears. All plunge us into the enigma of the human heart. In a poem about a Christmas tree, Foley writes of
“Jack Foley continues to grow and surprise. Add to his accomplishments in poetry, criticism, literary scholarship, and radio promotion of poetry and poets, this small, brilliant collection of tales, short plays and occasional prose pieces. Foley’s unique combination of insight, originality, erudition, and humanity, combined with a hitherto unsuspected flair for story-telling, are in full display here—from a bittersweet faux Irish fable to a tongue-only-partly-in-cheek apologia for the Australian literary hoax ‘Ern Malley’ (the intellectual’s J.T. Leroy), from a purgatorial comedy of family manners to a Shavian satire full of pith ‘and vinegar,’ set in Hell and starring the Devil and G. B. Shaw himself, to the collection’s eponymous masterpiece, an arabesque from a 21st century Scheherazade. The book is a bracing pleasure.” — Christopher Bernard



O Powerful Western Star: Poetry & Art in California, Pantograph Press, 2000.

This large-format book, which comes with a CD, is full of rich insight into San Franciscos's literary culture. Well-known as the host of KPFA's literary radio show "Cover to Cover," author Jack Foley has lived in the Bay Area for nearly four decades, and his historical, critical, visionary, and poetic observations are born of personal involvement as much as active research. The essays, talks, and interviews of O POWERFUL WESTERN STAR are introduced by Dana Gioia.


"Jack Foley's O Powerful Western Star is not only an engrossing and original book. It is also for Californians--a necessary one. Foley's collection ranks high among the few serious investigations ever written of San Francisco literary culture. It is, however, by no means a conventional study. O Powerful Western Star is by turns historical, critical, philosophical, visionary, and poetic. It is also often autobiographical. Foley has lived in the Bay Area for nearly four decades, and his insights grow from personal involvement as well as active research. Literary criticism is rarely so intellectually wide-ranging, imaginatively suggestive, or unabashedly personal . . ." --Dana Gioia, former head of the National Endowment for the Arts

"Foley is doing great things in articulating the poetic consciousness of San Francisco"—Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Foley's Books: California Rebels, Beats & Radicals (A companion volume to O Powerful Western Star.) Pantograph Press, 2000.

A companion volume to Foley's O POWERFUL WESTERN STAR, this book contains reviews and articles on a variety of people, all stemming from Foley's many years of writing and thinking about poetry, Beats, rebels, and radicals. "Literary criticism is rarely so intellectually wide-ranging, imaginatively suggestive, or unabashedly personal"—Dana Gioia

Jack: Books & CDs

Jack: Short Poems

Jack: Long Poems

Jack: More Long Poems

Jack: Choruses

Jack: Short Stories

Jack: Essays

Jack: Reviews

Jack: Plays

Jack: Origins of Poetry

Visions & Affiliations: A California Literary Time Line 1940-2005

Autobiography

Irish I's

Lyrics and Light Verse

Eileen Battersby, Teethmarks on My Tongue, Dalkey Archive Press, 2016.



This most unusual coming-of-age novel with its impressive characterization, humor and vivid sense of place takes its clever, if barely street-wise and increasingly obsessive, teenaged narrator on a physical as well as psychological journey towards an astute, hard fought, and deserved, maturity.


“This is the whole world of horses, of Americans in Europe, of love and laughter and tragedy, told with brio and complete mastery. The heroine is compelling, delightful―and unique! The passion of this novel is expressed through its expert construction." (Edmund White, Huffington Post)

"Competitive rider, aspiring physicist, brilliant and pertinacious teenager: Helen Stockton Defoe takes her place among literature's unforgettable deadpan narrators. . . . A perceptive, keenly intelligent bildungsroman, well marbled with dark humor, about inhabiting one's own life, body, and emotions despite upbringing and uncertainty." (Starred Review, Kirkus Reviews)

"A remarkably accomplished work." (Irish Times)




I WAS AT BOARDING SCHOOL with a gangly, bespectacled girl nicknamed Horsey. When we were in a particularly friendly mood, we simply called her “Horse.” She didn’t seem to mind — she assumed the name referred to her passion for stables and riding. But it was more a reflection of her demeanor, the way she walked with equine purpose, neck extended and eyes blinkered. Occasionally she snorted when something startled or amused her. To be honest, I don’t recall ever having a full conversation with Horsey. She was given to pronouncements that bewildered me, and when I think of her now, I see her peering into the middle distance, mumbling something I don’t quite catch and probably wouldn’t understand. She was the class nerd — both a gifted poet and a budding scientist — while I was the class show-off: thin on talent, big on melodrama. Horsey stayed in the background, not quite friendless but surely a loner. She gave the impression that she preferred her own company to that of giggly adolescents. We never teased or taunted her. Perhaps this was because of her extraordinary height or the soft certainty with which she spoke, or the fact that while we agonized over our budding breasts and mysteries that could happen “down there,” Horsey wrote poems to Nature. She lived on another, calmer planet, and part of me envied that.
I haven’t thought of Horsey in 40 years — not until I started reading Eileen Battersby’s debut novel, Teethmarks on My Tongue. She came to mind as soon as I met the novel’s teenage protagonist, who goes by the lofty name of Helen Stockton Defoe. Like my boarding school cohort, Helen is horse-crazy, solitary, and blessed with a brilliant mind. She is also both socially awkward and garrulous, lacking the antennae to notice that her fact-filled pontifications induce glazed eyes. To be honest, the prospect of 400 pages in Helen’s company without the reprieve of chapter breaks — there is almost no white space in this book — left me wondering if I had that kind of fortitude.
But after the first page I suspected I was in it for the long haul. The fact is, Battersby — a literary critic for The Irish Times with several awards under her belt — has brought us a thoroughly original narrator: a pedant and self-proclaimed prig who sweeps the reader along by sheer force of her quirky insights, deadpan humor, and disarming honesty.
The story gets off to a dramatic start. Helen’s mother has just been murdered outside a department store in Richmond, Virginia, by a deranged lover. The crime was caught on camera, and Helen watches the footage on television. She doesn’t scream or cry, as one might expect, but watches the event unfold with the same keen observation and mild interest with which she approaches all of life:
Mayhem, that word, kept dancing in my brain. My only clear response was … mayhem. Only I couldn’t visualize the word; I had forgotten how it looked written down. Then I noticed the white dress and it was slowly filling up with red, as the woman on the television in a slow motion free fall, dropped the big fancy box she had been carrying even though it seemed so light and it drifted on the air, weightless.
And moments later:
So many bullets; most likely six. Did I count? Perhaps? I’d like to think I didn’t … It takes six shots to empty a gun, but she was dead and all with the very first one.
Even after the shock of it, her mother’s murder evokes in Helen little more than muted regret. “I felt real sorry for Mother,” she says, “and I wished I’d known her better.” She recognizes this isn’t normal, and worries that she might have inherited the same detachment that she finds abhorrent in her father. “We three had shared a fine house,” she says, “but we were not a family. Not out of ill will, just ill timing, ill fitting.”
She goes on to describe their household as:
Three loners who just happened to coexist in our particular solar system without forming a unit; Mother had not understood what she was entering into when she married Father. And Mother’s little ramshackle world of nervous smiles and sentiment and pretty clothes did not include being a wife or a mother, Father had noted that and did not forgive her for it.
After an uncomfortable funeral, Helen returns to her pampered daily life on the estate, where her veterinarian father keeps thoroughbred horses and treats her with amused aloofness. Despite large teeth and mismatched eyes that her mother once said “absolutely ruin your face,” life for Helen is easy and full of pleasures: learning to ride a bad-tempered gelding named Galileo, studying the night sky through one of her telescopes, listening to her prized collection of classical music, eating enormous quantities of cakes and pies made by the grimly dedicated housekeeper, Mrs. Faulkner.
It takes another death — this time of a horse — to seriously fracture the household and send Helen on the odyssey that forms the bulk of the book. The stableman whom she adores disappears in a fit of grief; her father, too, is heart-broken at the loss of his brave, arthritic horse. This is the first time Helen has heard her father use the word “love,” and suddenly he appears human to her. But not for long. His bereavement quickly turns to bitterness — and what better target for his dark mood than the unsuspecting Helen. In short order, he robs her of the two main certainties of her young life: he ridicules her ambitions to become a scientist, and sells Galileo, informing her that he wasn’t her horse in the first place. Helen swallows her violent thoughts — “I longed to smash his glasses and grind them into his eyeballs.” Instead, she stares into her father’s fish tank and soothes herself by imagining her favorite painting: Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich, the high priest of German Romanticism.
It’s a peculiar response, even for a confessed oddball, until we see the painting through her eyes: a man gazing into a fog-drenched valley surveying the distance he’s traveled, or the journey ahead of him. Helen reflects on it and says, “Yes that’s me.”
In many ways, it is. She is standing on a summit of sorts, at the end of high school with her future shrouded in mist. She decides that, like Friedrich’s wanderer, she has to set out alone. She buys a first-class ticket to Europe with her prize money from a science project and is on her way.
Battersby divides this coming-of-age novel into four parts, each set in a different place. The first is on Helen’s father’s estate in Virginia, followed by sojourns in Paris, the Loire Valley, and, finally, Germany. Helen is an opinionated traveler, not above judging a city by the quality of its hot chocolate, to which she is addicted. She throws barbs at Parisians — “a tribe of intolerant egotists” — and laments the “canyon-wide gulf” between speaking French at her school in Richmond and “attempting to address the natives.” In Paris — the strongest of the European sections — she fixates on the Louvre and spends most of her time looking at its paintings of horses, buying horse postcards to send to her one and only friend in the United States, and drinking endless cups of cocoa. When she does have an evening out, it is with a man who turns out to be mentally unsound, not to mention a thief and a would-be rapist. Helen is a hopeless innocent and knows it, and she reports her experience with wry exactness.
But for all the adventures in each of the locations, it is Helen’s inner journey that carries the novel — a search for self, but also for love. She finds it in an old, cloudy-eyed, deaf dog with a squashed-in face who seems abandoned, or lost. For the first time, Helen has something of her own to love, and Hector, as she calls him, becomes her charge, propelling her to leave Paris and seek refuge on a horse farm in the Loire Valley.
The place is magnificent and charming, with a turreted chateau, an old stone farmhouse, and a drawbridge over a moat. On these idyllic grounds, Helen has a brief affair. We are told that she has found her perfect match, and yet the relationship seems more one of friendship than passion. It certainly lacks the ardor that Helen bestows on her dog, as she does here, for example:
Hector’s fur smelled of fresh-baked cookies. It was warm and helped me gather my thoughts as we sat on the mattress, me holding him close, on my lap, his paws in my hands, my knees drawn up as if forming a protective buffer around him. Us alone; us together. He gazed into my face. I wondered what he could see of me.
The final section of the novel is set largely in Germany, and it is the darkest. Helen is soul-weary and full of despair, and her own grief merges with the pain she sees in Germany — in the bullet holes in its buildings, in the ruins of a church, in the fear and dreariness that pervades East Berlin. (The novel is set in 1980s, before the demolition of the Berlin Wall.)
She is on a quest to see the paintings of her hero, Caspar David Friedrich, and in particular to find the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. When she finally stands before the original, she wonders:
What was going through the mind of the wanderer as he gazed out over the abyss? His life, his future … eternity, or was he just realizing how far he had climbed?
It is, of course, Helen’s climb that we have followed for the last 400 pages, and now that she has met her alter ego, surely her pilgrimage is complete. After all, she has come so far, and is a changed person who can now see her father and her old self clearly:
Father placed too high a value on intelligence and only existed through ideas and history the way I used to. But I had discovered how to love and how to feel and that it hurt for sure, no denying, but at least I was capable of loving.
But there is a final twist that the author has in store for us, and it’s head-snapping. Battersby clearly enjoys making sharp turns in plot, sometimes at the risk of straining credibility. The bigger challenge of the novel, however, is following Helen’s digressions about art, classical music, horses, literature, and whatever fact she is compelled to share. “Facts, facts, facts,” she says at one point, “as always, historical detail, enter the class nerd.” She just can’t help herself, but that is part of her charm. Battersby offers us an entertaining ride with an extraordinary narrator who is both eagle-eyed onlooker and the main act. - Jean Hey   https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-wanderers-journey-on-eileen-battersbys-teethmarks-on-my-tongue/




Competitive rider, aspiring physicist, brilliant and pertinacious teenager: Helen Stockton Defoe takes her place among literature's unforgettable deadpan narrators like Meursault and Oskar Matzerath.
In this first novel by Battersby (Ordinary Dogs: A Story of Two Lives, 2011, etc.), the literary correspondent for the Irish Times, Helen lives a charmed if lonely life of elite Southern privilege on her family's Richmond estate. Living amid her veterinarian father's thoroughbred-filled stables, she is kindly treated by her classmates but mostly friendless, wanting for nothing but emotionally disconnected from her arrogant, brooding father and frivolous, detached mother. When her mother is publicly shot by her crazed lover, Helen joins her father, who, like her, values animal companionship over human, in shrugging with bewilderment—and a touch of indifference—at her mother's violent and ignoble death. Helen is largely content to tend to her passions, science, art, and horses, until her father's beloved racehorse dies, leaving him awash in the bitterness and grief that failed to appear after his wife's murder; he denounces serious and disciplined Helen as a mere dilettante, bound not for a life of invention and discovery as the scientist she has always dreamed of becoming but that of a historian, an eternal observer. In disgust, she flees to Paris but, after a perilous incident with a loathsome stranger, regrets having chosen a city she'd never much cared about over Berlin, a place better suited to her character. Helen is saved from mounting self-loathing, despair, and aimlessness by an elderly lost dog who "wail[s] like a Confederate widow" and gives her a renewed sense of purpose. Her mission, to stay in Europe long enough to find a way to bring Hector back home to Richmond to die, leads her to a training yard in Amboise and to true passion, love, and sorrow.
A perceptive, keenly intelligent bildungsroman, well marbled with dark humor, about inhabiting one's own life, body, and emotions despite upbringing and uncertainty.  - Kirkus Reviews


But what saves Helen, a spoilt American teenage horse-mad nerd, obsessed with the solar system, is her growing self-awareness. Set in Richmond, Virginia, where her remote father is a leading equine vet and horse owner, Helen is no southern belle.
This oddity is androgynous, has two different coloured eyes, and relates more readily to animals than humans.
As well as riding horses, she likes nothing better than peering through her telescope from her comfortable bedroom. Helen sees the murder on TV. It attracts media attention — but you wonder where the novel can go after such a dramatic start.
But it’s a good if rather extreme device for revealing Helen’s lack of emotional engagement, as she describes how “a cold helpless feeling” came over her after witnessing the crime.
Helen is conscious that she and her father “were equally repressed” and utterly self-reliant.
However, it becomes very clear that while Helen is her own woman, she is not at all streetwise.
When her father sells Galileo (the name Helen gave a difficult horse that she looked after), she is bereft and cuts loose, going to France, the country to which Galileo has been sold. She is nicely set up having won $10,000 in the State science prize.
Alone in a Paris restaurant one evening, Helen is picked up and plied with booze by a ‘struggling artist’ called Marc. What follows is a description of utter sordidness.
Helen is lucky to escape from this odious man. She was naive enough to think that he was concerned about her welfare when she vomited all over herself and gratefully went to a ‘party’ with him where he promised he would wash her clothes and tend to her.
Animals turn out to be a safer bet. An ailing dog attaches himself to Helen. She christens him Hector after the Trojan prince in Greek mythology. And he turns out to be a trusty companion that gives Helen a purpose.
She gets a job in a large stable in Ambiose in the Loire Valley. And it is there that this girl, given to “daydreaming about horses or space and just living in my head” learns what it is like to love and to lose.
Later, having left her job, Helen makes a pilgrimage to East Berlin to see the work of the German Romantic painter, Caspar David Friedlich. She credits this artist with helping her to understand what it is to be human.
And that is what this odyssey is all about. The physical journey that Helen undertakes is mirrored by her spiritual and emotional awakening.
Helen’s cold father, with whom she has very little connection, looms large in her consciousness.
He stole her dream of being a scientist, having told her that she’s more interested in the narrative story of the scientists she admires than their discoveries.
He has her marked down as a historian, a lesser profession, he implies.
This enjoyable novel ends, however, on a strange note. But it has a curious aesthetic symmetry about it, a karmic quality that sees Helen coming to an understanding of her mother and feeling sympathy towards her and her need for emotional drama. - Colette Sheridan http://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/artsfilmtv/books/book-review-teethmarks-on-my-tongue-445510.html


Eileen Battersby is best known for her championing of fiction from outside the Anglophone world and for the bracing honesty of her literary criticism. She has been known to ruffle some well-groomed Irish reputations. Her first novel is quite the heavyweight at almost 400 pages but despite being replete with references to literature and high art it canters along in an entertaining way. It's a classic Bildungsroman. We follow the emotional education of the narrator Helen Stockton Defoe (a resonant surname for its solitary heroine). In the character of Helen, Battersby has created a memorably monstrous prig. While her classmates were listening to Dylan and Neil Young she was listening to Bach and Schubert. She sneers at their trite music essays which are applauded enthusiastically "While my celebration of Bach's pioneering use of counterpoint ...might not have been." Following a squalid sexual encounter in Paris our brave heroine bemoans her fate: "How easily he had fooled me, the girl voted by my school as most likely to win the Nobel Prize". Her redeeming feature is her occasional expression of rueful self-knowledge: "even a prig like me couldn't miss this".
Helen grows up in a "fine residence", complete with stables, in Richmond, Virginia. Her austere and intellectual father is a distinguished vet who breeds horses. Her mother is a shallow, social-climber who, Helen tells us,  "Father regarded as a domestic pet". Helen has little affection for either of them. She is offended by her father's "sneering smirk, his pompous voice" and by her mother's persistent slights about her appearance. She was born with different coloured eyes and her mother once informed her that: "Those eyes, they absolutely ruin your face". The story opens with the mother being shot by a spurned lover. It doesn't seem to have much impact on the impregnably self-absorbed Helen, apart from her having to suffer the tedium of the funeral and watch the female mourners flirt with her father.
Helen runs off to Paris after two traumatic events. Her father sells Galileo, her favourite horse (not the Galileo that is the corner stone of the Coolmore stud), and Billy Bob, her Man Friday at the stables, disappears. In Paris she spends most of her time at the Louvre giving us the benefit of her wide knowledge of European art. Then, following her sexual misadventure, when she is at her lowest ebb, she meets Hector: an old, half-blind, scruffy and incontinent dog. She is immediately smitten and touchingly indicates what's at the heart of her plight - the absence of any love in her life:  "Most of all he really liked me". From then on Hector is the centre of her universe. She can't return to the USA because of quarantine restrictions so she decides to make her life in France. An unlikely encounter at Longchamp leads her to a job at Monsieur Gallay's racehorse training establishment in the Loire Valley and to her first real romantic encounter (not counting Hector).
Ms. Battersby knows her way around a tack room and is familiar with the routines and equipment associated with riding. But she clearly knows little about the world of horse racing and the book contains a number of howlers. A race horse can be a gelding or a colt but not both at the same time. Horses have prep races or trials but not practices. A jockey that rides at Longchamp (a flat racing course) is never going to ride in the King George VI (a steeplechase) at Kempton. Also, her heroine's throwaway comment about Nijinsky is just plain wrong. She claims he was "too high strung to settle in an atmosphere as carnival-like as that of Longchamp on Arc day". Nijinsky won the Derby at Epsom - a far more carnival-like milieu. He probably lost the Arc because of a very hard race in the St. Leger not long before. But these are quibbles about detail that will just bother racing buffs like me and leave most readers unmoved.
Helen's rural idyll continues for a while before a series of tragedies sends her off on the road again - alone and bereft. She heads for Germany in pursuit of the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and with thoughts of suicide swirling through her mind. She identifies with the character in Friedrich's famous painting "Wanderer over a Sea of Fog".  She even takes a risky journey into East Germany (it's set in the mid-80s) to find the artist's grave. Her downward spiral is arrested by an event which comes as a major surprise not only to our heroine but to every reader of the book. You can make up your own mind whether it's a wonderful coup de théâtre or a ludicrous non-sequitur.
- https://ardmayle.blogspot.hr/2016/12/review-of-teethmarks-on-my-tongue-by.html











Born in California, Eileen Battersby is a graduate of University College Dublin. An Irish Times staff arts journalist and literary reviewer, she has won the National Arts Journalist of the Year award four times and was National Critic of the Year in 2012. Second Readings: From Beckett to Black Beauty was published in 2009. Ordinary Dogs – A Story of Two Lives was published by Faber in 2011. Teethmarks on My Tongue is her first novel.

Andrei Bely, Petersburg, Trans. by David McDuff,  Penguin Classics; Reprint ed., 2012)   /   Trans. by John Elsworth, pushkin press, 2009. / Trans. by Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad, Indiana University Press, 1979.
http://petersburg.berkeley.edu/
read it at Google Books


"The most important [...] Russian novel of the 20th century."
-The New York Times Book ReviewConsidered Andrei Bely's masterpiece, Petersburg, is a pioneering modernist novel, ranked in importance alongside Ulysses, The Metamorphosis, and In Search of Lost Time, that captures Russia's capital during the short, turbulent period of the first socialist revolution in 1905. Exploring themes of history, identity, and family, it sees the young Russian Nikolai Ableukhov chased through the misty Petersburg streets, tasked with planting a bomb intended to kill a government official-his own father. Bely draws on news, fashion, psychology, and ordinary people to create a distinctive and timeless literary triumph.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.


In a chapter of his memoir, Speak, Memory, Nabokov tells of his nocturnal wanderings through St Petersburg. Real darkness and artificial light conspire to make foreign his surroundings. “Solitary street lamps were metamorphosed into sea creatures with prismatic spines”; “various architectural phantoms arose with silent suddenness”; “great, monolithic pillars of polished granite (polished by slaves, repolished by the moon, and rotating smoothly in the polished vacuum of the night) zoomed above us.” The whole scale is recalibrated, all perspective redrawn, but the young Nabokov laps it up, feeling “a cold thrill” and “Lilliputian awe” as he stops to contemplate “new colossal visions” rising up before him. He is thrown by these hall-of-mirrors distortions but not entirely surprised to be so—after all, he is in “the world’s most gaunt and enigmatic city.”
This was 1915 and Nabokov was not the only writer to consider the city enigmatic. One year later, Andrei Bely’s Petersburg was published, a novel which possesses stranger, more fantastic distortions. The characters in Bely’s book are too flummoxed by the city and intoxicated by its swirling yellow mists to share Nabokov’s thrill. Their dazedness hardens into fear, and the reader is thrilled (and admittedly flummoxed, too) by the fecundity of surrealness on show and the sheer exceptionality of such a book coming from such a country at such a time. Nabokov himself approved, declaring Petersburg one of the greatest novels of the 20th-century.
Andrei Bely was born in Moscow in 1880 as Boris Nikolayevich Bugayev. He studied mathematics at Moscow University but realized his real interest lay in writing essays and poems. His work began to appear in print in 1902, poetry collections and prose “symphonies” that belonged to the burgeoning Symbolist tradition. Russian Symbolism, modeled on its French equivalent, sought to amalgamate literary genres, and its practitioners successfully fused poetry and prose into poetic prose. Despite their radical innovations, or precisely because of them, the Symbolists were considered scandalous by purists still grounded in 19th-century realism, forcing Boris Bugayev to become Andrei Bely to spare his distinguished father’s blushes. He left Russia in 1906 as the political situation worsened, settling in Munich. When he returned to his homeland he was reinvigorated and ready to utilise his pent-up reserves of literary energy. He started tentatively, his first novel, The Silver Dove (1909), being a conventional tale about a town’s religious sect and an outsider’s reaction to it. Believing the novel to be unfinished he set about writing a sequel, but during its composition it acquired new characters, a more complex plot, and grew into a thoroughly original work of art. The result was Petersburg. Bely remained prolific until his early death in 1934, producing poems, essays on culture, literature and philosophy and, in the 1920s and 1930s, a series of novels under the collective title Moscow that were never completed.
But it is Petersburg for which he is best remembered. It appeared in English in 1959 and has stayed in print ever since. This Penguin reissue features David McDuff’s masterful 1995 translation and a new introduction by Adam Thirlwell. Both offer loving praise for their subject, praise which has been slow in coming in Bely’s native land. Considered decadent by the Soviets, the novel first appeared with major cuts and was later banned for being incommensurate to the idealised standards of Socialist Realism. Bely suffered at the hands of the critics, too; the Russian Formalists, though grudgingly commending his inventiveness, essentially deemed the Symbolists en masse irrelevant to the study and advancement of literature. Bely was only properly rehabilitated in the ‘80s and is now rightly lauded as one of the last century’s great literary talents.
But Bely makes the reader work. Petersburg has frequently been compared to Ulysses, which both helps and muddies the water. It takes place in 1905, a time of war, social unrest and the constant threat of revolution. The main strand concerns Apollon Apollonovich and his son, Nikolai (two possible antecedents of Bloom and Stephen; in addition Apollonovich has been cuckolded and jilted by a wife, Anna Petrovna, who, like Molly, reappears at the end). Nikolai, a student who has got caught up in a terrorist organization bent on political change, is coerced into taking a time bomb and assassinating a senior government senator. Through Sofya Petrovna, the source of his infatuation, and furtive dealings with shadowy conspirators, both he and the reader learn that the bomb’s target is to be his father.
Bely tracks Nikolai’s anguish and ambivalence over the course of a few days and almost six hundred pages. But Nikolai is only one cog in Bely’s huge wheel. Petersburg itself is the book’s main character, and Bely fleshes out what plot there is with history, geography, topography, and a multitude of voices. Apollonovich is borne along in his carriage and catches the stubby, interweaving chatter from the pedestrians below. “The gossip of the Nevsky began to plait itself,” Bely informs us as he brings the city’s main thoroughfare alive. Like Joyce, Bely has a love of language, subordinating the telling of a tale to the texture of that telling. Thus he plays with language, and on practically every page he coins neologisms, plies us with puns, coaxes words, bends them, fashions them to sing and dance for the reader.
And this is vital for Bely intended his novel to be musical, a compendium of voices and sounds. In this way he is again like Joyce, giving us the whole picture of his depicted city, including its commotion. Background noise is pressed to the foreground: songs and laughter, transliterated coughs and yawns, barroom hubbub and protesters’ chants (“Revolution . . . Evolution . . . Proletariat . . . Strike . . .”). We are informed that pavements “whispered” and “rural distances will be muttering” and gladly accept it. As we would expect from an early modernist work, dissonance alternates regularly with consonance, and the novel is all the more exciting for it. Winnowing insidiously throughout the book is a peculiar “ooo-ooo-ooo” noise that is dismissed as neither a factory siren nor the wind. It is explained as simply “this October song of the year nineteen hundred and five” and is either menacing or jubilant, depending on which events it is brought in to underscore. The acoustics in Bely’s world are so good that even silence is audible: “In the vestibule the doorbell began to tinkle: it tinkled sporadically; silence spoke between the two jolts of tinkling; like a memory—a memory of something forgotten, familiar.” (And we can make another connection between Bely and Nabokov here: “memory,” like silence, “spoke.”)
Bely influenced many writers of the next decade with his novel stylistics and blurring of boundaries: however, he eschewed the stream of consciousness that would later be developed by Joyce and Woolf, instead preferring the description of his characters’ thought patterns as they crystallise and take shape. He leads us most often into Nikolai’s head, his feelings, mostly towards his father, in constant flux. Nikolai’s thoughts are like “flocks of frenzied crows, frightened by a shock,” chaotically circling this way and that “until the next shot”; his worries make him forgetful, prompting him to lose his thread mid-conversation and then try “to catch one of his own thoughts that had run away.” Then there is this section regarding Nikolai’s handler, one of the revolutionaries:
Aleksandr Ivanovich continued to drink cognac. The alcohol worked with systematic gradualness; after vodka (wine was beyond his means) there followed a uniform effect: an undular line of thoughts became a zigzag one; its zigzags intersected; if he went on drinking, the line of thoughts would disintegrate into a series of fragmentary arabesques, brilliant for those who thought it; he had only to sober up a little for the salt of brilliance to vanish off somewhere; and the brilliant thoughts seemed simply a muddle, for at those moments thought indubitably ran ahead of both tongue and brain, beginning to revolve with frantic speed.
Vodka seems to engender thought. In an earlier passage we are told of the beneficent quick-fix effect produced by this “astringent, colourlessly shining poison”: “the oesophagus and the stomach lick its vengeful fires with a dry tongue, while the consciousness, detaching itself from the body, like the handle on the lever of a machine, starts to revolve around the whole organism, making everything incredibly clear . . . for one instant only.” Aleksandr Ivanovich Dudkin doesn’t need alcohol to think, or even an alert and cooperative consciousness—“he did not think—the thoughts thought themselves”—and can skulk and scheme with the city’s other raznochintsy (non-gentry intellectuals) while on autopilot.
Also, as is true to life, Bely’s characters occasionally think alike—we see similar thoughts in their heads at different moments in the novel. Apollonovich calls the scuttling people on Nevsky Prospect “the human myriapod,” and emphasises both their quantity and multifariousness by enumerating their many different hats. Later, Dudkin comes to the same conclusion for himself, unprompted, when he sinks into “the blackly flowing mass like a grain of roe” and becomes one of them: “The same thing happened to his stubborn thought; it instantly stuck to an alien thought, inaccessible to the mind, the thought of an enormous, many-legged creature that was running along.” First we get the allusion, then Bely allows their thoughts to coalesce: “There were no people on Nevsky Prospect; but a creeping, wailing myriapod was there.”
Bely describes Dudkin’s ordeal as “bathing in the mental collective.” As with many of Bely’s ornate terms, the meaning here is two-pronged. True, Dudkin has to share mental airwaves with the jabbering masses and their “flowing stream of nonsense,” who are jostling for room to move and room to think. But as with the second-hand usage of “myriapod,” such mental-sharing becomes even more intimate when the same thoughts overlap and become replicated realizations. We could scoff at Bely here for resorting to coincidence to convey his trickery, until we remember that Petersburg, though vividly brought to life, is still swaddled in unreality. Bely’s safeguard is his Symbolist stance, which affords him carte blanche to befuddle the reader with his meandering plot and distorted reality while prioritizing the novel’s style and tone. Once Dudkin wrests himself from “the moving tide of abundance” in order to think straight, he is out of the frying-pan and into the fire, for this is a big, brash Bely novel and characters can only hope to swap one kind of abundance for another.
“Abundance,” key to Petersburg, crops up in an entry in Bely’s memoirs. On the topic of gathering material for the novel, he admits to having “invented nothing, made no contribution of my own; I simply listened, looked and read; while the material was given to me quite independently of me, in an abundance that exceeded my ability to contain it.” It is exactly this abundance that makes Petersburg hard to summarize. Bely showers us with an abundance of the real—seemingly cramming in every geographical detail of the city—but he earns greater plaudits for using these strikingly real settings as stages on which to enact an abundance of absurd drama. Gogol used the city for many of his grotesquely comic tales and Bely continues the tradition by sprinkling the text with references to one of his literary heroes and updating and increasing the absurdity—doubly disorienting for being juxtaposed with real tension and real events from a particularly fraught time.
Bely even manages to be absurd when he is attempting verisimilitude. Apollonovich travels the streets in his carriage and finds the immaculate layout comforting, all rectilinear regularity and flawless symmetry. (Here is a customary Bely trope: the words in the above quotation that denote lines that help formulate Dudkin’s thoughts—undular, zigzag, arabesque—are re-deployed as symbols and recycled to delineate the city’s contours.) In contrast, Apollonovich hates the hodgepodge islands and its inhabitants, whom he believes are “neither human beings nor shadows.” (Unsurprisingly, the man who wants Apollonovich dead, Dudkin, lives on one such island and is therefore “a denizen of chaos.”) He sits ensconced in his carriage, bound by its perpendicular walls, and notes with satisfaction the cube-like houses, perfectly numerated, and the arrow-straight prospects and their parallel intersections. There are shapes before his eyes and behind them, for “he was in the habit of giving himself up for long periods of time to the insouciant contemplation of: pyramids, triangles, parallelepipeds, cubes, trapezoids.” But then Bely breaks off to go all out and dazzle us with a full-scale geometrical and metaphysical assault:
And now, as he looked pensively into that boundlessness of mists, the man of state suddenly expanded out of the black cube in all directions and soared above it; and he desired that the carriage should fly forward, that the prospects should fly towards him—prospect after prospect, that the whole spherical surface of the planet should be gripped by the blackish-grey cubes of the houses as by serpentine coils; that the whole of the earth squeezed by prospects should intersect the immensity in linear cosmic flight with rectilinear law; that the mesh of parallel prospects, intersected by a mesh of prospects, should expand into the abysses of outer space with the planes of squares and cubes: one square per man-in-the-street, that, that . . . After the line of all the symmetries it was the figure of the square that brought him the most calm.
For some this may be too hysterical—hyperbole strangling any imminent chuckles—but I would prefer to term it “exuberance,” which of course takes us back to Bely’s love of abundance. His streets are crammed with life but not as much as his sentences are stuffed with ideas. He may very well have “simply listened, looked and read” in terms of research but in doing so he has gorged on detail so as to force-feed every paragraph.
This early quotation works as a microcosm of the linguistic tricks displayed throughout the whole novel. It is lyrical and it is unreal (dare we say it is poetic nonsense?), leaving us marveling and scratching our head in equal measure. The repetition of words is crucial, as motifs are regularly churned and aggrandised into leitmotifs. Images change hands and serve new masters: the cube goes from describing the house to the carriage and then back to the house, this time clad in the original black of the carriage. For all its mock-seriousness it ends bathetically with a bump and in the form of one-liner. (Bely goes on to lampoon the senator further, informing us that despite the solace to be got from shapes, “he was seized by anxiety only when he contemplated the truncated cone.”) Finally, that “boundlessness of mists” serves as the springboard to Apollonovich’s dizzying head-trip, with apposite mind-expanding prose matching his out-of-body sensations. Suddenly we realize that Bely refuses to be hemmed in by Petersburg’s walls. He is keen to reconstruct the city but also to jettison it and take us far outside: first expanding out to cover Russia, from the encroaching waves of liberalism and progress from the West, to distant Manchuria (the arena of the war with Japan) and the threat of marauding Mongols from the East; and secondly, transcending all peripheries and leading both characters and reader beyond into bizarre new otherworldly dimensions. Only by centring on vastness can he fill it with his chosen abundance; and only by expanding can he succeed in dwarfing his characters, miniaturizing and floundering them by marooning them in “howling limitlessness.”
But we shouldn’t forget that his unending scope is still to be found within the borders of the city and the country. Apollonovich hurtles into “the infinity of the prospects,” and Nevsky Prospect, we are told, “had neither an end nor a beginning”—a playful reimagining of Gogol’s description of it as “the be-all and end-all.” However, not every inhabitant is happy with this wealth of living space. Perversely, for all the roominess on offer in the city, Bely’s main characters are a timid, claustrophobic bunch who are afraid to explore. The senator “feared spatial expanses” and feels the distance between his carriage door and the nearest wall can be calculated “in many millions of versts.” “Immeasurabilities” are anathema to this man who thrives on mutable, containable shapes and simple planes. Similarly, Dudkin fears the barrenness of the Yakutsk region (“the physical plain of a not so remote province has turned into a metaphysical plain of the soul”), and then speaks of how outer space “desperately plagues me,” even the “space” that is “my abode on Vasily Island: four perpendicular walls covered with wallpaper of a darkish yellow hue.” (These perpendicular walls imprison Dudkin while the perpendicular walls of Apollonovich’s carriage cocoon him.) When Dudkin views the city from the window of his garret he suffers from the same warped perspective as his adversary, the window being “a slit on to immensity.” In both characters’ defense, they have traversed the country and witnessed for themselves how “measurelessness flew: the Russian Empire.” But neither is at ease with this surrounding “immensity”—not like Conrad’s Razumov in Under Western Eyes, another book dealing with early 20th-century Russia, a character who is not unsettled by the “endless space and countless millions” in the night sky seeing as he is “a Russian who is born to an inheritance of space and numbers.”
* * * *
Bely was the greatest writer of Russian Symbolist prose and Petersburg remains the best example of how he could take an idea, turn it into a symbol, and insert it into his narrative. For any idea to become a symbol, repetition is key, but therein lies the rub: how to repeat and not grate? Bely’s trick is concealment. He buries his symbols in his texts like depth charges and, unlike Nikolai’s time bomb, which ticks incessantly until the close of the novel, has them explode when we encounter them, thrillingly, entertainingly. Thus “thunder” is spun through a variety of combinations: “a roulade of Chopin thundered,” the Nevsky strollers are “thunderous surf,” inflammatory headlines appear in “thunder-bearing newspapers” and “a carriage thundered . . . like blows of metal shattering life.” Several pages later “roulade” is recycled to describe a car’s engine, just like the house/carriage cubes we came across earlier. Other symbols are employed even more subtly, not exploding one after the other to prompt our recognition but gently rippling the text like skimmed stones.
Most plentiful, however, are colors; Petersburg is a canvas spattered with them, from the vibrant tones of local color that throw the city into stand-out relief to the allusive and metaphorical pigments that dot the narrative. One is prominent for being political: “the color red was, of course, an emblem of the chaos that was leading Russia to ruin”; red is revolutionary, and we learn that the senator “rushed like a bull at anything red.” Red also coats lights (“lamps that looked like bloodshot eyes”), a satirical journal that mocks Apollonovich, and “the bloodstained fields of Manchuria.” There is the red domino worn by a mysterious figure, Petersburg’s very own Scarlet Pimpernel, who turns up at masked balls and races around the city at night, and Bely ensures his pages are streaked in color with this phantom’s presence. Finally there are many crimson sunsets which at conclusive moments appear like a dropped curtain, bathing the whole city and seeping into its brickwork: “All the usual weights—both indentations and projections—were slipping away into a burning ardor,” to the extent that soon the “rust-red” Winter Palace “began to run violently with blood.”
Bely has as much fun with yellow—Dudkin’s nicotine-stained wallpaper, the murky Neva, the top-to-toe clothes of the agent provocateur, Lippanchenko—and as yellow is the predominant color of central Petersburg, from its grand residences to government buildings, there is often no avoiding it. There are uncomfortable undertones when we read of the color spreading and engulfing the country as a whole, not yellow architecture but that of the aforementioned “yellow hordes of Asiatics [who], having moved from their long-occupied places, will turn the fields of Europe crimson with oceans of blood.” Yellow and red work separately, Bely seems to be telling us, but a fusion of the two could have catastrophic consequences.
At its best, such a technique is effective. Each symbol or allegory, appearing and reappearing, essentially signposts the reader to something, be it a thought or a theme; or it is there as a descriptive device, a sprig of adjectival color decorating the fabric of the narrative, and one that can be relied on for the same purpose again and again. At its worst, it is style over substance, and one that can cloy. When Bely goes for word-for-word repetition at all-too regular intervals he unwittingly changes his modus operandi; instead of gently massaging out his meaning he opts for relentless, heavy-handed tapotement. We experience much the same as Dudkin when he is being harangued by Nikolai who
had long been beating his ear with words; but the passing words, flying into his ears like splinters, shattered the sense of the phrases; that was why Aleksandr Ivanovich found it hard to understand what was being repeated over and over again into his eardrum; into his eardrum idly, long-windedly, tormentingly, the drumsticks beat out a fine tattoo.
We are privy to the pestering violence but on the other hand don’t find it hard to understand what Bely is repeating.
Bely has the same kind of mixed success with puns. There is no denying that he is adept with such wordplay, but at times he seems unable to rein himself in. The result is impressive but excessive. Also, many puns fall flat, particularly those regularly spouted by Apollonovich who sees himself as a great punster. To be fair, this could be an intentional ploy of Bely’s: his bumbling old out-of-touch statesman firing off involuntary quips to overcompensate for his deathly dull senatorial duties. Or it could be a translation problem, with the humor unable to cross the cultural divide. One example concerns Apollonovich’s confusion between the term “apperception” and “pepper”—two words which, as David McDuff explains in his notes, sound remarkably similar in Russian. The pun evaporates in translation and must sound opaque and wearying to those fluent enough to tackle it in its original language. We could of course argue that no pun makes it in translation; Martin Amis, a huge enemy of them, claims they are the upshot of “an anti-facility: they offer disrespect to language, and all they manage to do is make words look stupid.” Bely justifies his actions in his 1909 essay, “The Magic of Words,” in which he describes how “it is better to fire rockets made of words aimlessly into the void than to fill the void with dust.” Bely wants to wow us with words, and he instils the same urge into Apollonivich (playing a name-game into the bargain: Apollonian meaning orderly, rational, self-disciplined). But ultimately it is irrelevant how they fail if the end product is not a rocket fizzing into the void but a downed and smouldering damp-squib.
But thankfully Bely’s artistic missteps are few. Petersburg brims with passages of awe-inspiring prose which don’t depend on linguistic frippery. “You ought to observe the verbal niceties” one lackey tells another with regard to the contents of a letter, but it might as well be a command from Bely to the reader to admire the contents of his novel as he unpacks them. He is marvelous on cityscape detail, ornate buildings, and statuary, but also the attendant minutiae. We learn that “A row of riverside street lamps dropped fiery tears into the Neva; its surface was burned through by simmering gleams.” He surprises us by minutely modulating stock phrases: when Dudkin bewails that “life was going up in price” we appreciate the switch from the more expected and thus more prosaic “cost of living.” The closest we come to romance in the novel is when he sketches Nikolai’s infatuation with Sofya Petrovna, but he tackles it on his own terms: Nikolai whispers his “unearthly confessions,” his “wheezing passions” to her, and “that was why incoherent whistlings sounded in her ears, while the crimson of the leaves chased beneath her feet the rustling alluvial deposits of words.” Then in a bravura display, Bely paints “a universe of strange manifestations” which drifts across Apollonovich’s consciousness every night before he falls asleep. We are even shown congeries of images that are shards of events which took place that day for the senator: “all the earlier inarticulacies, rustlings, crystallographic figures, the golden, chrysanthemum-like stars racing through the darkness on rays that resembled myriapods” (those infernal myriapods again).
This last example is where Bely truly shines. He can map the city, birth its people, layer its societal schisms, and portray its virtues and vices, from the defiant revolutionary spirit of the dispossessed workers to the all-pervading poshlost (crassness) of the bourgeoisie; but his genius lies in his ability to stay grounded in Petersburg while careering away from it. He calls Apollonovich’s pre-sleep hinterland “the senator’s second space,” one of many alternate realities in the novel. Bely’s forays into fantasia are intoxicating, a series of freewheeling ideas that feel effortlessly imagined and transcribed. Here he is markedly different from Joyce the perfectionist who labored to achieve his wonders (reputedly spending a whole day trying to craft one sentence).
* * * *
There is always the risk of generalising when attributing writers to literary groups, not to mention a great deal of brush-tarring, which damages greater writers and unfairly increases the stock of lesser ones. More peculiar, though, is the tendency to throw countrymen together under the atavistic assumption that similar roots and heritage automatically translate into similar artists. Out of all nationalities, it is Russian writers that we feel inclined to lump together most. Perhaps it is convenient to have these tortured, soulful people link arms and seek comradely solace together. Maybe there is something in the (little) water that unites them artistically in their plangent grief and wacky humor.
That said, with Bely there is a direct lineage that can be traced and which would be imprudent to ignore. Gogol begets Bely, who in turn sires Bulgakov, who gives rise to Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. Each writer implodes fictive conventions with their absurdities. (Isaac Babel remains only a distant relative because for all his far-out flourishes (his short story “The Journey” tells how “Nevsky Prospect flowed into the distance like the Milky Way”), his fiction leans more towards the fanciful than the absurd.) Bely makes constant reference to Pushkin, and a quotation from a poem serves as an epitaph to every chapter, but it is Gogol’s ghost that haunts Petersburg’s pages. Bely distends Gogol’s absurdities into wilder, bolder visions. In turn, Bulgakov’s giant black cat is prefigured in the marauding Bronze Horseman that terrorises St Petersburg in the apocalyptic finale and Petrushevskaya’s bleak and macabre little parables are at times a palimpsest on which we can trace remnants of Bely’s exemplary magic. All of these writers create baffled characters who have to pinch themselves to check they are not dreaming. Everywhere we find a mingling of dreams and daydreams. “Was this the influence of some nightmare, or a demon?” Gogol’s hero asks himself in his Petersburg tale “The Portrait,” before adding: “Was it the delirium of a fever or real life?” Bely responds by declaring “Petersburg is a dream.” Dudkin listens to Nikolai’s description of the dream that plagues him (“everything is what it is, and yet different”) and answers that “the more usual term is: pseudo-hallucination.” Nikolai responds like this: “?,” one of many such single question marks that litter the novel as mystified retorts. Shorn of words preceding them they look odd at first glance, but the more we read on the more we absorb and accept them as fitting rejoinders to even odder statements. We also end up siding with the characters in their perpetual incomprehension. How are we to separate the real from the unreal in a city whose streets “turn passers-by into shadows” but also “turn shadows into people”?
The natural offshoot of all this agonised grappling with absurdity is madness. We read as early as page ten that “in this [Apollonovich’s] house everyone became disconcerted.” This is Bely at his most ironic, for walls cannot confine the madness at work in the book. Conrad wrote in his essay, “Autocracy and War” (written in 1905, the year in which Petersburg is set) that “ill-omened” Russia is “the fantasy of a madman’s brain.” If madness played a role in St Petersburg’s conception then it is likely to have infused it, rendering it as “ill-omened” as the rest of the country. J.M. Coetzee fights for the other side in his novel The Master of Petersburg by having his fictional Dostoyevsky ruminate on his surroundings and the possible madness within him: “This is not a lodging-house of madness in which he is living, nor is Petersburg a city of madness.” In the middle stands Bely, countervailing normalcy with madness and then going off on dastardly riffs and blending the two. We revel in the resultant mayhem and conclude that his giddy synthesis has no geographic frontiers and can afflict one and all.
“Petersburg, Petersburg!” he proclaims at one juncture, breaking off the narrative to launch into one of these riffs. “Falling like fog, you have pursued me, too, with idle cerebral play: you are a cruel-hearted tormentor; you are an unquiet ghost.” It was always Bely’s intention to make his novel “cerebral,” a game that would divert and perplex his readers (and once again we are put in mind of Joyce, who stuffed Ulysses with enigmas so as to “keep the professors busy for centuries”). Petersburg is undeniably cerebral but Bely also appeals to our feelings, and we relish the atmosphere of Nietzschean nihilism together with the queasy uncertainty that accompanies drama unfolding while a time-bomb counts down. It was also Bely’s aim to make Petersburg part two of a trilogy, the third novel, never realized, called Nevidmyi Grad, “The Invisible City.” The title implies it was to be the antithesis of Petersburg, its subject bathed in ethereal swirls but also vividly, accurately visible. Bely’s seminal novel is a hymn to the city and an anthem for its country. However, in one curt line and a rare show of unambiguity, Bely tells us which place is more deserving of our worship: “beyond Petersburg there is—nothing.” - Malcolm Forbeshttp://quarterlyconversation.com/the-moving-tide-of-abundance-petersburg-by-andrei-bely

Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, first published in 1916, is one of those world masterpiece’s of literature that for whatever reason – general disinterest, lack of popular promotion, minimal amount of time for tackling large dense novels – is largely unknown in the United States. I consider myself to be an avid reader and I didn’t know about it – as I didn’t know about Machado de Assis or Lu Xun – until I came across it through the PopMatters books-available-for-review list.Bely is studied in Russian literature classes, but his relative unknown might have something to with being a modernist writer dwarfed by 19th century titans like Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy. Petersburg has been compared to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Though it takes place in a single city-as-character over roughly 24 hours, the comparison is a little slight.
But this novel does belong to the extraordinary flowering of ambitious modernist constructs that was happening in the arts at the beginning of the 20th century of which Ulysses was a part – books like Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americanand Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time -- and employs many of the same innovations in writing from structure to dialogue.
This year Pushkin Press has released a new translation by John Elsworth, first in the United Kingdom and now in the United States. I have no complaints about the actual translation, but it would be nice if an annotated edition of the text could be issued.
Though essentially universal in its themes, Bely’s writing is dense with references and unless you are overly familiar with the 1905 Russian Revolution, the Saint Petersburg Soviet, “The Queen of Spades” (the Pushkin short story and the Tchaikovsky opera), Zemvsto, the founding and general layout of the Saint Petersburg and its popular image in Russian writing, Russian politicians of the era, and the rise of bomb throwing terrorism you may find yourself reading it next to a web browser opened to Wikipedia, like I did. I don’t doubt that I missed much more and it would help to have a guide reveal the book’s many layers.

Within Bely’s maximalist writing lies a story that is at first brutally minimalistic. Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, the lead senator in the Duma, wakes up and goes to his office. His pampered son Nikolai is given a mysterious parcel by a revolutionary confidant Alexandr Ivanovich Dudkin.
Meanwhile a woman that Nikolai has a passive-aggressive non-relationship with, Sofia Petrovna Likhutina, is given a letter to pass on to him from a grotesque revolutionary leader name Lippanchenko. She does, to spite him. It tells Nikolai that he needs to kill his father with a time bomb that is contained within the parcel he was given by Dudkin. The ticking of the clock sets the final movements of the characters interactions, disastrous and combustive, towards the finale.
It seems to take forever for this plot and the characters to reveal themselves. Through the use of familiar melodramatic devices like mistaken identities and unlikely coincidences, Bely gives narrative tugs that pull the reader from one section to the next. The bomb inherently creates tension, first in the reader discovering how it intends to be used and then in the reader wondering who will end up being damaged or killed by it.
But the patience of the reader really pays off through the use of repetition in color, character, interior thought and place. Repetition can be very annoying, but here sets up musical themes that gradually start to play off each other in surprising thematic twists.
The colors red, white, green, yellow, and purple/blue are used in descriptions to simultaneously convey information (red=revolutionary), emotion (a green mist invokes a suffocating menace), and raise thematic flags (white corresponds with a Christian mysticism that is occasionally overdone). The characters are defined and evoked by key traits – for example Nikolai’s pale skin, “flaxen hair”, and “frog-like lips” – used like a code so that we know a character is hiding on the periphery when these words are used. (Especially helpful since many of the characters have multiple aliases.)
These patterns typically play off of each other in pairs. The make-up of Petersburg is presented as both one of straight lines laid on top of “cosmic infinity”, echoing the city’s founding as a pre-planned creation set down by Peter the Great over a swamp (and the novel’s themes of bubbling darkness and chaos). The uncertainty of identity in a newly created cosmopolitan city is evoked through the use of varying place names: the Ableukhov’s “Mongol” heritage, the “Mongoloids” also evoking the Russo-Japanese war on the empire’s eastern boundaries, and Finland to the west is placed as a mysterious habitant of the green mists.
As the characters are kept to a few defining descriptions, their interior thoughts are marked by specific themes that gradually coalesce into the book’s larger themes. Historical figures haunt them: a bronze statue of Peter the Great seems to punish them and the Flying Dutchman threatens them with the curse of one who can never go home. Dudkin is constantly remembering a dark yellow stain on his wallpaper, “on which something fateful – is about to appear,” while Nikolai enters reveries where he sees the bomb’s explosion as revealing a dark emptiness and enacting the myth of Saturn, where the father devours his children and in turn is devoured by them.
By piling everything on top of each other, through constant juxtaposition and repetition of ideas and imagery, Bely interweaves his exploration of father/son relationships, revolution, history and how we belong to it, destruction and transcendence, and an indifferent universe or compassionate god that might lie behind all of it.In promoting Petersburg, it is often pointed out that Vladimir Nabokov reportedly said the book is one of the four greatest of the 20th century. This points to a whole other set of recommendable qualities of Bely’s writing. Everything I’ve written above sounds hopeless heady, almost geeky in its mythological grandeur.
But like Nabokov, his writing can also be incredibly playful (he’s fond of word play) and is capable of satirical swipes at St. Petersburg society, and large humorous set pieces, as when Nikolai travels around in a red-domino suit to frighten Sofia after she calls him a “red clown”. The writing can veer from abstractly cosmic to tangible minutia, as in this description of Lippanchenko: “Suddenly between the back and the nape of the neck a fatty fold in the neck squeezed itself into a faceless smile: as though a monster had settled in that armchair.”
Yet ultimately this is a very pessimistic portrait of personal and societal evisceration. Petersburg is about one event as a perpetual moment in history, a constancy of new orders usurping old orders and children destroying and then becoming parents, the battle between liberty and repression, and how this can leave people feeling permanently uprooted and haunted by the past. This is not a story about whether or not the Russian revolution was a worthwhile endeavor, but it is eerily prescient in predicting how the initial euphoria, the bomb explosion of Communism, would scorch the earth as badly as any tsar did. - Michael Buening   https://www.popmatters.com/107347-petersburg-by-andrei-bely-2496046427.html


Petersburg, Andrei Bely’s best-known novel, is difficult to pigeon-hole. Except for a brief flash-forward epilogue, its events unfold over a ten-day period in the early autumn of 1905, not long before that year’s ineffectual revolution culminated in the Manifesto of 30 October (17 October in the Russian calendar). Its characters are men and women “of uncertain status,” shadowy revolutionaries and anarchists, and the aristocratic government functionaries whose wayward offspring are drawn into their web. Unsurprisingly therefore, it puts one in mind of novels like Turgenev’s Virgin Soil and, especially, Dostoyevsky’s Devils. Indeed, the highest ranking government official we meet, Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov (henceforth AAA), in his obsessive-compulsive behavior, domestic disarray and ultimate inability to handle stress, recalls Lembke, his provincial counterpart in Devils. But Petersburg’s debt to Dostoyevsky is superficial —else, one presumes, Nabokov would not have ranked it as “one of the four most important works of twentieth-century literature.” Instead of Dostoyevsky’s standard ploy of a naïve chronicler within the frame of the novel, Petersburg is told throughout from the perspective of an omniscient third-person narrator of prodigious poetic gifts.
And poetry is at the very heart of Petersburg, from the level of individual lines to its broader structure. Its eight massive chapters are subdivided into numerous short vignettes and dramatic scenes, each with its own title. These sub-chapters often unfold like lyric poems. Each has its own refrain, usually quoted in the title, which may be anywhere from a line fragment to a short paragraph in length. Commonly, the refrain returns to close a section. Some sections have multiple refrains and some treat them as subjects for variation. Now, one might expect this fusion of poetic and narrative structure to be problematic; My initial reactions to some of the longer repetitions included wondering if my eye had strayed back to an earlier passage and thinking I had discovered a gross misprint. But after adjusting to the rhythm of the book, I began to embrace the technique and to increasingly admire the ingenuity with which poetry and narrative were fused—to see that what might have become a distracting fetish was, in fact, a flexible and ingenious technique with multifarious narrative functions. Some refrains, for example, are merely atmospheric, capturing a state of nature—gloom or mist, the play of light on rooftops, or so on—that infuses the experience of a character throughout a scene. The repetition in these cases reflects the characters’ continual perceptual awareness of these phenomena as well as the rhythms with which they reoccur to consciousness as attention shifts focus or wanders. Other refrains function variously as Idees fixes, expressions of obsessive fears (like AAA’s recurring quasi-hallucination of a mustachioed bomber outside his carriage), or incantations. In most cases, however, I came to find deep psychological truth in the repetitions and to realize that my initial bemused reactions were just the residue of ingrained habits and narrative conventions.
Examples of Bely’s descriptive genius and singular vision are ubiquitous; I’ll cite just two. Like Dostoyevsky’s Devils, the revolutionaries in Petersburg become more absorbed in infighting and personal enmity than in any sort of principled action. One such scene ends in violence, at night in a small room by murky candlelight. Most of the violent imagery in the scene is performed by a “huge, fat shadow-man, emerging from under ______’s feet” who begins “to dance around with fretful movements,” or springs from his head and hangs from the ceiling, while the act of violence itself is disorienting in its calm and in the victim’s startled and frozen contemplation of its new sensations; Thus the play of shadows overshadows the fatal stroke. Elsewhere Bely develops with hallucinatory power the extended metaphor of a paper war conducted at “the certain establishment” where AAA is the obsessive-compulsive field-marshal.
The narrative dimension of the novel is equally well developed, though those expecting a novel of political intrigue are apt to find the pacing slow. Two of the main characters who figure prominently in the beginning, AAA and his son, the student Nikolai, are drawn with cold detachment—more like inanimate objects than persons. They believe each other to be scoundrels. AAA is a husk of his former self because two years earlier his wife had abandoned him for an Italian singer. Nikolai is tormented with unrequited love for Sofia Petrovna, who is married to an army officer named Likhutin. Sofia holds a sort of salon frequented by riff raff and revolutionaries, entertaining in a kimono and decorating with paintings of Mount Fuji, which is significant given that Russia is at that time enmired in a disastrous war with Japan. In his despair, Nikolai acts out and pledges his service to a revolutionary cabal represented at first by his contact, Alexander Ivanovich Dubkin. A bomb enters the scene. It is left ominously ticking for nearly two hundred pages. One character, in a hybrid allusion to Pushkin’s "Bronze Horseman" and the short play Stone Guest, is visited in his garret by a “bronze guest,” the dismounted figure of Peter the Great. There is attempted suicide, patricidal conspiracy, madness, murder, betrayal, riots in the street suppressed by Cossacks—but in the end the strongest through-line proves, unexpectedly, to be that of an understated and deeply insightful domestic drama.
There are flaws perhaps. The trappings of theosophy, which too obviously originate in the mind of the narrator, seem dated and quaint—like the credulous flirtation with Freudian psychology one finds in some Hitchcock films. And in the beginning the narrator threatens nudgery. After describing the workings of Petersburg’s electric trams on one page and then pointing out two pages later that they did not exist in 1905, the narrator tells us not to blame him; The mistake was not his but his pen’s. This had me worried but was, thankfully, an isolated tic. And there is a strange and likewise isolated spoiler concerning the later affairs of a major character from his first novel, The Silver Dove. The flaws are trivial to me; I have always thought perfection is overrated and a cheap aspiration.
It took me several weeks to read Petersburg. In the early stages it is easy to get lost in a lyrical-poetic trance, savoring individual scenes. The last third of the book I devoured in a single day. I am not in a position to judge the quality of the translation. But whoever is responsible for the final product and in whatever measure, the Elsworth translation of Petersburg is some of the most beautiful and imaginative English prose I have read in recent memory. - WyattGwyon http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?70407-Andrei-Bely-%97-Petersburg



What an amazing, strange, wonderful, funny, frustrating, magical book. Needless to say, I highly recommend it. So what have you heard about Petersburg? Vladimir Nabokov declared it one of the most important works of the twentieth century, but he also stated no good English translation was available. I have no idea whether or not the 2009 Pushkin Press edition that I read, with translation by John Elsworth, corrects that deficiency. Even if the language only hints at what the original Russian achieves, it is a wonderful read on the surface as well as for deeper import. One example I can point to “on the surface” is the repetition of words, phrases and sentences providing a rhythm to the work that begs for it to be read out loud. This rhythm mimics the corkscrew-like plotline, circling back on itself while at the same time moving forward.
Petersburg is often likened to Joyce’s Ulysses and I find myself puzzled at that comparison. Many techniques in the style and wordplay are the same, to be sure. In addition, both books focus on a short time period with a city as a major character, but the main thing in common is that one or a dozen posts can’t sum up what it feels like to read the work. I’ll take a brief stab at a few of things I found interesting.
With a non-linear plot, jerky character development, and recurring motifs I found myself constantly asking “what is this novel all about?” The setting provides one clue, taking place in October 1905 Petersburg at the beginning of an unsuccessful revolution. There are many “revolutions” in addition to the obvious political friction taking place during the course of the novel. There is a strong generational conflict that reminded me of Turgenev’s Fathers and Children at times. Marital strife surfaces often as we see the possible dissolution of at least two families. Even with all the strife, the similarities and ties between characters stand out more than the differences. Actions and thoughts recur and migrate across characters, providing literal and symbolic patterns to help understand the individuals as well as the society. Bely looks at how everyone fits together in the “human myriapod” as well as what happens when they don’t engage harmoniously. The collective provides a life...a sound, a consciousness...of its own.
I’ve posted several excerpts that provide examples of the dual nature of characters and events, things described literally and symbolically for surreal effect. One recurring motif throughout Petersburg is that of expansion, whether of body parts (literally and figuratively), sensory diffusion, childhood nightmares, or the looming explosion (or at least the threat of it). This motif and the question of what is the novel all about fit together in looking at the Prologue, where the narrator asks “What is this Russian empire of ours?” He starts by pointing at a map and specifically at Petersburg, a two-dimensional dot. Throughout the book the meaning of Petersburg and of the Russian empire are expanded into greater meaning. The surreal and otherworldly descriptions of Petersburg append themselves to its very existence, a city whose existence mirrors the opening question. The statue of Peter comes to life (to some extent) worming its way into the consciousness of the city’s inhabitants and becomes an apocalyptic figure guarding the city from attack. The setting also plays into this question of what is the Russian empire, occurring after the disastrous loss of the war with Japan and as workers’ strikes begin. Petersburg itself stands as a symbol of Peter the Great’s imposed modernization while the appearance of Mongols in the city and bureaucracy (described by their dress) highlights the East vs. West struggle to define the empire. Possibly to signal which side Bely thinks will triumph, the young Nikolai discards Kant (Europe) in favor of Skovoroda ("Russia", in particular the East).
Here are my previous posts on Petersburg:
Petersburg online resources (including links to the prologue and first chapter as well as other works by Bely)
Discussion: Prologue and Chapter 1
Excerpt: The senator’s second space
Excerpt: A laughable figure
Excerpt: Beyond the wall, beyond the mirror
Discussion: Chapters 2, 3, 4
Excerpt: The terrible import of his soul
Excerpt: Why am I—I?
Excerpt: The horror in the eyes of his consort
Excerpt: And she was sad    -   bookcents.blogspot.hr/2010/11/petersburg-summary.html


Of Dreams, Phantoms, and Places: Andrey Bely's Petersburg (pdf)
Andrei Bely’s Petersburg







Andrei Bely, The Silver Dove, Translated by John Elsworth. Northwestern University Press, 2001. 
read it Google Books

Dissatisfied with the life of the intelligentsia, the poet Daryalsky joins a rural mystic sect, the Silver Doves. The locals, in particular the peasant woman Matryona, are fascinated by the dashing stranger. Daryalsky is in turn taken in by the Doves' intimacy with the mystical and spiritual--and by Matryona. Under the influence of Kudeyarov, the ruthless cult leader, Daryalsky is used in a bid to produce a sacred child. But in time the poet disappoints the Doves and must face their suspicions and jealousies--and his own inevitable dire fate.


You would have thought Andrey Bely’s 1910 novel The Silver Dove would be a book to
produce books, to be interpreted and exegized endlessly. While I’m not prepared to call it one of the greatest books ever written—it lacks a certain unity, and isn’t quite grand enough in scope to compensate for that deficit—an abundance of astonishing material is contained in its pages. At least two subchapters of the novel are the stuff of immortality, and taken as a whole the book could be considered the highest expression in prose form of that by-word for the esoteric, Symbolism (as opposed to Modernism, to which its author turned next.) And yet little has been written about The Silver Dove, within Russia and without. When Bely’s books are discussed—which is not as commonly as you might think; his memory in Russia having been much effaced during the 1920s and written out of official literary history by the 1930s; and like Platonov, Bunin, Grossman, and others considered disagreeable by the Soviet powers-that-be, ordinary Russians rarely name him among their greatest writers—he is usually lauded for his novel Petersburg, which Vladimir Nabokov counted among the four greatest books of the 20th century, along with Joyce’s Ulysses, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and the first two books of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. The Silver Dove demonstrates Bely clearly belongs in that company, but his greatness is in delightfully unexpected ways distinct from that of Joyce, with whom he is often compared. Like the other three members of the group, he has exceptional qualities that are entirely of his own stamp.
Bely, together with fellow poets Vyacheslav Ivanov and Aleksandr Blok, was a member of the second generation of Russian Symbolists, which turns out to be both more and less of an overwhelming phenomenon for casual readers to enter into than it sounds. On the textual level, Symbolist writers used naturalistic imagery to mean both literally what is said as well as what allegorically is implied, either by nature images directly symbolizing something or by their conjuring up an overall mood or impression, as in a painting by Cézanne or Monet, and Bely uses such descriptive techniques almost constantly throughout The Silver Dove (though he does more with them than just describe and represent, as we shall see.)
Beyond merely changing the way ideas were represented textually, the Russian Symbolists also expressed through their writing a sort of reactionary religious and philosophical viewpoint. (Reactionary, that is, to the Orthodox church, to Czarist rule, and to the cosmopolitan intelligentsia and the landed aristocracy.) This was not so much an atheistical viewpoint so much as a stew of new age belief systems based on various native sectarian and international religious movements, such as theosophy with its claim to reconcile paganism and Christianity, or the rural sects’ claims to draw mystic power from the simple life of the rural peasantry, or the ideas of sobernost and Sophia (which, frankly, I still can’t make heads or tails of) advanced by the 19th century philosopher and mystic Vladimir Solovyov. It is debatable how committed Bely and his associates ever were to all this—though we are furnished with examples in the book and in the explanatory notes of real life members of the Russian intelligentsia who went to soil, basically, and adopted a life as wanderers or farmers tied to the land; in any case, it is too easy as a reader to get caught up in the tangles of mystic-philosophic esoterica that follow this book like a Maenad’s hair train; the ideas are somewhat peripheral to the art, which is why you have Nikolay Berdyaev, a Russian religious writer and literary critic, quoted on the front of my edition of The Silver Dove, praising the book to the skies in his review of 1910, only to find him a decade later castigating Bely and fellow Symbolist Aleksandr Blok for their acquiescence to the Russian revolution and lack of commitment to the ideals of Solovyov in another essay.
What will first stand out to readers of Bely is not his ideas, but rather his style. Long before Bely had ever been available in English translation, D.S. Mirsky in his History of Russian Literature offered the following surprising assessment of his achievement in The Silver Dove:
It is closely modelled on the great example of Gogol. It cannot be called an imitative work, for it requires a powerful originality to learn from Gogol without failing piteously. Bely is probably the only Russian writer who succeeded in doing so. The novel is written in splendid, sustainedly beautiful prose, and his prose is the first thing that strikes the reader in it. It is not so much Bely, however, as Gogol reflected in Bely, but it is always on Gogol’s highest level, which is seldom the case with Gogol himself.
The stylistic connection to Gogol is fairly obvious and it’s one Bely himself wasn’t shy about playing up. As translator John Elsworth explains, the year 1909 when Bely was writing the novel was a time of widespread centennial celebrations of Gogol’s birth, and Gogol’s style was considered by many including Bely to contain in it something more homespun, more essentially Russian than other 19th century writers. In an essay on Gogol, Bely describes him and Nietzsche as “the greatest stylists in the whole of European art, if by style we understand not merely verbal style, but the reflection in the form of the living rhythm of the soul.” I think an examination of the first two paragraphs of The Silver Dove will show how Bely has surpassed Gogol in a couple respects. Here is the first paragraph:
Again and again, into the blue abyss of the day, hot and cruel in its brilliance, the Tselebeyevo bell-tower cast its plangent cries. In the air above it the martins fretted about. And heavy-scented Whitsuntide sprinkled the bushes with frail pink dogroses. The heat was stifling; dragonfly wings hung glassy in the heat above the pond, or soared into the heat of the day’s blue abyss, up into the blue serenity of the void. A perspiring villager assiduously smeared dust over his face with his sweat-soaked sleeve, as he dragged himself along to the bell-tower to swing the bell’s bronze clapper and sweat and toil to the glory of God. And again and again the Tselebeyevo bell-tower pealed out into the blue abyss of the day; and above it the martins darted with shrill cries, tracing figures of eight.
As with Gogol, Bely is a hypotactic writer who makes use of elaborate clause structures to convey a magisterial, Ciceronian sweepingness to his writing. He loves bright colors and lively images—those shrill cries!—and loves painting a whole scene before introducing his characters. Yet notice the recursive quality of the paragraph, how it circles back upon its initial images; the subsequent paragraphs do it too. What you can’t tell from just this paragraph (what I, beginning the novel, could not have foretold) is how all the images in this paragraph would continually recur and even become schematics for larger scenes; how some, like the sky and the dust, almost become characters unto themselves. But that’s still not the most impressive quality of these paragraphs . . .
In the next paragraph, Bely abruptly shifts to another of Gogol’s voices, the comical one of Rudy Panko the beekeeper, the country-bumpkin narrator of Gogol’s early short story collection Evenings on a Farm Near Dykanka:
A fine village! You ask the priest’s wife. When the priest used to get back from Voronyo (his father-in-law has been a dean there these last ten years), this is how it would be: back he comes from Voronyo, takes off his over-cassock, greets his buxom wife with a kiss, adjusts his cassock and straightaway it’s: ‘See to the samovar, my love.’ And then he gets up a sweat, sitting by the samovar and, sure as eggs is eggs, gives voice to his emotion. ‘Ours is a fine village!’ And he ought to know, the priest; besides, he’s not the sort to tell lies.
The foregoing might suggest we are in for some whimsical tale of village life, and the humor seems harmless while the ducks are quacking in the pond and the priest and sexton drunkenly reenact Napoleonic battles in the bushes while haranguing the priest’s wife to keep strumming the guitar. But as soon as everyone wakes up in their own filth and covered in flies, it becomes apparent: this is no idyllic rural village. This is Gogol’s Dykanka by way of Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff, with a plot that ultimately turns as lurid as anything in that author’s The Devil All The Time.
Because this is not just any old time in Russia: brigands and famine stalk the countryside, anarchists and “Slocialists” are urging peasants to rise up against their manorial lords. New religious sects are forming in opposition to the rule of the Orthodox church. Messianic, apocalyptic ideas are in the air. There are rumblings of growing class consciousness and independent-mindedness in the untapped spirit of the peasantry. Some cataclysmic explosion lies just over the horizon, and every naturalistic detail from the burnt bush that seems to hover like a demon at sight distance from village, to the poignant sunsets and the peals of the village bell of Tselebeyevo, represent harbingers of the revolution in human affairs that is to come.
Within this context Daralsky, a young poet and “misfit” (by his own admission), has come to Gugolevo, the country manor of the Baroness Todrabe-Graaben, to seek the hand of the Baroness’s lovely daughter Katya, a match the Baroness begrudgingly consents to in spite of Daralsky’s low status occupation and rumors that he is an eccentric who writes indecent verses, and associates with such characters as his friend Schmidt who “was just like an Orthodox Christian, only his name was Schmidt and he didn’t believe in God . . .” These are not times when an aristocrat like the Baroness can be too choosy, what with her estates failing, the peasants marching to her door with pitchforks demanding payment, and greedy upstarts like the businessman Yeropegin from the nearby town of Likhov continually scheming to gain of possession of her estate. Meanwhile, there are rumors in the area of the activity of a secret cult called the Silver Dove, with particular suspicion being attached to the local carpenter Kudeyarov and his enigmatic red-haired, browless, poxy-faced wife Matryona. Daralsky sees this strange, mystical vision of a woman everywhere as he loiters around Tselebeyevo; in spite of the conventionally ugly terms with which she is describe—flabby, with a pocked-marked face—something about her eyes he finds unable to shake an attachment to. He feels far in the depths of his soul a crisis; how can he marry Katya with this strange peasant woman haunting his dreams? In fact, Kudeyarov and Matryona have big plans for Daralsky; they believe that (like Joseph and Mary) Daralsky and Matryona are destined to have a child together who will bring peace and order to the collapsing world.
If I can characterize the plot of the novel without spoiling it, I would say that the outcome is largely telegraphed, but the vagaries by which that outcome comes about will constantly surprise you. Bely is that perverse sort of writer who likes to do quite otherwise from what we would normally expect him to do; by the time “General Chizhikov” (from Dead Souls) makes an extended cameo appearance it’s pretty clear that all the rules have been thrown out the window and pretty much everything goes in this novel. There are hilarious bits in here about the struggle between “the mud party” and “the dust party” in the town of Likhov, the sheer squalor that the peasants live in, the “eccentricities” of the aristocratic class and in particular the family of the Baroness Todraben-Graben, as well as a very macabre scene involving a poisoning. The book is frequently amusing when Bely’s rhetorical hijinks are not amusing in themselves. We also see in the never-less-than-witty dialogue that Bely’s art incorporates the heteroglossia that Mikhail Bakhtin celebrates in the works of Dostoyevsky.
But there is one specific thing that Bely does that I have not seen done to this degree in any other writer, and which to my mind makes The Silver Dove one of the most beautifully written books of all time, if not necessarily the greatest—neither ancient writers, nor those from the Renaissance, nor writers in the 18th or the 19th century do this; James Joyce doesn’t do it (and he supposedly knows all the tricks); your supposed modern masters of the sentence (looking at you Morrison, McCarthy, Krauss, Pynchon, Gass, Krasnahorkai) don’t even contemplate doing it; I am talking about Bely’s symphonic prose.
A symphony, as music enthusiasts know, is made of series of interlocking motifs, point and counterpoint, strophe and antistrophe and strophes arpeggiating in-and-out and in-and-out of antistrophes; Bely’s prose works much the same way, across phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, sections, chapters—the dance of parallelisms is enacted across every level of the composition. I wonder if there has ever been a more musical prose writer than Bely. What he composes is not so much prose poetry as prose jazz; he will lay down a dozen leitmotifs and play them like jazz parts, which have wonderful suspended effects (like the sly repetitions of Milton in Paradise Lost) when drawn out between his winding Gogolian banter and the ornamental Ciceronian prose sculptures that constitute many of his paragraphs.
The miracle of Bely’s prose is how he makes a paragraph like the following, so precisely rhythmic, so active and yet serene, seem commonplace:
The rain had stopped: again the sun gleamed for a moment; Gugolevo appeared before him, opened itself out, enclosed him in its blossoming embrace—and now it was looking at him, Gugolevo; looking at him with the lucent waters of its lake, Gugolevo; and the lake was rocking him with its dove-blue waters which sang with silver, and all the while the rippling lake was reaching out to the bank with its waters—but it could not reach: and whispered with the reeds—and there, in the lake, was Gugolevo: it rose behind the trees in its entirety, then gazed with a smile of longing at the water—and escaped into the water: there it was now, in the water—over there, over there.
Isolated here, this paragraph is a masterclass in rhythm and imagery that most writers would have been proud to produce. In the overwhelming lavishness of Bely’s prose, however, it seems almost like filler material. As a reader, you find yourself swimming atop such an ocean of golden lyricism, unable (unless you pause and take a breath) to count the gemstones on one measley crown.
The passages that stand out from all this bounty of musical prose are those that convey Bely’s central theme of the opposition between “Russia” and the “West,” with Katya and the intelligentsia representing the West, and the mysterious Kudeyarov and Matryona representing the enigmatic East. There is a section of chapter five titled, “Matryona,” in which Daralsky agonizes over Matryona’s peculiar beauty; it is in its way as stunning (albeit a bit creepy) a statement on the subject of beauty as Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18. I won’t quote the whole thing, but offer some excerpts here:
If you fall for a dark-eyed beauty, pretty as a picture, with lips as sweet as a luscious rasberry, and a gentle face, unrumpled by kisses, like an apple-blossom petal in May, and she becomes your love—then do not say that love is yours: even though you cannot tire of her rounded breasts, of her slender frame that melts in your embrace like wax before a flame. . . . The day will come, that cruel hour will come, the fatal moment will come, when he face will fade, rumpled by kisses, her breasts will no longer quiver at your touch: all this will come to pass; and you will be alone with your own shadow amidst the sunscorched deserts and the dried up springs, where flowers do not bloom and the sunlight plays on the dry skin of a lizard; and you might even see the hairy black tarantula’s lair, all enmeshed in the threads of its web . . . And then your thirsting voice will be raised from the sands, calling longingly to your homeland.
But if your love is otherwise, if her browless face has once been touched by the black blemish of the pox, if her hair is red, her breasts sagging, her bare feet dirty, and to any extent at all her stomach protrudes, and still she is your love—then that which you have sought and found in her is the sacred homeland of your soul.
What’s wonderful about these passages are their captivating, back-and-forth rhetorical movements, but they also call back to a central theme in the novel, the “sacred homeland,” the East as an entirely different and inescapable state of mind. There is a surprising strain of Russian essentialism that appears not only in the progression of the plot (Daralsky’s rejection of the cosmopolitan and therefore “Western” Katya in favor of the homely, indefinably “Russian” inner beauty of Matryona), but also in how the book descends further into the mystical murk as it goes further in further, falling into the mystical clutches of the Rasputin-like Kureyevo.
Bely’s narrator becomes an unexpected poet-defender of a type of Russian essentialism Vladimir Putin might rhetorically embrace, one that extols the fields and the peasants and the unspoken and unseen as opposed to the modern and proven; Bely the modernist turns anti-modernist, at least towards the end of The Silver Dove. A revolution against the false Westernism will soon come, yet for Bely it’s a spiritual revolution and not necessarily a communistic one. In a indubitably important set of passages in chapter six of the novel (widely admired at the time of the novel’s release by Bely’s contemporaries), the narrator extols at length the “Russian fields,” and describes in passionate prose the difference between Western “words” and the “unspoken words” of the Russian peasant. Whereas in the West (and the Western-infected classes of Russian life) “they dissipate their words, into books, into all manner of scholarship and science; and therefore theirs are effable words, their manner of life is a spoken one,” in Russia by contrast, “the Russian fields know secrets, as the Russian forests do . . . Russian souls are like sunsets; Russian words are strong and resinous: if you are Russian, you will have a bonny secret in your soul, and your spirit-strewing word will be like sticky resin.” There is also an apocalyptic prophecy that should chill us even today:
Oh, to live in the fields, to die in the fields, repeating to yourself the one spirit-strewing word, which no one knows but he who receives that word; and it is received in silence. Here amongst themselves they all drink the wine of life, the wine of new joy — thought Piotr; the sunset here cannot be compressed into a book, and here the sunset is a mystery; in the West there are many books; in Russia there are many unspoken words. Russia is that on which the book is smashed, knowledge dissipated, and life itself burns up; on the day when the West is grafted onto Russia, a world-wide conflagration will engulf it: everything will burn that can burn, for only from the ashes of death will rise the soul of paradise, the Fire-bird.
Whether or not this reads a touch too much like mystical gobbledygook (and as someone a Nikolay Berdyaev might condemn as a “Western Positivist” myself, I am inclined to regard it as such), it certainly seems to capture part of what separates Russia culturally from the West, why we are liberalizing and secularizing while they retreat back into a Czarist, pre-scientific past.
As a complete work, I don’t regard The Silver Dove as among the greatest books ever written (as stated at the top). The telling of the story is too diffuse, too haphazard to earn a +9 score. The many pages of naturalistic/symbolistic description are beautiful, but I’m not entirely convinced they are necessary, even if the prose effects Bely achieves with them are unique; one of the criterion for judging a work of art is how efficiently it makes use of its materials, and who is to say that a more tightly written book couldn’t come along that does something similar? Likewise, Bely’s sentences are certainly beautiful when taken schematically, as part of their larger paragraphs; but while Bely is a great prose writer, his friend Blok was the better poet, and so on a word-by-word basis there are in fact more stupefying writers of individual sentences out there. The Silver Dove is nonetheless clearly the work of a writer with the potential to produce a masterpiece, and I am curious to find out if that is what Bely accomplished when I get around to reading his Petersburg. - https://www.oldbookappreciator.com/2017/12/29/review-the-silver-dove-by-andrey-bely/


A few years ago in a televised interview, portions of which were reprinted in The New York Times, Vladimir Nabokov called Andrei Bely's novel “Petersburg” one of the four greatest masterpieces of 20th‐century prose, the others being Joyce's “Ulysses,” Kafka's “Metamorphosis” and, as he put it, “the first half of Proust's fairy tale ‘In Search of Lost Time.’ “Those unfamiliar with Bely's name and achievement must have dismissed such a selection as either a legpull or a deliberate paradox. But Nabokov was simply stating the facts: the novel he named is indeed the most important, most influential and most perfectly realized Russian novel written in the 20th century, and its author is the man who affected the development of modern Russian prose more than any other 20th‐century figure.


“Andrei Bely is often discussed in the same breath as Joyce; that alone ought to give Anglophone readers some sense of the difficulty his translators face. Brendan Kiernan not only recreates the intricate texture of Bely’s prose, but also approximates its rhythmic undulations.  We bound after the absentminded Korobkin, the self-important Zadopyatov, and the nefarious Mandro with a strange mix of heightened concentration and reckless abandon.  The Moscow Eccentric is a coup, and I hope we won’t have to wait long for Kiernan’s renditions of its sequels.” – Boris Dralyuk


Little known even to Russians, Andrei Bely’s The Moscow Eccentric is a virtuoso performance by one of the twentieth century’s prose masters. In this first translation of the work into English, Brendan Kiernan brings Bely’s effervescent style to life, using neologisms where Bely does and even retaining the distinctive rhythmic drive of the original. Copious notes alert the reader to untranslatable puns and other stylistic subtleties, while also supplying much-needed explanations of topical references and historical allusions. All in all, this is a remarkable achievement that will be valued by both scholarly and general readers.”– Michael Wachtel


“The grotesque vignettes of pre-Revolutionary Moscow life – particularly that of its intelligentsia – constitute some of the novel’s most successful and dazzling passages. Moreover, with a cast of spies, provocateurs, prostitutes, rapists and perpetrators of incest, the novel does not want for sensational episodes and dark intrigue… A delirious Gogolian caricature attended by disturbing scenes that recall the demonic visions of Bosch and Breughel…. An important and intriguing work, a decadent Silver Age curio quite unlike the frothier literature of its day.”– Times Literary Supplement

Published in Moscow in 1927, Belyj's autobiographical novel describes family life and Moscow academic society at the turn of the last century, attempting to capture the memory and imagination of a child in the sustained rhythmic prose of the adult Symbolist poet and theoretician. In The Christened Chinaman Belyj ultimately reconciles himself with the figure of "father" that had so haunted his earlier novels, The Silver Dove and Petersburg. In Professor Beyer's translation accuracy and fidelity to the original capture that complexity and make the special magic of Belyj's ornamental prose accessible to a new audience of English readers.

Like Robertson’s book, Da Happie Laand is a hugely ambitious novel of the type that Scotland rarely produces. It looks at much more than one person’s story or a moment in time, but tries to contextualise Shetland’s past viewing it from the present. The novelist presents himself as the editor of a number of documents which he takes delivery of and which piece together to make up the novel.
There is so much going on that it is difficult to take it all in at the first reading. There were many sections I had to re-read more than twice, something I haven’t had to do since ploughing through Jack Kerouac’s Doctor Sax. But in this case the difficulty lies not in unusual or unfamiliar language, except in some of the transcriptions of interviews, but the multitude of voices and sources that are referred to. There is a magical/realist feel to parts of the novel, as the reader is never quite sure of people or place. Much of the story is told in the form of letters, journals and interviews which our editor is charged with making sense of. There are appearances, indirectly, from Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, placing this novel in a Scottish literary context that is more than simply modern.
Some of the writing is sublime and stays with you long after the story has been forgotten. Like fellow islander Kevin MacNeil, Jamieson’s love and mastery of poetry is obvious in his prose. Here is a short example:
“I’m breathing deeply, chest pounding. I can see the organ on the heather, the eye watching nothing, removed from its casing. The lamb lies still, short curls of wool tight over its warm body. It lies on  the heather, peaceful, blind. The mother’ll stay with it till it’s cold. Then the the crows’ll eat, ants’ll clean the evidence away. Only a few bones a child might pick up and admire, might take home to identify. A few wisps of wool in nearby nests. A clue caught on a barbed wire spike.”
There are many such passages, but they are mostly to be found in the ‘diary’ sections relaying the story of David Cunningham and his search for his missing father which date from the year 2000. These are my favourite parts of the book, which I realise says as much about my reading preferences than the book as a whole in that I am more interested generally in the contemporary rather than the historical, but it also flags up the novel’s major problem. There is not one uniting voice which holds the various ‘texts’ together. Jamieson may have done too good a job of becoming the editor rather than writer, and he is an unreliable one at that. New Zetland, where much of the story is placed, is a fictionalised land, at least in part. This is fine, but it causes more questions than answers, the central one being; where is da happie laand? Shetland (or Zetland) or New Zetland? Maybe this shouldn’t matter, maybe it’s both, but the question typifies many of the unanswered questions that the reader is left with.
Da Happie Laand is a hugely ambitious novel that almost pulls it off. It has interesting commentary on religion, language, belonging, colonialism and the unreliable nature of the written word. There are nods to Scott, Hogg and Stevenson, but I would have liked to have read more of R.A.Jamieson as it is when his voice is on the page that the novel really sings. Having said that it is still one of the most interesting, informative and lyrical novels I have read this year, and that’s against some stiff opposition. It is one I will have to re-read to fully get every story, and as such demands close-reading and work on the part of the reader. This is not a problem as such, but when a novel requires such reassessment it is normally because there is an ending which can only be properly understood by doing so. In this case it is to try and separate all the stories and threads which are to be found in Da Happie Laand and, ironically, with further editing, I feel that the novel would have overcome these problems. It may seem that I’m being harsh on Da Happie Laand, and I really enjoyed reading it. But it is on the brink of greatness, and that is the most frustrating place to be of all.

Instead, she had his written account of the time they'd spent together in Vancouver. But it wasn't what had really happened. Some of it she remembered, some of the things they'd done, even some of the words that he'd put in her mouth. But the names were wrong, the details were wrong. If she had become the story, he had told it his way and it wasn't how she would have done it. His story.

But one person’s renaming is another’s theft; a way of staking out territory to justify its possession. The Scots were never shy about their presence in Canada and, beyond dishing out Scottish names, endlessly inventive in finding ways to announce it. Stanley Park in Vancouver is named for an Englishman, but in 1928 Ramsay MacDonald unveiled a Burns statue there. It is modelled on the one in Ayr and the plinth is dug into high ground at the heart of the traditional territory of three Coast Salish Nations – the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh. The statue celebrated the poet but it was also a way of saying ‘this is ours now’.
Scots renamed people too. A close friend in British Columbia had the surname Bruce when she was a member of one First Nation community and became Wallace when she married into another. Bruce came from her great grandfather who was an Orkney fur trader and Wallace from an Indian agent registering people for the Canadian government who, her husband told me, ‘either didn’t want to or couldn’t be bothered writing down our real names.’ The people of her community are Wallaces to this day and the removal of their names begat the removal of everything else, including their culture and their children. Their community is now one of the poorest in Canada, but close to one of the richest – the ski resort of Whistler, British Columbia.
None of this has stopped writers from whitesplaining First Nations’ experiences. John Buchan’s Sick Heart River includes some problematic First Nation characters, routinely excused as Buchan being a man of his time. More recently, it’s almost impossible to escape the British Columbia school system without reading I Heard the Owl Call My Name. Written by American Margaret Craven, it is set in the First Nations village of Kingcome on the West Coast, home to the Kwakwaka’wakw nation. Both novels are concerned with sickness and death. Buchan’s Sir Edward Leithen has advanced tuberculosis and has been given a year to live. Craven’s young Anglican vicar also suffers from a terminal illness and the Kwakwaka’wakw believe that he will die soon after the owl calls him.
It is a brave writer, then, who would broach any of these themes in a work of modern fiction, far less all of them. But Robert Alan Jamieson does just that in macCloud Falls. He has travelled a long way from his under-appreciated 2010 novel Da Happie Land which was set in Shetland but reached to the South Pacific. Now in British Columbia, he focusses on the province’s Scottish connections, First Nations’ land rights, illness and Burns. And if that’s not enough, the book has a love affair at its heart.
The narrative opens in medias res. Jamieson’s protagonist Gilbert Johnson, an antiquarian bookseller from Edinburgh, has taken a Greyhound bus to a small town in interior British Columbia and Veronika is looking for him. They met when Gil’s flight from Scotland stopped over in Calgary. Both are cancer survivors and Veronika – whose resemblance to Sigourney Weaver confuses the locals – is afraid that Gil is contemplating suicide, perhaps influenced by ‘Sick Heart River’. Instead of Gil, she finds a journal in his hotel room which proves that her fears were not unfounded. It also contains a fictionalised account of the time they spent together in Vancouver and some information about Gil’s Canada quest. He wants to research and write about a migrant Scot called James Lyle to whom he might be related. To that end, he has hiked into a secret valley in the hope of discovering the cabin where Lyle lived with his first wife, a member of the Nlaka’pamux nation.
It’s soon clear that Lyle is a version of the real-life John Teit (or Tate), a migrant Scot who married a Nlaka’pamux woman and became fluent in several First Nations languages. Teit was born on the Shetland Islands and migrated in 1884 to Spences Bridge in British Columbia’s Fraser Canyon. He initially helped manage a store on an estate owned by his uncle, John Murray, an enthusiastic renamer who called a local mountain ‘Arthurs Seat’ (now ‘Art’s Ass’ to some irreverent Canadians). Murray grew fruit and his orchard became famous for Grimes Golden apples when it was under the care of a ‘Widow Smith’. Teit eventually worked with anthropologist Franz Boas and was an advocate for First Nations’ rights in British Columbia, acting as a bridge to white officialdom. When Canadian Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier visited Kamloops, British Columbia, in 1910, Teit prepared the declaration that asserted land rights on behalf of the Secwepemc, Okanagan and Nlaka’pamux nations. His Susanna Lucy Antko and they lived together for twelve years Nlaka’pamux wife was until her death in 1899.
Jamieson’s Lyle shadows Teit in every important respect (if Tate and Lyle isn’t a clue, then it should be). Lyle’s uncle John MacLeod is clearly John Murray, Widow Smith becomes Widow Spark, Lyle’s wife is also called Antko and when Gil travels to ‘MacLeod Falls’ in search of their stories, he ends up in a place that sounds a lot like Spences Bridge. But Teit’s thin disguise allows Jamieson to move some geographical features around and insert Gil into Lyle’s story. Gil believes that Lyle, who made a trip back to Shetland after he migrated to Canada, could be his grandfather.
All this provides an early indication of Jamieson’s sensitive touch. Teit/Lyle is the kind of Scot sometimes used to assuage colonial guilt. The argument is that some Scots settlers were more sympathetic to the First Nations and more prone to intermarriage than others in the British colonial project and somehow partially atone for other Scots like Canada’s first Prime Minster John A. Macdonald, architect of the assimilationist Indian Act and the residential school system. Gil resists this exculpatory line and, instead, embarks on a voyage of discovery which reveals that the credit for Lyle’s actions really belongs to someone else.
The journal discloses the fact that Gil is aware of ‘the right to name, the language of power, the dominant narrative’ and, with the help of an elder and a young Nlaka’pamux woman, he learns to read First Nation silences rather than depend on the voluminous written testimonies that Scots tended to leave behind. However, he also feels the need to provide some lengthy formal explanations that interrupt the narrative flow. After he reappears, Gil has Veronika read a book proposal which includes a six page appendix entitled ‘A Chronology of the History and Exploration and Settlement of the territories known to early European voyagers ‘New Caledonia’. It is the kind of thing a British Columba high school student might use as a primer for his social studies exam. Later a group of tree planters rehearse some routine arguments about First Nations’ land rights while Gil listens from outside the hotel window.
After his Nlaka’pamux nation epiphany, Gil heads to Barriere, British Columbia to meet Gordon who thinks he has a first edition of Burns’ Kilmarnock poems. He had remote contact with Gordon while still in Edinburgh but the episode feels extraneous and unlikely. They travel to Helmcken Falls in Wells Gray Provincial Park to no obvious purpose other than to describe them. There’s a similar sense of randomness when Gil watches hockey games, all of them from the Stanley Cup series between the Vancouver Canucks and Boston Bruins in 2011. He never masters the vocabulary of the game and speaks of fouls and puckdowns. More importantly, he misses the key role that hockey plays in Vancouver by giving its ethnically-diverse population a cause to gather around. For once, this includes the First Nations. Algonquin Gino Odjick is a Canucks legend. I met my first First Nation Wallaces while watching a Canucks hockey game in the Legion Hall in Pemberton, British Columbia.
These are minor quibbles. Perhaps it is unfair to expect Gil to understand hockey on such brief acquaintance or have him fully resolve the novel’s central dilemma: the provision of too much formal information for a British Columbia audience and not enough for a Scottish one. Jamieson is a writer of endless narrative invention and soaring prose and he tells an important story here. Scotland tends to view its Canada connections as historical but Jamieson’s pursuit of Jimmy Lyle makes it clear that they still influence the way Canada functions today.
Eventually everything else drops away from the story and all that’s left is love and illness. The final passages are very affecting and achingly familiar as a loved one turns towards Scotland and leaves you there in the Vancouver gloaming: ‘Tomorrow he too would fly above the city, on the first leg of the journey back to Scotland – across the Rockies where he first met her, then on across the vast wastes of Northern Canada, Greenland, Iceland and the Atlantic, back to the North Sea, far from this strange Pacific shore. The day of departure would carry him through the night towards home, but also towards the end of this companionship. This love he now felt. He could call it that, on his side at least.’ - Harry McGrath  https://www.scottishreviewofbooks.org/2017/08/mccanada/


Poems by Robert Alan Jamieson:

An Interview with Robert Alan Jamieson

Robert Alan was born in Shetland in 1958, where he grew up. After publishing two novels and a collection of poems while in his twenties, he attended the University of Edinburgh as a mature student. Subsequently he held the William Soutar Fellowship in Perth, was co-editor of Edinburgh Review from 1992 till 1998 and writer-in-residence at the universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde from 1998 until 2001. Since 1993 he has pioneered the teaching of creative writing at the University of Edinburgh, initially through the Office of Lifelong Learning, from 1998 at undergraduate level and, since 2002, the post-graduate Masters in Creative Writing. His third novel A Day at the Office (1991) was placed among The List's '100 Best Scottish Books' in 2006, while his poetry in Shetlandic Scots, as published in Nort Atlantik Drift (1999/2007) and Ansin t'Sjaetlin: some responses to the language question (2005), has been translated into Arabic, Basque, Catalan, Czech, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, German, Greek, Hebrew, Icelandic, Irish Gaelic, Italian, Latvian, Norwegian, Polish, Scots Gaelic, Spanish, Ukrainian and Welsh. As a result of his work with the organisation Literature Across Frontiers, he has translated the work of over thirty contemporary European poets into Scots and English. He has also written for the stage, and collaborated with the composer David Ward and the painter Graeme Todd. His fourth novel Da Happie Laand was shortlisted for the Saltire Book of the Year in 2010, the Scottish Book of the Year in 2011, and longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC prize in 2012. In 2013, he was the subject of a biographical film directed by Susan Kemp, which premiered at the Glasgow Film Festival in February 2014, before touring Shetland as part of the Screenplay festival in August of that year. It was subsequently screened at the StAnza International Poetry Festival in 2015. - http://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/robert-alan-jamieson(03db5fd1-bb9c-47eb-95cb-5806b6a77500).html

Tom Mallin, Knut,Verbivoracious Press, 2014. [1970.]
http://tmallin.blogspot.hr/


Knut takes place during WWII in the house of the Strobls, a Norwegian aristocratic estate populated by leeching relatives, ruled by the loveless widow Madame Strobl. Sickly son and heir Knut writes of his early life in a confessional manuscript handed to his doting sister Katya, for whom he nurtures intolerable incestuous desires. Knut is a darkly comic take on the gothic novel told in a prose style that captures the tension, violence, and decay of its setting, and parodies its cast of beastly hangers-on and contemptuous aristocrats. A largely neglected artist and writer, Tom Mallin published five novels with Allison & Busby in the 1970s before his death to cancer 1977. This reprint and first paperback edition hopes to introduce new readers to his peculiar and original talent. Introduction by Rupert Mallin.







Tom Mallin, Erowina, Allison & Busby,1972. / VerbivoraciousPress, 2015.


Completed in 1962, first published in 1972, Tom Mallin’s third novel Erowina is an encyclopaedic portrait of the titular troubled heroine, whose traumatic experiences in childhood and adolescence are transformed in adulthood into self-hatred and wild abandonment to erotic and sadomasochistic activities, ending with her suicide at thirty-six. Over twenty chapters, Erowina utilises a stunning range of styles and forms, from an autopsy report, confessional stream-of-consciousness, theological conversations, surreal symbolical stories, third-person accounts, scenes in dialogue riddled with puns and wordplays, short plays, copious lists, and sections with newspaper headlines, sealing the novel’s indebtedness and homage to Joyce’s Ulysses. A dark, ambitious, stimulating, and challenging novel, Erowina is Tom Mallin’s masterpiece, and a work that remains surprising, fresh and vital. Introduction by Nate Dorr



Tom Mallin, Lobe, Allison & Busby,1977.



Tom Mallin, Dodecahedron, Outerbridge & Lazard,1970.


First things first: Mr. Mallin is a British playwright and this novel owes a great deal to that genre; and Dodeca, a girl of virgin birth endowed with special curative gifts as well as an unassailable faith, was defended (only) by the Grand Vicar more simply called Father Hedron who found her nearest of any to God. Not so the Abbess of the convent where she trained and served until the 32nd year of her life and who wrongly condemned her -- ""guilty of hedonism."" She is stripped and sent naked into the world, pilloried ""in facets"" paralleling the stations of the cross (by a cobbler who leaves a nail to pierce her foot; in a beauty parlor -- there are anachronistic touches which disrupt the mood of the parable -- in a whorehouse) all prior to her death at the hands of some youths when even her crucifix, mangled, ""begins to bleed."" A curious, only distantly involving processional which of course invites a comparison it cannot withstand even with its variant version special effects. - Kirkus Reviews




Tom Mallin, Bedrok, Allison & Busby,1978.


Fripp by Tom Mallin (First 20 Pages)








Tom Mallin Interviewed by Alan Burns
Tom Mallin was born on 14 June 1927 in West Bromwich. His father died when he was four, and he was charitably educated at a boarding school, and later went to the Birmingham School of Art, from where he won a scholarship to the Royal Academy. His art studies were interrupted when he was drafted into the army and between 1945 and 1947 he served much of his National Service in the Middle East. He moved to London and in 1949 married the American-born painter Muriel George. He trained as a picture restorer, while continuing to paint in his spare time and also contributing illustrations and cartoons to periodicals such as Lilliput and Picture Post. In 1955 Mallin moved to Suffolk with his wife and two sons, where he continued to work as a sculptor, painter and restorer until 1966 when he suffered a crisis of confidence in the visual arts. He buried most of his sculpture and destroyed many of his paintings and turned his attention to writing. When his first novel, Dodecahedron (1970), was published, Francis King wrote in the Sunday Telegraph that “it is amazing that a writer so gifted should only now be publishing his first novel at the age of 43”. In the same year his first stage play, Curtains, was produced at the Tower Theatre in London, from where it went to the Edinburgh Festival under the direction of Michael Rudman at the Traverse Theatre. Mallin’s other published novels are Knut (1971), Erowina (1972), Lobe (1977) and Bedrok (which was posthumously published in 1978). Mallin died of cancer on 21 December 1977. In the fifteen years before his death he produced over forty full-length novels and plays. Mallin’s intense, fast, joyful way of working was in direct contrast with the usual cliché of the artist suffering to produce a few sentences each day. Similarly, his willingness to reinvent whole countries he had never seen is at odds with the realistic novelist’s research and information gathering.

Guðbergur Bergsson, Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Trans. by Lytton Smith, Open Letter, 2017.


Read an Excerpt
   
“Guðbergur Bergsson achieved success with his novel Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, which shocked Icelandic readers in innumerable ways, lashing out as it does at the Icelandic society of the post-war years for its cultural confusion, amorality, and hypocrisy. The main character is a grumpy old man who speaks and writes in various styles, grumbles and babbles and criticizes everything."—Dagný Kristjánsdóttir


A retired, senile bank clerk confined to his basement apartment, Tómas Jónsson decides that, since memoirs are all the rage, he's going to write his own—a sure bestseller—that will also right the wrongs of contemporary Icelandic society. Egoistic, cranky, and digressive, Tómas blasts away while relating pick-up techniques, meditations on chamber pot use, ways to assign monetary value to noise pollution, and much more. His rants parody and subvert the idea of the memoir—something that's as relevant today in our memoir-obsessed society as it was when the novel was first published.
Considered by many to be the 'Icelandic Ulysses' for its wordplay, neologisms, structural upheaval, and reinvention of what's possible in Icelandic writing, Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller was a bestseller, heralding a new age of Icelandic literature.




A modernist classic from Iceland, half a century old, makes its first appearance in the U.S.
He’s a mean man, a sick man. And, though “descended from the bravest, bluest-eyed Vikings,” Tómas Jónsson doesn’t strike much of a heroic figure; old and fast falling apart, hidden away in a basement flat, he spends his time filling the pages of composition books with reflections, sometimes aphoristic and sometimes stream-of-consciousness floods, on the things he has seen and done. “I am completely bound to the passing moment,” he records. “I am the passing moment. I am time itself. I have no remarkable experiences. I have no spare moments from the past.” Ordinary though his experiences may have been in the larger human story, they’re enough to sustain an off-kilter, often dyspeptic worldview. First published in 1966, a decade after Halldór Laxness became the first and so far only Icelandic writer to win the Nobel Prize in literature, Bergsson’s novel has a Joycean quality to it, Finnegans Wake as much as Ulysses, with portraits of the artist as a man at various stages of life, all of them querulous. Jónsson frets that he cannot be a real writer because he lacks a callused pen finger, and that’s only the first of his strict attentions to the body and its functions, as when Bergsson via Jónsson describes a woman eating a boardinghouse meal even as other diners “de-wind themselves with a couple of farts”: “She put it in her mouth on the tines of her fork, her jaws swinging to and fro, bjabb-bjabb, as the steak mashes down her esophagus down to the stomach grog-grog.” It’s not the most appetizing of visions, but Bergsson’s shaggy (and, in a couple of instances, carefully shaven) dog stories have a certain weird charm, even as it develops that Jónsson has discovered one great raison d’être for writing a memoir: revenge.
Nothing much happens on the surface of Bergsson’s yarn, but underneath there’s plenty of magma bubbling.  - Kirkus Reviews




How much of someone’s memoirs do you need to read and how much of their story do you need to know before you can judge their character? Would you need to understand their relationship with every other person in the world? Hegel proposed as much in his interpretation of the universe in its entirety, referred to as “the Whole” or “The Absolute.” For Bertrand Russell, in his AHistory of Western Philosophy, “there is an underlying assumption” in Hegel’s philosophy “that nothing can be really true unless it is about Reality as a whole.” In other words, knowledge of any individual cannot be considered valid until every fact about reality is taken into account, however trivial or unrelated it may seem.
The essential nature of the seemingly trivial had already been mockingly underscored in Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, written over thirty years before Hegel’s first published work. Rather than construct a linear narrative, Sterne based this fictitious autobiography on the chaotic nature of one human’s relationship with the world, and found artistry in the mayhem of successive digressions replete with philosophical musings, eccentric characters, and life events that so many other authors of his time had dismissed as wholly insignificant. The work Tristram Shandy sets out to write never progresses beyond his infancy; the work Laurence Sterne does write raises the question of how much of a person’s life is truly relatable.
Despite never having been translated into Icelandic, Sterne’s radical recalibration of storytelling’s fundamentals—in particular, style, structure, and the criteria for relevant content—laid the groundwork for many other texts that would come to influence Guðbergur Bergsson’s modernist work Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller. Now, half a century after its original publication in Icelandic, this magisterial work been translated into English by Lytton Smith. In this “memoir,” a popular genre in Iceland at the time itwas written, Tómas, a resentful, senile, self-absorbed retired bank clerk, elaborates on the minutiae of his life spanning World War II through the year of the novel’s publication in 1967. Through Tómas’s numbered composition books, we are privy to his anal-retentive habits, and idiosyncratic thought processes whose landing points include the intricacies of chamber-pot usage, the inherent amorality of money, and the invention of the ballpoint pen. Non-linear and largely absent of temporal markers, Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller is an unruly, borderless flow of life episodes and digressions, the latter in the form of folkloric tales, theater acts, dreams and a mini-essay. Yet as much as Tómas feigns to be in complete control of this text supposed to be his autobiography, it is the co-habitants of his world who come to define him. He suggests as much at one point, through a statement in line with the Hegelian view of human relations: “Does man, as an individual, only exist to the extent that he is a context for other people?” Bergsson, who would also garner recognition as a children’s book author and translator from Spanish (most notably of García Márquez and Cervantes), cemented his legacy with this genre-defying novel. Although a controversial figure over the years for his outspoken opinions on Icelandic culture, he is now widely revered by many of his compatriots, such as the writer Sjón, who referred to him as the “grand old man of Icelandic literature”; among his cohort, only Halldór Laxness, the country’s sole winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, outranks him in literary stature.
In Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Bergsson’s originality is partly attributed to the number of stylistic elements he employs to make us question his narrator’s wavering grasp of reality. First, there are his prose-style variations. Among the most prevalent forms is a stream-of-consciousness technique, lacking in punctuation, comparable to the “Penelope” chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses (the latter is commonly proffered as the novel’s English-language counterpart), often reflecting a lack of cohesion between thoughts. In Tómas’s digressions, there is a bizarre and playful tone reminiscent of Pynchon, Foster Wallace, and Gombrowicz, (and, similarly, Jónsson’s effervescence hardly disguises the darker elements of his work) that keeps at bay any notion of realism. Secondly, there is his erratic use of typography: inexplicable gaps, random capitalization and lowercasing further add to the semblance of an unsteady mind.
Some of these elements are clear from the outset, where Tómas introduces us to the co-tenants of his basement apartment, families with omnipresent children who intrude most often upon the otherwise structured and pragmatic life he claims to maintain. So much so that he begins his memoir with a vague summary of the occupants who will feature prominently in its pages:
I think it would be easiest to begin this way, this First Book, and move without further delay right to the kernel of the matter, thus: during the first years of World War II, I took some lodgers into my apartment, Sveinn and Katrín, a married couple with five children: Stína, who died; Dóri, their son; an infant boy . . . . together with Anna and Magnús and Dóri                     I think they’re all grown up and moreover there’s a new addition to the crowd, Hermann, I hear them call him,                      cursed forever is the day they returned
Due to a housing shortage in Reykjavík, Tómas is forced by mayoral decree to rent out his home to others. Between the two families (excluding Hermann), each inhabiting the apartment in subsequent periods, it is Katrín who crops up most often in his thoughts. She may be the target of many of his most cranky and reprehensible remarks, but she nonetheless serves as a muse of sorts for Tómas. Likely envious from listening in on her loud, nocturnal lovemaking with her husband, he even goes so far as to name his soul Katrín, and in one composition book, envisions her as his romantic partner. She’s a protagonist in a couple of digressions as well: in one told by another character, she (or perhaps someone Tómas has assigned her name) is a famous opera singer in Nazi Germany whose fall coincides with that of the Reich; in another, she must deal with a horrific turn of events during a visit from her parents. Less important to Tómas is Anna, his caretaker and distant relative, whose identity he sometimes merges with Katrín’s, perhaps to compensate for the latter’s absence. Tómas’s perception of women (including his former coworker Miss Gerður) is a recurrent theme in Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, as it reveals much about his own personality defects and dependencies (even if Bergsson’s personal stance isn’t entirely clear). More broadly, this constant fixation on the feminine could be viewed as a critique of the insecurities associated with midcentury Icelandic notions of masculinity.
One composition book is devoted to Tómas’s primary link to the world outside his apartment: “The Board.” A quasi-elite circle of dining partners at the refectory (a type of dining hall), The Board consists of members from various professions, such as bankers and engineers, and two foreign students who show more enthusiasm for “traditional” Iceland than any of the natives. Tómas is a former coworker and reluctant friend with two intellectuals who actively participate in its discussions: Oláf, cynical and antagonistic; and Sigurður, “rakish” in behavior and broken in spirit. Tómas’s depiction of The Board’s personalities and discussions, including their limited interactions with the working-class men who sit apart from them, offers the broadest glimpse into the troubling hypocrisies of Icelandic society. In perhaps the most telling example, The Board claims to be liberal in its tolerance of free speech, yet in its unaccepting stance towards dissenting views, reveals itself as resistant to such openness.
From Tómas’s perspective, Iceland is a nation that “lives indefinitely in pubescent fantasies of hope” with an overblown sense of its importance on the world stage. “Money-rich” and “dignity-poor” from the World War that made possible its independence from Denmark, it has transformed into a more urban society. This postwar shift from a largely rural economy to a relatively industrialized one undergirds Jónsson’s narrative; the once clear (or so Tómas claims) skyline of Reykjavík—which literally means “smoky bay” in Icelandic—has started to show traces of vapor, from the “factories and refuse dumps” of its “innumerable citizens.” It is an Iceland completely at odds with its romanticized self-image as a nation of farmers:
Now everyone is gathering in the city. Forces conspire in a wasteland. No one wants to keep doing the things he is already doing. Rural folk no longer want to stay in their farm lairs and watch the sun disappear into the glaciers and darkness fall gentle and quiet over the valley . . . . No, everyone wants to get lost in the throng and live an oppressed life . . . . These days, whining and cruelty pay best. Losers are rewarded everywhere, on the radio and in the press, and they act without consequence in movies. Everyone discovers he is needy. Why should people not pursue the renown that follows from inferior behavior.
Tómas, himself a needy and whiny man, vents often about this “inferior behavior.” Foremost among his grievances is the submissive nature of postwar Icelanders, their degradation through socialism and capitalism alike, and their inability to find meaning in either. In the case of the former, they have achieved an over-dependence on the welfare state. Through the latter, they lead an anonymous existence, in particular the working class: factory workers stake their hopes on the fleeting recognition of newspaper interviews, “little more than birthdates and years” that get “lost in a soup of names.”
Before Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller’s publication, Icelandic novels largely ignored the social upheaval that Tómas believes to have undermined the country’s moral fabric. Although postwar writers began to experiment with modernism in other prose forms, novelists operated within the narrow confines of two seemingly incontestable premises. The first was the national myth of the self-resilience (“independence) and eternal wisdom of rural Icelanders. The second, closely linked to the first, was the long shadow of the epic-realist novel cast by Halldór Laxness. Although Laxness himself would eventually mock the Icelandic farmer’s stubborn insistence on living an independent, yet nonetheless meager existence in his iconic novel Independent People, it was his earlier works, pastorals that perpetuated the national myth, that came to define the only acceptable template for Iceland’s cultural arbiters. As the scholar Daisy Neijmann points out:
And it was Laxness more than anyone else who made the novel an important and respectable genre in Iceland, made its narrative potential measure up to that of the Icelandic saga in the minds of readers, critics, and other writers. He was the avatar of the epic-realist novel, and anyone who sought to subvert the genre was in a way challenging his dominating presence.
In her discussion of those writers “between those born around the turn of the century (e.g., Laxness) and [Bergsson’s] own generation” Neijmann also cites Bergsson’s declaration that a “whole generation of authors [was] lost inside the walls of Icelandic culture.” It was this stifling legacy that Bergsson sought to dismantle in Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, and the result was a work that shocked much of Iceland’s reading public.
Among the causes of this outrage was likely his attempt to trivialize agrarian Iceland through satire, even as much of his ridicule was also directed towards urban Reykjavík. In one example, a banal tale about one farmer’s marriage to his farmhand, the characters are odd and simplistic, reflecting little of the admirable qualities typically attributed to them. Bergsson juxtaposes these scornful reimaginings with a contemporary Iceland where Tómas’s characteristics of greed and misanthropy are widely shared, and in doing so, suggests there are darker connotations underlying “independence” as a national ideal.
Bergsson’s attack on the central tenets of Icelandic novel-writing was deeply rooted in his style, in the irreality of experience it conveyed, an approach antithetical to portraying Iceland according to a common standard. Lytton Smith touches upon this in an interview for Scott Esposito’s Conversational Reading, where he cites Neijmann’s observation that Bergsson’s writing is anti-mimetic, or “suspicious of the kind of word that claims to replicate experience,” and as a result, produces an “unreliable narrator” (as with Tristram Shandy) in the character of Tómas Jónsson. This contributes to the contradictory and ambiguous information that Tómas provides to the reader, who is prompted to repeatedly question assumptions. As such, Smith deserves accolades not only for producing an exceptional translation but also for maintaining a deft balance of clarity and ambiguity in a text that is so deliberately misleading.
Lending further evidence to Tómas’s unreliability is his deficient sense of self-awareness or irony. He claims there is nothing in his life worth relating (“I have no remarkable experiences . . . . [my past] is as much hidden from me as is my future”) and gives reason to doubt his take on events (“an incident never has a reliable outline”), yet still views his memoir as an act of public charity. In addition, his allegedly superior outlook is undermined by his marginal role within society. At work, he gets passed over for a promotion, and either resigns or gets fired (of course, this remains unclear). He sits far removed from the center of The Board’s discussions. Due to poor sight and obesity in old age, he must depend on the assistance of others. He is a deplorable, though at times pitiable man, an outlier with some parallels to Dostoevsky’s “superfluous man” narrator in Notes from Underground. But he is not in any way an authority figure within or outside his apartment.
Through his work, Bergsson seems to propose that the only foundational truth underlying Icelandic (and more generally, human) experience is uncertainty. Yet it is uncertainty, whether about Icelandic identity or the cumulative meaning within Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller’s pages, that that will challenge and intrigue its readers. The hyper-concentration of details and cultural references in Bergsson’s writing offer countless opportunities to decipher the mental workings of one of the most distinctive narrators in world literature. Even if Tómas himself takes time to excoriate writers (e.g. “all writers pretend to be endowed with compassion and true faith,” “fiction is a superstition spun in the fabric of people who neither know nor want to know life itself), its relentless experimentation is a paean to the manifold possibilities of the novel. Much in the way that uncertainty about the course of their national literature in the wake of Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller enabled a whole generation of Icelandic novelists to embrace a new set of aesthetic principles, the novel lays a similar path before readers. Unchartered territory as an artistic experience, Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller offers innumerable rewards to those who choose to immerse themselves in its dark, ribald, yet strangely edifying meanderings. Even when the narrator doesn’t care if you to understand and believes (or wants us to think he believes) that “nothing normal can be true.” - Tyler Langendorfer


The remarkable thing about literature in translation is that there can be an entire Ulysses just sitting around for decades, unknown until someone translates it—and boom, suddenly it exists in our world.
Such is the case with the 1966 Icelandic novel Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller by Guðbergur Bergsson, which is often compared to Ulysses and which was a complete revelation that forever transformed Icelandic literature. This mammoth, enormously complex and playful novel has been carefully translated by Lytton Smith into English and is now available to readers from Open Letter Books.
In addition to being a translation of such Icelandic authors as Jón Gnarr, Bragi Ólafsson, and Kristin Omarsdottir, Smith is also a poet whose collections include The All-Purpose Magical Tent, which was selected by Terrance Hayes for the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize in 2009, and While You Were Approaching the Spectacle But Before You Were Transformed by It. In addition, his poetry has appeared in literary journals and magazines including The Atlantic, Bateau, Boston Review, and Tin House.

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Scott Esposito: If you know one thing about this book, it’s probably that Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller has been called the “Icelandic Ulysses.” In the world of literary translation we definitely see our share of such claims, and it is true that many of them are quite legitimate and useful, but they are a thing one tends to take with a grain of salt. So I’m curious to know your own take on this description of the book. Do you see similarities there?
Lytton Smith: The translator Michael Scammell introduced me to the importance of “touchstone” texts in the target language, the language you’re translating into—texts that might be comparable to the experience a reader in the original language would have. In that sense, Ulysses, or perhaps Finnegans Wake, make good comparisons: they’re poetic in that they play with words and the meaning of language even as they have onward momentum and narrative causality. So thinking back to Ulysses as a reader helped: I read it in a group, with a compendious books of notes with us, often out loud, and that’s a different, wonderful, reading experience—I hope some readers of Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller do that, too.
But I also want to throw out two other touchstones, perhaps more important to me. The first is Moby-Dick, which I had in mind because it’s a work of self-conscious national construction which is composed and pastiched from myriad places. Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller is much more ironic, suspicious and critical of the national myth, but the two texts go together well—not for nothing does Bestseller end on the high seas! And then there’s Lawrence Sterne’s 18th century The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, largely because of the importance to both books of the unreliable narrator. I love books that explore the unreliable narrator—Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier is one of the books I keep re-reading—and thinking of those types of novel helped me think about Bestseller.
What matters most about Bestseller, though, is that it’s a sort of anthology: it contains stories within stories. So I was also thinking about Moby-Dick and other texts that share that approach: you’re reading one story, come across another, and get influenced by that. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad were often in my mind, in quite different ways. Perhaps we’re less looking for the perfect touchstone than some kind of Venn diagram of myriad touchstones!
SE: Hearing you talk about stories within stories, unreliable narrators, and works on the level of Moby-Dick and Tristram Shandy, it’s clear that this is a rather sizable, complex book. So this may not be the easiest thing to do, but could you give us a sense of what this book is about in terms of plot, character, theme, etc?
LS: You’re right that the plot is hard to sum up, but I’d say this: Tómas Jónsson, a retired bank-clerk living in a basement apartment in Reykjavík, decides to write a best-selling autobiography, both to lament the diminishing quality of Icelandic people—particularly the increasingly soft men—and to laud its culture, through stories about an opera singer who Hitler chased around Europe and the first black baby born in Iceland, among other things. Along the way, he digresses into meditations on owning property—the book’s plot can be measured by which story a character lives on: the ideal is to progress from basement apartment to first then second or even third floor, and Tómas, despite a life of hard white-collar work, has ended up in the basement, subletting rooms. It’s a novel about disability—he’s blind for at least part of it, and bedridden, and needs carers—and about intimacy—hearing subletters having sex, revealing one’s bodily functions—and within in Tómas tries to make a case for innocence against charges of rape.
SE: As with many of the titles you’ve brought up here, this is a text that is extraordinarily playful and abounds in wordplay. For you as the translator, is rich prose like this more of a pleasure or a pain? What were some of the memorable challenges of this text?
LS: It’s a tremendous pleasure, but also a responsibility: as a poet, I’m trying to make language supple and energetic in the ways I believe poetry, and poetically minded prose, can be, but as a student of Icelandic modern and ancient (I started out learning Icelandic by learning Old Iceland and studying the Icelandic Sagas at University College London) I’m trying to be responsible to the whole sweep of that history. For instance, the character Bósi appears in places, a bit-part. I eventually learned that is the name of the main character in a less celebrated, less ancient saga (from the group known as “fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda,” not part of the classic canon)—and his saga is known for its pornographic nature. So there’s another level of challenge: you can’t teach the often esoteric history of Iceland, but you’re wanting to keep avenues open for readers who might disappear down the rabbit hole and search out all the references. And such is the author’s own compendious, deft mind, that you know you’re going to miss things.
I was stumped by a simple description of Tómas getting up one morning, laboriously doing everything you’d expect him to do (swinging his legs out of bed, stretching) and amid this all there’s a reference to him emptying his socks. Was he turning them inside out? An Icelandic friend and author pointed out the contraction involved: you can use “skin-sock” as a euphemism for penis in Icelandic, so TJ is taking a piss—that’s quite a few steps of association, and it’s one reason I love the writing of Guðbergur Bergsson, but it makes the task difficult. I think I could spend my life translating this book; there will always be more to uncover. Which is another reason to have collaborative rather than isolated, individual reading: we’ll each discover from one another.

SE: I have read that this is a very, very well-known book in Iceland—the sort of thing that everybody owns, or at least everybody knows about. Could you give some since of the impact of this book on Icelandic literature and the Icelandic language?
LS: The impact was huge, and still is. I think it’s hard to contemplate an equivalent in the UK or the US. Bestseller skewered a set of cherished ideas about what a novel was meant to be for, how it was meant to be written, and what the Icelandic nation was. Against a prevailing romanticized idea of rural purity and wisdom, the sort of pastoral celebrated in Hálldor Laxness’s earlier (but not later) novels, Bestseller recognized the corruptions and injustices, the danger of that myth. And the publication hugely divided the reading population—which in Iceland is just about the entire population. Almost every review was scathing. The keepers of prevailing culture indicated he’d destroyed everything, which was about the best compliment he could receive. But what’s crucial, and something I learned from the scholar Daisy Neijman, is that Guðbergur Bergsson’s achievement is stylistic as much as in terms of content: she points out that he’s anti-mimesis, suspicious of the kind of word that claims to replicate experience. Every time you think you’re identifying with a character, the narrative doubles back on itself. (And I should mention that, beyond all this, Guðbergur is a notorious figure who is prone to outlandish and controversial statement about other authors—he can be exacting/dismissive, depending on your perspective – and wider culture. I hesitate to focus on the author rather than the book, especially with a book like this, but his continuing divisive impact on Icelandic life shouldn’t be understated.)
One metaphor that Bergsson himself has used for the role of the author is that an author is involved in creating “groups of islands.” We start off writing in a particular geography—say, Iceland—but, he argues, the author should be less concerned with this originating geography and more with creating some set of places (it’s telling he uses islands as the metaphor, not constellations or cities or something) which creates “another possible world,” even, he argues, a “mother tongue” existing in his works. So there’s a sense in which this most Icelandic of books is also aware of a universe that exceeds Iceland.
It’s telling that I’m writing to you in the wake of Donald Trump Jr.’s e-mails. Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, really is about the danger of us trusting the narrative rather than questioning the narrator. I think that’s a lesson many of us—on all sides of the political spectrum—need to learn again. It was an education to be working on this book this past year.
SE: Hearing about the radical impact that Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller had in Iceland, I’m curious to know about Bergsson’s work following that book. This was (I believe) his second published novel, in 1966, and there has been quite a steady output since then, going right up into 2014. What is the work since then like, and is there something of a shadow cast over it by the impact of this early, major work?
LS: One of the key incursions made by this book was that it advanced the novel by skewering the fetish for biography, particularly for overly laudatory biographies: Tómas is an anti-hero, fleshly and led by appetite, and as such he’s both true to Icelandic culture and a way to parody it. In one sense, nothing Guðbergur wrote lived up to this—it’s been in three editions in Iceland, over the years—but it’s also true that the effect of it in 1967 exceeded the number of readers: perhaps like D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, far more people had an opinion on than had actually read it. (There’s a bit of a joke today that everyone in Iceland owns a copy but almost no-one has finished it. That’s not quite fair, but it’s like Don Quixote or Infinite Jest: you’d want to be able to say you’ve read it, but perhaps haven’t.)
That’s not to say he hasn’t had great successes and continued cultural importance: there’s a museum devoted to his life and works, he’s been the subject of international symposia, received from the King of Spain the award De la orden de Isabel la Católica, a huge deal for Spain, translated numerous writers including Gabriel García Márquez and Don Quixote (twice!) into Icelandic, and his own books have won acclaim. The other book he’s most known for is probably The Swan, because it won the Iceland Literary Prize in 1991; it explores the sufferings and toils of rural life, in ways that Bestseller touches on, but it’s an inverse of that book in that it’s set in the country whereas Bestseller is really set in the city and aware of the country. Plus the protagonist is a young girl, not a near-senile man. It was translated into English by Bernard Scudder. But there are other gems: he also received the Icelandic Literary Prize in 1997 for a book whose title translates as “Father and Mother and The Mysterious Power of Childhood,” a fictional autobiography. And his novel Sú kvalda ást sem hugarfylgsnin geyma, a title usually translated as “The Mind’s Tormented Love,” also uses diaries and the conceit of a man writing in his basement. I’d see the shadow cast by Bestseller more as a reaching, that it’s exploring themes that other books also turn to. And Guðbergur’s continued success make clear he’s far from a one-hit wonder: Bestseller may be his most important book, but it’s so because of the literary environment of the time, not necessarily because it’s his most accomplished or read.
SE: It’s interesting to hear you bring up Trump in this context—I suppose right now it’s a very unavoidable subject, but it also brings up a question that I’m always interested in when we’re talking about translations. What sorts of things would you say this brings to a U.S. context—words, ideas, plots, characters that you think can add something to our understanding of the world?
LS: Bestseller‘s very taken with the idea of meritocracy: one key subplot concerns Tómas being passed over for promotions he feels are owed him. It’s hard to know whether to side with his view or not: on the one hand, he seems to be a dependable kind of worker with great experience. On the other, he’s clearly old-fashioned and bumbling and the guys that get the management positions are perhaps scoundrels and fraudsters, but they’re also high-flying in ways he isn’t. We’re living at a moment where the first family is the manifestation of that process: they believe they’ve succeeded by merit, and many people want to buy into that because it would mean they, too, could succeed by merit. But merit has very little to do with it: privilege, nepotism, access to cash, and lack of scruples have more to do with it. At the heart of the book is a group called the Board or the Table, who eat together in a restaurant in Reykjavík. They’re the movers and shakers of Iceland, and there are definite hierarchies of who sits where. But the joke is that they’re insular and all they’re doing is eating: they’re less a Board than a table. And I think Bestseller can help us realize the illusion, see that the emperor’s new clothes are actually no clothes at all. The novel begins with the narrator trying to write his autobiography in a way that emphasizes his noble descent, and he has to give up right away: it’s nonsense. And that move seems one we need to make now: so much of what’s being said about transparency and such like is nonsense, literally: it doesn’t not accord with any definition of words in any dictionary or common usage anywhere. In one sense, this isn’t a political point: it should be possible to agree with Trump’s politics and still notice the nonsense. But either we’re so partisan that’s impossible, or so post-political that the politics doesn’t matter at all: the illusion does.
SE: Lastly, to circle back to what you were saying about Bestseller having a sense that there’s a whole world out there that exceeds Iceland, do you feel like this is kind of an Icelandic thing? I mean, there are some countries I could think of (e.g. America) where it seems that most authors don’t tend to be troubled by such thoughts when writing a novel. And as a related question, what was it like walking the line of keeping this book firmly rooted in what must be a very Icelandic sort of prose and culture, while also making it a work of its own in English?
LS: My sense of Icelandic literature, particularly contemporary writing—and much contemporary writing does owe a debt that starts with Bestseller, to the ways it exploded conventions and expectations of literature—is a beautiful paradox in which the world, both spiritually and geographically, is profoundly Icelandic, often including very esoteric meditation on dirt floor homes or sheep herding or the fishing industry, and yet will often draw on many languages (it’s not uncommon to encounter Danish, English, and German in an Icelandic book, alongside poetic coinages) and either allude to or reference directly other places and cultures and literary situations. Guðbergur is heavily associated with the town of Grindavík, but engages with it in ways that cast it as a kind of Florence. Kristín Ómarsdóttir’s beautiful and sad Hér (which I got to translate as Children in Reindeer Woods) exists in this no-place that’s both Iceland and non-Iceland, and it’s informed as much by her experience of Spain as Iceland.
I think many writers reach beyond the place they’re from or writing about, even as they’re writing about it. But that seems to be particularly common within the Icelandic writing I spend time reading—I’m not saying it’s true of all Icelandic writing (I don’t see it as much in the poetry, and not in the thrillers), but I don’t want to be an outsider claiming to know exhaustively all of Icelandic writing: there’s a sense in what I see is often pre-selected by publishers as right for translation. But I would feel comfortable saying that Icelandic insularity means, post-Bestseller, not a navel-gazing focus on one’s own small island, but on the fact that you need to be aware of a world beyond your island to recognize it is an island—and so Icelandic writings often tends to triangulate narrowly Icelandic phenomena via other cultural events. That’s not to say there aren’t blind spots: Icelandic writing can be years behind American when it comes to thinking through race, and one other challenge I had with Bestseller was working out just how much the novel was challenging racist tropes and where it was repeating them; the story-within-a-story about the black baby is going to be something that American readers take issue with, and should. So we have to be careful about being overly full of praise for Icelandic open-mindedness. I know there’s plenty of criticism of that from within Iceland. But I do think, to go back to one of your prior questions, we can learn something from Bestseller and Icelandic literature more widely: that there’s a way to be of one’s nation, aware of and engaged with the place you’re from, without being protectionist and closed-minded: to be nationally international, or something. - Scott Esposito  http://conversationalreading.com/seven-questions-for-lytton-smith-on-tomas-jonsson-bestseller-by-gudbergur-bergsson/


Guðbergur Bergsson is the author of twenty-one books, from novels to children's literature, and a translator from Spanish into Icelandic. He has received the Icelandic Literary Prize and the Nordic Prize.          

Tom Moynihan, Perfect: The Encyclopedia of Perfection, Adams Media, 2012.
read it at Google Books


What is perfect?Now that is the perfect question.
It's a 300 if you're at the bowling alley. A 2400 if you're taking the SATs. And firm with a warm, red center if you order your steak medium-rare.
While the execution of perfection depends on the subject in question, the result is always the same—complete satisfaction. This intriguing collection of what qualifies as perfection covers quite the array of topics. From the perfect pour of a pint and the perfect age to propose to the shape of the perfect face and the telling of the perfect joke, you will be pleasantly surprised by the scope of perfection.
Simply put—it's Perfect.


Behind the pristine, pale blue hardcover of this properly clever guide Perfect: The Encyclopedia of Perfection, author Tom Moynihan provides his own witty advice on mastering a multitude of tasks, identifying the ideal features of any object, and generally being brilliant. Whether you're delivering a handshake, taking a penalty kick, preparing a cup of tea, de-skunking your dog, telling a joke, or searching for skiing snow, this manual has you covered with step-by-step instructions and thoughtful insights on the topic. Equipped with expert knowledge on everything from pouring champagne to taking a vacation, you'll be a flawless force to be reckoned with!

Trevor Dodge, He Always Still Tastes Like Dynamite, Subito Press, 2017.
www.trevordodge.com/laws
trevordodge.wordpress.com/
twitter.com/trevordodge?lang=en


He Always Still Tastes Like Dynamite is a flash-fictional evisceration of toxic masculinity, a difficult yet tender exploration of the implicit and explicit violences men do to those they are afraid to love, those they pretend to hate, and those hearts, minds, and bodies they nervously call their own. In stories set amidst the sagebrush and clay of drive-through territories of the contemporary intermountain West, Trevor Dodge writes honestly and forcefully about characters trapped inside the cartoon performances intoned from having watched John Wayne movies, listened to Toby Keith albums, and suffered George W. Bush’s America.Here language dances between the highly abstract and grittily realistic, between the structurally provocative as well as the emotionally stark. Dodge’s latest short story collection delivers scenes of domestic realism in an array of inventive, energetic, and poignant prose styles that invite readers to both literally and figuratively read between the lines.
Mirroring a masculinist culture where the ghost of work has long since expended itself but whose mindless meaning still lumbers on, these stories challenge us to consider the kinds of expressions, situations, and relationships that hamstring and harm us. If we are to imagine ourselves liberated from these things, we must first recognize our erasures by them. If Dodge’s bold new collection is painful, it is made so in the portrayal of recognizable selves that we are loathe to acknowledge but nonetheless mandated to make better not only for ourselves but for those we claim to love. He Always Still Tastes Like Dynamite demands we look deep into the mirror, and obligates us to change what we see.






Trevor Dodge's He Always Still Tastes Like Dynamite is a finely-crafted collection of birthdays, firsts, thirds, stones, heaps, adjustments and so much more. It's quietly explosive, a dynamite book.
--Kim Chinquee

He Always Still Tastes Like Dynamite conjures a modern America that is hilarious and heartbreaking and deeply familiar. Dodge's talents and range are frighteningly impressive, and these stories are true and rich. From the first page I was in this book's grips. There isn't a word out of place here, not a single story that doesn't grab you by the collar. -- Jensen Beach

What's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding tipped at strange angles? Nothing, Dodge tells us with conviction. Nothing at all. -- Rafael Alvarez





Trevor Dodge, The Laws of Average, Dzanc Books, 2015.



Read The Laws of Average Online



In 60 flash fictions, The Laws of Average celebrates the insanity of falling in love, the absurdity of playing by the rules, and the stupidities of discontent that ensnare us all.





The world in Trevor Dodge's The Laws of Average resembles a Donald Barthelme fever dream: a woman drives a Yukon Denali equipped with after-market rear and front-mounted surveillance cameras, so she can look both behind and ahead of herself at the same time, a lube both numbs the body and makes vigorous intimacy possible, a narrator takes James Frey and Oprah to task for introducing the concept that memoirs should have Terms of Service. With these stories, Dodge has managed to pull realistic fiction back from the brink of destruction. The Laws of Average is essential reading for anyone who wonders what happens next in the story of American Fiction after Lydia Davis, Ben Marcus, and George Saunders. -Matt Briggs

Trevor Dodge's The Laws of Average is a puzzle, mathematical. I've detailed nothing yet about the stories themselves, those hanging from the frame. They are in a word: competent, skillful, and interesting. That's three.--Elizabeth J. Colen 

“And I should be happy now the grin is back, right? It should remind me that the core of him is still there, despite what the shell of him looks or smells like. Well I am not happy. Now that the grin is back I am reminded of being me more and more, while feeling like you less and less. And I’m not sure who to blame for any of this. I see you in my mailbox, on my computer screen, in once-sacred places and thoughts I used to visit because I thought they were truly sacred. I’m wearing your clothes, brushing your hair, shaving your legs. I am becoming un-Real.” ~P207, The Laws of Average by Trevor Dodge.
I discovered Trevor Dodge when I took one of his workshops at the Clackamas Community College’s Compose Writing Conference this year. He was teaching flash fiction that day, and I was inspired by his passion, inspiration, and obvious skill.
When his book of 60 flash fictions, The Laws of Average, came out, I grabbed a copy and have been savoring it ever since. I have almost finished the book, but wanted to do a paragraph review of it, so I skipped ahead to a page and story I hadn’t read yet, and landed on the above passage.
The conversational tone struck me immediately, like the narrator is having a drink with the reader and lamenting her (I’m assuming, here) relationship woes, maybe a marriage that has hit a rut. I have a distinct visual in my head of a dark wooden bar, and two crossed legs, the top one bouncing up and down as the narrator speaks, high heels dark and classy at the end of shapely calves. I get nothing but that, though. Who is the narrator ultimately addressing? Another woman? The man with the rediscovered grin? Herself? There is a sense of borderline obsession toward the end of the paragraph- an obsession of becoming someone else, disappearing into another’s identity.
I feel the crux of this paragraph is the line, “And I’m not sure who to blame for any of this.” That’s where the direction of the conversation gets more pointed, where the narrator includes “you” and “your” with “I” and “me.” The paragraph becomes almost accusatory at this point, the narrator has felt intruded upon by this, “you,” and seems to be trying to decide whether or not to blame “you” for the sudden lack of sacred places. In fact, the only thing the narrator seems sure of in this paragraph is that she is unhappy, and the acts that she is doing to become un-Real.
I also like the use of the words “core” and “shell” combined with “looks” and “smells.” I got a definite sensory reaction to those words, even a faint smell of ocean air and dead fish. The paragraph is emotionally driven, and the narrator seems to be someone who thinks with her heart.
Dodge does a great job of using the conversational tone to build tension in this paragraph, and it has me wondering about the rest of the story. I already feel like I’m in the narrator’s head, I can’t wait to find out the context for her thoughts. - Jessica Standifird
https://blueskirtproductions.com/2014/09/19/paragraph-review-the-laws-of-average-by-trevor-dodge/

Trevor Dodge, Everyone I Know Lives On Roads,Chiasmus Press, 2011.

Everyone I Know Lives On Roads examines the accident scene of celebrity, fate and language, measuring the skidmarks for traces of our Oedipal selves and chalking out the metaphorical places where these three paths converge. Road ragers and rubberneckers met along the way include Ayn Rand, Kathy Acker and Alan Greenspan, with hourly traffic reports from Dan Rather and James Joyce on weather.






“Though literature is usually the most conservative of art forms, a book sometimes appears that offers exciting, new possibilities. Trevor Dodge’s Everyone I Know Lives On Roads is one of them: with the smooth surfaces found in new-painting, with the understated riffs of new-music, the stories collected here are as lean as they are savvy, as savvy as they are funny, as funny as they are connected to the thought, life and paths of our present moment.” —Steve Tomasula

Selected Shorts

Kirsten Kaschock, Confessional Sci-Fi: A Primer, Subito Press, 2017.
kaschock.wordpress.com/



CONFESSIONAL SCI-FI: A PRIMER is a book of in-between spaces and times. No one is quite what or where or when they seem to be. Each of the five prosepoetic pieces in the book has a narrative although it would be more difficult (though not impossible) to say each has a plot. Identity is interrogated here, but also community, and also the isolation that is unique to our current non-time—when our spheres of contact are more virtual than visceral.
In “Oh, Lorraine” a woman runs into the arms of an urban ruin to escape her marriage—maybe briefly, maybe for forever. In “A Bedroom Community Diary” a town is derailed by strangely antiquated (yet still prevalent) gender codes. In “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter” a young woman seeks a new life and finds all the little deaths. “After Museum” is a dream about loss and the fear of loss as accompanied by rollerskating and winged primates. Finally, “WindowBoxing” plumbs the rage that accompanies search and sorrow.
Kirsten Kaschock:  “I hoped, in each of these small works, to find a way into the hidden places that no memoir or non-fiction work quite reaches in their slavish adherence to reality… the place where personal history intersects with phantasm and prophesy becomes probative.”


Fiction and poetry are both types of distortion: what happens to representation when representation fails. In theater, mask work is done to get beneath the (sur)face. Each of these five pieces delve into different facets of autobiography while resisting realism at every turn. They are: the Lynchian-suburban pastoral, the urban-ruin-porn of midlife crisis, the psychologically-fabular herstory, the trauma-imbued dreamscape, and a synthetic meditation on the domestic-virtual.





"Kaschock's CONFESSIONAL SCI-FI: A PRIMER bravely crosses the rivers between genres to salvage the unpredictable and essential particulars of lived experience. We haunt the Divine Lorraine Hotel beside a speaker seeking to extract herself from the prefabricated narratives of family and gender. We hover inside an explosive abecedarian sequence. Throughout it all, we witness a dance comprised of sinew and wind, a mind unfettered by familiar architectures."—Eric Baus


In her latest collection, poet and novelist Kaschock (The Dottery) evinces a fluid and playful relationship with both confessional poetry and science fiction, suggesting that neither can sufficiently establish a relationship to truth. What is confessional, after all, when “To scale these stories/ requires a system of pulleys and/ falsehoods./ Scaffolding. To clean/ things all the way up.” The book’s five long pieces are heavily engaged in worldbuilding, each piece serving as a window—“Windows are what make domesticity seem picturesque, in that windows make sculpture into painting”—into a richly developed narrative context. Whether the subject is a woman who is having an affair with a soon-to-be-demolished hotel called The Divine Lorraine or a suburban community that’s home to a host of suspicious characters and the site of a grisly murder, each piece is dense with activity and anxiety. The collection’s middle section, “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter,” functions as myth and ars poetica. Here, the importance of violence to Kaschock’s poetry becomes clear: “Myrtle’s life is like all life—dependent on the endless digestion of smaller deaths, on their incorporation into the work.” As much a noir adventure as it is a sci-fi confessional, Kaschock’s dynamic collection revels in expanding our understanding of genre, and life itself: “I wonder, Can what is not enough—be?” - Publishers Weekly


In her book 300 Arguments, Sarah Manguso asserts, “You might as well start by confessing your greatest shame. Anything else would just be exposition.” Kirsten Kaschock’s Confessional Sci-Fi, A Primerpivots on the axis of a confession. Its first section, Oh, Lorraine, is relatively brief, comprised of ten prose paragraphs, grammatically constructed in the future. It begins: “In three years, I will leave my husband, my three boys (aged 11, 8 and nearly 6) to move into the Divine Lorraine Hotel for the three months prior to its scheduled demolition.” The ramifications of this simple fact engine this book’s catastrophic anxiety.

[…] The entire process
(I blush for me) is like cutting — a bodying forth of the internal
shameful. I enter the Divine Lorraine because she is the only
divinity I will allow myself to enter. I enter the Divine Lorraine
because I have not allowed entry to myself in nearly a year. I
enter the Divine Lorraine looking for something to save. It is
not me. Already, it will be too late for that.

---

The book’s fourth section is the truly mesmerizing After Museum. The Museum is“pre-garden, what went underground but was not sown, or was sown without resource. see Orpheus, see Orphanage.” The Museum, built on the site of the burned original, places the speaker on decimated ground. She is led by a docent — a “two-guide” — described as ape-like, with wings, a child asleep within the appendages. There is a woman strung out on a loom, twins playing cellos, frogs hanging in rafters, a clone “who replaces what / you have lost, and yet is not real, / does not threaten the memories of / the lost by being real and in its own right.” I won’t catalog the encounters further. The tendency is to read this museum tour as a psychological one — an outward manifestation of an inner world. I do not discount this interpretation. But letting the muscle of conventional narrative atrophy makes for the best reading. Here is an excerpt:

This is the Greatroom of Non-
Differentiation, she tells you,
the child-voice catching on a red
feather spit out of the wings, wet
and thin. Teeth hang in mid-air as
if for plucking. A rich stain of liver
tissue on the far wall accuses you of
your last orgasm. The question you
want to ask is the same one: How
do we keep from drowning in these
bodies? The two-guide touches your
arm with her damp, hairy palm, and
the answer is: membranes. And the
answer is: form. And the answer is:
some god. You don’t want to hear
that so, move along.

The columnar structure creates claustrophobic rooms punctuated by more boxes; colophons like fortune cookie fortunes create equations for what is and what is not (Pain ≠ transcendence) (Pomegranate = placebo). The wisdom is less enlightenment than resignation: “This is your missing. The grief you can’t own. This is your gap in the skyline,” the speaker says. The section is punctuated with a final empty box, when the poet has left the building and its perverted lessons behind. The whole sequence is beastly, spectral, fascinating, solemn, visceral, wondrous:

[…] You feel the
dark on your back first, a cloak of
cold. The sunset has withdrawn to
the longitude of its next withdrawal.
Such a different personality than
dawn. You wonder how they bear
to co-exist.

There are muted, unjust lessons in this primer: pomegranates are eaten with the expectation that the speaker will “shit spring the next day,” a grasp at the elusive angel-child leads to hand nipped and bloodied. A bridge connects two worlds, as heaven and earth: at last, the on-ramp to those tourists’ more familiar lives — the mundane ones with the macabre baked in. The lesson that smarts most speaks to the machinations required to live in it: “To scale these stories,” it is said, “requires a system of pulleys and falsehoods. Scaffolding. To clean things all the way up.”

Paula Fox, novelist and children’s book writer (and Courtney Love’s grandmother, how’s that for Lynchian) said that words are nets through which all truth escapes. Kaschock makes you believe it. She writes in the double-voiced discourse of feminist poetics — at once new but rubbing against an established convention. With Confessional Sci-Fi, she continues to forge her her place within its lineage. Windowboxing: A Dance with Saints in Three Acts finishes the book. The section was published as a chapbook in 2012. After being confined in so many small spaces, this choreography of poems explores gender stereotypes with a sense of freedom that may have, by itself, been read as restriction. “By starting that sentence two women perhaps I have indicated / something,” the speaker states, as language playfully ruptures as if newly autonomous, showing the reader its many deceits.

---

“Here, rules fray,” says the speaker in After Museum, speaking to a changed You — the I, perhaps now doubled.“Some, it seems, as you peer into their unknotted faces, find such slippage comforting.” The role of literature, it has been said, is to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. I read Confessional Sci-Fi first in the fever dream of a summer vacation and was unmoored by it. The second time I read it I was back in real life, vaulting between garden-variety distress and family trauma. Its semantic dance, its grotesque truths, its disobedience, the heartbreaking reach of the speaker toward the child that eludes her — they comforted me. - Michelle Lewis   https://medium.com/anomalyblog/the-disturbing-comfort-of-kirsten-kaschocks-confessional-sci-fi-a-primer-7c36ed4e861e

Kirsten Kaschock, A Beautiful Name for a Girl, Ahsahta Press, 2011.


Human identity testing itself: are the speakers of these poems mother, teacher, creative artist--or are they merely bones to be sorted and juggled? The ramifications of identity ("we'd know... the translation / into mother to be exaltation. Murder, also") leap up sharply in the book's central poem, "Snuff Ballet," in which one speaker, a dancer, is tested by inquisitors who may be a board from whom she seeks a grant. But perhaps these voices, which quickly become intimate and judgmental ("When was the last time you had sex?"), are merely criticism internalized, part of the "one-woman show."


Daughter Song

(1)
Out of a body, the heart.
I wrapped it in red lettuce and sang to it.
I don’t know why it was more fall than I was.
The turning of the year
that usually anchored things
was extricating them.
Imagine my fear.
Removal of this, removal of
beauty, infancy.
 
(2)
Winter. The other word for aging.
Yearly, fewer people make it through January
than other months. On the radio.
I sang to the muscle even as it grew
ashy. The song was continuing pain.
I gave it up like fainting choirboys.
I gave it up like cancer.
I have no control over what comes out of me.
 
(3)
Bereft of the heart, the body
refused to lullaby. To lie down.
I could not make the body into a doll.
I had to leave it behind in the grass
to break down. While I went off
circling the tender
dying woods with its heart in a leaf.
Kirsten Kaschock, Sleight, Coffee House Press, 2011.
read it at Google Books


Sisters Lark and Clef have spent their lives honing their bodies for sleight, an interdisciplinary art form that combines elements of dance, architecture, acrobatics, and spoken word. After being estranged for several years, the sisters are reunited by a deceptive and ambitious sleight troupe director named West who needs the sisters' opposing approaches to the form—Lark is tormented and fragile, but a prodigy; Clef is driven to excel, but lacks the spark of artistic genius.
When a disturbing mass murder makes national headlines, West seizes on the event as inspiration for his new performance, one that threatens to destroy the very artists performing it.
In language that is at once unsettling and hypnotic, Sleight explores ideas of performance, gender, and family to ask the question: what is the role of art in the face of unthinkable tragedy?


‘I quit because I was good, and when you’re good and a girl at something, you should be suspicious.’
'Of what?’
'Of what part of yourself you didn’t know you were selling.’


Siblings, mysterious billboard messages, maimed children and a bizarre art form coalesce, up to a point, in an unusual, dreamlike tale.
Choreographer/poet/novelist Kaschock constructs her debut around a new performance art form combining sound, movement and structures, called sleighting, and invents a new set of meanings to go with it: Needs, Souls, wicking, precursors all take on fresh connotations in a teasingly oblique story written in prose sometimes lyrical, sometimes clotted, requiring the retuning of the ear: “He saw darkness as necessary, a part of the scrutiny, the spelunking of sleight’s potential.” Two sisters, Clef and Lark, have performed sleight, although emotionally troubled Lark left the troupe. West, who runs a different troupe, has met Byrne, a gifted writer who carries a rock in memory of his hated father. As a new sleight work is assembled, a horrible serial killing comes to light, the Vogelsongs’ ritual murder of some two dozen children, and this terror becomes woven into the new show. Kaschock’s inventive but odd story is matched on the page by peculiar layouts, lists, script dialogue and footnotes. Gothic and intense, this fully imagined yet partly private work of storytelling loosely connects themes of pained childhood, eventually wrapping up some of them.
Powerfully original verging on the obfuscatory, this is a novel with no middle ground: Readers will either love or hate it. - Kirkus Reviews


This muddled debut novel, though ostensibly about “sleight” (a fictional interdisciplinary art form combining dance, architecture, acrobatics, and spoken word), provides no clear definition of sleight. That Kaschock, the author of two poetry collections (Unfathoms; A Beautiful Name for a Girl), never offers a clear visual of this practice is only one of the book’s many problems. Focusing on two sleightist sisters, Clef and Lark, the novel examines their troubled relationship, which is paralleled by the strained bond between two brothers, Byrne and Marvel. These four troubled sleightists are brought together by West, a less-than-scrupulous sleight director, in order to create an unorthodox sleight based on the tragic murder of 25 children. As the intense preparations for the performance collide with the legacies of past transgressions, the sleightists begin to fall apart, even as they increasingly come to feel that sleight offers their only chance at salvation. The reader may well feel some of the presumed contortions of sleight while attempting to make sense of this strenuously pretentious and humorless novel. - Publishers Weekly


In her novel Sleight, Kirsten Kaschock has set herself a near-impossible challenge: the creation of a new, multidisciplinary art form that she can only communicate in words. Set in an almost-alternate reality where people have names like Kitchen and Marvel and “sleight” is a prestigious cultural institution with its own rich history, the novel centers on two sisters, Lark and Clef, who have spent their lives training as sleightists. Although temperamentally at odds, they’re inextricably bound together by their art. In their divergent approaches to sleight — Lark is tortured and delicate where Clef is steadfast and cold — they become twinned allegories of artistic creation.
But what is sleight?  The task of answering this question — poised from the work’s very beginning — proves difficult. Sleight is a universe unto itself, with a prescribed set of practices and movements: sleightists are like dancers, only they move with structures called architectures that are themselves interpretations of drawings. A string of Dada-like spoken words called a “precursor” governs their movement. (It’s as elaborate as it sounds.) An omniscient narrator with a scholarly air unfolds the form’s history and aesthetics in footnotes:
In the syntax of sleight, an architecture is a word.  A manipulation is a single definition of an architecture; an architecture can be moved through several different manipulations — anywhere from three to thirty. A link is the method by which one architecture attaches to another.
Perhaps it’s a failure of my imagination as a reader, rather than Kaschock’s as an author, but the nature of sleight never coalesces into a visualizable art. As often as she explains what it is, she never shows what it looks like. Even the climactic performance, which upends the sleight community and nearly destroys its performers in the process, loses its force by virtue of its abstraction. The closest we get to an explanation of “wicking,” the apotheosis of sleight — apparently a kind obliterating dissolution of the body into the work — is that “a performer is snuffed out.” To Lark, at six, “it was ice. An incapacity to hold warmth in the marrow, below the level of bone.”

Kaschock has built an allegory about the toll art extracts from its creators around an art that proves fundamentally unknowable. This is not to say that a new art form can’t be invented in prose (had she written a novel about, say, ballet, her book might have gotten dangerously stuck in Black Swan territory) but that Sleight loses the precision of its otherwise entrancing language when trying to convert an imaginary practice into images. Kaschock is a sensitive writer, with an uncanny empathy for her characters — particularly when dealing with the limits of the body. “Lark was bruised. It was her state, bruising, blood welling up only to be blocked by membrane. Lark would have liked to let herself: dress in leeches, sate them, have them fall from her deceased,” writes Kaschock in only one of her haunting metaphors.
Cut away from sleight itself, the novel is a moving portrait of mental illness, of sibling love and rivalry, and above all, of the destructive power of great art over its performers. It’s a shame that we can’t see what Lark and Clef create; we can only make out their scars. - Amelia Atlashttps://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/sleight


I just finished the beautiful and affecting Sleight by Kirsten Kaschock, and I can honestly say I’ve never read anything like it. It was a novel written in poetry, in dense, brief little chapters — each one a rounded, shiny truffle with a spider lurking inside.
What two forms could be more different than poetry and the novel? Poetry produces gems, small rich things to turn over in your mind all day long, little hauntings to revist you as you dust the mantel or brush your teeth or let out the dog that last time before bed. And then a novel is a movie: for flopping onto your belly with a bowl of popcorn, for being swept away in, for falling in love with characters. You don’t fall in love with the characters in a poem — the poetic voice, maybe, but not the characters. And wouldn’t so much poetry be too rich for a novel?
Somehow, Kaschock makes it work. She is a poet who loves her characters, and her writing, though rich, won’t make you feel ill if you read a lot in one sitting. Somehow each poetic chapter doubles itself — you’re reading just a little more, a little more, and the language becomes not an obstruction but a guide, a guide on a subway no less, until you’re reading faster than you should be but you still can’t stop. Kaschock venerates language like a poet, but, like a novelist, she’s crazy in love with her characters. “The characters were/are like family—hard to lose in that way,” she says in an interview, citing the day that, while unloading her dishwasher, it occurred to her how the novel would end.
The title, Sleight, refers to an art form Kaschock has invented for the book — primarily dance, but incorporating elements of architecture, spoken word, acrobatics.You won’t be surprised to learn that Kaschock, in her own words, “collects advanced degrees” — she has a Ph.D in English Literature and another in dance; she’s attended Yale and Syracuse universities, among others.
Lark and Clef are two sisters who have been practicing the art of sleight since they were young. They have been estranged for six years, in part because of a minor betrayal over a lover but also because of larger familial trauma; they have now reunited to dance for a troupe director named West, who is pushing the limits of the form. As the book jacket reveals: “When a disturbing mass murder makes national headlines, West seizes on the event as inspiration for his new performance, one that threatens to destroy the very artists performing it.”
While a murder is referenced on the book’s jacket, it feels less like a driving force of the plot than it is a sort of umbrella of commonality under which the characters operate. At the moment we find out about this murder, we find out who did it and why they revealed themselves. This is no murder mystery in a traditional sense. It is arumination  — on murder as a personal act, as a bad national habit, as an inevitable, occasional flaw of humanity. The murder referenced here is used to psychoanalyze the characters, to work towards their healing or lack thereof. How they will relate to one another, how or if they will forgive one another — these are the mysteries we wait until the end to see resolved. It might not work if Kaschock’s characters were not so immensely riveting. Her pacing is also dead-on — just when we might start to feel mired on one character’s consciousness (or, as the character Clef describes her sister: “narcissistic…focused on [her] own darkness”), we move to another character, to the delectable mysteries that make them both human and otherworldly.
“His father’s face has had, for some years, the blurred edges of a twelfth-century gargoyle — its granite angles sloughing off, one by one, degrees of severity. Deserts are not to Byrne location but pestilence: a desert is slower locusts” (p. 100)
A desert is slower locusts. You can feel the poet playing there, all those s sounds making you say locust, locus, deserted slower locus. And yet there’s the concrete image of sleightist Byrne’s father, his disapproving gargoyle face, aging, or changing in Byrne’s mind. It’s beautiful. Beauty throbs through this book like a heartbeat. - Andria Williams  militaryspousebookreview.com/2014/03/05/book-review-sleight-by-kirsten-kaschock/


The analogy of the 'Russian doll' has been discussed to death in the manner of speaking about 'worlds within worlds,' and in a way, this notion is so wrong: it makes the worlds seem clear and separate, contained within one another as a placeholder, to be toyed with and stored, each painted cool.
Hell naw.
Let's drop the cute crud and pretend like we're actually talking about something that exists, and is made not of snap-shapes, but of air and doors.
Like, here: Kirsten Kaschok's 'from Sleight', which appeared in the always brain licking Action Yes in Spring 2007. I hadn't read any of Kaschok's text until coming upon this in reading and rereading the AYes archives for some fuel to make me want to spurt.
(How easy it can be to forget how much the act of writing is as much a method of intake as it is out-.)
Excerpts in fiction often suffer in that they feel strung out or lopsided: I've never had so much trouble and frustration as when I am trying to cut up a very long text into something 'submittable,' etc. In this case, with this excerpt from 'Slight' (which I am now very interested to find the body of, having chewed a digit and wanting body), the effect is forward-pushing, if also maddening for how it makes the blood boil wanting more (good!).
This text, in its most reduced state, is an exploration of one my favorite, or at least perpetually recurring, thoughts: the body as a house and house as a body, and how rooms connect to rooms, with blood, etc.
And while these ideas are things I've walked upon for so long, here in 'Sleight' the approach feels fresh, in the way it takes an even more literal, somehow almost clinical approach (the narrator goes into a room and flexes her body, thinking about the state of the architectures) and the way is mashes with Kaschock's manner of melding the heavy-headed with the offhand: an aesthetic that can often come off bratty, but not here.
Clef rearranged her leotard. She adjusted the elastic along her hipbones, tugged at her spaghetti straps, then bent over to gather up the architecture. During performance she wore no leotard beneath her web, but in rehearsals the women wore them and the men—athletic belts or biker shorts. She looked in the mirror. Her hair, though pulled back, was coming undone around her face—which was growing somewhat red. She could already see blood pooled where a few bruises would be forming: one beneath her left knee, one on either hip. A throb told her of a fourth on her shoulder. It felt good—her—moving again. Tender.
So mathematical, almost bizarrist, using the anatomy as a map, inside the worm of rooms where the body itself has gone to flex for no apparent purpose but to do so: leaving that insisted upon 'Russian doll' junk at the gate. The narrator is aware of her body, and the body around her body, without wanting their connection: though all still within a mood of kinetics, like someone is about to somewhere be stabbed or have a fuck.
These ideas are propagated and allowed to worm, rather than be needled, letting the sentences and their surrounding space do most of the work, like here, a one sentence paragraph:
Clef began to rotate her tubes and wires.
There is likely an analogy of the name 'Clef' that could be fucked up out of someone wanting music but the music is just there, and is not asked upon, and rides, and lets eat: this is a text and not a story, not a poem. Text. No labels. Words. MMM.
The last graph, in its exit from the space of the rest of the narrative, a connected disconnection, takes the architectures of the fleshy body in the building body and reverts them to the fleshy body's own ingestion of a smaller cell, the eating of an apple, which, once bitten of its best flesh, is tossed away, left in a trash pile to be resettled somewhere, bitten somewhere else, maybe, or left to rot:
Clef ate an apple as she walked toward the subway. The apple was a world. The wind that whipped a lock of wet hair into her mouth was inside the apple. She sucked salt from the hair before pulling it from her lips. Above her the blue pressed down coldly. She was taller now, and could pierce it. Clef cut a swath from the air as she moved down the street. First, someone noticed her passing. Then, someone else. Scraps of newspapers and neon-hued flyers drifted down to settle in her wake. She tossed the apple core into a wire trash can and peeled some red paint from her palm. It had the irregular shape of a continent. Some vagrant continent—brightly bloody.
The variance of space, like something throbbing, lands in lands in the best way, the sanguine, tunneled way, over the insistence shelf-sat 'doll' diagram where everybody already knows: this is a text like meditation. This is text made of fine things: High, low. Bloody food. Sentence. Sentence. Shit. Rapacity for shit same as a temple, and for flexing. Yum. - Blake Butler http://www.gillesdeleuzecommittedsuicideandsowilldrphil.com/2009/05/ssm-kirsten-kaschocks-from-slight.html


The most challenging and fascinating, and impressive, novel I’ve read lately is Sleight by Kirsten Kaschock. As a writer, you are attracted to reading that resonates with your own writing. I enjoy texts that ask the reader to make their own connections, and our understandings of the characters, the story, and “sleight” begin as disparate then coalesce, in the same way the sleight troupe’s practise comes together and arrives as a singular definitive event. In this way, the subject mirrors the novel’s structure, which is always effective, when achieved.
The multi-dimensional, abstract, almost impossible performance art-dance Kaschock created in sleight also resonated with the abstract-impossible aspects of The Sovereign Hand: those elements that are often decribed as “unfilmable”, where concrete description and detail surrender to an impression that eludes reality, and is all the more potent for it. The slake moth of Perdido Street Station and the perpetual train of Iron Council come to mind; the affect of scent in Süskind’s Perfume; In The Sovereign Hand, it’s the diablerie, in particular. All evidence that sometimes you can not just call a spade a spade, that you need richer language to unchain the reader from unthinking signifiers and permit them to draw their own ring around whatever is signified in their mind. That’s what speculative fiction, in whatever genre, does best. - Paul Gilbert


Spellbinding: ostensibly a novel, Sleight reads like a critical theory treatise that’s been Pixared into plot and characters, with all the sentences personally airbrushed with the scrupulousness of Mallarmé
- Jed Rasula


However, when it comes to the contemporary weird, Kirsten Kaschock’s Sleight is the most remarkable novel I’ve encountered in a long time. It focuses on sleight, an art form which is remarkably elusive; indeed it seems to be not so much an art form as a denial of art, an effacing of performance, a self-abnegation, perhaps even an indulgence given one wonders if it actually exists. One learns, mainly from footnotes to the main text, that it involves sleightists (the actual performers) and objects (architectures) which they in some way move with and around on stage, and link together in assemblages of people and objects, but this is performance which is form stripped of narrative and which, when done well, manifests its success through the performers no longer actually being visible on stage. The performances themselves are somehow ‘drawn’ by ‘hands’ yet at the same time sleight appears to be an art form which almost from its inception has been ossified, slavishly adhering to its original forms. Preference is given always to men although it seems that women may, on the whole, be the better sleightists and indeed it was a woman who brought sleight into being. Creativity is simultaneously necessary yet suppressed. It is, if you like, the highest form of performance art in that the sleight troupes seek no recognition as individuals, and indeed exceptionality in performance is institutionally frowned upon. Audiences do not applaud, and there is much debate as to whether they actually understand what it is they are seeing. One might suppose that sleight, as an art form, is somehow related to the Emperor’s new clothes in its very invisibility.
The title refers to a fictitious performance art form that apparently somehow blends architecture, acrobatics, mysticism, geometry, dance, sculpture and spoken word. All of the characters in the novel are steeped in sleight as not only a profession, but a compulsion, a burden, an inspiration, an atmosphere, a planet—for most of the players here, sleight is life itself. A doctoral fellow in dance at Temple University at the time of the novel’s publication, author Kirsten Kaschock has obviously spent enough time in the performing arts to understand this phenomenon very well and to portray it clearly. The artists’ personalities and interplay are recognizable, but the author is less successful at bringing the nuts and bolts of sleight itself to life and making it real for the listener. This is not a story in which action is very important overall, but the intrinsically vague and abstract nature of the mechanics of sleight tends to make it hard to envision what’s happening in the rehearsal chambers and on the stage. Add to that the unfamiliar terminology the author deploys in support of her made-up art form, and you get a narrative thread that proves difficult to follow at times.
Sleight, the novel, turns out to be just as difficult to describe as “sleight,” the art form. At the story’s center are sisters Lark and Clef Scrye, both of whom began training and working as sleightists when very young. Lark left the life, however, and has been living in self-imposed exile from sleight, consumed by her body’s expulsion of Needs and their conversion into Souls, as mentioned above. Clef, still an active sleightist, gets caught up in the inevitable drama and intrigue when the enigmatic sleight director West conceives a grand plan to combine two sleight troupes and create a performance piece like nothing ever seen before, and Lark gets sucked back in at the same time. Mysterious hidden talents come to light, with disturbing and unexpected consequences — especially when West recruits a young outsider named Byrne, and a longstanding case involving missing children is solved.
Adam Verner narrates Sleight with clarity and precision, and adopts the novel’s prevailing tone of cool detachment as his own. When things are as trippy and hard to pin down as they tend to get in this story, it takes a straight-arrow, matter-of-fact reader to lend a sense of reality to the proceedings. Verner does quite well on this score.
Sleight is not for everyone, but for those who are comfortable with the abstract and who like a narrative that challenges at every turn, this novel offers much reward. Reminiscent of the works of Aimee Bender and Jonathan Carroll in both style and substance, the story relies on the reader to meet it halfway, and supplies a dreamy surrealism that makes its own logic and is often quite beautiful. Kaschock is not only a dancer, but also a poet, which is apparent in her facility with language, especially her willingness to be experimental with it. Her experimentation pays off, with many lovely and unusual juxtapositions that surprise and delight, and smell like truth. For instance, “‘What other mirrors are there?’ ‘Oh, glass at night, and tinfoil. And some people are. They’re walking knives — you can see yourself in them, but you’re cut up.'” - mockturtle https://mockturtle.wordpress.com/2012/05/17/audiobook-review-sleight/


Kristen Park’s review in Bombay Gin.(pdf)


I like to swim in fiction, all books really, but specifically those creative worlds developed by those creative world-makers dubbed novelists. I glide through their settings and periods and places and sneak up against their characters, our bare skin touching with the most sensual of intimacy. I want to be lost in the author’s liquid space of words and ideas. And it was with great pleasure that I stroked, crawled, and waded through Kirstein Kaschock’s debut novel Sleight and its intoxicating layers of form.  
- Beau Hancock


Sleight is disorienting at first: entering the world of the book means picking up its vocabulary, the vocabulary of an imagined form of art called sleight that’s part acrobatics, part dance, but something else entirely. One character, early in the book, says sleight is “beyond anything it may have come from. Or out of”: she goes on to say that “at several points during a sleight performance—you’ve got epiphany” (9). More concretely, sleight troupes, which all have nine women and three men, work with “architectures,” which are flexible frameworks—glass or fiberglass tubes strung together by fishing wire—shapes that encourage certain movements, shapes that link to other shapes in shifting forms. Sleight is about two sisters, both sleightists: Clef and Lark Scrye, who’ve been estranged for several years. Sleight is also about the art itself, and about a director named West who reunites the sisters to make his greatest work; by extension it’s about art in general, or maybe more about performance-based art in particular: it’s about bodies and space and discipline. It’s about more than that, too: ambition and motivation and desire, and art’s relation to its subject matter and its audience, and family, and connections between people. It’s sometimes almost-frustratingly abstract, not-entirely-articulated; it’s got touches of magic that never get explained away, or explained at all. But mostly it’s delicious and engrossing, and the kind of book I don’t want to say too much about. I like Clef and Lark, their resonances and differences. Here’s Clef, on why she performs:
I think I sleight because I always have. My mother sent my sister Lark and me, I guess for poise, and I was good. And when you are good and a girl at something, you stay with it—maybe for all the goodgirl words that come. Goodgirl words like do more, keep on, further—instead of the other goodgirl words—the if-you-are-you-will words—be nice and softer and you-don’t-like-fire-do-you? In sleight there was less of that so more of me, until there was less. (11)
And Lark, on why she stopped:
“I quit because I was good, and when you’re good and a girl at something, you should be suspicious.”
“Of what?”
“Of what part of yourself you didn’t know you were selling.” (92) - letters and sodas


A review preview at Bombay Gin…


Author Kirsten Kaschock didn’t make things easy for herself in her novel Sleight. In it, she creates an all new art form, and then, having created it, she has to describe it to her readers — who have never seen of heard of this new art form before its appearance in the book’s pages. How does one do that? And why would one make that much work for one’s self as a writer? Kaschock has her reasons, and here she is to explain them.
KIRSTEN KASCHOCK:
Sleight is the name of my novel; it is also the art form that is central to the world the novel describes, and in some ways it is the main character.  Sleight combines elements of dance, circus performance, poetry, and sacred geometry.  It is one hell of a chimera to get onto the page.
Art forms don’t monologue about their identities (at least not by the rules of my novel), and art forms made of transmuting parts that don’t and probably can’t exist are difficult to picture.  Sleight is impossible to fully describe because it reaches into the sublime—the peak experiences that all art strives for—those moments of absolute transcendence when you are no longer thinking about what you are hearing or seeing but only experiencing it.
This book is about that, about the people whose lives revolve around those magics—its creators and performers—and how their art is like a drug to them.  But how do you give a form to something that is always just there at the edge of your peripheral vision?  How do you make the ineffable visceral?  Sleight needed a body.  And I had to be the Frankenstein who would provide it.
I used footnotes.  I used play-dialogue, some poetic language, obituaries and reviews and letters: I used the kitchen sink.  I also used people: Lark and Clef Scrye are semi-estranged sisters brought back together by a pregnancy, by their love of sleight and their need of each other; Byrne and Marvel Dunne are two brothers drawn to the visual and verbal elements of the art and warring over their different understandings of their father’s death; West is the svengali-like director of one of the sleight troupes, and he orchestrates the collecting of human talent and pain that drives the novel to its inevitable end.
I have reasons for chronicling artists.  My four siblings and I were all trained in ballet, then I left that world to study literature and write poetry.  I entered fiction.  I returned to modern dance.  I married a molecular geneticist and became the mother of three young boys.  I know now that I can never not make.  But I also like to be engaged with the world in a way that all my disparate identities somehow weave together to make sense.  There are elements of Sleight (as I imagine there are in every novel) that are autobiographical, and probably the biggest one is this: the book unabashedly pieces together ideas of family, spirituality, history, artistic responsibility, and the daily horrors brought to us through our various screens.  I admit to large ambitions, and that containing them requires a science fiction sensibility I’ve had since childhood, thanks to Saturday morning Star Trek reruns.
When I was first drafting this book, I was in school in Athens, Georgia with a kindergartner, a toddler, and an infant.  During the day I discussed literary theory and aesthetics, and at night I swum among the bodies of my boys—feeding, cleaning, swaying, bathing, burping, lullabying.  My life affected my studies and my fiction profoundly: no theory, no novel that could not address my whole world was going to resonate with me nor tap itself into existence across my keyboard.
Sleight grapples with grappling, with making sense of things in the midst of chaos, and sometimes letting the chaos wash over you until, nearly drowning, you finally catch a glimpse—and the invisible web of connection shimmers out over the waves.  What could tie the never-quite-gone images of the confederate south to the crescent smile of my infant to the alien grace of a dancer exiting a tour bus at the alley backdoor of hundred-year-old theater to the clean elegance of an Erlenmeyer flask brought home from the lab and filled with daylilies?  If I could tell a story that connected those dots—that would be something.
Sleight is my chimera.  Speculative fiction, familial drama, and serial killings all wrapped into the plot of one of the old Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland movies: let’s put on a show.  This is its Big Idea: if looking for meaning is a profoundly human experience, then creating meaning out of shards of a broken world must also be—only even more so. - Whatever John Scalzi’s blog


The creation of an entirely new form of performance art—drawing from modern dance, spoken word, and architecture—provides a provocative debut novel by Kirsten Kaschock. Sleight attempts to address the ever-pervasive issue of how art should function in and respond to the tragedies of the modern world. With an array of characters depicted in lyrical, short language, the novel unfolds in traditional from, small plays, word sequences, and boxes filled with words that experiment with the novel form in a self-reflective manner, allowing further introspection.
Kaschock creates a new performance art named sleight, an art created by Antonia Bugliesi, a ballet dancer who found drawings from a 17^th century Frenchman Jesuit and brought them to life with glass and wire structures, designed by architects and manipulated by dancers. Nearly a century later, a modern sleight troupe director, West, decides to revolutionize sleight, deciding that he must imply meaning into the performance in response to a couple’s murder of various nameless children. He recruits two sisters Lark and Clef, one a former and one a current sleightest, to implement this new sleight performance. The sisters must navigate their relationship to each other and their relationship to sleight, highlighting dilemmas of how art functions in today’s society.
While the beginning of the novel may be difficult to navigate, Kaschock provides ways for the reader to adjust to the novel’s abstractions and dense language with its short, direct sentences that attempt to tackle complex ideas. Footnotes provide background information for the sleight, including defining unfamiliar terms, explaining histories, and giving other necessary background information. The novel’s language reads much like a poem (Kaschock authored two poetry collections) in its musicality and rhythm. For example, during a sleight performance, the writer of the troupe describes it “As if they were all just masks with nothing behind, or else wreckage. …He was dumb, although the words came and hung from him like a noose. He tried to offer the audience this same terrible stillness.” This tension in art permeates these artists as they try to grasp the art they continue to perform.
Sleight questions underlying notions of meaning and meaninglessness in art through its complicated nature, but it does not become the most challenging aspect of the novel. Lark, the former sleighest who is married with a child, speaks about ridding herself of her “Needs” by crushing them into powder. In a conversation with a writer for the troupe, she attempts to explain a Need, saying “‘Desire is what I do. A Need does desire to me.’” Lark then paints wood knots with a paint derived from the powder and calls them “Souls.” A few moments in the novel imply that these souls belong to some of the artists yet are owned by others. By transforming the unseen into the real, concepts become an unsettling reality. Always disorienting yet fascinating to watch unfold, Sleight provides a deep examination of art and those who engage with its ever-shifting presence.- Alyse Bensel at New Pages.


Sleight: the underpinnings
The art form at the heart of my first novel, Sleight, does not exist. Since there is nothing new under the stage or in the sun, Sleight is stitched together from aspects of modern dance, circus performance, experimental poetry, and sacred geometry. Research on the not-yet existent can be tricky, also frightening. I was trained as a dancer and a poet. I began writing Sleight as an exploration of the artist’s compulsion to make useless things. Sleight deals in the strange passions of the obsessed, their ties to their art, and how those ties bind them to one another. In addition to the art forms I vivisected to provide the guts for Sleight, I also had to learn how to splice unrelated fragments together. I studied the art of monster-creation: collage.
Research is what we call a series of questions that congregate around any black- or rabbit-hole. The closer I got to the singularity of art-making, the faster my questions spiraled, and the stranger the properties of Sleight became. Ideas came in fits and starts and quotes. Sleight itself is an amalgamation of straightforward narrative, play dialogue, Sleight reviews, obituaries, footnotes, and prosepoems. My research was equally fragmented. Some of my sources, thoughts, and preliminary findings are numbered below — what came to me as I was pacing around my laboratory. My library. My head.
1. “To begin with, I could have slept with all of the people in the poems” (Jack Spicer). I, too, desired only this much realism — that my characters be bodied.
2. I meant the characters, the types, I drew in Sleight to be both concrete and ungraspable, like people. There is a Svengali-like director who is just a little boy with a fear of cowboys. My fiery redhead is muddled. A would-be slacker feels compelled to one-fist his father’s death. The prodigal Sleightist regularly purges herself of art, and of feeling. Their secrets do not make them, which is why their secrets are not wholly satisfying. The objects and actions in which they house their secrets — these are more telling. These things point at what is unsayable: West’s ten-gallon-nightmares, Clef’s constant braiding and over-managing of her passions, Byrne’s rock ever-a-threat-in-hand, Lark’s vomiting-up of Needs.
3. In a world where art is the reason, the reason behind the art is only an excuse for its making.
4. A novel is a cobbled-together-thing, a machine. While writing, I tried not to be concerned with the traditional purposes of the machine I was building. I tend to distrust machines. But Sleight became my Rube Goldberg — especially beautiful in the ways its parts surpassed its function, in the ways the characters began to orbit the central art form like an unmappable electron cloud. The closer I went in, the more unpredictable they became.
5. A line in Borges’ “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” reads: A book that does not contain its counter-book is considered incomplete.
6. Sleight, the art form, is all about its counter-self — what it could be but is not. Its unexplored potential. At the pinnacle of Sleight, performers flicker out of existence. This is called wicking. The characters also negatively mirror one another and their art, as they submit to it. In Sleight, dark matters.
bq. This beloved is a hole. This, beloved, is a hole.
7. In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke writes: “Now you have gathered yourself together into yourself, see yourself ending ahead of you in your own hands… there is scarcely any room inside you… nothing very large can possibly abide in this narrowness.” This description of artistic angst — being limited by the self — is something I’ve felt. So in Sleight, I made Needs real. I gave them bodies so they would be wholly felt. And so they could wholly die.
8. Sleight is written in small sections, divided by scalpel cuts. As if the author could not bother to wait for the unnatural birth. These lines could be called hesitation cuts for a c-section or an abortion. I have a severe Need: to double my language into the body whenever possible. Then, get it out.
9. I have always been obsessed with the questions Sleight asks. In this way, it is embarrassingly autobiographical. What is art? What is it to be an artist? What about engagement with the world? Where is that? What are the ethics of borrowing pain?
10. A new art form should exist inside a new genre. While writing Sleight I wondered — how might one foster a Confessional Science-Fiction? Might I rescue two stones with one bird?
11. “[A]n allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture language… the principle being more worthless even than its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and the former shapeless to boot” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge). I think Coleridge is trying hard to be negative, yet he admits that allegory gives shape to the shapeless. I suppose I could call Sleight an allegory, but I like Confessional Sci-Fi better.
12. Another Need: to catch, however briefly, bits of down out of the air and sew them into a pillow that could support a dream of the lovely-dead-bird-sacrificed before growing sodden with nightsweat. One of Sleight’s main characters is named Lark. Because of birds.
13. “[S]uch works as have had their beginning in form… show, in token of their origin, an incurable want at the very point where we expect the consummate, the essential, the final” (Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling).
14. I am used to working from the external toward the center. Create the shape — the arabesque, the sonnet — and the heart is supposed to follow. I have at times felt that this was a grasping at the empty. Sleight revels in just such emptiness.
15A. “If it weren’t for prisons, we would know that we are all already in prison” (Maurice Blanchot).
15B. “Theatre takes place/all the time wherever one is and art simply/facilitates persuading one this is the case” (John Cage).
15C. One of these two statements should illustrate the goal of Sleight. Taken together, as they can’t reasonably be, they nearly do.
16. What happens when your ground is suddenly pierced, when you look deep and find in the darkness the beloved, and the beloved has a face? Do you then know the hole? That the hole is a grave? Or is it only the nature of the beloved that you see — as it transforms all that surrounds him? (He is dead.)
17. “You are living on the site of an atrocity” (ubiquitous billboard in Sleight). I think everyone is.
18. That sounds like horror. I tried to write something other than horror. Connection. The loving stitch: I wanted to show how Dr. Frankenstein is, at heart, a romantic.
19. “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture” (Elvis Costello). Yes! To dance about architecture, to write about such dancing. Attempting the impossible was the impetus for Sleight. To waltz with zombies, to have the mind utterly, happily consumed. Em-bodied. Yum.
20. Novels should be at least as risky as early nineteenth-century childbirth: in one out of five books, the author or the book should have to die. This I believe.
21. Sleight is my beloved hole. The living earth I knowingly carved into. I do not know what might have to die to fill it. Maybe, it will be me. - Kirsten Kaschock http://necessaryfiction.com/blog/ResearchNotesKirstenKaschock




Kirsten Kaschock, Unfathoms, Slope Editions 2004.


"As I get closer with my weapons," writes Kirsten Kaschock, the rules change -- the rules regarding how we must look at the body and spirit. A poet and choreographer, Kaschock uses language and the dance thereof to mount her attack. Using cities as metaphorical backdrops, the result is a voyage into the streets and arteries of various physical and psychic terrains. "With grace and whip-smart wit, Kirsten Kaschock is a gift from the gods of young talent. Her first book won't be her last, but it's indispensable to anyone who loves poetry and wants to fathom the unfathomable"--Mary Karr





Kirsten Kaschock, The Dottery, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014.
read it at Google Books


The Dottery is a tale of dotters before they are born. In this series of prose poems you meet their would-be-mutters, the buoys they will know, their inner warden, and the mutterers who cannot have them. The Dottery itself is a sort-of pre-purgatory, a finishing school for the fetal feminine. The five sections correspond to the conceptual set-ups interrogated within. In “wound,” The Dottery is described, as are its inhabitants and their difficulties. In “Dual,” a gender binary is introduced and (hopefully) eviscerated.  “Triage” establishes the issues that plague both the dotters and those who would bring them out into the world—specifically into the idea of America (I’m Erica and I can prefer a hummer to the rose parade”). In “Fear,” failed dotters (out in the world) are described in obit fashion. Finally, in “Thief” one mutterer recounts how she stole her dotter (“a snatched piece”) to become a mutter and chronicles both her desires and regrets.




“The Dottery,” perhaps best read as, ‘daughter-y,’ is a kind of finishing or boarding school for female children about to be born. This finishing school focuses on interactions between “mutters” and “dotters,” and the central question of what it means to become a gendered female. ‘Where does gender come from?’ ‘How is it constructed?’ and ‘Who decides?’ are central questions in Kirsten Kaschock’s The Dottery, winner of the 2013 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. The book emphasizes how our contemporary society marginalizes female power, femininity, and feminism. The word “woman” isn’t even uttered until Page 33; only homophones and nicknames that ‘skirt’ the label are employed beforehand. Kaschock proffers the idea that the female is somehow always for sale in contemporary culture. The personal—sexuality and lifestyle choices—become commercial in this volume, a “concentric cap and trade.” Women are also bought and sold through marriage, and the suppression of women’s needs and desires is a consistent motif in Kaschock’s scathing social commentary.
Gender is a social construct and this idea is, of course, accepted in the liberal purview. Kaschock knows it and thus envisions a scenario where the thread of gender making is tugged to the extreme, even reflexively back to birth. She wades into the murkiest of waters, asserting that our society affects children, and definitely their parents, before a baby is even born. Dotters should be treated with “sugar,” and maybe also ‘spice and everything nice.’ The Dottery is strict and life altering machine; its comparison to Catholic school, “very like a church,” doesn’t seem far-fetched. Conforming to the standards set at school will lead to physical or metaphysical death, Kaschock warns: ”Dotters have been regularly educated to their detriment. Sugar is often their fondest wish. It is why some are born, and how they would die.”
Although The Dottery is clearly grounded in contemporary feminism, Kaschock’s influences cast a wide historical net into the patriarchal past. She seems to draws on, while railing against, the language of John Ashbery, modern art, and the manifestoes of the early 20th century and before. These conceptual clusters augment the necessary narrative of the book. The frontispiece prose poem, perhaps better thought of as a forward, brings a few of these influences quickly into focus: “It is essential to note that manifestoes, their tiny toes, are generally written to defend the birth of the monster rather than messily during conception.” Later on in “: nevertheless, a manifesto,” “Dotters are not semisweet surrealists. They are hard cookies.” Of course, drawing from famous manifestoes, and then rejecting them, is a way to define who the Dotters are. The Dotters compare themselves to historical and societal models to necessarily establish a school, though the speaker warns that this can be extremely harmful.
Like Manet, or even Judith Leyster, Kaschock is interested in shocking her audience. She looks out directly from her pages and forces her readers to confront uncomfortable truths about themselves and their society. It is established that women cannot ultimately be what society wants: “I was taught to beget myself postmodernly, produce likenesses, and then found I could not.” For the daughters, this is a travesty; the finishing school has taught them that acclimating to society’s expectations should be their singular life ambition. Female sexuality is gauged by what it can produce, perhaps economically. Female children begin as edible “sweets,” then turn to those with “unfortunate insides,” and are ultimately seen as a burden. Dotters begin as pink and then raisin, “purpling in useless apartment” after childbearing age. The Dotters, married and otherwise, often turn to self-injury in order to follow cultural dictates, as shown in the Dotter obituaries in the “Fear” section: “The Achemist’s dotter went under with a sharp spoon. Along the vein.”
In regards to craft, readers quickly gather that Kaschock is fully capable of the lyric beauty we often look for in poetry, but she has bigger philosophical fish to fry. Next to a turn of phrase like, “Each new dew and it is gone from yesterday’s span across the grass. The dottery houses women before they are conceived” comes, “Dotters are not dotters from anatomy, dotters are dotters from edits, diets, tides, the cakey residue of Desitin in folds of infinite orchid.” This is a beauty that is visceral and confounding. It is in turns pornographic and might be labeled as “ugly,” yet it is still beauty. It is reminiscent of Ashbery’s “They Dream Only of America,” where “the murderer’s ash tray” is only a few lines from that great Romantic moan, “And I am lost without you.” Kaschock is a Jill of all trades: just like her “dotters,” she is pulled toward accomplishing a pretty lyric but has a tougher challenge than this.
Brilliant sound play nevertheless propels the prose sections forward: In “Dual,” the second of the five sections, Kaschock chants, “Dotter is a cutout, a flay. A pair of mimes out of papier-mâché, the last Matisse.” Kaschock’s wordplay reminds me of Dora Malech’s poems, which riff on language and sound, making a meaning we can’t quite articulate, so much deeper than the sum of its pieces. The melancholy in a line like, “I recognize control is not inside my mouth—no I know now means yes,” illustrates this suffocating hopelessness.
Finally, the book comes apart in strands, calling attention to the oddness of writing poetry itself. Like the Dotters, it becomes obvious to the author that a book of poetry has no practical or productive use beyond a certain point. No one may even read it. Kaschock’s speaker advises in a footnote: “You are probably reading this because you are a poet or a mother, my mother, or some other blood relative.” The book takes on this emptiness in the form of wounds, rotting, allergies, aging, and self-injury among others. Perhaps the crucial question The Dottery asks is, ‘Is trauma internal to the female condition or external? Can centuries of societal warfare on women make trauma innate?’
Contemporary science asserts that environment affects human life just as much as DNA; The Dottery asserts that western culture interrogates women even before they emerge from the womb. This collection, perhaps fantasy, perhaps closer to garish reality than readers would like to admit, teaches that non-judgmental love is the one (flawed) redemption. In a last Mutter/Dotter interaction, Kaschock writes: “When it is time to go I offer my hand. She wraps it in a napkin, tucks it into her pocket.” This is a long moan for love, and readers must accept its laced, metallic sweetness.- Sandra Marchetti  http://www.tupeloquarterly.com/the-dottery-by-kirsten-kaschock/


Kirsten Kaschock’s The Dottery is a book-length meditation on the constructed nature of femininity. The “Dottery” – daughtery– “houses women before they are conceived,” and dotters are messy and conflicted broken dolls, schooled in the requirements of femaleness and stored in a red brick building reminiscent of a womb, just this side of birth.
To get inside this book, you have to accept Kaschock’s tweaking of language – dotters, mutters, buoys – for daughters, mothers, boys – but once you’ve gotten comfortable with that, it’s eminently readable. That’s not to say it’s always a permeable book. In fact, there are plenty of moments where you just have to trust where Kaschock is taking you. Puns, misappropriations, words enjambed with other words (“manicures cancer”), thoughts linked by sound (“A dotter mislays, misdirects, misogynies, misses America…”) are Kaschock’s tools, and she uses them with a casual deftness. The book is comprised almost entirely of untitled prose poem chunks:
It’s a wonderful wife. The new year is a sigh. The inner warden opens the floor and swimming pool. Green or blue, but not in color. They take a naked dip at midnight and call it tobacco. Inside the water, the flesh they will repeatedly try to own is reminded of its content. A dotter is a series of membranes. A congregation of seals. Rings around the water: water, only domesticated. One of the dotters chooses her wet name. Some mutter will come for her tomorrow and, muttering, rename her dry. Once renamed, she will be clothed – a tankini perhaps, a single ruffle not quite over the ass, something appropriate. It is, all of it, in the ledgers. But for one hour of one night she will float with the others autonomous. There is a depth of nostalgia here unknown outside the dottery, a missing of some frivolous center. She chooses. Later someone may lasso her, the moon. Or ride her. Or hide her, robe, in a bush. But beyond piano, petals, beyond broken banister, she has not been the always and steadfast marry. If you take the time, or can replay it altered, pull your head out of your suicide and try whispering it. Marzipan.
The decision to write in prose poems lets Kaschock expand, wander, and loop back to make her point – “Skins will shed until no skin is left, and a dotter is all skin.” Femaleness is also confused and recursive, so the method echoes the madness. The downside of this technique is that we sometimes wonder why we wandered down a particular alley.
A dotter can wait. A table. Or a brick wall. And so. What? Accuse me of something. I can hear you under this caterwaul, this dispelled gospel tract as it has been in through the mudroom, heart. I listen to the way you are, hymn of you, so quiet when I am talking of them, them not mine. Just say I shouldn’t. That it is enough. Tell me what it is I’m missing in these boxes, this attic of fucked.
“This attic of fucked” is a great, percussive line. But I felt I was doing a lot of wading in the shallows to get to it. A poet writing in this idiom has to balance against two points: 1) creating a productive sort of chaos that can hold layered images and contradictory voices; and 2) running the risk of inadvertently hiding the through-line from the reader. The through-line here is anger, at times a coldly clinical rage –
The doll is not what the doll replaces. The doll is not what the thing the doll replaces was made to replace. The doll is not the roadtrip. The doll is not the pointe shoe… The doll has two spiderlashed black blinkable eyes. The doll has been pulled apart a thousand times for horror. The head of the doll on the side of the road at the edge of the surf will not watch you back. N’accuse. The doll cannot, in this way, be the subject of mutilation. The subject of mutilation is what you are after, but you must remember it is not the doll. The doll is what every dotter has been fashioned after, save her unfortunate insides.
At times, more direct –
I’m Erica and I do not hate women because I still fuck them, don’t I? I do.
And –
It is required we adopt all slurs now, like purse-fed Pomeranians. But what if I do not feel like a pussy, not for dinner, or if cunt has too many teeth or none…?
And sometimes, the anger is saved for a footnote, literally:
Everyone should… envision herself a mutterer. (Murtherer.) Of dotters especially. … You are probably reading this because you are a poet or a mother, my mother, or some other blood relative, or because you are trying to prove your goatee soul patch tousled hair cock looks good on a feminist. It does.
Hello! I kind of wished Kaschock had gone into a little more detail at this point. I’m not a blood relative, after all; I do want to hear what she thinks “looks good on a feminist.” As I was reading the book, I made a note to myself that “The Dottery is also about not being committed to saying something.” The through-line of The Dottery is both: anger – at the constant mutilations of self that women are asked to submit to; and also the suppression of that anger. The poem even knows this –
The failure to risk is not the failure I want today to bear.
The aggression part I am I am just now learning to reinhabit.
You can read the repeated “I am” as repetition for the sake of prosody, but I don’t – I read it as “The aggression that I am composed of”. The narrator is not ready to own her aggression, and this ambiguity is at the heart of the book.
There is a particular sort of poetic voice that’s popular now – a sort of rushing, maximalist, wall-of-sound voice. Its best function is to open up language and let in some much-needed air. But the technique can also function as more of a screen than a window, so that we feel we’re watching a deft performance of truth, rather than truth itself.
And this is where I go back and forth on The Dottery. What struck me as layered and oblique also sometimes struck me as detached. It was a lot of fun to read either way, but I wished for just a few more of those bursts of cutting honesty. The dottery, after all, is not just an intellectual exercise – it’s a stand-in for our actual, princess-obsessed, Kardashianed culture, where a woman still gets exponentially more attention for being a pin-up than for writing code, or poetry for that matter. So I wished Kaschock would take the whole endeavor a little further, as she does in the last two poems, which are as keenly edged and startling as an Angela Carter short story.
I face my dotter, the one I should never have taken. … She has a heart where her mouth should be, a heart at the crux of her left elbow, little hearts in her fingers, between her legs – a heart. She models them. … We table – share a cup of firemilk. She sips, and the beating of her face makes it a pink almost warm. I stare at the life. When it is time to go I offer my hand. She wraps it in a napkin, tucks it into her pocket. I have seen her do this many times before – with a half-eaten sparrow.
The dotter, finally confronted in person, is at once an oppressed creature and a hazard – both a victim and a sugary-sweet horror. Kaschock captures the truth of how we come to terms with our masks – imperfectly. - Jeanne Obbard  therumpus.net/2015/01/the-dottery-by-kirsten-kaschock/


The Dottery by Kirsten Kaschock is the 2013 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry winning book of poems that explores the beginning of identity, gender and humanity.
The Dottery refers to a building where beings with semi-consciousness learn to become good dotters (daughters) and is the focal point or planet around which the poems orbit. The Dottery as an educational institute for all dotters allows Kaschock to discuss what it means to be a woman, a dotter, a mutter (mother) and what is lost in creating or educating spirits into simplified human forms with expectations related to gender, occupation and beauty.
The book opens with a critique of manifestoes, saying, “It is essential to note that manifestoes, their tiny toes, are generally written to defend the birth of the monster rather than messily during conception,” thus laying the grounds for the precursive location of life and the investigation of what happens in this formative institution. This much I know about the book.
Underneath the invented space, the words, the repurposed words, this book is a firm pillar in the contemporary feminist movement. However, I hesitate to limit it to feminism because, if taken to its core, it is a battle cry for all human identity (gender, religion, morality, race, etc.) and the institutions that shape us all, whatever they may be.
The rest of the book follows Ezra Pound’s ideal of art: “make it new.” The Dottery attempts to be fresh, unseen, undone, in anyway possible that, as the poems progress causes meaning to take a back seat to the author’s creative impulse and imagination and language play. Ultimately, this book, more than most, becomes dependent on its reader to put their own insights into the poems. Readers are always required, or if not required are inherently, putting their own interpretation onto poems; when poetry, and art in general, becomes more abstract and imaginative, the reader is forced to do more work than the creator. If you like that experience, then this book is certainly for you because it is playful and creative to an extreme.
The book is split into five parts titled: wound, duel, triage, fear and thief, respectively. Parts one and five mirror each other in tone and ease: they are the simplified versions of the book, both being more clear in speaker and addressee.
Part two is the strongest: it bridges the gap of “new” and clarity that the rest of the book ebbs and flows around: that is, it is fresh to the reader in both content and form without being too abstract or empty or confusing. The first poem in the section has a line that summarizes the whole book: “On the field a dotter can work the war, other than to sew or whore.” Boom. The book examines all three of those duties in detail, including how a dotter enters into each by describing her experience in The Dottery (a dotter who works a war has a different Dottery than the dotter who learns how to whore at The Dotter). Other highlights from part two are: “The failure to risk is not the failure I want today to bear. / The aggression part I am I am just now learning to reinhabit.” In too many ways, our society tells girls to be weak, acquiescent and servile, and that line is the speaker reclaiming her goal of learning how to be fierce and fiercely self as a woman, a woman of her own definition.
However, in part three, the clarity begins to break down when we physically enter The Dottery. It is confusing, as it must be, because it is the author’s manifestation of society forcing us into mannequins. For those of you who love metaphor, fantastic imagery, experimental forms and intensity of language, this is your section. A glimpse into The Dottery: “Entering the dottery, slipped: a threshold creased with lard. From your ass, the dotters lining the walls looked less like cringing. So many unached fors. Aborted ones of porcelain. Daffodillings. Tinroofed and footed ones and straw others ands of brickshit.” This what The Dottery contains. For some intense language and imagery: “When I come to a room with too few vaginas, I have a long knife for opening some up.” However, this is not a man-hating book because a few lines later: “Wandering into the wilds of too many— / elementaries, nursing homes, malls, ballet class, waitresses—I also long to.” This book rejects anything but perfection and independence. Kaschock argues for the ideal woman (or human) as completely independent, self-built, ferocious, with heroes chosen by the self naturally rather than a parent or movie. Ultimately, this hope leads to the title: The Dottery and explains why the word “woman” may not ever appear in the book (if it does, it is in passing): woman are constantly defined by the vagina: daughter, mother, rather than the spirit that enters The Dottery, women are defined by what The Dottery turns them into before turning them out into the world.
To return to Ezra, this whole book’s concept about what makes an ideal woman is the same as Ezra’s goal for art: Make it new. It should be unique, undone previously and very possibly undoable again.
Part four is a series of linked-form/theme poems. Each poem is about the dotter of a specific occupation or thing: “the Typist’s dotter” or “Shrapnel’s dotter” or “the Alchemist’s dotter.” The capitalization saying a tremendous amount. Then each poem discusses this dotter, this human, and who they are but always in relation to the parent, which is how the world sees many individuals, dotters and buoys (boys). Several are very focused and specific to the profession and the dotter existing within that reality, while others are much more abstract, like the shrapnel poem, and explore the effects of being such a dotter, that is, how their daily life is shaped by the very fact of being a dotter.
Part five returns to a more direct approach in terms of universality and a clarification of speaker and listener. Part four’s dotters have no listener for their struggle, whereas most of part five’s audience and speaker is easily ascertained. Near the end, there are a series of four poems that are from a dotter to a mutter or from a mutter to a dotter. These poems also feel personal (the only poems in the book which made me think of the author as a speaker), and are also in the form of letters, adding to the personal nature of their existence.
Returning to the earlier point of trying to be new in an ancient art form: One poem that exemplifies the “make it new” goal in an ineffective way reads in its entirety:
It’s a wonderful wife. The new year is a sigh. The inner warden
opens the floor and swimming pool. Green or blue, but not in col-
or. They take a naked dip at midnight and call it tobacco. Inside
the water, the flesh they will repeatedly try to own is reminded of
its content. A dotter is a series of membranes. A congregation of
seals. Rings around the water: water, only domesticated. One of
the dotters chooses her wet name. Some mutter will come for her
tomorrow and, muttering, rename her dry. Once renamed, she will
be clothed—a tankini perhaps, a single ruffle not quite over the ass,
something appropriate. It is, all of it, in the ledgers. But for one hour
of one night she will float with others autonomous. There is a
depth of nostalgia here unknown outside the dottery, a missing of
some frivolous center. She chooses. Later someone lasso her,
the moon. Or ride her. Or hide her, robe, in a bush. But beyond
piano, petals, beyond broken banister, she has not been the always
and steadfast marry. If you take the time, or can replay it altered,
pull your head out of your suicide and try whispering it. Marzipan.
There it is. Bring to it what you want. There are many spots that strike my soul in this poem: “One of the dotters chooses her wet name,” followed by, “Some mutter will come for her tomorrow and, muttering, rename her dry,” which is a great combination. It speaks to every person who has ever felt forced from the outside to change or adjust to society or a superior. It is a universal experience, and it is expressed in a “new” way, which I love, but, I must point out, it is not the “new-ness” I love, nor is it the “new” that imbues that line with universality, the “new-ness” simply heightens my experience of the lines and their sentiment, rather than defining it, which I feel the rest of the book (and the majority of this poem) tries to do: define itself by being “new.” Rather than giving the reader something new to think about in terms of how we define dotters and woman and buoys and men, the poem opts to give us new images, hoping that we’ll create our own genius.
On the flip side, one poem that feels completely new and creative yet still enlightening reads, again in its entirety:
The designation “dotter” illustrates a certain unspelunked speci-
ficity: one’s identity finds no twin in cross-stitching, scarification,
tattoo, or piercing in relief. Preliminarily mapper, a dotter is all
limitation and railing, as is the nature of preliminary maps. What
you want to realize is that several colors busted as they brought
her edge about. Starboard. She is a wax precipice—in that, drawn,
the dimensions drop deeply away, unbuttressing her. Leaving her
susceptible to light. Her blinding, fourth-dimensional parts are
etched, roughed, into limestone cloud. She is left, but condensed
or desiccated—at any rate—more artful. Cathedraled. Dotter is a
cutout, a flay. A pair of mimes out of papier-mache, the last Matisse.
She is de rigueur, but up in her crow—actual fathoms below actual
cave floor—and not to sail. Moby this. Moby that.
This poem is so playful, so fun, so much the author enjoying their imagination that a reader can’t help but enjoy the ride. However, I do understand the similarity in the two poems quoted in their entirety. The difference, I admit, is the reader’s tastes, what they bring to the poems. I’m partial to the word ‘spelunking’ so I find my imaginative footing better. BUT, this poem excels at balancing the creative impulse with the overall point it is trying to make: the untapped source of ‘woman’, one that we cannot know for sure and are left to create ourselves.
Our jobs as humans is to be open to whatever the source may be, to allow ourselves to imagine any origination, and to leave life open to allow for any outcomes from The Dottery. - Jacob Collins-Wilson https://heavyfeatherreview.com/2014/11/18/the-dottery-by-kirsten-kaschock/
Kirsten Kaschock on The Dottery


The Rumpus Poetry Club Interviews Kirsten Kaschock


I met Kirsten Kaschock twelve years ago when we were new graduate students in creative writing in the Syracuse University MFA program—she, in poetry; I, in fiction. She was pregnant at the time; a few days later, she gave birth to her first child. When I think of Kirsten’s work, that first image of her always comes to mind because it strikes me as a metaphor for the kind of artist she is: generative, essential, fully ripe. Her writing has a tender ferocity that represents the maternal, but more. She’s a writer whose every breath and word comes from the core. What she delivers is pure guts and stop-your-heart beauty. There is about her work a vast inner hush and an eternal keening. There isn’t anyone like any single one of us, but the way there is no one like Kirsten Kaschock is a different thing. You need only read one page of her debut novel, Sleight, just out from Coffee House Press, to see what I mean.
Kirsten Kaschock is also a poet and a dancer. Her two previous books are Unfathoms and A Beautiful Name for a Girl, which was a Rumpus Poetry Book Club pick earlier this year. In addition to her MFA from Syracuse University, she has degrees from Yale, the University of Iowa, and the University of Georgia. She’s working on another degree—in dance—at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she lives.
The Rumpus: Why did you write Sleight and how did you come to write it?
Kirsten Kaschock: I was on tour for my first book of poetry—ten days in the Northeast after being in Georgia for a year. I was away from my three-year-old and my fifteen-month-old and was feeling their absence acutely, but driving along 95, I was also able to let my mind wander over things I had been thinking about in brief spurts during the first year of my PhD. Specifically, I was wondering about the relationship of art to place and to the act of witnessing. I had been reading some events of American history I hadn’t been exposed to before (the massacre of Chinese miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, for example) and looking at the bureaucratic documents of slavery (bills of sale, census forms, and so on). On the hour-plus drive I had from our home outside Atlanta to the University of Georgia in Athens, there were these crazy religious billboards signed—blasphemously, one might think—by God. On tour, I thought about how differently “truth” might be interpreted in different locations. The billboard that is threaded throughout my novel reads: “You Are Living on the Site of an Atrocity.” The idea for that billboard and its dismissible knowledge were the seeds of Sleight.
Rumpus: You’re known as a poet and many passages in Sleight read like poetry. What did you achieve in this book that you can’t when writing poems and what couldn’t you achieve?
Kaschock: I couldn’t leave things too open-ended. When you read a sonnet, fourteen lines with white margins all around, you are signaled to sit with the thing, to mull it over, to apply it to your life (or not), to the poet’s life (or not), to think about it as a quirky expression of a unique personality or as a universal truth. Poetry (at least the poetry I am interested in) invites the reader to read in several ways, to take time with the language, to resist arriving. But I want something different from the novels I read: I want direction. So I sought to offer a different experience than I do with my poems. That isn’t to say Sleight does not provide room for thought, but I did work very hard to give readers ground to stand on, a compass of sorts, and structures to hold onto when things go slanty (even if some of them are moveable).
Rumpus: What about the experience itself? How did it feel different to write a novel than it does to write a poem?
Kaschock: I loved writing Sleight, having so much time with the characters, the world, the art. It was for me a place to go outside my doctoral classes, outside my third pregnancy, outside of my suburban cul-de-sac partway between Atlanta and Athens. It was better than a poem because it lasted: It wasn’t just a snatched moment but a sanctuary. I remember the day—I was loading the dishwasher—I was about halfway through the book, when I suddenly knew how the novel had to end. That was a scary moment for me, because until then I had been writing it scene-by-scene as I write poems word-by-word. After that moment, though, I had a place I had to get to: an end-point. And I was terribly sad. New to long-form fiction, I hadn’t realized that I wouldn’t keep writing Sleight forever, not emotionally anyway. The characters were/are like family—hard to lose in that way.
Rumpus: I know that experience you speak of, when you’re at the point in writing a novel that it seems it will go on forever and then one day you see the end like a shore in the far distance and you have no choice but to swim to it. It’s the relentless drive of narrative, the great machine of the novel form, and it’s a part of what makes Sleight so compelling. But I was always aware of the poetry too. In Sleight, the forms gorgeously coexist. Can you talk about that please?
Kaschock: Most of the sections of Sleight began with me writing prose poems. Many of these were edited out, some were incorporated more prosaically into the sections, and a few remain. A novel lets you take the candlelight of an idea and give it flesh. The prose poems were flickery—faint lines of barely heard music. After I got them down, I just kept going. The characters grew less skeletal, and their circumstances acquired blood as well as mood. But I never did relinquish what one might call poetic mystery in this book. The more I wrote about the central art form (sleight—which does not currently, actually exist), the more it became unsayable. The more description it has, the more footnotes, the more explanation of how the characters are obsessed with it, what it means or doesn’t mean to them—the more unmoored the book gets from this world. In this way, the book is poetic. Something at its heart escapes my attempts at pinning down.
Rumpus: That’s a wonderfully apt phrase: “something at its heart escapes my attempts at pinning down.” I think it applies to all the most beautiful things in the world—art, love, the way the sun looks as it sinks into the horizon. They are beyond pinning. And yet, you pinned your main characters, Clef and Lark, to the page. The intimacy with which you portrayed them was remarkable. It felt emotional, mystical, psychological, and visceral, but most of all physical, in a literal way. It struck me that the body was the touchstone of this narrative. Do you agree? I know you’ve been a dancer for years. How did that experience inform the book?
Kaschock: Oh, I agree. The body is big in my family. Of my four siblings, three have danced professionally, and the fourth runs marathons. I’ve danced since I was seven, although never professionally. I still take ballet, and when I’m not dancing, I do yoga, give birth, write books, and collect advanced degrees. Dance informed the way I approached this novel absolutely. For one thing, the scenes in the first half of the novel are choreographed. Each of the four main characters first appears solo. Then possible duets are explored, dropped, and reconfigured. When all four finally appear in the same room—the book reaches a crisis point. Building tension with bodies is a compositional strategy I learned from dance, but it marks a truth in the world, not just on stage. John Cage once wrote: “Theatre takes place / all the time wherever one is and art simply / facilitates persuading one this is the case.” When two strong personalities need to coexist, you have conflict. When there are four—you have chaos. I grew up in a house filled with art, love, and a little madness. We all danced. Sleight, among other subjects, explores the fraught relationships of those who belong to such a thing: an art, a cult, a family.
Rumpus: List the three sentences in Sleight that mean the most to you and tell me what they mean to you.
Kaschock: You go for the throat, don’t you, Cheryl?
Rumpus: Not just the throat: the jugular.
Kaschock: I’ll do my best.
1. “You can’t imagine what it’s like . . . not to have desires but be populated by them.”
This sentence is spoken by Lark—one of two sisters the book is concentrated around—to Byrne, a new acquaintance. It is her way of expressing an overfullness that I have felt both as an artist and as a woman. We often hear of being pulled in many directions, as if external forces were, more often than not, the cause of struggle, but Lark recognizes her lack of balance as a sort of internal crowding.
2. “And when you are good and a girl at something, you stay with it—maybe for all the good girl words that come.”
Clef says this to a reporter when she is trying to explain why she and Lark stuck with their training in sleight. I think anyone who has succeeded in a sport, or in academics, or in any artistic discipline has experienced external validation and how it can become both addictive and identity-defining. When we exhibit certain talents, our pleasure in them can become wrapped up not just in the doing, but in the being-applauded-for.
3. “You don’t get to be a miracle without knowing it early on.”
This is from a description of West—the director of one of the sleight troupes who brings everyone in the book together. He is the impetus. Some people are charismatic and confident as if from birth; I’ve known a few and been related to one. I was trying with this sentence to capture the guilelessness and immodesty of that type of aura.

Rumpus: Each of these examples is connected directly to one of your main characters and yet your explanations thread back in discreet ways to your own life—your experiences of motherhood, success, acceptance, and love of charismatic people, to name a few. Just as those crazy religious billboards you saw years ago were a seed for the larger social questions you grapple with in Sleight, I wonder about the more personal seeds that informed the way you developed your characters.
Kaschock: I have taken to calling my work Confessional Sci-Fi. I really think it is apt. You, Cheryl, work in autobiographical fiction and in memoir in this gentled-brutal way I will never fully understand, although I admire and adore it. I say this because alternate worlds are the only way I know to access what some lovely man recently called my “severe muse.” So I dig deep into this world where art could really matter, could actually alter reality, and what do I find there? I find both horror and a way back to the dance I thought I had left when I began writing. Lark is a character who removed herself from the sleight she loved and ended up pursuing other art: I’ve done this. Perhaps because of her choice to leave, Lark questions her ability to be fully present in her own life: I’ve done this too. But as you know, characters become themselves through a process more alchemical than structural. I know Lark because I share some traits with her—but other things about her are darker and more twisty than I could claim even in my most gothic moments. Other characters have traits plucked from myself (and artists I’ve known) and thrust into backstories and situations that provide the catalysts for different types of reactions. I take the undisclosed seeds of the real and plant them in the soil of the what-if. Then, I watch for bloom or blight—Confessional Sci-Fi.
Rumpus: I think Confessional Sci-Fi is the perfect description of what you’ve done in Sleight. I laughed at your observation that you will never fully understand what I do in my writing because I know precisely what you mean. It’s my experience of your work too. I love it while knowing clearly it is not what I could create. That ability to truly see the original other is infinitely profound to me. When an artist works fearlessly out of his or her vision, such as you’ve done in Sleight, something vital is communicated that transcends the camps of aesthetic and style. What’s more interesting to me than aesthetics is what’s happening on a core level. I think at the heart of every writer’s work there is a question he or she is trying to answer. Mine, for example, has been: How can I live without my mother? Which I translate into the more universal: How can we go on when what is most essential is lost? What’s the question at the core of your work?
Kaschock: My question: Why do I make art? Translated more universally: What do we want from art, religion, from each other? And why the hell are we willing to accept so many substitutes?
Rumpus: And so, what have you come up with? In all of your glorious artmaking, why do you make art?
Kaschock: I make art because I have to. I would be lying if I said anything else first. But that is only the beginning. It isn’t enough for me to just make it. I need it to do something, to communicate with others, to provide them with information or language or questions that make them want to do something. More and more, along with this urgency I feel, has come a sense of responsibility: I want art to do good in this world. And since I am the mother of my art, I am trying to raise it right. In the end, Sleight is a book that questions those of passionate intensity who yet lack all conviction (forgive me as I cannibalize Yeats, poorly). It is not enough, I think, to want to make something happen. There are worlds to consider at every step. - interview by Cheryl Strayed   http://therumpus.net/2011/10/87604/



Kirsten Kaschock, Windowboxing: A Dance with Saints in Three Acts, Bloof Books, 2013.


A sequence of twenty-four interlinked pieces, WINDOWBOXING: A Dance with Saints in Three Acts by Kirsten Kaschock moves with both muscle and grace through its three acts of steadfast looking—at dance, grief, abuse, the streets of Philadelphia, and especially "the elaboration of woman." 


I am fascinated by the sentences in Kirsten Kaschock’s Windowboxing: A Dance with Saints in Three Acts , a collection of short poems, each of which are constructed through a series of accumulations. Her sentences are sharp, and cut deep into bone, such as “History flattens. She can see out.” from the poem “[WINDOWER],” a piece on seeing through and seeing out, and striking at the differences between the two. The collection works through ideas of perception, of seeing, and of conflict through movements on gender, gender relation and gender perception. There is a violence throughout the collection, and a tension, as she writes to open the poem “[WINDOWNER]”: “You would have my explosions be localized and armed against themselves. // You would prefer I not discuss ‘men’ or ‘women.’ The genres. // It would be better to prevent the spread of the insurgency.” The collection wraps itself around the image of the window, framing a way of both seeing directly and through. The poem “[WINDOWRIGHT]” opens: “Window, like woman, an invention. // Think caves. Invent: to welcome wind. To shun: unwelcome.” Her title suggests a performance and a stage watching, instead of a series of characters or performers, a sequence of short poem-scenes, each as thick and descriptive as an essay. Kaschock’s poems explore the violence and confusions so often included between the genders, and the way gender is perceived, as one fixed idea clashes up against another opposing fixed idea.
As one moves through the collection, the poems begin to open up into a narrative arc, progressing intention, anger and a matter-of-fact ending that can’t be avoided. Kaschock is very much a poem of sentences, built incredibly strong, and enough to cut through any material, or allow any coin to bounce off. Composed with the slight distance of journal entries or letters home, Kaschock’s Windowboxing: A Dance with Saints in Three Acts reference dance movements, death by fire and suicide, unafraid of dark territory and yet removed from it as well. It’s as though the only way to discuss any of this is absolutely straight. - Rob McLennan http://robmclennan.blogspot.hr/2014/02/kirsten-kaschock-windowboxing-dance.html


On the morning walk to drop him off at school, my son and I play twenty questions. He likes it best to think of a person and I have to guess. Is it a man? Is it a historical figure? (Only characters he knows from Horrible Histories, Doctor Who and Star Wars are allowed) Is it a king? Is it an English King? Was he a Stuart? Did he get his head chopped off? It's Charles I.


Windower
I want a new wife but with all of my old things.

I am tired of the domestic packaging of woman, the imprisoned-cellophane versions.  Meatdress.

I will fail to say this correctly.

In some ways, I have already failed; in some ways, I am failing continually.

And this suits me, buttonhole.  Pivot and clasp.

The elaboration of woman makes windows grow in enormity, if by enormity what I mean is importance.

The adverb, said to be weak, is viewed as an addendum to, or a subtraction from, thought.

Slyly.  Widow-like.

Bereft but not, emboldened by loss.  Wise.  Liberated from life.  Sprung.

Most windows are right-angled, like their houses.

Modeled on the premise that a box is the best shape with which to contort the soul, i.e. book.

Some mini-dresses from the ’60s achieved the same lines, and the Volvo.

The illusion of transparency is a problem, as it is with women, vellum.

I like to think of make-up.  Adjustment to mood.

The window is thought of as immaterial—certain things permitted fluidity—the gaze and light, but not the head or hand.

Windows are what make domesticity seem picturesque, in that windows make sculpture into painting.  Like said Hegel.

History flattens.  She can see out.

She could move through doors and into a car, but then store, catastrophe, park, gym, restaurant-with-bar, waiting room, hotel lobby, book, brick, suffocate, 12-step, home.

Windows can be effectively cleaned with vinegar and newsprint.  You want to remember newsprint.

The hand smelling of a kind of vain poverty, of human interest.

Window—deathtrap for a next bird or birdhead.

Thinking open.

Windowner
You would have my explosions be localized and armed against themselves.

You would prefer I not discuss “men” or “women.”  The genres.

It would be better to prevent the spread of the insurgency.

I should not place a woman in a house, done to death—a veranda?  Deck.

The way my bombs work is that I set them beside my heart, and although I fly apart and out, flesh of me meeting flesh of the other dead I’ve made, still I am whole and focused.

My heart, once muscle, now a rapture, now remains.

To contain me, you must rewrite the previous century and go forward in horror from there. As if it were not horror to begin with.  You must Whitman.

If I named her field, instead of she, I might have a philosophy, or a beard.

I might be, say, a nurse in the war.  More acceptable.

Less shrapnel.

WindowØmen
I can’t do my heart today, fuss till it’s lacy, coral, a century or more of microscopic animals.

The men I am are plural and all thumbnails, larger and quicker than that, but clumsy.

Overlaid, they palimpsest into substance.

The men I am are wilders—btw, wrong prosecution, a satisfying lying.

In the pack, they slap the bitch down.  It is like a whisper.

She stays down.

I shrivel when they touch the border of me—when I touch the border of me, I get unvivid and a harder called brittle, intelligent, not-young.  The ocean fails.  Wombs fail.

The men I am are violent or they are not.

Illicitly got confession.  Et tu?

I have never bothered to go fathom-by-fathom underneath.  I am more afraid of what I might one day do.  Fail to do or say accurately.  A bad renovation, the bones unhidden, reef a graveyard, the body drunk up, loved at arms’ length (fathom of rope, leash, a good stretch to hang by).

The car, assassination, dishwasher, low-cut: all my fault.  Ahem.

Windoors
This one has trees outside it.

To be accurate, they all have trees outside them somewhere.

I can see these: a white mulberry, a maple.

In mid-June the postage-stamp yard is a swamp of alcohol, the fruit shedding or shat by birds beneath the lush cover.

A dark and small yard, where nature is still about its own decay, happily.

Satyrically.  Big deck.

The windows on the other side of the house look at other windows, but this is not a conversation—this is a subway.

The street rivers between, floating cars carrying other windows.

The city is also about its own decay, and the poorer kids at the neighborhood pool are turned away for not having legitimate bathing suits.

Nothing private is natural.

She has had her shirt blown up by the wind.

She has held her shirt up, exposing her nipples, covering her brown, her summer face.

Mistakenly supposing this will make her nakedness private, but her face is not really on the table.

She is six.

Windormant
I never used to be able to keep things alive, cacti.  Jade.  I can keep them going now, but at what expense?

I can take a hormone so my unborn daughter will one day push strollers without rancor.  There is a hormone for that.

A hormone I take opens my bronchi despite badly-planned landscaping: all flowers, no fruit.

Corticosteroids turn me unhappy.  But a breathing unhappy.

All the breathing unhappies, forgetting that austerity is a sort of pleasure, except those who have embraced austerity because superiority is an even clearer, cleaner sort of pleasure.  Vinegar.

Comfort is overrated.  Bliss, a sister’s word for drug use.

A nun’s.

The pachysandra in the yard was a gift from a dead woman.  It is supposed to make me happy but I am only more afraid it will die.  The older I get.

I want to own this living stuff, this desire to wrench shit out of the earth.

The truth is something more like fear than it is like April.


[WINDOWTREATMENT]

Up against memoir

What voice has my voice got? Rage
gives flavor. Don’t I got some
rage? The answer is — hells yes but
it’s a long stew, quiet-in-the-crockpot
all-day-long-night-next-day stew, horrors
simmerd so reduction long they want put
back2bed and taste of syrup. You stay
up real late, my voice’ll stare you down
through all those stars we got btween us
now. Ever wonder how you got stuck
while mute-as-fuck I swam naked
as the scent of late-June-suckle out past
Reeser’s Summit trailer park — then past
the moon you bn riddln with gun&needle
like there’s a couple more where that one
was? Admit it. Night’s harder now, im-
perfect + unlit, plus you don’t know
where I’m off 2 ridin’ the dark unspokn
of my thoughts. I don’t know neither.
I may die. Bfore I say real words
about the things I hate and all the other
things I hate how other people hate. Forget
I said. Take this frackwaste voice you wish
I’d use 4 truth instead of dare. You’ll want
to salt&bury it, so it don’t rise, but where’s
your shovel? Where’s the body? You call
me scared when I don’t blare all I want and am
in trumpet porno-blast. I hate that fuckn shit.
When I strip down it’s all science all
fiction all the goddamnd time. World —
please. If you’d lend me your ears
for a spell I cd tell you what &
tell you where the body is — & how to pull
that punkass moon back out your veins.

Presents

My brother gave me the heavendress to wear.
So it is a gift.
It isn’t enough to look at it.
Repeat Nothing is wrong. Say it again.
We have been discussing first divisions. Reconsiderations.
Alignment of spine and star. Recurrent dreams
of splintered coffins, moons
below horizons.
We take turns neglecting the light — anti-watchmen we.
Insomnia wants to wear my brother’s heavendress
in organdy. It is wool.
I insist.
Accept her. Insomnia is not wrong. This
is what I am supposed to say.
He says Remember — there is
no supposed to.
My brother is infuriatingly there. I ask him
What if I bleed on the heavendress?
It is red.
And if I rip it?
Already these rags are more beautiful than the skins of angels.
Do you skin angels? I ask. Is that what
you are?     Nothing is wrong.
He will say this as many times
as I have need.
Of course I have always known what nothing is.

“Figure it out, tiny dove.” (Oahu 2014)

we weren’t climbing a volcano            we might 
have been            one in the vicinity            a trail led 
up the coast            but the islands are            all coast 
to a tourist            a small bird half-crossed our path      
reversed itself             &you laughed            at its dithering
your dry note of direction            was the more humorous  
a garden hat            made british             pale eyes centuries older 
than you have rights to            in the course of all these things      
                                                                                                                                            I fell 
a little bit in love             with whales in variegated strips 
of blue water            a-breech in nameless joy            as if 
winter were a species of meander            &not tepid
reticence            days later            zebra doves flocked 
into my hands            to eat bread I held out as 
reason to tremble close            &lightly, go

Negative One

I can write as if I am a wound.
There is another life : the one
beside. We have leaned
through its windows, held
our hands beneath its sinks.
The water is the same water,
our hands — our hands.

Phobia

is lightning broth. What should be salt
sears electric. Fear of holes is (&this is
recent) a thing—related fears include caves
coves, trapdoor-bellies of bombers, wombs.
I’ve a fear of basements &blue tents &butnot
shell casings—a fear of photos (mostly close-
ups of Demi Moore’s pores &also of lotus seed
pods &oaken doors without knobs) &butnot
the odd, exotic spot where a yanked tooth
was. I fear most a certain type of recurring
shifting aperture it does no good to predict
or avoid. Example: the scalloped glint
of cloudslits whence I have seen terrifying
babies fall, riced into a fine sleet.

Jay Bernard, The Red and Yellow Nothing, Ink Sweat & Tears Press, 2016.


‘The Red and Yellow Nothing has the feel of a heartfelt and intense investigation into something complex and significant, a true poetic quest, and one that has compromised little, if anything at all. It’s confusing, it’s challenging, it’s deeply satisfying, and it would be a real mistake to let such an exciting piece of work pass by uncelebrated.’


‘The pace and menace of The Red and Yellow Nothing has the horse pace of the ride of the Valkyries. It is time traveling through gender race and genre and is explored through an Arthurian legend – It reads like a song in my head.’ - Kathryn Williams, singer-songwriter, Ted Hughes Award judge 2017


‘The source text was translated into English by Jessie Weston in 1901. She commented, “the poem is a curious mix of conflicting traditions”. Bernard has more than lived up to the gloss. The pamphlet is a strange, lurid, baroque mash of tradition that calls to mind the “livingness” attempted by Hölderlin in his work with Sophocles’ Antigone. It does not stick with one style for long but is always dangerously alive…
…It is joyfully anachronistic (at one point Morien plays “the first computer game”). The world of the sequence is other, but complete. And the reader swallows each psychedelic trip. It is a magic trick to write back like this, into “the land before the story-o”, and for it to feel so crisp and alive and crackling.’ - Edwina AttleeThe Poetry Review


Disclosure: Saw the poet read many years ago, don’t know Bernard personally. The book deals with social aggressions over race and gender, and a character in constant negotiation with their identity, or the identity imposed on their body. These are things I’ve tried to educate myself about, but have very much not experienced. It’s also a riff on a medieval text, which is not my specialism. Huge thanks due to Muireann Crowley for editorial advice.
The Red and Yellow Nothing was published over a year ago, and usually I’d take the loss and pay closer attention to pamphlet releases in future, but in part because of its Ted Hughes Prize shortlisting, and in part because I’ve never read anything like it, I want to spend a short time discussing it now.
Review: The Red and Yellow Nothing is a prequel to Moraien, a Middle Dutch poem about a Moorish knight who comes to Camelot to find his white father, Aglovale, who had abandoned him and his mother to continue his quest for the Grail. Bernard provides a brief but invaluable introduction and commentary on the original text:
I’ve talked on here about how truly radical texts need an uncommon amount of critical scaffolding to transport the (culturally centred) reader from canon-friendly reading practices to a place where those practices may be effectively criticised. Alongside this introduction Bernard has written two blog posts, at Speaking Volumes and The Poetry School, and they both helped me triangulate things in a book that does very little hand-holding. As Bernard argues, this quest is as much a textual as a physical one, and that requires a lot of lateral thinking, creative reading.
The first lines are not words but punctuation:
Morien ‘enters page left on his horse, Young’Un’, and ‘a bard of indeterminate gender’ sings:
The poem’s action literally happens in a book, or a dramatized literary space, where postmodern ideas of text, contemporary slang and understanding of gender fluidity meet folk song and knightly romance. Wherever or whatever this ‘land’ is, it is a contested and uncertain place, and primes the reader to start making themselves uncomfortable. Perhaps it’s useful to visualise the story playing out onstage: The Red and Yellow Nothing regularly calls attention to its own artificiality and breaks the fourth wall, highlighting its episodic structure and the self-conscious humour of its narrative/stage directions. There’s that elongated ‘siiiiing’ that nudges the reader to imagine its vocalisation, the physical body behind the words. Maybe, again, this is a primer to think of Morien (and his dramatic monologue) as embodied also, both textual artefact and physical form; certainly the text and its players alike read his body like an open book. The narrator argues that ‘maybe we can empathise with the frustration one feels when the local people take one look at you, then hurry away from you before you’ve finished your sentence’. The ‘maybe’ seems pointed: as a middle class white reader I certainly cannot – the only thing that ‘maybe’ hinges on is who’s reading it. Morien, in turn, instrumentalises this fear:
Before either poem or reader meet Morien, or see anything of his inner life, we meet his violent response to the world. Whether this is due to a preternaturally hot temper, a perfectly understandable response to prejudice, or a mix of both is finally unknowable. He is, for now, all exterior.
The following episode is taken up by two perhaps competing exteriors, both unreal in their own ways. The section begins with William Dunbar’s hateful poem ‘Of A Black Moor’, describing a white woman in extreme dishygiene and blackface posing as a black woman for the crowd’s entertainment; Morien spots a woman in the crowd, wearing red and yellow, ‘both cheeks shining black like whorls of wood’, ‘shoulders like a proto-stradivarius / lost to the sea’. She disappears and Morien wakes drunk in a field, ‘the dew that / cradles him finds the word: innocence’, a beautifully poised moment that allows Morien his youth and inexperience, and allows the reader empathy for a character who in this moment is completely lost. It’s possible the idealised and vanishing woman appeared in Morien’s imagination in self-defence against the collective ridicule of blackness, but the gloves left in Morien’s hands seem to suggest otherwise, and the section ends:
The Red and Yellow Nothing is full of these doublings and halvings: Morien and his father dream corresponding parts of the same dream, there is a town split down the middle with one half in summer, one in winter, one character sings a song about promising a song, other examples abound. While a recognisable literary trope, and one that feels right in a medieval romance, its sheer abundance adds to the uncanny sense that the usual relationship between story and protagonist (or even reader and story) has broken down, is in transition to something stranger.
The book doesn’t shy away from the ghoulish. Later, a female convict is ‘hog-tied’, ‘hanging from a pole […] writhing like an errant C’. Though that last simile seems to point to the girl’s existence as a leftover trope of misogynist writing, her fate is still extremely gruesome. A figure called ‘The Something’, which might be the ‘red and yellow nothing’s grim counterpart, emerges from the trees and draws the woman bodily into its anus before releasing her for burial. Bernard’s account is visceral and revolting, giving the whole scene the air of an awful ritual or sacrifice. Like Morien, the woman is painted in innocent tones, ‘She is a child’s finger’, ‘crying for god and her mother’, and their connection seems substantialised by a later, crucial episode in which Morien is transformed and processed (‘Morien is currently a turd.’) by sinking to the lowest point in Earth’s sea and being ‘expelled’ ‘from the slippy slide / of time’. Where the woman’s ordeal is socially inscribed and compulsory, Morien’s seems to be the result of some psychological shift that originates in dreams and comes to reorder reality as Morien perceives it.
If it wasn’t clear, The Red and Yellow Nothing is, by any standard in common currency, extremely weird. But there’s something so clear and graspable and purposeful about that weirdness that has kept hold of my imagination weeks after first reading it. Shortly after the horrific scene discussed above, the whole adventure becomes increasingly surreal, increasingly subject to bizarre and arbitrary laws and rules. And yet those rules are almost followable, the story’s progression right on the brink of logical, while the meanings attached to Morien’s body become increasingly nonsensical, or perhaps their inherent nonsense is revealed.
I can’t help feeling that in someone else’s hands the book and its narrative would have felt pretentious, or merely arbitrary, rather than a faithful account of the odd trajectory needed to get from the book’s start to its finish. Throughout, there’s a wry humour (‘in which Darkness herself comes across Morien’s dreaming body and is like woah’) that keeps the story grounded, human, and for all its depictions of suffering and brutality, Morien himself (or themself, for a significant passage) is neither the butt of the joke nor a punching bag. The book clearly cares for him, however much it focuses on the change and uncertainty being visited upon him.
Most of all, I think, this is a story about blackness and how the world responds to it. The white people at the fair and the people in the book’s first episode won’t talk to Morien, and the brutal execution scene is implicitly enacted by white society. Darkness appears as a character, and while she doesn’t interact with Morien either, she is invested in his story and knows he is both closer to and further from Camelot than he thinks. Five African soldiers in Scotland speak the book’s most peaceful and mindful sequence, on ‘the strangeness of the land they’re in’, articulating a complex thought about empathy and mutual respect:
The book’s climactic scene has Morien encounter the figure of Saint Maurice, a character who the writer of the Medieval POC tumblr – which Bernard cites as an originary source for the book – argues might be cognate with Morien himself, given the shared linguistic root of their names and the habitual shuffling of characters’ identities in romances of the period. Given this final muddling, the final passage seems deeply significant:
This may be the story’s final doubling, or the final doubling’s reconciliation. The canonised Christian martyr Maurice gives way, of his own volition, to the transformed, multi-identitied, genderqueer Morien, to whom Christianity and its official sanctioning have meant nothing. The next moment, Morien finds Camelot, and Moraien begins.
It’s incredible that so much has been fit into about 24 pages, including the handful of full-page illustrations by the poet, without feeling overburdened. The Red and Yellow Nothing has the feel of a heartfelt and intense investigation into something complex and significant, a true poetic quest, and one that has compromised little, if anything at all. It’s confusing, it’s challenging, it’s deeply satisfying, and it would be a real mistake to let such an exciting piece of work pass by uncelebrated.
- Dave CoatesDave Poems

‘For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?’ (W.H. Auden ‘The Night Mail’). Many poems have fallen underfoot in the forests of memory. Jay Bernard’s pamphlet makes brilliant use of one of these. Morien is a Middle Dutch romance; its hero, a Moorish knight. Bernard inroduces her poem as ‘an inquiry into the idea of blackness in Europe’ before slavery.
This retelling of Morien is wildly appealing. Its opening (which can be sung) owes less to Le Morte d’Arthur than to topsy-turvy Disney, spiced with folk song in the style of the late great Kenneth Williams…’ - Alison Brackenbury Under the Radar

It is difficult to put a finger on the immediate aftermath of reading The Red and Yellow Nothing: there is puzzlement, rage, and wonder, but ultimately the sense that Jay Bernard has created a rare and beautiful thing. Part contemporary verse drama, part mythic retelling, the pamphlet – containing one long poem, broken into sections with stage directions – is framed as a ‘prequel to the tale of Sir Morien, son of Agloval’, narrating the backstory of the young Moor’s arrival in Camelot.
Its premise is cleverly, and comically, formulaic. Morien and his horse, Young’un, gallop onto the scene in search of his father, a knight of the Round Table. They kill a poet, lose a tournament, encounter a mysterious woman, find Morien’s mother in a strange village, and endure other fantastical trials before crossing a wasteland to Camelot. The true quest, however, is not Morien’s but ours. Employing metrical ballads and concrete poems with equal vigour, Bernard takes us on a visual and allusive journey to test the imagination, thus putting the poet’s resources of sight and sound to full use.
 While two conscientious footnotes point us to direct quotes from William Dunbar and Kendrick Lamar, it does not take long to see that the entire text is crinkled with allusions. Bernard’s use of Sir Morien’s story alone is a case in point: the tale has tangled roots with various Arthurian tales, including Parzival, and she draws fully on the immigrant resonances of Morien’s name (which in Medieval Welsh means ‘sea-born’) as well as his ethnicity. The fact that ‘Morien’ also derives from the Old Welsh ‘Morgen’, which is the spelling Geoffrey of Monmouth uses for Arthur’s gentle healer (or ambitious nemesis) Morgan le Fay, further lends her project its deliberately ambiguous – and subversive – character.
But this is not merely another Arthurian remix. Bernard casts a wry eye over the past, playing with our modern expectations; from start to finish we recognize supporting actors that look and sound, uncannily, just like we expect them to. Morien and Young’un enter (‘page left’) introduced by a bard – rhyming of ‘the distant land where books begin / where maids and men and hermits siiiiiing’ – whose over-the-top, modern lyrics fall into the quatrains of a minstrel’s song. Before they exit, they encounter St Maurice, the third-century black martyr and leader of the Theban Legion, and he is dressed (of course) ‘like a burned manuscript: gold halo, gold / on the collar of his breastplate’. The half-seen, half-remembered quality of each description brings the narrative’s intertextuality to life, and in one of Bernard’s own lines, ‘it is hard to hold the two halves of the past and future apart.’
Poems that aim to do this much with the past often buckle under their own weight. It takes a poet of Bernard’s skill and sensitivity to keep the lyrical movement of the sequence alive, and the joy of this pamphlet is in its language. From Morien’s exuberant taunting (‘Wanna fight? / I’ll fight you…I’ll have a disco inside you.’) to the echoey dream-world he shares with his father in a haunting twin cinema (‘black was the light / black was the field / and the rain was / falling backwards’), reading The Red and Yellow Nothing brings continuous surprise. Bernard is careful not to let her inventions slip into wordplay for its own sake. Many excerpts deliver hard-hitting critiques of colour and femininity; in one scene, after a wild man has won ‘a kiss from a black lady’ in a tournament, and the assembled scrum of courtiers express their relief that ‘beneath her skin the black was white in fact’, Bernard writes –
How white, is another thing. If the colour
Was the smell, then the maid was grey. Tallow,
Fish-oil and potash; saddle seat; monthly blood
In dusty streaks along the base and up the crease.
Brilliantly, this is what never happened as it happened, and not as we expect.
Ultimately, Bernard succeeds in bringing the travelling pair to life, and fleshing out her mysterious knight in the fullest sense. As they arrive at part x of the poem, Morien (now without Young’un’s reassuring presence) undergoes ‘something we won’t call a transition, exactly’, and we get a precious glimpse of the possibilities that are larger than both life and legend. In the slow, almost prenatal dusk where ‘shadow and form change place’, a new Morien is born: ‘s/he has ceased to be a thing, / but a rule – a how or why, / a reason, / a what things are / governed by’. Morien’s plea – and perhaps Bernard’s – is to put aside all we think we know about past and present, about the thingness of things, and learn the value, freedom, and colour of nothing itself. There’s something to be said about that.
-  Theophilus Kwek  The London Magazine

The Red and Yellow Nothing is the story of a quest… or is it, and if so, for what? Jay Bernard has unearthed an Arthurian tale from a Middle Dutch poem of possible French origin, translated into English a century ago. Sir Agloval, a knight travelling in Moorish lands, meets a princess and then leaves her. She gives birth to Morien, who grows up and rides to Camelot in search of his father. He has some adventures, and there’s a happy ending… in the original.

Some things we know but can’t say why
the dark is what light travels by
a blind man’s finger is his eyyyyyyye
in the land before the story-o

Everyone says
I know not good knight where your father dwells,
mincy mincy moo. Ergot brained fuckers. Fight me.

Her shoulders like a proto-stradivarius
lost to the sea. Which sea, Morien couldn’t say.
A red and yellow one, a sudden one, sudden.

I dreamt that I dreamt that I woke in the wilderness
wanted for something and walked in the wilderness
black was the light saw folks made of green
and the rain was falling backwards

Morien’s body speaks to
the thin high black he
sleeps in.

Hadopelagic:
A roseate spoonbill snorts crushed ecstasy off the belly of a blow-up doll. Eats bunga kuda.

He was all black, even as I tell you:
his head, body and hand
was all black, save his teeth;
and weapon and shield, armour,
were even those of a moor,
and as black as a raven.

I'll fight you. Why don't you come out and face me and
fight me and tell me what you know? I've been riding since 
I don't know when, now I don't know where, 
why don't you come and face me. Everyone says
'I know not good knight where your father dwells.'

How white is another thing. If the colour
was smell, then the maid was grey. Tallow
fish-oil and potash; saddle-seat; monthly blood
in dusty streaks along the base and up the crease.
As Morien pressed his nose into the fine clothes
and finer stench, he caught a woman in the corner 
of his eye: she was dressed in red and yellow, sat 
silent in the crowd, mouth and lips full and pursed,
both cheeks shining black like whorls of wood.

His lids flutter, the hatched lashes betray a milky slit. On it:
the surface of a dream in which a hermitage roof slid down
a century ago and left a jagged aperture above. Below,
Morien appears skeletal and genderqueer:
                        promise that you 
                                                      will
                            sing
                                                                        about me.

Is ‘horrible’ horribly good?
I didn’t like this ‘prequel to the tale of Sir Morien’ but I can’t forget it, which must – I think – be sign of potency. What I remember best is the bit that appalled me most. That’s the way memory works: we have hotspots for disgust, sex, violence.
… I’m reminded that when I first met the word ‘allegory’ I thought it meant a story you couldn’t fully understand. And so it is, for me, with the The Red and Yellow Nothing. I don’t understand it at all but I can’t forget it. I wish I could. - Helena Nelson,Sphinx OPOI Reviews

Bernard turns the story of a lit­tle-known me­dieval knight into a fresh, witty and ex­cit­ing quest for iden­tity, in an imag­ined me­dieval world that is equal parts strange and fa­mil­iar. The poem is in­ter­spersed with gor­geous, richly tex­tured im­ages. - Diva (UK)

Jay Bernard on The Red and Yellow Nothing
…The Red and Yellow Nothing was like that. I didn’t realise what I’d written until I’d written it.
There are many influences. My introduction to the story begins with a quotation from Jessie Weston about the story of Morien in its current form – part of an idiosyncratic C14th compendium called the Lancelotcompilatie: “As it stands, the poem is a curious mixture of conflicting traditions.”
When I first started this project, I tried to be coherent. I tried to make it a neat confection of historical figures interacting with each other. And it didn’t work because the technical requirements of such a story are not neat.
The story itself isn’t neat, how could my interpretation seek to neutralise, formalise, make coherent?
More, including the influences of Kendrick Lamar, The Child Ballads and, we kid you not, Super Mario can be found by clicking the link below.
Blog, March 2017 Poetry School feature where each of the 2016 Ted Hughes shortlist is asked to blog about the writing process.

…I wanted to write something about blackness that wasn’t tragic, but still spoke to the situation we are currently in. The paradoxical nature of now: the way you can be erased, snuffed out, disfigured, distorted, while being privy to the remarkable insight that is only possible from the margins.
I thought that writing about black characters in a world before the construct of race as we currently know it would be a liberating move. I thought it might open up a contemplative space less weighted by the ballast of the media, and American media in particular. We are always expected to view ourselves in a certain way – and I wanted to present and view Morien completely differently.
Interview, October 2016 Poetry Spotlight



“I wanted to go back in history and begin exploring a time when blackness was not the thing it is today.”
Jay Bernard is one of 10 writers returning to the US for part two of Breaking Ground. This year, the group is visiting the West Coast for a series of readings, workshops and university visits. Jay won the 2004 London Respect Slam and is the recipient of a Foyles Young Poet award (2005). She is from London and has been published in in numerous international journals and magazines. Her first pamphlet Your Sign is Cuckoo, Girl was the Poetry Book Society’s pamphlet choice for summer that year. She was the inaugural 2012 writer-in-residence at the Arts House and National University of Singapore and 2013 City Read young writer in residence at London Metropolitan Archives. Her second book, English Breakfast, appeared in 2013, and her most recent book The Red and Yellow Nothing, has just been published by Ink, Sweat and Tears
Jay is also a programmer for BFI Flare: London LGBT Film Festival and, as a graphic artist, her work has appeared on the cover of Wasafiri and in Chroma, Diva and Litro. In her own words: ‘I am interested in graphic/public art, film, literature, technology, cyber-feminism, queerness and impending doom(s).’
We caught up with Jay Bernard just before her departure to the US.
Speaking Volumes: You were part of the Breaking Ground Tour in 2015. Were there any moments/events that particular stood out for you as highlights, and why?
Jay Bernard: I managed to get on the bus that was heading to Solomon Island and joined in the ceremony they held for the slaves there. Everyone walked out onto the jetty and dropped flowers, and there was a slow current, so as the sun was sinking, there was magenta, yellow and violet on the surface of the river. Beforehand, one of the women conducting the ceremony said that if you can’t remember a name from history, make one up – your imagination would almost certainly correspond with the destitution someone was experiencing as they stepped off the boat. So it was very poignant and I was holding it together, and afterwards they gave us little bottles of water that contained drying agent, which I found completely undrinkable.
SV: Your new collection The Red and Yellow Nothing has just been published by Ink Sweat and Tears, and it was joint winner of the Cafe Writers Pamphlet Commission. Can you tell us a little bit about the collection, and what led to you deciding to write about this particular subject?
JB: I came across the story a few years ago on medievalpoc.tumblr.com and decided it would be an interesting concept for a book. The original idea was to profile several black figures from European history, including Sir Morien, but as I was writing, I realised that I wanted to do something with more of a narrative drive. So I decided to write a prequel to the story of Sir Morien instead. The Red and Yellow Nothing is basically the figure of Morien in the twilit, pre-story universe before he enters the narrative that was eventually passed down. But I didn’t want it to be a strict historical project, so it’s very anachronistic, and there’s some gender bending in there, shape-shifting, Kendrick Lamar makes an appearance as does William Dunbar.
I wanted to write this pamphlet because I wanted to go backwards in history and begin exploring a time when blackness was not the thing it is today, when Moors culturally dominated the British, when race/racism had not yet been invented. There are some interesting scenes, such as when Morien rides to the beach and none of the sailors will take him because of his appearance. It’s very easy to read that as racism as we now understand it, but in the story its pitched as a kind of stupidity; the other figures, particularly Sir Agloval, who is Morien’s father, do not have an issue. So what is that? Also, Morien is described as literally black, yet his father is, presumably, a pale-skinned European. His mother is described as simply a Moorish princess. So this story has cultural / ethnic difference in it, but it’s being pitched in a way that you and I probably don’t understand and possibly contaminate. Or not, as the case may be.
SV: How much research did you do in order to write the collection, and how long did the entire project take?
JB: I wrote it over two years. It started out as portraits of different figures – some of whom are still in there, such as the black lady who is mocked by William Dunbar and Sir Maurice. Then I decided to make Morien the narrative thread, so I wrote out a prose version of the original tale, took some of the most interesting scenes and tried to thread it together that way. I was going to have different figures from history interrupt the tale at key moments, but that didn’t work out. I then wrote some really weird poems which later became the section about the five African soldiers whose bodies were found in Scotland, and finally I hit on the idea of making this a prequel. I think I was being too strict with myself in the beginning, whereas this is basically me doing the opposite of scholarship and the opposite of history. Sometimes I worry that someone is going to read it and haul me in front of an academic judge for not sticking to the details.
SV: In addition to writing, you’re also a graphic artist. Does your artistic practice influence your writing practice in any way?
JB: I’ve done quite a few projects that are part text, part graphic. Yemisi Blake and I collaborated on London-wide installation for TFL that was part poetry, part graphics. I like to draw comics. The Red and Yellow Nothing has images in it. I’ve done the covers for all my own books. So yeah, maybe the two things are entwined. - Interview, April 2016, Speaking Volumes







In January 2017, Jay Bernard read at Goldsmiths college with the Centre for Feminist Research alongside Eileen Myles and Isabel Waidner. In conjunction, Jay produced Other Ubiquities, a short zine containing poems old and new. Grab this for a flavour of Jay's work on family, the body, relationships and Brexit...



Jay Bernard, English Breakfast, 2013.


In 2011 I went to Singapore to undertake a fellowship at the National University. It was amazing - a lot came out of it, including this pamphlet,


From 'Coming from Ankhit':
Do you Jay? Do you rub lotion on an otherwise bald white skin
to make it blacker? Are you really a Jersey cow, or are you like
the long lashed sabu, gold, really, or are you really skinless
like the pig, being dead, being skinned with a knife?
From 'The Language of Fish':
In my flat there’s a photo of a boat a little way out to sea.
Now it’s reclaimed land and sepia prints are the only proof
that fishermen ever returned to the one-storey shop-houses
lining the sea front, and lit joss sticks in the sand. That temple
sent the smoke of gratitude into the fickle dark to find some
warm ocean current, tasted by whoever, whatever, was listening.
From 'A Milken Bud':
I was never a mother; I never brought to term
a lit cluster of dividing eggs, thriving like bulbs
and streaming behind me, like the proud amphibious
matriarchs hatching their young in my hip bone.


Jay Bernard is a poet, writer, and film programmer. Her published pamphlets are Your Sign is Cuckoo, Girl (tall-lighthouse 2008), English Breakfast (Math Paper Press 2013), and The Red and Yellow Nothing (Ink Sweat & Tears Press 2016).
Jay’s poems have also been collected in The Salt Book of Younger Poets (Salt 2011) and Ten: The New Wave (Bloodaxe 2014).

Spitzenprodukte, Confirmed Pigfucker: Political Poems, Vile Troll Books, 2017.




POSTERS. Big-top Circus. Tiny-eyed Brideshead shits. Heel boys. Late summer evenings. Dogbloc lies. Busted flush. 7 VERSES OF PURE TRADE UNION FILTH. So much for a kinder, gentler politics. 48%. Sex Person of the LRB. As plotters they're fucking useless. World-wide content exporter. Harambe. Republican cuck. SPITZENPRODUKTE. Section 28. If anything it reflects well upon the man. Prize Turkey. Hillary Benn's International Brigades. Asset-stripping whole regions of England. VILE TROLL. Sad!


http://viletrollbooks.bigcartel.com/product/confirmed-pigfucker-political-poems-by-spitzenprodukte





Spitzenprodukte, Chubz: The Demonization of My Working Arse,Montez Press, 2016.
excerpt


Andy “Chubz” Wilson is just another NEET on the street, spending his summer days sucking dick and chilling in the park, one hand on his touchscreen, the other down his pants. That is, until he meets charming left-wing journalist and cute crypto-twink Owen whilst trawling grindr for sex. But what starts as a quick, breathless hookup ends up changing Chubz — and London — forever. Whilst Owen battles poppers-mad PM Nigel “Nige” Farage, our cock-hungry comrade wages his own “ass” war, and is left wondering: just what exactly is it he’s fighting for? Socialism? Barbarism? Or just cheap kicks?


Published by Montez Press, Chubz takes the satirical power of fan fiction seriously. In author Huw Lemmey’s hands, the objects of political life in the UK—nativist politicians, fresh-faced left journos, rapist policemen, and council flats—are fissile material to be activated by eroticism. The protagonist, Chubz, moves through London ass-first in the summer of 2011 on the eve of an uprising driven by a mysterious new link between prostates and dead cops. The result is a hilarious and highly-charged pornographic take on the prospects of revolution today and what Owen Jones is like on Grindr. The excerpt below has the book’s delirious mixture of raunch, humor, and insight on full display.


Obscene, hilarious and sharp-eyed, spitzenprodukte channels Stewart Home-meets-Alan Hollinghurst-meets Kathy Acker realness in a startling debut of 21st century Grindr modernism, set in a familiar, dystopian political landscape dominated by poppers addict Nigel 'Nige' Farage.
Spitzenprodukte says in an interview with Rhizome: "As for the fanfiction; well I think Owen Jones as a public persona is kinda an interesting avatar. To be honest, he's completely instrumentalised in the book, devoid of real agency as a character, and totally 2-D. But his book [Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (Verso, 2012)], and the way he has produced himself as a public figure from the publicity surrounding it, is for me a really interesting hook to talk about the disconnect between class, sex, and politics as a Question Time debate, and as lived experience in streets and shops and bedrooms." -  Verso blog


"a hilarious and highly-charged pornographic take on the prospects of revolution today"The New Inquiry


London could do with a make-over, a bit of a tastier plotline, and Chubz might be the one it’s been waiting for. That’s partly because this book has more slippery well-satisfied arseholes in it than the state opening of parliament. As a potential participant in that most democratic of sacraments, the gamiest of pantomime blokes Nigel Farage himself makes a starlit performance, even as a dodgy politician; one lured and then trapped into supporting a legal return for proper poppers, isobutyl nitrate instead of the lamer approximations of the now outlawed original compound. His nemesis and handler is none other than Gutrot Essenem, a freedom fighter for this particular chemical compound whose increasing blackmail of Farage leads to a line of nervy slapstick.
This thread of the plot interweaves with and is overtaken by the story of Chubz, for whom Grindr is initially a way of wandering through and interrogating the city, taking its pulse. The layers of interface, image, data, sorting and arranging, sink into the viscera, but then other forces take over, or other lines of writing shift into predominance as prior ones dry up and the city swelters. The heat draws other figures to the fore; Chubz has an anarchist mate Pete who appears haphazardly, and likes a good bellow of rage at the yuppie strawmen, figuring as a kind of divining rod for the social tumult that the book climaxes with.
One of the characters who really gets into Chubz in his early wanderings is Owen, a holographic version of the political pundit Owen Jones, and ‘straight-acting’ charmer with lush nipples in his contact photo. He’ll flirt nervously, fold his clothes neatly, and fingerfuck you after muttering some social democratic strategy thinkpiece into the small of your back, just above the buttocks where such a touch does the erogenous business. And on Chubz those buttocks frame the most powerful arsehole in the history of the written word, slurping up entrants like sloppy spaghetti in one episode, devouring the power of the state in another. Here, the anal orgasm becomes a visionary shamanic force stirring up and rewriting the city. In this mode, the book is at its finest and funniest, most visionary and vulgar.
Written as roughly and gleefully as an adrenaline-fueled riot – in which each brick may be as carefully hefted, considered and flung as those that make the difference to a moment, or bunged somewhere in the right direction to keep up the pace of missiles – Chubz, short-circuits the hormones, events and vocabulary associated with riot to those associated with sex, making the link between one kind of convulsion and another. In a sense, the book is a knowing part of riot-lit, like William Burrough’s Wild Boys, or aspects of Stewart Home’s earlier pulps. These are books that linger over the moment of insurrection, urging it into being. We see in them the flickering of some other in becoming, or watch it turn into another charade. Fusing the farcical with the romantic urge to the union of souls or with its blackly comedic counterpart, Chubz is a little book of dreams to press up against the city and inhale in one go. - Matthew Fuller http://www.metamute.org/community/your-posts/rectum-rave


The premise of Spitzenprodukte’s CHUBZ:The Demonization of my Working Arse is the following: we are in the middle of a brutally dry and hot London summer some time after 2011 — some time, that is, after the mass riots of August 2011, which are still fresh in the minds of the author and his fellow Londoners. It could easily happen again. Chubz, the eponymous protagonist of the book, states it plainly in the first pages: “I didn’t want a job this summer, I wanted to fuck, and I wanted stuff to kick off. I felt angry, too, right.”
Chubz is an unacknowledged composite of social types. In conversation and action he embodies various characteristics of a young, tough rude boy: he lives in council flats he grew up in, in Bermondsey; he naturally uses slang that would sound ironic coming from the mouth of a boy from another class (“innit,” “swear down,” “skin up”); he describes graffiti in East London as “bullshit posh graffiti”; he jumps fences continuously and kicks bottles down the street. His inner voice, on the other hand, is something more like that of an artist/intellectual and, by extension, probably that of the author himself: “I measure hookups in data involved, uploaded or downloaded… I never run the analysis. Quantifying is not the thrill, mediation, running desire through culture. Description, narrative…”
Formally reinforcing this unacknowledged/subtle composite structure, the perspective from which Chubz’s story is narrated jumps between first, third and, in a particularly confusing passage, second person. By the end of the book, as the story spirals into its euphoric climax of violence, other voices, representing a mix of Marxist analysis (“The looter and the online pirate are the subjectivities with the clearest most intuitive comprehension of the nature of contemporary semio-capitalism”) and branding sociology (“It is from within this cultural landscape that the influential and socially credible aesthetic consumer trends of the next 10-20 seasons will emerge”) further insert themselves, often italicized, into the text.
At no point does the composite nature of the protagonist feel like a product of authorial libidinal fantasy. Chubz is no ultimate queer hybrid superman who offers us “solutions.” Instead, this composite seems like a genuine attempt to render an urban fabric that Chubz (in his author-artist voice) “feels”: “London’s like a load of maps laid over one another; in my mind, a series of different lives like neighborhoods, and neighborhoods like lives, where angers and tears and joy sit upstairs and downstairs, on top of each other…”; or the portrait he produces in his mind of his Grindr date while waiting outside his door: “a composite of… the photos on his profile. How his head fits his body, how the skin from one photo, distorted through a dirty mirror, blends with the skin on his torso, bleached dry from the flash and the low-voltage lighting of the gym shower rooms… a Frankenstein top I’m piecing together from bits of grindr and second-hand sensations.” The composite style is the result of a process of mapping a city being strafed by algorithms of desire, fitness levels, finance, etc.
The London that Spitzenprodukte maps is the London anybody who has tried to be an artist there recognizes. A city that always seems to force one to become a kind of utopian toxic rat. A poor animal scurrying through the underground of the city, nibbling on it’s filth and getting infected. The infection, though, for the artist-rat, has to be delirious, a fantasy of some kind of utopia glimpsed through the delirium (obviously, for literary writers this utopia quickly turns into dystopia). London literature of the last thirty years is peopled with all sorts of examples of this, from J.G. Ballard to Stewart Home to Iain Sinclair to China Miéville.
Spitzenprodukte gets delirious as well. He’s an artist; like all of us he has a taste for the extreme, likes to slum it, likes to venture into the dark heart of capital where flows are intensely bodily but invisible. He knows that the body gets poetic when it moves into these situations of such force as to exceed any possibility of commensurate response. The summer gets hotter, violence begins to gurgle from the hot cement, the air becomes humid, a storm is imminent: “Sleepless, wireless, pinned 100ft over the building sites, a mesh of bitter data, buffering social disorder, high up above the estates, amongst the England flags, my arse is transforming the atmosphere! … The city is rattled and changed, the sky bruise-purple with pure cop-hatred.” The anticipated riots break out.
But as the city begins to be held hostage by violence, it’s clear that the writing lacks that literary something (I almost feel that the author’s fixation on representing London blocks the path to this something in the same way that, by the 19th century, the weight of reification seems to block serious literature’s use of modalities of the imaginary or wish-fulfillment, which in turn have to be reborn in subgenres like the popular science fiction novel) that would allow him to produce an immanent response, a twitch or shudder, a virtuoso performance that the reader’s imagination can hold without foregoing a sensitivity to the real.
Toward the end of the novel the texture of the real is in fact lost. In its place we are treated to a form of authorial fantasy: a somewhat textbook and retrograde Burroughsian Wild Boys pastiche of nihilism: boys (some also have vaginas) running about having anal orgasms and beating up cops. And the theoretical voice that inserts itself — “we were bodies here together and how we used them together like a diagram, a diagram of a process all linked, how my body worked with the body of the boy I’m next to — that became our politics because that’s where power was” — does little to recuperate value from this fantasy prose-explosion, even though, for all I know, what it’s saying might be right. - Lodovico Pignatti Morano  https://www.flashartonline.com/2015/03/spitzenproduktes-chubz-the-demonization-of-my-working-arse-montez-press-hamburg/


Chubz: The Demonization of My Working Arse is Huw Lemmey's story of a young man, Andy "Chubz" Wilson, who spends a long, hot summer unemployed and fucking around the city via Grindr – and meets a young, left-wing journalist, Owen, whose earnestness is matched only by his sex drive. In the background, a poppers-addicted Nigel Farage rises to power as Prime Minister, and police crawl the sweating London streets as they begin to erupt in sex and violence.
It's political pornography. Not in some mortifying Michael Gove in the Whip's Office way, and not because it tries to make its sex right-on and joyless. The sex is filthy, uninhibited and completely uninterested in any agenda except pleasure, but it's political because of the people it involves, the class and taste lines it crosses and, especially, because of the way Chubz's getting off is placed in direct, violent conflict with other uses of the city. All these things – class struggle, the cult of Farage, and our obsessive relation to technology – are hung around the characters' desire to cram as much sex into their day as possible.
As suggested by the reference in the title, the "Owen" of the book is of course based on real-life journalist Owen Jones– author of Chavs, The Demonisation of the Working Class. The real Owen would probably raise an eyebrow at what his fictional counterpart gets up to, for instance as Chubz gets carried away in a fantasy of Owen being devoured by his arse:
But Lemmey isn't just interested in the grotesque outer limits of fantasy for the sake of it. He has suggested that he is less interested in the actual Owen Jones than in how his public image is received, and in what has to be excluded from a public persona to be counted as "credible". In that sense – fantasising about what a public figure keeps private – Chubz has its roots in internet fanfiction, a genre dominated by young women writing graphic fantasies about their favourite celebrities. Chubz is more ironised and self-aware than this, and in a sense has to be: there's only so much mileage in a sex fantasy before you start thinking about the way sex connects to the world around you. It's smut, but it's not just smut.
One of the ways to understand the politics of scandalous literature is to go back to France in the years before the Revolution. Paris was a city that thrived on smutty stories, and political careers were made or broken by the circulation of gossip, innuendo and scandal. Simply by standing on a street corner in Paris, you would hear some filthy rumour or burning "secret". Real news and libels, or collections of anecdotes, circulated in little haphazard gazettes printed in presses on the French borders – free from the elaborate categories of censorship applied to printed books by the French censors.
Robert Darnton, the preeminent historian of this literary underground, has uncovered the networks through which these underground best-sellers circulated. Sometimes the banned works were those of dangerous political philosophers and radicals, but more often outright pornographic works, or raging anti-establishment tracts – and they all circulated in the same catalogues. It's a useful corrective to the idea that the literature that proliferated before the Revolution was all (or even largely) chin-stroking philosophy about the rights of man.
The French police at the time took these libelles seriously, both because they were injurious to public opinion of the monarchy and because they could have serious effects on public order. Darnton mentions one 1752 rumour – that police were stealing working-class children so a royal prince could bathe in their blood – actually causing a riot. Slander, rumour and gossip of this kind were literal weapons, with aristocrats even hiring libellistes to bolster their reputation and destroy others. It's hard to reconstruct how much of a role these libels played in creating the crisis of legitimacy before the revolution – though some of their authors were among the revolutionary leadership – but they undoubtedly spread the image of a monarchy in decay, where the body of the king, the source of law, was rotted from the inside out.
It's in this tradition of secret lives that we have to read Chubz's fictional Farage: nursing a secret loathing of his supporters, driven to illness by endless pints of ale, possessed by a secret longing for European food and sophistication – a delicate sfogliatella and glass of light Italian rosé – that he has to hide to maintain his public image, and addicted to poppers at the behest of a continental dominatrix called Gutrot Essenem.
But not all of the book is about the secret life of Nigel Farage: much of it is about Chubz's pursuit of sexual pleasure, his negotiation of the city, and his use of Grindr. Chubz is a pleasure seeker, uninterested in respectability, politics or romance. As Owen takes him on an excruciating date in an All Bar One temple of blandness, all the typical codes of mainstream gay life, the desire for respectable profession, relationship, and career break against Chubz's insistence that he just wants "spit and skin and dick." But even that's not quite true. In the middle of sex later, Chubz thinks to himself, "I wish this were mediated", "I wish this were data".
Desire and regulation are never far away from each other, and when they come into conflict it's often over who gets to be in public and use public space. Grindr promises Chubz and its many devotees not only an on-demand menu of sexual options, but a way of reordering the city, uncovering sexual opportunity round every corner. It's an ordering of the city that is only open to its participants, and a way of reclaiming control over a city only otherwise configured for transportation between home and grinding, miserable work. Chubz's worry is about whether, unaware, digital augmentation has become an inextricable part of how he thinks about sex.
But Grindr is largely a privatisation of the kind of cruising that used to happen in certain public toilets and desolate night-time urban spaces. The vague conception of gay history most young men grow up with is that being gay was "illegal" until somewhere in the middle of the 20th century, and then there's been a gradual swing in tolerance until the present day. If we think of our predecessors at all, it is at the mercy of violent police and a hostile society, haunting rundown establishments in the hope of a furtive fuck.
Matt Houlbrook, in his historyQueer London, challenges this notion: though subject to police raids, early 20th Century London had a wide range of queer institutions, from Turkish Baths to private clubs, and a huge number of public spaces used for sex. For many of the men Houlbrook describes, the queer and the urban are inextricably linked – the book begins with a letter from a married man who had "only been queer since [he] came to London"– and often possessed of a defiant pride and very little sense of shame. The same man, in the middle of a police raid, drew himself up, introduced himself to the presiding Inspector as "The Countess" and demanded that he take one of the young cops on the raid home with him.
Houlbrook uncovers a world that extends far beyond contemporary notions of the homosexual, to encompass the highly-flamboyant West End queen, the generally respectable middle-class homosexual, and the otherwise "normal" working-class man. It's surprising how widely tolerated out-and-out flamboyancy was, but the real surprise is in the highly-fluid, highly-conflicted sexuality of "normal" men, who were otherwise straight. Though freer to openly enjoy sex than middle-class homosexuals, a "normal" guy who had just enjoyed some gay sex clearly felt the need to scorn, extort or violently separate himself from the "brown-hatter" he had just fucked. There is nothing so brutal and uncaring as desire satisfied.
The 1957 report issued by the Wolfenden Committee – which had as its remit two "problems" of urban life, female prostitution and male homosexuality, and took evidence from distinguished middle class homosexuals – marked the beginning of toleration for homosexual men, and the gradual decline of the old queer world. But the rise of easily available, anonymous apps like Grindr have meant easy access to a digital cruising ground where cross-class liaisons, and interactions with men who consider themselves "straight", are far likelier than they were in highly "gay" environments like late 20th century Soho. How else, these days, would a feral NEET like Chubz meet an established middle-class journalist like Owen?
Illustration by Michael Oswell and Huw Lemmey
Lemmey is too canny to give us a simple tale about Grindr as a tool of liberation, though it must have been tempting, given the endless parade of pop drips lining up to condemn anything but the most dishwater-dull sexuality – for instance Sam Smith saying hookup apps have "ruined romance". His visual work with graphic designer Michael Oswell shows clearly how technology that claims to free us can just loop back around into narrow repression.
Though Chubz is without doubt the smartest character in the book, his pursuit of pleasure and violent catharsis as the annihilation of existing society isn't a conventional hero's tale. The book is far more interested in the way sexual pleasure is always almost a liberation from alienation and political oppression, and the way looking for sex forms and changes and our sense of self: "I identify as red neon in wet asphalt and I use the pronouns now/nearby/online," says Chubz.
If you watch the news after reading Chubz, it's hard not to wonder about the secret desires that lurk behind the eyes of David Cameron or Ed Miliband. Hard not to see sex – and power, which always follows hotly on its heels – lurking in every interaction. It provides an easy way of asking: how might those in power be lying to us? What might they be concealing? Even if Chubz's anal apocalypse isn't your cup of tea – they're good questions to ask.  - James Butler   https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/4w7kxg/james-butler-huw-lemmy-chubz-322


Spitzenprodukte12's first novel, "Chubz: The Demonization of my Working Arse2" has been described by Vice3 as "political pornography" or, more floridly, by Verso, as "Stewart Home-meets-Alan Hollinghurst-meets Kathy Acker realness in a startling debut of 21st century Grindr modernism." In actuality, it's exquisitely written fanfic inspired by journalist Owen Jones and a roundabout commentary on UK politics. (Its title is a play on Jones's recent book, "Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class.") The novel recently launched with an event featuring Spitzenprodukte in conversation with McKenzie Wark at Interstate Projects in New York. We sat down with Huw Lemmey, pen name Spitzenprodukte, to talk about the novel, the Owen Jones, and the recent UK elections.
As someone who is primarily an artist and critic, what drew you to fanfic as a form? Considering it is often subjective and sexual in nature, how do you feel it fits into political discourse?
I like reading fanfic so I wrote fanfic. It's the mixture of short attention span and short time periods available for reading or writing that makes popular literature appeal to me. But also I think there's something in the history of fanfic, in its earnest approach to irony, that I find really refreshing. That's suited to this moment. To this colossal death of the political imagination that has thrown Europe into these frigid conditions. Even on the radical left what's taking precedence is a concern with reinforcing representation in a really rigid and repressive way. We're picking at bones here.
I thought when I was writing it that dumbfuck pulp like Chubz plays some part of unravelling novels as bourgeois forms, or contributing the rotting away of literature in my own little way, but now I think that was just trying to justify the effort. I like the casual use of words. I like disruptive political speech. I like hecklers and that. I guess my petty-utopia right now - or, at least, my political project - is stripping away at the language of politics, at how it's represented back to us. I feel like the images are hiding the material realities. I want to see again how the individual and complex moments, what they share with other moments, how those put together constitute a collective political reality enough to acquire a name. And how that becomes its representation. No more so in Britain than with class, this shitty mix of cultural affectations and material conditions.
Does that answer the question? To me it's only important that the book isn't seen as grotesque. It's not one of these old-fashioned satires where peoples moral failings are depicted in the grotesque forms or behaviours, to shock. I'm not that sort of boy. To grotesque is to deform. I'm not out to shock but maybe to invoke a sexuality hidden. Like if you lick your skin with a really wet tongue, all tongue, right up your arm. If you then smell it, it's obscene but fascinating, it's revealing, like all the secret human smells in the air stick to it. That's what I wanted for the book. It's not obscene in a displaying genitals way, something society deems obscene but is not shocking to those of us who understand that humans can have genitals. But it's obscene in it's stupid obsession with seeing sexual tensions and powers realised between all the characters, in using sex to reveal the things that exist in plain sight that we nevertheless pretend we don't so, because they're default and all-powerful and totally suck.  read more here


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http://montezpress.com/publications#!


https://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/nov/20/chubz-demonization-my-working-arse-interview-huw-l/

Michael Crowe, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in GTA Online, Studio Operative, 2017.


Michael Crowe's An Attempt At Exhausting a Place in GTA Online takes George Perec's serene 1975 conceptual exercise in Paris as its starting point, reenacting it within the chaotic and excessive virtual world of Grand Theft Auto Online. Giddy murder, Fassbinder lookalike contests and amber lights twinkling in the far distance all dance together as Michael Crowe attempts to exhaust one location in the world's most popular video game.
With an accompanying essay by Jamie Sutcliffe, this edition playfully explores the discursive spaces of online games and questions their relationship to our current material world and potential immaterial futures.

George Perec's serene conceptual exercise in 1970s Paris is reenacted once again, this time in the depraved contemporary world of Grand Theft Auto Online. Giddy murder, Fassbinder lookalike contests and amber lights twinkling in the far distance all dance together as Michael Crowe attempts to exhaust one location in the world's most popular video game. Includes an introduction by Jame Sutcliffe. —Studio Operative

An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in GTA Online (Studio Operative) is Michael Crowe’s update of Perec’s famous experiment with time and attention, relocated to Los Santos, GTA’s ultra-violent T-shirt-weather multiplayer environment. Crowe’s avatar looks like Perec, with a fan of grey hair and black turtleneck, and immediately becomes a victim of griefing (repeated killing ofthe same player on respawn). - SAM RIVIERE

Grace Dane Mazur, Hinges: Meditations on the Portals of the Imagination, A K Peters/CRC Press, 2010.

























www.gracedanemazur.org/main.php
Click here to download the first chapter of Hinges as a PDF file

Grace Dane Mazur uses the idea of the hinge to illuminate real and metaphysical thresholds in fiction, poetry, myth, and ordinary life. From ancient narratives of Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Parmenides, and Orpheus, to modern works by Katherine Mansfield and Eudora Welty, the exploration of the Other World acts as a metaphor for the entrancement of reading and writing.
Looking at Lascaux, Renaissance and Byzantine images of Christ harrowing Hell, Rubens, Vermeer, and others Mazur contemplates writing, attention, Hades, the gates of Hell, trap doors, demons, love, the human body, forbidden looking, Virgil, Ovid, Nicodemus, Nighttown, and the melancholy of twilight.

What is it to be at the edge of the world of the imagination? How do writers, readers, and thinkers deal with this threshold? How do painters represent it? This unusual book—a combination of personal essay, literary criticism, art history, and memoir—examines what happens when we come under the spell of writing, when we get to that place where we enter into an altered state of consciousness, either as writer or as reader. Mazur uses the idea of hinges to explore what happens at real doorways as well as at metaphysical turning points and transformations¬—in fiction and poetry, and also in ordinary life. As she ranges from the ancient narratives of Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Parmenides, and Orpheus, to the modern fictions of Katherine Mansfield and Eudora Welty, she presents the hero’s exploration of the Other World as a metaphor for how we enter into the entrancement of the novel. Looking at art from the time of the prehistoric caves at Lascaux, through the Renaissance, and up to the Dutch Baroque, Mazur contemplates the structure of Hell; the usefulness of demons; and the paradox of writing and solitude. Along the way, she ponders such questions as: Why are the gates of Hell so noisy? Why is falling in love like a trapdoor? Why is the rotation of the earth uncanny? Why do spiders provoke phobias? What happens when looking is forbidden? What is it about twilight that makes gods behave strangely and brings a brief melancholy to both humans and apes? Mazur shows us new ways of thinking about mind, writing, and existence.

Some of the illustrations in Hinges: Meditations on the Portals of the Imagination are hard to see in the small format of the book. As they deserve and repay fierce attention, I have put themhere.


"Ordinary things can lie around unnoticed until someone comes along whose poetic imagination makes the vital connections and uncovers the riches lying concealed in their depths. Grace Dane Mazur has created an inspired fugue, writing with sensitivity and passion as she finds in the common hinge a multilayered, apocalyptic and powerful metaphor of entrances and exits, openings, initiations and descents."―MARINA WARNER

"Hinges, by Grace Dane Mazur, is a masterpiece of literary and artistic insight. To read it is to experience all over again the thrill of reading. It makes you want to revisit the world’s great masters of verbal art―Homer, Virgil, Milton, and so many others. Page after page, the reader sees something radiantly new about each of them―and about the reader’s own self at the moment of reading them. The author of this remarkable book has an uncanny instinct for seeing things as they really are at that liminal moment when the reader, in reading, crosses over from the everyday to the eternal."―GREGORY NAGY

"Mazur’s book is strange in wonderful ways. It perches itself on the liminal perspective, where the risks of instability can yield long sight. Reaching deep into inspired erudition, it is filled with quirks and profundities, told in a voice that is both of this world and not."―REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN

"What lies between everything and nothing―asleep and awake, reader and book, the space between words, the hero/heroine and the world they occupy and from which they must escape―what lies between all that, and on what invisible spring is it all tightly held and delicately balanced and vulnerable to becoming undone? With stunning and direct simplicity, Grace Dane Mazur illuminates these darknesses, revealing an imagination that is original and vital. Here is a book I absolutely needed to read."―JAMAICA KINCAID

What a curious little book Hinges is. Written by a biologist-turned-writer, the spouse of a mathematician, it combines art history, the act of reading, memoir and mythology into one accessible package. Grace Dane Mazur explores what happens when we cross the threshold between reality and imagination, and also examines the importance of the threshold itself. Mixing Greek and Christian stories — among other religions/philosophies — with classic poetry and paintings, she demonstrates how other inquisitive minds have tackled the notion of Other Worlds. It is a fantastic and useful read, especially those looking to better understand their own craft.
Stories begin with instabilities — perhaps because beginnings themselves are such unstable conditions. In fact, the opening pages sometimes show the protagonist in a condition of both liminality and entrancement, liminality being the state of being on the threshold. It is as though there is a sense of, "Look, reader, the same thing that is happening to you — now that you are coiled around this book and are about to slip into the imagined world — is happening to this fictional character, who is at the edge of his own altered consciousness, and at the edge of adventure."
Interestingly enough, Mazur has a connection with the last book I reviewed, A Kite in the Wind, in that she has also taught in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Like many of that book's contributors, she maintains that inspiration and understanding of the written word can come from a variety of sources, and that different artists will have different interpretations of similar events. Her main focus lies with characters' first entrance into another world, and she uses paintings from Peter Paul Rubens, Dionysus, Fra Angelico, and more to illustrate her thoughts.
Our entrance into the other world when we read fiction is in many ways analogous to the hero's descent to the underworld, or crossing over to the Other World. I base this on the three qualities that seem most indicative to me of such journeys: the disappearance of boundaries, the distortion of time, and the distortion of language.She goes on to add:
Like dream time, narrative time is non-linear, looping when it wants, disappearing when it chooses. It is elastic, stretching and contracting, two minutes can take several pages, while one sentence may leap through years.
When writing, we are often told that the best approach to our most climatic or intimate moments is to stretch them out, to build suspense and longing in order to have a greater impact. Slowing down can prolong pain in a good way — the way in which we read books to process the world, pain that can be put away when we need to, in order to go about our day. The same can be said for love, for who doesn't want to draw out, for as long as possible, the best feelings of love? Think of all the kisses, the stories, the trips, the conversations that you wished would never end. Think of all the sights and sounds that can bring them back in an instant.
Mazur's writing is also that of an academic, and Hinges has plenty of footnotes, citations and an index, as well as a timeline for the the writers and painters she mentions. Her points of reference date all the way back to 15,000BC, with the Lascaux cave paintings, up to the year 2000AD, with Charles Baxter's The Feast of Love. She outlines and re-outlines her position, down to the point of better defining her word choices:
The door that is not plumb, not correctly suspended from its hinges, is like a carcass, a side of beef, dead weight; it is pretty useless. It can fall open, but not swing shut. This is why becoming unhinged is such a serious thing. You collapse wildly; you swing heavily askew.
One form that becoming unhinged can take is obsession. Although the etymology of obsession implies that something sits on us or besieges us — from the Latin ob meaning against, toward, over, and sedere, to sit — perhaps one can also think of it as when we sit in one of the rooms of our mind, unable to perform the hinging action to take us to any other room.
Some of the specific examples of hinging into another room are Christ's decent into the underworld (and how different forms of Christianity interpret that event), the Homeric "Hymn to Demeter," and Virgil's story of Orpheus, the man who made a deal with the underworld to have his beloved Eurydice back in the land of the living, only to derail his own plans at the last moment. (Mazur's line, "Descended from the Muses, he is not one for prudent behavior or stolid obedience," made me laugh knowingly.) I will admit that I was not too terribly familiar with any of these stories, but Mazur explains them all in a way that does not seem overly simplistic, nor does she fly right over the head of the classically under-read. Her teaching skills shine.
Hinges is not a long book — just 152 pages, including the index — but it provides plenty to think about. Both academics and creative types can find thoughts applicable to their work, as she articulates what we find satisfying in making our worlds permeable. I'm quite glad I read it right after A Kite in the Wind; the two complement each other well. The lines between writer and reader are also fuzzy for those who are in the business of doing both. We know what it's like to be enveloped by a good story, and yet that story also makes us want to get to work. We also know what it's like to care about a character, yet wish its creator had done a better job. The Writing world and the Reading world co-exist on a greater plane, the Imaginative Universe. Mazur acknowledges these separate-but-overlapping entities, and in the end, elevates the discussion on what art can do. - Sara Habeinhttp://glorifiedloveletters.blogspot.hr/2011/12/hinges-meditations-on-portals-of.html

Night towns, Orpheus, Gilgamesh, Hinges  and Doors
Hinges: Meditations on the  Portals of the Imaginations by Grace Dane Mazur is a very illuminating look at the worlds reading can take us into.  This a very rich book that covers brilliantly much directly of great interest to those of us very into the reading life.   
Mazur  explores the myths of Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Parmenides and Orpheus as  they relate to how we experience literature.  She  helps us to understand what happens to our analytic mind as well as our subconscious as we enter a fictional world.



How can you resist the subtitle of Grace Dane Mazur’s Hinges?
It’s Meditations on the Portals of the Imagination.
Well, you can’t resist it. Not if you’re book-ish, and especially not if you’re also writer-ish.
If book-ish was in the book’s index, you might see a reference to this passage:
“When we enter the altered state of consciousness to which fiction carries us, we lose ourselves.”
And if writer-ish appeared below, you might see a connection to this one:
“Because the close, focused attention of the writer is often even more piercing and prolonged than that of the reader, the imagined world replaces by its intensity and brilliance the ordinary world of the living.”
And there *is* an index. Because Hinges has some personal anecdotes, but it also reads a little like a series of lectures.
But lectures given by someone who holds her subject close, so the tone is somewhat academic but infused with an intensity and a passion for these portals. (So that’s not a bad thing.)
To illustrate, here is the longer passage that I think would be indexed under book-ish:
“When we enter the altered state of consciousness to which fiction carries us, we lose ourselves. We lose our sense of time. Language becomes strange or altered. We replace our loved ones – our lost, our missing, our absent, our longed for – with new people, sudden strangers who are at once accessible and beguiling. Though we cannot quite reach out and touch these strangers, they touch us, move us, break our hearts or heal them, and cause us to lurch into laughter and weeping. They make us know in ways we have never known before, and take us beyond human limits, beyond the borders of the mind.”
You can see the emotional quotient of the subject matter, with the talk of the readers’ engagement and being touched and broken-hearted, and you can also see the ways in which the sentence structure and vocabulary take it to a more formal mode of expression.
I actually found the more-academically-styled portions of Hinges, with their detailed analyses of specific paintings and excerpts from literary works, quite interesting; I had intended to read the book in 20-page sections, and more than once I read beyond that point in an analytical segment, because I was sincerely intrigued and challenged.
Nonetheless, I really enjoyed the more personal parts of the narrative and wished that there had been just a little more of that. Because imagination is personal, our engagement with art works and art forms is personal.
(There is a story about the author stealing plants, for instance, that I absolutely loved; a little more of that would have been much appreciated. Although I understand the risk of prosecution might just be too high. Heheh. And please don’t hold this against her until you know the details: said plants were sorely neglected and needed to be rescued. Or something. See Theft-ish-ness in that index.)
But if you are wearing your student hat while you’re reading this post, you might want to know that some of the works considered herein include: Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party”, Fra Angelico’s “Christ in Limbo”, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Peter Paul Rubens’ “Orpheus and Eurydice with Hades and Persephone”, and Ovid’s Metamorphosis.
Each is considered in the context of a hinge, or an edge, or a border. Here is how the author explains her preoccupation with such objects, with such states, with such symbols.
“Edges delight me. Borders and thresholds – these are the terrifying places where I am most at home even while I find them puzzling, doubt-engendering, and loaded with possibilities of choice and danger of permanent exile. My favorite people inhabit the margins. Dawn and twilight make me shudder.”
I can easily relate to this. I went through a long period of snapping photographs of gates on county roads.
(You can see one of them below, which I scanned to accompany my current Thursday posts on Adam Gopnik’s Winter; see how one book/photo I’m reading manages to hinge into another, too.)
At first I thought that was odd, a monstrous coincidence, that this book would make its way to me, seemingly the ideal reader for it. Even though I hadn’t articulated my interest as surrounding the hinge specifically.
But then I thought back to book-ish and writer-ish, and I think it’s more likely than not that, if you’re checking the index for these subjects, you, too, are fascinated by something like this, something which represents a transition, a turning, an opening.


Call her Gretchen. But that is surely the only simple signifier for Grace Dane Mazur, a writer of vast and passionate interests to which the label "interdisciplinary" rings hollow; this is a woman, after all, who has a section of her website dedicated to "astonishments." Consider Mazur's new book:Hinges: Meditations on the Portals of the Imagination. It is partly an exploration of the creative process, partly a work of art history, partly an anthropological study, and partly an exploration of the brooding underworld (both metaphorical and literal). Try as I might, I simply can't sum up this slim book; it speaks for itself.
Mazur herself has an eclectic background and a powerful presence. (As Amy Minton put it in her book review for The Collagist: "If you find yourself in a dark wood, like Dante did, you might choose Virgil, the light, to guide, or you might choose Mazur—the wise woman, the mothering protector, and the childlike explorer.") Before turning to writing, Mazur studied painting and ceramics at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. After that, she studied biology at Harvard University, where she ultimately became a post-doctoral research biologist at the university's Biological Laboratories, where she studied the morphogenesis and micro-architecture of silkworms.Turning her wide mind to literature, she earned her MFA at from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She has since become the author of Silk, a collection of stories that was a New York Times notable book of the year, and the novel Trespass. Mazur was the fiction editor of the Harvard Review for a decade, and now serves as the fiction editor for Tupelo Press. She teaches creative writing at various colleges, leaving a long string of inspired students behind her; in fact, she was my instructor for my essay semester in the MFA program at Warren Wilson. Mazur lives just outside Boston, where she and her husband, the mathematician Barry Mazur, have been known to host a most gracious late morning breakfast.
In our conversation, Mazur and I discuss nothing less than the hinges of hell -- as well as Albrecht Dürer woodcuts, the Aeneid, how visual art and literature compare in their renditions of the underworld, Herman Melville, how nonfiction explorations influence the author's fiction, and, of course, Black Fire.
Here, then, is Gretchen:If it doesn't sound too grim to put it this way, what lured you to the hinges of hell?


- Anna Clarkhttp://isak.typepad.com/isak/2011/02/isak-interview-10-grace-dane-gretchen-mazur.html

For a review of Hinges by Elizabeth Bachner in Bookslut,  Click Here



Fall book season is upon us with a slew of big names releasing giant tomes within weeks of each other. It will be difficult to keep up with even the greatest of the Great American Novels and the Booker short list, let alone anything coming out of the smaller presses.
Read the last Bookslut on Coco Chanel.
So what should be done about the small, hard-to-categorize gem of a book about art and literature, released by a tiny mathematics specialty publisher that has thus far been overlooked and neglected?
Grace Dane Mazur’s Hinges: Meditations on the Portals of the Imagination is a wide-ranging and provocative examination of where we go when we read—or write—a book. From Homer to the caves in the Dordogne to Eudora Welty, Mazur takes us on a tour of the underground and the far reaches of imagination in the name of finding out where our stories come from, who is really doing the telling and why storytelling is in our blood.
It’s worth making a little room for in your fall reading schedule.
Hinges seems like it was pulled together after decades of interest and reading. Was there a spark that made you decide or figure out how to pull it all together?
It was more like a succession of tiny sparks.
The two main strands of this book appeared to me in around 2004. One had to do with a state of the psyche, our descent into the world of fiction. The other was that most ordinary piece of old-fashioned hardware—the hinge. I had been thinking of the strange things that happen to us when reading, or writing, fiction. It seemed to me that our spiraling down into the altered state of fiction echoes the visit of the archaic hero to the land of the dead.
Looking in the visual arts for representations of Greek heroes descending to Hades, I stumbled upon paintings, frescoes and mosaics of Christ in Limbo, also known as the Harrowing of Hell. It was there, in a painting by Fra Angelico, that the hinge grabbed me.
Before becoming a writer I had been a biologist. I’d spent years and years looking at microscopic structures in insects. So I had been trained to stop and gaze at things that I don’t understand, the sort of thing that the eye usually skips over because it doesn’t make any sense. The broken hinges on the doors of Hell in Fra Angelico’s fresco called out to me as though they were flashing in neon. “We are strange things,” they said. “See if you can find out what we are doing here.”
So both of these strands were obsessing me, and calling out to be woven together, even though one was mind, the other matter. Over the course of the six years of working on the book, those sparks you mention would come, but they were tiny, barely bright enough to be called thoughts, and they would continually braid and knot and tangle things together.
Hopefully this isn't a too personal question, but I was wondering how being married to a mathematician influences your interest in art and literature, and your own writing.
Fine question. My husband does Number Theory, mathematics of the pure sort, up where it’s very close to poetry. In fact, he reads more poetry and fiction than almost anyone I know, and writes poems when he’s not doing math. We’re always showing each other things, both in the world and in texts. He is my first and most demanding reader, and he has a wonderful eye for the distinction between simple fuzzy-mindedness and the necessary ellipsis of the lyrical. There’s a crystalline clarity to mathematics that shimmers up there, acting as a sort of beacon.
You seem to state that reading is a creative act in itself—not just writing. Is that fair to say?
Yes, I would make that claim. The best kind of reading, I think, happens when we are paying ferocious attention. All our antennae are quivering. It involves the lifetime of unconscious preparation that has formed our “eye” or “ear” as a reader. (I need the lectorial equivalent of the “voice” of the writer.) This preparation determines the depth of our interaction with the work.
When we read, we explore the world of the text. We are instructed by the author as to how to imagine this world, but even the most generous author can only propose the images to us. Our own imagination must then go to work. So author and reader are partners in a strange kind of construction, where the only tools are the author’s words and the reader’s wisdom. Each time we reread the same book this construction changes—we are different, older, wiser, even if only by a day or two—we see new facets of the narrative architecture emerge.
So, going into a text is an active form of exploration. As we read, we are creating our response. It’s lonely, bewildering and full of dangers and astonishments. This is true for writing as well as reading. But the exploration works both ways—a work of art explores and examines us while we are experiencing it. Even a headless statue can look at us and find us wanting.
Reading your book I was reminded of Marina Warner, a writer I hugely admire. You both seem to undertake the act of decoding your surroundings like she does. Do you read her? And what, pray tell, would you call this type of writing?
I’m a huge admirer of Marina Warner! And I like your use of the word “decoding,” with its sense of parsing the texts (code coming from the Latin codex for split block of wood that was covered with wax for writing…) of one’s surroundings. The world is full of secrets, some of them esoteric, but others are hidden in plain sight because we have forgotten to notice them. We have neglected to realize that we don’t understand them.
The subtitle of my book has “Meditations” in it, and that may give the philosophical flavor of it. At times I am tempted to call these works essays, but sometimes instead of making an argument or leading to a single point, they seem to ramify, to just keep branching, leading to digressions which seem to take on a life of their own. It makes me very happy when they do that. It seems to echo some excitement of the cosmos. What I really like to do is to take disparate things and show what happens when they nudge up against each other.
There are philosophers who build entire structures from first principles, vast cathedrals of new ways of thinking—Kant, say, or Hegel. And then there are people who prefer to notice and unify things that already exist, or make them understandable in a new way. I guess I tend to look at the Humanities as one vast landscape which becomes ever so much more fruitful and interesting when we forget about the boundaries between its various principalities and domains and simply conduct our investigations everywhere. - Jessa Crispinwww.kirkusreviews.com/features/hinges-small-press-gem/

“In this absorbing collection of short stories, newcomer Mazur does an excellent job of intertwining the emotions of her characters, mostly young women. In the title story, for instance, Suzanna becomes so involved in the art of wearing silk and of working with silkworms in her lab that she overlooks the rest of her life. Many of the 11 stories involve a young art student named Cass. As she takes Cass from Singapore to Paris and has her pose nude for her Aunt Marika in ‘Backlighting’, Mazur creates memorable scenes that definitely evoke the senses. An intensely felt collection; highly recommended for public libraries.”-Library Journal”Many of the stories in this collection are charged with erotic energy, especially those that feature a young American called Cass. We first meet Cass in ‘Privacy’, when she is ten years old, spending the summer with her grandparents in the French countryside. Cass’ sense of her own sexuality is awakened by her exotic aunt, Marika, a painter. Years later, when Cass is in Paris to study physics, posing as a model for Marika precipitates an affair with Stasek, Marika’s lover. Cass’ sexual development, through three marriages, in fact, is explored in the stories that follow; her personal journey unfolds sometimes in the first person and sometimes in the third. With its sensual imagery, foreign flavors, and layered themes, this is a richly textured collection.” - Booklist

For a review of Silk by mel u in The Reading Life,   Click Here

More reviews

CURRENT PROJECTS -- ESSAYS and ART REVIEWS -- 2011 to Present
Ambergris and Alchemy -- a Pilgrimage to John Singer Sargent's "Fumee d'Ambre Gris"
An essay in The Arts Fuse about John Singer Sargent's mysterious Woman in White, the Nature of Ambergris, and the Alchemy of Art.
Gods in the Gallery -- A Visit to the Russian Icon Museum
An essay in The Arts Fuse about Byzantine and Russian icons, and about what happens to us as we look at all the Gods in museums. This one is rather long and has 28 images, all of which can be clicked on for high resolution.  
Known and Mysterious -- Wendy Artin's Watercolors in "From the Roman Studio."
An essay in The Arts Fuse about the wild generosity and utter mastery of Wendy Artin as she finds beauty in a clutch of beets, old paintbrushes, ruined statues, and the human body.  
What is a Moment? -- Two Paintings of the Wounded Eurydice by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
An essay in The Arts Fuse about what we can see when we juxtapose two very similar paintings by Corot showing Eurydice in solitude before dying.  
The Riddle behind the Riddle -- William Kentridge's Fifth Norton Lecture at Harvard, Spring 2012
A review in The Arts Fuse of one of the stunning lectures of contemporary South African artist William Kentridge. All of his 2012 Norton Lectures can be found on line Here .  
The Strange Beauty of Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge
A review in The Arts Fuse of the large exhibition "Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe" at the Harvard University Art Museums.  
Wendy Artin -- Translating Marble onto Paper
A review in The Arts Fuse of the mastery and beauty of contemporary painter Wendy Artin's Watercolors of the Parthenon Friezes.  
Flowers as the Work Table for the Imagination
A review in The Arts Fuse of "Global Flora: Botanical Imagery and Exploration" a show of contemporary and historic floral works at the Davis Museum of Wellesley College.  
Emotion, Time, and Eros in the Paintings of Damon Lehrer and Rick Berry
A review in The Arts Fuse of two very different contemporary figurative artists currently working in Boston.
Hinging between Worlds: The Paintings of Anne Leone
A review in The Arts Fuse of contemporary paintings of swimmers in otherworldly cenotes in Mexico.

Teetering between the everyday and the surreal, Arndt’s debut collection investigates narratives of the queer body.
Many of the unnamed narrators in Arndt’s stories defy categorization. Even in their own thoughts, they skitter up to the boundaries of language and glance away, unwilling—or unable—to put a name to their identities. “I’m like a...you know,” attempts the narrator of “Been a Storm” during her brief roadside encounter buying fishing bait from two backwoods misfits. In the sardonic “Jeff,” a chance meeting with Lily Tomlin, who calls Jess by the wrong name, sets off an imaginary battle between Jess and Jeff, the alternative identity she both loathes and longs for. In “Third Arm,” the narrator obsesses over the feeling of “carrying around something that wasn’t mine,” while in “Together,” a couple deals with an intestinal parasite taking up room—literal and figurative—in the dregs of their relationship. Nothing in Arndt’s worlds is straight. Through the haze of alcohol or drugs or self-loathing hallucinations, characters elbow for space with frightening visions that exist just outside what is real. They morph into animals or become literal representations of figurative language; they flee the instability of inner turmoil only for their existential fears to manifest as larger-than-life visions. Reading Arndt is like walking toward a shimmering desert mirage and being met with a cloud of acid instead of an oasis of cool water. You’re not sure what just happened or whether you’re the same now that it’s over. Maybe you were never there to begin with.
A deeply transgressive, riveting shot out of the gate. Arndt is one to watch. - Kirkus Reviews


Arndt’s short stories are delicious flights of fancy, or obsession, or fertile curiosity—or, more accurately, some beguiling combination of all three. All 12 pieces in her debut collection are written in the first person. It could arguably be the same narrator in each, perhaps the author herself—or not. Often the stories seem to end abruptly, albeit usually meaningfully. “La Gueule de Bois” riffs on a trip to Paris, “the city whose sole monument is a comically upturned syringe.” “Jeff” features a brief encounter with Lily Tomlin. “Can You Live with It” juxtaposes musings on Raskolnikov and Crime and Punishment with a kind of pub crawl through various colorful bars. “Moon Colonies” explores tacky, yet strangely beautiful Atlantic City: “In the morning the waves glowed like uranium, a deep sweat coming up off the seafloor.” In “Third Arm,” which is full of puckish phrases—“the gag of cars,” “a pudgy dark had descended”—the narrator feels herself at odds with her rebellious body. And in “Together,” the longest and most plot-driven story, a couple contracts a mysterious malady that slowly breaks them apart. This is a playful and provocative collection, full of sly, deft turns of phrase and striking imagery. - Publishers Weekly


Jess Arndt’s debut story collection “Large Animals” (144 pages; Catapult) is intellectual but not above bathroom humor, morbid yet always in service of troubling divisions—between genders, between oneself and another, between different versions of oneself. The stories are richly metaphorical but their strangeness is presented matter-of-factly, as if events are taking place in an enhanced version of the world we know, one where the façade of propriety has been stripped away to reveal reality’s grotesqueness.
Though all of the stories are in the first-person, the identity of each speaker is malleable: They’re in states of transition along with their surroundings—if not on the edge of change, then they are longing to change, or are suddenly, irreversibly changed. They’re concerned with how to tell others about their change, and afraid of the permanence of it, afraid to undergo change alone, but also afraid to do so in the presence of others.
“La Guele de Bois” is set in a “city whose sole monument is a comically upturned syringe.” For the last week, it has smelled like linden trees—which smell like the “blossomy funk” of semen—one of many perfectly evocative details in the collection. “I’d woken up with a wooden face,” the protagonist says in Ardnt’s typically deadpan tone. This begins as a crisis but by the end of the story, the protagonist is distraught when another character fails to recognize the face’s difference.
In “Together” (which opens, “We had it together but we also had it when we were apart”), a couple has returned from a trip to Mexico with a “relative of giardia partying in our now shared intestinal tract,” which has given them both diarrhea-like symptoms. Though the speaker is supposed to be taking pills to treat the infection, he instead buries them in the garden—a way to stay connected to his partner—if only fluidly—even as their romance is floundering.
Arndt’s prose pushes the limits of grammar and sense even as it perfectly depicts her characters. Her sentences are colorful and condensed, strange and beautiful, often deriving their emotional effect from clever combinations of image and sound. The opening sentences of the first story, “Moon Colonies,” embody the alienation of the protagonist, a transgender man considering sexual reassignment surgery: “In the morning the waves glowed like uranium, a deep sweat coming up off the seafloor. It was beautiful but it was nerve-wracking too, being that close to the future.”
Similarly, Arndt captures the odd humor of the asparagus-like weeds growing behind the couple’s apartment in “Together” in the way they are “pubing skyward.”
Arndt is linguistically nimble, sometimes pivoting the focus of a story, once well-established, on the sudden appearance of a new proper noun. “But this isn’t even what I wanted to talk to you about,” says the speaker of “Jeff”—a story which, until this point, has chronicled her fascination with the Penthouse 808 Ravel, seemingly the narrative’s crux—“There’s something more pressing, something I call ‘Jeff.’” It’s as if, with a single word, Arndt drops a lens onto the camera-eye of the reader. This is her strength as a prose stylist and a storyteller: reshaping the way we see. - Sarah Gerard  https://awomensthing.org/blog/book-review-jess-arndt-large-animals-pushing-limits/


For the first time in my life I paid extra to have legroom in an airplane. I was getting over a cold, but also I wanted to stretch out and fully enjoy Large Animals by Jess Arndt. You see, Jess Arndt is like a queer Kafka who perambulates the surreal container of the body by dealing almost wholly in non-sequiturs.
Many a great story in Large Animals, Arndt’s debut collection, has a strong resemblance to Kafka’s shorter fiction — which, unlike his longer work that deals with bureaucracy, are rather works of gorgeously, painfully strange portraiture in which one is irredeemably ill-made for the world. Arndt is fond of creating a constellation of small desires for her characters that are hilariously specific, and as with Kafka’s shorter work, her stories turn on the heel of making one seemingly insignificant obsession lie in wait and then ambush the biggest questions of selfhood.
However.
There is no question Jess Arndt would have made Kafka blush.
To wit: in Third Arm, an English Professor drives around touching herself while avoiding her love life and pretending to be largely endowed. “I only liked jerking off while driving — otherwise the sincerity of the act completely killed me,” she quips. This unnamed character sees healers at the Authentic Process Healing Institute, and also, she carries a bit of unspecified gore in alcohol in a jar.
Arndt’s stories are built like this—in as many compelling directions as possible. But invariably, one direction rises above the others. The bit of gore — described as apricot-sized, mostly made of fat, and with darker globs — finally turns allegorical. As you are busy ticking off options for what the jar could possibly contain (an amygdala? definitely an organ?), Arndt continues breathlessly: “It made me think of a bar I’d been to near Joshua Tree.” It is here where you get an answer of a different kind as the unnamed character recounts what she told the bartender: “Scientists have proven that matter doesn’t exist. You see a foot but when you get past all that skin bone squishy stuff et cetera, nothing’s really there,” which is a subterfuge lobbed at the mysterious jar, but also to the feeling of being mismatched with your body which artfully haunts this entire collection.
Arndt’s imagination is amusing and far-flung. Her characters are amorphous and refusing of a gender binary, and the construct of each story is a delight. In Together, two lovers share an STD, in Jeff a misheard name introduction (Jess to Jeff) drives a low-key identity crisis. In the title story, Large Animals, a man who is perceived to be a lesbian whiles away his time in the desert where Walruses seemingly materialize by his bed at night. (Only one story in this collection was a miss for me, Shadow of an Ape, which details the rather confusing ordeal of a man in 1860’s San Francisco gold rush.)
There are some eerily stunning sentences in this collection, nonetheless, foremost of all in Moon Colonies, the opening story where a threesome haunt the Vegas strip chasing after myriad temporary playthings:
In the morning the waves glowed like uranium, a deep sweat coming up off the seafloor. It was beautiful but it was nerve-racking too, being that close to the future.
The great unresolved discomfort of perception and body punctuates the landscape in all the stories in Large Animals, and each character finds themselves at the mercy of a conniving version of the self that is overpowering, stacks the deck, and ruins the possibility of what is precisely most desired. In this sense, Large Animals is a collection of humanity reaching toward what might be graspable but remains painfully out of reach. At one point, Arndt writes:
Then it’s spring break. I go on a wine tour. We stare into the big sweaty vats of red. “Wine fermentation,” the expert says, “happens when all of the individual grapes explode against the walls of their bodies.” How nice, I think, for them.
This is a delightful read, perfect for the burgeoning summer, where the fact of the body is always at odds with the life of the mind. - Ingrid Rojas Contreras  https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/2017/06/04/the-cosmic-predicament-of-the-body-large-animals-by-jess-arndt/


It’s easy to get sentimental about animals. There’s a fantasy, explains writer Jess Arndt, that they will “somehow redeem us, or return us to our sinless selves. I don’t think I buy it. I listened to my cat torment a giant bug all night.”

In “Beside Myself,” we witness the austere life of a woman attempting to impregnate her wife by using her brother’s sperm. Here, as in many of the stories, the reader inhabits the aching body of the protagonist, and empathizes with her while questioning one’s own physical insecurities as the narrator morosely remarks, “among all life-forms, humans alone [are] defenseless-vulnerable blobs clothed solely in skin.” A blend of the bizarre and believable, every story in Large Animals is voiced by individuals battered by the daily toil of living as outsiders. No story captures this motif more than the title story, wherein the narrator’s mundane life is disrupted by recurring nightmares of animals in her bedroom. As the animals become a burgeoning obsession, they develop an order in her dreams, a kingdom with a bestial hierarchy in which the “massive, tube-shaped” walrus reigns. When the walrus speaks, its words are obscene but devoid of context. The narrator’s nocturnal encounters rapidly deteriorate her life, revealing her dormant sexuality and animalistic lust towards a fast-food worker even as she struggles through a vicious divorce.
And in its short shorts like “Containers,” where a decision to stay home and smoke weed rather than party with friends compartmentalizes an identity crisis in less than three pages, Large Animals proves wickedly entertaining. These are modern fables of the body exposing a naked perspective on femininity, masculinity, and the need — or lack thereof — for human relationships.
Carnal and experimental in tone, expressed in Arndt’s beguilingly casual and frequently colloquial prose, Large Animals is equally vivid in its depiction of human vulgarities as in its exploration of the body. It prowls through our preconceptions of the sexes, paring back its fallible, idiosyncratic character to render a raw and unnerving portrait of the self. “Animals are only animals because they are observed,” one character says, and here Arndt observes the largest animal, exhibiting our fears and our instincts. - Hayden Robel  http://www.zyzzyva.org/2017/06/21/large-animals-by-jess-arndt/


There is an abundant feeling of being lost in Jess Arndt’s debut short story collection, Large Animals. The characters in the diminutive volume float through various forms of limbo—emotional and physical to be sure, but also geographical. It doesn’t matter if Arndt’s mostly nameless narrators are roaming the streets of New York or festering in a shack in some hellish desert landscape, they drift from situation to situation, attempting to espouse meaning where none may exist. The stories collected in Large Animals are about characters in the midst of transition, in the long endless moment between Point A and Point B where the boundaries of our lives have broken down and possibilities seem—for better or worse—infinite. These are worlds where the normative rules of existence haven’t been broken, just temporarily sidestepped on the way to whatever might be next. The past has occurred, and the future is inevitably barreling toward these characters, but Arndt’s aim is the often times harsh grey space that lives between them. In Large Animals, Arndt explores what it means and what it looks like to be what we as conscience beings always are, in the process of change.
In “Beside Myself” Arndt writes, “Recently I’d been gripped with a phobia about places. It seemed to me that places were inevitably marked by their future potential.” The fear of what comes next or what happens when someone actually arrives wherever they’re supposed to be, weighs heavily onLarge Animals. The collection is replete with characters who aimlessly wander and find solace in skidding to a halt just on the edge of actual arrival. The final destination in Large Animals isn’t an achievement, it’s a burden, a far heavier one than the continued pursuit of a hazily defined existence. More than this, Arndt seems to be saying that there is no actual demarcation of moving from one phase to the next, but rather we exist in a state of perpetual transition. Our arbitrary wants and needs propel us forward, but we do so as a chaotic jumble of thoughts and emotions hog-tied together into a constantly shifting bundle we loosely refer to as our identity.
And there is an urge to categorize the stories in Large Animals as primarily about gender transition, but a reader would be amiss to limit their scope. These are stories about characters who may identify as transgender, but Arndt allows them to be vessels for questions about the general act of navigating the multiple identities contained within. Many of the stories in this slender debut feature characters grappling with another entity—subconscious or otherwise—living beneath their skin. In “Together”, her narrator grapples with both a Mexican-born parasite and her own relationship and identity ennui; in “Jeff,” the narrator fantasizes about abusing a thick-necked, sexually aggressive bro she fears she might be. “Jeff” is the crown jewel in this outstanding debut, an unsettlingly funny tale in which Lily Tomlin mistakenly refers to the narrator as Jeff, hurling them into an identity crisis. The brief story captures both the anxieties of transition—physical, yes, but life’s as well—and how they bleed into our relationships, our friendships, the very core of who we are.
There are times in Large Animals where the writing veers towards the experimental, the overly surreal, and the sense of being lost overwhelms. Arndt’s writing is the compass that guides though, the angular prose darkly humorous and disquieting but still steeped in a warm bath of humanity. We stumble along with these characters, grasping for their coattails, their sense of being lost mirroring our own. Arndt is a cartographer of the steadily changing landscapes of existence. Her stories don’t map with the intention of revealing a destination, but rather at illuminating the nebulous territory that precedes it. - Noah Sanders  http://theeastbayreview.com/review-large-animals-by-jess-arndt/


I heard a lot of hype about Jess Arndt’s collection of short stories, Large Animals, that centers the body, and was excited for its arrival. It did everything that was promised—but turned out just not to really be my thing.
Arndt’s collection confronts the weirdness of having a body. Arndt digs into gender dysphoria, into illness and parasites, into transness, queerness, and the struggles of being a biological being in our world. The characters speak with an ambiguity that allows queerness to flourish in a formal way, in a way that refuses to be binary and avoids labels. All those are good things, and they’re why I pushed through this collection to the end. In some of her stories, that ambiguity and centering of the body results in absurd and darkly almost-funny tales. My favorite was “Together,” where a parasite haunting a couple mirrors their slow falling apart, the main character’s self-destructive tendencies flowing to the front of their struggles. But I also really appreciated “Moon Colonies,” where a gambler hits it big in Atlantic City; “Containers,” a short story that packed tons of great social commentary into just a few short pages; and “Large Animals,” where the main character sees “walri” in their room at night.
This collection was an “It’s not you, it’s me,” problem. From the first few pages, I knew I’d delved into a kind of story that I recognized and didn’t personally like: the semi-vulgar bodily tale of sex and failings where the main tone is some sort of shame or confusion, and where the language is heavily pretentious (not necessarily in a bad way). There’s nothing wrong with those, and I would also say that Large Animals was obviously going to have the explicit descriptions and bodily absurdity, and I was ready for that—but I find stories with that heavy secondhand embarrassment, that physical and emotional shame, difficult and unenjoyable to read. Maybe the point is for me to feel uncomfortable, but it’s never been a kind of story that I’ve wanted to read, and so I found some of these stories hard to get through and enjoy. - whilereadingandwalking.com/post/166682842726/i-heard-a-lot-of-hype-about-jess-arndts


Life within a body is hard. In Large Animals, Jess Arndt takes a truth so obvious that we tend to ignore it and renders that truth absurd, hilarious, and a little bit redemptive. As someone who defines the body as essentially “a swarmy, queasy place,” Arndt revels in the body’s inconvenient needs, its instability as an identity marker, and the gender ambiguity that trails her narrators from Atlantic City to the Mojave Desert to Los Angeles. She also has a fair amount of fun allowing them to morph into the odd walrus or share an inner emotional world with a chair, to dip their toes in transcendence. You could call this collection transgressive, but ultimately Arndt is after something deeper, revealing the raw emotions that surface in every kind of human container, the feelings always scratching at the skin, waiting to make contact.
There’s a kinetic restlessness afoot here as these characters wrestle with their own lovability while going to dare-deviling lengths to get love or sex or hopefully some of both. Their longing inevitably outsizes the bodies that contain it, but that’s no reason for them to stop trying to make it hurt less. Throughout all these stories, Arndt is as skilled at blurring the boundaries between external reality and that of the body as she is between male and female, natural and unnatural. She distills the awkwardness of simply being human into a primordial world where nature dissolves and intermixes seamlessly with urban artifacts and ruin. For all its lush weirdness, I found this world deeply familiar.
The Rumpus: In “Beside Myself,” the narrator’s girlfriend says at one point, “You always put yourself through stuff like this… trying to write.” I’m wondering what you’ve put yourself through to write this book as well as what your general practice is like. What have been the unavoidable costs to you of becoming a writer?
Jess Arndt: I love that you pulled that quote out. These are my favorite parts of writing—arriving at a weird little promontory or cliff of a mini-realization. The things you can’t plan for. Of course, I didn’t set out to say this or that in the story about “my” life, but when something emerges like this, that does feel true, it’s always nice. Maybe this is a way into saying that I usually hate composing and am terrified of writing fresh work. I’ll do mostly anything to avoid it, and sometimes it gets so bad that I really start to loathe myself, and even all the extra yoga and other kinds of hard-to-manage-health fixes won’t solve it. Then I know the only way out of the pit I’ve dug is: try to write.
This book has been so long in coming. I started it while living in New York—teaching in the day, often bartending at night, breaking up with somebody. And it wasn’t until I fell in love again and moved out to the Mojave Desert, as a way station to LA, that I had the mental and physical space to finish it. I do feel very porous to the world around me, and I do think I begin to feel very obligated to whatever life I set up, the people in it, the relationships, the plants, the animals, the things. So moving to the desert, where it was nothing but dry and the landscape basically said—“You can try to hunch here if you want, but I CERTAINLY don’t need you and also, good luck buddy”—was, at least temporarily, an immense relief. This feeling, of the tension between the life you kind of intuitively create as a support system and the room you might need to create your work is something I think artists are so often struggling with. It was helpful then, as you noted by pulling the above quote out, to try to deal with some of that uncomfortable vertiginous “come close, get away from me” feeling, by actually letting it pop up in the writing explicitly.
It’s painful to try to take the space to write, at least for me. It’s also funny looking back at that quote now. In one way, it still feels very true. But really I think how it works is: I put myself through stuff living, and then somehow rescue it/myself by employing it in my stories.
Rumpus: You have an enviable way with verbs: “… a line of sweat slurred along my chest binder,” “… it took strong desert sun to unshrivel me” etc. And your stories, in general, contain a lot of movement. What do you think this says about your narrators? Did you consciously try to inject a sense of restlessness into them as characters?
Arndt: Throughout my life, people have said to me (and probably say to most writers): “You’re a writer, so you’re obviously good with words.” I couldn’t feel farther from that (of course awesome, enviable) truth. To me, talking is hard. Committing to meaning via marking words down is almost impossible. Each time I enter language I’m embarrassed; I fumble around. Bodies, at least mine, feel like these big inarticulate lumps. But there is so much to feel—so much raw feeling. I think in these stories I’ve reached for a kind of maximalism of undigested feeling, but tried to arrive there through a highly controlled approach. Maybe somewhere deep down inside, I think the less words on the page the better, i.e. the less risk. So it is true—I’d rather have a verb than an adjective. If that verb can imbue the sentence with an electrical current close to what the body that is intertwined with that sentence might be feeling, even better. Best, to me, is when language isn’t allowed to describe. I like it as part of the human meat grinder: mixed up with the body it’s come out of. Also, I find with verbs, I often hit a moment of panic. It goes like: (yelled very loud in my head) “CMON HOW CAN YOU SAY THIS BETTER? MORE ECONOMICALLY? WITH MORE PUNCH?”
In terms of restlessness: yes. The narrators are not exactly restless like wanderers (although they do wander), as much as restless like: where can I rest in a world where I don’t easily find myself represented? What are the strategies—often, at least in this book, self-destructive strategies—if I cannot rest, to keep myself moving? Huge caveat here: I think this can apply to almost anyone who has a body.
Rumpus: I love how the narrator’s gender inserts itself into these stories almost seemingly at random, as when Tamara in the final story, for instance, assumes the narrator is a lesbian because his Adam’s apple isn’t big enough. You seem to be having fun with ambiguity throughout the book. How much was that at the forefront of your mind when constructing the plot of each story? Or did some of that insert itself later?
Arndt: Ambiguity is a daily experience for me. Yesterday, for instance, the parking attendant guy at the chiropractor I go to called me “sir” what seemed like fifteen times in a five-word interaction. Maybe that doesn’t seem ambiguous! But, in my everyday, I never know how someone will read me, or what they are reading “of” me. This has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember—a gender negotiation that often seems hyperbolic or arbitrary. Add to that a kind of “imposter syndrome”—i.e. what if they find out? Find out exactly “what” is never clear. I like that you bring up story construction because I do really believe that, for me, stories can’t come out apart from this or on the side of this. They’re kind of built through it. If a compressed effervescence, or gallows humor, sometimes emerges too, that’s great. I do think it’s funny (the whole system), when looking at things from the outside, if the outside is where I already am. I also think it’s crushing. Both—pretty equally true.
Rumpus: Simply being nonbinary or fluidly gendered now seems to make a political statement. In these dark days of Trump, do you feel pressured to represent a certain community through your writing? Is this—potential political readings of your work—something you’re comfortable with as an artist? Something you want to encourage?
Arndt: I think what you mean is that just “being” means something political, in our current climate. I agree. But terms like “nonbinary” and “gender fluidity” also seem like places of language arbitration. They all have their particular historical hue. I am happy to be an LGBTQ artist, a gender nonconforming artist—someone who writes up close to these things. But also, something I think you’ve quite astutely pulled from the book, is that I’m even more comfortable the blurrier it gets. The body is such a swarmy place. At least it is for me. And I have to believe that much of what I’m feeling is possible to be felt by much of this planet’s population. Don’t get me wrong—I believe in the specificity of experience, especially with regard to minority subject positions. But also, when I think: “Ugh you said ___, and it made me feel seen and also it made me embarrassed and (to approximate a line from my book because I can’t seem to make up a new one) ‘I felt like red construction paper was stapled to my throat’”—I might be feeling that way because of gender, but haven’t you also felt that way at some point? You who have bodies?
Rumpus: To me, all of your stories feel like tightly constructed collages. You’re a wizard at creating friction and movement through juxtaposition of dialogue, for instance, with kinetic descriptions of cityscapes. This has to take some intensive editing work. So I’m wondering how the revision process works for you. How much material do you have to cut to get to the final product, and how painful is this?
Arndt:“Collages” is a great word. It might just be how my particular brain works best—“put this next to this, hope some of this rubs off on this, crumple it up and pray the outside observer can feel it.” In terms of editing, though—the more I cut, usually the happier I am. The problem is, ideally (at least, I have this idea in my mind) the best way to work is to create a lot of material and then shave it down from there. I’m the opposite. I’m so afraid of composing that I’ve already edited it to bits before it gets on the page. That said, there were some painful moments when working with my real-life editor, Julie Buntin (who I owe so much to for her vision and perseverance and humor), where she felt I was being excessive, or a little overdone. I think there’s a danger in being too familiar with, or comfortable in, your work. In my case, I’d read these stories so many times. Annie Dillard talks about it in her book The Writing Life. Basically, I’d naturalized the cadences in my head so completely that it became hard to pull anything out. That’s where trust comes in I guess. Often, Julie would say “out,” and I’d say “fine.” Once in a while, though, I’d say “no way!” I’m not entirely sure if this was because I was thinking with my best writing brain, or because I was just overly smitten with a line, or because I was scared. In any case, some stayed. Give me five years, though, and I’ll probably agree with everything she suggested. Somebody said to me: fight for what you believe in because you are really the one who has to live with it. I also followed that.
Rumpus: Your narrators seem self-deprecating to the point of hilarity, though there’s a sadness also underlying this. In “Jeff,” she blames herself for Lily Tomlin misunderstanding her name, admitting she speaks with marbles in her mouth. In “Moon Colonies,” we see her leaving the woman she wants to have sex with alone in the hotel room only to lose almost all the money she’s just won at the casino. I felt most of these narrators had trouble accepting love from the people they wanted it from the most. Is this—a consistent thread of disappointment in love—something you consciously were going for? How much of this has to do with gender ambiguity, and how much with simply being human?
Arndt: I’m glad you get the hilarity. I agree there’s a kind of manic, sad quality to it.
I think it’s almost impossible to accept love from others when you don’t know how to love/accept/be with yourself. Maybe it sounds canned but, at least in my life, it’s felt true. So here are a bunch of narrators, who are really very close to the same narrator, projecting outward in order not to have to deal with themselves. Maybe this gets back to your restlessness question. The itchy, agitated state keeps them from having to fully encounter truths they might not like or know how to deal with. But it also forestalls any ability to make real connections with the surrounding world.
Being checked or challenged at one of the most basic points of entry into society, i.e. gender, makes cohesive subject formation really hard. How to be a self? In this way, “Am I recognizable? Am I lovable?” is a gender question. But again, I do think most people with bodies have felt some shade of this at some point in their lives. It is hard to have a body. To accept the container. To feel, when moving around in the world, that a cohesive, readable statement is being maintained.
(And wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have to?)
Rumpus: For the most part, this book is a particularly urban creature. There’s a forceful beauty to your descriptions: “the gum trees chatter their dry long tongues” in “Shadow of an Ape,” for instance; the roots of Japanese knotweed “flanged out at the base like butt-plugs” in “Together.” This seems to embody the tensions between the natural and unnatural while also dissolving them through the vividness of your prose. Blurring the unnatural and natural likewise seems like it may comment on the body, giving us the freedom to reshape it in the same way we do our landscapes. Am I onto something here?
Arndt: I think you’re onto something, in the sense that the narrators of these stories share a permeability with the world(s) around them. And are—maybe as a survival mechanism, maybe as the special lesson they’ve entered the book to try to impart—in an unending series of blurriness-es. The disquiet (I think) comes from a lived feeling that there is no “natural”—or if there is, they don’t have entrance to it. This sounds dramatic but when I think about it, I visualize what I’m trying to describe here in 3D—as a kind of primal yell. It jostles everything. Then, from that electric Jell-O moment, it’s not such a big move to have your sexuality grow from walrus parts or to share an inner emotional world with a chair.
Rumpus: In “Beside Myself,” the narrator says, “Some bodies needed more space,” but there’s an inescapable sense of all of these narrators feeling imprisoned inside a body whose needs subject it to constant suffering. Yet at the same time I feel like this is also the source of most of your writing’s humor. How consciously, then, did you invoke humor to both offset and highlight this pain?
Arndt: Maybe you’ve located the pivot point. I often find being in a body excruciating. It is also true that I want to keep living, and to do so, I need my body. Here I am right here on the couch in the dark while my newborn kid sleeps, using my body to answer these questions. (And hoping, as he grows up, that he feels more spacious in his body than I have yet learned how to be in mine.)
About the humor? Everything is so emotionally close to everything else. Like how real happiness contains a little corner where you are also bawling. Or how everything can kind of be summed up by: I’m crying/I’m laughing/I’m shitting my pants. Humor puts us in our bodies, usually. We have an uncontrolled physical reaction that, I hope, lurches us into new space. But this makes it sound so planned. Mostly, the humor is a way for me to let off steam in a scene. And give a little lateral distance. First of all, for myself, and secondly I guess, for the reader.
Also I just have to say, there are some genius comedians who deal so deep down in the queasy body. Louis C.K. and Dynasty Handbag, for starters. And George Saunders. In my experience, the funniest writers are dealing with the hardest stuff. - interview by  Melissa Wiley http://therumpus.net/2017/06/the-rumpus-interview-with-jess-arndt/

Benjamin DeVos,Lord of the Game,Apocalypse Party, 2017.


This is the story of a young man and his life in the city of Philadelphia. On his journey, he experiences many things, such as a pigeon-shooting simulation. A no-holds-barred fight in a slaughterhouse on the edge of town. A psychotic drug dealer named Satan. A legally-blind maintenance man. Multiple pig carcasses. A sequence of dead-end jobs. A series of homeless people. And much more. This novella is like traveling through a massive garbage shoot that ends where it began. Come one, come all, through this emotional black hole. You will feel better about yourself when it is over.





Benjamin DeVos, Madness Has a Moment and Then Vanishes Before Returning Again, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2016.                                


Popular culture is strange. Celebrities that occupy the cult are even stranger. Are you sick of your ordinary life? Then embrace the madness for a moment, and enter a world where Shia LaBeouf is a cat, Zach Galifianakis is a werewolf, and Ryan Gosling is a serial killer of handsome actors. I promise, good things can happen when you move out of your comfort zone.
 
I was a rookie detective investigating my first homicide. I knocked on the suspect’s door, and Ryan Gosling answered, wearing a bloodstained bowling shirt. I did not notice the blood at first. I was too distracted by his beautiful blue eyes. He was the perfect specimen of a man. He looked like the kind of man who could nurse a dying puppy back to health. I told him that I was investigating his eyes. Then I said that I was investigating a murder, which occurred the evening before at Lucky Strike Bowling Alley. (pg. 13)
Celebrities are just normal people, if normal people are mass murdering, werewolf evolving, child-enslaving psychopaths. A humorous take on pop culture, Benjamin DeVos’ book Madness Has a Moment and Then Vanishes Before Returning Again is a fresh and humorous short story collection reminiscent of the tabloids in the checkout line of your local grocery.
But there’s a twist here; these are actually well written.
I was nervous when there was no answer at the front door, and I thought maybe he had skipped town. I decided to break in through the window. There was no sign of him on the first floor, but I could hear a metallic rasp coming from the basement. I followed the sound until I found Ryan Gosling, standing over a meat grinder, holding Jake Gyllenhaal upside down by his ankles. Jake Gyllenhaal’s lower body was in a gory mound on the ground. I initially considered calling the paramedics, who I thought might have been able to separate the grinder from its housing so that the leftovers of Jake Gyllenhaal could remain, maybe in a museum, where future generations could behold the once promising young thespian. (14) 
Madness is a perfect blend of urban legends and non-fiction style stories that have gone too far. Using current fan favorites of the entertainment industry, DeVos weaves head-scratching surrealist elements into a world of pop culture that is central to everyday life.
Each story moves along a similar track, recounting the narrator’s mundane encounters that quickly unfold into, as the title indicates, madness. For example, the Ryan Gosling series seems at first to be a typical police investigation, but by incorporating elements from existing media like the cult television series The X-Files and best-selling self-help guide The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, along with aspects of his deranged imagination, DeVos takes a familiar situation and twists it until it is unrecognizable.
Beneath the shelf was a chainsaw, which, before I became lucid, had suggested we use to chop up David Duchovny into little pieces. Ryan Gosling rejected my suggestion, calling it, “Cliché amateur bullshit.” I picked up the chainsaw and tried to rev the engine. Ryan Gosling laughed and said, “There’s no gas in it, stupid.” He pulled the hammer out of his tool belt, and, with a deranged look on his face, charged toward me. I swung the chainsaw in self-defense, and inadvertently sliced open Ryan Goslings jugular with the teeth of the blade. Blood squirted everywhere. David Duchovny cheered, “Hooray! You got him.” I caught Ryan Gosling as he fell, and pinched shut the severed artery by reaching my hand into his neck. David Duchovny told me to “Let the bastard bleed out,” but I was a vegan. I valued all life. (pg. 17)
Though the humor of this book is dependent on obscurity, it also allows the readers to examine themselves as consumers of pop culture. Madness brings celebrities down to our level, but it does so with certain empathy that simultaneously humanizes the characters. Together with the narrator, they are thrust into situations that test both their ethics and their will to survive in the real world, separate from the realm of celebrity that we are accustomed to seeing them in.
I called the paramedics, who took Ryan Gosling to the hospital where he got three hundred stitches across his neck. The traumatic incident led Ryan Gosling down a spiral of nightmares and chronic depression. He tried to kill himself in prison but was saved by one of the guards. Eventually, he was able to cope with his demons through intense psychotherapy and The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, which he read over and over again on a never-ending cycle. (pg. 18)
Here’s the challenge.
Pick up Madness and enter a book where the rules of literature are second to the plot, where the cult of personality is nonexistent, and where the celebs are too casual for comfort. Despite its dissociation from actuality, this collection is for anyone living in the real world that is looking for an escape. It is for anyone who encounters famous people and visualizes them in uncanny circumstances. Like have you ever wondered if Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker actually make a good crime-fighting police duo?
I know I have. -  Chuck Harp






Benjamin DeVos, Freaking Out The Neighborhood, Flutter Press, 2015.


The poetry included explores life in the city, the social experience of growing up in an impoverished community, and how the environment can culminate in life or death. It's American life reinterpreted from a rare and neglected perspective. 

death

 

i see in your teeth

the limbs of all people

being chewed and eaten

you are consuming everything

you are killing everything

can you please turn back

into my friend

  

burial

 

a revelation is seeing the body

of a deceased sibling

a beautiful child dressed in lace

whose face has been retouched to the point

where by contrast you look at them

in an ideal state of total putrefaction

maggots and other orgiastic eating machines

suffering and inflicting suffering

everything must die

before it can be honored

 

ossuary

 

not all death decays

skeletal remains settle

in the ocean

bone becomes rock

buried deep

in temporary graves

the earth’s crust

made of bodies

positive thinking
i catch my mom re-potting a dead plant
when there are guests over for dinner
she stands in the doorway looking at her iphone
then takes a close-up photo of the new plant
sending it to people via text message
people that are sitting two rooms away
my mom had me when she was sixteen so she’s relatively young but still slightly out of touch
i wonder if she is like me
i wonder if being around people makes her feel lonely
i wonder if she has thoughts about her body in relation to other bodies
feeling bad and physically isolated
receiving text message responses that consist only of question marks
we all have our problematic conditions whether we are troubled by them or not
it does not really matter
as long as we know that thoughts can be controlled
everything will be fine

There are a few questions I forgot to ask author Benjamin DeVos, like why he’s dressed as one of Santa’s elves in a Facebook picture, or why he’s too good to produce mix-tapes for bootleg rappers. Still, I love the humor, violence and existential malaise he brings to his writing, especially in Lord of the Game, where, with the same outsider matter-of-factness author Sam Pink utilizes to show us Chicago, DeVos displays the shiesty underbelly of Philadelphia, highlighting the city’s lowest common denominators through swollen black eyes and a rattled disposition. Seems like a sweet kid, though.

BRIAN ALAN ELLIS: Where’d you come from, man? First time I heard about you was when you submitted a funny story about working in a “fart factory” to that ill-fated Tables Without Chairs #2: Bad Job anthology, which Bud Smith and I gave up on. Did you ever place that “fart factory” story, and if not, how come?
 BENJAMIN DEVOS: Ah, the fart factory. I can almost smell it now. Unfortunately, I never did place that story. I wrote it specifically for the Bad Job anthology but later considered doing a whole series of bodily function-related workplaces, like “The Sneeze Store” and “The Urination Station.” I ended up losing interest in the series though, somewhere around “The Blood Bank,” which was not your typical blood bank.
BAE: What about “The Cum Dumpster”?
BD: Thought about it, but seemed like a waste of some perfectly good cum. I’d rather figure out a way to sell it as a healthcare product. “A multivitamin in every ejaculation,” or something.
BAE: The protagonist in your latest book, Lord of the Game, smashes up the bathroom of the bar he works at, and there’s a whole scene where the boss tries getting him to admit to smashing up the bathroom, even pulling a gun on him at one point, and it’s beautiful. Have you ever smashed up a bathroom IRL?
BD: The closest I’ve gotten was when I tripped in my buddy’s bathroom and accidentally cracked his toilet seat. I was pretty drunk and probably could have caught myself, but thought that drilling my elbow into the toilet to break my fall would be more fun. It left a bruise that I couldn’t figure out how I got until a day or so later. Proud moment.BAE: Bet it feels good to smash up a toilet. I tried smashing up a bathroom once. This band I was in had a really bad gig, like terrible, like I kept getting into shouting matches with the sound guy while on stage, in the middle of our show, so after the set I hobbled off stage (I’d rolled both my ankles during the show) and headed into the venue’s bathroom with every intention of destroying it, which isn’t a smart idea at all but that’s how I felt at the time. Shockingly, the bathroom was already destroyed. Like, there was nothing I could do to make it look any worse than it already did. I couldn’t believe it. I just stood there looking at this dilapidated bathroom while my anger settled into a kind of numb despair. I’ll never forget it.
BD: Wow. That sounds like a nightmare dream sequence. It was probably for the best that you didn’t smash up that specific bathroom since the venue would have known it was you, but it is my greatest hope in the world that both you and I will one day feel the joy of destroying an entire bathroom with our bare hands.
BAE: God willing *sigh* Anyway, Lord of the Game culminates in this crazy street fight, like something out of They Live or something. Have you ever been in a wild brawl, or a prizefight, or anything like what’s described in the book?
BD: I have only been in one real fist fight. It was when I was a freshman in high school, and it pretty much went down in the most classic way possible. We met up behind the school and duked it out until we were both exhausted and shook hands. After that, I did a few years of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, which I was pretty damn good at. I started doing tournaments almost every weekend, competing as an eighteen-year-old against dudes in their thirties who were bigger and hairier than me. My teacher wanted me to go to California to compete in the World Jiu-Jitsu Championship, but it was on the same week as my final exams so I missed it. Shortly after that I lost interest in anything athletic and started writing.
BAE: That’s fucking badass, dude. My cousins and I, when we were ten or eleven, took Taekwondo one summer on Long Island, and looking back I’m pretty sure our sensei was a cokehead ’cause one time he was real manic and he left all the students unsupervised so he could drive to the record store to purchase the Rocky III soundtrack ’cause he said he just had to hear “Eye of the Tiger,” and twenty minutes later he returned with the CD and he put it on and did this whole routine to it, but he did it in a way that looked like he didn’t give a fuck if we were there or not, like he did it just for himself. He was in the zone. It was pretty awesome.
BD: Holy shit that’s awesome. It reminds me of this time that I was over my neighbor’s house as a teenager. I was playing the video game Rock Band with him and his kids. The guy was an alcoholic, and said that he wanted to make the video game “like a real concert.” So he stumbled out, drunkenly drove to Wal-Mart, and came back with a bunch of strobe lights and a fog machine. For the rest of the night, he did vocals while we played songs from his favorite bands: Foreigner, Bon Jovi, etc. Then as he got drunker, he seemed to forget that we were there. The night ended with him breaking the Xbox.BAE: Fuck YES. Speaking of Rock Band… I did some research (AKA I read a bio to one of your previous books) and found that you’re apparently a music producer? Like, do you produce mix-tapes for bootleg Philly rappers who distribute them out of the trunk of a car, or something?
BD: Oh god, I wish. I’m just one of those bedroom SoundCloud producers that tries to make weird-ass soundscapes and stuff like that. I actually haven’t done anything with music production in a while. I play some guitar with my roommate on occasion though.
 BAE: That sounds terrible. Like, you and your roommate just sit around jamming Sublime songs?
BD: Oh, it is terrible. Doesn’t help that it usually happens after a couple of beers. No Sublime though, we play exclusively depressing songs.
BAE: Like Nick Drake stuff? Bright Eyes?
BD: Neutral Milk Hotel, Elliott Smith—all that stuff.
BAE: Yikes. Worse than I initially thought. Okay. You once wrote a book where all the characters were celebrities, like you made Ryan Gosling a serial killer or whatever, so while reading Lord of the Game, I pictured the protagonist as a Shia LaBeouf type. Did you have Shia in mind when you were writing the book, and if not, how come?
BD: I mean, there is a little Shia in all of us, but I didn’t have him in mind specifically while writing the Lord of the Game. Now that I think about it though, all of the self-talk in the book is kind of the equivalent to Shia’s “Just do it” motivational speech. I was more picturing myself as the protagonist, because I bounced around from three different jobs in less than six months and was feeling super unhinged.BAE: What’s been the shittiest job you’ve had?
BD: Probably when I was a busser for a country club. There was a lot of old money there, and the members that came in always acted like they were entitled and treated the staff pretty bad.
BAE: Woof. What’s your day job like now?
BD: Right now I work in a kitchen as a pierogi pincher. That’s literally all I do for six hours straight, put the filling in the dough and pinch it shut.
BAE: Zen AF. Oh FYI I just simultaneously purchased kitty litter and your previous book (Madness Has a Moment and Then Vanishes Before Returning Again, Dostoyevsky Wannabe) on Amazon to qualify for free shipping, so it might say “Customers Also Purchased: Arm & Hammer 40lb Clump & Seal Platinum Multi-Cat Litter” on your book’s Amazon page. You down with that? Am I your target audience?
BD: Thanks dude, that’s awesome. I think if my book can help people get free shipping then I have done my job as an artist.
BAE: MFA in free-shipping qualification.
BD: My target audience is made up of neurotic, reclusive hoarders, so a big-ass bag of cat litter seems like the perfect companion to the book.
BAE: #Blessed.  - Brian Alan Ellis  yesclash.com/2017/05/18/you-and-i-will-one-day-feel-the-joy-of-destroying-an-entire-bathroom-with-our-bare-hands-an-interview-with-benjamin-devos/

I Want to Believe

Two months ago I was sitting in the backyard when I witnessed a stunning explosion in the forest outside my house. A green light filled the atmosphere, and there was a commotion like a thousand spirits screaming in the night. I will never forget how the asteroid sounded during the collision. It sounded like a fist punching through the Earth. I rose from my hammock and hazarded into the forest to see if I could determine where the asteroid laid its impact. It was not that hard to find. I only had to go in the reverse direction of the animals that were running out of the forest, wailing, howling, barking, and tweeting in a cloud of terror.
I forged ahead, upstream through a river of frightened fur, until at last I arrived at the smoldering spot in the forest where a crater the size of a Buick lay. The smell of that smoke was unlike anything I’d experienced in my entire life. It was the smell of a goblin’s breath hot on your back as he chases you through a warm sewage system. In the middle of the crater, there was an egg, the color of an almond. I ventured further into the impact zone, though I knew that I should have called a scientist instead. It was as if that egg had a hypnotic hold on my psyche and I couldn’t help but walk toward it.
The very top of the egg looked like the protuberance of a baboon’s buttocks, fleshy and round. What happened next changed me forever.
The egg split open, and out of it emerged an alien, who would one day be known as Lady Gaga. She looked as if she had a high-temperature fever at full throttle. Her eyes were popping out of their sockets, slowly receding into her head as a green ooze poured from her mouth like radioactive saliva. Her face had an excruciatingly neutral expression. She didn’t speak any Earthly language, but when she did make noises, her voice resonated in a mezzo-soprano range that left me speechless.
Lady Gaga could convey an array of emotions without speaking. For example, I knew she was sad and hungry when she lay supine in the dirt, eating ferns with hot green tears dripping from the whites of her eyes. She slowly crept away, and I followed her until we reached a ranch on the outskirts of the forest. She appeared happy when a cow approached and proceeded to tear it apart with her long nails and teeth like a human blender. Her roar of victory was deafening.
She made a dress to wear out of the raw beef and continued on her journey. I couldn’t hear anything after that, but it seemed like Lady Gaga was singing by the way her mouth moved incessantly and her throat vibrated like there was a pure wave massager in her torso. It was hard to tell if she was a monster, or if she was just born that way. In any case, I was frightened for my life.
I continued to follow her until she reached an underground cave beneath a highway overpass. Lady Gaga’s glowing body lit the cavern. I tried to keep up, though my eyesight was continuously straining and deteriorating as we walked. It got to the point where I could not breathe due to the brutally suffocating smell coming from inside of the cave, so I idly tried to find my way out with most of my senses in jeopardy. All I had left was touch, and with each time I felt the wall, it seemed like my body grew more and more numb, until I couldn’t feel anything at all. I was anesthetized on the outside and filled with regret on the inside for following Lady Gaga without thinking about the possible consequences. Then everything went black, and not even my thoughts could penetrate the obscurity.
When I woke up, I was in my backyard as if I’d never left. I thought maybe it was a dream, but then remembered the smells, the sensations, and knew that what I’d seen was real. I couldn’t explain it, what Lady Gaga was. She was a species that neither the world nor I seemed ready to accept. I wanted to tell everyone what I’d seen, but I knew nobody would believe me. So I kept it to myself, watching and waiting for more like her to emerge from the forest. But no more aliens appeared. None like her anyway. - https://www.swimmersclub.co.uk/treadingwater/i_want_to_believe.php


Benjamin DeVos (b. 1992) is a writer from Philadelphia. He works as an overnight custodian and enjoys listening to gentle aural soundscapes while cleaning. Caffeine and crossword puzzles are what inspires his dreams. Insanity is what inspires his writing.