Now What

Open Letter to J.D. Salinger on the Event of his Literary Decomposition

2010-02-02T11:23:00.001-07:00

From my blog.

Some years ago, and I suppose it was around the turn of the century--I received an email invite to contribute a one-page letter to a Letters to J.D. Salinger project, which, now published, will no doubt no receive a spike in sales due to J.D's passing.

Being a young, hungry, overeager, graduate student type with a need for publication, I dutifully re-read the red-covered tome, and, well, my reaction differed from my teenage reading of years before.

The first time, 10th or 11th grade English lit class---just after I'd realized English was more than grammar and handwriting--I was far from blown away. I enjoyed the book in the way one enjoys high school English books: Lord of the Flies, Brave New World, etc. I suspected then--like Nostradamus predicting his own commodification as a new age prophet--that the whole thing was merely a bit of calculated ennui from the business class.

No doubt my teachers really believed in the transformative power of the novel--nay, even the transgressive power--but I suspected that if I kept Holden's lessons too close to my vest, I'd be playing the rinsed-out high-school teacher myself in a few years: prattling on about the power of Walden and Emerson and Hawthorne and America's greatest white-boy hits to legions of America's largely ambivalent high schoolers. (Yes, I am now a college professor...)

[Note: most transgressive moment of high school. 9th grade health class. Ms. Kerkoff (I kid you not on the name) asks us to complete this thought--a way to jag us about our inner feelings: "Adolescence is like _____." The class makes shift to answer--stalls--stares at the clock, until a school mate (later to head into Naval intelligence of some sort, but at this point, an unrepentant rabblerouser), takes the floor: "Mrs. Kerkoff...Adolescence is a lot like a (long pause) Twinkie, because inside, for us all, there waits a creamy surprise..."]

Anyway, I figured the teachers meant well enough, but there was something about the supposedly subversive message of Catcher, handed to me on a silver platter, that read, well, more "phony" than the diegetic antics of Caulfield.

The re-reading, for the anthology project, made the book just seem, well, silly. Sure, it's well crafted, and yes, accessible in the cum-hither-late-modernism sort of way, but by the standards of the early oughts it seemed downright tame.

For me, longevity in a novel comes not from its increased relevance to the current social clime or its reasoned assimilation into the mainstream of American thought, but its continued belligerence--its pervasive refusal to make sense of the word or let itself be used a mirror.

Naked Lunch still fascinates me because it never lets you get handle on it--the book refuses to give up its secrets; it's not even a "novel," really, at least according to anything Salinger would have approached. (It's epistolary in its genesis: cobbled together from letters, also, as Oliver Harris would tell you).

I'm 3/4 of the way through Marcel Proust, for the second time, and the time-distortion of these ridiculous parties...where it takes longer to read than experience, where the Hawthorne trees speak to this boy-man who explores human depravity and manipulation for the sake of an aesthetic ideal...well, that stuff still works for me.

And so, I sent in my "letter" to J.D. to the editors, and never heard back. Good thing, too, since the piece took on a second life (with my musical partner in crime Don Meyer) in Mad Hatters' Review some years later, and after that, as a main track on our audiocollage release, Memorials to Future Catastrophes.

Here's the link at MHR: enjoy, read/listen if you like.

And, J.D., wherever you are, don't rest in peace--try to raise the roof a little bit. On second thought, maybe don't take the words of no college prof nohow.

Who is the Next Zachary Mason?

2010-01-31T07:07:00.002-07:00

A year ago, the New York Times poked fun at Zachary Mason. He was one of those crazy authors that sent them wacky things in the mail, begging for reviews. Silly rabble -- reviews are for the well-connected!

A year and a half later, the NYT finally assigned The Lost Books of the Odyssey for review. Of course, first the book had to be published by a major NY house, Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux. The Times's primary job isn't to discuss literature, after all -- it's to support the beleaguered NYC publishing establishment. FS&G also got its cue from somebody else -- they picked up The Lost Books after it was nominated for a Young Lions Prize by the NY Public Library in early 2009. (Thanks, Brigid Hughes! Thanks, Ethan Hawke!)

The first recognition The Lost Books of the Odyssey received was when it won The Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction in 2006-7, a blind-judged manuscript contest offered annually by Starcherone Books. We've got our seventh such contest accepting manuscripts now, until February 15. Zach was winner #4.

I'm not saying that books like The Lost Books of the Odyssey come around every year, or even every two or three years. But keep your eyes on our other winners. Without making it a competition, these are definitely books that at least deserve to be in the conversation with The Lost Books of the Odyssey:

> Woman with Dark Horses, stories by Aimee Parkison (selected by Cris Mazza)

> Hangings: Three Novellas, by Nina Shope (selected by Kenneth Bernard)

> The Blue of Her Body, by Sara Greenslit (selected by Brian Evenson)

> The Creepy Girl and other stories, by Janet Mitchell (selected by Lance Olsen)

and forthcoming in Fall 2010:
Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, by Alissa Nutting (selected by Ben Marcus)

Readers interested in what's new in contemporary fiction can purchase any of these titles, or subscribe to our entire 2010 season or 4 titles at a discounted rate. The Jack Kerouac Just Sent Mom Out for Another Bottle of Tokay Annual Subscription -- which this year includes three novels, Raymond Federman's Shhh: The Story of a Childhood, Leslie Scalapino's Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows, and Thaddeus Rutkowski's Haywire, as well as Alissa Nutting's contest-winning short story collection, is only $49.95, ppd.

If you read books, this subscription is one of the best deals you can find -- especially when we see the Starcherone first edition/first printing of Zachary Mason's book now a coveted rarity, selling for over $100! When you wait for for someone else to tell you what's good, you pay for it.

Our subscription is also a very well-kept secret. As of today, and including our donors who get the subscription as a thank you for their contributions, we have a total of 22 subscribers! Meanwhile, The Lost Books of the Odyssey has crossed into amazon's Top 200 -- and it doesn't even get released until Tuesday!

You can read tomorrow today by subscribing to Starcherone Books. If you are interested in mainstream publishing, continue to read what the mainstream publishers are selling. But if you are interested in the future of literature, subscribe to Starcherone Books.

From Mad Hatters' Review

2010-01-04T19:19:00.000-07:00

December 30, 2009

Dear Friends of the Mad Hatters:

In case you haven’t heard the buzz, our journal has decided to hit the cyber-streets on an annual basis.

Please be forewarned that our open submissions guidelines for Issue 12 (next in queue after THE MAD BUNKERS MASH, due to emerge in early 2010) is now posted on our front page, in the usual place, namely on the sidebar: Submissions Guidelines (http://www.madhattersreview.com/submissions.html). We’ll be reviewing submissions sent to us from January 1st through 31st, aiming to publish Issue 12 in January or February, 2011.

We have some old and new and juggled about staff members, namely:

Shirley Harshenin, webmaestress extraordinaire (nutheadproductions)
Alla Michelle Watson, Managing Editor
Gene Tanta, Art
Cartoons: Phil Nelson, assisted by Marja Hagborg
Visored Burgeonette (no kidding), Music/Audio
Ann Bogle, Creative Non-Fiction & Reviews
Marc Lowe and Matthew W. Maxwell, Fiction
Karen Garthe and Jefferson Hansen, Poetry
Amy Marie Bucciferro, Wit & Whimsy
Drama and Whatnots will be reviewed by yrs truly publisher.

Issue 12 will feature exhibitions of Visual Music presentations (edited by Jean DeTheux) and Moving Words (edited by Camille Bacos and Jeremy Hight).

All of our contributors, past and almost past (the Mash issue will be up in early 2010) are welcome to let us know about recent publications. We’ll be happy to include reviews, as long as we find reviewers (hint); alternatively, if you have your own reviewer, we will consider publishing the review as an exclusive to our journal. Please send publication news to madhr.12@gmail.com, subject line: CONTRIBUTOR’S NEW PUBLICATION.

Please consider surrendering a bit of currency or gold to keep our unique journal going and save the publisher from Empty Pockets Syndrome. If you pay taxes to the US government, your donations will be totally tax deductible. Find the donations link on the sidebar of our main/menu page. Click madly with passion and devotion and you’ll earn warmest thoughts and appreciations.

We’ll send another newsletter when the huge, mind-blowing Mad Bunkers Mash issue emerges.

New Year’s Cheers!
Carol Novack
Publisher
Mad Hatters’ Review

Hey, want a job?

2009-09-17T15:45:00.001-06:00

Assistant Professor of English. Lake Forest College seeks a specialist in literature from the Early Modern period (1530-1780) to fill a tenure-track position. Preferred secondary specialization(s) in one or more of the following areas: the early novel, print culture, colonial/post-colonial/commonwealth literature, and dramatic literature. Applicants must have Ph.D. at time of appointment, substantial teaching experience, and a strong record of scholarly publication and promise. Submit letter of application, curriculum vitae, critical writing sample, and three letters of recommendation to Davis Schneiderman, Search Committee Chair; Box K-11; Lake Forest College; 555 N. Sheridan Road; Lake Forest, IL 60045. Screening of applicants begins immediately and continues through a postmark deadline of November 15, 2009. A highly selective liberal arts college located in a suburb of Chicago, Lake Forest College enrolls approximately 1,400 students from over 45 states and 65 countries. At Lake Forest College, the quality of a faculty member’s teaching is the most important criterion for evaluation. The College also expects peer-reviewed publication or creative works and active participation in the College community. Lake Forest College embraces diversity and encourages applications from women and members of historically underrepresented groups.

10K, plus a place to write

2009-01-09T11:51:00.001-07:00

Lake Forest College
Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer's Residency Prize (Prose)

Lake Forest College, in conjunction with the &NOW organization, invites applications for an emerging prose writer under forty years old, with no major book publication, to spend two months (February-March or March-April 2010) in residence at our campus in Chicago’s northern suburbs on the shore of Lake Michigan.

There are no formal teaching duties attached to the residency. Time is to be spent completing a manuscript, participating in the Lake Forest Literary Festival, and offering two public presentations.

The completed manuscript will be published (upon approval) by the Lake Forest College Press &NOW Books imprint.

The stipend is $10,000, with a housing suite and campus meals.

Send curriculum vita, no more than 30 pages of manuscript in progress, and a one-page statement of plans for completion to:

Plonsker Residency
Department of English
Lake Forest College
Box A16
555 N. Sheridan Road
Lake Forest, IL 60045.

Submissions must be postmarked by April 1, 2009 for consideration by judges Robert Archambeau, Davis Schneiderman, and Joshua Corey.

The Return of the Starcherone Fiction Prize for Innovative Fiction

2008-11-07T19:18:00.003-07:00

After a year away, Starcherone Books announces the return of our annual manuscript contest, featuring fiction writer Ben Marcus as Final Judge.

The 2009-10 contest, offering $1000 and publication with Starcherone Books, is now accepting entries. Contest is open to story collections, novels, or indeterminate prose works up to 400 pages. Manuscripts will be blind-judged; the author's name should appear on the first of two title pages and nowhere else in the manuscript. There is an administrative fee of $30. Please do not send cash. The postmark deadline is February 15, 2009. The winner will be announced in August 2009. All finalists will be considered for publication with Starcherone Books. See our ad in the January 2009 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

We are very happy to have as judge for our prize for innovative fiction one of the most daringly innovative and powerful authors of our time, Ben Marcus. Marcus is the author of three books to date -- The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, and, with Matthew Ritchie, The Father Costume. He also edited The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. He is Chair of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Columbia University.

Complete information is available at starcherone.com/prize.htm.

30 under 30

2008-11-04T12:26:00.001-07:00

Lily Hoang & Blake Butler are now in the early stages of putting together an anthology to feature innovative writers under the age of 30. The anthology has interest from a respected small press.

Please submit no more than 15 pages of prose/poetry/whatever goes to: thirtyunderthirty@gmail.com by January 15. Send as .doc or .rtf attachment. (For truly exceptional cases, we will consider longer submissions.) Previously unpublished work only please. Also, all submissions should be open to editorial review.

We're looking for the innovative, fresh, exciting writing, and as long as you're under 30 & doing new things with words, please submit.

Campbell Tatham 1940-2008

2008-10-28T19:37:00.009-06:00

Cam Tatham, a good friend to many of us, and one of the most perceptive critics of postmodern fiction, died this afternoon at his home north of Milwaukee. He fought brain cancer--effectively--since the summer of 2007 but took a sudden turn for the worse in the final months of this year.

Cam first published on John Barth before turning to the more significantly minor (in the very best Deleuzian sense) works of FC2 founders and mainstays like Ronald Sukenick and Raymond Federman. With Federman he conducted a lengthy correspondence that helped produce, in part, the novel, _Take It or Leave It_.

For me, he was a mentor through grad school, as well as a very close friend then and now.

We will miss you, Cam.

FEDERMAN@80: A CELEBRATION

2008-10-04T12:57:00.001-06:00

FEDERMAN@80: A CELEBRATION
Saturday, Oct. 18, morning, noon, and night, Buffalo, NY

Friends, colleagues, critics, and students past and present from near and far welcome writer, raconteur, and retired distinguished professor Raymond Federman back to Buffalo for a day-long celebration of his work and him in visual art, critical appreciations, rollicking literary readings, & champagne. All events are free and open to the public.

Sponsored by Starcherone Books, the Department of Romance Languages of the University at Buffalo, UB Anderson Gallery, the Poetry Collection at UB, Medaille College, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, and the following endowed chairs at the University at Buffalo: Melodia E. Jones Chair of Romance Languages, James H. McNulty Chair of English, David Gray Chair of Poetry & Letters, and Samuel P. Capen Chair in American Culture.

Morning: 10:30 A.M.-12:30 P.M., UB Anderson Gallery, One Martha Jackson Place.
Opening reception (with coffee and accompaniments) of an exhibition of Federman-inspired art works by Terri Katz-Kazimov and Harvey Breverman, & photographs by Bruce Jackson. [The image above is Jackson's.]

Noon(ish): 1:00-4:30 P.M., Poetry Collection, 4th Floor Capen Hall, UB North Campus.
Two sessions of presentations and discussion featuring contributors to the forthcoming SUNY Press collection of essays, Federman at 80: From Surfiction to Critifiction, edited by Jeffrey DiLeo.

1:00-2:30: A Life in the Text.
Dr. Larry McCaffery, Dr. Menachem Feuer, & Dr. Ted Pelton.

3:00-4:30: Laughter, History, and the Holocaust.
Dr. Susan Rubin Suleiman & Dr. Marcel Cornis-Pope.

& NIGHT: 8:00 P.M., Medaille College, Main Building, Foyer & Lecture Hall.
An Evening of Laughterature, Surfiction, & Playgiarism in Tribute to Raymond Federman

Readings by (in order of appearance):

Ted Pelton, Christina Milletti, Geoffrey Gatza, Julie Regan, Michael Basinski, & Steve McCaffery.

—Intermission—

Davis Schneiderman, Charles Bernstein, Simone Federman, & Raymond Federman

The readings will be followed by a reception and 80th birthday toast.

david foster wallace : 1962-2008

2008-09-13T21:52:00.004-06:00

CLAREMONT, Calif. (AP) — David Foster Wallace, the author best known for his 1996 novel "Infinite Jest," was found dead in his home, according to police. He was 46.

Wallace's wife found her husband had hanged himself when she returned home about 9:30 p.m. Friday, said Jackie Morales, a records clerk with the Claremont Police Department.

Wallace taught creative writing and English at nearby Pomona College.

"He cared deeply for his students and transformed the lives of many young people," said Dean Gary Kates. "It's a great loss to our teaching faculty."

Wallace's first novel, "The Broom of the System," gained national attention in 1987 for its ambition and offbeat humor. The New York Times said the 24-year-old author "attempts to give us a portrait, through a combination of Joycean word games, literary parody and zany picaresque adventure, of a contemporary America run amok."

Published in 1996, "Infinite Jest" cemented Wallace's reputation as a major American literary figure. The 1,000-plus-page tome, praised for its complexity and dark wit, topped many best-of lists. Time Magazine named "Infinite Jest" in its issue of the "100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005."

Wallace received a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation in 1997.

In 2002, Wallace was hired to teach at Pomona in a tenured English Department position endowed by Roy E. Disney. Kates said when the school began searching for the ideal candidate, Wallace was the first person considered.

"The committee said, 'we need a person like David Foster Wallace.' They said that in the abstract," Kates said. "When he was approached and accepted, they were heads over heels. He was really the ideal person for the position."

Wallace's short fiction was published in Esquire, GQ, Harper's, The New Yorker and the Paris Review. Collections of his short stories were published as "Girl With Curious Hair" and "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men."

He wrote nonfiction for several publications, including an essay on the U.S. Open for Tennis magazine and a profile of the director David Lynch for Premiere.

Born in Ithaca, N.Y., Wallace attended Amherst College and the University of Arizona.

the writer's edge 2009

2008-09-01T15:23:00.002-06:00

Please help pass the word that we are accepting applications for the fourth annual Fiction Collective 2 (FC2) Writer's Edge workshop, held March 19-21, 2009, in Cuernavaca, Mexico, at the Universidad International. This year, the FC2 Writer's Edge will be held in conjunction with the American Book Review (ABR) Writer's Conference, held March 16-18.

Sponsored by FC2 and ABR, the conference will feature workshops on innovative fiction, panels, a faculty reading, open mics for participants, and myriad conversations about experimental prose.

Below are descriptions for the FC2 Writer's Edge workshops, as well as a list of the faculty teaching them. For more information on both the FC2 Writer's Edge and ABR Writer's Conference, including information on how to apply, please click here.

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REALITY FICTION
Alexandra Chasin

Creativity, we may imagine, resides in the imagination of the new. It’s cheating to use found texts and other objects. Yet at the same time the body of already-existing texts and artifacts is a vast archive too fantastic to consign to the dustbin of literary (and extra-literary) history. In fact, there is already a rich tradition of literature that imports bits of the world. And those bits needn’t be limited to literary texts. Newspapers, songs, legal documents, textbooks from any number of disciplines, medical records, maps, photos, and other images—not only is it not cheating to use such materials, but it opens up a new set of possibilities for writing into, out of, and/or about the historical record. For writers interested in investigating techniques of representing and referring to the phenomenal world and its infinite pasts and presents—techniques of incorporating its material effects into fictional work—this workshop will offer examples of, discussion of, and exercises in salvage, rereading, quotation, recycling, imitation, cut and paste, (re)appropriation, repetition, reproduction, revision, parody, hoax, and other acts of unoriginality. In preparation, you may want to acquaint yourself with the following fictions: Don Quixote, Kathy Acker; “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Jorge Luis Borges; A Humument, Tom Philips; Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed.

STEALING BEAUTY: “TRANSLATING” FROM THE SISTER ARTS
Jeffrey DeShell

“Mediocre Writers Borrow; Great Writers Steal.” —T. S. Eliot
“Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.” —Pablo Picasso

Writing is never done in a vacuum; it occurs always in context. Often fiction writing is provoked by contact with other art forms like painting, music and film. If composition is a series of decisions about what goes where, shouldn’t the translating of decisions from painting, music and film into narrative language be possible? And if it is possible, how can we go about it? Or, to start from the other direction: how can we weave our obsessions with music, painting and film into our fiction writing? The Greek word for this translating is ekphrasis (which usually refers to poetry), and in the contemporary world we often speak of allegory and mimesis. We’ll try to bracket the theoretical discussions and center our discussion on practical larcenous techniques. Participants are asked to bring a representation (postcard, photocopy, photograph, mp3, film, video, etc.) or actual object of something they’d like to translate into prose. Students may also wish to read Gertrude Stein’s portraits of Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso.

ANAEROBICIZE YOUR PROSE
Stephen Graham Jones

So one argument and I don’t necessarily disbelieve it is that punctuation is just a parasite that all it is is the side effect of writing words down in these lines that it’s just a clumsy visual approximation of the natural rhythms of speech that in prose fiction are pretty much exactly what’s supposed to lull the reader into a state where the story can work or or a better way to say it maybe is that that unbroken patter and burble and spike of words is what transports the reader not off the page but into it face first ankle deep and evermore. But yeah, sometimes a comma sure is nice, right? Here we’ll talk about this, both in terse, nervous, over-punctuated sentences we try to laugh off and in long unbroken fragments that wander and forget themselves and then find each other in surprising ways. And we’ll do some writing as well. And never stop

THE CALIFORNICATION OF HISTORY
Lance Olsen

Despite frequent (and frequently naïve) claims to the contrary, innovative fiction is neither necessarily ahistorical nor dehistoricized. Rather, it continually questions our culture’s suppositions about what constitutes historical knowledge, embracing the counter-intuitive recognition that texts are simultaneously self-conscious linguistic and formal systems shut off from the world and active participants in larger sociopolitical contexts. In this workshop, which will consist of mini-lecture, conversation, and two exercises, we shall explore the practical and theoretical joys, problemitizations, assumptions, and possibilities in engaging with the past(s)—“real” and imagined—inventively in writing. In preparation, you may want to acquaint yourself with the following fictions: Da Vinci’s Bicycle, Guy Davenport; History of the Imagination, Norman Locke; Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell; Nietzsche’s Kisses, Lance Olsen.

BORDER CROSSINGS
Lidia Yuknavitch

One of Gloria Anzaldúa's major contributions to United States academic and creative writing and discussion was the term mestizaje, meaning a state of being beyond binary (either-or) conception. In her theoretical works, Anzaldúa calls for a “new mestiza,” which she describes as an individual aware of her conflicting and meshing identities who uses these “new angles of vision” to challenge old ways of thinking, being and writing. The work of Guillermo Gómez-Peña concerns the U.S.-Mexican border itself, immigration, cross-cultural identity, and the confrontation and misunderstandings between cultures and races. His artwork and literature also explores the politics of language, the side effects of globalization, “extreme culture,” and new technologies from a Latino perspective. Unlike what might happen at an academic conference, as creative writers we will be “inhabiting the territory” of their texts, and moving through their language as citizens of an unnamed country with identities forming at a border of language and geography. We will push ourselves through two major writing exercises meant to reinvent identity stories. In some ways we will be deconstructing whiteness and the position of the “U.S.” writer. We will also create a blog that “performs” our “texts” as an extension of the workshop. In preparation, you may want to acquaint yourself with the following: Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzuldua; The New World Border and Dangerous Border Crossers, Gómez-Peña. You may also want to check out some of Gómez-Peña’s performance work at the Video Artist Database: http://www.vdb.org/

Federman's Return

2008-08-11T21:09:00.006-06:00

Raymond Federman turned 80 this past May. In 2009, a collection of essays tentatively titled FEDERMAN AT 80: From Surfiction to Critifiction, edited by Jeffrey DiLeo, will appear from SUNY Press, and this October 18 there will be a celebration of Federman and this forthcoming collection in Buffalo, where Federman taught for some 30 years at University at Buffalo.

I've just finished reading Return to Manure, Federman's 2006 "novel," or whatever one wants to call Federman's particular way of telling elements of his incredible life-story, where he writes about things that have happened to him, but doesn't distinguish between memory and imagination, the real and the made up.

It occurs to me that what I didn't articulate in my disgusted entry of a couple weeks ago about the creative nonfiction workshop "Turning Trauma to Treasure," was the degree of self-exploitation involved in such an attitude toward telling one's own experiences, a degree of selling out that Federman has rejected not only for his whole writing life but, arguably, for his entire life. The starkest formulation of this problem is seen in Federman's crucial single-sentence narrative tour de force, The Voice in the Closet. (The above image, a collage by Buffalo artist Terri Katz Kasimov, is featured on the cover of the Starcherone Books edition of that book, pub. in 2002.) There, Federman tells his most traumatic story: the French police having come to the door of his family's apartment in Paris, in 1942, and his mother saying only "Ssshhh," and pushing him in a closet where he alone in his family would escape detection. Except he doesn't tell it, doesn't assume that the "treasure" he will get by doing so will be worth the diminishment of the trauma that will result from its conversion into mere words on a page.

The narration embodies this dilemma by actually breaking the protagonist in two: the writer who would purport to tell the story is accused and cursed throughout by a second voice, that of the narrrator's younger self, the child who lived the experience and who realizes that a straight narrative articulation of it will have to be a distortion, a lie, an alchemy whereby, after "trauma" gets turned into "treasure," it loses something of itself, its own integrity.

Perhaps this is a reason why Federman's story and the art by which it comes to an audience has failed to find as large an audience in the United States as it has in France, Germany, Romania, Poland, and elsewhere. I was in Toronto over the weekend, and at one point accompanied my 16 year-old niece into Queen St. t-shirt shop. (Queen St. is sort of like a longer, cleaner version of NYC's St. Marks Place.) One of the t-shirts there featured only three words, but summed up how the big country to the South has a rather fundamentally different identity. The shirt said, simply, AMERICA LOVES MONEY. Sad to live in a country that can be summed up in such a way. Here, narrative "trauma" apparently needs conversion into "treasure" -- narrative payoff -- to gain its full share of an audience. Remaining "trauma," a state wherein the wounded is also afflicted with shock and the inability to perform narrative alchemy fully, it doesn't acquire its full value with an American audience conditioned to respond to the "treasure" being laid at their feet while they recline on the couch, faces glowing.

Return to Manure precisely avoids narrative payoff. "Federman" (never merely the author, but never not entirely the author either) and his wife Erica drive in the French countryside to the farm where he as a boy had escaped Nazi radar in the years 1942-5, subsequent to the closet episode. The narrative meanders like a drive itself, with alternating periods of roadside attraction and boredoms during which the narrator slips back into his memories. The memories do not particularly highlight emotional pain but skip through details of the nearly pre-industrial peasant life lived in the French countryside nearly a lifetime ago, as well as recollections of a 14 year-old's growing sexual awareness and stories he made up. When in the end Federman and Erica get to the farm itself at the end of the book, there is no epiphany, unless it be an anti-epiphany: the landscape holds no secrets waiting to be found. Around the back of the barn Federman finds no gleaming treasure, but just another pile of cowshit, smaller than the one at the farm of his youth because now there are fewer cows.

Federman has long maintained that the story of the Holocaust is (to use one of his words, with the cow pun accidental), "unutterable." In the introduction to the forthcoming SUNY Press collection, Charles Bernstein writes that Federman is not a writer of fiction, but a storyteller, that he writes the same stories again and again because that is what storytelling and history both do -- they evoke reality, a complex of delusions and non-delusions. Quite coincidentally (I just read Bernstein's piece for the first time, as I prepare to spring it on the local Buffalo media in advance of the October Federman celebration), Bernstein also describes how Federman's art differs from the Creative Nonfiction vogue: "The elementary error of the literature of self-help and affirmation, the preferred fiction of the mediocracy," writes Bernstein, "is that trauma is overcome, that you get better, that there is healing. That there can be understanding. Federman neither dwells on the abyss, nor theatricalizes it, nor explains it, nor looks away."

This is the farm at the end of Return to Manure: it is not rendered into a trope, symbol, metaphor, emblem, narrative climax, or any other form an author makes. The author resists those alchemies. The farm simply is. The power of such a narrative moment is that, without it being given a single, intended effect, you are left with life and with history, which also offer no easy explanations or resolutions.

[We've got no money, NY State being in a budget crisis ("dollars damn me," said Melville), but whoever wants to come to Buffalo October 18 to help celebrate Federman's life and achievements should let me know, either via this blog or by email and I'll give you the details.]

Interviews from the Edge 5: Davis Schneiderman and Carlos Hernandez

2008-08-10T23:26:00.002-06:00

This new episode in Chiasmus Press' ongoing author interview series is a tag-team event with Davis Schneiderman and Carlos Hernandez, authors of the collaborative novel Abecedarium. They talk about the novel's conception and creation, the importance of explicit collaboration, and scamming their way into a book competition.

Visit carlos-hernandez.net and www.davisschneiderman.com to keep up with the authors and their current projects. Thanks for listening.

Got Dugatti?

2008-08-03T20:35:00.001-06:00

Chiasmus Press is proud to announce that Stephen Graham Jones' latest novel, The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti, is now available on Amazon.com. Here's the back cover propaganda:

If there's a line between the real and the digital, between meat and the game, between past and present, then hold this book close to your mouth and whisper it into the pages. Please. Maybe the kid in there'll hear you. His name is Nolan Dugatti. He's lost, see, running down hall after hall, something both ancient and not-yet born galloping up behind him on a hundred legs, each individual footfall a sound he knows, a way of shuffling that he's always known. His father? Except it can't be. Unless of course this is another novel from Stephen Graham Jones. Not quite horror, not quite science fiction, but like his five or six other books, a story trembling at some pupal stage between meat and the game, where words will sometimes stop their crawl across the page and crane their neck around at the sky, nod about what they see there-you- then unfold their wings, drift up into another world altogether.

Check out Stephen's latest blog post here, in which he explains the method and madness of a novel written---yes---in a 72-hour blast of fright and delight.

Writer's Edge 2008 Day One

2008-07-26T01:08:00.001-06:00

Things I noticed on Day One from this year's Writer's Edge conference in Portland:

1) There are a lot of guys named Andy attending. Cool guys named Andy. So much so that I am thinking about changing my name to Andy now.

2) Lily Hoang is a filthy overachiever but she gives awesome hugs so it is impossible to hold anything against her for more than a picosecond.

3) Steve Tomasula and Shane Hinton are handy guys to have around if you cut your foot on a rusty nail and want to avoid a staph infection. Steve carries bandages in his wallet and Shane rolls with a tube of Neosporin.

4) Lidia Yuknavitch has the coolest students up at UW-Bothell. One of them is named Selena. I think I am going to try to adopt her before the conference is over, whether she wants to be adopted or not.

5) Andi and Lance Olsen are losing sleep over their inability to score a 3G iPhone and getting to the Apple Store way too late. It's a vicious cycle and I am praying Steve Jobs takes mercy on them tomorrow at Pioneer Square.

6) Mia De Bono is still the most awesome writer name I've heard in a long, long time.

Here are some photos I snapped earlier today. I'll post more to the set as the weekend progresses.

Mash-Up of two mags

2008-07-25T09:22:00.000-06:00

A cool project:

Davis

*****

Calling works for an unprecedented mashup of two stately publishing venues:

The Mad Hatters' Review & Bunk Magazine
MaSh up & MayheM & haw Issue

Wedding date: Spring/Summer 2009
Reception: The Mad Bunkers' Mash & Racket Club, Bronx, NY & Somewhere off the L.A. Freeway, date TBA

****************

Mashup is the spirit of the day (second only to dementia): Mash a Democrat and a Tory. Mash a Hip Hop CD with Beethoven's Ninth. Mix the movie Dark Victory with a modern Japanese horror movie sound track. Cross eclairs with ecosystems, a Bush speech with a toilet brush. Of course, writers have been mashing for quite some time with their cutups and exquisite corpses.

Mashup is what happens when content is no longer king, usurped by the mischievous jester adept at standing on his head and hands, spouting irreverent nonsensical sense, walking with frivolity on ceilings, pirouetting on paradoxes, ridiculing rules and rulers, and turning rapid somersaults -- all for the pleasure of the jester, her audience, and his sagacious self.

In homage to the jester, we are mashing two publications:
the irreverent, collaborative, genre-blending multimedia literary magazine Mad Hatters Review
and
the provocative satirical new media lampoon Bunk Magazine

Not only will the publications collide to present a mashed union (The Mad Bunkers), but we will feature mashed content.

For this hystorical issue we are soliciting three types of artistes:
Those who wish to be mashed
Those who wish to do mashing with those who wish to be mashed
And those who wish to mash their own

WE WILL BE OPEN FOR EMAIL SUBMISSIONS ONLY (madbunkers@yahoo.com cc: madbunkers@gmail.com) ON SEPTEMBER 1ST. Deadlines vary according to category.

Verily yours,

Carol Novack, Pub/Ed Mad Hatters' Review &
Mark C. Marino, Pub/Ed Bunk Magazine
& various & sundry editors to be listed on our Bunkhouse page
_____________________________________________________________________

Those Who Wish to be Mashed

Submit your inventive written works to us for surprise use in the issue. Primarily we are seeking poems, short fictions, whatnots and literary non-fictions. Please familiarize yourselves with Mad Hatters' Review and Bunk Magazine to get an idea of what we like before deciding to submit. We cannot predict how we will mash your work, only that we will mash it and you will receive proper acknowledgment. In fact, we will present unmashed works on the 3rd floor, baby clothes department.

Aside from the above literary submissions, the Mad Bunkers are seeking visual, aural, and interactive art forms, as well.

These may include:
videos
music
still images
flash animations, text generators, or other forms.

Have no fear, if you can make it, we can mash it.

Submit:
Poems, short fictions, whatnots, or literary non-fiction (maximum word count 3000) by October 1st.

We will consider previously published works, but you must provide detailed publication credits.
Also provide a bio (150 words max).

If you are interested in collaborating (directly) with the mashers, please let us know that in a brief cover letter.

PLEASE WRITE YOUR NAME & THE APPROPRIATE DESCRIPTIVE IN THE SUBJECT LINE OF YOUR EMAIL: I'M A (WRITER, MUSICIAN, VISUAL ARTIST, FLASHER, VIDEOGRAPHER, VISPOET, TEXT GENERATOR, OTHER FORM INVENTOR, MULTI-NEW-FUTURISTIC-POSTPOSTMODERN MEDIA TYPE) AND I WANT TO BE MASHED
_____________________________________________________________________

Those Who Wish to Mash

Submit your proposal for a mashup project using our accepted literary works. The proposal will necessarily be somewhat general since you will not know your text just yet. However, we are looking for innovative (oh, that tired word again) visions on how to mash texts with each other or with other media. The finished piece may differ widely and wildly once you see the text.

Submit:
Proposal: 500-750 words
Portfolio of previous work
Links to online examples (if they exist) of works similar to the mash you propose.
Bio (150 words max)

October 15th deadline

PLEASE WRITE YOUR NAME IN THE SUBJECT LINE OF YOUR EMAIL FOLLOWED BY: I WANT TO MASH.
_____________________________________________________________________

Those Wish to Mash Their Own

We will also consider self-contained mashup submissions (unpublished) in which artists mashup other source material in new and interesting ways. When using large chunks of still recognizable texts, if the source material has been created by another person or persons, we will need written permission from said individual/s (unless other licenses -- read: Creative Commons -- apply).

Submit: Completed Mashup work by November 15th.

PLEASE WRITE YOUR NAME IN THE SUBJECT LINE OF YOUR EMAIL FOLLOWED BY: I WANT TO MASH MY OWN.
_____________________________________________________________________

Submission Guidelines:

Selection Criteria: For a sense of our selection criteria, please peruse the contents of our publications and then mash those together in your mind. If you find yourself mindless after the mashing, you won't be alone and help is on the way. We will facilitate an online Mash Support Yahoo or Google Group for a modest fee.

Submit all works to madbunkers@yahoo.com, cc madbunkers@gmail.com. Texts (words alone) should be pasted into the corpus of your email and attached as Word or RTF docs. Visuals should be medium resolution jpegs or gifs. Very large files should be sent via yousendit or other file-sharing software, but only after September.

Add both of these e-addresses to your contacts list so we don't have to deal with spam blockers when we correspond with you. We do not believe in snailmail. The GPO is under the influence of 5,687 corrupt greedy bastards who plot daily against the struggling masses. We won't reveal the identity of the 5,687 corrupt greedy bastards. You of all people should know.

Simultaneous submissions are politically correct. We are politically correct. And we believe that self-important, self-centered editors who want writers to place their creations in mothballs for more than 30 days while awaiting decisions should be tarred & mashed with sharp-beaked birds. Of course, if your precocious child is accepted into another nursery school, please let us know immediately. We'll serve up the Ritalin to some other brat.

On the other hand, we hate sending rejection emails and refuse to do so. So please --- if you haven't heard from us within 120 days of your submission, presume that "while we enjoyed your submission, it didn't suit our current needs." This has got to be the dumbest, most over-used rejection letter language both of us editors and you have had the misfortune to read. Lots of chi-chi journals send out letters like that. We've surmised that lots of chi-chi editors lack imagination. So instead, imagine that our rejection letters would read: "Dear ____, Thank you so much for sending us __________. We came to blows over it, but the other editor prevailed. There's no accounting for taste. We'll never work together again. The other editor's a Philistine. You deserve better, but please don't forget to revise at least 10 times and check your grammar and word usage, particularly "lay" and "lie." We are offering an online sentence diagramming & verb conjugation workshop for a modest fee. With cutting edge, new media grammar films. Adverbial abuse will be thrown in free if you sign up today. May you thrive & multiply! Love, Carol & Mark et al.

Multiple Submissions: NO NO NO, we can't deal with them. EG. If you send us a mashup video called "Mama's Boy" and a month later decide to send us "Daddy's Girl," we won't consider the latter. No way. Send us your best. We deserve it and so do you.

Multiple Type/Category Submissions: Let's say you want to be mashed, but you also want to propose a mash. You may email separate submissions, but watch the dates, please!

Queries: Okay, sure, go ahead, but don't ask what time it is when there's a clock on the wall behind you.

Digression:

COMBINATION SPECIAL VIDEO CONTEST PITCH - a Mad Hatters' Review & Web del Sol hosted competition with a $500 prize to the first place winner: ENTER ENTER ENTER!

_____________________________________________________________________

Some examples of mashups. These serve as an inspiration for the theme -- rather than models for how to mash for this issue.

Movies:
Toy Story Requiem for a Dream Mashup
http://youtube.com/watch?v=D1qihwMN0JM

This video mashes up footage, music, and more
http://youtube.com/watch?v=9QfrsD1CpPI

Music:
One of the most famous mashups:
The Grey Album
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_Album

Generators -- these automate the process of mashing up.
Here's an existing text mashup machine that draws upon Project Gutenberg
http://flashups.org/mashups.php

Here's a typical mashup parody: The Show Title Mashup Generator
http://www.generatorland.com/generators/tv_show_mashup_gl.php

Here's another satirical masher
http://www.theadgenerator.org/

fin

CONGRATULATIONS! If you've managed to get through these verbose, rococo, convoluted, selves-indulgent, compulsory guidelines and believe you've understood them, you have won a virtual mad bunker's beanie with a genuine starfish (one of the few left on this planet) embroidered atop. Please send head size and choice of colors (EG: complicated cerulean with vibrant yellow starfish; sexy violet with neon green starfish.)

It was TRAUMA, but now it's TREASURE!

2008-07-15T20:34:00.002-06:00

I have changed nothing below in this advert I found on the Creative Nonfiction Magazine website:

Turning Trauma into Treasure

Washington, DC

September 20

This intense, day-long program with CNF Editor Lee Gutkind will present the art and craft of memoir writing, explaining how to capture traumatic stories in a way that touches and impacts readers.

During this intense and entertaining day, participants will learn how to:

• find the precious nugget of the story
• isolate the crucial magic moment
• infuse the story with a universal chord
• develop a narrative arc
• frame and focus the story
• capture essential intimate details
• share their hard-earned, hard-learned wisdom

$275 registration fee includes a 4-issue subscription to Creative Nonfiction. (After August 20, $290.)

chiasmus press podcast #6

2008-07-07T16:25:00.001-06:00

Episode #06 marks the return of the Chiasmus Press podcast after a lengthy absence. You tell us if it was worth the wait:

:: Conference recaps from AWP and &NOW :: 2008 releases by Lou Rowan, Kevin Sampsell and Lily Hoang :: Looking forward to Writer's Edge :: Teaser preview of our upcoming release from Stephen Graham Jones :: First Book Contest :: Post-production update on The Iconographer :: Lidia's healthy skepticism towards Barack Obama :: WE LOVE STEVE TOMASULA!! :: Andy's love affair with Big Oil :: Trevor drinks Andy's milkshake P.T. Anderson style :: Chiasmus mascots Rusty and Chomsky get it on :: Flashmob of kids threatens to destroy the Milwaukie mothership ::

You can shout back by email (contact@chiasmusmedia.net), or leave us voicemail through Skype (username: chiasmuspress). Don't forget that the podcast is listed on iTunes, which makes subscribing to our RSS feed easy enough that even a U.S. president could do it.

undoing the novel : first book contest

2008-06-23T18:21:00.003-06:00

This just in from the amazing Chiasmus Press . . .

Dear Chiasmus Nation:

The last time we held our Undoing the Novel contest, you blessed us with epic, sexy books by Colette Phair and Lily Hoang. And we thank you ever so much for these blessings.

Now we come before you again with our arms and hearts agape, and ask that you bless us yet again...

Undoing the Novel—First Book Contest

Eligible fiction: innovative novels, anti-novels, novellas, graphic novels, short story collections, hybrids

Deadline: August 30, 2008

Reading Fee: $25.00

Award: Publication + 10 author copies

We are looking for new writers at the front edge of fictional form. Our mission is to continue to publish fiction that burrows underneath the commercial market and busts up and through consumer culture book-as-product bunk. We believe new writers ought to share the space with accomplished writers.

Send Manuscripts, SASE, and fee by August 30 to:

Chiasmus Press
8826 SE 28th Ave
Milwaukie, OR 97222

Make checks payable to: “Chiasmus Press”

Winner announced: November 1, 2008

press home: [www.chiasmuspress.com]
press blog: [chiasmuspress.wordpress.com]

One thing you've always known about us, Nation, is that we are never satisfied. Please speed the most fierce and ferocious to us.

Amen.

XOXOX,

-Ch

Jefferson Hansen Starts New Review Blog

2008-05-26T14:19:00.003-06:00

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: I am looking for reviews, books to be reviewed, and interviews for a new blog, Experimental Fiction & Poetry: Reviews, Interviews, Commentary at experimentalfictionpoetry.blogspot.com. (I just renamed it, so you might have to access it by googling "blogger" "Jefferson Hansen".) Please visit, leave comments and spread the word. Currently featured is a review of Charles Bernstein's GIRLY MAN, in addition to commentary on the underground fiction writer David Ohle. Send books for review to 4055 Yosemite Ave. S., St. Louis Park, MN 55416

First Wall Rebate podcast

2008-05-15T13:23:00.001-06:00

This week, Chiasmus-nauts Shane Hinton and myself are launching First Wall Rebate, a podcast focusing on videogames and gaming culture. Unlike the overwhelming majority of gaming podcasts that focus on sales figures and finicky demographics by industry insiders/reviewers, we are insisting upon a serious, engaged and intelligent conversation about the aesthetic, socio-political, philosophical and/or rhetorical functions of games, and how this new media artform compares to older ones (including writing, film, music, and performance). This is not a podcast geared specifically for gamers; we are hoping to share and showcase a wide variety of experiences and interests.

We recorded Episode 00 on 12 May as both an opening salvo and test run for our digital recording setup. There are a few hiccups towards the end, but we are hoping you will give it a listen anyway, and to continue coming back in the weeks and months ahead. You can subscribe to our RSS feed here; we will be available at iTunes Music Store shortly.

Mad Hatters' Review event

2008-04-26T12:33:00.003-06:00

Continuing my glut of recent postings. A cool event to check out:

Mad Hatters' Revue
Sunday, May 4, 4-8 pm, Bowery Poetry Club, NYC

http://www.madhattersreview.com/events.shtml#may4

MC'd by comedienne Lisa Levy, the Revue will feature FICTION WRITERS & POETS, PERFORMANCE ARTISTS & MULTI-MEDIA MASTERS Alex Caldiero, Alan Davies, Samuel R. Delany, Tonya M. Foster, Pierre Joris, Timothy Liu, Eileen Myles, Nicole Peyrafitte, Wanda Phipps, Alan Sondheim, Stephanie Strickland, Steve Tomasula & Edwin Torres; MUSICIANS & SOUND ARTISTS, including Benjamin Rush Miller, austin publicover, Tom Abbott, & Ben Tyree with Will Martina; VISUAL ARTISTS & FILM-MAKERS, including:: Amy Cohen Banker, Orin Buck, Theresa Byrnes, Michelle Handelman, Heide Hatry, Gregg LeFevre, Iris Schieferstein, & Robert Withers. + Drink Specials & Door Prizes

Mad Hatters’ Review
Edgy and Enlightened Literature, Art and Music in the Age of Dementia
http://www.madhattersreview.com

Deconstructing Books Contest

2008-04-23T21:11:00.002-06:00

Here's some non &NOW-fun. Make you own book-deconstruction video and win one-hundred American dollars.

Judges: Raymond Federman, Lidia Yuknavtich, and me.

The inspiration was a previous shameless-but-failed attempt to get on "The Colbert Report" that my postmodernism students cooked up after we read I am America (and So Can You).

Best, and happy deconstructing.

Davis

&NOW Books/ Residency at Lake Forest College

2008-04-22T14:13:00.002-06:00

Two opportunities:

&NOW Books (an imprint of Lake Forest College Press)

The newly formed Lake Forest College Press is pleased to announce the formation of its imprint, &NOW Books. Every two years, &NOW Books will publish THE &NOW AWARDS: THE BEST INNOVATIVE WRITING—a collection of the most provocative, hardest-hitting, deadly serious, patently absurd, cutting-edge, avant-everything-and-nothing work. Distribution of &NOW books will be through Northwestern University Press.

Attendees at &NOW 2009 (Fall, SUNY Buffalo) will receive a complementary copy of the debut anthology, but writers need not attend &NOW to be included in the collection.

The contents of the &NOW AWARDS will be chosen through a nomination process. Attendees of the &NOW conference and friends of the organization can send up to four nominations of published creative pieces (print or online) to andnow@lakeforest.edu with the subject line: “&NOW Nominations.” Please briefly tell us why we should consider a particular piece, and, whenever possible, send us relevant author bibliography and/or web links. Nominated works must have been published since 2004 (the year of the first &NOW conference), and the first anthology will cover the period from 2004 through 2009.

The Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize
&NOW/Lake Forest College

Lake Forest College, in conjunction with the &NOW Festival of Innovative Writing and Art, invites applications for an emerging writer under forty years old, with no major book publication (chapbooks and the like excepted), to spend two months (February-March or March-April 2009) in residence at our campus in Chicago’s northern suburbs on the shores of Lake Michigan. There are no formal teaching duties attached to the residency. Time is to be spent completing a manuscript, participating in the Lake Forest Literary Festival, and offering two public presentations.

After the residency, the completed manuscript will be published, upon approval, by the new Lake Forest College Press &NOW Books imprint. The stipend is $10,000, with a housing suite and campus meals provided by the college. The position will be offered on alternate years to writers of prose and poetry, with the 2009 residency going to a poet. Hybrid genre and non-classifiable applications are welcome during either year. Send curriculum vita, manuscript in progress, and a statement of plans for the completion of the manuscript to Plonsker Residency, Department of English, Lake Forest College, Box A16, 555 N. Sheridan Road, Lake Forest, IL 60045. Review of manuscripts by judges Robert Archambeau, Davis Schneiderman, and Joshua Corey will begin May 15, 2008 and continue until the position is filled.

Chiamus Press First Book Contest

2008-04-21T17:22:00.000-06:00

Undoing the Novel—First Book Contest

Eligible fiction: innovative novels, anti-novels, novellas, graphic novels, short story collections, hybrids

Deadline: August 30, 2008

Reading Fee: $25.00

Award: Publication + 10 author copies

We are looking for new writers at the front edge of fictional form. Our mission is to continue to publish fiction that burrows underneath the commercial market and busts up and through consumer culture book-as-product bunk. We believe new writers ought to share the space with accomplished writers.

Send manuscripts, SASE, and fee by August 30 to:

Chiasmus Press
8826 SE 28th Ave
Milwaukie, OR 97222

Make checks payable to: “Chiasmus Press”

Winner announced: November 1, 2008

Click here for more information

Subito Press Book Competition

2008-03-19T16:43:00.002-06:00

Subito Press of the University of Colorado invites submissions to its annual book competition. We will publish two books of innovative writing, one each of fiction and poetry.

Submissions will be accepted from June 2 to August 15 (postmark date).

Submit manuscripts of up to 70 pages of poetry or up to 100 pages of (double spaced) fiction along with a $20 reading fee and an 8.5 x 11 SASE if you would like a copy of the winning entry in your genre. Manuscripts should include two cover sheets: one with title only, the other with title, author's name, address, e-mail, and phone number. All submissions will be judged anonymously by the creative writing faculty at the University of Colorado; friends, relatives, and former students of University of Colorado creative writing faculty are not eligible. Simultaneous submissions o.k.; please notify Subito immediately if your ms. is accepted elsewhere. Winners will give a reading at the University of Colorado. Notification of winners will occur by December of 2008.

Send mss. to:
Subito Press
Department of English
226 University of Colorado, Boulder,
Boulder, Colorado 80309-0226

Subito Press adheres to the Council of Literary Magazines & Presses Contest Code of Ethics:
CLMP's community of independent literary publishers believes that ethical contests serve our shared goal: to connect writers and readers by publishing exceptional writing. We believe that intent to act ethically, clarity of guidelines, and transparency of process form the foundation of an ethical contest. To that end, we agree to 1) conduct our contests as ethically as possible and to address any unethical behavior on the part of our readers, judges, or editors; 2) to provide clear and specific contest guidelines—defining conflict of interest for all parties involved; and 3) to make the mechanics of our selection process available to the public. This Code recognizes that different contest models produce different results, but that each model can be run ethically. We have adopted this Code to reinforce our integrity and dedication as a publishing community and to ensure that our contests contribute to a vibrant literary heritage.

Email: cwengl@colorado.edu
Voice and Voicemail: (303) 492-1853
Website: http://www.colorado.edu/English/crw/crwprogram.htm

tubearts contest

2008-03-01T10:41:00.004-07:00

I just received the following email from Aaron Jaffe about what sounds like a fascinating contest/project. For a video explaining things in more depth, please click here.

I’m writing to let you know about an art and writing contest we’re holding on YouTube. Writing is a central part of our society, but writers who want to focus on something other than pop culture and drunken celebrities are struggling to find footholds on YouTube. It’s a site that should naturally be a haven for writers, but the YouTube staff takes a passing interest in the arts at best.

The purpose of the TubeArts contest is to call for the addition of an “art and writing” category, and to let writers explore YouTube as medium for their work. The winner will also receive $500 and some great exposure (between myself and the six judges, we have 90,000 regular viewers).

I’ve included a link to the contest introduction video below. I hope you can take a moment to visit and leave a comment. The comment section is serving as an online petition, and the more comments we get the more people will see the video. . . .

YouTube could be a place for writers to showcase their work. It could be a place that makes poetry accessible and interesting to a new generation. We’ll take a big step towards that goal if this contest is successful, but we’re not going to be able to do it without you!

alain robbe-grillet : 1922-2008

2008-02-19T09:46:00.002-07:00

This sad news from Bloomberg.com, courtesy of Marc Lowe:

Feb. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Alain Robbe-Grillet, the French author and theoretician of the 1950s ``new novel'' genre, died today, the Academie Francaise reported. He was 85.

Seeking to overturn conventional fiction, Robbe-Grillet attempted to write novels that avoided psychological or ideological commentary, as he explained in his 1963 book, ``Pour un Nouveau Roman'' (``Toward a New Novel'').

In place of plot and character, Robbe-Grillet focused on meticulous descriptions of things and events as seen by an objective eye. With their timetables of people coming and going, Robbe-Grillet's novels can resemble noir detective stories.

His 1953 novel, ``Les Gommes'' (``The Erasers''), addresses a murder committed by the man who's investigating the crime. ``Le Voyeur'' of 1955 describes a stranger who kills a young girl.

Two years later, Robbe-Grillet published ``La Jalousie'' (``Jealousy''), in which a jealous husband spies on his wife and her suspected lover through the shutters of a blind, or ``jalousie.'' Time and again, his work explores the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity.

Born in Brest, Brittany, on Aug. 18, 1922, Robbe-Grillet trained as a statistician and agronomist before turning his hand to fiction. He wrote more than 10 novels, including last year's ``Un Roman Sentimental'' (``A Sentimental Novel''), a book about pedophilia that he called a ``fairy tale for adults.''

Robbe-Grillet also directed motion pictures, including ``L'Immortelle'' (``The Immortal,'' 1963) and ``L'Homme Qui Ment'' (``The Man Who Lies,'' 1968). His best-known work in film was his screenplay for Alain Resnais' ``L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad'' (``Last Year at Marienbad,'' 1961).

He was elected to the Academie Francaise in 2004.

the writer's edge : 1 march application deadline

2008-02-10T10:54:00.000-07:00

Please note that the application deadline for the third annual Writer's Edge conference is 1 March.

Sponsored by FC2 and hosted by Portland State University, The Writer's Edge will be held Friday through Sunday, 25-27 July, in downtown Portland, Oregon, and feature five workshops on innovative fiction, two panels, a faculty reading, two open mics for participants, and myriad conversations about experimental prose.

For more information, please click here.

Goodreads politics

2008-01-13T10:12:00.000-07:00

Simultaneous with reading Lidia's last post, I got involved in the past couple weeks with Goodreads, a networking site that operates on the basis of books -- who's read what, how you felt about it. It's not quite coming in each other's mouths, but it's addictive, promising, and emphasizes -- I'm right there with ya, Lid -- READING. One of the probs with the "year's best" lists we come up with is that inevitably we're listing our friends, and even if they write great books, it feels a little bit too local for me (besides which, there's the inevitable "hey, how come he didn't list MY book"!). A more outwardly networked service like Goodreads let's you list your faves, and then the listing riffs out into worlds semi-known and totally new.

Reading = Jouissance, yes, yes, yes... but I also feel nowadays a need to have a fully political commitment to reading as well. The new NEA report on reading, "To Read or Not to Read" (pdf), which updates the earlier 2004 report,"Reading at Risk," begins with three factual statements about our failing democracy:

• Americans are spending less time reading.
• Reading comprehension skills are eroding.
• These declines have serious civic, social, cultural, and economic implications.

Reading is becoming more and more explicitly a political act,and promoting reading certainly is. I made phonecalls for John Kerry in 2004 (I called Pennsylvania, which he won) -- now I'm trying to devote more time to promoting reading. Starcherone Books is a non-profit -- as are many small presses -- whose legal justification is as an educational organization promoting reading. That once felt like a convenient legal loophole in order to compete for grant money. It doesn't anymore.

dear reader

2007-12-31T14:36:00.000-07:00

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, Half Life by Shelly Jackson, Anxious Pleasures and Nietzsche’s Kisses by Lance Olsen, The Jiri Chronicles by Debra Diblasi, American Genius by Lynn Tillman, Frances Johnson by Stacey Levine, VAS (still), by Steve Tomasula.

These books gave me piss shivers over the last years, because, in their various ways, they unmasked the totality of the authority of capitalism--the glitz and grind of all our consuming—and reflected back to us the importance of art—that it can be an erotic exchange.

But I don’t really want to talk about books and authors just now. I want to talk about readers. Instead of listing the top ten authors or books of the last years, I’d like to list the top ten desires I have of a reader. Maybe it’s a dream reader who doesn’t exist. Maybe it’s a reader who really is out there, and I just haven’t quite written my way to her yet. Or maybe it’s a reader we play a part in creating—like people in intimate relationships do—unmaking and remaking each other. I don’t know. But lately I have developed an oceanic impulse to reach her, and the writing I am doing is different than any other writing I have ever done because of it. It’s very urgent, this feeling.

So:

1. Let her hair be made of fire. Her wonderous mind let loose finally, without permission or limit, burning with its desires and violences.

2. Let her hands breathe. Put the child to bed. The dishes are washed. The lover is sleeping. The lines near your eyes are the map of a life; ssshhh. Your fingers carry the crouch of dreams. Your hands are a world.

3. Let her heart beat. Not the dull thud of a good citizen but the wild rage of a love breaking open the very walls of story.

4. Let beauty come from inside the turmoil of her body. Where the blood gushes. The menses. The placenta. The cunt. The ass. The guts and shit of it—that transformational thing, that animal lunge, that tender rush of pulse, the body.

5. Let her knowing come in waves. Not what we’ve been told, not how we’ve been told to understand it, but with closed eyes and a body floating in warm water. Still the intellect open.

6. Let her transgress. Break any law here. I am waiting for you on the other side.

7. Let her mouths be what they are.

8. Let her tricks and fragments make pieces of things. I will let you be someone else and then yourself and then change as many times as you like. I will not tell anyone your secrets. I will carry your lies with the loyalty of a dog.

9. Let her come in my mouth. These words. I made them for you.

10. Let reading be a radical act of lovemaking.

Book Recommendations

2007-12-12T12:45:00.000-07:00

Hi, All --

Can we put together a list of books from the past year(ish) that we'd recommend? And maybe ones we look forward to reading?

I'll start with just a few (sorry if I actually *got* some of these from our past lists):

Half Life, by Shelley Jackson
B., Jonathan Baumbach
Anxious Pleasures, Lance Olsen
Europeana, Parik Ourednik
Tetched, Thaddeus Rutkowski
American Genius, Lynne Tillman

I plan to read Only Revolutions, by Mark Danielewski

I'm sure I'm forgetting many more.

Experimentally Friendly MFA / Ph.D. Programs

2007-11-22T21:17:00.000-07:00

Hello Everyone,
About this time of year I usually have someone ask, 'What schools are good for someone who's interested in experimental, conceptual, hybrid, avant-garde, postmodern (etc.) writing?' I thought it would helpful if we could put our heads together to come up with a list of schools/programs where like-minded students are working on this kind of writing (either as authors or critics), could find a mentor to work with, or at the least, find an atmosphere conducive to this kind of writing. Just off the top of my head, I'd start with the below list. Can you make suggestions or additions?--add you and your school if so inclined. Refine the listing, i.e., by filling in if the school offers an MFA or Ph.D. or whatever other info might be helpful to someone trying to sort out where to go?....

Lance Olsen at U of Utah
Brian Evenson, Robert Coover, Carol Maso at Brown
Ben Marcus at Columbia
Kate Bernheimer and Michael Martone at U of Alabama
R.M. Berry at Florida State
Jeffery DeShell and Elisabeth Sheffield at U. of Colorado
Naropa in Boulder, CO.
Steve Tomasula (fiction); Joyelle McSweeney (poetry) at U. of Notre Dame (MFA Program; the Ph.D. in Poetics is very experimental leaning: Check out Romana Huk and Stephen Fredman).

Suggestions more than welcome to this very sketchy start....
Yours,
Steve

Happy Thanksgiving from your Uncle Bill

2007-11-21T18:53:00.001-07:00

Good American Guts

ellipsis press

2007-11-16T10:04:00.000-07:00

I'm delighted to announce a new innovative press on the block: Ellipsis, founded by by Johannah Rodgers and Eugene Lim, is interested in novels that are structurally innovative.

On the press's website, the editors write: We like: novels that look normal but aren't (more than those that look weird but are actually quite normal); those that are successful at bypassing or evolving the seemingly necessary but often tired elements of character and/or plot; and those that respond in some way to the history of the novel as genre and form. Writers who have studied the traditional elements of the novel and experimented with them to emotionally moving and/or extraordinary ends are invited to submit for publication.

Live long and prosper . . .

What Rocks Cris Mazza’s World (and Other Stuff She Won’t Tell Just Anybody)

2007-11-15T18:53:00.000-07:00

Hey, look at me, I'm proxy-blogging!

Kat Meads recently sent me this interview she'd done with Cris Mazza. It appears here for the first time. Thanks, folks. - TP

CRIS MAZZA, director of the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, published her ninth novel, Waterbaby (Soft Skull Press), this fall. She is also the author of four short fiction collections, a collection of personal essays and the co-editor of two anthologies of women’s fiction, Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction and Chick-Lit 2 (No Chick Vics), both from FC2. A Southern California native, her first novel, How to Leave a Country, won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award, judged by Studs Terkel and Grace Paley. She has lived outside Chicago since 1993.

KAT MEADS’s most recent novel is The Invented Life of Kitty Duncan Benedict Roberts Duncan (Chiasmus Press).

KAT MEADS: Labels. Over the course of your career, your work has been called experimental, alternative, post-modern, feminist, postfeminist, and more. Labels. A good thing or a bad thing?

CRIS MAZZA: It’s chic, hip, the writerly vogue to be anti-label. And yet it distresses me when doctors and CPAs write crime novels in their “spare time” and call themselves novelists. Next time someone says this to me, I’ll say I’ve been performing some brain surgery in my spare time.

KM: So you’re not entirely anti-label.

CM: Already, as a novelist, I’ve been labeled and accepted a label. It’s the word before writer that exasperates. I could easily say: “I’m not a postmodern writer, and all the real postmodern writers will agree with me that I’m not.” But would I be putting a lot of other people into the boat I just got out of? No one wants to be known as a mystery writer, a historical fiction writer, or a young adult lit writer, any more than an actor wants to be known by only one role he or she played, like Batman, Superman, or one of the Brady Bunch. Why not just categorize the fiction? Why not just say: “I wrote an alternative collection of stories,” or “I wrote a novel with a historical component,” or “This novel has a feminist sensibility.”

KM: Woman writer. I forgot that one.

CM: There’s no parallel man writer. It even sounds stupid. Even those labels that might seem harmless at first, experimental or alternative, mark you as untouchable to a whole world of editors and as unreadable to a whole world of readers. They’re exclusionary (“intended only for smart, offbeat intellectuals”). The same is true for feminist writer (“boys keep out’) and postmodern writer (“you’d better have a PhD”). The postmodern label was the most difficult for me because I don’t understand Derrida, Foucault, and the other boys-of-theory and have decided to leave it that way. I’m not really interested in “the heady fun of learning deconstructive theory,” as one former student expressed it on a blog. So how could I wear the postmodern label proudly?

KM: So if Cris Mazza were labeling Cris Mazza….

CM: “You don’t have to be a student of an era to be the product of it.” That’s my label.

KM: After co-editing two Chick-Lit anthologies back in the mid-1990s, you seem to have become the ‘go-to’ commentator on how that genre has evolved (or devolved). Anything you haven’t said on that topic?

CM: How about that it was originally Clit-Lit and Jeffrey DeShell, the co-editor, and I were laughing so hard neither of us took either title seriously. We both thought the publisher would change Chick-Lit. When that didn’t happen, we were a little worried, but decided to remain audacious. That’s how we viewed the pieces inside, the attitude the anthology radiated. But the rationalization that the new commercial chick-lit “at least gets more people to read”??? Before the advent of personal VHS players in the early 80s, pornography got more people to read.

KM: At 27, you won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award for your first novel in manuscript, later published as How to Leave a Country. What did (or didn’t) that award do for your career?

CM: It didn’t do what the award was designed to do: discover an unpublished novelist and introduce his/her work to the world and NY publishers. It felt like every editor in NY asked to see the manuscript, but they all had the same response: not commercial enough. My “major-award winning manuscript” took eight years to find a publisher—an established independent, not-for-profit press.

KM: Which was a different kind of success story.

CM: A different kind of publicity story. “Award-winning novel takes eight years to find a publisher.” Because of that twist I enjoyed some exposure in Publisher’s Weekly, NYTBR, and other industry-favorites. Not too many years thereafter, the PEN/Nelson Algren Award was discontinued. Nobody ever told me why, but I assumed it had to do with the basic malfunction in its mission: the award was meant to discover new, interesting writers, and the respected-writer judges chose winners based on what they thought to be artistic quality. But the publishing industry wasn’t interested in the manuscripts of the “discovered.” This is no reflection on individual editors. In fact one editor who loved the book voluntarily sent the MS to other editors, essentially acting as my agent. I’ve never forgotten that small act of literary passion in the midst of a commercial enterprise.

KM: By any standard, you’re prolific: eight novels and another forthcoming, four short story collections, a collection of personal essays. A totally unfair question, but do you have favorites among your brood?

CM: As soon as I say I like one book over another, I feel sorry for the one(s) I put lower on the list. I have a certain fondness for each of my books, based on different aspects of their characteristics and personalities, each kept in a different place in my mind, based on nostalgia for the era in which they were written. At least one book and several stories I would very much like to revise because I know they can be better. Someone once told me a book is never finished, the writer just gives up. On at least one book I gave up too soon.

KM: An after-the-fact judgment.

CM: Of course. Typically, I think the book I’m working on is my best yet. Which is a fortunate outlook. To think, this is the best I’ve done, while I’m writing, whether it’s true or not, certainly is preferable to, wow, I used to be better than this. That would be reason enough to shitcan that particular project.

KM: A sentence from your published work that makes you think: yeah!

CM: “I’d been assigned to him, not at all by accident, to do my practice teaching in his classes, under his supervision, before I was granted the secondary teaching credential I never used—put away the day it arrived in the mail, with only wry thoughts of Mr. Wood and what I had hoped to learn but, ultimately, hadn’t.” Oh, you said published work. It’s not a true sentence, but I kind of like this one from Disability: “Hotdogs & mashed potatoes & wet carpet & industrial disinfectant & plastic toys & usually pee & sometimes poop.” And a short one that, for me, summed up an era: “They were, by then, fearless and nonchalant.” And from the ‘who needs first person to know the character’s voice?’ file: “Wannabes and pervs, didn’t it seem like that was all she’d ever worked for?”

KM: If someone locked you in a room and said you couldn’t come out until you’d written something, would or wouldn’t that faze you?

CM: If the “something” was a sentence, maybe a paragraph, that would be OK. But I’m the one who already IS locking me in a room—at least until I escape too often to get coffee or change a sprinkler in the garden.

KM: Do you maintain a ‘writing schedule’ per se?

CM: I almost always feel that I must be lazy, that I have no discipline, because I don’t often work on a novel past noon. Or feel guilty if I work on other kinds of things during my “novel working” time in the morning—preparing stories or excerpts to be sent out, researching lit mags, or answering interview questions like this, which I am doing at 9:30 in the morning when I should be working on the end of a novel-nearing-completion. I used to get out of bed, eat, have coffee and sit right down at the computer, not even change out of my sweats. But recently I’ve started taking a dog to field training two or three days a week, which means I meet with my master trainer at 7 a.m. somewhere—a pond, a cow pasture, a hayfield, a forest preserve to toss dead frozen ducks for the dog to retrieve. After that, I come home, get my second cup of coffee and try to settle in at the keyboard by 9, which is what I did this morning. I’m already needing a nap, but striving for self motivation.

KM: Dog training and novel writing—any similarities?

CM: Even if a dog has the instinct, the drive, to herd sheep, you can’t explain to a dog why he’s wrong when he scatters the flock instead of gathering, and how to do it right the next time, the way a good editor/reader helps with a MS-in-progress. Dogs learn initially through shaping: the trainer shapes their behavior by way of repetition, treat “bribes” and behavioral “corrections.” Eventually the dog (1) learns what a command means, (2) learns to obey the command without a food bribe and (3) learns no matter what else is going on, when it hears the command, it better do the behavior. Can you imagine that applied to writing a novel? What would the shaping be? I will shape the behavior of your mind to think of an interesting idea by … what? Hypnosis?

KM: Food bribes?

CM: The hypnotic suggestion of food. Every time you get a good idea, you smell chocolate, something like that. And if the idea you come up with is stupid, there’d be an electronic collar and you’d get a shock correction.

KM: Like a bad review.

CM: Like a really bad review. The kind that makes you think you never again want to write anything in the same vein as what got blasted.

KM: But when you do screw up your courage and take another shot at this thing called a “novel,” what’s the start-up process like for you? Do you (generally) begin with a visual? A sentence? A vicious conflict?

CM: Once a novel’s well under way, and particularly once I’m revising it, and especially when it’s finished, I can’t remember what I started with. There was one, Girl Beside Him, probably the only one, that I started with an image, and a stolen image at that: the helicopter bursting from over the jungle cover in Apocalypse Now. Except I substituted a lone sharpshooter aiming at coyotes in the grasslands of the West. Other ways to start: a character has recurrent memories, begins to question “what might have really happened,” and the novel develops from there. A revisit to my past can also start me off. Pretty much anything can incite me to spiral into the past, and while many of my characters share this emotional defect, usually their pasts are more interesting then mine.

KM: That comment is going to open you up to charges of Mazza is her character and her character is Mazza. Care to launch a preemptive defense?

CM: I’d actually be flattered if anyone thought that. My characters seem to have richer, more evocative experiences that I do. Of course, that’s one difference between real life and novels—few of us live dense, braided, comprehensive, complex dramas, and those “dramas” we do experience aren’t often related to each other nor as meaningful as what we find in novels. That’s why we read them, isn’t it, to have more heightened sensations, emotions, profundity, and drama than our own pitiful lives can provide? That said, when I do use my own experiences, it is often a vicarious reliving and revision of a situation, with a more complicated character—more useful for the drama at hand. By the way, that helicopter image had nothing to do with my past—probably the reason it’s the only novel that germinated out of a picture. I get too airsick to ever ride in a helicopter, so never will, except in writing.

KM: Why are your short stories short stories and your novels novels? Do you know? Do you care?

CM: I always tell students a piece needs to be as long as it needs to be. Sometimes it’s in the no-man’s-land length of novella or long story, and if so, so-be-it. I’ve never started a story that ended up a novel, nor started a novel that ended up a story. So there must be something different about my approach or mind-set, a rhythm I get into. Two years ago I wrote five stories to join five much older stories and create a complete collection. But I didn’t feel any difficulty turning the ideas into stories instead of novels. Perhaps the real answer is that some of my stories have played with formal qualities—like a story I created out of a timeline, or stories that used imbedded boxed text, or two columns, or a faux playscript. That kind of thing—called a gimmick by those who are irked by it—really can’t be sustained through a whole novel. (That would irk me too.) A story can be a testing ground, a place to showcase how an alternate form or narrative approach works. But you pretty much know how it works, what it produces, in the span of a short story. Why extend it 300 pages?

KM: The bulk of your work is fiction, but in 2003 you broke wide with a collection of autobiographical essays, Indigenous: Growing Up Californian. Why a nonfiction approach to that particular material?

CM: I had an agent who wanted me to write a nonfiction book. (Don’t they all?)

KM: But you published many of those essays, individually, in the San Diego Reader before they became a collection.

CM: The features editor of the San Diego Reader was one of those editors who could evoke work out of a reluctant writer. She asked me if I had any essay ideas for the Reader about San Diego. I said no, I didn’t really, that my life had been fairly uninteresting. She started asking questions: what did my parents do, how did they meet, what did our family do for recreation, what were my hobbies as I got older, and in answering her, I realized that as unspectacular as I’d thought my life had been (compared to the child-abuse, incest, addiction memoirs that were coming out then) there was something I could write about.

KM: Many readers of Indigenous were amazed that your childhood in Southern California came off so rural.

CM: Our family entertainment activities in San Diego County all involved hunting and gathering: hunting, fishing, gardening, even scavenging.

KM: Was disabusing assumptions about “the California experience” a motivation?

CM. For some of the essays, yes. When I had enough essays to make a book, I had to look for a way to unite them, so the subtitle, Growing Up Californian, did that for me after-the-fact. Not every essay is directly involved with “California-ness,” but all are part of “growing up,” or finally becoming adult, which can be a longer, more drawn-out journey for those of us who have chosen not to have children.

KM: Because of your indie rep, do you feel under obligation to produce a particular kind of “risky,” non-commercial book?

CM: The only thing that makes a novel successfully commercial, as opposed to being designated non-commercial, is a substantial print run, a publicity campaign that lets the general reader know the book exists, and the availability of the book in a majority of bookstores at an easy-to-find location. And it wouldn’t matter how “risky” the book was, all that readers would have to do is be able to find it, and hear that it’s worth reading, and they’ll read it. I believe that. So I don’t use the term “non-commercial.” I understand that some of my novels don’t conform to standards of traditional realism, but that doesn’t mean the experiences they depict can’t be vicariously experienced by the reader as realistic. As far as my subject matter being seen as “taking risks,” there’s been some applause but there’s also been some eyebrow raising at things I did but never with any thought that they were “risky.”

KM: For example?

CM: For example to develop a female character who’s weak, who is the source of her own weakness, and instead of having her overcome and end up “victorious” at a manifested place of individual strength and independence, she only comes as far as self-knowledge. Doing something with her new awareness is up to her outside the covers of the book. It’s this kind of “not-happy” ending that may be the real essence of “non-commercial.”

KM: How did we arrive at the presumptive “happy ending”? Literature is rife with unhappy endings.

CM: Past and present. Look at Susan Minot’s Evening. No happy ending. Not really done in “straight” narrative storytelling fashion. And no one said: “This isn’t commercial.” The book was available, and people read it. Tim O’Brien, Mary Gaitskill, A.M. Holmes, Annie Proulx, Jeffrey Eugenides, I can see types of “risks” in all of their work. Readers are adaptable and flexible; there just aren’t enough of them. If people who read know about a book, and the book is widely available, it will get bought. Getting bought (and hopefully read) is what makes a book commercial.

KM: For your new novel, Waterbaby, you have a new editor (Richard Nash) and publisher (Soft Skull). Will Soft Skull broaden the Cris Mazza audience?

CM: The whole atmosphere at Soft Skull is never-say-never. There’s so much shit piled up here … there must be a pony somewhere! Every optimism-first, rid-yourself-of-negative-vibes cliché you’ve ever heard can be applied to Soft Skull Press. So I’m catching that optimism. Trying to catch it.

KM: Waterbaby has a ‘historical’ component. That’s new terrain for you, isn’t it?

CM: Historical component with a familiar Mazza riff. A character who isn’t interested in doing “real” archival research to discover whether or not a 19th century family legend is true instead invents, and lives vicariously, an extended story she constructs starting from the legend. In “real life,” she’s also trapped in a “real memory” cycle. She’s a character disabled by a past that she feels has impaired her life, when it’s only her obsession with that past that hurts her. Whew, those three-sentence summaries are difficult!

KM: But that 19th century Maine legend intertwines with your own family history, correct?

CM: Yes. My maternal ancestry comes down from lighthouse keepers in Maine. My great grandfather and great-great grandfather, and several of each of their brothers, were lightkeepers. My great-grandfather and great-great grandfather were keepers of the same light for a combined 54 years. Therefore the legend, the story of “Seaborn, the shipwrecked baby” starred my great-great grandfather as the lightkeeper who supposedly rescued a baby who washed to shore bundled between two featherbeds after being tossed overboard from a sinking ship. The story qualifies as legend because no one knows what became of the baby. Like most legends, it was repeated by those who heard it from somewhere else.

KM: Any other plot secrets you’d care to divulge, pre-publication?

CM: There’s stuff involving the main character’s semi-estrangement from her immediate family, her history as a young competitive swimmer, a love affair she abandoned because of her interfering, bi-polar brother. And then, in what I call the “current” story, she finds a baby (I won’t say where), then “rescues” it, then hides with it in—where else?—a lighthouse. Sounds like a mess, but I did (and do) feel completely in control of it.

KM: So when the Critic on the Shoulder sneers: What’s a California native doing writing a novel about Maine? your response is…

CM: I think I already took care of that critic when I wrote Girl Beside Him, set in Rawlins, Wyoming. I’ve handled the Maine novel the same way I handled the Wyoming novel, by having the main character not be a native of the novel’s setting—a stranger-in-a-strange-land. Because, believe me, it makes steam come out my ears when a California transplant tries to write a “California novel,” and either sets it in or dresses it up with beaches and fast cars, or the Hollywood/Sunset Strip drug culture, or the Valley high-school culture. It breaks my heart that California is becoming a caricature of its own clichés. There’s still a lot there that the popular media, as well as most transplants, and in fact a fair percentage of natives don’t see, or don’t want to see. But I realize the same is going to be true of Maine natives who don’t want yet another novel about the romantic life of Maine lighthouse keeper, or the mystery of a lighthouse ghost legend. I was pre-alerted to this attitude when the local newspaper in Boothbay Harbor ran a series of articles trying to debunk the lighthouse legend that involves my relatives. The writer-historian was insulted that tourists were so interested in legends; she wanted them to be interested in “real history” instead. I was interested in the “realness” of the fact that the legend refused to die.

KM: What kind of research did you do for the book?

CM: When I started in the late ’90s, I had only the legend—called a “complete fabrication by a Maine writer-historian—and a “genealogical list” of my family. I knew the shipwrecked baby, Seaborn, wasn’t on the genealogical list, but that didn’t mean that my great-great grandfather hadn’t, in fact, rescued her. I eventually discovered that family lore suggested he gave the baby to a local doctor. So the historian’s effort to prove the entire legend was false intrigued me to the point of wanting to go further into the material. My first “research”—and I use the word lightly because I can’t claim to have dived into-the-archives—was to compare the different recitations of the legend and note dates, shipwreck details, details about the lightkeeper’s family. And then the crucial ones: 1) the lightkeeper and his wife had recently lost a baby; 2) the lightkeeper and his wife had recently lost a first baby; 3) the lightkeeper and his wife adopted the rescued baby; and 4) the baby was the daughter of a Swedish land baron.

KM: The daughter of a Swedish land baron—that’s quite a detail.

CM: And preposterous. That one came from a potboiler novel, published around 1900, that had all the elements of the story of the shipwrecked baby, plus the Swedish heiress twist. My genealogical list told me that my great-great grandfather’s wife was born in Sweden. The writer-historian used the existence of the novel to prove that the story originated in a novel, and therefore was all false. But couldn’t a local novelist have heard elements of the story and facts about the characters and used this legend to write a novel? That is, after all, one way novelists work.

KM: Did you also go to Maine?

CM: I did. My most important research was to go to Southport Island, Maine, and visit the small cemetery where my descendants are buried. Right beside the stones for my great-great grandfather and his wife there sat a stone for one of their children who had died at four years old, and it was a name that did not appear on my genealogical list. So there was a dead child, and it was around the same time as the shipwreck. My research turned up another surprise: that the dead toddler had been the twin of a woman who was on the genealogical list. This started my imagination running as to what her life had been, after the death of her twin, and she became the principal person whose life my character co-opted, imagined, fabricated, and lived vicariously.

KM: So you got to play, as a novelist, with a “19th century voice”?

CM: Pseudo 19th century voice. “This is a fixed, sturdy, faithful place, a place seething with strength yet surrounded by uncertainty, violence.”

KM: Current writing projects?

CM: Back to California, back to the border where development meets backcountry. I had read about the sex slave trade in California and Arizona, where girls are abducted from Mexico, Central America, and farther south, brought to the U.S. and forced to be prostitutes, mostly for the migrant workers, but sometimes for rich gringos. When law enforcement started rousting them out of rented houses, they took the business outdoors and began offering the “services” of these girls in the chaparral just outside the border.

KM: Not quite the same kind of research you undertook for Waterbaby.

CM: No. One thing I felt I couldn’t do was track down the activity and see it up close, even interview one of the girls. The literal danger was too high. So I knew I couldn’t write a novel that starred an abducted victim or a pimp. So once again, I gave the experience of discovering this activity “in her own backyard” to a character whose particular past makes watching and reacting to this particular horrific situation, more consequential than a simple journalistic “outing” of the story.

KM: And now for the writerly influences question: Who/what has had the most influence on Cris Mazza’s writing?

CM: I read Fear of Flying in college, several years after it was released. It kind of rocked my world. Nowadays I’d probably think its use of first person was an unnecessary distraction, but I think in order to do what it did (not just to me, but to women’s writing in general) it had to be in first person at the time. So Jong directly influenced my writing. Intimate confessions about sexual issues decidedly from a female POV. Sex not always being the fly-me-to-the-moon experience male writers had wanted to assume for women. Other than that? Maybe Nabokov. At one time, Carver. Recently, like 2 months ago, I read The Golden Notebook for the first time. It crystallized and validated some issues I’ve had with how to best use first person to its optimum potential. And a lot of it re-rocked my world.

B'Byes to the Prize -- an open letter

2007-10-25T13:35:00.000-06:00

To whom it may concern,

After five years of sponsoring an annual contest for works of innovative fiction, Starcherone Books has decided to discontinue our annual Fiction Prize for 2008-09.

We make this decision with a mixture of emotions. In its five years of existence, the Starcherone Fiction Prize fulfilled our highest hopes of finding wonderful new talents on which to bestow our prize and offer publication. All five winners of our blind-judged prize have been first-time authors: Aimee Parkison, Nina Shope, Sara Greenslit, Zachary Mason, and Janet Mitchell. Three of these books have been published to date. The fourth, Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey, is in production for Spring 2008 release, and the fifth, Janet Mitchell’s The Last of This Day’s Light, will appear in our 2009 season. We could not be prouder of our choices, all of which splendidly exhibit inventiveness, idiosyncracy, and artistic bravery. It was our contention at the birth of our contest that mainstream publishers’ moribund fiction offerings today were missing out many of the most significant young talents – writers who took chances not rewarded by a strict “market” approach to publishing. We feel this list of our prizewinning books is a small gesture in proof our case.

Our prizewinning authors have gone on to enjoy other successes that validate our decisions, including Nina Shope’s having won the Italo Calvino Prize for Innovative Fiction, and Aimee Parkison’s winning of the Kurt Vonnegut Prize from North American Review and a fellowship from the Isherwood Foundation, in addition to other awards our writers have received in the wake of our selections.

Of equal importance to the legacy of the Starcherone Fiction Prize is the record we leave behind of unimpeachable ethical behavior. During a period when several national contests were accused of questionable practices and more than one absconded with funds or otherwise left its entrants feeling betrayed, Starcherone’s contest reputation was never called into question. In 2005, we participated in CLMP’s development of a set of contest ethics, both to combat the negative perception of contests and to ensure that our own contest would always be conducted with the highest standards of responsibility. We then went the CLMP statement one step further, defining what constituted “conflict of interest” in a blind-judging procedure, and posting these guidelines as well on our website. Part of these additional guidelines was the offer to return any entrant’s contest fees upon request. Receiving over 900 entries over a five-year period, we were asked only once to return a fee, which we promptly did. More notably, over these five years, we received countless thankyous and congratulations for offering writers of innovative fiction a venue for their work to be read and have a chance at publication outside the who-knows-who world of agents, writing programs, and the insider-deals of big publishing.

Several factors unrelated to our successful experiences with the contest have made us decide to offer it no longer. First, we have come to a recognition of our size and the resulting limited ability we might have to singlehandedly change the contemporary fiction landscape. We have done our part, but now we have a strong stable of authors we would like to continue to support while turning over some of the work of discovering new talents to other small presses. We hope to return to reading new manuscripts sometime down the road, but at present have all the projects we need, at least for the near future.

As well, we have found (to our dismay), running our contest – despite its clearly articulated rules, history of ethical conduct, and success in locating new talents previously unknown to us – has made it difficult for us to attract grant money needed to insure the success of Starcherone Books over the long haul. Specifically, the New York State Council for the Arts (NYSCA) has never approved of our or any other publisher’s contest, for reasons we have never ourselves found convincing and, indeed, inconsistent with the positions of many other state funding agencies. We have endeavored for several years to try to obtain NYSCA funding while also offering the contest, which we contended (and demonstrated) helped bring many unknown writers into print. Alas, NYSCA and Starcherone never saw eye-to-eye on the subject. As said above, we are small, and have decided it is now time to discontinue fighting City Hall.

Finally, the time commitments of running the contest have finally proven too much for our dedicated but small staff. Reading for the contest (leaving out the processes of advertising, cataloging entries, etc.) annually consumed two-and-a-half months out of our yearly schedule. Since our staff readers have always been volunteers who were almost universally writers themselves (as well as workers, teachers, parents, etc.), and despite what we see as the overwhelming success of our half-decade venture, we breathe a collective sigh of relief at concluding the contest process. Personally speaking, I have given myself over to contest judging, full-time, for the six weeks between May 15 and July 1, five years running – a total of thirty weeks of my life! It will be nice to get that time back in my life, even as I will miss the thrill of hitting gold after endless hours of digging and panning.

Starcherone Books remains an active publisher of innovative fiction, with a slate of four titles scheduled for 2008 and several books under contract for 2009 and beyond. We thank our many supporters and urge those interested in new fiction – who may have entered our contest many times before or be reading about our contest here for the first time – to make the effort to read new works of innovative fiction. Particularly, we recommend the books (three published, two in the offing) that have won our very competitive prize since judging first began in 2003.

Best wishes,

Ted Pelton, Executive Director, Starcherone Books

Multicultural > Romance, or, How to Pleasure a Sister

2007-10-12T15:19:00.000-06:00

Oh, we are all such busy people! Who has time to blog? But friends, let us not forget what brought us here. No need to write essays every time out of the box. But we should continue to talk about why we think innovative/avantgarde/experimental/heterodox fiction is what we all have said it is: a potential antidote to the stupidity of American hegemony in 2007! to the mindlessness of a society that knows of many ways that it's going in the wrong direction but seems powerless to stop itself!! to the simplistic selves we're told we are by advertisers politicians law enforcement officers and many many others!!! an art form at a time when books are commodities and Bertelsmann Murdoch Time Warner etc. has nearly secured its victory over us and we're at the point of near-irrelevance!!!! -- It's important to keep talking. We are not against tradition. We are a version of the tradition that's being edited out.

Or: Fuck, it's Friday afternoon & I'm home from work & no one else has been writing so I will.

A funny thing happened to me this week. I am promoting my novel Malcolm & Jack during the month of October (and so the smartest among you are now saying, oh, I see, this isn't a legitimate blog, this is just part of his marketing strategy ... but I'll just leave that thread alone ...), and have it linked on amazon.com with Jack Kerouac's new "Original Scroll" version of On the Road (See promotion here). This has made my sales rise ever so slightly (and not nearly enough to pay for the cost of the promotion).

Anyway, my novel is called Malcolm & Jack (and Other Famous American Criminals) and is centered around a conjectured meeting between Malcolm X and Jack Kerouac. It's a novel about history, underground characters during the beginnings of American empire, improvisational poetics & politics, etc.

But this bump in sales had it challenging this past week in the top 100 in sales in the "Romance > Multicultural" category. It reached as high as #56. (This corresponded to about #50,000 overall.) What other kind of books are in the "Romance > Multicultural" category? When later in the week I was #69, here were the rankings between #60-70:

60. Shattered Trust
by Leslie Esdaile (Author)

61. Jared's Counterfeit Fiancee (Silhouette Desire)
by Brenda Jackson (Author)

62. Solid Soul (Kimani Romance), by Brenda Jackson (Author)

63. The Honey Well, by Gloria Mallette

64. Bodyguard (Indigo)
by Andrea Jackson (Author)

65. No Apologies (Indigo: Sensuous Love Stories)
by Seressia Glass (Author)

66. Let's Get It On (Love Spectrum Romance)
by Dyanne Davis (Author)

67. The Politics of Love (Noire Fever)
by Giselle Carmichael (Author)

68. Baby Momma Drama
by Carl Weber (Author)

69. Malcolm & Jack (and Other Famous American Criminals)
by Ted Pelton (Author)

70. Somebody's Gotta Be On Top
by Mary Morrison (Author)

The plot of Jared's Counterfeit Fiancee is

"In the real world there was no way flower shop owner Kylie Hagan would ever meet up with millionaire Chance Steele. But the world of single parents and teenage hormones brought them together the first time -- and a simmering passion they both tried to deny wouldn't keep them apart for long.
"Chance made her think of hot, sultry Southern nights. Kylie had him imagining satin sheets and soul-stirring kisses. But in the cold light of day, they had to resist each other. There was no way they'd let uncontrollable desire ignite their carefully protected hearts.
"But some things they couldn't ignore.…"

But I like Somebody's Gotta Be On Top even better:

"So says Darius Jones. At twenty-two, he’s grown…but he hasn’t necessarily grown up. He still thinks the opposite sex exists purely for his satisfaction. Not that he doesn’t know how to pleasure a sister; he just doesn’t want them telling him the way it’s going to be. But trying to be on top all the time only gets him into trouble with the women in his life—including Fancy Taylor. With a regal bearing and skin like brown sugar, Fancy’s definitely intriguing. Darius is sure he’d enjoy sampling what the lady has to offer, but that’s all. Fancy’s past precludes her from being serious relationship material. Yet fate has a way of stepping in and putting the wrong people on the right path…
"Caught between pride and the call of his own untrusting heart, Darius has a lot to learn: about life, women, and what it takes to find and nurture real love. And if he’s not careful, he might just end up on the bottom of everything…."

Evidently, merely having Malcolm X as a title character in my novel Malcolm & Jack is enough to put it in the hot black sex soft-core. It seems to me that this was something Malcolm complained about during his lifetime, at least 40 years ago -- that the mere image of the black man sent the white establishment into a frenzy of sexual fantasy.

What do you see as the moral or lesson of this tale? Dear readers, what say ye all? Do we yet still know each other?

kore press chapbook competition

2007-09-29T12:51:00.000-06:00

judge

Lydia Davis

deadline

31 October

prize

The 2008 Fiction Award Winner will receive $1,000 plus publication as a stand-alone short-story chapbook.

guidelines

This competition is open to any woman writing in English, regardless of nationality.

Please submit one copy of a previously unpublished short story, a cover sheet, and a $15 reading fee payable to Kore Press. Please make sure your name, address, phone numbers and email address is on the cover sheet (see below).

All entrants will be notified of results via email. If you wish, you may send a self-addressed stamped postcard to confirm we received your manuscript. Please note that manuscripts cannot be returned.

Cover sheet should include:

name
address
daytime and evening telephone numbers
email address
title of manuscript

Manuscripts must be:

a minimum of 4,000 words and a maximum of 12,000 words
on standard white paper, doublespaced
paginated
unbound
anonymous (do not include your name anywhere on the manuscript)
original fiction written by the applicant (translations are not eligible)
unpublished at the time of submission

If the story is accepted elsewhere during our deliberation process, please notify us immediately.

Send submissions to:

Kore Press, Short Fiction Award
P.O. Box 3044
Tucson, AZ 85702-3044

a word about the judge

An American virtuoso, Lydia Davisis an innovator of the short story form. She is the author of four collections of short fiction, including Varieties of Disturbance (2007). Her fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and Best American Poetry, and has been published in literary journals ranging from The New Yorker and Harper's to Conjunctions and McSweeney's. Davis is also the translator of numerous avant-garde French novels, memoirs, and volumes of literary criticism.

for more information

Click here.

the writer's edge 2008

2007-09-16T12:37:00.000-06:00

Please take note, and please help pass that word: the third annual Writer's Edge conference will be held Friday through Sunday, 25-27 July, in downtown Portland, Oregon.

Sponsored by FC2 and hosted by Portland State University, it will feature five workshops on innovative fiction, two panels, a faculty reading, two open mics for participants, and myriad conversations about experimental prose.

Here are descriptions for next year's workshops, as well as a list of the faculty teaching them. For more information, please click here.

Fairy Tales Almost Blue
Kate Bernheimer
“At an early age, children are weaned on the marvelous, and later on they fail to retain a sufficient virginity of mind to enjoy fairy tales,” André Breton wrote in 1924. “There are fairy tales to be written for adults,” he continued. “Fairy tales almost blue.” (Perhaps not coincidentally, Andrew Lang’s first fairy-tale collection, published in 1884, was The Blue Fairy Book.) This workshop will ask us to transform our minds into virginal ones, to seek the marvelous, to be almost blue, to discover what almost blue means. We will read short fairy tales, with an eye toward abstraction, from Hans Christian Andersen, Angela Carter, the Brothers Grimm, Mohammed Mrabet, and others. We will inspect their language, their motifs. We will discuss intuition and form in fairy tales. We will seek to be weaned on the marvelous, to see where it takes us in writing. We will leave the workshop having written a short fairy tale for adults, and, hopefully, an appreciation for the avant-garde nature of fairy tales.

Usage is More Powerful than Reason
Noy Holland
“Now is the night one blue dew,” James Agee wrote in A Death in the Family. We are urged by many to choose the right word, but, having chosen it, where do we put it? This is a class about syntax and sound—it’s about the music of sentences, the visceral effect of the language. We’ll exercise a poet’s attentiveness to cadence, to where the stresses of syllables fall, to the beauties of repetition. Some of the most glorious sentences in the language are composed of humble and familiar words. Some of the most glorious paragraphs and pages in the language are composed of humble and familiar words. The labor, then, is in the arranging, in the rightly misplaced adjective, in the dissonance produced by concentrations of sound and stress as with “one blue dew”—which, while it describes the loveliness of twilight, surges with something terrible and portentous. The chemical affinities between words are greatly altered by distance and proximity; that is, we manipulate those affinities via syntax, and by this do our work on the body of the (bless you) receptive reader.

The Mosaic Mind: Fiction as Collage
Lance Olsen
Collage is an aesthetic and theoretical gesture committed to liberation through juxtaposition, conflation, fusion, confusion, patchwork imaginations, cyborg scripts, centaur texts, narratologically amphibious writings, the mosaic mind that embrace a poetics of beautiful monstrosity. Through mini-lecture, conversation, and three writing exercises, we shall examine the history of this form in the arts, then visit several theories of the collage, including those posed by Picasso, Duchamp, Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, Burroughs, Ronald Sukenick, Donna Haraway, and Shelley Jackson, exploring how, through the very process of cutting up and cutting off, collage in fiction (and painting, and body modification, and . . .) opens up and out, often calling attention to the sensuality of the page, the canvas, the skin, the surfaces it inhabits. In preparation for this workshop, please read the following: Blood & Guts in High School, Kathy Acker; Snow White, Donald Barthelme; My Body, Shelley Jackson (a hypertext available online); The Last Novel, David Markson.

M(M)MW: Multi(Modal)Media Writing
Steve Tomsula
Anytime a medium goes through a time of flux, exciting possibilities open up. This is certainly the case with writing today where authors can employ visuals or sound as never before. M(M)MW will take up what can be called multimedia, or multimodal, writing: fiction, poetry, e- and hybrid works, both print and electronic, that incorporate visual and/or audio elements, and yet still foreground language as their main material, and are experienced primarily through reading. When is an image gratuitous or only an illustration and when is it part of the fabric of a story? How is a graphic novel different from a film? That is, why write at all? Why not just make an animation? The goal is for everyone to formulate their own M(M)MW poetics: What makes a word-image text good? Bad? Ugly? How can you incorporate this poetics into your own writing? Before the workshop convenes, students will be asked to become familiar with several M(M)MW works, and arrive with a completed, short M(M)MW writing exercise.

Wrestling the Novel
Lidia Yuknavitch
It’s 2008-9. The novel in America has reached an unfortunate kind of product pinnacle, in that what gets named and legitimized as a "novel" either wins a buncha academic prizes, makes a lot of money through its entertainment value and mind-numbing massagery, or makes it onto Oprah. My question is this: what else can the novel be, right now, right here? Using the novels listed below as case-studies, we will explore NOT what is killing the novel, but what IS MADE POSSIBLE by the formation, deformation, and reformation of the novel in America. We will discuss the hardships/challenges of longer work, and we will put ourselves through three writing crucibles in an effort to rescue and engage novelistic writing strategies, the last of which we will use to create a collaborative undoing of the novel by the end of the weekend. Using a framework I am borrowing from the collaborative novel I co-wrote with Ken Kesey and the grad students of the University of Oregon, we will create an undoing of the novel. Our collaborative undoing of the novel will be published by Chiasmus Press. To prep: get your hands on and read around in these books:

VAS/Steve Tomasula
Anxious Pleasures/ Lance Olsen
AVA/Carole Maso
Dra-/Stacey Levine

Marco Breuer at the Von Lintel Gallery

2007-09-07T16:21:00.001-06:00

For those of you in New York City, check it! You can still make the opening. Breuer creates exquisite 'camera less' photographs by physically manipulating (scratching, tearing, abrading) I wrote a short accompanying text to his installation last year. Here are some images:

More can be found at:
http://www.vonlintel.com/index2.html

Or, for those not in New York, check out his book, Early Recordings:

Jeffrey

chiasmus press podcast #3

2007-09-02T16:43:00.000-06:00

Long-time friends Virginia Patterson and Ryan Smith joined The Chiasmites on August 31 to record episode #03. Here's what we discussed:

Chiasmus Fight Song Contest :: Virginia's role as Chiasmus publicist :: Ryan's role as box-lugger, burrito-buyer and switchblade-packer :: How Ryan paid Harold Jaffe's mini-bar tab :: Raymond Federman :: Lidia and Virginia reminisce about Those Days Of Yore At Pacific University :: Mark Amerika's new book (BUY IT NOW!) :: Alt-X :: Zombie Chic :: Gamer Chix + Boiz :: Virginia's 20 year love triangle with Mario and Link :: Grant Morrison's The Invisibles :: Ryan hails King Mingo as "Honey" :: Lidia explains the artistic tragedy b/k/a Seung-Hui Cho :: Nick Mamatas :: Madness, art, and higher education :: Andy explains how Larry Craig's penchant for fine footware in public bathrooms is Totally Not Gay :: Trevor attempts a half-assed comparison between Craig and Cho :: Andy's new blog :: Ryan abuses a stripper during a recent shoot for The Iconographer (free greasy T-shirts!) :: Team America: World Police :: Snake hunting in Estacada :: A room full of overpaid professors whine about having to go back to work :: Ryan compares and contrasts adjunct and EMT work :: Trevor's fever dream about team-teaching with Lidia ::

Let us know what you think and what you want to hear in future episodes by sending us an email at contact@chiasmusmedia.net. You can also leave us voice feedback via Skype; our username there is chiasmuspress. We're also on Facebook and MySpace. Click here to subscribe via iTunes.

Keep those knees bent.

Mullen's Murmur

2007-08-29T17:25:00.001-06:00

Quick notes being all I’m capable of at the moment, here’s one about a terrific book (I’ll even call it a novel) I read over the summer. I’m not yet convinced writers who write primarily poetry can produce interesting narrative, but Mullen manages to ask the questions in fascinating, skillful and elegant ways. I’m quite interested these days in the tensions between individual moments (sentences, images, glimpses) and the larger (external?) demands of narrative, and Mullen’s book seems to worry similar knots and problems. She works the questions of genre so rigorously and authentically that I begin to imagine the as yet untapped possibilities of liminal prose (or at least I begin to imagine such possibilities as positive, and drop my ‘neither fish nor fowl’ objections). Still, I have some investment in calling this a novel, as the language refuses to refuse narrative momentum, refuses to rely on (mere) revelation, and offers instead a dark and obscuring tale, at once familiar (a murder mystery) and deranged. Delicious.
Jeffrey.

chiasmus podcast, take two

2007-08-19T02:09:00.000-06:00

Pimped/name-dropped/discussed in episode #02 of the Chiasmus Press podcast:

:: Chiasmus on Facebook, MySpace and iTunes :: Chiasmus Battle Hymn Contest :: Writer's Edge redux :: Lance Olsen :: Andy's film shoot at Magic Gardens (Lidia=aroused!) :: Andy Blubaugh's Scaredycat :: Trevor's shirt that didn't get him laid :: Fiction Collective Two :: Lily Hoang's glittering genius :: Steve Tomasula's raging egomania :: Notre Dame's prima donna MFA program :: King Mingo holds court :: Colette Phair sells her body :: Eraserhead Press :: How a college education = meh :: Hal Jaffe :: How Andy romanticizes Eugene lumber yards :: Ken Kesey's debt :: Creative economies :: Lidia and Michelle totally ruin the Harry Potter books for us all :: Aesthetics =/ Market :: How 300 was "totally not gay" :: Brian Evenson :: Graphic novels =/ Films =/ Sentence and Paragraph novels :: Top Shelf :: Dark Horse :: Oni Press :: VAS: An Opera in Flatland :: Anxious Pleasures :: Do filmmakers get to have sex with their novelist wives? :: Alan Moore :: Trevor frustrates Andy with The Big Vocabulary :: The blessings and curses of the 48-hour Film Project :: Oulipo :: Andy frustrates himself with his own double-talk :: Willem de Kooning :: Lidia's codeine-fueled flatulence and spankin' new blog :: Authorship as fiction :: This podcast emulates stupid college radio ::

Let us know what you think and what you want to hear in future episodes by commenting on this post or sending us an email at contact@chiasmusmedia.net. You can also leave us voice feedback via Skype; our username there is chiasmuspress.

Some Classics Overheard in the Classic City

2007-08-13T14:06:00.000-06:00

So I've spent a not insignificant amount of my summer vacationing in Athens.

Georgia, that is.

Among the things I like about the place are its restaurants—especially Five and Ten. But I also appreciate the interesting variety of programs on the local NPR station. Today one of those programs—To the Best of Our Knowledge—had a show on Tristram Shandy, the book and the movie. That was the hook. But really, the show was about metafiction. Several familiar names get mentioned here: Cervantes, Chaucer, Borges, Coover, Barth, Gass, Pynchon, Calvino, Marquez. The show ends with an interview with hip hop artist Saul Williams, author of the Dead Emcee Scrolls, as a representative of metafiction's future. In an earlier segment, journalist Steve Paulson reminisces about a 1983 interview he did with Borges. Some nice audio from that interview is included with a few readings from Borges' work. Paulson returns, then, with a more recent interview with Robert Coover.

I appreciate that a radio program would spend an hour considering something called "Metafiction," but there remains throughout a tone of bewilderment, perhaps even frustration, at the works and their creators. Metafiction is still weird and confusing, a bit too clever for its own good, Shandy (the book) a slog one might be "forced" to read in English class, Borges a player of games. And, tacitly, it seems like kind of a dude thing this "metafiction." Coover is the only person to mention a female writer by name (Angela Carter) while also pointing out that there was a general refusal of received narrative style by his generation, resulting in a variety of different approaches, not all of them "metafiction." He's given credit, as a professor, for influencing young writers, but there's little discussion or evidence of this influence otherwise. A shame. What an opportunity this might have been to demonstrate the lively and spectacularly varied legacy of a "movement" that's too often dismissed as a literary dead end, a relic in the shape of a phallic ivory tower. Here it kind of feels like one as the show tends to buy into the rhetoric of a perplexed, even resistant (rather than healthily skeptical) student.

Presenting Williams (whose work I first heard on DJ Spooky's Under the Influence) as a future of metafiction was certainly an interesting choice, though, and I think there's a lot more to be said about the relationship between the DJ and contemporary narrative. Just would've liked to hear some discussion of one of our many literary compatriots, as well.

writer's edge readings

2007-08-07T20:29:00.000-06:00

Someone crammed a camera into the room during the Writer's Edge faculty readings in Portland last weekend...

Lucy Corin: YouTube | iPod/MV4

Brian Evenson: YouTube | iPod/MV4

Lance Olsen: YouTube | iPod/MV4

Lidia Yuknavitch: YouTube | iPod/MV4

Trevor Dodge: YouTube | iPod/MV4

the writer's edge 2007

2007-08-04T20:20:00.000-06:00

I've just returned, settled in, and got my brain back on straight after the awesome second annual Writer's Edge conference held Friday through Sunday, 27-29 July, in downtown Portland, Oregon. Sponsored by FC2 and hosted by Portland State University, the gathering was composed of five workshops, two panels, a faculty reading, two open mics for participants, and myriad conversations about innovative prose. Last year 50 participants from around the country attended. I'm happy to report that this year the number was 65 and we fully expect to see 75 next.

Lidia Yuknavitch and I served as co-sponsors, and our overwhelming impression was one of creative and intellectual good-spiritedness, invigorating energy, and a thoroughgoing committment to the notion of collectivity. We've already begun working on next year's conference, whose faculty will include, in addition to Lidia and me, the remarkable Kate Bernheimer, Noy Holland, and Steve Tomasula. Even as I write this, cyberguru Aaron Waychoff is proving himself divine by setting up a discussion space for past and present participants to come together to talk about their interests. More on all of this and more soon, but right now just a few of the highlights from this year's gathering of the tribe:

At the core of the get-together were those five workshops I mentioned. Lidia Yuknavitch led one on "Corporeal Texts," exploring the interstices between the body and writing where meaning is always in flux. Trevor Dodge focused on hybridity in creative nonfiction. In "Small Fictions in a Row," Lucy Corin posed such questions as: "How many different ways can a writer, who supposedly has one 'voice,' distill narrative and language within limited space?" and "How 'big' can you make a small thing?" Brian Evenson invesitgated the variety of ways in which contemporary writers can and do respond to writers who have come before them in "Collaborating with the Past." "Fiction as Architecture," the workshop I led, interested itself in the question: "How it is both illuminating and stimulating to conceptualize fiction's structures and discourses as spaces one lives in and moves through as one might, for instance, a Bauhaus building, a tenement, an emergency room, a funhouse, a cathedral?"

The Simon Benson House, site of our communal dinner on Saturday evening, as well as a snippet of the Portland State University campus.

Faculty reading: Lidia Yuknavitch.

Faculty reading: Lucy Corin.

Faculty reading: Brian Evenson.

The above panel, featuring Trevor Dodge, Lidia Yuknavitch, Lucy Corin, Brian Evenson, and me, addressed trends in experimental writing. A second panel, featuring innovative film makers Holly Andres, Grace Carter, Karl Lind, Andy Blubaugh, and Andi Olsen, addressed experimental film and narratology.

A photo of faculty who seem puzzled when a camera is pointing at them: Trevor Dodge and Lance Olsen.

And a gargantuan thanks to one and all for helping make this year's coming together startling and thrilling and warm and reengergizing, but most of all the epitome of what an intentional community can and should be.

review: david markson : the last novel

2007-07-25T11:34:00.000-06:00

david markson, 2007

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

I do not see why exposition and description are a necessary part of a novel.
Said Ivy Compton-Burnett.

I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man.
Said Joyce.

ronald sukenick, 1975

This novel is based on the Mosaic Law the law of mosaics or how to deal with parts in the absence of wholes.

david markson, 2007

A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel.

And thus in which Novelist will say more about himself only when he finds no way to evade doing so, but rarely otherwise.

lance olsen, 2007

Which is to say: both the structuring and the reading of collage fiction often involves an aleatoric component that recalls not only the Cubist work of Braque and Picasso, but also the Dada and Surrealist work of Duchamp and Breton: interest in the found object, the readymade, the chance encounter.

It also recalls Lévi-Strauss’ notion of bricolage, as Gregory L. Ulmer points out, foregrounding concepts of already-extant messages, severing, discontinuity, and heterogeneity.

Ulmer goes on to argue that collage is a form of citation “carried to an extreme …, collage being the ‘limit case’ of citation,” and Derrida reminds us that “every sign, linguistic or non-linguistic … can be cited, put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable.”

Collage, then, through the very process of cutting up and cutting off opens up and opens out.

By appropriating and quoting out of context, the form releases new and often unexpected contexts, recontextualizations that can surprise the author as well as the reader.

shelley jackson, 2003

In collage, writing is stripped of the pretense of originality, and appears as a practice of mediation, of selection and contextualization, a practice, almost, of reading. In which one can be surprised by what one has to say, in the forced intercourse between texts or the recombinant potential in one text …. Writers court the sideways glances of sentences mostly bent on other things. They solicit bad behavior, collusion, conspiracies. Hypertext just makes explicit what everyone does already. After all, we are all collage artists.

ronald sukenick, 1994

You need to understand that understanding is an interruption. Understanding is always an interruption of which you understand in the form of the cryptic. You need to interrupt yourself.

david markson, 2007

Novelist's personal genre. For all its seeming fragmentation, nonetheless obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax.

david markson, 2007

Jacques Derrida failed his entrance exams to the École Normal Supérieure. Twice.

lance olsen, 2007

Collage fiction draws attention to the sensuality of the page, the physicality of the book, and therefore draws attention to writing as a post-biological body of text. This point is evinced, for instance, in Steve Tomasula’s novel VAS: An Opera in Flatland, and Shelley Jackson’s web-based hypertext, My Body.

Replete with three-color graphics, foldout pages, wild typographic play, diagrams, doodles, drawings, and disparate citations, the former involves an expansive comic plot about a man named Square living in a (literally) two-dimensional suburban world with his wife, Circle, and their daughter, Oval, and Square’s struggle over whether or not to undergo a vasectomy. But it is the structure of that plot—that is, the body of the text about the text of the body—that makes Tomasula’s collage fiction an unforgettably unique reading experience.

In the latter, the reader chooses which parts of Shelley Jackson’s critifictional autobiography to read by clicking on various parts of her body in a schematic sketch. The sound of lungs inhaling and exhaling in the background provides musical accompaniment to much of the reading experience.

david markson, 2007

Nobody comes. Nobody calls—
Which Novelist after a moment realizes may sound like a line of Beckett's, but is actually something he himself has said in an earlier book.

david markson, 2007

Thinking with someone else's brain.
Schopenhauer called reading.

lance olsen, 2007

Since discovering Wittgenstein's Mistress perhaps a decade ago, I haven't been able to write without writing through Markson.

I wouldn't want it any other way.

Which isn't to say Markson's moves in The Last Novel may not have begun to seem faintly familiar to those who know his last two non-novels.

But, still: what gorgeous, exciting, invigorating moves.

david markson, 2007

My old paintings no longer interest me. I'm much more curious about those I haven't done yet.
Said Picasso, at seventy-nine.

chiasmacast!

2007-07-25T00:52:00.000-06:00

I met up last week with Andy Mingo and Lidia Yuknavitch to record the first episode of a brand-spankin'-new podcast for Chiasmus Press. Here's who and what we pimped/name-dropped/mentioned in ep #01:

Lidia's new novel and her boxing match with Stacey Levine :: Andy's new film, The Iconographer :: Mark Amerika :: Lou Rowan :: Davis Schneiderman :: Carlos Hernandez :: Strippers and donuts in Portland :: 2007 Writers Edge Conference :: Lance Olsen :: Brian Evenson :: Lucy Corin :: Magic Gardens :: Miranda July :: Holly Andres :: Grace Carter :: Andy Blubaugh :: Karl Lind :: Kill Me Tomorrow :: The White Stripes' one-note show :: Prince's "free" album in England :: Lidia tangles with The Oregonian :: Writing as a dying commodity :: How James Frey is a fucking liar :: How Andy loves the Iraq War :: Jean Baudrillard's "The Persian Gulf War and Other Fictions" :: Trevor's stupid conspiracy theories about mainstream publishing :: Noam Chomsky :: Curtis White's "The New Censorship" :: Cindy Sheehan :: How Jon Stewart is totally a bourgeois genius :: How Stephen Colbert is totally a 21st century Jonathan Swift :: Andy's love/hate relationship with the poor :: How Kathy Acker, William Burroughs and Charles Baudelaire are posers :: How the Harry Potter books reinforce Anglocentrism :: Andy's hatred for American film-making :: The possible redemption of Robert Rodriguez :: Hal Hartley :: David Lynch :: Jim Jarmusch :: How Lidia craves schlock :: Trevor's obvious declarations about punk :: How YouTube and blogs are community more than commodity :: How, in declaring that "The Matrix is pure!", Andy gets cut off for at least a week :: How Chiasmus Press is an elitist, hypocritical enterprise worthy of everyone's scorn

You can subscribe to the podcast by copy-pasting this feed into your favorite RSS aggregator or by clicking here if you have iTunes.

last lines

2007-07-14T18:17:00.000-06:00

American Book Review published its 100 Best First Lines from Novels in its January/February 2006 issue. I recently heard from co-publisher Charlie Harris that, in the wake of that issue's success, not to mention the good time had by all the participating editors, writers, and critics, next January ABR will publish a companion list: the 100 Best Last Lines from Novels.

Should you want to try your hand at the game yourself, here are the few rules Charlie lays out: "Only lines from novels or novellas count; short story collections arranged as a series that unfolds like a novel (e.g., Winesburg, Ohio or Lost in the Funhouse) count, but not typical short story collections (e.g., Nine Stories). A novel's final line will usually consist of a single sentence, but not always."

"It's interesting how much longer many of the nominated last lines are than the first lines were," Charlie emailed me as we began to think about this a little aloud. "Several . . . consist of more than just one or two sentences. One reason for this, I think, is that first lines are more or less context free, whereas final lines carry the contextual burden of the entire novel and, for maximum effectiveness, often need several sentences to do their work."

My obversation back: "That strikes me as exactly right. Too, last lines often carry what I think of as a sort of rhythmic burden, a sort of aural crescendo that depends on the lines just before them to establish the right rise and fall, or rise and rise and rise, or ironic brake or trap door."

Here are a few contenders from my list, in no particular order:

There was only the Viewer, slumped forever in his sour seat, the bald shells of his eyes boiling in pictures, a biblical flood of them, all saturated tones and deep focus, not one life-size, and the hands applauding, always applauding, palms abraded to an open fretwork of gristle and bone, the ruined teeth fixed in a yellowy smile that will not diminish, that will not fade, he's happy, he's being entertained. —Stephen Wright, Going Native, 1994.

Are there any questions? —Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale, 1986.

The others listened with interest, their naked genitals staring dully, sadly, listlessly at the yellow sand. —Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1979, trans. Michael Henry Heim.

The aircraft rise from the runways of the airport, carrying the remnants of Vaughan's semen to the instrument panels and radiator grilles of a thousand crashing cars, the stances of a million passengers. —J. G. Ballard, Crash, 1973.

Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead. —Don DeLillo, White Noise, 1985.

Another failure. —Ronald Sukenick, 98.6, 1975.

Which one or five or seven, I'd be interested to know, might you add? What captivates you about them in particular? About the notion of last lines in general?

&now festival : 2008

2007-07-03T21:06:00.001-06:00

The Struggle for Independents (from Salon.com)

2007-06-21T07:06:00.000-06:00

The struggle for independents

The bankruptcy of a book distributor sent shock waves through the indie publishing world, leaving small presses like McSweeney's struggling to survive. Can the Internet help keep them afloat?

By Priya Jain

Jun. 21, 2007 | McSweeney's is holding a garage sale of sorts. An e-mail sent out last week announced that, "for the next week or so," the publishing house founded by Dave Eggers would be selling its new books at 30 percent off and its backlist at 50 percent off. It is also, by way of eBay, auctioning off donations from its more well-known contributors: One could bid on an original Chris Ware comics page, a personal tour of "The Daily Show" guided by John Hodgman, or a "one-sentence apology to your boyfriend/girlfriend, written and signed by Miranda July."

But the excitement stirred by the McSweeney's e-mail had less to do with the booty on offer than with the alarming news that McSweeney's needed to raise money at all. For fans, and for those who follow book-trade news, the e-mail raised the possibility that the much-beloved publisher could become another casualty of a bankruptcy saga that has engulfed the independent-publishing world for six months.

The bankrupt company in question, Advanced Marketing Services, was the parent company of Publishers Group West, which distributed books for more than 130 independent book publishers. "For us the timing was particularly bad," says Eli Horowitz, the publisher of McSweeney's Books, which has lost about $130,000 in actual earnings as a result of the bankruptcy. "We had a new Nick Hornby book and [Dave Eggers'] 'What Is the What', which was our best seller of all time."

McSweeney's is far from the only publisher that's taken a hit: As a result of the bankruptcy, either directly or indirectly, small publishers Soft Skull, Hugh Lauter Levin and Inner Ocean have been acquired by larger publishers, and Carroll & Graf and Thunder's Mouth, two Avalon Publishing Group imprints, have folded. Tiny punk-rock publisher Re/Search puts out two titles a year, but this year it'll be lucky to release one; publisher V. Vale was planning to update and reissue a book on William S. Burroughs for its spring title, "but we didn't have the money even for the down payment on the printing cost," he says.

Not every publisher is hurting so deeply, but the bankruptcy has left the small-press world at least temporarily wounded, and has probably changed it for good. "This was the biggest bankruptcy that's ever happened in publishing history," says Munro Magruder, the associate publisher of the new-agey New World Library, which publishes Deepak Chopra's books. "And its implications are going to be felt for some time."

Horowitz says that part of the problem is the tenuous nature of the business. "For all of these publishers, it's a break-even business at best; you just try to stay afloat to do what you love to do. If we found ourselves making money we'd probably take on more ridiculous projects we'd want to do. It's not really a business that's equipped to absorb a big chunky loss."

The fact that AMS/PGW's financial troubles could affect publishers so dramatically also serves as a reminder that, despite indie publishing's do-it-yourself ethos, the one area in which it hasn't been able to escape the middleman is in distribution. You can't sell a book if no one knows where to find it, and in helping them overcome that problem, PGW had become indie publishers' most indispensable partner.

"The beauty of PGW was that it allowed the publishing and editorial people to focus on publishing and editorial and not worry about being a marketing and sales organization," says Charlie Winton, who started PGW 30 years ago and sold it to AMS in 2002. PGW also allowed bookstores to find independent book publishers easily and helped small presses put together large shipments they wouldn't have been able to handle on their own. And it helped turn books like the Earthworks Groups' "50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth" and Charles Frazier's "Cold Mountain" into bestsellers.

Ironically, PGW -- the largest American distributor of independent publishers -- was by all accounts having its best year ever, and the financial troubles of AMS, a corporate giant that mainly distributed to wholesalers like Costco and Sam's Club, brought it down. AMS filed for Chapter 11 on Dec. 29, a result of being unable to bounce back from SEC and FBI investigations into its advertising accounting practices -- which led to three executive indictments -- and a class-action suit on behalf of its shareholders. As Horowitz points out, "It wasn't the indie distributor; it was a big, old-fashioned corporation with accounting problems."

Or, as Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash puts it more bluntly, "The independents got fucked by the Enron of publishing." When AMS filed for bankruptcy, PGW's assets were frozen, which included book sales for the last quarter of 2006 that belonged to its clients. Instead of receiving that money on Jan. 1 as expected, publishers were left uncertain as to when -- or if -- they would get paid, an especially panicky situation considering that the sales in question covered the holiday season, the most profitable time of year for any publisher.

Then, at the end of February, the Perseus Book Group successfully took over the majority of PGW's accounts, rescuing PGW's employees and paying the publishers 70 percent of what they were owed. Although many publishers were quite happy that Perseus -- a group that, like PGW, is focused on independent publishing -- had taken over their accounts, they found themselves losing 30 percent of their sales for the fall of 2006.

Even for those publishers who could take the fourth-quarter hit, the new deal with Perseus meant shifting over to a different payment schedule, which will leave many publishers virtually penniless until August. "Over the very, very long run, it's no big deal," says Nash, "but in the short run it is, and the short run is how smaller independent publishers live."

Nash, who has been running Soft Skull since 1993, was one of the publishers who couldn't bank on the long run. "I remember seeing the new contract and thinking, This is going to be a pain, but not realizing the impact until putting numbers into a spreadsheet and [seeing that] I was going to be a quarter of a million in the hole by September and October," he says. "Around then I started talking to Charlie Winton." In May, Winton bought Soft Skull for his new publishing house, Winton, Shoemaker and Co., LLC. "For Soft Skull itself," says Nash, "we ended up in an incredibly lucky version of an incredibly unlucky situation in that no one knows how to operate an independent business profitably better than Charlie Winton."

Winton sold PGW to AMS in 2002 so that he could focus on his growing publishing house, Avalon Publishing Group. "People ask, 'Do you wish you had kept PGW?'," he says now. "At some point that question becomes personal, but the business had gotten so big that it was necessary for PGW to go to a new place." In a feat of serendipitous timing, Winton was in the process of selling Avalon to Perseus when AMS/PGW went bankrupt. "The PGW bankruptcy occurred just as we were going into final papers in the Avalon sale," he says, so "part of the opportunity was the fact that they were already in a deal mode with me." Winton, however, couldn't save Carroll & Graf and Thunder's Mouth, two Avalon imprints that Perseus axed after buying Avalon from Winton. "I've been on the record that I've been very disappointed with the outcome there," says Winton.

All of the publishers Salon spoke with were happy to be working with Perseus, which has kept the PGW sales and marketing team intact, thus making it easier for the publishers to transfer their businesses smoothly. The odd thing about this salve, however, is that it has forced independent publishing distribution to conglomerate like a big corporation. Perseus' distribution arm now owns both PGW and Consortium, another independent-press distributor, which means it distributes books for more than 300 publishers.

If the demise of one corporation, AMS, could hurt indie publishing so badly, what does it mean that the majority of the indie-publishing world now relies on Perseus? "Not necessarily by intention, but by outcome," says Nash, "in the Texas hold 'em of independent press distribution, American independent publishing had collectively placed its entire pot in Perseus. If Perseus goes under, who knows what will happen."

For those that survive, the AMS/PGW/Perseus story serves as a good reminder that independent publishers are best off when they're self-reliant. Felice Newman, the co-publisher of Cleis -- which specializes in sex and gender books from authors like Tristan Taormino and Violet Blue -- estimates that Cleis lost about $100,000 in the bankruptcy and takeover, and had to sell off discounted books on its Web site and "cut everything to the bone," she says. Thanks to the fact that Cleis also sells direct to sex-positive stores like Good Vibrations, and wholesale distributors, they were "able to go on without any distributor for a few months," says Newman. "Cleis has been able to bounce back completely -- which means if this hadn't happened, we would be flush now."

The best tool that indie publishers have is the Internet, of course. McSweeney's was inspired to hold its online sale by a similar, successful move that comics publisher Fantagraphics made a few years ago when its distributor filed for Chapter 11. Like McSweeney's, Cleis appealed directly to its readership and offered discounted books on its Web site. "We got this outpouring of love and support from our authors," says Newman. "We asked them to send people to buy direct from our Web site, and sales increased a lot." Munro Magruder says that New World Library, which acquired the smaller Inner Ocean as a result of the bankruptcy, was lucky in that "we're a larger publisher, we've been around for 30 years, we simply had the financial resources" to deal with the bankruptcy. But it too asked some of its authors to do an e-mail blast and urge readers to buy directly from the publisher.

In this, at least, independent publishing is retaining its intimate, DIY flavor. Horowitz, who says McSweeney's has received "thousands of orders in the last few days," quips, "I don't think Bertelsmann can send out an e-mail saying, 'Hey, guys, we need to sell off some books so we can put out some more.' In a way this feels like a whole town coming together, and to me, this is all of a piece with what we're about."

Nick Montfort's interactive vision

2007-06-20T14:07:00.000-06:00

Nick Montfort has been doing important work in/on the narrative convergence between traditional and new media for the better part of a decade now. His interactive fiction Book and Volume is nothing short of stellar, both in its writing and gameplay.

Montfort defended his doctoral dissertation on narrative variance in interactive fiction at the UPenn this morning, in which he argues:

My vision is for a fourth era of IF, one in which interactive narrating joins interactive fiction. It wouldn’t preclude other independent IF production, but it would bring IF more fully into the literary life of our world and use computation in new ways to do some of the important work of literature and art. If IF does become a more prominent part of our cultural life, we could expect to see landmarks like these.

I just finished teaching a course on games and literature this past quarter, and we often wondered out loud about a similar convergence/timeline. I'm also curious what us Now-Whatters have to say about Montfort's prognostications.

What say ye?

New Starcherone Sampler

2007-06-20T09:08:00.000-06:00

Starcherone Books has posted a pdf sampler of excerpts from its most recent books: see FINALLY, A NEW SAMPLER.

This 87 page wonder features excepts from recent Starcherone titles by Joshua Harmon, Sara Greenslit, Harold Jaffe, & Jeffrey DeShell, as well as from the expanded second edition of my own Endorsed by Jack Chapeau and Nina Shope's selection from the anthology, PP/FF, edited by Peter Conners.

If you like what you see there you can also purchase our books directly from the Starcherone website. As an entirely volunteer-run non-profit, we can sure use the sales revenue!

Now, back to your Baconator haikus!

Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your...bacon(?)

2007-06-19T14:54:00.000-06:00

I've been getting a disturbing amount of web traffic lately from people seeking information on a new hamburger called "The Baconator." So much so, in fact, that I'm holding a haiku contest. Deadline is July 1.

Have you eaten your Naked Lunch?

2007-06-13T10:32:00.000-06:00

In my neverending spate of William S. Burroughs-related projects, I'm preparing an piece for a 50th-anniversary collection of essays on Naked Lunch to be released by Southern Illinois University Press. The anniversary, btw, will be in 2009.

I've taught the novel a number of times, and, always always forget that what I now gloss over in the text from my repeated readings...well...many readers still find shocking, patently offensive, disturbing, etc.

In fact, I've started to classify NL as one of those books, like Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, that many people own, but few actually read.

So, I wonder if any of you could share your thoughts on this--has NL been important to you? Have you read it? Do you own it?

My supposition is that the book's major legacy has been in non-print media: the adoption of Burroughsian editing/identity-mixing techniques in everything from YouTube to Second Life to MTV to the cult of popular celebrity. Conversely, I'm not sure that the text has been succesfuly co-opted, or "made safe" in the last five decades for the literary establishment. Thus, the literary legacy of the text may stand with the small presses such as Chiasmus or Spuyten Duyvil, willing to publish literature for concerns which exist to some extent outside the marketplace and the reversed economy of traditional academia (although, yes, I know, not completely).

Perspectives welcomed--and I'll integrate responses into the article. Reply here or directly to me at dschneiderman AT lakeforest DOT edu.

Best,

Davis

don delillo : falling man

2007-06-09T10:29:00.000-06:00

In his famous (some might say infamous) appendix to his influential study, The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard contends that the postmodern work struggles continuously, if paradoxically, to find a way to present the unpresentable. Its goal, whether in the form of one of Ad Reinhardt's all-black canvases, Beckett's Unnameable, or David Lynch's Lost Highway, is to "enable us to see only by making it impossible to see"; to "please only by causing pain."

There are some situations, Lyotard maintains, that by their very nature cannot be thought about or articulated within the bounds of reason. There are some events—he cites Auschwitz—whose atrocious complexities refuse to be reduced to conventional understanding, conventional storylines and forms, to anything other than what they are: manifestations of unimaginable difficulty and radical existential unease. In the wake of such limit situations, you can only say, along with one of the characters in Don DeLillo's astonishing Falling Man: "Nothing seems exaggerated anymore. Nothing amazes me."

The task of presenting the unpresentable is central to the recent haunting and haunted genre of fiction called the 9/11 novel. Perhaps this accounts for the critical cliché that there are no good ones out there.

For my full review, please click here.

burning Kansas (City)

2007-05-28T21:40:00.000-06:00

Peculiar news here from Kansas City, where an indie bookstore owner staged a public burning of books to protest "society's diminishing support for the printed word":

"This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today," Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch of books.

The fire blazed for about 50 minutes before the Kansas City Fire Department put it out because Wayne didn't have a permit for burning.

Wayne said next time he will get a permit. He said he envisions monthly bonfires until his supply — estimated at 20,000 books — is exhausted.

"After slogging through the tens of thousands of books we've slogged through, and to accumulate that many and to have people turn you away when you take them somewhere, it's just kind of a knee-jerk reaction," he said. "And it's a good excuse for fun."

Thoughts? (Debra, I'm especially looking in your direction...)

Mad Hatters NYC June 10 Blast!

2007-05-22T17:35:00.001-06:00

EXTRA! EXTRA!
SAVE THE DATE: SUNDAY, JUNE 10TH! The Mad Hatters will present their first
FUNDRAISING EXTRAVAGANZA
at The Gallery Bar, 5 – 11 + PM
120 Orchard Street, The Lower East Side, NYC
http://madhattersreview.com
On June 10, 2007 the literary multimedia webzine Mad Hatter's Review (MHR) will host their first Live-action Multimedia Fundraising Extravaganza at Gallery Bar, an innovative new venue/art space in Manhattan's Lower East Side. The event will consist of live music, dancing, readings by MHR contributors and guests, screenings of video art and animations plus a possible special guest or two, infamous Mad Hatters' facoctails at an attractive discount, and edible morsels (while they last). There will also be a silent auction and an OPEN READING at the end of the featured performances.
Mad Hatters' Review is a unique online multimedia magazine featuring edgy, experimental, gutsy, thematically broad, psychologically and philosophically sophisticated writings, music, and art. The magazine specializes in collaborative ventures, bringing writers together with artists and composers to create a full sensory reading experience. Poetry, fiction, non-fiction, dramatic pieces and experimental whatnots are displayed adjacent to images of original artwork and accompanied by musical compositions or authors' recorded recitations.
The evenings' live musical offerings range from the experimental adventure of an improvised duet by Ben Tyree (acoustic guitar) and Will Martina (cello) and the 21st Century Composed (Jazzy) Improvisation group The Push-Pull Quartet (Ben Rush Miller & friends) to rocking, rolling, and swinging international music for DANCING by The Alphabet City AllStars.
There will be a showing of video art and animations by Jean Detheux, Jeff Lowe, Orin Buck, Debra Di Blasi, New Zealand film makers, and possibly others. Poetry and Prose Readers will include Eric Darton, Ranbir Sidhu, Rich Murphy, Tsipi Keller, Jason Price Everett, Urayoan Noel, and Andrew Taylor. The work of these authors can or will be found in the pages Mad Hatters'.
There will also be a Photo/Art Slideshow, featuring works by Joel Simpson, Jean Detheux, Peter Schwartz, Tantra Bensko, Dee Rimbaud, Roz Dimon, Brian Hutzell, et al. A Silent Auction will include donations of books by Michael Rothenberg, Vernon Frazer, Denis Emorione, Burt Kimmelman, George Held, Tsipi Keller, Vanessa Place, Stephanie Strickland, Debra Di Blasi, G. K. Wuori, & Jessica Treat, artworks by Robert Kirschbaum, Anne Pearce, Donna Kelsh, Debra Di Blasi, Tony Baloney Juliano, Joel Simpson, Peter Schwartz, Tantra Bensko, et al., and cds/dvds by various artists.

The event will begin at 5 pm. Gallery Bar (http://www.gallerybarnyc.com) is located at 120 Orchard Street, near the corner of Delancey St. ("F" train to Delancey).. Tickets for purchase online cost $15 and will be available through June 9th via PayPal (Address PayPal payments to madhattersreview@yahoo.com), or $20 at the door. This event benefits the Mad Hatters' Review and its local programs promoting innovative art and literature.
Contact Carol Novack (Publisher/Editor) and
Amy Bucciferro (PR Director) at madhattersreview@gmail.com Subject Line: Fundraiser
TO MAKE A TAX DEDUCTIBLE DONATION, PROCEED TO https://www.fracturedatlas.org/site/contribute/donate/580

fc2 innovative fiction contest

2007-05-09T18:38:00.000-06:00

Eligibility

The Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Contest is open to any writer of English who is a citizen of the United States and who has not previously published with Fiction Collective Two. Submissions may include a collection of short stories, one or more novellas, or a novel. Works that have previously appeared in magazines or in anthologies may be included. Translations and previously self-published collections are not eligible. To avoid conflict of interest, former or current students or close friends of the final judge for 2008, Michael Martone, are ineligible to win the contest. Employees and Board members of FC2 are not eligible to enter.

Judges

Finalists for the Prize will be chosen by the following members of the FC2 Board of Directors: Kate Bernheimer, R. M. Berry, Brian Evenson, Noy Holland, Brenda Mills, Lance Olsen (Chair), Susan Steinberg, and Lidia Yuknavitch.

The winning manuscript in 2008 will be chosen from the finalists by FC2 Board of Directors member Michael Martone.

Selection criteria will be consistent with FC2's stated mission to publish "fiction considered by America's largest publishers too challenging, innovative, or heterodox for the commercial milieu," including works of "high quality and exceptional ambition whose style, subject matter, or form pushes the limits of American publishing and reshapes our literary culture."

For contest updates and full information on FC2's mission, history, aesthetic commitments, authors, events, and books, please visit the website at: http://fc2.org.

Deadlines

Contest entries will be accepted beginning 15 August 2007. All entries must be postmarked no later than 1 November 2007. The winner will be announced May 2008.

Prize

The Prize includes $1000 and publication by FC2, an imprint of the University of Alabama Press. In the unlikely event that no suitable manuscript is found among entries in a given year, FC2 reserves the right not to award a prize.

Manuscript Format

Please submit either TWO hardcopies of the manuscript, or ONE hardcopy and one Word file of the manuscript on a labeled CD.

The manuscript must be:

--anonymous: the author's name or address must not appear anywhere on the manuscript (the title page should contain the title only); include a separate cover page with your name and contact information;

--typed on standard white paper, one side of the page only; paginated consecutively; bound with a spring clip or rubber bands; no paper clips or staples, please.

Please include a self-addressed, stamped postcard for notification that manuscript has been received, and a self-addressed, stamped, regular business-sized envelope for contest results.

We strongly advise that you send your manuscript first class.

Please retain a copy of your manuscript; FC2 cannot return manuscripts. Submission of more than one manuscript is permissible if each manuscript is accompanied by a $25 reading fee. Once submitted, manuscripts cannot be altered; the winner will be given the opportunity to make changes before publication. Simultaneous submissions to other publishers are permitted, but FC2 must be notified immediately if manuscript is accepted elsewhere. FC2 will consider all finalists for publication.

Submission Address

Full manuscripts, accompanied by a check made out to American Book Review for the mandatory reading fee of $25, should be sent to:

Ronald Sukenick American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize
American Book Review
University of Houston-Victoria
School of Arts and Sciences
3007 N. Ben Wilson
Victoria, TX 77901-5731

CLMP Contest Ethics Code

CLMP's community of independent literary publishers believes that ethical contests serve our shared goal: to connect writers and readers by publishing exceptional writing. We believe that intent to act ethically, clarity of guidelines, and transparency of process form the foundation of an ethical contest. To that end, we agree to:

1) conduct our contests as ethically as possible and to address any unethical behavior on the part of our readers, judges, or editors;

2) to provide clear and specific contest guidelines--defining conflict of interest for all parties involved; and

3) to make the mechanics of our selection process available to the public.

What are genres?

2007-04-28T16:31:00.000-06:00

Following up on Timmi's & other posts, I'd like to relate an experience recently that has me scratching my head.

I've been working very lately in a narrative form I've kinda made up, but borrowed from new techniques in oral transcriptions of native tales, where line breaks are used to indicate breath pauses. I've had Olson in my background for years and this put me in touch with "projective verse" in a new way -- I've always liked the field composition notion and its urging for one to make decisions at each new moment in the process of making the work. Sukenick relies on this quite a bit in In Form, which was also a big early book for me.

But what I've always written is so-called fiction, as per Sukenick. So it feels to me like I'm writing fiction when I write, for instance,

"Ah, Woodchuck

I will tell the story
of Woodchuck

One day
God looked down

On the people and
the people were having

a bad time
because of the sportsmen

The sportsmen would travel
in cars along the roads

so all the people had to do
was put out their heads

or stand up out of their holes
and the sportsmen

would shoot them from the road
with rifles

To die
when all you want

is to look out of your hole
is a bad thing" etc.

it's fiction, to me, but with line breaks.

I sent this out recently to someone who'd asked me for some new work and he said, yeah, he'd like to publish it, but could I rewrite it as sentences. Otherwise, he'd have to pass it to the poetry editor (who, he gave me to think, might not be so well inclined...). So the piece will soon appear ...

"Ah, Woodchuck.

I will tell the story of Woodchuck.

One day God looked down on the people and the people were having a bad time because of the sportsmen.

The sportsmen would travel in cars along the roads so all the people had to do was put out their heads or stand up out of their holes and the sportsmen would shoot them from the road with rifles.

To die when all you want is to look out of your hole is a bad thing." etc.

Well, this raises all sorts of questions regarding the definition of fiction, but from other situations than those discussed already, it seems to me. That is, it seems that the working definition of fiction in the marketplace (and the marketplace of ideas, for that matter) is as a resticted form. On one side, we have poets who write without line breaks increasingly, and whose work is most often called Prose Poetry -- that is, a species of poetry that happens not to employ line breaks. A poetry editor receiving a piece without line breaks likely wouldn't think twice about publishing a work without running past a fiction editor. From another side, "creative non-fiction" claims that the discourse of fiction isn't as serious or relevant in the "real world" as their discourse -- even though fiction writers throughout the twentieth century regularly employed (more "creative") non-fiction in collage and fragmanted narrative forms -- a la Sukenick, Kundera, Vonnegut, Kingston, Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, etc.

It seems as if the territory allowed to fiction in the dominant consciousness these days is a very limited one. Frequently I hear people who pick up Starcherone books say, "It's like poetry..." or "I don't know what to calll the form with your books." To me, it's fiction, but it seems as if I assume a larger territory for the form than is currently accepted.

Poetry's identity in a culture where fewer and fewer people read is less compromised than that of fiction. Fiction, on the other hand, it seems to me is starting, even in the reading public, to suffer from definitions given it by marketplace forces that privilege realism. There's a great review in the new ABR (yes, more than one, but one to the point) by Anis Shivani on the new Harcourt "Best New American Voices" short story anthology. Editor Sue Miller claims in her introduction to the collection that there's not "a workshop story" in the entire book, but Shivani argues there's nothing but -- and then masterfully defines what constitues a typical "workshop story": "occur within realistically identifiable milieus and settings...; history, politics, and culture serving only as background to individuals' private struggles," etc.

I don't know how it might be done, but I think part of reclaiming fiction must reclaiming be its SPACE -- space that the atrophied contemporary mainstream models of fiction has ceded away.

I think the first version above is better (though containing the same words) than the latter -- it preserves the question of whether fiction can use language as its tensions and traditions may allow, much as any other form or genre would allow. Eugene Onegin wrote a verse novel way back when, and Nabokov dabbled with line break -- not to mention the line smashing of Federman. But when "form" became "genre" -- a subtle shift in nomenclature in recent years -- we may have gotten the short end of the shtick.

at the very least...

2007-04-25T23:38:00.000-06:00

Lance poses the question What should fiction (or writing) do?

“Should” is one of those words that makes me nervous. Nevertheless, although I’d be loath to offer up a list of shoulds and should-nots to be observed by all writers, I’ve discovered, thinking about this, that I can come up with at least one should with considerable confidence.

Fiction should transport the reader to a place s/he has never been, however powerfully the work might resonate with the reader’s own experience and understanding. This is the minimum of what everyone demands of the visual, aural, and performing arts, and fiction should be no exception.

The fiction I love best induces a textured state of mind that I carry around inside me for as long as I’m reading it, that I regret losing when that state of mind fades a few days after I’ve finished it, but that I can recover whenever I begin reading the work again. This is above all an effect of language, and one that seems utterly magical when I think about it. How does it happen? I suppose it involves a certain sort of textual synergy in which many elements come together with such power and coherence that one is transported into an altered state, and because one is transported, one feels the reality of the book’s imaginary. By this I don’t mean simply that the characters seem “real” or the details of the setting plausible. I mean the imaginative logic underlying the work’s voice and style and, perhaps more intangibly, its choice of detail, syntactical preferences, rhythm of the sentences, and formal structure, all of which combine perfectly to create feelings and perceptions and sensations and thoughts that constitute a place we would never have been able to visit on our own.

Here’s Wallace Stevens:

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

And they said then, “But play you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”

Most writing, of course, doesn’t create a textured state of mind that infuses one’s whole reality for days at a time and leaves behind it a trace memory of such rapture that one never forgets. But any fiction worth reading should at the very least take us to a space that is outside of the one already in our heads (though it may be a familiar space we’ve visited often before, cozy and comfortable for some or boring and stifling for others, but always small and limited). Even the most mediocre fiction must be able to do that for at least some of its readers (though it’s obviously not going to succeed in transporting those who find such familiar high-volume tourist spots tedious and ugly).

Living with Virginia Tech

2007-04-24T07:50:00.000-06:00

I have no doubt that everyone on this blog was riveted by the events that took place at Virginia Tech last week—particularly since Cho Seung-Hui regularly took classes in a field in which many of us are currently teaching. The enormity of the event looms large—5 faculty and 27 students dead—and I can’t help but reflect on my relationship with some of my own troubled students. We all have them: every semester, students who come from difficult backgrounds, others who are on medication for psychiatric problems, and still others who should be, sign up for my fiction classes. Every semester, violent fictions are submitted for critique to my workshop. What seems to be missed in the reports that have arisen about Cho and his work, however, is that violent fictions are written as frequently by “healthy” students, as by students who are still coming to grips with their problems.

As the public tries to come to some kind of understanding about what role creative writing, academic bureaucracy, and our mental health system may have played in last week’s tragedy, I’ve become frustrated by the continued association between Cho’s violent “predisposition” and his creative work: that his writing was oracular for the terrible events that took place last week.

Stephen King is the most recent “expert” to chime in on the matter:

“For most creative people, the imagination serves as an excretory channel for violence: We visualize what we will never actually do….Cho doesn't strike me as in the least creative, however. Dude was crazy. Dude was, in the memorable phrasing of Nikki Giovanni, ''just mean.'' Essentially there's no story here, except for a paranoid a--hole who went DEFCON-1. He may have been inspired by Columbine, but only because he was too dim to think up such a scenario on his own. On the whole, I don't think you can pick these guys out based on their work, unless you look for violence unenlivened by any real talent.”

(Read the entire piece at: http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20036014,00.html)

I understand why it’s much easier to blame the work or the person, rather than addressing the systems in place that might have caught Cho before he took the incalculable actions he did. If Stephen King were the least bit introspective, he’d try to address the larger context arising from VTech. Of course then he wouldn't be Stephen King.

At this point, some of us have no doubt read (or read reports of) Cho’s plays “Richard McBeef” and “Mrs. Brownstone.” For better or for worse, I’ve seen material as violent in my classes. Television and video games (or a simple lack of talent) might be blamed for the all-too-easy transition between character development and violence in works like these. (Certainly, our workshop discussions inevitably take up the question of genre, the influence of the media on the scene of the literary, and the role that language plays in the creation of voice.) But that question, for the moment, belongs to a different day.

Let’s face it: Cho's writing isn’t what clued his professors in that he was ill. From what I’ve read, it was his persona in class—his inability to relate to students or his teachers. His actions and behaviors (an unwillingness to speak, photographing other students with his cell phone, hiding his face etc) were the evident and eerie disruptive force in those classrooms—not his work itself. I’d like to think that, if any of us had a similar student, we would have tried to flag him or her ahead of time, to call attention to such inappropriate behavior. What’s frightening is that Lucinda Roy (then Chair of Creative Writing) seems to have tried her best in this regard—to no success.

What I fear from this event—my reason for posting at all—is that Cho’s actions will change the field in which we work: that administrations will censor what students turn in to class (perhaps through obligations put on instructors to report violent work), though more insidiously, and more worrisome, is that student will begin to censor their own imaginations. For example, one student who handed in a manuscript with pedophilic content this week prefaced to the class that it was written “pre Virginia Tech.”

This might be just one sad outcome arising out of larger, far more tragic circumstances.

What has become more than evident however is that academic bureaucracies aren’t equipped to handle one lone distressed student. Certainly, our mental health system is too clunky and inadequate to handle the isolated minefield that represents a single person’s mind.

kurt vonnegut : 1922-2007

2007-04-12T20:08:00.000-06:00

Kurt Vonnegut died Wednesday night, 11 April, of brain injuries he sustained after a recent fall in his Manhattan apartment. He was 84.

I'm not sure if he's thought of as experimental these days, but I am sure his crazy-funny speculative imagination, brutal political satire, acidic existential irony, poignantly unfussy prose, and liberating structural waywardness lured a host of my generation during our teens onto the wilder side of fiction, into narrative irreverence and opportunity.

I'm also sure I consider Slaughter-House Five (1969) one of the best novels about World War Two, not to mention one of the best of the second half of the twentieth century. By way of a eulogy, let me simply quote a passage from it. Billy Pilgrim has just been snatched by extraterrestrials called Tralfamadorians who intend to put in a kind of cage in a kind of zoo on their planet.

There were two peepholes inside the airlock [of their spaceship]—with yellow eyes pressed to them. There was a speaker on the wall. The Tralfamadorians had no voice boxes. They communicated telepathically. They were able to talk to Billy by means of a computer and a sort of electric organ which made every Earthling speech sound.

"Welcome aboard, Mr. Pilgrim," said the loudspeaker. "Any questions?"

Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquired at last: "Why me?"

"That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because the moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?"

"Yes." Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it.

"Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why."

Goodbye, Kurt. There are a lot of earthlings still unstuck in time who will miss you.

interview: mark danielewski

2007-04-07T17:42:00.000-06:00

Electronic Book Review just posted a new interview with Mark Danielewski, author of the amazing fictive experiments House of Leaves (2000) and Only Revolutions (2006), here. A few teasers:

On centripetal versus centrifugal novels:

House of Leaves is what I would call a centripetal book. It's about interiorities and history and progeny and ancestors. [Only Revolutions] was pointedly a centrifugal novel. It was about getting outside. It was about looking at landscape. It was about addressing what the open was. It was about—not only an academic level—reading Agamben's "The Open" and readdressing what Heidegger was talking about with "the open." Looking at the naturalists, looking at ecocriticism.

On television, movies, & novels:

My job is to write something that could not just as easily be seen on television or at the movies.

On what is absent in Only Revolutions:

You know, one of the things this [Only Revolutions] resists is vision. The word "light" never appears. With the exception of some colors mentioned, it never quite paints those borders, the edges, it's always resisting the edges. . . . So the word, for instance, "spectacular" is never there, because it comes from speculare, to see. Words that are about seeing, for the most part, were taken out. I've been described—not as dogmatic as Oulipo—but there's a resistance to certain things.

On the future of the book:

My feeling is that there is going to be a technology that will look like this book. The three dimensional quality is an experience that cannot be done away with one reading tablet. I think what's going to happen is there are going to be pages that are as thin as this, and you can go to "A plague on both your houses" and you can click on it, and you'll connect: "Romeo and Juliet. FDR also said it." And suddenly you have this connected tissue.

review : lynne tillman : american genius

2007-04-06T17:34:00.000-06:00

What I think I enjoy most about Lynne Tillman's American Genius: A Comedy (Soft Skull, 2006) is its extraordinary investigation into the limits of interiority and the lusciousness of torqued language—two areas of experience that prove virtually impossible for any other art form to engage with as fully, as deeply, as resonantly as the novel can.

In many ways, this novel is about a series of lacks. There is no real plot, no real character development, not much forward motion, almost no dialogue. It's even difficult to tease out the setting. The funny, bright, wildly neurotic narrator, Helen (we don't learn her name until the narrative moves into its endgame), may be a patient at some sanatarium, a resident in some New Agey artists' colony, a visitor at some wacky spa. The outlines of the external world are fuzzy at best. What's important, rather, is the movement of her mind, the musicality of her thought, as she obssesses on the pleasure of cotton socks, the vicissitudes of various skin conditions (hers and others'), the Manson killings, the slave trade, Calvinism, Eames chairs, the beloved dog her parents had put to sleep, her dead father, her increasingly unmoored elderly mother, the people surrounding her whose quirks she notes in gossipy detail.

What's important, as well, perhaps even more so, are stunning sentences like the following typical two, which share a great deal with the oceanic language of Woolf, the feverish eye of Bernhard, and which go a good way toward rethinking what a sentence can be, what it can do, and how, through their relentless digressive qualifications that skirt conventional grammar:

Everything is a problem in some way, I can't think of anything that's not a problem from the past for the future, and I often worry, frowning to myself, unaware that I'm frowning, my lips turning down involuntarily, which I've been told to stop doing since I was a child, because it creates the impression that I'm sullen and also etches fine lines around my mouth, but I can't. My father worried about the future, which presumably he could imagine, but I can't, just as I can't imagine lines like tributaries running from the river of my mouth the way they do from my mother's, who was angry, who'd abandoned her girlish hopes of marrying a violinist named Sidney, and who often speaks of him now that my father is dead, wondering where Sidney is, and also wondering where my father is, if he is outside, waiting for her in the car that he loved.

Jeffrey Deshell lauded this novel last December in Now What's posts concerning the best alternative fiction of 2006, and I've only recently found the time to settle down with it. Thanks, Jeffrey. Thanks, Lynne Tillman. What a strikingly intelligent, mischievously obsessive, beautifully written book.

fc2 podcast two

2007-04-04T18:32:00.000-06:00

As I mentioned a while back, FC2 has inaugurated a series of podcasts that will contain interviews with and readings by its authors.

In the second, which might interest some of you, host Frank Giampietro interviews me about the definition of experimental fiction, my novel Nietzsche's Kisses, and Fiction Collective Two's past, present, and (in the wake of R. M. Berry's stepping down as publisher after eight years at the helm) future.

You can download this podcast and the first with R. M. Berry at the FC2 website here, or you can subscribe via iTunes by doing a search there for FC2.

what should fiction do?

2007-04-04T18:11:00.000-06:00

Lidia Yuknavitch recently posed the following provocative question on Other Mouths, the Chiasmus Press blog: What should fiction do?

Here are several of the answers, some from our own bloggers at Now What.

What form would your answer take, hmmmm?

andrei codrescu: Writing should . . . give you a feeling of "weight" when you walk around, it should make people soft and hard, it should keep playing in your head long after it’s written/read, and it should be swift and consensual.

trevor dodge: Writing should share a hot shower with you, towel you off with a high thread count, and then retreat downstairs to powder the sugar on your pancakes. But before all that, writing should throw a psychotic fit in front of you because you haven’t been paying enough attention to it lately. You, with all your InterWebs and XBoxing and iLife–a-ma-jigging that you do; with all your attempts to tell writing what it is (a juice extractor!) and what it is not (a mini-fridge!), you are missing what writing could be, and this is why writing is so thoroughly and justifiably pissed off at you right now.brian evenson: I don’t think that writing should be doing anything in particular, but I do think it should be "doing." It’s easy for writing to slip into old tired patterns where it doesn’t have to "do," where it’s following the same groove in the same record, where it’s covering the same tired ground, where it’s one of the millions of cars on the same superhighway, inching along with everyone else. How much better if the writing is traveling down disused back roads getting knocked by branches and trying to make it around places where the road has been washed out. Or threading itself thinly down an animal track. Or hacking its way deep into the thicket of being without having decided in advance what it’ll find there. The more effort, the better….

lance olsen: In The Middle Mind, Curtis White maintains that the narratives generated and sustained by the American political system, entertainment industry, and academic trade have taught us over the last half century how not to think for ourselves. Essentially, those narratives shun complexity and challenge; avoid texts that demand attentive, self-conscious, and self-critical reading; and embrace The Middle Mind’s thoughtless impulse toward the status quo. In a phrase, what we are left with is the death or at least the dying of what I think of as the Difficult Imagination. What writers can do is attempt to revive the Difficult Imagination by exploring various strategies that call attention to, reflect upon, and disrupt the assumptions behind conventional narratives, thereby challenging the dominant cultures that would like to see such narratives told and retold until they begin to pass for truths about the human condition. "Our satisfaction with the completeness of plot," Fredric Jameson once noted, is "a kind of satisfaction with society as well," and I would add much the same is the case with our satisfaction with undemanding style, character, subject matter, and so forth. My orientation, then, rhymes fairly closely with those posed by Viktor Shklovsky for art and Martin Heidegger for philosophy: the return through complication and challenge (not predictability and ease) to perception and thought.

davis scheiderman says: What shouldn’t writing do is perhaps a more germane question if writing mainly gets us—in the form of the most obsequious best-seller—only more of the same hum-drum mediocrity of the spirit, dead-eyed keno zombies mugging their way through the Shop N’ Save in search of Tostitos, cheap soda, and maybe on a whim at Wal-Mart, or Sam’s Club, some dime-store book about the good within us all, et al. Why write at all about anything, really, if living in American is so damn, well, like being the butt-end of some data-mining target marketing campaign that plays and plays and reads itself into the uneasy sleep of an over-stimulated 10-month old rubbing her eyes, right now, jet-lagged from a cross-continental air trip from China where she was just adopted, and ready to spring back into action at any moment. Why write? For her of course. And what shouldn’t writing do? Make her world smaller with every word. Baby, I say starting now, we’ve got a long way to go.

lidia yuknavitch says: It should break the back of language in its truths, then softly heal her, cradle her, sing her back to life.

Chapbook Competition

2007-04-02T14:35:00.000-06:00

Announcing Subito Press

Subito Press of the University of Colorado is proud to announce a new chapbook competition which will publish two chapbooks annually, one each of innovative fiction and poetry. Submit manuscripts of up to 40 pages of poetry or 30 pages of (double spaced) fiction along with a $15 reading fee and an 8.5 x 11 SASE if you would like a copy of the winning entry in your genre. Manuscripts should include two cover sheets: one with title only, the other with title, author's name, address, e-mail, and phone number. Submissions will be accepted from June 1 to August 15 (postmark date). All submissions will be judged anonymously by the creative writing faculty at the University of Colorado; friends, relatives, and former students of University of Colorado creative writing faculty are not eligible.. Simultaneous submissions o.k.; please notify Subito immediately is your ms. is accepted elsewhere. Winners will be give a reading at the University of Colorado. Notifications of winners will occur by December of 2007.

Send mss. to:
Subito Press
Department of English Box 226
University of Colorado, Boulder,
Boulder, Colorado 80309-0226

1 + 1

2007-03-25T20:40:00.000-06:00

Just a note to reintroduce myself into this conversation, albeit briefly for now—me, pleasantly encumbered by two new projects in which you all can share. They're of equal importance, so I hate to announce one above the other, but here goes.

I'm now a co-founding editor of a bouncing new baby press called Ninebark, based in Rome, Georgia, where I teach at Berry College. My co-editors are Mindy Wilson, managing editor of The Georgia Review (and my wife); poet Sandra Meek, my colleague at Berry College; and Ray Marsocci, formerly of Elixir Press. As some of you know, our first book, Deep Travel, an anthology of American poets whose work has been significantly informed by their time living abroad, debuted at AWP this year and did so pretty nicely. The book was edited by Sandra Meek (with excellent cover design by Lou Robinson) and includes work by established poets as well as several new names. If you or someone you know might be interested in using such a title in a course, please get in touch with me.

But all this is to say, that the press is interested in prose, as well, and we're currently on the lookout for a prose manuscript to be our second title. While we generally have an interest in international work, that's not our exclusive focus, and, furthermore, while the press is not strictly about avant work, as a reader, that's where my heart is, and, well, yes. So. If you've got a manuscript or know a colleague or even a promising student who does, again, please get in touch with me. I'd love to see anything by this crowd and its associates.

A word about the name Ninebark (from our press release): The press takes its name from a genus of flowering shrubs, Ninebark, named for the way the plant’s bark peels away in many layers. Ninebark occurs naturally both inside and outside the United States in diverse varieties. Both as natural object and as word, Ninebark suggests that complexity is not antithetical to beauty, but necessary to its creation.

+

I'm on the clock as the editor for the Fictions Present thread at electronic book review:

http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent

And, again, I'd love to look at any work you or your associates might have that speaks to the concerns of this currently short thread. Some of you have either contributed to it already, or mostly to other threads of the review, but this link here, from Joe Tabbi:

http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/introductory

gives a nice intro to what's going on at Fictions Present, or at least where it starts. Where it stops, if it stops, is another question. I'm just learning to drive this thing. Regardless, as I say, please get in touch with me if you have something to contribute now or in the future, and in the meantime, I'm sure I'll be nudging you all individually about this as well. And, hey, if you presented at AWP, you know, come on now, give it up to ebr, yeah?

Fight the power.

Mad Hatters' Review Reading 3/23 NYC

2007-03-17T15:21:00.000-06:00

MAD HATTERS' REVIEW
Edgy & Enlightened Literature, Art & Music in the Age of Dementia
Poetry, Prose & Anything Goes Reading Series
Curated & Pickled by Publisher/Editor Carol Novack
6th Reading
Friday, March 23, '07, 7 – 9 pm
KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, N.Y.C.

Featuring
Patricia Catto, former Finger Laker, now "Midwasterner," is Associate Professor of Something at the Kansas City Art Institute. She was tenured in 1994 after a now legendary battle with Franconian fascists. Her book Aunt Pig of Puglia (edible portions published in various journals – one such to be published in MHR) recounts the magical realist tale of her cruel, unacceptable, beloved family whose Auntie was born with bristles and trotters. The true but utterly fake tale of the Ferri Family, this fable can be understood as the Sopranos Meet the Fawkers and They All Call Into Car Talk For Advice on Existential Problems. Catto is the author of a poetry book, Wife of Geronimo's Virile Old Age (Mathom Press), several poesms, art reviews and earnest articles dealing with the ecospiritualviagra issues of our day. In addition to teaching creative writing (like, RIGHT) and raks sharki (belly dance ), she does large scale murals in Indian restaurants. She has studied with the Maurice Sendak Kalighat School of the Indian Restaurant Mural. Catto's latest triumph was surviving if not partially mastering a parasite ingested last summer in Chandigarh India. You'll want to come and see her -3 dress size and query her about weight loss strategies.

Ted Pelton is the author of three books, most recently the novel Malcolm & Jack (and Other Famous American Criminals) (Spuyten Duyvil, 2006). In 1994, he was awarded an NEA Fellowship in Fiction. In 2000, he founded Starcherone Books (starcherone.com), an independent publisher of innovative fiction, and he now serves as its Executive Director. He's also an Associate Professor of English at Medaille College of Buffalo, NY. See samples of his work at tedpelton.com.

Steve Tomasula's short fiction has appeared widely and most recently in McSweeney's, The Denver Quarterly and The Iowa Review where he received the Iowa Prize for the most distinguished work published in any genre. His essays on body art and culture appear in Leonardo and other magazines both here and in Europe. He is the author of the novels IN & OZ; The Book of Portraiture; and VAS: An Opera in Flatland, a novel of the biotech revolution that has been released in paper by the University of Chicago Press. He teaches in the writing program at The University of Notre Dame.

With LIVE MUSIC performed by BEN RUSH MILLER

For further info, email: madhattersreview@gmail.com
(type READINGS in the subject line)

Curtis White podcast

2007-03-15T00:54:00.000-06:00

Curtis White gave a talk tonight at Clackamas Community College in Oregon City, OR. Lucky for you, we recorded it and we're willing to share.

jean baudrillard : 1929 – 2007

2007-03-08T13:03:00.000-07:00

Jean Baudrillard, the remarkably influential French cultural theorist who argued, among other things over the course of his 50 books, that we live in an age of hyperreality where the real has been effaced by simulations of the "real," died on Tuesday, 6 March, after a long illness, at the age of 77.

I first ran into his ideas back in the early eighties, and simply couldn't shake them. They ended up infecting radically my speculative-fiction anti-trilogy, Tonguing the Zeitgeist, Time Famine, and Freaknest, as well as my recent novel Girl Imagined by Chance. Engaging with his imagination had the same effect on me as engaging with Barthes's and Derrida's. It was impossible not to feel, in some deep-structure way, that you'd left the Garden for good.

Here are a few excerpts from the Time Online coverage:

His interests ranged from anthropology to modern literature, film, art and photography, and he adopted many different styles of writing, from essay to poetry, from monograph to aphorism. Though not always clearly understood, his writing was influential across a broad range of disciplines that included literature, sociology, culture and media, and philosophy.
He was also an important influence on artists and writers — the novelist J. G. Ballard held that he was the most important French thinker of the past 20 years.
Jean Baudrillard was born in 1929 in Rheims, where he attended the lycée. His education was interrupted when, in the crucial year of preparation for entry into higher education, he abandoned his studies and, in his own words, “ran away” à la Rimbaud. He eventually returned to education, however, and spent ten years teaching German in provincial lycées.

In the 1960s he became a leading translator of German literary and philosophical works into French, while at the same time undertaking studies in sociology and preparing a thesis — influenced by the ideas of Henri Lefebvre and Roland Barthes — which would allow him to take up a university position.
This he did at Nanterre in 1966, at a time when left-leaning intellectuals were being increasingly radicalised in the wave of anti-bourgeois agitation that characterised the 1960s. His major publications begin from 1968. He continued to teach and to research in Paris until his withdrawal from academia in 1987. Thereafter he spent much time travelling and lecturing throughout the world and developing his talent as a photographer — his work was shown in several exhibitions.
Baudrillard’s career as a social theorist began with two substantial studies of affluent, modern society: The System of Objects (1968) and The Consumer Society (1970). These were followed by For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972), where sociology, semiology and Marxist economic theory were combined. At the high point of the influence of Marxism in France Baudrillard thus contributed, against the more orthodox styles of Marxism, a recognition that a profound shift had taken place with the development of consumerism. His two studies of consumerism charted the emergence of a society dominated not by commodities as such, but by objects now consumed more and more for their image, or as he called it, their “sign-value”.
This transition to a system characterised by what he called “saturation” and “obesity," among other categories of his invention, made analyses based on scarcity, need, function and proletarian revolt redundant. It was soon clear to him that Marxism, like socialism, was part of the system it sought to overcome.
What distinguished Baudrillard’s response therefore was his search for a way of analysing modern societies that still remained radical.

Wikipedia offers a good overview of his life and work here.

Gender and the Construction of Authorship

2007-03-06T23:39:00.000-07:00

Last fall I read Julie Phillips’ James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, and it provoked me into months of reflection. For those who don’t know, Sheldon was, among diverse other things, an important sf writer in the 1960s and ’70s who wrote under the name “James Tiptree, Jr.” In 1973 Tiptree’s style was characterized by Robert Silverberg as “ineluctably masculine;” and some of Tiptree’s correspondents characterized “Tip” (as he called himself) as a “man’s man” and a “man of the world.” And yet Tiptree’s work also appealed to feminists, who held him up as a rare examples of a man who “got” it. All of these notions of the masculinity of Tiptree’s writing vanished in the late 1970s when Sheldon was outed as a “little old lady living in McLean, Virginia” (as she bitterly put it). Although Sheldon had had the same experiences as Tiptree (expeditions in Africa, sexual adventures, Army (intelligence) service during WWII, and employment with the CIA for a brief time in the 1950s), the glamour had gone.

Significantly, Phillips’s first epigraph for the book is taken from a letter by Joanna Russ to Tiptree: “To learn to write at all, I had to begin by thinking of myself as a sort of fake man.” Sheldon wrote for many years before creating Tiptree’s voice and style, but apart from her columns as an art critic in the 1930s and an occasional letter to the editor or other nonfiction piece, she published only one story in all those years (published in the New Yorker under the name Alice Bradley. This was written from a female pov, but (going by Phillips’ description) suffers from the very qualities Sheldon in her journal around the time she was writing it believes is typical of women’s writing:

I find, in all the writings of women, a strange muffled quality, as if the living word, as it left the lips, had been hastily suppressed and another substituted, one which would conform to some pattern imposed from without….

The construction of Tiptree, as voice and author(ized) persona, apparently solved her problem.

I know many examples of women sf writers (several of them personally) having pretended (to themselves) to be men to authorize their voices and then eventually being able to write in their own (i.e., non-impersonating) voice; in most cases creating female pov characters presented a challenge to them they overcame with great difficulty. I have also been told by some writers (both men and women) that they are unable to create interesting women characters only by first writing them as male characters and then later changing their sex. And I know that many women writers—regardless of their feminism—are unable to think of women characters as unmarked or “universal.” (Just a week ago a former student told me that though she wishes it were otherwise, this is the case for her.) The consequences of such gender issues for the construction of authorship are significant. Apart from everything else, as Joanna Russ wrote to Tiptree: “Not being oneself in any way at all exacts its price…The minute one writes about [one’s own experience], you walk head-on into the cruxes of your own life, whatever they are.”

An essay in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Blue Studio (“Reader, I Married Me”) offers some insight into the reasons women writers’ construction of authorship is frequently so vexed. (DuPlessis’s most famous essay is probably her experimental piece “For the Etruscans.”) As an undergraduate at Barnard “circa 1960,” Duplessis was a “secular humanist” who saw no need for feminism. She describes herself as having been “poetically awakened” by the Donald Allen New American Poetry anthology and as having being categorically told in a creative writing course that “women can’t (really) write.” She notes that she kept asking herself

which was I, the woman or the artist, with a relentless and lacerating binarism. It was the greatest pain and grief—the sense that I had to choose, that one precluded the other, and that I was a bad woman for wanting an artistic career, a bad artist because I was a woman and couldn’t work out the terms of any art. This ideological and psychological stalemate was perfectly ridiculous, now arcane sounding. Yet at the time it presented a powerful invisible barrier….Self-repression and cultural censorship of females were in interlock. Adrienne Rich’s “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” captures the sense of desperation, loneliness, and near-paralysis women felt when faced with what seemed like a billion years of cultural and social despising…My resistance came destructively, in not writing, in long silences around writing, in baffled and punishing blockage. This went on for years.

And then in the late 1960s, Duplessis became a feminist. “If I had not become a feminist,” she observes, “I probably would not have been able to write much or to think anything especially interesting in an original way. I would not have been able to create the works that came through me and go under my name. My title torques the ethical-romantic climax of Jane Eyre (“Reader, I married him”) not to deny biographical marriage but to signal a polygynous entitlement.” The result of her feminism, though, wasn’t simply that she escaped the desperate binarism forced on her psyche, but that she learned that “structural and formal choices were part of ideology; that language, hegemony, discourse, form, canon, rightness and wrongness, allowable and not allowable were historical, relativized, and interested concepts. This insight was always mixed with a strong aesthetic sense of form and language.”

More specifically, she discovered that “as a feminist” one needed “to invent an endless number of forms, structures, and linguistic ruptures that would cut way beyond language-business-as-usual and narrative-business-as-usual, which always seemed to end up with ‘the same’ kind of binary, ‘patriarchal’ normalcy. Experimental writing of all sorts had always been crucial to the female project of cultural change: of revolution, not revision. It seems to me that feminism (with other socially based cultural movements) is a necessary completion of modernism… Writing cannot make these changes alone; but writing exerts a continuous destabilizing pressure and, in both analytic and formal ways, creates an arousal of desire for difference, for hope.”

Science fiction has, of course, been a marvelous medium for all sorts of feminist experimentation. Despite that, many of the women writing science fiction have had to struggle (and may still be struggling) with the construction of authorship. I’m wondering whether this is still the case for women doing alternative/experimental writing. Or have the very powerful female voices of alternative writing over the last twenty years made this a non-problem? For those of you who teach creative writing: do your women students find the gender-inflections of the construction of authorship difficult to negotiate?

The China Syndrome

2007-02-26T11:05:00.000-07:00

Hi all;

Sorry to have been more than silent in the past few weeks; my wife and I have been in China, adopting our daughter Athena. For details of the trip, see here: http://www.chicagotribune.com/adoption. [Can't seem to link in blogger today....]

While in Beijing, we worked with a wonderful guide with an interest in expanding her English. I offered to send her some American novels, yet she asked for "nothing too hard." Her spoken English is quite strong, and she has some concerns about my package not making it through the Chinese mail. We'll see.

So, an interesting question for the blog: What should I send to someone in burgeoning China to further her undertsanding and study of English, while perhaps offering an entry point into interesting American literature?

I have some ideas, but thought you might as well.

--Davis

Graphic Narrative

2007-02-17T09:12:00.000-07:00

I feel bad that, as one of the founders of this blog, I've posted so little in recent months. One reason, of course, is the time involvements of doing something related to the means of expression discussed in this blog -- namely, I run a small press, and do so more or less in my so-called "spare time."

Teaching 4 classes this semester, Starcherone Books is enough of an additional chore to keep me pretty busy, and behind in my obligations. But this semester particularly has been one in which I've attempted to bring my teaching in line with my other interests. I teach in a college, Medaille College of Buffalo, which has no graduate Creative Writing program; we barely have an undergraduate English major. The main constituency for my pedagogy is undergraduate students who are pre-professional in inclination, and the professions are much more likely to be elementary school teaching, police work, or veterinary technicians than more literary-minded professions such as the law or those requiring grad school educations. The anti-reading figures cited by Lance from the NEA report are realities for my students -- they do not read, not even bestsellers, and Literature to them is primarily something that other people do, somewhere else, with more than a little presumed class advantage.

Nevertheless, I wished this semester to engage them and, sad to say, had had my fill (at least temporarily) of trying to force them through "difficult" work. Doing so is not without its converts, of course -- I've had students in recent years who were very moved and even permanently changed by being introduced to works by Lance Olsen and Ralph Berry when they each visited Medaille, and by texts by Ben Marcus, Williams Burroughs, and Nina Shope, among others. But I was tired of writing off the vast majority of Medaille students. Was there nothing that could engage their creativity? Was I writing off 80-90% of the college's student body, the imaginations of 19-20 year olds which should have some potential for unscrewing the doors from the jambs, and then the jambs themselves? Wouldn't they also derive some life benefit from kicking out the jambs, muthafucka, just once in their narrativally pre-prescribed lives?

I went into the trenches -- I am now teaching 3 sections of General Education 230 - Creative Expression, a sophomore-level creativity class in a Gen Ed curriculum that students by and large hate at Medaille. I decided to try, instead of a more standard Intro to the Arts class, a more populist version of avant-garde. I called the class Punk Rock & Comics. We began with the Sex Pistols movie, The Filth & the Fury, and from there moved into the McSweeney's anthology of avant-comics. Not so populist, really (only 2 of 50 students in 3 sectionshad ever heard of the Sex Pistols!), but with more potential for populist consumption -- and from there inroads into theory and the avant-garde, via Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces & its connections to Dada & the Situationists. I also (as noted in a comment below) showed Lars von Trier/Jurgen Leth's The Five Obstructions, which they are currently wrestling with. Next up is Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel/memoir, Persepolis. I'm trying to keep them drawing, doing cut-ups, etc., the whole time.

This could go in various directions, but my focus for this post is this: What do you folks think about the revolution going on in comics today, toward, it seems to me, a lot of the issues our fiction is interested in? That is, like punk and like us, the alt-comics scene is very much fueled by an anti-corporate aesthetic; it's likely to draw attention to its own act of creating, to be self-referential and question easy assumptions of representation; it's also drawn ("drawn") to depictions of the margins of culture, those left out of the airbrushed versions of American (and world) existence which are the subjects of mainstream books & movies; as well, it is a medium that is, in essence, a post-medium-- it refers to the tradition (see, for instance Art Spiegelman's peon to 100 year-old daily comics, in In the Shadow of No Towers) but sees such as a lost time that cannot be repeated given what we know now, our current complexities; finally (rhetorically, anyway), it engages the "creative non-fiction" debate in a striking and fresh way: artificial and discredited as a serious discourse by its very nature, it nevertheless engages the notion of factual experience, and indeed, history, writ large and small. I think, in this last formulation, of such texts as Spiegelman's Maus, Satrapi's Persepolis, Phoebe Gloeckner's Diary of a Teenage Girl, or in the McSweeney's book, Joe Matt, Lynda Barry, Jeffrey Brown, etc. As well (the hits just keep happening...), is this in any way an extension/reenactment of fiction writers' own desires to create visuals -- Vonnegut, Sebald, Marcus, Federman, Shelley Jackson, etc.?

What say ye?

(Above: Gloeckner's cover for J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition.)

the writer's edge : a final reminder

2007-02-16T19:46:00.000-07:00

A quick friendly reminder that the application deadline for The Writer's Edge Second Annual Innovative Writing Conference (27-29 July, 2007) in Portland, Oregon, is 1 March.

For more information on the workshops, panels, one-on-one conferences, multimedia room, and more, please click here.

Excerpts from An Interview with Lynda Schor

2007-02-16T11:43:00.000-07:00

An Interview with Lynda Schor, author of "The Body Parts Shop" (FC2 2006) et al.

By Carol Novack

CN: I'm delighted to interview you as our Issue 7 featured author, Lynda. You're a true Mad Hatter writer, unafraid to take stylistic and thematic risks and brilliantly, hysterically, "over the top" satirical. The Mad Hatters adore "over the top" writers who don't play croquet by the rules.

******

CN: Do you think that offbeat literary women writers have a tougher time than offbeat male writers? How seriously does the publishing and literary world take offbeat satirical writings by women?

LS: I think whatever women are doing—and women are publishing a lot of books, some of which are experimental and offbeat and satirical—we have to remain nice, and we have to be "acceptable." The cuter we are the better. I think that right now the visual art world is way ahead of the literary world in terms of anything wild, weird, difficult, non-narrative, and transgressive. I'm talking about the U. S. now. Transgression in language or ideas will be less accepted from women authors. The male story is still the main story, and the male story structure is still the acceptable story structure.

Satire is often mean, and satirizing sex (from a woman's point of view) can get disgusting and anti-romantic, or anti politically correct. Probably only about 30% of the American population can recognize that satire is funny. And that it might be funny and dark at the same time is too disturbing. People (and I'm generalizing) seem to think they have a right to be protected from being insulted or disturbed, and many feel empowered to censor what's disturbing rather than to just stay away from it. That said, it's hard to tell what people will really accept, as the publishing corporations are the gatekeepers between the writer and the public, and the publishing world is about money and fear, mass markets and bottom lines.

******

CN: What's the riskiest thing you've ever written? Do tell!

LS: I'm not interested in anything that isn't risky. I've been sued, and I've lost friends. I've written stories that haven't been published until 20 years after they were written. In a story called, "Eva Braun's Last Tragic Abortion," I describe, in great detail, Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler having sex on their final evening alive. It took 25 years for that one to get published.

I'd say, though, that my riskiest story was about race and class. After a number of responses to the story, I decided to hide it away in the dark, somewhere where some of my most unacceptable ideas simmer. Maybe in 20 years I'll send it out.

I am very interested in and influenced by the "bad guys and gals," such as Henry Miller, Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Kafka, Lidia Yuknavitch, William Burroughs. I love Shelley Jackson's writing. I'm attracted to the innovator, the nasty, the bad, the sexy, the dingy and disgusting, the wild and surrealistic.

******

CN: You have a degree in visual art, not in writing. How has being a visual artist influenced how you write?

LS: I see my writing in images and one of my challenges is using words as a medium to describe visual images. I'd like my stories to be visual and vivid, and to be remembered as if they are films. My story structures are visual to me. I could diagram them as drawings. I love to think about how the medium of paint and the medium of words are alike, and how they are different. I've never wanted any written work of mine to be illustrated. But I have been using photos and drawings and diagrams as elements that need to be understood the way words are. I like photos that are slightly blurred—like in W.G. Sebald's work—that add mystery, rather than adding a pictorial version to something being said. In writing I use the visual art techniques such as pastiche and collage. I also write many stories about visual artists. I want my writing to be like the art of Francis Bacon, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Egon Schiele, etc.

In the past, writing was for a tool for expressing something I wanted to express, and doing visual art (painting, printmaking, photography) was a tool for expressing other aspects of myself. I didn't see that there was much connection. My visual art was also sunnier, prettier, I think. But now the visual and the writing have moved closer. My writing has become as abstract as my visual art, my visual art subjects have become darker and more political, and much more satirical. I am happy with my writing and my visual art when the connections vibrate just above or below the line of comprehension, as in an Ashbery poem or a Bacon painting.

In "Sex for Beginners 2," I used the graphic (visual) material instead of words to say something of their own. The graphic or pictorial sections may be inexplicable, but they say something visceral and visual that is related to the written sections. And they are all related to sex in the same tenuous ways.

******

CN: All of your stories are spectacular, Lynda, but I read "Coming of Age" [In "The Body Parts Shop"] several times because I loved it so much. I was bowled over by the way you depicted your first-person protagonist's real emotions of maternal love, powerlessness, bewilderment, alarm and self-denigration, in the face of her "tough" teenage "whore" daughter's seeming self-satisfaction and independence, and . . . finally, fragility. But what is remarkable is that this beautifully crafted character study of mother and daughter dwells within what we realize in the end is an absurd surreal landscape. Thus the piece goes beyond the borders of a well-executed "realistic" New Yorker type story into the realm of the experimental.

Can you talk a bit about that story and your earlier classification of its theme as bearing on class? Can you tell us what inspired you to write "Coming of Age?"

LS: If it's OK, I'd like to start with your last question and move backwards.

I wanted to write a story about that hideous moment when one's child is very young and vulnerable, but thinks he/she is very grown up. It's a moment that seems very frightening to the parent, who understands mortality and danger, while the kid feels newly powerful. It's also a moment when the child really doesn't have to listen any more, or follow any of the rules that the parent imagines will keep the child safe. It's a very autobiographical story, though it isn't "realistic." I'm not interested in portraying anything in a "realistic" way—whatever that means. I'm interested in believability. All my stories are somewhat surrealistic, and grossly exaggerated. But that protagonist is me in an incarnation, and the daughter is mine in many ways, though not all ways. My real daughter is not a prostitute dating a senator's son who has graduated from Harvard Business School, for instance. "Coming of Age" is successful, and unusual for me, (I write very long stories and love to add any related material I can find) because it covers a lot of issues, but it's pretty short. It's extremely concentrated.

So still going backward to your question, Carol, about how "Coming of Age" bears on class, I guess I really meant American capitalism. I am always aware of how family members become separated by huge differences in income, as that's one of the stories of my family, but that's only touched on in the story. What IS there is the generational difference between the parent and the child—the different interpretation the child has about all the things her mother did during her youth, and all the things her mother felt were important are nothing to her daughter, who has different morals, different standards and different goals. The child's values are materialistic. Because she has a bigger, better apartment than her mother, it doesn't matter to her that she's a prostitute who the mother feels is being exploited. The daughter thinks her mother has been exploited by not being paid enough for her writing, and for living in a crummy apartment with only one window. The daughter would agree maybe that a prostitute can lead a sordid life—but when she owns a business, exploiting other workers (prostitutes too) and making a lot of money, running her enterprise like a C.E.O., her prostitution is institutionalized, she is a success, and she has the material proof of that success. The daughter says, "How am I exploited? I'm the one earning a great living, who's getting rich, who has great clothes, and a great apartment . . ."

_____________

Lynda Schor's piece in Mad Hatter's Review may be accessed HERE.

issue seven of mad matter's review

2007-02-14T19:17:00.000-07:00

Poetry
Joe Amato
Gunnar Benediktsson
Bob Marcacci
Sally Molini
Michael Neff

Fiction
Jai Clare
Brandon Hobson
Juan José Millás Translated from the Spanish by Peter Robertson
Rochelle Ratner
D. Harlan Wilson
G. K. Wuori

Non-Fiction
Kevin P. Keating

Whatnots
Lynda Schor
Rob Stephenson
Vernon Frazer

Audio Text Collages
The Memorials to Future Catastrophes Distant Early Warning System
by Davis Schneiderman& Don Meyer

Book Reviews
The Last Stage by Jim Cherry
Walden' by Michael T. Dolan
A Bit of a Marriage by Karina Mellinger
Institutionalized by Fred Smith & Joe Schmoe

Columns
Rich Andrews
Sir Castor Bayley
Tantra Bensko
Crazy Jane
Pete Dolack
Shirley Harshenin
Lockie Hunter
D. A. Eis
Helen Ruggieri

Comics
Coconuts, Patriotic Polly, Tristan, Miss Julie & Steve & others

Contests
The Wrong Roof Winners
Current Contest Guidelines: "Mad About You"

Editor's Rave
Carol Novack

Galleries
Calum Colvin I II
Issue 7 Art
Issue 7 Music

Interviews
Calum Colvin
Lynda Schor

Mental Theatre
Don Bergland

Video
Video by Joel Schlemowitz

Seminar in Contemporary American Fiction

2007-02-12T08:09:00.000-07:00

Hi, All--

Quick update on the grad seminar. Encouraged by your support, I decided to fill the term with contemporary "experimental" texts (with a couple of early classes devoted to discussions of texts/traditions leading to present).

Here's our reading list:

Jeffrey DeShell, Peter
Shelley Jackson, Melancholy of Anatomy
David Markson, This is Not a Novel
Carole Maso, The Art Lover
Lance Olsen, Girl Imagined by Chance
Susan Steinberg, Hydroplane
Steve Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in Flatland
David Foster Wallace, Oblivion
Lidia Yuknavitch, Real to Reel

So far we've talked through Maso, DFW, and Markson. Jackson this week. We've dealt with some typical complaints (these texts are too difficult, elitist, etc.) and gotten into some fruitful discussions of both text and context (and where context is concerned, I'm lucky that a bunch of these students have already had some theory). Probably one of the luckier things for the class: the group, as a whole, seems to feel safe enough to not only admit what they don't understand but also speculate about the books in some pretty funky ways. Lots of playful consideration of the "links" in Markson, for example.

I only regret not including a hypertext novel, like Joyce's Afternoon.

I'm kind of tempted, now--since we're having such a good term--to offer a few, optional evening film screenings to complement the readings. I, unfortunately, only have a sense of a few mainstream films, like Adaptation, that might work. I'd appreciate any other suggestions.

time capsule: 17 May 1996

2007-02-07T14:36:00.000-07:00

Mark Leyner, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen appeared on The Charlie Rose Show on 17 May, 1996 (fast forward to the 36 minute mark, btw) to discuss televisual reading habits, publishing and the state of the novel at the dawn of The InterWebs. It's nearly 11 years later, and I'm wondering what--if anything--is markedly different. (Besides Franzen's hairstyle, natch.)

Eh?

a conversation with jeffrey deshell : part three

2007-02-04T17:54:00.000-07:00

Lance: In its Human Development Report 2000, the U.N. defines illiteracy as the inability to read or write a simple message, and reports that 90 million children worldwide are denied any sort of schooling, 232 million any sort of secondary education, and that one billion adults are illiterate through and through. Is that really what we mean when we say illiteracy? Is that the only kind? In 2004, as I mentioned earlier on this blog, the N.E.A. questioned 17,000 American adults about their reading preferences and habits. The survey discovered that since 1982 there has been a loss of roughly twenty million readers—a number that represents a ten percent drop in readership—and that reading rates are declining among all demographic groups regardless of gender, ethnicity, education, age or income level, with the steepest decline in the youngest groups—i.e., those between 18-24 and 25-34, respectively. Of those surveyed, 95.7 percent said they preferred watching television to reading, 60 percent attending a movie, 55 percent lifting weights.

In light of such news, to what extent aren’t all readers “elitists,” the very existence of written texts “radical” and “disruptive” … while, ironically, increasingly anachronistic and pointless with respect to the culture at large, to any real “revolution”? To what extent do such statistics reduce all queries concerning “elitism” and “innovation” to ethically challenging if ultimately unenlightening drills in semantics?

One way, it occurs to me, that we might define most, if not all, contemporary experimental fiction is to say it is that sort of writing shot through with a theoretical intelligence—a self-reflexive, difficult, often contradictory critifictional awareness. In a sense, this is no more than an extension, I think, of your use of the notion of irony. Whether or not that’s generally the case, it strikes me as the case in an important and illuminating way with respect to your own project. Which theorists and/or philosophers (if you sense a difference between the two terms) most inform your writing?

Jeffrey: Your facts regarding reading numbers are sobering, but not surprising. Although, I daresay if you look at enrollment in creative-writing programs today, I’m guessing you’ll see a pattern of growth: there are more writers than readers existing today, at least in this country. Writing has become just another technique for self-expression, just more data to be mined and processed.

This is why I’m hesitant to embrace hyper-text, e-writing and the rest of the new hyphenated media. On one hand, I understand that this is a way of reaching new readers, of meeting new audiences on their own terms (between working out and watching TV). On the other hand, I’m wondering how much of literature’s peculiarity, the things that it does that other media can’t, is lost. Literature can do things that painting, music, architecture, film, etc., cannot, just as these other forms can do things that literature can’t. “Reading” on a computer screen is a useful way of (quickly) obtaining information or absorbing surface images, but it’s not a good medium for experiencing difficult text, for encountering language that needs to be reflected upon, language that requires time to be comprehended. Every year I ask my students about this, and every year they tell me that anything difficult or long they have to read, they print out. The required sound track, the dancing text, the visual imagery, the machineness of hyper-text prohibits this sort of linguistic contemplation (I don’t like that word) and questioning that the printed book can encourage.

This is not to say that e-writing can’t be interesting, provocative and beautiful and/or sublime in its own right. But I don’t see it doing the things that literature can do well. I don’t believe that art is "platform neutral." Quite the contrary. So I’m interested in literature that does what literature does well, that demands participation from the reader, that performs the questioning and critique we’ve talked about. And I’m interested in painting that does what painting does well, film that explores the possibility of film, and so on. This might be a generational thing. Being so text based, I mean.

I would say a critical awareness is necessary, rather than a theoretical one. This critical awareness can be gained by a variety of means: reading a lot of good fiction, studying painting or architecture, traveling. If we see language as a problem, then whatever can deepen and help articulate that problem for you (I didn’t say "solve") is good. I’ve read too much bad fiction where the writer thinks that undigested theory or philosophy gives the writing ideas, a weight or profundity it wouldn’t otherwise have. These fictions are seldom interesting.

I teach a lot of theory and some philosophy (it gets me out of the workshops), and I certainly don’t like or agree with all of it. I find Bhabha, for example, such a horrible writer, nearly unreadable that I find I can’t pay much attention to his ideas (whatever they may be). I have a hard time with Deleuze as well. The theorists or philosophers I keep reading—Benjamin, de Man, Blanchot, Ronell, and to a lesser extent Nietzsche—are all stylists themselves, what I would consider great writers (de Man sounds way like Nabokov to me), and all put themselves into play in the ways we’ve discussed. I read Derrida, Heidegger and Hegel in grad school, and although I come back to them now once in a while (for teaching), I’m glad I read them in grad school. Hegel is someone whose writing is incomprehensible, but whose ideas, when read though his interpreters, seem important and "true." I often read theory when I’m writing fiction because I find it good mental exercise, and the language doesn’t infect my writing like other fiction can. I don’t write much theory or criticism these days, but I remember not finding the process all that different. Now I think I would.

What about you? I’m guessing Nietzsche, certainly, and maybe Barthes, but who else? And how important do you think it is to your fiction writing? And do you see a large gap between fiction and critical writing?

Lance: We are witnessing—and have been for at least the last 30 or 40 years—what Steven Connors discusses as the slow “collapse of criticism into its object.” Cixous, Delany, Federman, Hassan, Sukenick, Shaviro, to name the first half dozen that come to mind, have been investigating in various performative critifictions ways to erase the artificial distinction between primary and secondary texts, asserting by example that all texts are in fact secondary ones, linguistic and generic collages, bits of bricolage. Said another way, many experimentalists have attempted to efface, or at least deeply and richly complicate, the accepted difference between a privileged discourse written by those who believe that they can somehow step back from what it is they are discussing, as critics sometimes believe they might be able to do, and attain with respect to it something like an elite (that word again) position of metacommentarial objectivity, on the one hand, and, on the other, some subordinate discourse that can be intellectually colonized, written about without actually being written through, engaged with, changed by the very act of said writing. My next project to be published, Anxious Pleasures: A Novel After Kafka, takes this notion of performative critifiction seriously by reimagining The Metamorphosis.

And so, yes, I feel shot through with theorists and theories, all to the good, and, yes, Nietzsche, for sure, opened up everything for me when I first encountered him as an undergraduate and then graduate student with his amazing epigrammatic style and fierce intelligence that refuses to stay put. Early on Guy Debord, Baudrillard, Bataille, Lyotard, and Derrida influenced me intensely as well. My impression is that once you catch a case of them, you can never shake it, never retreat to a more innocent, uncomplicated perspective. It’s a wonderful illness. Barthes's style and cerebral restlessness teach me something new every day.

Speaking of which, in his famous essay on the death of the author, he writes, as if he were writing yesterday, as if he were writing about your latest novel, Peter: An (A)historical Romance: “We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning . . . but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture.” Would you conclude by talking a little bit about how that novel engages with this notion of text as multidimensional nexus, how it enters the larger conversation concerning the experimental?

Jeffrey: I’m not sure I’d want to give the game away, even if I could remember what the game was in the first place. I’ve always been interested in amphibology, where a word or image can be grammatically correct and yet mean different things. The famous example is “I shot an elephant in my pajamas.” In S & M, I worked this through the absence of punctuation, and in Peter, through the overabundance of punctuation. I was also interested in a certain nausea of objects (I first wrote “abjects”), as well as its converse, the sort of bleakness or lack. That’s where the Moses and Aaron quote from the epigraph comes from: Moses, who didn’t believe in images, was strict, terrible in his austerity, dreary, while Aaron understood that people need images and things. This is a tension I’m trying to exploit in the novel, the tension between a materialism and an asceticism, where you can’t trust either. I also remember being interested in miscommunication and misunderstanding. Peter doesn’t listen very well, he’s the ultimate American. And yet, and yet, and yet, I find myself growing more understanding of his character the older the book gets. Which is somewhat frightening.

Do I consciously think of the novel as experimental? I guess after the fact, sure. It was published by a small but terrific press—Starcherone—after being rejected by a number of other presses of various sizes, and the book is somewhat difficult to read, with all those parentheses and brackets. It’s interested in language and its own composition. But it does have a linear story, with characters and conflict, and it is, at least somewhat, timely. There are a lot of pop culture references in it, with a lot of fashion and gear. So what makes it inherently or immanently experimental? More experimental that Frank, or Nietzsche’s Kisses, or The Melancholy of Anatomy, or Frances Johnson? And by experimental do we mean “won’t sell very well”? Or do we mean “fits into a slot with others”?, or do we mean “doesn’t fit into a slot with others?”

We’re interested in what we’re interested in, and we do what we do. We’re all realists. There’s everything, and yet nothing, experimental about it. It’s writing, with all the joy and dread that entails. When I was writing it, did I think it was experimental? Yes and no.

We’re back to where we started.

Two Arguments

2007-01-30T09:32:00.000-07:00

Two Arguments

I seem to be hearing what amounts to two recurring and concurrent arguments on this blog -- interconnected arguments, surely -- but two arguments, as follows:

(1) The economic argument, which is also an aesthetic argument: the major trades are a problem b/c their approach to the literary marketplace has little to do with literature per se, which they view in the main as a commodity. The consequent emphasis on producing blockbuster novels and the like is clear evidence that the trades will continue to churn out homogenized product as long as it continues to make money -- or to lose money, as in loss leaders.

Against (1), the small presses offer a competing model of literary production, in which what is valued is the literary per se, as opposed to its capacity for commodification.

(2) The aesthetic argument, which is also an economic argument: those who are involved with the trades, from agents to editors to publishers (in many cases, entertainment magnates), hold relatively conservative views of what literature can be. Now while it's clearly the case that economics may drive such aesthetic predispositions, aesthetics can drive economics too -- there are prevailing sensibilities about literature that can, by virtue of the massive circulation of ideas and values (and, uhm, fiscal inertia) attendant to publishing networks, be made to speak rather directly to readerships.

Against (2), the small presses offer a competing model of literary aesthetics, in which what is valued is unconventional literature and literary modes, as opposed to more mundane realisms and the like.

In the midst of this deplorable (yes, OK) situation, we have the "long tail" argument, in which people (readers) will presumably be buying less of more. But may I observe here that there is less, and there is LESS. Buying (selling) 3000 copies of a book -- 3000 down on the flatter part of the tail, if you look at the overall distribution range -- is a whole different ballgame than selling (buying) 50 copies of a book, and 3000 is a good bit higher than most (most) small-press runs with which I'm familiar. So I'm not certain about the scales at stake here, finally, and without being certain, I'm simply not willing to put too much hope in the tail end of things.

But here's my main point: If I have to choose between (1) and (2) -- and nobody is holding a gun to my head, mind you -- I'll have to rate (1) as the more urgent reality at this point. It seems to me that if literature as such -- by which I mean to designate quality literature, or literary fiction, poetry, etc (please permit me to allow these terms to pass unexamined) -- is jeopardized outright as a result of economic realignments at the global level, then the small presses might think about getting less caught up in aesthetic arguments than in finding a home for any literature, as long as it's deemed of sufficient quality.

I know that the word "quality" will give some conniptions. Me too. However, given the urgencies at stake here, as I understand them, I likewise see no reason why someone who's doing challenging work in a realist mode, but can't find a home on the trades, ought not to be welcomed by the small presses.

(This is already happening, of course, in some quarters, and in said quarters, there are people making negative noise about this development. Please don't ask me to name names.)

Of course, small press publishers are free to publish what they wish -- it's their (your) dime. And of course, much (but not all) of the literature I continue to be drawn to is aesthetically ambitious. But my appeal, I suppose -- and w/o wishing to come off as too disputatious -- is that we might reconsider the aesthetic argument as a rationale for publication, and turn our attention to the literary, in all of its more ambitious manifestations.

Then what?

Conversations in the Book Trade

2007-01-28T08:30:00.000-07:00

I was recently contacted by Finn Harvor, who maintains Conversations in the Book Trade. Below are my responses to his questions, to be posted there in a couple days. I recommend the site, which features responses to these same questions as well from Che Elias of Six Gallery Press, James Chapman of Fugue State Press, Micheal Allen of Kingsfield Publishing (UK), Jon Paul Fiorentino of Snare Books (Canada), Catheryn Kilgarriff of Marion Boyars Publishing (UK), Michael Bryson of the Danforth Review (Canada), Robert Lasner of Ig Publishing, Richard Nash of Softskull Press, Fred Ramey of Unbridled Books, and Bev Daurio of The Mercury Press (Canada). I think these are interesting interviews because they are international in scope and also issue from a place other than our own sphere (for instance, see the questions about agents, big contests, etc.). I apologize for the repetitions of other things I've said here, but I've tried to have some new thoughts as well!

Conversations in the Book Trade: Literature is in trouble -- that is, more trouble than usual. Why do you think this is? The increasing prevalence of TV? The distractions of increasingly narcotic subcultures such as video games? Sept. 11? Or is talk of the "death of literature" simple exaggeration?

Ted Pelton: Lots of economic & cultural reasons gave rise to the novel as a popular form some 300 years ago, and lots of cultural reasons get in the way of it being an easily consumable form of entertainment today, just having to do with amounts of leisure time, different forms of entertainment and entertainment technologies being available, etc. Tough to read while listening to an iPod – and even I just got one for Christmas. Lots of other kinds of entertainment are more passively enjoyed than in Samuel Richardson’s, even Henry James’s, or even James Baldwin’s day, and these can fit multi-task life-functioning better, are less demanding. But I wouldn't go so far as to say the "death of literature." As a rejoinder, look at the enormous & growing number of creative writing programs in the US today. One might be cynical and say that this is symptomatic of our current self-obsessed time -- everyone wants to be writers but no one is reading. I think there's validity to saying that. But I also think that people feel & comprehend the deep inadequacy of being limited to only ephemeral pastimes; they want to be readers and be turned on by books, recognizing the deep satisfaction, pleasure, and wisdom to be found there. It isn't as central a part of our society as it may used to have been, but then there's also a lot more people, and if we had a publishing and establishment that was literature-friendly instead of hell-bent on blockbusters, I think we'd see literature have a bigger profile. Small presses are trying to fill in this gap.

CBT: And what is literature, anyway? Should the traditional novel be considered the prime example of it?

TP: Sure, but look also at what's happened to comic books, which have arguably become MORE sophisticated in the age of the Graphic Novel, so that we have Literary comics now as well as the more typical forms, novels, poetry, etc. Definitions are troublesome, because no sooner does one come up with one than someone else comes in and says, "Yeah, but what about 'x'?" But I would say, off the cuff, that literature is an open, expanding art form that contains writing of some sort and is intended to have more value than simply being useful as entertainment; that is, it has artistic ambitions. So while the novel might generally be considered Literature, I'd say many novels published today are not Literature (i.e., they have no artistic ambitions, but simply entertain in formulaic, predictable ways), while some categories of writing that formerly were not thought of as Literature -- like the alternative comic, for instance -- might today be seen as Literature.

CBT: Prizes and awards are playing an increasing role in determining an author's career-trajectory. In short, winning a major literary prize can win a writer a large audience overnight (not to mention, considerable fame and financial remuneration). But, as British critic Jason Cowley has observed, what is lost is the ability for readers to think in a critically complex fashion.

Are literary prizes dangerous in this regard? Do they convey to the public the message that "this book is worth reading and all these others aren't"?

TP: I haven't really thought about the big prizes, which probably do operate in the way Cowley suggests. Then again, a prize that's honorably given for the right aesthetic reasons can be a terrific cultural instrument for good. I think of the recent Nobel Literature Prizes, including the stunningly brave awarding of it to Elfriede Jelinek the year before last. Who in the United States read Jelinek before this? Indeed, to this day, she doesn't even have an American publisher -- her brilliant, savage books, severely critical of Western capitalism and male-domination, are distributed in the US by the British publisher Serpent's Tail.

Let me also give you another view of the prize issue. The press I direct, Starcherone Books, does an annual blind-judged contest, now going into its fifth year. We do our best to make certain the contest is run completely on the up-&-up, including publishing a strict set of ethical guidelines on our website. Over the past 4 years, we have 4 times discovered debut authors as winners, whose work was terrific, couldn't get published elsewhere, and makes us proud to be in this business. A contest was the vehicle by which this occurred. So I'd at least complicate Cowley's view of the role of prizes to suggest that they are actually a means by which authors who are less privileged can compete and get into print.

CBT: Literary publishing has always been a marriage of art and commerce. But in recent years, the Cult of the Deal has become more influential, with agents demanding larger advances and marketing people paying especially close attention to sales figures. Is the "art" side of the business being pushed out?

TP: Oh, most definitely. But that's what makes a press like Starcherone -- or FC2, or Chaismus, or Other Voices, or 3rd Bed, or Calamari, etc. -- so important and valuable. Major publishers today are more than ever divisions of entertainment conglomerates with business concerns involved in the editorial decisions: how predictable a market does this book give us, who's going to buy it, how do we target its appeal in a marketing blitz, etc. These are not concerns of Literature. Big houses want to run their book divisions like movies are distributed -- get them out to venues, give people a short time to "consume" them, then clear the venues for the new products. Again, this is where small presses are more in line with how literature actually works: we keep books available longer than that 3-6 month window. I'm always quoting Emerson that "one shouldn't read a book until it's at least a year old." I find that I read that way -- the books I'm reading at any one time have generally been out 1-3 years, and are still new; I wait until several people have told me to read a book, etc. That's antithetical to how the book business is set up – the celebrity deal culture. But it coincides with how small presses work, keeping their books in print indefinitely; and now, with internet venues (as well as the indy bookstores that have stayed afloat) allowing for "long tail" retailing -- extending customer choices by having many more products available, instead of making everybody consume this month's Harry Potter or Johnny Depp product -- the mainstream publishers are in trouble. Their way of doing business doesn't make sense (either economically or for readers) and needing as they do huge profits in order to stay healthy in the weird way corporate economics works these day, they are covering up their panic in glitzy press releases. That's my read, anyway.

CBT: Many major publishers now refuse to accept "unsolicited" work; that is, they will not even consider work unless it is agented. Is this a sound policy from point of view of finding the best new literary voices? Isn't there a chance good writing will be squeezed out?

Of course it isn't a sound policy for finding the best new literary voices, but commercial publishing isn't about that. And it certainly isn't interested in good writing. Commercial publishing is about finding the best new literary PRODUCTS -- works that fit in already understood niches, are marketable in predictable, pre-established patterns, etc. Accepting agented-only manuscripts is part of streamlining the corporate process -- outsourcing the work of finding talent. And agents present at least 2 problems, it seems to me, as arbiters of Literature: 1) they will always (except in very rare circumstances) favor books that are more commercial in orientation; 2) agents largely draw from a rather pre-selected pool, which I think is pretty much class-based: those who go to the top schools, who meet at the top clubs & prep schools, who already know the top dealmakers, etc. Literature has always been the rich person's game, but I think it's likely worse than it's ever been, in the state of affairs you describe.

No wonder we have such boring, pedestrian mainstream literature these days.

CBT: Alternatively, for small presses that do accept unsolicited work, is the problem that the majors are squeezing the small houses at the distribution/retail marketing end? In other words, even when good writers get published by small houses, do they have a fair chance of winning an audience? Or are the major houses introducing an overly corporate, overly aggressive mentality to the book trade?

TP: The deck is stacked against small presses in major ways. Follow this scenario: A major publisher has a new book. It sends out its galleys 4-6 months ahead to the major reviewers, complete with descriptions of the national publicity campaigns planned. The major review venues (Publisher's Weekly, NYT Book Review, etc.) then write the reviews of the major publishers' books, coinciding with the week the books come out in retail chains around the country. It's a beautiful, multi-million dollar industrial ballet, with advertising, reviewing and distribution synched up all across our nation of 300 million people, via the major newspapers and book chains positioned all across the country to serve those people. Of course the small presses can't compete with that. The mainstream reviews don't review our books, because they know we're not corporate players (again, the decision to review or not review has little or nothing to do with the quality of the book); the distribution systems that ship tens of thousands of books only to see most of them returned unsold and get remaindered and pulped, within the year -- these are well-beyond the finances of small presses to compete with.

But what I've come to realize is that small presses don't have to operate in direct competition with this model. We make our books' marketing period not the three months after it comes out, but the lifetime of the book -- that is, always keeping our books in print, available, and continuously marketed. And by not competing with this corporate model, we not only help even the playing field, spreading the news by longer-extended, word-of-mouth means, author tours, ads for backlist titles, localized approaches, etc., but we also adopt a practice that's more in keeping with the way literature actually works. As a small press fiction publisher, I look at how poetry has been sold for years, with virtually no visibility in the cultural mainstream, yet selling steadily, as it were, through underground channels.

CBT: Returning to the question of agents -- are they too powerful? If so, in what ways? Or are they a largely beneficial and necessary element of contemporary publishing?

TP: I have had little direct involvement with agents. I think I operate in a different world.

Generally, I think agents can help distort what literature really is. I have from time to time met agents who seem like nice people, with their hearts in the right place. But by fundamentally judging writing by the expectations of its sales potential, which it seems to me they MUST do, by the very nature of their jobs, I think they help pre-select a largely predictable, culturally received type of literature.

CBT: Does America have too many publishers? Or too few?

TP: Too many publishers! Well, the mainstream book world certainly thinks so, and the corporate review establishment basically tows this line. It's always, inherently, "Are there too many small press publishers?"

Starcherone Books publishes really great books. We do an annual contest that finds terrific debut authors (not that we limit it to that, it's just how it's gone) every year. So, no, there aren't too many publishers -- there are as many publishers as there need to be, because no one is going to go through the hard work of selling in a marketplace where the odds are stacked against you, unless there's a real need. And rarely does a week go by that I don't hear about a new press starting. Maybe there really are too few... Maybe a better way to think about it might be this -- when some kids start a rock band, they don’t think so much about "are there too many rock bands," they think "I want to be in a rock band, I have some friends who'll come see us," etc. So, too, presses. Why should there be a category of "too many"?

CBT: In your opinion, how will new technologies such as the e-book or audio books affect the "form" of the book?

TP: I really don't know. This has been argued about for a while -- but the changeover to electronic books has seemed very slow in actually happening, perhaps because people really like books, their tangible feel, etc. It's happened much more slowly, for instance, than technology has affected how we listen to music, for instance.

One thing that is definitely happening, and happening for the better, concerns the literary magazine world. It used to be that people would get published in these, but you'd rarely see them; they were very localized, and obscure in other parts of the country. But now, web magazines are all over the place and there's much more of a sampling of everybody's works out there -- at least among avant-garde/experimental/innovative writers.

CBT: Putting aside the hype, does the Internet provide a real opportunity to publishers? If so, how?

TP: As I started to say above, now you have the opportunity to see just about anyone's writing you're interested in (short of the very established writers, whose work is everywhere already anyway), immediately, for free. Book publishers, I think, are less affected, because internet reading isn't really given to book length works. Or at least it doesn't seem yet to be. But the literary magazine has been transformed forever. Now people have magazine blogs, as well as new mags forming all the time, and linking to one another. It's actually quite exciting, if you give up the idea of making a living at it!

My friend Geoffrey Gatza has a press called BlazeVox that may also be a sign of things to come. He's done a terrific amount of work in sponsoring new literature through the internet, with virtually no money expenditure. He "publishes" books as pdf's, then if you want to get the book in tangible form, you order it online and it's assembled per order -- pure print-on-demand, through amazon.com's BookSurge, and the book quality is superb! He has the authors doing their own proofreading, and by farming out such tasks he's able to publish dozens of books. My novella, Bhang, is available through BlazeVox Books. The titles include books by some of my favorite alternative authors, Kent Johnson, Daniel Nester, Kazim Ali, etc. This is one guy, with no cash expenditure, working out of his home office, who has published about 3 dozen books! The authors themselves are then responsible for marketing, etc., besides website and email marketing.

Starcherone Books is more traditional -- we do print-runs and publish a more manageable 4 titles a year. But we started with nothing in 2000 except the name, taken from "start your own." It would have been impossible to do what we have done without the net -- we advertise there, do a lot of direct sales, communicate with our authors, other publishers, printers, etc., and otherwise make up the ground between us and the big publishers.

CBT: And what role can traditional, venerable institutions such as libraries and English Departments play in reversing the decline in sales of literary fiction?

TP: English departments can spend more time studying the economics of the book industry, as this very much affects what Literature indeed is, as I've been arguing. But the more radical kinds of theoretical discourses, that should theoretically lead English departments toward buying and supporting indy lit, assigning it to classes, etc., runs up against the continued corporatization of the universities. Universities themselves get into the book business, agree to have Barnes & Nobles on campus, or outsource the campus bookstore to an online dealer -- all of which works against anything that isn't routine. Big booksellers profit big publishers, and on it goes.

Libraries generally do their parts when they have funding and they're informed about the small presses. But small press literature is somewhat akin to organic grocers -- it takes an effort and thus requires education of its customers. Lots of cities have "If everyone read the same book" programs -- when libraries and other community organizations get involved with these kinds of events, it can really raise the profile of literature. But people also have to want to do this. Maybe we are seeing Literature become a more selective pastime. I don't think this means that it will die out -- but the people who believe in it have to work to keep it a healthy part of our culture.

CBT: What projects are you working on now that you are excited about?

TP: We're always working, bringing out new books. We have new books by Harold Jaffe and soon another from Raymond Federman -- authors with world-wide reputations (particularly Federman) who can't get mainstream publishers in the US because they are viewed as too "difficult," or simply now not young and glib enough for the pre-conceived American marketplace.

We've also discovered some great new writers -- Nina Shope, Aimee Parkison, Sara Greenslit, and just coming out, Joshua Harmon. People interested in finding out about our authors at http://www.starcherone.com .

And of course I also write. I've got three books, the most recent a novel, Malcolm & Jack, about the American underground in the 1940s. See more about me at TedPelton.com.

In the Shape of a Disappointed Publishing House

2007-01-26T15:23:00.000-07:00

Read Lawrence Norfolk’s In the Shape of a Boar. It’s one of the most challenging books I’ve read in a while, one that emphasizes grammatical tense over plot, myth and the insensate experience of myth over verified reality. A strange book, that’s my best description, and a very difficult one.

The reason I’m writing this piece on Norfolk is not to give a review of the novel, though I will discuss it mostly, but to point to Norfolk as a writer who adroitly pulled the wool over the eyes of publishing/marketing/reviewing world. His first novel, Lempriere’s Dictionary, was an international success. I can only guess that he signed a doozy of a book deal off that success. Since then, he has used that deal to publish books which, had they been submitted by an unknown author, would have been rendered absolutely unpublishable by a major American house, or most of our smaller independent outlets. Granted, Grove Press (the publisher) has done good work in the past, but Norfolk is considered one of England’s best right now, and the fact that his novel In the Shape of a Boar received so much advance hype is, frankly, kind of astonishing.

This was a book that I understood. I didn’t understand it logically, or analytically, and I can hardly explain to you what it’s about or purports to be about. In other words, I didn’t understand it in my brain, but at some further remove, maybe behind my eyes, or inside my skull but outside the brain. The opening section which recounts the myth of the boar of Caladonia reads as though it were being told in an unfamiliar but classical heroic style. The tense is all wrong. The events described are written as though in stone. There are most definitely a series of active descriptions, of actions, of killing and fighting. Of hunting. But the actions belong to such a distant past, and the grammatical tense is so arch and, well, marmoreally diagrammatic, that even the thrust of a spear seems as though it were dabbed by painter on an ancient vase. In other words, Norfolk makes you feel the expanse of time between the narrator’s now (the 1960s) and some mythological classical past. Regardless, the hard slog through the opening section ends in a cave where the boar hides out, and at any moment, an immensley violent act threatens. I made my way through this section as a somnambulist reader.

Let me give you a sample of the action, which is perfectly intelligible, easy to understand, but in its accumulation of detail without context, soon becomes epic in scope, but fragmented in form: “They are here to hunt the boar. Atalanta plucks at the folds of cloth about her waist. Her chiton has dried. She covers her breasts and ties the garment in place. The men pay her no attention, gathered together on the twilit shore and meddled by the shadows and Meleager’s challenge. The dusk settles on them all like a rain of dusk or ash, the rain they have fled. Their pasts are carcasses, toted shoulder-high as trophies, as is her own. Her father left her wailing on a mountainside. She sucked bear’s milk in place of her mother’s. She was the bear-girl. Now she is the huntress, the bitter-virgin, the centaur-killer: her own monsters, of which the most insistent and insubstantial is her own circling shadow. A bronze arm points her forward at dawn. Midday, and the arm of iron warns her back. She has looked up through the breaks in the forest canopy expecting vast slow-beating wings but there was nothing and nobody save herself.”

The first section flows in a similar style. On each and every page, there are footnotes to Ancient Greek texts which reference the boar myth. This section, then, is the modern fictionalization of a myth. Reading it was somewhat akin to reading Nathalie Sarraute’s Portrait of a Man Unknown or Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. But not quite. I only mention them because they were the first two books I can remember reading in a hazy daze. No, a better metaphor might be Lamont Young’s, um, music. Young was born and raised in the American mountain west. Living so close to the highway, the sound that accompanied his childhood was the incessant buzz of the powerline. He attuned himself to its various frequencies and tones, and he made a virtue of the singularly reductive note which contains within it a great many other notes. To use a writing metaphor, imagine the writer who can’t change speeds, all his characters sound alike, and yet he’s able to create a polyphony of meaning/noise just the same. He's not a ventriloquist at all, but a master of the sentence. Young’s home in New York City, as very infrequent visitors have reported, is filled with diametrically opposed speakers which constantly leech out a barely audible hum. Visitors train themselves to listen to the hum’s many tonalities, and soon enough they can hear changes as bodies move through each room. I saw a Young performance a few years ago in a church. We sat down, watched as the performers warmed up, tuned their instruments, etc. Thirty minutes later it became clear: this was the performance. Singular searing notes, a bow whose trip across the violin strings lasted ten minutes, a three hour performance with three instruments, cello, violin, flute, and only 8 or so sweeps of the bow. After an hour of this, I was hallucinating. Not quite asleep, but in some sort of hypnogogic state, “music” bypassing my ears and being rendered inside as a maddening, but strangely riveting, obsessive hum. I didn’t leave. And when it was over, I felt exactly as I felt reading the opening section of Norfolk’s book.

Yes, I know my description of reading this book is a bit dramatic, but what can I say? It was literally an enthralling experience. It might’ve been my mood, who knows, but I blame it solely on Norfolk and the novel.

The rest of In the Shape of a Boar is about a Paul Celan-figure, a Jewish poet who treks out of Romania, escapes the deportations to death camps, as suffered by his family and friends, and lands in the mountains of Greece. Specifically, he finds himself in Agrafa (literally, “the unwritten”) which takes its name from the fact that the Ottomans never bothered to collect taxes or administer the region because of its remoteness in the central mountains. For this reason, the region has a reputation as a home to all sorts of ungovernables, mainly brigands and the like. There, the Celan character (who goes by the name of Solomon Memel) is resuscitated by the Communist resistance, whom he joins in the fight. Years later, he recounts these events while living in Paris as the internationally renowned writer famous for writing a poem that compares one particular female resistance fighter to the Atalanta of the myth. The poem becomes compulsory reciting for German schoolchildren, much as Celan’s Todesfuge became compulsory, and as you might expect, Memel thinks of it mainly as a yoke around his neck. The memory of his time in those Greek mountains (which coincidentally is also the site of ancient Caladonia) hides a secret, one which the protagonist, the narrator, and the writer refuse to uncover. That secret is hidden in a cave. Inside the cave a horrifically violent boar awaits confrontation.

At no point in my reading did I even consider that the opening section would serve as a primer or palimpsest for the ending. The very idea seems odd, because of the insanely difficult references. The book precedes from mythic voice, to memoir, to a dark secret with echoes of myth, a secret never revealed. I was astounded that a book would be so hazily constructed. I don’t know of many other books like it. Reviewers seemed similarly flummoxed, but they liked the book generally and the reason is obvious. After all, Norfolk wrote it. So, I guess I’m making the case that sometimes a book can literally put us in a trance. We may not know what we read. The author function certainly validates some of these books, and in a way, you have to earn the rep that allows such a thing to be published. But, it makes me think, if there’s a space for a book of hallucinations and secrets, refusals to reveal the core of the story, then the publishing industry will just about publishing anything. But only if there’s money involved.

a conversation with jeffrey deshell : part two

2007-01-21T18:12:00.000-07:00

Lance: Do you sense something about what you think of when you say “contemporary experimental fiction” that separates it from the experimentalisms of, say, the 1960s? The 1760s? What, I mean to ask, makes the experimental experimental for you in 2007 that might not have made it experimental in 1907?

Jeffrey: These are indeed thorny questions. Let me begin by clarifying just a bit. The questioning I’m talking about has to happen on many different levels—the level of writer, of text, or reader—and will (necessarily) put into play the status or existence of each. So while a mass-consumption romance novel has to ask questions about genre and marketing, these questions do not extend to a serious inquiry about the status of language, the status of the text and the status of the self. So not only do I not consider this “experimental,” I don’t even call it literature. This is probably a weak restatement of the Frenchie (Blanchot, Barthes, Derrida) distinction between work and text. This brings up a couple (at least) more questions: if we (I) exclude this, can we exclude other, more “radical” types of writing, like e-writing and hypertext? And, can realism be experimental?

I’m going to tackle the “easier” question first, the question of realism. Can realism be experimental? Can realism, the dominant mode of narrative, question itself sufficiently, genuinely, strongly, so it becomes truly self-conscious? I would argue yes, and use Flaubert as an example. On some level, Flaubert is the opposite of what we’ve termed experimental, having distilled Madame Bovary from an original of 600 odd pages to 250: now that’s some revision. This revision, if I would not call it spontaneous or improvisational, I would still call self-conscious. He’s the one who first articulated the desire to write a book about Nothing. What marks Flaubert’s realism as experimental or literary is his irony, his ruthless (self) distance. Irony is what separates “good” questioning realism (Flaubert) from “bad” reactionary realism (Franzen).

One could argue that it is irony which is the quality that determines experimentalism, as one (text, writer, reader) needs self-distance in order to be self-conscious. It’s impossible to say if irony precedes self-consciousness, or if self-consciousness preceded irony, although they are not identical. I think Wendy Steiner would place irony fully in the modernist sublime camp. And wasn’t there a discussion going around a couple of years ago about the death of irony? Some sort of post-irony?

It’s hard to say that irony is the necessary ingredient to experimental fiction, however, because as de Man reminds us, there can be no theory of irony because irony is the interruption of theory. So we have to take each case separately, and maybe we’ll find a quality these works have in common, and maybe this thing will be called irony rather than self-consciousness, or maybe it will be called something else.

Now, the trickier question of e-writing. Quickly and simply, I would not put e-writing into this category of literature that questions itself. I say this for 2 reasons, which really might be more than two, but really might be one as well. Let me begin by asking this question: is e-writing a radically different form of writing? If you say yes (as Tomasula’s excellent post seems to indicate, a post deserving of a separate response), then how can both the pros and cons of the medium be part of the work? In everything I’ve come across in my (admittedly limited) reading on the subject, why is it that there’s very little questioning of the value or project of doing this at all? What is lost in the demand that one “think in terms of screens, chunks, or blocks of text that would fit on a notecard”? What is lost in the expectation that the work “have a sound track, move around”? Why isn’t the questioning of (the value of) technology part of (most) work? He implies an ideology of progress that I’m uncomfortable with. Can technology itself be self-questioning? I don’t think so.

If you answer the other way, that e-writing is simply another form of writing, and that language is platform neutral, then I would ask what does the machine add to the experience of language? In other words, isn’t all text hypertext, in that references and signifieds are open-ended, multiple and personal? Don’t we all have multiple, uncontrollable, textual links, every time we read? And how dare you control how my links function, where they go. And unless you’re going to link (I’m unfamiliar with the vocabulary) every single word, aren’t you still working within a hierarchy of directed manipulation? I have a similar complaint against hybrids, or fiction with pictures, soundtracks, etc. It reminds me of MTV. I don’t want a video to limit the images I get from language or music. This is not to say that such work is invalid, or uninteresting, or not as radical as it claims. It is to suggest, however, that it doesn’t possess the irony or self-consciousness necessary for what I’ve termed literature Electronic literature is a contradiction in terms. I know we disagree on this, so I’d like to hear how and why you classify these hybrids and/or e-writing as experimental.

I’m sympathetic to what both you and Tomasula call difficult work, work that isn’t resolved by a single or even multiple readings. And difficulty, contradiction, ambivalence, complexity etc. can come in many forms: there are as many ways to be self-conscious as there are selves.

You’ve asked me how experimentalism might differ today from other times. I was going to think about this in terms of irony, but if we even go back to the 1970’s and 80’s, how do we define writers like Federman, Sukenick, Hawkes et al.? I mean, the ironic Hawkes of Travesty is quite different from the mawkish Hawkes of Blood Oranges, and Sukenick, Katz, Coover et al., well, their irony is hard to pin down (maybe Roberson can chime in here). And all of our irony today isn’t subversive or complex: metacommercials are rather popular, as was Seinfeld. It seems much of today’s irony is used to reinforce the status quo, to abstract or detach the ego or self from the game, which is the opposite of the questioning I’m interested in.

So how are we different? I guess I would say that women are more fully represented now than they’ve ever been. It was possible, although ignorant, to talk about experimental fiction in 1960’s and 70’s (let alone the 1760’s and 70’s) without mentioning any women, while now, even the most superficial discussion has to include Acker, Maso, Tillman, Caponegro et al. And Stein, Barnes, and others have been mainstreamed to a certain extent. So yeah, I’d say that’s important.

There seem to be a lot more avenues for disseminating fiction than there were even 5 or 10 years ago, with places like Chiasmus, Starcherone, Akashic etc. This is certainly a good thing. There’s a lot of good work coming out now, of all different kinds, with all different presuppositions and concerns. At the same time, there’s a certain despair over how quality writing has become marginalized, neutered, rendered irrelevant. This is what now Tomasula calls “a diminishment in the appreciation of poetics.” I would argue that this diminishment is not unrelated to a general devaluation what I’ve called the peculiarity of literature: if all (textual) experience is equal and similar, if a video can do the same thing as a written story, then interesting and complex texts, perhaps the most interesting and complex texts, will get ignored.

One of the differences, which I hinted at in my Steiner response, is that I do believe that while writing of fiction has remained healthy, the critical apparatus for innovative fiction has certainly broken down. Under this rubric I would include review mechanisms, as well as more academic criticism and theory. There’s so very little of it, and much of what is written sometimes isn’t very smart. I do think we need full-time critics who know what they’re doing who care about such writing. Actually the word “need” is perhaps a bit strong. We’ll keep doing what we do, I suspect, regardless. These points are certainly not exhaustive, but are maybe places to start.

Lance: I’m not sure I wholly agree with your suggestion that it is irony that separates “’good’ questioning realism (Flaubert) from ‘bad’ reactionary realism (Franzen).” This is not so much because I disagree with your sense of irony as a mode of self-distancing consciousness, but because my sense is that irony has beaten at the heart of the novel genre from its inception, whether that genre has engaged in so-called “realistic” practices or not. I’m thinking, for example, of Cervantes’s use of acidic irony toward the romance tradition in Don Quixote, Sterne’s toward the novel genre itself and its assumptions in Tristram Shandy.

But I’d rather focus momentarily on the word “realism” in your equation and ask if perhaps we should think of “realism” as one of the least mimetic forms extant, suggest that the real “realism” is the one embraced by the fast fractures and radical destabilizations we see taking place throughout recent literary history in experimental fiction, the sort we find, in other words, evincing itself at the rise of modernism and carrying on through postmodernism into whatever we want or don’t want to label our current alternative aesthetic impulses. Isn’t it experimental fiction, in its varieties and vagaries, that is most seriously involved with, as Lyotard put it, trying to present the unpresentable, the flux we think of as contemporary existence? Isn’t experimental fiction the kind most committed to giving us a sense of what “reality” feels like, and isn’t the traditional “realism” of, say, a Stendhal or Zola, with its coherent subjectivities, arced plotlines, transparent stylistics, and comfortable moralities, the opposite of that?

You’re right that I tend to disagree with you, as well, in your assertion that “electronic literature is a contradiction in terms.” I should begin, though, by underscoring how much unsuccessful e-writing is out there, how much of it is produced either by visual artists who have no sense of language, or language artists who have no sense of the visual, or perhaps “artists” who simply like to see things move on a screen and go bang in the night, or practitioners who don’t seem to be aware that, with barely two decades of exploration behind them, they are still working in the infancy of a new mode of expression. That said, the most interesting examples do by their very presence pose the question: what is fiction in general, what is e-fiction in particular, and what, if any, is the relationship between the two? I’m thinking of e-writers like Michael Joyce, Stuart Moulthrop, and Young-Hae Chang, who have produced fascinating work that continuously challenges its own processes while presenting us with textual events we simply haven’t experienced before, don’t quite know how to read yet, how to talk about. They thereby insist that all of us writers push farther, even if we decide not to venture into electronica.

What you have to say about contemporary experimentalism(s) differing from past experimentalism(s) resonates deeply with me. I might only add that I sense over the last ten or fifteen years a certain political urgency having entered the discourse of experimental prose that maybe wasn’t there to quite such an extent in the modernist or even early postmodernist projects. Of course even as I write that line I can name exceptions: Dos Passos, the Dadaists, Burroughs, Pynchon, Sukenick. Still, I tend to think of many modernists as being quite content to stand back paring their fingernails along with Joyce—which, in a sense, leads me to my next question: how do you respond to the charges that much experimental fiction is elitist, that, at the end of day, if our conversation is any indication, one needs an advanced degree to talk about it?

Jeffrey: I would definitely agree with you that irony has “beaten at the heart” (nicely put) of the novel since its conception: I was arguing that its presence in what we term realism differentiates it from a naïve or sentimental realism, what could be argued as the dominant mode of narrative, the realism that works to reinforce preconceptions and habits rather than works to question them.

I would also agree, up to a point (because I think I see where you’re going with this), about how realism, with a small ‘r,’ tries to (re-)present or articulate the contemporary world in all its destabilized forms, all its vicissitudes and variables. Flannery O’Connor argued that we are all realists, and in this sense, it’s hard to disagree. What else can we do but represent the world as we (want to) experience it? But if we push this, then there are as many realities as there are participants. What might be contemporary to me might not be contemporary to you, or what might be positive in contemporary life to me might be negative to you.

Representation is never objective, and so one constantly takes a position on what one is representing. And by “taking a position” I mean “putting oneself in play.” And putting oneself into play can be a way of resistance, or a way of celebration, or something else entirely. To be more precise, this putting oneself into play, what we’ve called irony or self-consciousness, simultaneously detaches and involves, abstracts and questions. This is key, more fundamental than mimesis. If we take mimesis, even a formal mimesis, as the ultimate objective, then we are no different from Zola and Stowe, or from Franzen and Drabble. Just because we live in an e-chamber pop-culture wild wired world does not mean we should reflect, without irony, that world. I’m remnded of a Bernhard quote: If we do not constantly exist against, but only constantly with the facts, says Oehler, we shall go under in the shortest possible space of time.

One could argue that this irony is itself a mimesis. We live in an ironic, all-too self-conscious YouTubed MySpaced world, and so the "natural" response to such a world can’t help being ironically self-conscious. I would counter this argument by saying this type of irony celebrates and affirms the self rather than questions it: it is the opposite of putting oneself into play. Plus, we can’t overlook the fact that, well, writing is different.

We’re not going to agree on e-writing yet, mostly because I’m too ignorant of it to offer anything other than ill-informed platitudes.

To your last question, about politics and elitism. I agree that the political situation of the world is so pressing that to ignore it seems irresponsible. The fact that the political situation of the world has always been pressing is really beside the point. We have to ask ourselves, individually, if a previous reaction, say the modernist one (as if there is a single modernist reaction) of silence, exile and cunning is appropriate or adequate for us. For many (most?), I expect that it’s not.

What can fiction do, then? I would like to make a distinction, first of all, between discussions of politics and discussions of power. Now obviously the two are inseparable, but they’re not indistinguishable. We can think of politics as relations between people, and, like aesthetics, politics in this sense is closely tied to choices, choices how we live our lives and how we compose our works. Here, fiction CAN affect, in direct and oblique ways, in immediate and mediated ways, the other(s). The danger of this, of course, is that art and life decay into solipsism and selfishness, where the authentic choices of how to live and how to make art are obliterated or eclipsed by mere consumer choices (Ford or Chevy, Miller or Bud). But ideally, and hopefully, by reading a provocative and self-conscious work, where the choices are imaginative, dangerous and, well, right, one can learn to make similar imaginative, dangerous and right choices in living. That’s the hope.

I’m not sure how art, or experimental literature, can directly affect discourses of power. Other than make the reader question the "naturalness" of power discourse through politics (choice, as defined above), the contest seems one-sided. I think of Genet or Sade as the most possible examples, but I can’t see how even they directly and successfully challenged the power structures of their times. I don’t think fiction, literature in general, is that efficacious at directly confronting and changing discourses or structures of power. What it can do, however, is perhaps, in the long run, more powerful, in that it can show a) how we are interconnected through the choices we make, b) that these choices, whether they be aesthetic or political, are important and c) that the easy choices are often not the best, that one needs imagination to truly make good choices. But this might be Pollyanna-like here, perhaps a rationalization of my own emphases.

As for the elitism part, I won’t argue against the word, only its connotation. On the one hand, I’m fond of the Wilde quote, that Art should not try to become more popular, the public should become more artistic. The public, the masses, I can’t define those groups any more, and “reading public” seems a contradiction in terms. There are readers out there, but I have no idea how many readers are interested in what I’m interested in, or the things we’re talking about today. It reminds me of when I used to work at the campus radio station: you’d bring your records and put together a set, but as to how many people were actually listening to you, who knew? Some nights you’d get a phone call, other nights not, but you’d still try to compose a good set. I’m guessing it’s not an overly large group who is willing to put themselves into play like we’ve been talking about, but I really have no idea. A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand? I’m guessing less than ten thousand. What difference does that make? What does the number of one’s readers measure?

But since elitism has so many negative (at least in this culture) connotations we need a new word. How about educated? I don’t necessarily mean university educated (although the university can be a good place for the reading and writing I’m talking about), but educated in the sense that you’ve had experience reading this type of thing before, that you’re not bothered or disturbed by reading that asks more questions than it answers, that tries to break you of habits of presupposition and safety, that forces you to interact with the text, the world and yourself imaginatively and dangerously. How is this education tied to opportunity, to class and to other economic factors that might limit it or make it impossible? I wish I knew. I’m guessing we’re more of a mandarin than elite class anyway. I mean we have very little power.

Lance: What a wonderful quote from Bernhard, Jeffrey, and I had never thought about your distinction between irony as mode of self-consciousness and—what do we call it?—a certain faux or unreflexively staged contemporary irony that’s all about jumping up and down and saying Look at me! Look at me! Look how cool and detached I am! Which, of course, is about nothing save green narcissism, the existential mode du jour, and hardly about revelation or revolution. A mode, by the way, that jibes nicely with the one you describe in which democratic choice has become bastardized into the right to download whatever songs you deem fit from iTunes. This is late-stage capitalism in democracy’s clothing, and people are falling for it more than ever, I'm afraid.

Ben Marcus argues provocatively in his by now well-known piece on experimental fiction in Harper’s that the “true elitists in the literary world” are the ones who evince “a hostility toward the poor common reader, who should never be asked to do anything that might lead to a pulled muscle.” But what, I wonder, constitutes a “common” reader? A bus driver in Baltimore? An innovationist in Indiana or India? The bland (if ever amorphous) bourgeois whom many of the early avant-garde movements sought to harass? And what sort of textual aerobics might lead her or him to pull a muscle?

In its Human Development Report 2000, the U.N. defines illiteracy as the inability to read or write a simple message, and reports that 90 million children worldwide are denied any sort of schooling, 232 million any sort of secondary education, and that one billion adults are illiterate through and through. Is that really what we mean when we say illiteracy? Is that the only kind? In 2004, as I mentioned earlier on this blog, the N.E.A. questioned 17,000 American adults about their reading preferences and habits. The survey discovered that since 1982 there has been a loss of roughly twenty million readers—a number that represents a ten percent drop in readership—and that reading rates are declining among all demographic groups regardless of gender, ethnicity, education, age or income level, with the steepest decline in the youngest groups—i.e., those between 18-24 and 25-34, respectively. Of those surveyed, 95.7 percent said they preferred watching television to reading, 60 percent attending a movie, 55 percent lifting weights.

In light of such news, to what extent aren’t all readers “elitists,” the very existence of written texts “radical” and “disruptive” … while, ironically, increasingly anachronistic and pointless with respect to the culture at large, to any real “revolution”? To what extent do such statistics reduce all queries concerning “elitism” and “innovation” to ethically challenging if ultimately unenlightening drills in semantics?

One way, it occurs to me, that we might define most, if not all, contemporary experimental fiction is to say it is that sort of writing shot through with a theoretical intelligence—a self-reflexive, difficult, often contradictory critifictional awareness. In a sense, this is no more than an extension, I think, of your use of the notion of irony. Whether or not that’s generally the case, it strikes me as the case in an important and illuminating way with respect to your own project. Which theorists and/or philosophers (if you sense a difference between the two terms) most inform your writing?

part three of this conversation
coming soon . . .

rain taxi fundraising auction

2007-01-16T17:46:00.000-07:00

In order to raise ever-needed and well-deserved funds, Rain Taxi Review of Books is holding an auction this week on eBay.

There are lots of great first editions, broadsides, artwork, etc.

For a full listing, please click here.

a conversation with jeffrey deshell : part one

2007-01-15T18:13:00.000-07:00

Lance: In his podcast interview with Frank Giampietro, R. M. Berry defines experimental fiction, essentially, as that which knowingly poses the question: what is fiction? Would you agree?

Jeffrey: So we don’t get a chance to get warmed up or anything, then, do we? R.M. and I had the briefest of conversations about this at the Attention/Inattention Conference at Denver University a year ago last fall. I have a couple of approaches to this question.

On the one hand (and I haven’t yet listened to the podcast, as the word “podcast” frightens me), this seems like an adequate, working definition. There are a couple of words here that seem key: the word “knowingly” and the word “fiction.” In order to fit this definition, one must be (self-)conscious about the questioning, one must set out to question, as it were—the questioning is the project, the questioning is the problem. This questioning quality, I think, indicates the open(ing) and process(ing) of the fiction we’re talking about, its movement and restlessness. And it’s not just a questioning of its own status, it’s the questioning of fiction (and by extension language, reality and the self) itself (themselves). The question of What am I as writing? becomes the question of What is writing? becomes the question of What am I?

I’m curious, however, if we’re saying enough. Doesn’t all fiction, all literature, question itself on some very basic level? Isn’t even the most genre specific formulaic and trite mass-marketed trash, self-conscious? Doesn’t it demand (self)conscious (at least on some level) choice and effort to make a piece of writing fit the genre? Isn’t all writing, on some very basic level, an experiment? In the very act of writing, does anyone know, when they write the first word, what the last word’s going to be? When I wrote the word “When,” six words ago, did I know that the final word of the sentence would be “be”? No. And that’s just with a single sentence. Every word, every sentence, every page, every chapter etc.: all experiments.

Barthes wrote somewhere that writers are those for whom language is a problem. If you already have the solution before you start, it’s not a problem. This is something I’d like to ask a more traditional writer someday: do you really know how your sentence, paragraph, novel or chapter is going to end when you write the first word? One might have a general idea, a bright and shiny figure idea in one’s head, but in the translation to imperfect, dirty and stubborn language, doesn’t something get lost (gained)? Not to mention life getting in the way. The vicissitudes of writing something long, like a novel, when you have to live with the thing for years, and the kids are making noise, and you get sick, divorced, remarried, and it’s a nice day to go for a walk, and you want to watch all of Robert Mitchum’s movies, and you have to grade papers etc. etc. etc.: how can you say that you know what you are doing and what you will be doing? How can you say that you’ll know how your sentence will end? How can you say that’s not an experiment? So is it a question of degree or intensity?

On another hand, the word I’m most concerned with in the R.M.’s definition, and the one that causes the most trouble for me, is the word “is.” By saying experimental fiction is, aren’t we arresting its experimentalness, its contingency, openness and restlessness? Doesn’t the is stabilize the fiction, make it into a thing, into an object like other things? An object with use-value, with existence, with presence, with a status that is predetermined and fixed? This is why I objected so strenuously to the metaphor of fiction as architecture in a discussion a couple of months ago: can built (realized) architecture question its own existence in the world? I don’t see how (this could be my own blindness). To my mind, music, with its ephemerality, with its existence and yet non-existence, seems closer to literature. If we takes Berry’s definition seriously, the is is the first place we have to question. Does experimental fiction exist? Yes and no.

Still, on another hand, the western tradition often defines (advanced) human life as requiring self-consciousness, the ability to question one’s existence. I like that Berry’s definition connects experimental fiction with this human life, making it lively, open, animated, uncertain, indeterminate, indefinite. Experimental. Experimental fiction puts itself in play, as well as the self in play. And if we say that all literature is experimental, then let’s take that label off, and say that all Literature, indeed all Art (and I’m very invested in these terms), rigorously asks these questions: What is a text? What is a reader? What is a writer? Literature asks these questions (serves as the ax for the frozen sea within us etc.) while other, more “popular” forms of writing, do not.

Your turn. I know, from your posts and other writings, that you consider self-consciousness a key component to experimental fiction. How does your thinking differ from mine?

Lance: I very much like your troubling questions and caveats, think they’re right on the mark, believe in many ways we’re thinking along much the same lines about experimentalism—or, better, as I've mentioned here before, experimentalisms. Let me respond quickly to a few points you make, however, that may help delineate a few difference in our approaches. I don’t seem to be as convinced as you that all literature questions itself on some basic level. Or, perhaps, I want to assert that different sorts of writing ask different sorts of questions of writing. Authors of Harlequin romances, for instance, surely pose questions about genre to themselves, as you suggest, maybe questions about market forces, but for me the questions their texts pose are neither interesting nor enlightening about the nature of fiction and the culture/languages that speak through it. On the other hand, I don’t see a clear binary between experimental writing and whatever we might conceive of as the other thing. Would it be helpful, therefore, to think of experimentalisms as existing along a continuum? At one end, we would posit cookie-cutter texts like those romances; at the other, we would posit something called, say, Finnegans Wake. Other texts would then situate themselves somewhere in between.

Texts begin to become engaging for me at that point where they become much more than predictable, much more than texts I’ve seen before, where they begin to impede my easy understanding of them, where they begin to challenge me to invent a modified and fairly complex way of speaking in order to converse with them. So, yes, self-consciousness is a key component of experimental fiction, as far as I’m concerned, but, equally if not more important is a certain textual density and difficulty of imagination at the strata of language, structure, character, voice, vision, and so forth. Of course, my threshold for difficulty will be different from other readers’, and perhaps that’s enlightening as well: that is, not only are there different experimentalisms (Burroughs’ project isn’t Coover’s isn’t Diane Williams’s isn’t Shelley Jackson’s isn’t Jeffrey Deshell’s), but it is also the case, I think that I think, that different texts will strike different readers as more or less experimental at different times in their lives. One’s first engagement with Ulysses will not be one’s third or thirtieth. Moreover, different texts will strike different readers as more or less experimental at different times in the conversation across time and space called literary history.

Do you sense something about what you think of when you say “contemporary experimental fiction” that separates it from the experimentalisms of, say, the 1960s? The 1760s? What, I mean to ask, makes the experimental experimental for you in 2007 that might not have made it experimental in 1907?

part two of this conversation
coming soon . . .

Two Announcements

2007-01-08T14:19:00.000-07:00

A revision:

1) The January 26 reading by Debra Di Blasi, Steve Tomasula, and Davis Schneiderman has been postponed; it will be rescheduled later.

In the meantime, your best bet is to order books from Debra and Steve.

2) I'm looking for contributors for a new co-edited project:
Love Letters to Mom: A Final Goodbye to the Mothers We've Lost.
Details here.

--Davis