A Review of A Fool's Paradise by Anita Konkka

Anita Konkka, A Fool’s Paradise, tr. A.D. Haun and Owen Witesman. Dalkey Archive Press, Normal, Illinois, 2006. tpb. 133 pages. $12.95

Dalkey Archive’s back-cover copy for A Fool’s Paradise places the novel “in the great tradition of Jean Rhys and Violette Leduc.” That’s fair enough, if one chooses to classify novels according to the socio-economic status, lifestyle, and character of their protagonists. But the description fails to recognize that stylistically, the novel bears a greater affinity to work by Anna Kavan, Jane Bowles, and Lenore Carrington than to Leduc and Rhys. Although… Certainly, for the first several chapters of the book (all of them short), the clarity and spareness of the prose gives the illusion to first-time readers that the novel is offering a straightforward (albeit psychologically) subjective realist story. As I case in point, consider a passage on the fourth page of the text that I mistook for the usual excursion into playful imagery that ornaments current “literary” fiction:

During the night my alarm clock shifted over to the time of some unknown planet. It’s 53:90 and the news is on the radio. The population of mother rabbits has increased and unemployment has decreased. The clock moves ahead ten minutes at a time. Maybe it’s showing the time on Mercury. The light on the wall grows stronger. The colors in the picture start to come alive; the yellow gladioli glow for a moment. The sun is on its way toward the south; the globe turns on its axis, and in space the solar systems rush toward unknown destinations. It’s already 74:20. I woke up in the middle of an exciting dream...[description of dream cut, for length] They gave a special storm warning for the Gulf of Finland on the radio during the day. They said that there would be dangerously powerful gusts of wind. But the storm changed its mind and went somewhere else. The sky was clear. Jupiter shone above the trashcans and the Big Dipper was dimly visible behind the insurance company building.(10-11)

The statement that her alarm clock “shifted over to the time of some unknown planet” is not the narrator’s playful way of noting that her alarm clock malfunctioned sometime after she went to sleep and before she awoke: likely, she imagines she is actually offering an explanation for how the clock could give 53:90 as the time and why it moves ahead in ten-minute increments. By the end of the novel, the phrase “During the night” has become a familiar cue for the reader; the events in the narrator’s dreams, which are key, are not always distinct from the events of her waking life. And so the description of her dream (which I’ve cut from the quote, for length) is not incidental, as it would be for another narrator; rather, the narrator accords what happens in her dreams the same degree of importance and reality as she does her waking experience. Moreover, the narrator’s statement that the “storm changed its mind” is not a figurative anthropomorphism, but a literal (to her) statement of why the storm did not materialize in the city. As for the narrator’s noting the turning of the globe on its axis, the southward journey of the sun, solar systems in space, and the presence of Jupiter and the Big Dipper in the night sky: these are not random details that happen to have occurred to the narrator as she visualized what happened (outside her dreams) in the night just passed, but what she takes as significant facts, clues for explaining the past and predicting the future. And just so, in the very next sentence, the narrator notes that the banks in Japan “have their own astrologers, who predict changes in the relationship between the dollar and the yen from the movements of Mercury and Uranus.”

The narrator, that is, emerges as an interesting if sometimes irritating combination of New Age folderol and incisive insight:

*She is defiant in her guilt-free enjoyment of being unemployed (which is apparently not the correct attitude for a proper Finn to have);

*She believes in astrology, reincarnation, signs and portents, diverse forms of divination, ghosts, angels, animism, prophecies, oracles, sorcery, and the power of dreams;

*She devotes a great deal of time and energy to keeping herself permanently unemployed;

*She endears herself to her natural audience (viz., readers like me) when she says of Claude Simon’s Georgics, which she checks out of the library: “Judging by its stiffness, it had never been opened. People are peculiar about wanting to borrow the same books as everybody else…Whenever I see someone reject a book, I hurry over to it. That’s how I found Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Lauridis Brigge, Yeats’s memoirs, and, most recently, Ceare Pavese’s diary”(33);

*We can surmise that the most formative experience for the person she has become was being rejected at the age of 18 by the boy she fell in love with, who wrote poetry. Certain he was lonely and too shy to call her, she called him; because this annoyed him, he told her she wasn’t his type and was “too forward.” And so now, at the age of 38, she passively waits—for her lover to divorce his wife; for her destiny to find her; for revelations to guide her. “After researching fate, I’ve come to the conclusion that it works every seventh year. It waits in every person for its moment, like egg cells waiting in a woman, but not every cell produces a child. You can prevent your fate from being fulfilled if you live an orderly life, walk along the same streets you’ve always walked, don’t change jobs, stamp your time card, eat and go to sleep at the same time, spend your vacations in the same place, and avoid talking with strangers.”(39)

The narrator often talks about her dreams as though they actually happened. “Last night I tried to make love to my father, but he ran away from me, terrified.”(45) “During the night, Anneli fired me from my job.”(48) “Now I’ve changed into a man completely. I walk through the village and drag behind me a bundle of twigs.”(56) Although she occasionally adds a cue (“Three women in black hats visited me in a dream”(104), most of the time the tone and the lack of preface or contextualization she uses to relate dreams are exactly those she uses to relate her waking experience: “The world has been saved again. The people who did it were standing side by side on television, telling jokes and smiling, pleased with themselves”(86); or “On Father’s Day I walked from one end to the other of a road that I call West Street, but which no longer has that name on the map.”(59)

For many chapters I experienced no difficulty picking up on the difference between the narrator’s dream-life and waking-life. But after reading three sentences at the beginning of Ch. 16, I realized that what I’d taken for a dream was waking life and found myself backtracking to start the chapter over, after which I continued smoothly, without hitch. But it was at this point at which I began to be unsure of the difference between dream- and waking-life for the narrator, even when she offers clear indications. “My heart is knotted up and things fall out of my hands all day,” the narrator says. “A glass of milk crashed to the floor and shattered, a knife escaped under the table, and I sat down on a frying pan with spaghetti sauce in it. I’d left it on my chair. Dreams confuse my feelings. During the night I participated in a swimming competition and came in first… but the judges didn’t certify the result; instead they announced that the winner was a woman who’d come to the finish line after me.” (73) The woman who was announced the winner “swam diagonally across the pool, breaking all the rules.” On waking in the morning, the narrator knows that the woman who unfairly won was Vera, the wife of her lover, Alexander. After she tells him, a book falls from his shelf, and he tells her that the sentence it opens to is meant for her: “A thousand reasons to worry, a thousand reasons to be shy—they bind the fool, not the wise man.”(74) Though the narrator generally assumes such “signs” bear powerful significance, in this case she rejects the “wisdom.”

Significantly, the distinction between dream and waking reality blurs most often when the narrator is talking about Vera, the estranged wife of the her lover, Alexander. Perhaps this is why I haven’t been able to believe that a long narrative that begins with the sentences “Last summer I visited Melnikova Street. I had Vera’s telephone number, but didn’t care to call her and I thought that I’d go and see what kind of building she lives in”(82) is something the narrator actually did, especially since first, her account of it is interrupted by a fantasy she has while riding the subway to Melnikova Street about what will happen when she arrives at Vera’s building, and second, she experiences dream-like difficulty in finding the building, and finally, she describes a pedestrian walking past her and fantasizes that the pedestrian is Vera. How, reading the words of a narrator whose personal ontology and epistemology places as much emphasis on dreams as waking, can signs and portents, dreams and reveries be distinguished sharply and clearly from “real” events and “facts”? And yet, at that particular point in the novel I continued to think that probably the narrator did go to Melnikova Street and that however dream-like the narrator’s life had become, careful reading would uphold the boundary between the externally real (“facts”) and the internally real (thoughts, dreams, fantasies).

My ability to do this, however, broke down about twenty-five pages from the end. The narrator says that she “looked at the future by pouring melted tin in cold water on New Year’s Eve.”(109) She then describes seeing Vera and says she didn’t believe what she saw, but that Alexander’s son “confirmed it.” And for two pages she not only speculates about what she saw, but also notes “Alexander blames himself” (110). I reread the passage several times, trying to find the place where what the narrator “saw” in the cold water ended and “reality” began. When I realized that I’d never be able to do it, that the text refused to separate the two, I read on, hoping for more “facts” about Vera’s condition—& found nothing definitive. The narrator’s (inexplicit) conversation with Alexander on p.127 could be taken as corroboration that her vision was true. But other passages allow the reader to infer that she might be projecting her own condition onto her detested rival. In short, the narrative forces the reader to teeter between the two interpretations.

“Surrealism,” Penelope Rosemont observes, “begins with the recognition that the real (the real real, one might say, opposed to the fragmented, one-dimensional pseudo-real upheld by narrow realisms and rationalisms) includes many diverse elements that are ordinarily repressed or suppressed…. [S]urrealism is an immeasurably expanded awareness”(Penelope Rosemont, “Introduction: All My Names Know Your Leap: Surrealist Women and Their Challenge” in Penelope Rosemont, ed. Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1998, pp.xxix-lvii at xxxiii). The conventions of realism, which put a rationalist spin on the lives it portrays, haven’t a chance in the world of portraying the reality of someone like Konkka’s narrator. In a realist version of A Fool’s Paradise, the narrative would unambiguously distinguish conscious experience from unconscious experience, New Age prognostications and signs separate from facts, the subjective from the objective—and thereby render the “reality” thin and either pathetic or derisory. The life described in A Fool’s Paradise is neither.

God is dead? No! A zombie, resuscitated by factmongers, he terrorizes Americans who are caught reading “shit!”

Dimtri Anastasopoulos asked me to post the following piece on the state of so-called fiction and "non-fiction" in the U.S., and, well, it's all my pleasure.

Lance

==

This is a long diary (part of my ranting of late on non-fiction) which casts an eye at differences in genres and reading in the US and Europe.

Recently I’ve been god-talking with a lot of friends, and we’ve been wondering, why is it a huge swath of Americans seem more intent on propping up God than ever before? The fact that this is happening alongside the dominance of non-fiction in the publishing world is NOT a coincidence, I offered. And then I set to trying to explain what the hell I could possibly mean by this. So I decided to write a diary.

Religion is not really a problem, nor are the religious a problem, nor is God a problem. Instead it's our certitude in the knowledge produced by religion that is a problem. When God is a zombie, when he's been resuscitated and forced to feed on our brains, he’s a problem. As well, I’d venture to say, if religions or religious beliefs didn't exist, we would very likely have groups of people who gravitated toward the kind of “certified” knowledge that religion produces anyway. I'm talking about dogmas of all kinds, ideologies, cold hard facts, man. I'm talking about politicians, gurus, hell even historians.

I'll try to bring together a lot of my reading over the last few months into this one diary to explain a cultural difference regarding how Americans deal with information (or facts) in comparison to others, notably Europeans.

Last summer, the novelists VS Naipaul and Ian McEwan were quoted in the NY Times as saying that fiction is dead, that they no longer read fiction, that they always turn to non-fiction first because in this day and age--post 9/11, Iraqi War--what we need most is to come to grips with facts, with the truth, we need knowledge, and delving into unreal fictional realms is just a waste of time. All counterarguments to these statements in letters-to-the-editor (from some well known American literary types) took the Naipaul/McEwan argument head-on. In other words, they tried to preserve a space for fiction even in these harrowing times. Me, my response was to take VSN/IM at face value, and ask, “OK, just what KIND of information are you interested in? In other words, what do you want to know? And why?”

The basic idea behind the recent assaults on fiction and poetry in America (more on this below) is that, in terms of facts and information, fiction and poetry are valueless. They provide very little of either. Clearly, even famous novelists like VSN/IE were looking for a little certitude, knowledge of the so-called world. So, I asked myself, is there a kind of knowledge that fiction can be responsible for? What kind of information can fiction provide us? Does it fill the gaps that other disciplines can't? Surely, I’ve never read a case study as intriguing as the psychoanalysis of Richard Nixon I found in Robert Coover’s “A Public Burning,” or the look into Hitler’s young adulthood that I discovered in Beryl Bainbridge’s “Young Adolf.” This was a form of knowledge, wasn’t it?

And what of Bruno Latour’s “Aramis, or the Love of Technology”? What was this book? I saw memos cobbled together into a weird narrative about a personalized subway system for Paris. This is science-fiction, no? What kind of information does this “novel” provide me? What about JG Ballard and his use of a medical paper on plastic surgery? Ballard’s plastic surgery chapter in “The Atrocity Exhibition” produced a truly gruesome and horrific fiction that sets the horror genre on its ears.

Mostly I asked myself, what is this so-called category “non-fiction” which has usurped the province of fiction in America?

JM Coetzee was in my town recently and he offered an anecdote about the American literary scene which was very telling. He informed the audience (well, his intention wasn’t to inform, he was just talking) that “non-fiction” is a very unnatural and strange genre indeed. Coetzee said that the trilogy that was being marketed in the US as his autobiography was being sold elsewhere around the world as his novels. Fictions, in other words, or autofictions as some in the literary world have come to know them. His explanation for this was simple. The non-fiction category as a genre doesn’t exist anywhere else.

There’s a very good reason for this. The category of “non-fiction” writing is an academic category born in the MFA creative writing programs in American universities in the 1960s. When fiction writers and poets moved into the academy after the GI Bill, they were immediately accosted with the demand that they had to have at least one “toe” in the real world. The Harvard critic, Roman Jakobson, upon hearing that Harvard was hiring a writer to teach writing, remarked, “What’s next? Are we going to hire elephants to run the zoo?” Writers quickly discovered that the newborn genre “non-fiction” would satisfy the academic powers that be. In my opinion, this move vouchsafed our reason for being at all. You can’t employ people who are only good at making “shit” up. In fact, the very designation derives from Truman Capote’s pronouncement that “In Cold Blood,” his recounting of the horrific slaughter of a Kansas family by two drifters, was a Non-Fiction Novel. The writing programs in the US took this idea and ran with it. 40 years later, the publishing industry in the US is dominated by so-called non-fiction works. The term has become naturalized in the US. No one remembers the time before non-fiction, no one remembers its roots. Non-fiction is a kind of new religion here. No one even questions its very awkward designation. Non-what? Just come out with it man, what is your genre all about? Don’t pussyfoot around by telling me what you are NOT. Tell me who you are. You see, behind this Non, there’s a very subtle deceit which has come to dominate American culture, and that deceit is that someone has a certitude of knowledge which--while it can’t be called the “truth,”--we can just the same pretend that it’s very close to the God-awful truth, simply because--at the very least--it’s NOT a lie. That’s what this category of non-fiction reading has become in the US. A sly way of saying, this is not a lie. Initially, it was only supposed to designate a form of writing that presented real events through the use of literary writing techniques which were until then limited to the genre of fiction. If you look at American writing pre-Capote and post-Capote, there’s a sea change in style. There is no history, essay, or news reporting that incorporated fictional techniques the way that Capote’s form of non-fiction did. Here and there we might find such narrative techniques being used in literatures around the world, but elsewhere such writing is never categorized as “history” or “news.” Genet’s “Miracle of the Rose” or Von Rezzori’s “Memoirs of an Anti-Semite” or even Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” are treated as works of literature. Not “real events.” This, in a nutshell, is the categorical mistake the publishing world is making in the US.

This must be significant, no? That Coetzee is publishing his trilogy in Europe as a novelist but in the US he’s writing about himself, supposedly? Two continents of people are reading the same text differently, apparently, or so I’m told by the marketing/publishing industries on either continent. I imagine this is true of a lot of books. For instance, an American who reads Peter Handke’s “A Sorrow Beyond Dreams” (a fiction about Handke’s mother’s real-life suicide) may have a very different understanding from it than a reader who is not repeatedly asking the question--in knee-jerk fashion as an American probably would--“did this really happen?” Instead, the latter reader would probably be more interested in the question, “how does a sensitive writer like Handke perceive his mother’s suicide?” Another example: in the late 1940s, a small novel was published in Italy titled “Kaputt.” It was written by Curzio Malaparte, pseudonym of one Kurt Erich Suckert, the Italian Ambassador to Croatia during the Ustashe period. In the novel, several gruesome events were described, events which would resound in the Balkans as historical facts for the next 50 years. Suckert used the real names of leaders and generals he encountered in Croatia, and thus, the events in this novel--as it is labeled--bore the weight of a form of evidence to atrocity. Clearly, given the experiences of Yugoslavians under the Nazis, no one was really in a mood to ask about genre differences, whether the events described were fictional or not. Instead, “Kaputt” became a form of testimony to all the brutalities that had actually occurred, a general record of the era, rather than a record of specific events.

Again, compare this manner of reading to recent scandals and controversies in the USA. The Oprah-Frey scandal in which an autobiographer on the Oprah show, James Frey (author/victim of “A Million Tiny Pieces”) was found to have lied about a great many events in his book. JT Ellroy, the author of an autobiography of his life as an abused young boy, was discovered to be a female author in her latter years. Oprah’s initial response to the scandal, “So what, it’s still a great story,” was, in my opinion, the proper one. She quickly backtracked, however, as the scandal caught fire. America would have none of it. You do not LIE to Americans when you are telling your personal story, apparently. You see, despite our cognitive dissonance when it comes to WMDs, we don’t want evidence that we are being lied to exposed so baldly. At least with WMD, there’s still a chance Saddam hid them somewhere near the earth’s core. But with Frey, he lied to us. So, we have incident after incident in which Americans are hung up on the question, “Is it real?” “Is it real?” “Is it real?” That’s all we care about. That events happen is an uncontested fact (or, as Pynchon recently put it, “Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur.”) But the retelling of these events proves problematic again and again, and the constant refrain of “Is it real?” quickly becomes an obstruction to our critical capabilities, one that prevents us from examining the literary work for its information content. In fact, the question prevents us from examining any set of information at all. We are quickly satisfied with the certitude of the real. And we forget to ask, Is this logical? Does it educate? Is it probable? Who is the source? Or, even, what are the counterarguments to this theory?

No, I’m an American, I can’t ask these questions until I get to the bottom of the one and only God: “is it real?” I’m guessing that Naipaul and McEwan can’t get over that question. “Is it real?” I argue that this quest for certitude prevents us from examining information for what is. It prevents us from putting the information before us to the test of logic and functionality, and it exposes us to certain propagandistic beliefs which become dogma all too quickly.

The NYTimes Sunday Book Review recently announced that it will no longer review works of literary fiction. Instead, the new editor has been tasked with reviewing works of “non-fiction” only. Autobiography, Biography, History, News Reporting, etc. The new editor, in fact, was asked what he had against fiction. His reply, “Fiction is shit.” The new editor is Steven Erlanger. Erlanger, a veteran reporter in the Balkans during the 90s (I remember, as someone who read daily about Balkan events, Erlanger’s reports as being excellently balanced, with plenty of anecdotes, he had a real energy toward getting the full story, he and Kinzer, both were really good reporters). Obviously, his statement opened up a firestorm since the NYT is the biggest paper for fiction reviewing in the USA. Many writers bombarded his rather sensational statement without realizing the game was over. When the editor says, “You are Shit,” that pretty much says it all, no? Me, I was happy as hell because the New York Times was suddenly putting an emphasis on reporting, on getting to know more about other countries, in the culling of balanced information, and it was my hope that this trend begun by the Arts Editor would quickly catch fire to the rest of the paper. The hope was that ethics in journalism would return to the home of Judy Miller, David Brooks, Jason Blair, and the like. Maybe the NYT would become the paper of record again, instead of behaving like a propaganda organ.

You see what I’m getting at? The lowest level of reportage seems to be generalizing and propaganda. If this important newspaper wants to improve its reporting by getting rid of the review of a literary genre I love, then I’m all for it. Improve thyself.

But the fact is, Erlanger’s insistence that the non-fictive is more valued than the fictive can only lead to trouble. It propagates the same categorical mistake which inevitably makes American readers highly susceptible to propaganda. It emphasizes the “this happened” over the specific significance of the actual event itself, the power of an event to chasten us and realize our place in the world. As William H. Gass puts it (I’m paraphrasing), it’s not good enough to write about things because they actually happened. “People stand in lines at the bank and they cut cabbage.” But Gass doesn’t want to read about it. It happened. So what?

I have to clarify: I’m not at all arguing against news reporting, histories, etc., I’m merely criticizing the mania for them. The mania for certified knowledge, the mania for the real.

Most of all, I’m concerned that the USA is trashing a genre of writing which I find immensely valuable for building critical thinking skills. I’m worried that we’re replacing it with a genre that will easily become a vessel for propaganda, and the public will have disarmed itself of critical capabilities to know the difference. Genres are good things, I love them. They tell me how to read, they tell me which reading skills I need to bring to any particular text, they save me time even when I’m reading the Now What Blog! But when genres become dictatorial habits, the reader is in trouble. Why must we make a tyranny of our knowledge? Why must the category always wag the tail of the specific? God is not dead. He’s the lazy being in my head that says, you don’t have to read that shit. Read this instead.

“The Writer on Holiday”: A Lament in August

What proves the wonderful singularity of the writer, is that during the holiday in question, which he takes alongside factory workers and shop assistants, he unlike them does not stop, if not actually working, at least producing. So that he is a false worker, and a false holiday-maker as well.

--Roland Barthes

I always look at August as the international month of
 vacation, should one want it and have that as a
 possibility.

--Ted Pelton



Vacaciones. This is the term that we agree upon, that is I and the two cousins, F and M. The Spanish term we agree upon in a kind of Spanish as I sit in the enclosure that is their kitchen, in Tequila, Jalisco, Mexico, is vacaciones. That is their term, our term, for my current state as I sit in the kitchen. In opposition, that is, to my wife, who is trabajaring in Georgia, as I explain in the infinitive. I do not speak Spanish and the cousins do not speak English. We are unlanguaged together. Prelanguaged? Relanguaging? I am searching for another word, a word for a sort of work, a sort of writing. The search is accompanied by gestures. This is good and archaic. Vacaciones, F suggests. Vacaciones is modern and nude. Vacaciones, M insists. It is a disguise, sleek as a 737, and I vanish. Si. Vacaciones. Sure, yes, porque no? And as far as they are concerned, and for simplicity’s sake, I am spending my vacaciones in their kitchen. I am spending counterfeit American vacaciones.

It is true, what Barthes said, that I, as a writer, am a false worker (rolled sleeves and dungarees) and a false holiday-maker (sunscreen and aloe). I have no word for me in their kitchen and I no longer have vacaciones. I am wondering if I am not also a false relative. False not in the sense of an impostor (though, for me, this remains in doubt until the cousins produce a 30-year-old photograph of my parents, F and M, lodged in a spiral bound notebook, producing also a not unpleasant vertigo), but in the sense of another order of deception: that I cannot, or have not tried hard enough to make it understood why exactly I am in this kitchen, what I will do to it and to these cousins. Cómo se dice “my institution has paid for me to come here?” I confess that they will be written, transcribed; confess, but not in those terms, nor in their Spanish approximations.

It is very hot, F says.

Immanent transcription is a peccadillo that understandably carries little weight in Tequila. Apparently this is not really a confession. Apparently they believe I could do much worse, and they aren’t wrong. Even if they understood what that transcription might be, they have no notion of what that transcription might be. In any case, that I will write them isn’t really true either, isn’t really even the half of it. The entire encounter is a series of misunderstandings, exactly as I’d planned.

And even this lament is false because it is not about vacaciones at all. There were never intended to be any vacaciones and so there were none whose end or loss can be lamented. That is true. There have been no vacaciones all summer long and no one planned it otherwise. The summer has not been planned at all. The summer has not been a summer. The summer has not been vacaciones. I am thieving and mutilating, fulfilling my role as an American. I am shopping stolen goods and you are my fence.

F and M curse me with their vacaciones. Vacaciones is a lesson. Here is a word to take with you on the bus back to GDL, on the 737 back to ATL. Repeat it: vacaciones. Now andale, cabron. Vaya bien. Vacaciones is the mobile state of the extranjero. Who in Tequila, where there is no trabaje, who in this enclosure has time for vacaciones? Only me, sitting around with his click in his hand, QWERTY under fingertips, eye to the keyhole, exactly as I’d planned. But there is time for my vacaciones (whatever that means) because there is no work and we are cousins. And there is sun and it is Monday. And there is tequila.

An Alternative to Meeting New Friends

In response to Ted Pelton's "August Challenge" of a few post posts back, I present a review of a Starcherone Press book.

The author, Christopher Prater, composed the review for the literary journal Potion, which subsequently decided not to publish reviews.

And so, I am extremely happy to present it here, for your enjoyment.


Davis


*****
An Alternative to Meeting New Friends

Christopher Prater

Review of Aimee Parkison, Woman With Dark Horses (Starcherone Books, 2004) $16

Writing is just an illusion, right? Well Aimee Parkison makes me doubt this otherwise sensible conclusion in her debut short-story collection Woman With Dark Horses. Parkison connects her readers to a sense of loneliness through realistic characters who invariably fail to understand their lives. For instance, the narrator of “Blue Train Summer” admits, as if during a bar conversation, “At night, I thought if I murdered someone, I could probably get away with it, no big deal. But if I tried to love someone, people would think I had done something wrong.”

Parkison’s skill rests in her ability to paint unique characters onto a series of stories with similarly bleak palettes. This chorus line of colorful blues are reminiscent of Orr from Catch-22, because, as with Heller’s crash-obsessed character’s inexplicable desire to cram crab apples into his cheeks, the awkwardness of Parkinson’s characters sticks with the reader long after the book returns to the shelf. Such mealy characters include twins with eerie similarities to the creepy duo in “The Shining;” a boy cleverly disguised with a mustache who climbs into the narrow space between walls; and a girl who collects the detritus of her broken life—a garage door opener, her mother’s wedding ring, strands of her father’s beard—in memory of her dead parents.

For all the sullen docility of her players, Parkinson also fabricates a host of haunting images that linger like embarrassing childhood memories: a wife sipping foam from her dead husband’s mouth (“My Exhibit in the Blue Museum”); a suicidal teenager sitting naked in a room of mirrors while sketching her deformities (“Corolla”); a worm feeding on the dirt of a man’s chin (“Corolla”); and a cat sticking its head inside a boy’s mouth, sniffing remnants of toothpaste (“The Answer”).

Parkison’s style does not require elaborate language to impress. Her candid sentences fit the loneliness of her protagonists’ wounded psyches. In “Blue Train Summer” she needs only three sentences to capture the mood: “When I examined the dead girl’s arms, I found a small red heart tattooed on her left shoulder. A thin arrow was drawn through that heart. Underneath the tattoo, the scrawled letters carved into her skin read NOBODY’S GIRL.” Such is her effectively bleak imagery, like a raw wound, unconcealed by verbose, adjective-filled gobbets.

Ultimately, Woman with Dark Horses is not restricted to this measured style. In two of the stories, Parkinson’s stylistic experiments become change-ups that wonderfully diversify the lonely prose. In “My Exhibit in the Blue Museum,” time and place vacillate like erratic teenaged memories—Miami 1999; L.A. 1984; Dallas 1990; Amsterdam 1972—leading the reader to always wonder “where next?” In “The Answer,” Parkison’s story offers only questions: “Little man, can I kiss your mouth? Can I kiss your feet, your toes at one time? Can I comb the blood out of your hair?”

Woman with Dark Horses is not a collection of feel-good stories, but the reader will appreciate her shining characterization that make this issue even more moot than usual. Her creations linger on the page for moments of introspective quiet, before prancing right off the margin.



Christopher Prater graduated from Lake Forest College with a B.A. in chemistry and English and is currently a medical student at Michigan State University. In the past year, he has volunteered in an orphanage in Nepal, a Liberian refugee camp in Ghana, and an elementary school in Kenya.

He can be reached at: cwprater@gmail.com

the writer's edge : part two

Thanks to the inimitable Trevor Dodge, here are some audio and video files documenting the first annual Writer's Edge conference held in Portland, Oregon, last weekend. For those who might be interested, Lidia Yuknavitch and I have already begun planning next year's Second Act.

:: faculty reading : audio : mp3 format ::
Compilation Reading (59.8 MB)
R.M. Berry (15.8 MB)
Michael Martone (11.6 MB)
Lance Olsen (13.6 MB)
Susan Steinberg (15.8 MB)
Lidia Yuknavitch (16.2 MB)

:: faculty reading : video : .mov format ::
R.M. Berry (16.2 MB)
Michael Martone (10.8 MB)
Lance Olsen (14.4 MB)
Susan Steinberg (16.4 MB)
Lidia Yuknavitch (16 MB)

:: small-press panel : audio : .mp3 format ::

Click here to download a recording of the small-press panel that included R. M. Berry (Fiction Collective Two), David Cowsert (Ink and Paper Group), Richard Jensen (Clear Cut), Lidia Yuknavitch (Chiasmus) and Kevin Sampsell (Future Tense). The last four panelists appear in the photo (courtesy to Andi Olsen) above. The audio isn’t the greatest quality, but it is complete (1 hour 44 minutes) and in stereo. Filesize: 92.2 mb.

the writer's edge : part one

Sponsored by FC2 and hosted by Portland State University, the first annual Writer's Edge conference—a series of workshops, panels, readings, and conversations about innovative prose—was held 28-30 July in downtown Portland, Oregon. Over 50 participants from around the country and as far away as Australia attended. Early feedback has been extraordinarily positive. My sense is that something very special happened at this gathering of the tribe.

At the core of the get-together were five workshops. Lidia Yuknavitch led "Five Easy Pieces: How to Form, Deform, and Reform Narrative Using the Fictional Fragment" that posed the question: "What happens if we turn away from the idea that narrative form must be unified in traditional ways?" Susan Steinberg taught "Writing Obsession, Writing As If Obsessed" that explored "the ways in which various modern and contemporary authors effectively writing obsession/obsessively consider the inextricable relationship of form and content, paying particular attention to (often unconsciously chosen) rhetorical and experimental devices: repetition, recursion, ranting, listing, among many others." R. M. Berry's "What Is Writing?" grew "out of the idea that the principle mark of radically innovative writing is its somehow posing the question of its own nature and existence." Michael Martone led a workshop on appropriation entitled "Nixon Remix," and I led one entitled "Fiction as Possibility Space" that asked participants to think and rethink the metaphors workshops usually employ when talking about writing fiction.

The faculty read from their work on campus the second evening, while around 9:00 p.m. each night everyone descended on a different local bar, thanks to Garrett Strickland and the Phase One Reading Series, for an open mic and sampling of avant-garde music. Each afternoon offered participants, among other possibilities, a Multimedia Exhibition Room featuring experimental films, hypertexts, and collage-texts by Andi Olsen, Tim Guthrie, Trevor Dodge, Andy Mingo, myself, and others. A great panel on the past, present, and future of small-press publishing (with FC2, Chiasmus, Clear Cut, Future Tense, & the Ink & Paper Group) rounded things out.

Courtesy of Andi Olsen, here are a few photos from The Event:

lidia yuknavitch & r. m. berry planning

lance olsen signing
& author kris saknussemm imagining

michael martone threatening

susan steinberg & others partying
at an open mic

madhatter review editor carol novack (right)
& laura enjoying

chiasmus press authors
andy mingo & trevor dodge
looking self-conscious

Jeder Engel ist Shrecklich

Profane Waste—Photographs by Dana Hoey and Essay by Gretchen Rubin. Gregory R. Miller Books, 2006. An appreciation more than a review.

I love art books. Oversized, glossy, shiny and smelling of that expensive color ink. I love Hoey’s photographs as well. Glossy, luxurious, decadent in that smart, Dangerous Liaisons way. It’s Hoey’s photograph of the woman burning the $100 bill that makes the cover of Peter: An (A)Historical Romance. I learned that it was a real $100 bill.

I’m working on an essay called “Jeder Engel ist Shrecklich: Dana Hoey’s Terrible Pictures.” The angel I have in mind is from Bernini’s “Ecstasy of St. Teresa.” (This sculpture is reproduced on the cover of Jacques Lacan’s Seminar XX: Encore and forms the basis of his discussion of feminine sexual pleasure in “Dieu et la Jouissance de la Femme”). What is curious about the sculpture is the disparity between the angel’s facial expression and the saint’s. While the mystic’s face reflects the described (and by now comprehensible) ambivalence between ecstasy and pain, sexuality and spirituality, the angel’s face is much more difficult to read, as it seems a combination of radically incompatible and transgressive emotions—among them bemusement, empathy, pleasure, beneficence, superiority and even disdain. The angel knows what he is doing: his smirk, his posture, the way he holds his spear lightly between his middle finger and thumb, everything speaks of an accomplished, almost Sadean manipulator.

The book’s essay (by Gretchen Rubin, author of something called Power Money Fame Sex: A User's Guide) delimits ordinary waste from profane waste, and then goes on to explore three “species” of profane waste: “Heedless,” “Defiant” and “Denying.” The essay is mildly interesting in a sort of chatty, anecdotal, intellectual name dropping (but not too intellectual) way. But the real interest is in the photographs. Hoey’s pictures, her frozen images, are at once static and narrative. They ask questions in time. Questions centered around the idea of futility, waste, transgression. We see a blind woman facing a sculpture with her back toward a beautiful view. We see a pig rooting around a trash can full of dollar bills, a young woman at table with a pile of cooked ribs, a cemetery statue adorned with gold jewelry, a pregnant smoker on horseback. These are pictures not only of waste, but of guilt. Another theoretician of the angelic, Walter Benjamin, has written, “It is not accident that Atget’s photographs have been likened to those of a crime scene. . . Isn’t it the task of the photographer—descendent of the augers and haruspices—to revel guilt and point out the guilty in his pictures? (‘Little History of Photography’).”

Hoey, like Bresson (I’m watching a lot of Bresson these days to see if he’s successful) tries to make the image real. Through narration, or the combination of the image with narration. Flusser explains it this way:

“Basically, therefore, photographers wish to produce states of things that have never existed before; they pursue these states, not out there in the world, since for them the world is only a pretext for the states of things that are to be produced, but amongst the possibilities contained within the camera’s program. . . It is not the world out there that is real, nor is the concept within the camera’s program—only the photograph is real” (Toward a Philosophy of Photography 84).

Use-value is important to some of what we’ve been discussing. Waste, in a sense, can exist outside or beyond ‘work,’ ‘value’ and ‘culture.’

The book is elegant. It’s not a waste.

More images by Dana Hoey can be found here.

Can you Blurb my Blog?

“NOW WHAT explodes the blogosphere like a runaway comet attacking the dinosaurs at the dawn of mammal time. It’s an otherworldly rocket ride through the terrain of innovative publishing—a spinal tap for the dull consumerist spinal cord—an all-encompassing Whitman-esque embrace, that, like the godfather of American poetry—takes everything in and leaves nothing to chance. NOW WHAT is the heir to H.L. Mencken, Martin Luther, and Soupy Sales. Slip on a hand puppet, nail your complaints to the door, and enjoy this endlessly delightful show.”

***

I was struck by a recent discussion in the most recent American Book Review (27.5) between Joe Tabbi and R.M. Berry, regarding Tabbi’s review of Berry’s great novel Frank. There is much to the exchange between the two authors, but one point involves Tabbi’s worry that innovative authors and publishers sometimes claim a secret knowledge of the world, beyond the perception of the average reader; one implication is that such claims may be a type of marketing hyperbole.

I wonder if those on this blog, contributors and readers, have any thoughts about book blurbs. You know, those little parcels of often-outrageous praise we solicit and write for the back covers of new books.

Do blurbs tells us anything useful about a text or a writer—or, like many letters of recommendation in higher education—are there only differing degrees of extreme plaudits? Do any of you have evidence that authors have not read books to which they contribute blurbs? What are you blurbing habits? [BONUS: Can you write the best possible NOW WHAT blurb?] There's an entire publicity system at work that we have yet to discuss.

Of course, feel free to respond anonymously. And it is rare, if not unheard of, to be asked to blurb anonymously.

Davis

Kathy Acker's Life & Work

This isn’t the review of a small-press book that Ted has challenged us to post (which I hope to be doing soon), but a recommendation pf a book on Kathy Acker that I've recently had the pleasure of reading. Lust for Life: On the Writing of Kathy Acker, ed. Amy Scholder, Carla Harryman, and Avital Ronell (Verso: London, 2006), collects eight papers that were presented in November, 2002 at a symposium on Acker at Fales Library at NYU. Will Kathy Acker’s work live on after her death? In About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews, Samuel R. Delany notes that the making & perpetuation of a literary reputation entails numerous factors, which are indexed by what he calls “markers.” Among these markers, the development of a body of literary criticism of the writer’s work ranks high. Obviously, when a wide spectrum of scholars and critics pay serious attention to a writer, other scholars and critics, previously unfamiliar with the work, will be drawn to write about it, too. But perhaps less obviously, criticism of writers who are considered “difficult” or “alternative” serves an even more important function, that of making the work intelligible to those who would otherwise dismiss it as unreadable or meaningless, of stretching the limits of mainstream literary discourse to accommodate work that was previously marginal.

Accordingly, in her preface to Lust for Life, Amy Scholder writes:

The sophistication, prescience, and innovation of Acker’s work make it prime material for scholarly interpretation and academic study. My hope is that with this collection of essays, we set the stage for further inquiry into Acker’s project, and that general readers, students, and scholars take note of the myriad ways to penetrate and interact with this vibrant work.(viii)

The eight essays complement one another. The first, “Kathy Acker,” by Peter Wollen, provides an intellectual biography of Acker’s writing life. He notes that although most people assume that Burroughs was the greatest influence on Acker’s work, the context in which she first “read Burroughs had already been set by the cultural formation that she had received in San Diego”—where she followed Herbert Marcuse from Brandeis & came to know David Antin (who told her “Don’t be afraid to copy it out”), Eleanor Antin (who “provided a role model for Acker as a female performer and avant-gardist”), and Jerome Rothenberg.

In this context, she found in Burroughs a prose writer who “was dealing with how politics and language came together…Burroughs was the only prose writer I could find who was a conceptualist, oh he’s very much of a conceptualist.” Burroughs’s cut-up technique provided Acker not only with a methodology but also an example of how a literary technique could be given a political twist as a mode of resistance, envisaged as a way of subverting the control system inherent in verbal discourse, expanding the possibilities of writing, ceaselessly creating the new out of the old.(4)

Wollen cites Sarah Crane’s observation (in The Transformation of the Avant-Garde) that

because novels sell at a much lower price than paintings or other artworks, the market for literature is therefore much greater and commercial success comes from volume of sales. For visual artists, on the other hand, it comes from selling, for a high unit price, to an elite of collectors and museums who are guided in their opinions and tastes by currents they pick up from within the art world itself. As a result, rich and successful artists are often militantly avant-garde, whereas best-selling writers tend to write “in the tradition of the realistic novel” and avant-garde writers cannot realistically hope for much commercial success.”(7)

This observation resonates with the more personal account Avital Ronell offers in the next essay, “Kathy Goes to Hell: On the Irresolvable Stupidity of Acker’s Death,” which Ronell characterizes as a eulogy that attempts to “scan the resistant complexities of an unreadable friendship” (15). Ronell not only talks about Acker’s work, but also about their friendship (including Ronell’s wish for her to be friends with another close friend, Jacques Derrida) and her continuing bereavement five years after Acker’s death. Ronell is the first of the essayists to give us some idea of what it would have been like to have had a friendship with Acker. In doing so, she elaborates on what, for her, a “good friendship” is or is not:

It is imperative that good friendship be unbound from the yoke of understanding—who would be so deluded as to claim to understand the friend? Who would demean the beloved friend by finding her transparent or readily intelligible? Good friendship demands a strong measure of rupture in reciprocity or equality, as well as the interruption of all fusion or confusion between you and me. Born of disproportion, it is evidenced, claims Nietzsche, when you respect the other more than yourself… The good friendship, borne [sic] of disidentification, enables you to see your friend.(28)

The most painful, irreducible fact for Ronell is the “stupidity” of Acker’s death:

She remained unsheltered, teaching more or less as an adjunct [at UC-Santa Barbara], bereft of the benefits that would have pulled her out of her medical crisis. I will never get over the fact that Acker had to suffer the refusal of medical benefits. Like many Americans, she was uninsured. No one or no institution should get away with the degradation that was visited upon her, determining her fate.”(15)

Carla Harryman’s essay, “Acker Un-formed,” was, for me, the most illuminating piece in the book. She warns of “the traps Acker’s novels lay for anyone who tries to write about them” that chiefly arise from they way in which Acker’s characters function in her fiction.

The reader of an Acker work suspends her own interpretive coherence; self-identity in reading multiplies, expands, pixelates, contracts, is undone: the reader becomes to herself a multisensory/sensibility of the text, a further anarchic layer of the text and/or obstruction. Reading further crowds the text. “I” am interference.(36)

Harryman focuses particularly on what she calls the “architecture, or anti-architecture” of Acker’s later novels, noting: “The overlays of edifice and openness are related in her later works to childhood as both an institution and as unformed states of being that allow the text/world to be revealed and learned rather than known.” (38) And she points out that Acker’s novels recite stories the way children do.

Power of choice, power to do adult things, to give birth, to destroy things, to chatter about death and love without repression, and to find love outside the family are part of the dialogues and narratives that children make up when they play house and play with dolls…Refined diction along with words and phrases learned from fairy tales and movies are mixed with unsophisticated phrases. This is the language of the child’s mingled knowledge and wishes.”(42)

Robert Gluck’s “The Greatness of Kathy Acker” relates the anguish he feels when reading Acker’s fiction, “in which a marauding narrative continually shifts the ground of authority, subverting faith in the ‘suspension of disbelief’ or guided daydream that describes most fiction.” (47) In the end, he says, “judgment itself is worn down and falls away in favor of a kind of astonishment.”(49) Gluck places Acker’s work in a larger context of literary aesthetics, then concludes, “Kathy Acker had the highest ambitions: to reorient literature in a true relation to the present and to crack that moment wide open.”

Barrett Watten zooms out, to place Acker’s work in a larger, historical context. He begins by regretting that although Foucault was a devotee of avant-garde texts early in his career and made use of what he calls their “negativity,” he apparently ceased to read such texts in the early 1970s. Watten asks: What if Foucault had read Kathy Acker’s novels? If he had, Watten hypothesizes,

its genealogy would in his view not originate with the propriety of Pamela’s virtue but descend from the criminality and sexuality of Moll Flanders. Triangulating Acker’s work between Moll Flanders and Pierre Riviere allows one to disclose her formal motives, which are to undo and reinvent the novel as an inversion of the historical crisis of its negative, excessive origins.(58-59)

Fleshing out this delightful flight of speculative fancy, Watten offers a fascinating reading of Acker’s early work against a “chronology of the rise and destruction of the Symbionese Liberation Army,” which, he says, “provides a ready-to-hand index to the period, easily discernible in both the form and content of Acker’s writing.”(67)

The sixth essay, Laurence A. Rickels’ “Devil Father Mine,” interested me the least, probably because its style is heavily allusive. “The writing Acker summons demonologically must be reclaimed from projection. The secondariness or reactivity of projection in the wake or place of first contact…turns around in this process into new writing—original screen text—along lines long associated with the Devil.”(78-79)

Nayland Blake’s “Kathy Acker:‘Because I Want to Live Forever in Wonder’” tells the story of the author’s early infatuation with Acker’s work, his disappointment when Acker wrote an essay for the catalog of the author’s gallery show in 1990, his subsequent friendship with Acker, & his rereading the essay after Acker’s death & seeing that Acker had indeed “captured much of what I have become as an artist.” As for Acker’s work, he offers this distillation:

What marks Acker as an artist of her generation is the way she combined formal editing strategies that had previously been used to produce and effect of intellectual distance with content of overwhelming intimacy.(104)

Leslie Dick concludes the volume with “Seventeen Paragraphs on Kathy Acker,” which resonates with most of the previous seven essays. She notes that “Acker rewrote her texts eight times: once for sound, once for meaning, once for ‘beauty,’ once for structure, once in the mirror for performativity, etc…” She says, “Kathy’s generosity to unpublished writers was legendary. In the end we feel out. It was inevitable. Nevertheless, I won’t forget her generosity to me.”(113) & she, too, tries to get at the heart of Acker’s writing:

The relation of words and things, writing and life, is a relation that never quite matches—its asymptotic, as Lacan says, the je and the moi (asymptotic always sounds to me like asymptomatic, like chlamydia, but anyway)—and it is in that gap between words and things, in that rupture, that desire lies. Put bluntly, need is a material reality, like hunger or love, and demand the speech act that repeats that need in words. In the difference between them, a difference that can never be evaded, given the infinitely incommensurable mismatch of things and words, bodies and ideas, in the difference between need and demand, in that impossible subtraction, desire cmes into being. Kathy Acker’s work is located there.

Kathy got at that space partly by refusing the distinction between art and life, words and things, by mixing it up to the point where every text undoes the proper and proprietary boundaries between the author and her very own text. This presumed author, singular in its authority, dissolves in Kathy’s writing, vanishing into a rapid sequence of possible others…Kathy shoved it all together… In the collision, in this mix, the space between words and things starts to open up, to come apart, to break down into something else: into a text of desire, always marked by the shadow of the lost object.(113-114)

As such books should do, it made me want to read the novels by Acker I haven’t yet read & reread the ones that are marked indelibly in my memory. & that, of course, is its point.

August Challenge

One of the things that prompted Lance and I to begin this blog a couple months ago was the paucity of reviews of new small press fiction titles. But, to date, there have been very few of these, aside from short mentions of and allusions to titles/authors.

Let's see what we can do about changing this. A challenge:

During August, let's have everyone on this list do at least one review of a recent-ish small press fiction title, preferably by an author who is not a good friend of the blogger (this world being so small oftentimes, it may be impossible to avoid any acquaintance whatever; nevertheless, it seems to me that this project's success will be predicated on reviewers feeling that they are free, if they desire, to do a less-than-enthusiastic review, if such is called for).

Let me also say this, as a small press publisher myself: anyone desiring review copies of Starcherone books should feel free to get in touch with me to request such. But then I will expect you to WRITE THE REVIEW (and reserve the right to call you out if you don't). Email me at ted@starcherone.com.

meta-blogging

Who are bloggers?

According to the results of a survey of nearly 5000 internet users released today by the PEW Internet & American Life Project, there aren't all that many surprises in answer to the question. But there are a few.

In an effort to continue our thinking about the digital beyond—and specifically the possibilities for alternative prose writers and publishers there—here are some of the highlights from the report:

• 8% of internet users, or about 12 million American adults, keep a blog; 39% of internet users, or about 57 million American adults, read blogs.

• 37% of bloggers cite "my life and experiences" as a primary topic of their blog; in other words, we may have something like a digital analogy for the unthinking and narcissistic narrativity of most pedestrian and parochial memoirs here—only without even an attempt at editing.
  

• 11% of bloggers cite politics and government as the main subject of their blog. Entertainment-related topics were the next most popular blog-type, with 7% of bloggers, followed by sports (6%), general news and current events (5%—isn't that extraordinary?), business (5%), technology (4%), religion, spirituality or faith (2%), a specific hobby or a health problem or illness (each comprising 1% of bloggers—among which irrational numbers, somewhere between underwater basket weaving and leprosy, I'm afraid, Now What would find a place).
  

• The most distinguishing characteristic of bloggers is their youth. More than half (54%) of bloggers are under the age of 30.

• Like the internet population in general, bloggers are evenly divided between men and women, and more than half live in the suburbs.

• Bloggers are less likely to be white than the general internet population. 60% percent of bloggers are, while 11% are African American, 19% are English-speaking Hispanic and 10% identify as some other race. By contrast, 74% of internet users are white, 9% are African American, 11% are English-speaking Hispanic and 6% identify as some other race.

• Despite the public nature of creating a blog, most bloggers view it as a personal pursuit. 52% of bloggers say they blog mostly for themselves, not for an audience—but then why, I wonder, don't they simply keep diaries?
  

• One in ten bloggers spends ten or more hours per week on his or her blog; most spend about two hours.
  

• 52% of bloggers say they do so mainly to "express themselves creatively."
  

• Only 34% believe the blog is a form of journalism, and only 56% of bloggers attempt to verify "facts" they include in their posts. Duck and cover: thought and argument have given way to bloviation and bluster.
  

current projects

While one of the few constraints we Now What contributors work under is the Law of No Self-Aggrandizement, I thought every now and then it might be both fun and illuminating to hear what we're up to in our aesthetic lives, and so:

What publishing or writing project are you engaged in right now that holds your greatest interest and attention?

PP/FF in Brooklyn

Hey, cool cats one & all,

Join us Wednesday, July 26, 7pm, at Night & Day, for our Brooklyn PP/FF Anthology Party! If you haven't heard about PP/FF, it's the newly released Starcherone Books anthology featuring 61 of today's leading practitioners in the in-between prose-poetry/flash-fiction form that editor Peter Conners has named "PP/FF." See http://www.starcherone.com/ppff.htm for more info on this first-of-its-kind book, ideal for creative writing classes and for just hanging around in the park reading and looking cool with in these summer dog days...

Readers: Kazim Ali, Brian Clements, Peter Conners, Geoffrey Gatza, Christine Boyka Kluge, Ted Pelton, Anthony Tognazzini, Jessica Treat, & Mark Tursi.

Location: Night & Day, 230 5th Ave (cross street: Presidents St.), 7pm

Reader Bios:

Kazim Ali is the author of a novel, Quinn’s Passage, and a book of poems, The Far Mosque. He is the publisher of Nightboat Books and assistant professor of English at Shippensburg University.

Brian Clements is the author of several collections of poetry in print and online, including Essays Against Ruin, Burn Whatever Will Burn, and Flesh and Wood. He is the editor of Firewheel Editions and of Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, and he coordinates the MFA in Professional Writing at Western Connecticut State University.

Peter Conners is founding co-editor of the online literary journal, Double Room: A Journal of Prose Poetry & Flash Fiction, as well as editor of PP/FF: An Anthology. His third poetry collection, Of Whiskey
and Winter, will be published by White Pine Press in fall 2007. Conners works as Marketing Director/Associate Editor for the poetry publisher BOA Editions. He lives with his wife and two sons in Rochester, NY.

Geoffrey Gatza has dedicated himself to protecting the downtrodden of his city from a continuing series of deadly poetic schemes by the insidious School of Quietude. He is editor and publisher of BlazeVOX
Books. His web site is Geoffreygatza.com.

Christine Boyka Kluge is the author of Teaching Bones to Fly, a poetry collection from Bitter Oleander Press, and Domestic Weather, which won the 2003 Uccelli Press Chapbook Contest. Her prose poetry and
flash fiction collection, Stirring the Mirror, is due out from Bitter Oleander Press in 2007.

Ted Pelton is the author of three books, most recently the novel, Malcolm & Jack (and Other Famous American Criminals) (Spuyten Duyvil, 2006). Recipient of an NEA Fellowship for Fiction, he is an Associate Professor at Medaille College of Buffalo, NY, and Executive Director of Starcherone Books.

Anthony Tognazzini has published work in Swink, The Hat, Sentence, Quarterly West, Salt Hill, La Petite Zine, The Mississippi Review, Quick Fiction, Ducky, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among other journals, and
in Sudden Stories: A Mammoth Anthology of Miniscule Fiction. He has received a Pushcart nomination and an award from the Academy of American Poets. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Jessica Treat is the author of two story collections, Not a Chance (FC2, 2000) and A Robber in the House (Coffee House Press, 1993), and is completing a third. Her stories and prose poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is the recipient of a Connecticut Commission on the Arts Award.

Mark Tursi is one of the founders and editors of the literary journal Double Room, and he is an Assistant Professor at College Misericordia in Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Denver and his MFA from Colorado State University.

Hope to see you all there! It's not too late to book a flight!

Who owns this blog anyway?

Catching up with this blog is some task, let me tell you, which is why I propose, in light of the recent “digerati and literati” thread, that we find a publisher, and bind all of this web-babble into a book for easier reading. Then, we get corporate support with enough cash to splash a two-page in the Sunday Times, and watch our IRAs get phat, fat, phat….ahem. Sorry about that….but actually, who owns these words anyway?

I noticed something while printing out the above-mentioned thread to read on a bus back to Chicago from St. Louis--something more than the odd homology between my reading, in hard copy, about an (in-part) web-critique located on a blog.

I’m struck by Joe Amato’s comment: “the sense that the (digital) work itself might “automatically” incorporate criticism within it” (in relation to Bolter and Landow), and Lance Olsen’s response that perhaps this integration of criticism into the narrative flow might in some ways serve as a jumping off point for the innovative. Strangely, this all brings me back to where I almost always go: William S. Burroughs.

For the last six months or so, I’ve been involved in a close examination of Burroughs’s cut-up work, particularly in terms of a collaborative manifesto (with Brion Gysin) called The Third Mind (1978, English edition). The text is about as polyvocal as they come—merging tracts about how to do cut-ups, with significant pieces that demonstrate the theory of the practice within the practice itself. This is the pattern of Burroughs “Nova/Cut-Up” trilogy novels, The Soft Machine (1961, 1966, 1968), The Ticket that Exploded (1962, 1967), and Nova Express (1964), with exposition on process followed by rearrangement and interpolation of this exposition.

For those unfamiliar with cut-ups, or Burroughs (although I’m sure most Now What’ers are familiar), the cut-up ethos is multiform. A few important vectors: 1) to do something, now, in what Burroughs called the “pre-sent” time, mirroring populist poetic slogans “Cut-ups are for everyone.” 2) to rearrange words through the random factor (scissors, folding, tearing), redefines “quality”: “Rimbaud announces himself with some excruciatingly bad poetry, Cut Rimbaud’s words and you are assured of good poetry at least if not personal appearance.” 3) to cut-up is, most importantly, to explicitly plagiarize and in many cases infringe on copyright.

This last part is what I am particularly interested in just now (and what I will discuss at the upcoming conference, ¿Quién es?: William S. Burroughs revisited), in that the plagiarism of the cut-ups offers collaboration as explicit (when Burroughs and Gysin and others work on a cut-up piece together), or implicit (when a “single” writer uses other texts in her work). While I do not mean to trivialize the difference between the two modes, I do see an important correlation between the commonality of cut-ups as in some way “collaborative,” in their most effective form also serving as an auto-critique, and the manner by which traditional print media, in two dimensions, generally hides the collaborative stain.

When Picasso sticks a postage stamp on a canvas, we can see multimedia at work (and, if “he” did not “create” the stamp, we might call this the second type of collaboration). Yet, when writing is produced collaboratively, often through a mode of plagiarism, the page does not necessarily reveal its hidden multidimensionality.

And so I am obsessively tracing textual markers of collaboration in Burroughs’ work, looking at bibliographic codes (fonts, copyright notices, repetitions, etc.) that reveal the material hand of plagiaristic collaboration (following some excellent textual work by Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris, most recently in an essay called “Not Burroughs' Final Fix: Materializing The Yage Letters” at Postmodern Culture—but what I am getting at for this space is the supposition that our much-discussed theories on electronic art/writing might profit from (re)visiting the matrix of collaboration/plagiarism/copyright/authorship/ownership/ originality/genius/ad nauseum.

We know where people like Federman stand on this question in terms of print, and I can imagine his electronic thoughts are the same—and Steve Tomasula, both in VAS and The Book of Portraiture, offers very cool takes on same. From the latter text, aping painter Diego Velázquez, and so echoing the work of countless writers and scholars antagonistic to the legal fictions of a singular copyright regime: “Truly, the imagination, which may seem to bear much individual fruit, is root’d in a compost of forgotten books.”

So, while I am no doubt conflating a number of different problems here, I’d be interested to know if others see the mark of the “many” on the electronic “one,” and how, if so, an electronic praxis of plagiarism might evolve in this topsy-turvy, auto-critiquing, consumer-as-producer space-of-no-space non-space?

Burroughs, William S. "The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin" in Re/Search: William S. Burroughs and Throbbing Gristle. San Francisco: RE/Search, 1982: 35-36.
Tomasula, Steve. The Book of Portraiture. Normal/Tallahassee: FC2, 2006: 71.

Literary Capital

Seems like a good time for us all to have a look at this review essay by Louis Menand, which appeared in The New Yorker at the end of last year.

------------------------------

ALL THAT GLITTERS
Literature’s global economy.
by LOUIS MENAND
Issue of 2005-12-26 and 2006-01-02
Posted 2005-12-19

In 1987, “Paco’s Story,” by Larry Heinemann, won the National Book Award for Fiction. The acclaim that greeted this selection was less than universal, and the reason—no fault of Heinemann’s—is that 1987 was also the year of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” Morrison’s novel was a finalist for the award, and it had been widely regarded as the favorite. We can assume that she was disappointed, and we know that her friends were, because, after “Beloved” also failed to win the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction (which went to Philip Roth’s “The Counterlife”), forty-eight of them published a statement in the Times Book Review. “Despite the international stature of Toni Morrison,” they complained, “she has yet to receive the national recognition that her five major works of fiction entirely deserve: she has yet to receive the keystone honors of the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize. We, the undersigned blackcritics and black writers, here assert ourselves against such oversight and harmfulwhimsy. The legitimate need for our own critical voice in relation to our own literature can no longer be denied.” A few months later, “Beloved” won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Five years after that, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize.

James English has a lot to say about this episode in “The Economy of Prestige” (Harvard; $29.95), his ingenious analysis of the history and social function of cultural prizes and awards. He thinks that Morrison’s champions crossed a tacitly accepted and well-established line when they printed their protest in the Times. The transgression was not the complaint that the award had been given to the wrong writer. That criticism is as old as literary prizes themselves. When the first Nobel Prize in Literature went to Sully Prudhomme, in 1901, the choice was regarded as a scandal, since Leo Tolstoy happened to be alive. The Swedish Academy was so unnerved by the public criticism it received that its members made a point of passing over Tolstoy for the rest of his life—just to show, apparently, that they knew what they were doing the first time around—honoring instead such immortals as Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, José Echegaray, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Giosuè Carducci, Rudolf Eucken, and Selma Lagerlöf. When you have prizes for art, you will always have people complaining that prizes are just politics, or that they reward in-group popularity or commercial success, or that they are pointless and offensive because art is not a competition. English believes that contempt for prizes is not harmful to the prize system; that, on the contrary, contempt for prizes is what the system is all about. “This threat of scandal,” as he puts it, “is constitutive of the cultural prize.” His theory is that when people make these objections to the nature of prizes they are helping to sustain a collective belief that true art has nothing to do with things like politics, money, in-group tastes, and beating out the other guy. As long as we want to believe that creative achievement is special, that a work of art is not just one more commodity seeking to aggrandize itself in the marketplace at the expense of other works of art, we need prizes so that we can complain about how stupid they are. In this respect, it is at least as important that the prize go to the wrong person as that it go to the right one. No one thinks that Tolstoy was less than a great writer because he failed to win the Nobel. The failure to win the Nobel has become, in the end, a mark of his greatness.

The Nobel Prize in Literature was the first of the major modern cultural prizes. It was soon followed by the Prix Goncourt (first awarded in 1903) and the Pulitzer Prizes (conceived in 1904, first awarded in 1917). The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences started handing out its prizes in 1929; the Emmys began in 1949, the Grammys in 1959. Since the nineteen-seventies, English says, there has been an explosion of new cultural prizes and awards. There are now more movie awards given out every year—about nine thousand—than there are new movies, and the number of literary prizes is climbing much faster than the number of books published. When a prominent figure in the cultural world—a benefactor or a distinguished critic or professor—dies, the friends and family often establish a memorial prize in his or her name. (As English points out, the friends and family often have no conception of how much even a minor award costs to administer. The price of administration, in fact, usually far outstrips the value of the prize itself. The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition costs more than three million dollars a year to run; the winners receive twenty thousand dollars.) This doesn’t mean that everyone gets a ribbon. In the awards economy, the rich tend to get richer. Michael Jackson has been given more than two hundred and forty awards in his career. Steven Spielberg has ninety. “The Return of the King,” the third movie in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, won seventy-nine prizes. English estimates that among poets John Ashbery is the leader, with at least forty-five prizes and awards. John Updike sets the pace for novelists, with thirty-nine.

English interprets the rise of the prize as part of the “struggle for power to produce value, which means power to confer value on that which does not intrinsically possess it.” In an information, or “symbolic,” economy, in other words, the goods themselves are physically worthless: they are mere print on a page or code on a disk. What makes them valuable is the recognition that they are valuable. This recognition is not automatic and intuitive; it has to be constructed. A work of art has to circulate through a sub-economy of exchange operated by a large and growing class of middlemen: publishers, curators, producers, publicists, philanthropists, foundation officers, critics, professors, and so on. The prize system, with its own cadre of career administrators and judges, is one of the ways in which value gets “added on” to a work. Of course, we like to think that the recognition of artistic excellence is intuitive. We don’t like to think of cultural value as something that requires middlemen—people who are not artists themselves—in order to emerge. We prefer to believe that truly good literature or music or film announces itself. Which is another reason that we need prizes: so that we can insist that we don’t really need them.

In English’s view, therefore, Morrison’s friends and admirers violated the protocols of prize-bashing not because they publicly criticized the choice of the National Book Award judges but because they acknowledged that the award really matters, that it is (in their words) a “keystone honor” that helps to validate a book and establish its author. Their statement pointed out, in the frankest terms, that there is a literary marketplace, and that power and authority—“cultural capital,” to use the term that English borrows from the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu—accrue to those who succeed in it. Art does not receive its reward in Heaven; it is one of the things that belong to Caesar.

English speculates that this willingness to speak without embarrassment about the significance of prizes and awards, and about the whole economy of cultural production and consumption, may, paradoxically, signal the demise of the prize system. “As we lose our ability or our willingness to see the prize as a fundamentally scandalous institution”—scandalous because art ought to have nothing to do with winning and losing—“there is bound to be a period of painful contraction in the awards industry,” he says. “Faced with the withdrawal of what has been by far their richest and most reliable source of publicity, prizes may after so many years of uncontainable expansion at last show some signs of fatigue.”

Another indication that the prize system may not be working as it once did, English suggests, is that it is no longer cool to refuse an award. Once, Jean-Paul Sartre could turn down the Nobel Prize (which he did in 1964) and see a nice jump in the price of his stock as a result. Marlon Brando and Woody Allen enhanced their reputations as artists by their disrespect for the Oscars. (Of course, they had to win the thing first for the disrespect to have any value.) Today, the principled refusal of an award looks not just ungracious; it looks phony. Hollywood movies are a business—no kidding. If you’re not above accepting money for acting in them, how can you pretend to be above participating in the awards ceremonies that the industry uses to sell them? According to English’s theory, though, someone has to refuse to participate—someone has to insist that moviemaking is its own reward, that it is not about competition or material gain—for movies to retain their value in the symbolic economy.

One of the richest of the stories that English tells about the circulation of cultural goods is the saga of “The Bone People.” The book was published in New Zealand in February, 1984, by Spiral Collective, a nonprofit feminist press run by three women in Wellington. Its author, Keri Hulme, had published poems and short stories, but “The Bone People” was her first novel. It had been rejected by every major publishing house to which it was submitted; English describes it as “a long and somewhat perverse mixture of genres, styles, and languages, sloppily edited and riddled with typographic errors—by no means an obvious winner in the marketplace.” Still, two print runs of two thousand copies both sold out. Then, in the summer of 1984, “The Bone People” won two awards. The first was the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction, a leading book prize in New Zealand but of little note internationally. The jury, English says, was impressed by the novel’s “fusion of Anglo (‘Pakeha’) and indigenous (Maori) elements within a dreamlike narrative of trauma and recovery as a kind of national allegory.” Though Hulme herself is only one-eighth Maori, and was reared and educated in Anglophone society, “The Bone People” was consequently branded as “Maori fiction.” And it was under this description that it won its second prize of 1984, the Pegasus Prize for Maori Literature.

The Pegasus is an instrument of ExxonMobil. It was founded, in 1977, in order to promote international awareness of marginalized literary cultures, and it circulates among countries in which ExxonMobil has subsidiaries—a neat example, as English says, of “glocalization,” the official respect for (or colonization of) local cultural ecologies that is one of the contemporary features of international business. In 1984, New Zealand was the lucky host of the Pegasus, and “The Bone People” was the beneficiary. On cue, the choice was attacked on the ground that Hulme was not a real Maori. This was exactly the scandal needed to get the book onto the international stage, and, in 1985, after it was published in Britain, by Hodder & Stoughton, it won the most prestigious literary prize in England, the Booker. It was thus elevated to the canon of what is now called world literature. It is the “Maori novel,” and, English says,

"it is taught as such in contemporary world literature and postcolonial survey classes; it is discussed by journalists and scholars of world literature in articles and at conferences (one bibliography lists more than a hundred articles); most tellingly, perhaps, it remains in print in the United States and the United Kingdom some twenty years after its original publication, while other novels from the same period, including virtually all of the others that won the New Zealand Book Award, have long since disappeared from the international marketplace. It is not as a New Zealand novel that 'The Bone People' has become a classic, but, as declared on or inside the cover of every paperback edition since the late 1980s, as a world-certified, globally consecrated Maori novel."

English’s point is not that “The Bone People” is inauthentic. In his scheme, after all, accusations of inauthenticity are crucial to the successful functioning of the cultural economy: they shore up our faith that there is such a thing as authenticity. When people complained that “The Bone People” was not a genuine Maori novel, they were saying, in effect, that there is, or could be, a genuine Maori novel, and that they, and not functionaries in some multinational corporation’s public-relations apparat, were the ones in the proper position to recognize it as such. What the story of “The Bone People” reveals is that, whether or not a work of “indigenous” literature is the product of pure indigenes, if it is to achieve international recognition as world literature it must carry certain markers. For one thing, it cannot be identified as national literature. A book by a New Zealand writer would be unlikely to make it into the world-literature canon. The Pegasus Prize was for a work of Maori literature. Once, nationality was something that an ambitious writer hoped to transcend. A novelist aspired to recognition not as a New Zealand writer or a Nigerian writer but as, simply, a writer. Now nationality is transcended downward. Recognition comes from having one’s work identified with a marginalized or “endangered” community within the larger national or global polity—with Ibo culture (rather than Nigerian), or Maori (rather than New Zealand).

Although there are some minor differences, English’s discussion of this development parallels Pascale Casanova’s in her rather brilliant book “The World Republic of Letters” (translated from the French by M. B. DeBevoise; Harvard; $35). Casanova is also writing about the system in which books circulate in the competition for recognition. The standard practice is to understand works of literature as products of a national tradition, as examples of French literature or American literature; Casanova’s argument is that, on the contrary, the system has always been global. As she puts it, literatures are “not a pure emanation of national identity; they are constructed through literary rivalries, which are always denied, and struggles, which are always international.”

Casanova thinks that every ambitious writer aspires to be recognized for meeting the standards of the metropole. In her book, the metropole is Paris, the eternal center of the literary universe (she is, after all, French); but it might be London or New York as well. “Paris” is the place where art and literature are always truly modern and up to date, and the rest of the world measures its lateness by that meridian. For centuries, meeting the standard of Paris meant escaping the provincialism of one’s own culture—the constraints imposed by the Church, or the state, or the Party, which all want literature to serve their interests—and making art for the sake of art. James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright, Milan Kundera and Danilo Ki‰ all went to Paris in order to escape the fate of being national writers. They assimilated, not to Frenchness (as Casanova points out, Joyce and Beckett, although they lived in Paris for much of their lives, had no interest in French literary life) but to the universal modern idea of the artist. Now, she thinks, the strategy for acceptance has shifted from assimilation to differentiation, and differentiation means not being modern.

The challenge now is to combine elements of non-metropolitan indigenousness with elements that metropolitan readers recognize as “literary.” A subnational novel, such as “The Bone People,” must be what English calls “world-readable.” The judges of the Booker Prize probably didn’t know the difference between Maoris and Mallomars, but they knew, instinctively, how a work of “Maori fiction” should look. It should be a hybrid of postmodernist heteroglossia (multiple and high-low discursive registers, mixed genres, stories within stories) and pre-modernist narrative (conventional morality, the simulation of an oral story-telling tradition). Between them, English and Casanova list the features of the world-literature prototype: a trauma-and-recovery story, with magic-realist elements, involving abuse and family dysfunction, that arrives at resolution by the invocation of spiritual or holistic verities. If you add in a high level of technical and intellectual sophistication, this is a pretty accurate generic description of a novel by Toni Morrison.

“The Economy of Prestige” and “The World Republic of Letters” are not debunking exercises. They are simply efforts to understand literature sociologically. “Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings,” says the Martian, about books, in Craig Raine’s famous poem, “and some are treasured for their markings.” The Martian doesn’t know why the markings between the covers labelled “Beloved” are more treasured, or represent more cultural capital, than the markings inside the covers labelled “Paco’s Story.” The Martian sees only that human beings attach high value to some of these otherwise identical and interchangeable objects and low value to others, and he/she attempts, by analyzing the system in which the objects are produced, circulated, and consumed, to figure out how this happens. From the Martian point of view, it certainly looks like a competition, because the value of “Beloved” is determined by all the things that make it different from “Paco’s Story.” It’s a relational system: the value of a cultural good is relative to the value of every other cultural good. That most of us on planet Earth deny that competition has anything to do with the esteem that we, as individuals, confer on a particular book or painting or song or movie does not mean that the Martian is wrong. Our denial is just one more thing that needs to be explained. The Martian is experiencing literature from the other side of the looking glass.

Of course, as English and Casanova would agree, books are read on this side of the looking glass. We are ourselves products of the culture whose products we consume, and we can’t help taking it, for the most part, on its own terms. Still, their very strong books belong to a general challenge to the usual practices of literary pedagogy. Literature departments are almost always organized by language and country, but Casanova’s book gives us many reasons to doubt whether this captures the way literature really works. She has an excellent account, for example, of the international influence of Faulkner—once his novels had been translated into French. He was, as she describes him, the first of the glocal writers, an acknowledged model for the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, the Algerian Rachid Boudjedra, and the Spaniard Juan Benet, not to mention the African-American Toni Morrison. Faulkner was the novelist of the American South who demonstrated to novelists of the global South how to represent a marginal community in an advanced literary style, a style that could gain the respect of “Paris.” English’s and Casanova’s books also challenge the conventional “shock of recognition” idea of influence, which imagines literary history as one soul speaking to another across time and space. The soul may speak, but the international context is the reason it is heard. The appeal that Faulkner had for García Márquez had everything to do with the place that Faulkner occupied in the global literary system, and with the place that García Márquez occupied as well.

Literature is conventionally taught as a person-to-person aesthetic experience: the writer (or the poem) addressing the reader. Teachers cut out English’s middlemen, the people who got the poem from the writer to us, apparently confirming his point that we have to deny the economics of cultural value in order to preserve the aesthetics. But, once we’re outside the classroom, how rigidly are these conventions adhered to? How many people today really imagine “art” as a privileged category, exempt from the machinations of the marketplace? The literary marketplace has always been a theme of literature: “Tristram Shandy” reflects on its own status as a cultural good; Aristophanes’ “The Clouds” is a satire on literary competition. Since the nineteen-sixties, the constructed nature of the art experience has been one of advanced art’s principal preoccupations. Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s-soup-can paintings are all about art as commodity. The frenzy of prize-creation in the nineteen-seventies and eighties that English describes may have been a panicky middlebrow reaction against the demystification of culture that was already well under way, or it may have been a symptom and agent of that demystification. It is difficult to see it as a reinforcement of the ideal of autonomous art. That ideal disappeared a long time ago. The Martians have already landed.