Heart Hammer

2006-11-20T19:51:00.000-08:00

I suspect it's clear to anyone who has popped by over the past few weeks that the lights have gone out here.

Which is to say "click".

And good night.

2006-10-14T20:52:00.000-07:00

If you have a moment, pay a visit to the Tarpaulin Sky web page for Danielle Dutton's forthcoming book, Attempts at a Life. The book is terrific, one of two Dutton has coming out in the near future (the other, Sprawl, from Clear Cut).

Also, Sandy Florian's excellent Telescope is almost out (or is out??) from Action Books. For more info on it go here.

2006-10-11T20:55:00.000-07:00

Brian Evenson's The Open Curtain is out from Coffee House. Awfully nice to be in his company this season. There is a fine review of it here.

2006-10-10T16:39:00.000-07:00

Jim Ruland, in The Voice, on The Ex...

2006-10-07T12:22:00.000-07:00

going dark here for a while...

2006-10-05T22:23:00.000-07:00

Too true?

"...life is short, reading is long, and literature is in the process of killing itself off through an insane proliferation."

Milan Kundera (in the October 9th issue of the New Yorker).

2006-10-05T10:11:00.000-07:00

Time Out NYC and Seattle's The Stranger generously accord The Ex some column inches.

And:

Duncan Barlow's cat, Monkey, approves of the book too.

2006-10-04T22:21:00.000-07:00

Dead Souls meets the Yellow River:

CHENJIAYUAN, China — For many Chinese, an ancestor is someone to honor, but also someone whose needs must be maintained. Families burn offerings of fake money or paper models of luxury cars in case an ancestor might need pocket change or a stylish ride in the netherworld.

But here in the parched canyons along the Yellow River known as the Loess Plateau, some parents with dead bachelor sons will go a step further. To ensure a son’s contentment in the afterlife, some grieving parents will search for a dead woman to be his bride and, once a corpse is obtained, bury the pair together as a married couple.

“They happen pretty often, especially when teenagers or younger people die,” said Yang Husheng, 48, a traveling funeral director in the region who said he last attended such a funeral in the spring. “It’s quite common. I’ve been in the business for seven or eight years, and I’ve seen all sorts of things.”

The rural folk custom, startling to Western sensibilities, is known as minghun, or afterlife marriage. Scholars who have studied it say it is rooted in the Chinese form of ancestor worship, which holds that people continue to exist after death and that the living are obligated to tend to their wants — or risk the consequences. Traditional Chinese beliefs also hold that an unmarried life is incomplete, which is why some parents worry that an unmarried dead son may be an unhappy one.

Continued here (requires times select).

2006-10-02T21:59:00.000-07:00

Dennis Cooper on Maurice Blanchot:

"His novels are not really novels, his stories barely stories. His prose is very French in that it can be almost mathematical, yet it simultaneously evokes the most intense feelings of loss, misunderstanding, joy, and death."

2006-09-27T20:38:00.000-07:00

David Gutowski's largehearted boy has The Ex up in its Book Notes section this week. If anyone out there reading this has read the book, and liked the Tulip character, but wished there was more of her, there are some tidbits on her in what I did for this.

2006-09-26T19:52:00.000-07:00

One of the best things I've read in ages is Joanna Howard's In the Colorless Round, a chapbook of short-shorts with illustrations by Rikki Ducornet. It's an amazing thing, sort of baffles description. I kept thinking Jean Follain as I read it -- strange, quiet, haunting -- but also not Jean Follain at all. I've long held that the chapbook is the perfect length for collections of poetry, and I rather think that this may also be true for prose (that said, ahem, in an age of endless big fat books). At any rate, it's something to stalk and get hold of -- it's really marvelous.

2006-09-24T22:49:00.000-07:00

Bud Parr, my new hero (very nice, very smart, plus he's a fellow father), has put up this fabulous little movie inspired by The Exquisite, on his fab blog.

2006-09-24T08:31:00.000-07:00

You know you're really on your way when...

"nyc.freecityevents.com
Free Events in New York City
All Events > Event Locations > Manhattan > Downtown > Lower East Side > Bluestockings >

Reading
Laird Hunt

The Exquisite is her latest novel"

!!

2006-09-22T20:50:00.000-07:00

Another day in New York, a sense of sowhat sets in, it's too hot for the jacket there's no room for in your bag and the streets are endless and there's another fucking event to attend to in the evening, the city could give a shit, a book, sowhat, the city is out doing its business, the business is everywhere, it takes cabs, it sits down at the French Roast on 6th ave. and bitches about the service while the service bitches about it, it buys a bag at the crumpler store in the West Village and sets up a card table with some old ladies on Elizabeth street. The business drives a Lincoln Town car and spits on books as it splashes through another ugly puddle, then has a drink at the horse shoe bar near Tompkin's Square, a Cape Cod, thank you very fucking much, then has another. The business, subset of the city, could care less as it sips its soy chai somewhere or other near the Natural History Museum and slaps its three cards down on the pavement and stirs up some action, while the sun hits everything a little too hot because you are travelling light and there is no room to stow your brown velvet jacket purchased at Target and looking travel stained but still pretty good. This city, with its business, which cares so little, while conjuring up so much caring, positive and negative, so much fuckyouverymuchmydarlingetc, as if it mattered, for a second, which it does, despite everything, whatthefuck. A cup of coffee with friends on 4th Street, a meeting at the Bergen Street F stop, 5 ft of pizza on Allen, early bird sushi at Esashi, sowhat isn'tsobad, the slice of ricotta cheese cake bread isn'tsobad, yeah, the smell of coffee spilling out of Porto Rico, sowhat

2006-09-18T19:57:00.000-07:00

3 days in New York a walk through Harlem past the Alexander Hamilton house closed to the public while its structure is investigated -- it's not safe -- a woman serving roti on 125th street taking care to put together a nice portion across the street from Modells and close to the Apollo then tumblers on the subway like it was 1981 when they hit their break dance moves very polite very professional and fucking amazing paint flaking everywhere stuck out on the tarmac at laguardia doner kebab on houston pizza at two boots (got the newman and the cleopatra jones)saw my dear pals jackhammers on 8th ave at 2 a.m. not my problem so sleeping like a baby drinking the Macallan with Garrett the low grade horrors of bookstores indie and not who don't carry or barely carry the brand new book cool folks like Bud Parr at the Brooklyn Book thingamajig bumped into the awesome Lance and Andi Olsen on Houston saw some model guy ate at Rice (just okay) coveted a bag rescued a galley copy of The Ex from Housing Works (yeah right someone's going to buy it) feet smoking in my shoes brown velvet jacket too warm for this Indian summer thing or whatever that's happening time out at my grandfather's in Connecticut back to town tomorrow maybe a movie probably just more pavement smacking can't beat it not at all

2006-09-14T08:48:00.000-07:00

After years of putting it off (maybe because postage is so ghastly), I finally ordered something from Amazon.fr. It came yesterday -- L'Invité mystère by Grégoire Bouillier, the English version of which has been getting a lot of love at various good sites. I was delighted to discover that the marvelous Editions Allia (who publish Oliver Rohe, a writer I've translated) is behind it. Worth noting that Allia brings out its books in a very small, elegant paperback (of course -- it's France) format. The English edition is handsome too, but of course it's hardback and bigger. At any rate, Bouillier's book, in its original incarnation, which will fit very neatly in my jacket pocket, is my reading for this New York/Providence trip, which starts tomorrow and ends next Thursday.

I'll see if I can't drop in a couple of trip posts along the way -- though I won't have a computer with me (thank god) as I plan to take just a daypack and a totebag.

2006-09-11T20:29:00.000-07:00

This article, by Sara Gran, whose novel Dope I am currently in the middle of and enjoying a great deal, is good fun.

2006-09-10T21:21:00.000-07:00

A filmic teaser for The Exquisite, put together in a heartbeat by Tom Henwood and Daniel Brothers, is now up on YouTube. If you have 2 minutes and 17 seconds to spare, pay a visit to the world of Henry and Mr. Kindt...

2006-09-08T08:12:00.000-07:00

As The Exquisite is now officially out and about (I would love to hear about sightings of it), I will be dropping in notes about its doings and what I'm doing with it a little more frequently.

If you can make it to either of the New York launch events, which will include this guaranteed super-fun soiree, that would be very swell.

Very excited today to drop by The Elegant Variation and see that the book is the Friday give away.

And am extremely pleased to report that highly effective machinations are underway to put together a very short film around the book -- more on that soon.

2006-09-05T17:03:00.000-07:00

From a Brooklyn Rail interview with Grégoire Bouillier, author of The Mystery Guest.

"In a world where being young is valued above all else, I wouldn’t have liked to be labeled a young writer, with the emphasis falling on “young” not “writer.” In my opinion the writer has to place himself or herself in a time outside societal time, and in this sense, it seems to me, writing a book when you’re 40 could even be called a vaguely—very vaguely—political act. Plus, I still think that to write something worth reading you have to have lived. You need to have been up against things and beings, love, death, etc. Living deflowers the eyes and the mind. It tests our mettle. Cioran said that no philosophy survives a bout of seasickness; he could never have written that sentence if he hadn’t spent a day being seasick."

2006-09-04T08:07:00.000-07:00

The new issue of Poets and Writers has a feature on the great Alice Notley -- whose work, if you haven't explored it yet, is major. The Descent of Alette has a permanent spot on my short shelf of books and her new selected, Grave of Light, will be in our household shortly.

What boggles my little mind about it is that Poets and Writers chose to put Jennifer Egan on the cover of the mag rather than Notley (P Roth also is featured -- I'm sorry, but whatever, how many features does the guy need). It's a silly thing, and I'm sure Egan is on her way to being a great writer, etc., but Notley is amazing, has won major awards (if that's what counts) and looks fantastic (check out the photos in the feature). I had it in mind to write in a letter to the ed about it -- but it was just too silly and I didn't know how to do it without making it sound like I thought Jennifer Egan wasn't deserving.

But come on!

2006-08-31T20:45:00.000-07:00

I've just finished Stick out Your Tongue by Ma Jian (translated by Flora Drew). Fabulous. It's wafer thin -- the slenderest of volumes -- but it smacks you on the side of the head with its intensity. A "Han Chinese" wanders the high country of Tibet after a breakup. 5,000 meters (I live at 5,000 ft and think that's something), where the lack of oxygen can make you delerious. He chronicles his (and various characters') muted adventures and bizarre encounters with nomads who have the strangest, darkest stories to tell. Ma Jian lives in London -- publication of this book in the 80s got him in serious trouble with Chinese censors who reckoned Stick out Your Tongue wasn't tooting the horn of harmony clearly enough. There is a great deal of sex and death and peace flags flapping not so peacefully in the wind sweeping those endless plains and vast mountains. It will repay the hour or so it takes to read many times over. I'm sure of it.

2006-08-30T11:14:00.000-07:00

the opening of The Garbageman and The Prostitute
by Zack Wentz:

"I woke up next to the copy machine.
It was warm
Warm. Warm.
Above I picked out little patterns and faces in the surface of the dark ceiling; human eyes and mouths twisting and morphing into animals and landscapes, then back again..."

2006-08-29T16:19:00.000-07:00

The free copy of The Exquisite (see a few posts down) will be going out to Evan Parker of Des Moines for spotting the "glyph" on page 198 of Indiana, Indiana. I just looked at it again, and you would never know that there used to be a short paragraph there. In other words it just looks like something got added, not replaced.

2006-08-27T22:36:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in the past couple of days I saw a list of books that had gone into the making of someone's (but whose??) book. I love that sort of thing, and it made me try to remember what, beyond Sebald and Sir Thomas Browne's Hydriotaphia and Ben Katchor's comic strips (all mentioned in the acknowledgements), had been on my desk over the 7 years I was working on The Exquisite. Yeah, right! But here are a few of them:

The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley
Dark Property by Brian Evenson
Kiss Me Judas by Chris Baer
The Pink Institution by Selah Saterstrom
The Book of Jon by Eleni Sikelianos
Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
Gotham by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace
Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link
The Melancholy of Anatomy by Shelley Jackson
Jesus Son by Denis Johnson
The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead
Oracle Night by Paul Auster
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
Berg by Ann Quin

I suspect the list is something like three or four times as long -- I mean of books that nudged me, even just slightly, in some way during this project.

2006-08-26T10:29:00.000-07:00

“Nothing is less momentous in the world than the publication of another literary novel.”

J. Robert Lennon (in this week's Sunday Times)

Having quoted that, there are some bits and pieces up here on what's been going on around The Exquisite.

2006-08-25T12:15:00.000-07:00

Charles Baxter on one of my very favorite books, The Third Policeman.

2006-08-24T20:49:00.000-07:00

I stumbled across this lament about poor copy editing. Seems a note to justify a stet got itself incorporated in the body of the finished book. Definitely a drag, though perhaps, with time, it won't seem quite so horrific to the book's fine author -- these things do fade in importance. At any rate, it reminds me how lucky I am to have an extremely careful, diligent publisher who puts out very clean books. Having said that, I would be happy to send a free copy of The Exquisite to the first person who can give me the page number, in the US edition of Indiana, Indiana, of a weird glyph that crept into the text in the final, final stage of production (I freaked for a couple minutes -- a paragraph got zapped into the glyph -- but then I calmed down, esp. since it was a pretty good edit). Like the last time I did this, only folks I haven't met or corresponded with are eligible. I realize that this cuts the pool considerably, but it's more fun this way...

2006-08-20T09:45:00.000-07:00

You don't see this kind of sentence in The Times, or anywhere else for that matter, very often. It's David Foster Wallace on the the great Swiss tennis player, Roger Federer:

There’s a medium-long exchange of groundstrokes, one with the distinctive butterfly shape of today’s power-baseline game, Federer and Agassi yanking each other from side to side, each trying to set up the baseline winner...until suddenly Agassi hits a hard heavy cross-court backhand that pulls Federer way out wide to his ad (=left) side, and Federer gets to it but slices the stretch backhand short, a couple feet past the service line, which of course is the sort of thing Agassi dines out on, and as Federer’s scrambling to reverse and get back to center, Agassi’s moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and he smacks it hard right back into the same ad corner, trying to wrong-foot Federer, which in fact he does — Federer’s still near the corner but running toward the centerline, and the ball’s heading to a point behind him now, where he just was, and there’s no time to turn his body around, and Agassi’s following the shot in to the net at an angle from the backhand side...and what Federer now does is somehow instantly reverse thrust and sort of skip backward three or four steps, impossibly fast, to hit a forehand out of his backhand corner, all his weight moving backward, and the forehand is a topspin screamer down the line past Agassi at net, who lunges for it but the ball’s past him, and it flies straight down the sideline and lands exactly in the deuce corner of Agassi’s side, a winner...

2006-08-19T09:41:00.000-07:00

This gave me a first-class anxiety dream last night. I was supposed to read from The Exquisite, but when I got up to the podium I felt compelled to throw in some extras...like a little dance! My only option, as I didn't have anything prepared, was spontaneous improv. I sucked. And never got around to reading.

I've been to dull readings too, but they didn't make me wish the reader had started leaping around next to the mic. That, in most cases (especially my own), would have been even more painful to see.

I once gave a reading from The Impossibly wearing huge reflective sunglasses -- as a kind of tie-in to the book. Everyone was just sort of like, huh?

2006-08-18T07:49:00.000-07:00

I got on to Toni Schlesinger's Five Flights Up And Other New York Apartment Stories through an article in this month's issue of The Believer, which was so hyperbolic (the article) + it made a lengthy comparison to Perec + it has to do, obviously, with New York, much on my mind with a New York set book coming out, that I decided I had to have a copy. Outakes from Schlesinger's "Shelter" column in the Village Voice, where she was given the mandate of stepping into New York apartments and conducting brief interviews with their inhabitants, along with note-lets between sections of the book sinking us deeper into the surround of her mind as it channels a New York of vivid particularities, Five Flights Up is great fun. The inhabitants of one 250 sq ft apartment after another step forward and speak about their obsessions in the early pages. And while the apartments shrink and swell, the fact that they tend to make eccentrics out of their people is pretty consistent. We used to think we had it bad because our upstairs neighbor had a trampoline and a PA system that she used to practice her white rapper routines at all hours and because her ex-husband (Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me fame) ran rehearsals for a tap dancing play there one summer, but at least we had some space! It's true though that once New York sinks its claws into you, there is a pretty good chance you will put up with just about anything. Schlesinger gets at that very, very nicely.

2006-08-15T16:11:00.000-07:00

This from Douglas Coupland, blogging at The Times:

"I find a stifling homogeneity in most fiction. I walk into a bookstore and look at the shelves filled with thousands of doubtless worthy novels — beautifully crafted, nicely honed and all of that — novels of love, loss and redemption and … in my head I feel as if I’ve walked into a Broyhill furniture showroom. I feel like I’m looking at countless dark-stained colonial-style bedroom suites, and endless arrays of pickled-maple empire dining sets, with no spindle left unturned, every buffed surface dreaming of a shot of Pledge."

He's not wrong (even if his own books have helped contribute, perhaps in spite of themselves?? to the whimsy-at-all-costs/ kind-of-brainy-and-cutesy strain of non-realist work -- which has achieved its own variety of sameness). For most bookstores. Thank God there are still places like St. Mark's Books.

2006-08-14T22:19:00.000-07:00

"Strange how people are under the impression that making a bed is exactly the same as making a bed, that to shake hands is always the same as shaking hands, that opening a can of sardines is to open the same can of sardines ad infinitum."

Julio Cortazar
"Secret Weapons"

2006-08-14T10:43:00.000-07:00

Michael Martone's Michael Martone is the subject of discussion over at the LBC this week. Should be lively.

2006-08-12T22:29:00.000-07:00

I have the feeling I'm not the only one who had a bit of a thing for Richard Adams' Watership Down, a book I haven't looked at in 20 years, but that I read 9 times between the ages of 10 and 15. This thing, in addition to requiring multiple readings, multiple viewings of the animated film version, endless listenings to the album, and the purchasing of rabbits that were named after characters -- Bigwig, etc. -- moved me, in sixth grade, to start (boy that didn't go very far) an illustrated sequel called Woundwort's Revenge. That was my start in writing. "A dog loose in the woods." It doesn't matter if you don't have any idea what I'm talking about.

2006-08-10T10:41:00.000-07:00

"With respect to the American novel, the only problem I see with it is that typically nineteenth-century concept, which is the desire to encompass everything, and you can never encompass everything in a novel."

Javier Marias
from the afterword to Voyage Along The Horizon

2006-08-09T21:12:00.000-07:00

Voyage along The Horizon by Javier Marias (trans. from the Spanish by Kristina Cordero)is a tale within a novel within a novel in which the classic sea-faring yarn gets a delightful Verne-Perec spin -- which is to say a kind of forward rushing energetic detail rich narrative stream (Verne) cut by a painstakingly organized Russian doll plot structure and more than a tinge of sadness, defeat and incomplete completion (Perec). The book was started when Marias was 19 and finished soon after. Believer Books has it out in a handsome Tintin-inflected edition that will hopefully find its way out into the English-speaking world quickly. Marias is an international titan who is relatively little translated and less known on our shores (though The Believer and other venues have been doing their best to correct this). His work grew darker, moodier, deeper after Voyage along The Horizon but that doesn't keep it from being an excellent place to start an exploration of this excellent writer's work.

2006-08-06T13:46:00.000-07:00

If you have a few minutes, please take this visual dream tour of The Exquisite's East Village environs, with photos by Chris Narozny.

2006-08-03T22:18:00.000-07:00

Some of you probably caught yesterday's Fresh Air on NPR, which featured interviews with Samir el-Youssef and Etgar Keret. El-Youssef and Keret, who are friends and collaborators, are, respectively, Palestinian and Israeli, and it was quite extraordinary to hear them (albeit in subsequent conversations with Terry Gross), describing the extraordinary personal and political circumstances that surround and inform their friendship. It's well worth hunting down a transcript or recording of their Fresh Air interventions. Incidentally, I came into the show late and couldn't figure out what on earth an interesting writer like Keret (who was first up) was doing on Fresh Air, which is always trotting out the most predictable stuff when it comes time to do a literature segment. Of course, when El-Youssef came on I realized what the political hook was. Then I caught the beginning of the show later and heard Terry Gross referring to the Times verdict that Keret was the most famous young writer in Israel -- ah ha.

2006-07-29T11:51:00.000-07:00

In "Campo Santo", the eponymous essay of his posthumous collection, Sebald describes a visit to a Corsican cemetery. In excellent Sebaldian style he plunges past the yawing headstones and surrounding shrubbery to the underlying cultural practices -- the surround. In describing the local theatrics of mourning, he has this (which seems somehow emblematic) to say:

"In truth of course there is no discrepancy between such calculation and a genuine grief which actually makes the mourners seem beside themselves, for fluctuation between the expression of deeply felt sorrow, which can sound like a choking fit, and the aesthetically -- even cunningly -- modulated manipulation of the audience to whom that grief is displayed has perhaps been the most typical charateristic of our severely disturbed species at every stage of civilization."

Of course now, here, almost five years out from his own death, his description of physically and mentally wandering around in a cemetery feels like an instance of horrible, reified prescience. But then so did all his work. Strange, moving to register that his catalogues of/meditations on doom and destruction were so beautiful too.

2006-07-28T12:21:00.000-07:00

Books I'm currently reading and not finishing and feeling moderately oppressed by

A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur -- Proust
The White Bone -- Barbara Gowdy
Voyage along the Horizon -- Javier Marias
The Poetics of Space -- Blanchot
The Foucault Reader
Hard Boiled Wonderland -- Haruki Murakami
Twilight of the Superheroes -- Deborah Eisenberg
The Secret Goldfish -- David Means

The not finishing/oppressed by thing has nothing to do with the books. I'm just in that leaping from book to book in search of something/who knows what states of mind that too often afflict me.

2006-07-25T21:25:00.000-07:00

A decade ago I underwent some emergency surgery in a Bay Area hospital. Before going under, I recited some of Apollinaire's "Le Pont Mirabeau" (I was living in Paris at the time -- what I was doing in SF is a story to do with the heart and its conundrums). Just before everything went black, the surgeon leaned over me and recited some of it back to me. When I woke up, said surgeon, Dr. Specter (really his name), confessed to a love of Apollinaire and of that poem in particular. Very strange. He gave me his card and said to keep in touch, actually meaning it. I went back to Paris and, alas, didn't. On Thursday, I will be reciting the poem for the movie I'm in. It won't be apparent, when the film comes out, that I will be thinking of Dr. Specter as I recite, but that is absolutely what I will be doing. Here is the poem:

Le Pont Mirabeau

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Et nos amours
Faut-il qu'il m'en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure

Les mains dans les mains restons face à face
Tandis que sous
Le pont de nos bras passe
Des éternels regards l'onde si lasse

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure

L'amour s'en va comme cette eau courante
L'amour s'en va
Comme la vie est lente
Et comme l'Espérance est violente

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure

Passent les jours et passent les semaines
Ni temps passé
Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure

2006-07-21T08:55:00.000-07:00

An interesting review/essay in the recent issue of Context by Marty Riker steered me to Piotr Szewc's Annihilation. An extraordinary slender novel set in a small Polish city some years before the holocaust, which is never directly mentioned although it saturates every page. It's a collection of moments, perceptions, memories, observations of things and people about to vanish forever. Dalkey has had the book out for quite a while -- it's great that they regularly run these pieces and breathe fresh life into their backlist titles.

2006-07-20T20:35:00.000-07:00

Here is an early version of the opening of The Impossibly --

The first time we met it was about a stapler, I think. I knew the word for it, and she didn't, and although in retrospect it seemed to us certain that she would have finished by making her interest in acquiring a stapler understood, I had carefully examined and tested three pens, two mechanical pencils, and a highlighter, and still she stood at the counter calmly gesticulating, so I stepped forward, slightly, and said the word.

And here is what it became until near the very end of the revision process --

The first time we met it was about a stapler, I think. I knew the word, and she didn't, so I stepped forward, slightly, and said the word.

And what it is in the book --

The first time we met it was about a stapler, I think. I knew the word, and she didn't, so I stepped forward, slightly, and said it.

The substantive cut above was suggested by my editor Chris Fischbach, who rightly felt the thing got too clotted too quickly.

2006-07-19T22:00:00.000-07:00

Michael Martone by Michael Martone is the Summer Read This! pick over at the LBC. Other interesting books being discussed there as well.

2006-07-15T08:25:00.000-07:00

As we slowly continue the move in process in this new place I came across a copy of a wonderful but very short-lived (never went past the pilot phase) magazine called March edited by Adam Van Loon, which was kind enough to run some of The Exquisite. This was 4 years ago so it was pretty early stuff and represented a kind of time capsule on the piece. It made me think of just how radically, at times, and subtly, at others, the process of bringing something toward publication can change a text. This is not just a function of an editor's green pen, although that can be a big part of it. It is also a function of the way the mind shifts around a work as it starts to enter the reifying cauldron of publication. I thought it might be interesting to paste in the opening paragraph of The Exquisite as it was for most of its life as a manuscript and then what it became over the course of this past year.

Here is how it opened (and indeed more or less the first stuff I wrote on the book):

New York is no place to die. I have this recurring dream that Death, dressed as a hot dog vendor, or, better, as a cab driver eating a hot dog, rips me out of my shoes as I'm walking up Avenue B. People do die here, of course -- by the thousands, by the millions even, they are falling over onto concrete, into gutters, out of windows, off of fire escapes, down brutal flights of stairs; and, as they lie there breathing their last, there is the sound of a train screaming down the tracks towards them, or of a power saw slicing into steel, or of a mother screaming at her kids. Or smaller sounds, muffled. You are sitting collapsed in the glow of a low wattage light bulb in the center of a dark room in the middle of the night, while in the kitchen the faucet is dripping onto unwashed dishes; in the apartment below you the endless conversation, several voices, continues, the one you could never quite understand; you sit collapsed in the dim light, so dim that it seems a logical and even a beautiful part of your dying, and someone is walking back and forth over loose floorboards, the same someone as always, somewhere above your head. Well, fuck you, I don't want it; but you will have it, Henry, you must have it, my dear friend Mr. Kindt once told me, my dear friend who is now dead.

And here is what it has become (with some of the lost material resurfacing later in the first chapter):

Uh, uh, no way, I don't want it. But you will have it, Henry, you must have it, my dear friend Mr. Kindt once told me. My dear friend who is now dead.

I still like the original approach, as prose, as gateway to something, but it just didn't make sense for what followed. Too much happens too fast and it sort of overpowered the surround.

I'll see if I can dig up an early opening for The Impossibly too. There the change was subtler, but just as important.

2006-07-14T15:33:00.000-07:00

This

(http://bookdaily.blogspot.com/2006/07/there-is-something-intrinsically-funny.html)

sort of thing seems so strange to me. As in, what, exactly, does that mean? I just can't help dropping in on some of these things from time to time. Not long ago Zadie Smith joined the thread of a conversation of people trashing her latest on some blog or other: a lively moment. I like the idea of throwing the door open just a little every now and then...

(apologies for my inability to do a proper link -- something wrong with blogger)

2006-07-12T22:21:00.000-07:00

Today I had the quite remarkable pleasure (usually the arrival of Fedex makes me, inexplicably, anxious) of seeing Fedex pull up outside our house with, as it turned out, an advance copy of The Exquisite, just back from the printer. Amazing the feeling of holding the first copy (well, first for me) of the finished thing in your hands -- hard to describe. I actually couldn't look at it for a while. Eleni went over it as Eva hollered and climbed on things. I've been working on The Ex since '98, and to have it now, at hand, as a book ready to go out and brave the world -- well, it's pretty wonderful. And quite moving. Not least because Coffee House makes such great-looking books. This one will be the first paperback original of the novels (The Paris Stories, from Smokeproof, was paper too) -- so happy about that. Seems to me (and there has been quite a good deal of discussion about it in various venues) that these days novels with any kind of a kick are likely to be better served by paperback.

The Ex won't be generally available until Sept 1. But I couldn't help but shout out it's arrival. Even if it's just, for now, to 1180 Edinboro Drive. And the Coffee House offices in Minneapolis.

2006-07-12T08:20:00.000-07:00

This Times article linking the actions of Meursault (in The Stranger by Camus) and Zidane's now famous head butt in the final of the World Cup is worth a read. Meursault and murder (+ no remorse); Zidane and head butt (+ we don't know what he feels or doesn't feel) -- not, um, exactly the same thing, but interesting to see literary a tie-in to anything in The Times...

2006-07-11T13:18:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I got called onto the set for some "spinning cells" shots -- where one gets filmed in different positions without speaking. Shots that may or may not get dropped into the film. So I found myself leaning against the sink in Anselm Hollo and Jane Dalrymple-Hollo's kitchen, with lights and thingies being adjusted all around me (the terminology is great -- C-47s are clothes pins, jokers are shades, the 200 is a kind of lamp, etc.) having the odd experience of pretending to read a book -- a cookbook I had been handed. I read, like most of us do, all the time, so it was really unsettling and not easy to pretend to read. Why didn't I just read? Well, my head needed to move just a bit during the shot -- like I was pouring over something I was interested in (was how I interpreted what I was asked to do). While I was pretending, Ed (Bowes -- the director) kept saying, "good, really good, beautiful..." Which eventually, as I sunk into the thing, had me imagining some ghostly entity standing nearby as I read for real, say, Rebecca Brown's The Terrible Girls, and whispering "good, really good, beautiful..." And how at times its almost like that -- reading I mean: good, really good, beautiful...

2006-07-06T22:08:00.000-07:00

Two words for excellent, elegant, unostentatious, eerie, tough, smart, sock-you-in-the-gut-but-make-you-smile fiction:

Rebecca Brown

2006-07-05T14:16:00.000-07:00

Apologies for having let this slip into a dead zone of late. Teaching at Naropa's Summer Writing Program and acting in a movie (Against the Slope of Social Speech -- by excellent indie film maker Ed Bowes -- I play a guy called Reason) and still (after two weeks) stuck on Earthlink dial-up because of the move have conspired to make posting a tricky proposition. More to come soon though.

2006-06-25T15:22:00.000-07:00

From Between Life and Death
Nathalie Sarraute

“He shakes his head, puckers his lids, his lips… ‘No, positively no, that won’t do.’ He stretches out his arm, bends it again… ‘I tear out the page.’ He clenches his fist, then his arm drops, his hand relaxes… ‘I throw it away. I take another sheet. I write. On the typewriter. Always. I never write by hand. I reread…’ His head moves from side to side. His lips are pouting… ‘No, no and again no. I tear it out. I crumple it. I throw it away. And so, three, four, ten times I start over…’ He puckers his lips, frowns, stretches his arm, bends it again, lets it drop, clenches his fist.”

2006-06-23T13:13:00.000-07:00

Eleni [Sikelianos] and I often discuss the difference between the review culture (such as it is) for poetry and the one that exists around fiction. Basically, in part because books of poetry are often reviewed by friends, former students, etc., of the author, in part because many venues aren't keen on running negative reviews/only run very brief reviews, they often, when they get them, get flat-out raves. If one is lucky there is some analysis included, but it's all aimed at letting us know about how brilliant the thing and its author are. Fiction doesn't tend to work that way. It is certainly the case that the RCF won't run negative reviews, but man the majority of places are delighted to -- so much so that to bring out a book of fiction is to lean forward, chin first, and say, dude, slug me. One gets calloused, for sure, but some of the stuff that gets said is really something. Esp. if you write weird quiet work and your book has been farmed out, say, to the gal who regularly writes fantasy football coverage, or you write weird loud work and your book has been tossed into the lap of the I only really like quiet lyric novels guy. Not much more to say about it -- except to confess that when it's my turn (as it already is, even months ahead of the release of The Exquisite), I've come to strangely appreciate those punchings up that I do sometimes get treated to.

2006-06-23T13:11:00.000-07:00

The first volume of Encyclopedia (A-E), edited by Tisa Bryant, Miranda Mellis and Kate Schatz, is out. Pay a visit to http://encyclopediaproject.blogspot.com/ to see what it's about. One thing it's about is it's gorgeous -- hardback, color illustrations, handsomely printed...

2006-06-21T15:52:00.000-07:00

Reading the section of the latest N+1 devoted to the state of writing in America today, I found myself, once again, encountering the same constellation of names (Eggers, Wallace, Moore, Oates, Updike, Krauss, Foer, Franzen, Roth and several others), that one is obliged to have to consider whenever reading someone's appraisal of what matters in contemporary fiction (if we open it up to Canada and the UK then you've got to, of course, have Munro, Z. Smith, etc.). Fine, you say, the discussion is clearly about mainstream fiction, and those (plus those several others) are the names that must be checked or alluded to if one is to make some dreary fucking point about how it's all going. And I say, surely, even in the mainstream, there are some others... no?

This happens, of course, when one discusses slant fiction too -- it's just that one doesn't, all that much (though there are some exceptions, like Now What), and certainly not much at all in large, wide-circulation fora.

Not such a big deal, really, but it is tedious, after a time. Reading the articles, which were generally pretty interesting, and made some useful points, I kept being reminded of a journalist talking about running around LA with Sesshu Foster (Atomik Aztek), who asked, rhetorically, as they whizzed past the dreadful, even horrible banality of some section of LA, "Is this all there is???"

2006-06-18T14:29:00.000-07:00

If you are in the area, Naropa University's Summer Writing Program (http://www.naropa.edu/swp/) is about to kick off 4 weeks of fine stuff...

I will be chairing a panel, week 2, with the terrific Rebecca Brown and the fabulous Thalia Field, on those strange and wonderful works (like theirs) where prose and poetry colllide.

2006-06-14T22:43:00.000-07:00

In loading box after box of poetry volumes today one thing struck my bleary mind -- the endless shapes and sizes of them. From the huge Blake facsimiles and the Annotated Howl and Maximus to the tiny edition of Stein's The World is Round. No such revelation when loading up the fiction. It's all about the same size. Somehow or other I found this depressing. Then I remembered Robert Majzel's Apikoros Sleuth, a skinny, oversized wonder of a thing -- the Kabbalah meets The Maltese Falcon meets Derrida. Can anyone think of any odd size, odd works of fiction. This isn't just whimsy -- I'm troubled by/interested in the code of uniformity that seems to predominate in even slant fiction production values.

2006-06-13T21:15:00.000-07:00

If Not Night It Will be Evening

Having cleared my desk of one major concern -- by sending off/reluctantly letting go of the proofs of The Exquisite, which will come back all grown up as a book later this summer -- I find myself groping around for something else to fill whatever gap has been created by seeing one of the main projects of the past 7 years sent off to be bound. I opened up one of the other longer projects I've been cooking for a while, and read 10 or so pages, and wasn't unhappy (because there was a good deal of work that needed to be done and that I saw could be done), but I kept sending my eyes over to the little notebook I took with me to Barcelona where a brand new project had a few words thrown its way. The idea -- and who knows if it will ever go anywhere beyond those few words -- was prompted by the realization (surely re-realization) that The Impossibly, which revels in, among other things, twisty ways to say straightforward things, was simply a translation of all the twisty, bulging and straight spaces that your average old city has on offer. Wrought iron bulging off of 500 year old stone + someone's laundry + someone speaking into a cell phone + a feeling of deep and valued (if misunderstood) history being examples of the kinds of bulges and twists one encounters constantly as one navigates snaky alleyways with bits of ancient fortification jutting out of them and so forth. So we'll see. Likely, I'll just keep knocking out short things for a while. And hefting boxes. But also, now and again, looking at the notebook.

2006-06-13T07:37:00.000-07:00

"To you the bold venturers and adventurers, and whoever has embarked with cunning sails upon dreadful seas,
to you who are intoxicated with riddles, who take pleasure in twilight, whose soul is lured with flutes to every treacherous abyss --
for you do not desire to feel for a rope with cowardly hand; and where you can guess you hate to calculate..."

Nietzsche (Why Am I So Wise)

2006-06-10T22:08:00.000-07:00

The following is by Rob White:

(3:05)

Last night I dreamt of a man who became the wreck of another man. But not really. One of those extraordinary moments needs to occur. Yes. He still sleeps. Part of his bed is still warm. I don’t know his dreams. The night for him has probably barely been a night. The rain has stopped. Both these men would end up standing before the afterworld (I think this was suppose to be part of the dream) thinking of a world to ensure their passage. I like the word afterworld. Immediately I’m pulled down upon hearing the word. Afterworld. So much says that it comes from underground. Journeys have been made to this place. I nearly wake with his own dreams, I think, at times, carrying some disturbance from another world. The anotherworld. I am distressed and it is his doing. Look at him sleep. It is dark over there and I can’t see his body. Rain. It rained most of the night. The earth is too dry to hold this rain. Do I escape? Run for the finish of my dream. We had to say the right word so we wouldn’t get stuck outside the afterworld. I’m so afraid. Not really. He must have put it on my lips. Oops. There. That was for him. And there he goes, walking away.

2006-06-09T20:52:00.000-07:00

A kick-ass interview (at Econo Culture, by Davis Schneiderman) with a kick-ass writer, thinker, and powerful force for sanity in the world of writing (Lance Olsen) is here.

A taste -- my language in the brackets:

"While I wouldn’t want to suggest said [big, fat New York] houses aren’t bringing out some terrific and surprising work (think José Saramago, David Mitchell, David Markson), I do want to suggest they are bringing out less of it than they did, say, forty years ago. Nor would I want to suggest that indie presses don’t bring out some horribly mundane, simple, sloppy stuff in innovationists’ clothing. Still, in our current sociohistorical reality (and I use the term loosely), indie presses by and large remain sites of aesthetic, political, and philosophical resistance. They remind us that our fiction, and hence our world, can always be other than it is."

2006-06-08T21:21:00.000-07:00

"...characters are just words, and the words can be changed"

Matt Cheney (in an interview on Meme Therapy)

2006-06-05T22:08:00.000-07:00

In my spare moments I'm writing short prose shots inspired by the visual artist Rich O'Russa. The most recent one is about a dying professor of languages, plates of sausage and cucumber and fish rising to the surface of the water to be fed. Thing is I'm having trouble finishing it and want to try something. So: I'm looking for three words to serve as irritants to help me finish the piece out. The only stipulation is that they not be proper names (like Scrabble!). Please either leave a word, just a word, in the comments section or write me with it at lairdhunt@earthlink.net.

If the words get me there -- I'll post the finish piece here.

2006-06-05T07:46:00.000-07:00

An article in this mornings Times discusses digital publishing and web tie-ins to print novels. Mark Z. Danielewski's new work (see the eyeball note below), which apparently features a kind of Wikipediaesque reader comment aspect, gets special mention:

When Mark Z. Danielewski's second novel, "Only Revolutions," is published in September, it will include hundreds of margin notes listing moments in history suggested online by fans of his work.

I have long been in favor of things digital when it comes to publishing. Sure, I still have trouble reading longer things on my computer (and it was hilarious to try to read Waiting for Godot on my Palm Pilot -- though very cool to know it was there), but the technology is almost there (e-ink is coming) and once the platforms are more solidly in place, search engines will help redefine (in practice, not just in theory) what "books" are (are they, as some of us tend to think anyway, mega-conglomerates of all the books we've read or all the books, read or unread, we have on our shelves? or are they those discrete units? or something in between?).

There is, of course, a great deal of overlap in concern here with the transformation occurring in the music industry -- authors and publishers worried that the miniscule amounts of money they tend to make will be made even smaller by digital sampling (the google snippets one can have already). Maybe it's just because I don't make any money on my work, but this part of it doesn't bother me too much. No doubt though when the first indie publisher goes under because of some digital assault or other, I will change my mind on this. But until then, it's fascinating, not frightening times...

2006-06-04T06:42:00.000-07:00

The arrival of page proofs for The Exquisite has conspired with moving business, paper grading, and drafting 22 questions for graduate student comprehensive exams means my posting may be a bit sparse for a while. The page proofs part of the obligations is the notable one. This is the last chance I have to look at the book and slip in any final minor changes. This is the round where things like "Would you like to look at my car..." Instead of "Would you like to look at my scar..." can be caught before the book is sent to the printer. There is some anxiety involved, of course, because despite the best intentions of everyone involved, the manuscript tends to grow weird moments like that at every round. A lot of that has to do with my lousy handwriting. Other instances are those so-called "acts of god", where weird stuff just happens. The main anxiety though is whether or not the book is really meant to be heading off into print. I mean, we fool ourselves about a lot of things...

2006-06-01T22:46:00.000-07:00

This afternoon, on the way into school, I made a detour into downtown Denver, to the "Lodo" Tattered Cover bookstore, because I just couldn't stand to wait a second longer to own the new Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño (trans. Chris Andrews), which was reviewed in Bookforum (Koestenbaum gives Bolaño Saramago and Sebald status). I had to go to Denver for the book because it wasn't to be found in Boulder (at least not by me), which depresses me. We are supposed to have a decent indie store here, but too often it doesn't have the goods. At any rate, making a special, slightly irresponsible (life's crazy with moving, etc., at the moment) dash after a book I was dying to have has left me feeling very happy.

I'll have some things to say about Bolaño, and this one in particular, before long.

2006-05-31T22:03:00.000-07:00

I was asked about where A.N. was coming from in the talk referenced below -- my notes are either lousy or not, but what I put below is all I took down. Still, I do know this: Alice was coming off reading piles and piles of crime novels (not to mention the tragic death from cancer of her beloved husband, the poet Doug Oliver) and was wondering what it might all mean, all this death and killing, in the context of her poetry, and of Poetry in general. Part of what spoke so loudly to me about her talk, besides the fact that it was Alice, who is always amazing -- even if my notes are like telegraphic afterthoughts and don't put that across -- was that she seemed to be speaking to what we all need to take into account, at least some of the time, when we do this writing thing, this living thing -- yes, what exactly does it mean, what we do, in the context of all this death and killing, fictional and not?

The following, from Kierkegaard, isn't quite right, not the perfect thing, but it comes to mind around all this:

"If a man were a beast or an angel, he would not be able to be in dread. Since he is a synthesis, he can be in dread, and the greater the dread, the greater the man."

2006-05-31T10:30:00.000-07:00

These notes, such as they are, come from a talk Alice Notley gave two years ago during the Naropa Summer Writing Program -- the talk was on Poetry and Noir.

"These [crime novels] pretend to be coherent but mostly they aren't.

A story repeated becomes a poem.

Crime fiction -- a kind of folk song, a bloody ballad maybe.

First person -- the mark of the inept crime writer.

Many of the books simmer with cruelty. I'm not sure whose. The reader's or the author's?

We are obvioiusly involved here in the poem of "we must have war."

Many poems are cases and it is the geometry of case-solving that interests me.

The idea of needing to know who killed whom among the primary materials of poetry.

The best writers can't tolerate the stasis of corpse description passages.

I will search for you across light to undo murder [from Notley's The Black Trailer]

Perhaps contemporary poetry has become too reticent for my taste.

One's process is always a kind of third thing.

So much of my writing is elegaic because so much has happened.

There is more of everything all the time and that is the problem."

2006-05-30T08:33:00.000-07:00

An article on the Indie publishing scene in Brooklyn. Especially pleasing to me as it recounts a trip (one I've made -- it's strangely pleasant to think of such beautiful, essential books being edited and designed in the midst of so much brick, steel and construction) to the Archipelago offices in DUMBO.

2006-05-29T21:53:00.000-07:00

It has been a very long time since I was able to keep a regular journal, which is sad, because everytime I pick up an old one and read my notes -- a tissue of quotation, ideas for pieces, half-thoughts, a few diary kinds of things -- I find something useful. Useful in that it makes me think, gives me that frisson of thinking, wakes me up a little. Here are a couple of things I found in a journal from 1999. On June 9 this from Fleur Jaegy, "And aren't they our forerunners too somehow, these anonymous people we find in photographs?" Or this dream from June 16, "Nightmare. Awake in the dream. Room filled with wind. Something to do with Sebald. See the cover of The Emigrants. Some caricature of Sebald with a huge mustache leers triumphantly at me. Desperate to wake. Finally do." Or later in the month, this bit of Wittgenstein, from my favorite, On Certainty, "Here I am inclined to fight windmills, because I cannot yet say the thing I really want to say." Or this cryptic thing, from July 31st, in Detroit, "Storms belong to Shakespeare."

Then this, undated:

"If I were to make a chart of my recent mental geography it might include, at one point of the compass, scientists' recent discovery of objects at the edge of the universe that are older than light; at another, the village of ________, in central Mali, north of Timbuktu, which is slowly being swallowed up by sand; and at a third, my dismay, not to say my horror, at the thousands of hits that turned up when I entered the word 'decay' into a search engine..."

2006-05-28T21:24:00.000-07:00

"I kept seeing her in that dress that had no color, and the whites of her eyes like fireflies beneath her swarm of hair, and the way the clean knife changed in an instant into something wet and red."

from Rubicon Beach
Steve Erickson

2006-05-27T21:48:00.000-07:00

This review originally appeared in Rain Taxi. I reprint it in hopes of sparking interest in an excellent, underappreciated (here in the States) writer...

farewells to plasma
Natasza Goerke
Translated by W. Martin
Twisted Spoon Press 2001

Halfway through Polish writer Natasza Goerke’s collection of stories, farewells to plasma, a toenail blithely asserts that “monstrosity is an important issue.” Immersed in Goerke’s wonderfully disconcerting world of marriageable she-bears, writers who choke to death on egg yolks, marriages by correspondence, withering flowers, ballooning knees, a charming couple called the Zeroes, the reader doesn’t miss a beat and wants to hear more. The toenail, shut up inside a locket, obliges. It holds forth on plagues, it blushes, it scratches its head. It is a key and plausible element in Goerke’s through-the-cracked-looking-glass sensibility, an instance of 3-D synecdoche that blares absence and bespeaks troubled love: key themes in Goerke’s universe. She ends the story, “Zoom”, with the following:

So what to do with them all? If what keeps them apart is what joins them together, they still won’t be able to get close to each other.
But they won’t be able to get away from each other either.

Love and absence are at the heart of farewells to plasma, but they are not alone: Goerke’s palette is too broad, her energies too various for the collection to be so easily pigeon-holed. Goerke writes with verve on all shape and variety of topics. Her characters are travellers, writers, fortune tellers, spiritual seekers, masochists, talking shadows. They are concerned with the difficulties of reality, of communication, of self assertion. The fictional matrices they are conjured up in tend to be short, oddly and cleverly crafted, both pragmatic and dreamy, and crackling with energy. The result is an absurdist-inflected brand of magical realism, akin in its fusion of homegrown and international, often Western, often American, culture and concerns, to that set out in the shorter works of Haruki Murakami.

Part of the credit for the effectiveness of farewells to plasma, which is a representative selection from three of Goerke’s earlier collections, must go to its translator, W. Martin. He has turned the original Polish into pitch-perfect English, giving us a loose-limbed prose fully capable of handling Goerke’s typically complex, off-kilter blend of emotion, action and imagery as in the start of one of the longer stories in the collection, “dog”:

Clouds were blocking the sun, and Denisa, who was strolling along with all the grace of an open wound, picked up a stick off the ground and threw it as far as her strength would allow.

Goerke, who was born and raised in Poland, and currently resides in Germany, is widely considered in Europe to be one of the most exciting of the younger fiction writers working today. If enough people this side of the Atlantic get their hands on farewells to plasma, that sentiment will soon find itself shared.

2006-05-26T22:42:00.000-07:00

I like this.

2006-05-26T21:23:00.000-07:00

It looks like The Exquisite is not going to be the only book coming out in the Fall that has a big eyeball on the cover. There's so much wild eyeball on this one that it doesn't fit. Makes sense, methinks, for the author of House of Leaves.

2006-05-26T06:41:00.000-07:00

Incidentally, I should have said, either in the previous post or in my comment thereunder, that I do have plans to get something going publishing-wise in the next few years. I've deliberately taken a break from publishing and editing ventures to pursue reviewing, writing essays and translating as a way of serving, so to speak, and would like to continue doing same for a time, but will absolutely be putting my money where my mouth is around publishing before we all grow too much older. In the meantime, look for periodic fiction shots, poetry and guest interventions in this space...

2006-05-25T21:03:00.000-07:00

Almost daily, in my teaching life and out of it, I am reminded of the lamentable dearth of publishers interested in taking on slant fiction. Poets, bless them, realized years ago that some serious do it yourself was in order if interesting work was to have a place to live and circulate (and by God have the presses and prizes sprung up like mushrooms in a damp basement!); slant fiction writers (despite the great example of the Fiction Collective (now FC2) and others (like the folks at Starcherone, Omnidawn, Chiasmus, Clear Cut, etc.)) haven't been nearly as proactive. Some find homes with presses largely devoted to poetry or poetic prose (like Futurepoem, Krupskaya, Atelos...), some find spots with the longer-standing indies, a lot, alas, have trouble placing/can't place their work because there are only so many slots to go around. Every now and again someone with some experimental cred. gets a book taken by one of the big houses and everyone starts seeing big fat carrots in the sky. I've written on this elsewhere (see last Summer's Fence -- the one with the topless model on the cover), and will say again, that fiction writers who write weird shit, of any variety, need to stop imagining (I mean really) that they are the next Ben Marcus or something and that big house New York is waiting for them. It may be there, it may happen, but IT IS NOT waiting. And the reality is that the bigger indies only have so many openings, and that a lot of deserving people want a spot. Sure, we're not all meant to be publishers of journals or presses (I hear that a lot), but a few more of us better start doing something besides sending letters out to agents, etc. Otherwise, it's just going to get grimmer and grimmer for a field that is filled, from where I'm looking, with amazing younger/new fiction writers, who have very few places to go with their work. No?

2006-05-24T21:05:00.000-07:00

Not too long ago I was struck by something Paul Auster said in an interview (can't remember if it was in The Paris Review of The Believer) -- he asked, rhetorically, does anyone read Andre Gide anymore? I don't remember it that well, but it seems like there was more than just a hint of sadness for Auster about the thought that Gide and other worthy giants had fallen away/weren't being read/weren't being thought of. This wasn't, I don't think, about bringing back the DEAD WHITE MALES (or the DEAD FATHER), it was just a call for some awareness about the implications of scarfing down nothing but the contemporary. I reviewed Benjamin Ivry's excellent translation of Gide's Judge Not, a fascinating collection of his writings on criminal cases and weird judicial proceedings, for Rain Taxi and got a letter from Ivry afterward thanking me for having done it, and noting that it was the only review the book had gotten*. A terrific book by Gide comes out and it gets one review! Anyway, I don't know where I'm going with this, except to remind myself, for the umpteenth time, to stay vigilant -- it's not just the underserved marvels orbiting way out in our synchronic solar systems that need attending to, there are also the ones getting buried by time (and for every Gide, of course, there are dozens of less famous, perhaps even more exciting/useful/relevant writers waiting to be dug out. Shovel anyone?)

*Full credit should be given to Eric Lorberer, Rain Taxi's editor, for steering the book my way.

2006-05-24T09:59:00.000-07:00

An e-panel on literary translation. (More good work by Dan Wickett at the EWN.)

2006-05-24T07:03:00.000-07:00

There is a very nice, very simple tribute (in which the work does the talking) to Gilbert Sorrentino up at The Mumpsimus today.

The Mumpsimus, by the way, is one of the most consistently interesting litblogs out there.

2006-05-23T22:59:00.000-07:00

"The more refined the more unhappy.

Life does not agree with philosophy: there is no happiness which is not idleness and only the useless is pleasurable.

The grandfather is given fish to eat, and if it does not poison him and he remains alive, then all the family eat it.

A correspondence. A young man dreams of devoting himself to literature and constantly writes to his father about it; at last he gives up the civil service, goes to Petersburg, and devotes himself to literature -- he becomes a censor.

(...)

A large fat barmaid -- a cross between a pig and white sturgeon.

(...)

New literary forms always produce new forms of life and that is why they are so revolting to the conservative human mind.

(...)

Morning; M.'s mustaches are in curl papers."

from Notebook of Anton Chekhov
(trans. by S.S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf)

2006-05-23T20:11:00.000-07:00

Mad Science in Imperial City by Shanxing Wang. Another brilliant, and gorgeous, title from Dan Machlin's way-cool Futurepoem Books. Check it out. There is an appropriately enthusiastic review of it in this month's issue of The Believer.

2006-05-22T22:04:00.000-07:00

I've enjoyed reading various accounts of this year's Book Expo America, which comes across, in the reading of them, like some odd, oversize cocktail party, where books and trinkets were to be had by the bagfull, panels and so-forth were mainly excuses to schmooze/visit with friends and celebrity and near-celebrity sightings were the, yawn, ordre du jour. I did a tour of duty at BEA in Chicago a few years ago in conjunction with the release of my first novel, and was too giddy and sort of horrified to really take much of it in. What sticks most with me, besides grinning rather idiotically behind a stack of galleys as mostly not-at-all interested folks streamed by looking to score the hot stuff, was the book signing I did. There were a bunch of tables lined up next to each other and lanes (I kept thinking of sluices) leading up to each of them. I sat at my table, with my grin on, as a drip (clogged sluice, for sure) of people came up to get me to sign galleys (no one wanted their galley personalized -- a sign that they were booksellers hoping the thing might eventually have some value). In the lane next to me was a popular romance author, who had to sign so fast and furiously that smoke seemed to rise up off her table, which of course added to the vibe she had going. Anyway, what thinking of this made me think of was a much happier and weirder experience I had at the Indiana Author Showcase a couple of years ago, which was held in one of the Exhibition Halls at the Indiana State Fair. I was all ready with my grin, which had evolved, over time, into something a touch more jaded, a touch more back at you, but as it turned out, I didn't need it -- I was too busy talking to about every other person who came past (the book was Indiana, Indiana -- total Hoosier bait), as the gentleman running the showcase boomed into the PA system he had set up: LET'S GET READY TO REEEEAD, INDIANA!!! TODAY WE HAVE WITH US A BESTSELLING [sic] AUTHOR FROM FRANKFORT, INDIANA. STOP BY AND GET HIM TO AUTOGRAPH A COPY OF THE NOVEL PAUL OHSTER, ASTER, EASTER, AHSTER (there were a few other pronunciations too) HAS PRAISED AS BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, ETC. It was pretty extraordinary, and all really good-natured, and I actually signed a ton of books, which is, let's say, unusual for me. Most extraordinary perhaps was the sudden, separate appearance of wives of two of my basketball coaches from my Indiana farm days, who had been drawn over by the PA and just had to see if it was the same Laird. It was. Well, sort of.

2006-05-21T21:32:00.000-07:00

Good discussion of slant fiction happening at Now What. Pay a visit.

2006-05-21T21:06:00.000-07:00

If you are ever, as they say, in Barcelona, stop in at La Central, a top-rate bookstore, with fine French and English sections, and that great European bookstore smell: good glue in the bindings, fine paper. My Spanish is abysmal -- just fine for "getting around" but not good enough for comfortable reading -- so I was all over the French section. I came away with some Ponge, a handsome pocket edition of Jules Verne's Autour de la Lune (Georges Perec was a great Verne fan -- as a great Perec fan, I feel obliged to return to Verne, who I haven't read in a very long time; I'm happy to report that Verne (as if anyone needed me to say it) holds up big time), a Fred Vargas mystery (Alice Notely turned the audience on to her at a brilliant lecture she gave on murder and mysteries at Naropa a few summers ago -- I'll see if I can find my notes), and Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française. I was reading Beckett, have a backlog at home, and we're moving soon, so had no business loading up on books, even just those few, but it's a sickness, one I suppose many of us share... I just wish La Central had been great enough to have a few more P.O.L. books and a bit more poetry and a little more Roubaud. Then I would have really gone to town.

2006-05-20T21:57:00.000-07:00

Blind tired. 16 hours of travel with a game but eventually very worn out and moderately (justifiably!!!) crabby 10 month old coming off 4 days of pretty nasty flu (her first ever: scary) and one night in the middle of it completely lost to street celebrations after Barcelona took home the big football championship (over Arsenal). Having been in Paris when France won the world cup, and having ventured out into the not all together pleasant celebration that ensued, we chose this time to stay in bed as the revels devolved into moderate looting and riot police all within painful earshot of our hotel room (when the helicopters started swooping in around 4 a.m. we were actually pretty grateful).

But Barcelona was nevetheless magnificent (good coffee, good bookshops, good restaurants, good narrow streets and wrought-iron balconies, good museums (a lovely Twombly, among other goodies, in the Museum of Contemporary Art)). And the Spaniards (Catalans!!) we encountered all unbelievably warm and welcoming.

At any rate, more stuff soon. Promise.

2006-05-11T21:40:00.000-07:00

Just occasional posting, at most, over the next week (back the 20th (Barcelona)). In the meantime, enjoy this second excerpt from Eric Olson's The Procession of the Mollusks (a novel):

Know your body! Know yourself!

In most humans, this organ consists of an elongated tube that increases in size as it winds in a spiral around a central axis, or colummella. Each turn, or whorl, of the organ is separated from the next by a suture. At the apex there is often a tiny larval growth (“the nuclear whorls”). At the bottom of the organ there is a body whorl, which is the newest whorl and contains most of our soft parts. The spire of the organ consists of all the whorls above the body whorl. The base of the organ is the bottom part of the body whorl. The body whorl ends in an opening, or aperture (vaginal cavity), through which our feet and head can be extended or withdrawn. In many people, the hind parts of the feet (the heels) carry an operculum, a plate that fits into the aperture when the person has withdrawn from others. Humans are usually dextral, or right-handed, with the aperture on the right side, but some people are sinistral, or left-handed, with the aperture on the left side.
The columella is either solid or hollow; if hollow, it sometimes opens at the base in a small depression known as an umbilicus. The margin of the aperture are called the lips; the sides of the lips farthest away from the columella are called the outer lips and the sides near the columella are called the inner lips. At the bottom of the aperture a basal or siphonal canal is sometimes present. It may be an enclosed tube (uncircumsized) or an open groove (circumsized); a person’s siphon (penis) lies within it. There may be a smaller canal or notch at the top of the aperture for a second siphon, which expels water and waste products.
The inner lips of the aperture consist of the wall of the body whorl, or parietal wall, and the columellar area near the siphonal canal. Sometimes the parietal wall and columellar areas are covered with a thick or thin calcareous layer, or callus, which often has spiral ridges or teeth.
In some people the whorls are angled below the suture and there is a flattened area, or shoulder, between the angle and the suture. Or the whorls may be angled or rounded at the periphery, the widest part of the whorl.
Some people are smooth; others have spiral or axial sculpture, or both. Many are covered with a horny layer called periostracum.

2006-05-10T23:03:00.000-07:00

I am sympathetic to the earnest pleas/emphatic requests going out from Buzz, Balls & Hype and Dan Wickett at the EWN for publicists to cease and desist from barraging litbloggers with inappropriate requests for coverage of their authors.

And I'm reminded, by twists and turns, of the weeks I spent at Shakespeare and Co. in Paris in the early 90s -- the owner, George Whitman, took an inexplicable shine to me and sent me running all over town on book-related errands. At one point I returned to find him fretting over a misplaced manuscript, one of dozens he had received, unsollicited, just in recent days. He was frantic because the cover letter -- which described the heart and soul. etc., that had gone into the letter writer's novel, which the letter writer's son, an assistant manager at K-Mart, had thought was quite good -- noted that the letter writer was sending along the only copy of her book.

I don't know if it was ever found.

2006-05-10T20:06:00.000-07:00

"Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.... The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.... The not-knowing is not simple, because it's hedged about with prohibitions, roads that may not be taken. The more serious the artist, the more problems he takes into account and the more considerations limit his possible initiatives."

from "Not-Knowing"
--Donald Barthelme

2006-05-10T15:07:00.000-07:00

From Supercell Anemia (a novel)
Chapter “La Crème de la Récolte”
by Duncan Barlow

Although Gilles does not really like eggs, he is scared of angering the chef. Charlie collects some napkins and silverware and walks outside to sit at one of the tables in the cul-de-sac. Gilles stays to collect the food and pay the bill. The pirate straps a strange mechanical device over his nub. It looks like the base pirate’s hook, a black metal semicircle. He grabs a beater, slips it into the dark nub machine, and clicks a small switch on the side. The silver whisk whirls and the man dips the contraption into a stainless steel bowl. After several minutes, he clicks off the power tool and removes the mixer from his arm.
He walks to the back, to a strange makeshift-frying slab; he pulls an egg from a yellow styrofoam container, and cracks it over the edge of a blue glass bowl. Gilles shoves his hands into his pockets and feels the tiny balls he stole from Dr. Moore. He rubs them gently, rolling them between his fingertips, still unsure why the doctor held onto them.
The baker, unsatisfied with the shape of Charlie’s cooked egg, curses in French, and tosses it into the trash. He cracks another egg and drips it onto the griddle; it sizzles and the room fills with its sulfuric smell. Gilles looks out the window to make sure that Charlie is not watching and slowly inches an oval out of his pocket. He holds it before his eye and looks through it; he sees the chef, tiny and inverted. The chef curses again and grabs another egg out of the box. As he raises it over his head and says something to it in French, it lines up perfectly with the ball in Gilles’ hand.
Gilles pulls his hand down and lets the sphere roll into the center of his palm. The muscles in his abdomen tighten and he feels a rumble in the top of his back. Reaching into his breast pocket to grab a copper strip, he drops the translucent pellet onto the floor and it rolls beneath the counter. He wipes the metal clean and slips it into his mouth. Gilles looks to the chef, who has now inserted a spatula into his nub machine and is putting Charlie’s eggs onto a plate.
The chef brings the plates to Gilles and he pays for them as he carefully slips his left foot beneath the counter, rolls the ball back towards himself, and bends to pick it up. He walks through the door and Charlie stands to grab her plate from him.

2006-05-09T16:44:00.000-07:00

Tromping around the yard attached to the house we're going to move into, one of these days, I spotted a shiny candy wrapper in the tall grass below the swamp cooler, which sticks out from the back of the house like a retro jetpack, and straightaway found myself thinking of Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz, the great Polish novelist, short story writer and general man of letters. The book is about a student who goes to the countryside to spend the summer. There he falls in with an acquaintance and they decide to find a place to stay together. On their way to a house with rooms to let, they come across a dead sparrow hanging by some string in a tree. This dead sparrow sets their little minds to yammering and dreaming up conspiracies so that by the time they are installed in their rooms and are getting to know the various denizens of the house they are seeing (and creating) potentially linked omens everywhere. Needless to say they don't get to the bottom of much, but they (and esp. the narrator) do do a lot of thinking and running in circles.

So that's what I thought about when I saw the greenish, metallic candy wrapper. I thought, hmmm, there's some kind of mystery here.

Or actually what I thought was something more like, what the fuck?

(Cosmos is available from Yale University Press in a fresh translation by Danuta Borchardt.)

2006-05-09T09:05:00.000-07:00

For a limited time, exquisite pins for The Exquisite, designed by Linda Koutsky at Coffee House Press, are available for sneek preview/ownership. Send an sase with regular US postage and, I will send you a pin. LH/1195 Hartford Drive/Boulder, CO/80305.

2006-05-08T19:56:00.000-07:00

"All writers want the word to be flesh. The flesh of a bird, so it can take wing. Now the flesh has become words. And the words live among us."

from Lavish Absence
--Rosmarie Waldrop

2006-05-08T16:14:00.000-07:00

The art of the manhole cover in Japan. (Spotted on Matt Cheney's always interesting The Mumpsimus.)

2006-05-07T22:51:00.000-07:00

from The Procession of the Mollusks (a novel)
--Eric Olson

In one of my dreams I was tending an oyster bed corralled off from a wide bay by an enclosure of rocks stacked up to create a sea wall. I made my way around the enclosure, dipping a long vacuum hose into the water. The hose, attached to a loud, diesel-powered engine stationed a few yards up on the rocks, was grafted onto my hand at the handle, its tube melding with my skin in a stitch-work of flesh and plastic.
In the water, the rows of oysters, their shells slightly ajar, pointed upward toward the surface. The vacuum tip brushed along their calcareous lips, sucking away algae and seaweed. A cacophony of gull calls filled the air
As I worked along the edge of the constructed pool, head down, focusing the tube on each oyster with meticulous care, a loud splash of water behind me made my head jerk to see where the sound had come from. On the bay side of the rock enclosure, the tip of what was undoubtedly a long tentacle had slipped out of the bay, over the sea wall, and was rutting around in the pool, attempting to grasp a tentacle full of oysters. The long arm flexed and rolled as it fastened its grip, the suckers contracting and relaxing like the pupils of enormous eyes, each surrounded by a ring of what looked like teeth.
I attempted to drop the vacuum, but, of course, it was attached to my hand, so I settled for dragging the tube along with me as I scrambled over the rocks toward the tentacle.
When I was close enough to where the arm was still rooting around in my pool of oysters, I slapped at it clumsily with the end of the vacuum tube, missing several times before finally making contact. The arm flinched, and from behind the sea wall, the body of whatever enormous monster the tentacle belonged to, hauled itself out of the water, standing upright to confront me.
I was surprised to see that the tentacle was actually one of many legs that were attached to a humanoid creature that looked suspiciously like a medieval friar or monk. His hair was cut into the familiar ring around the circumference of his head, leaving the wet skull bald and gleaming in the sun. Around his neck hung a massive ornate cross, studded with jewels and inlaid with sparkling gold.
The monk smiled sheepishly at me, shrugging his shoulders slightly, then retracted the offending tentacle, trying to hide the five or six shells that were affixed to the suckers.
“Those are my oysters,” I said. “They are not yours to take.”
The monk’s smile disappeared, turning into a pathetic, imploring pout. I sighed and waved my hand dismissively.
“Alright, go ahead. But don’t come back looking for handouts. Go steal someone else’s oysters.”
His face broke into a satisfied smile as he returned the tentacle to the bay side of the wall. He bowed his head in my direction, then slipped beneath the surface and was gone.
I continued tending to my oyster bed.

2006-05-06T22:27:00.000-07:00

Chuckle. And much of it too true.

2006-05-06T20:52:00.000-07:00

Robert Glück gave a talk at the University of Denver a couple of months ago (much to our delight, he is in residence at DU this Spring). What follows are the more or less (I too often suffer from hearing what I want to hear, this impacts on faithfullness) accurate notes I took during it. I leave it to you to fill in the gaps, if they seem like gaps, I'm not sure they do.

fixed in eternity, where they ought to be

the disruption of ego boundaries

an endless permeability of self

the way sight would be in heaven

narrative names the world as if it knew it

I instinctively want to feel complete

the narrative of how to read the fragmented self

the excess of being and no place to put it

disjunct writing describes a fragmented self

using the sentence as the compositional unit

minimalism = subtraction of one of the elements of a piece

the porousness of being

the Madness of Day (la Folie du jour)
—Blanchot

what is appropriate transgressive fiction?

ugly on purpose (like some of Acker's writing) or ugly by accident

'even outlaw literature arrives with its pedigree'
—Dodie Bellamy

push the limts to see what can be contained in fiction

leave the reader in a state of wonder/vertigo/expectation

there is no sharper point than infinity

the time of the reading vs the time taking place in the story

compositional unit = unit of time

what is time in writing?

reading: offering yourself up to be organized

2006-05-06T07:48:00.000-07:00

I've had anxiety dreams much of my adult life. Most of them have been sports-related. Last night, in fact, I found myself involved in a very serious pickup soccer game, soccer being a sport I haven't played since seventh grade in London. I played defense, the only thing that seemed possible, and managed almost immediately to pass the ball to the opposing team right in front of my goal. Some defense. Oh well. A few nights ago I was giving serious thought to joining the high school football team and was asking my father what he thought. He wouldn't answer me -- seemed to be thinking about something else -- so I kept rephrasing the question. Until it dawned on me that I was 20 years too late to join the team. In recent years, another variety of anxiety dream has been creeping up in the standings. This is the "I am in the United Nations without my ID card dream". This actually happened from time to time when I worked at the UN (I mean forgetting to bring my ID card). It was a hassle and I had to sort of slink around. In these dreams, not only do I not have an ID card, my colleagues all act like they don't know me + I can't quite remember how to do my job. It's basically the same dream as the one where I head out for the football field without my shoulder pads on, except that at least in the UN dreams I get to be in New York for the night and maybe hear some interesting languages as I do my best to cope with an untenable situation.

2006-05-05T20:08:00.000-07:00

It was so strange to see my aunt sitting beside my bed, her great fat face simultaneously beaming and anxious, that I sat up, swung my bare legs over the side of the bed, and clapped her on the arm. This felt so good that I leaned forward and clapped her on the side of the head.
Go and tell them I need a shot, tell them that, then we can talk, I said.
My aunt shook her fat head, stood, walked a little way towards the door, looked back at me and said, you’re a schmuck Henry boy, you always were, and was gone.
A minute later she was back. She came at me so fast all I had time to do was start to raise my arm before she had slapped me, good and hard like the old days, across my face.
Jesus, Aunt Lulu, I said.
I’ll give you a shot, boy, you little schmuck, she said.
She raised her hand like she was going to slap me again but instead sat down, and after a couple of minutes the beaming, anxious look was back on her face.
Where you been, Henry? she said.

(from The Exquisite)

2006-05-04T21:11:00.000-07:00

"We live in a culture of radio and television interviews, newspaper profiles, public readings with question-and-answer sessions, which has ensured that novels themselves -- far from being seen as self-contained statements, as having anything remotely final about them -- have merely become one (early) stage in a larger process: a process devoted, essentially, to the scrutiny and interrogation of writers' lives in the name of that insatiable curiosity which feeds on anyone reckless enough to set themselves up as a public figure. No one retains any real sense of the novel itself, in other words, as a reliable model of human nature: we have lost all semblance of that kind of faith in literature, or in the trustworthiness of writers. Which means, in effect, that we no longer read literature at all: we cross-examine it, forensically, in the light of its writers' lives, assuming that it's in the gaps, the interstices, the shortfalls between theory and practice that the real truths about human nature will emerge. This has brought about a radical change of emphasis, enambling a situation in which people know far more about Philip Larkin's political beliefs, or Ted Hughes's treatment of his wife, than they know (or care) about their poetry. A situation in which the actor Kate Winselt can declare, triumphantly and without irony, that she is a 'huge fan' of Iris Murdoch even though she has never read any of her books."

Jonathan Coe (Like a Fiery Elephant -- The Story of B.S. Johnson)