Brooklyn Rail Anthology

Speaking of Brian Evenson, he's one of the contributors to what looks to be a terrific anthology edited by Donald Breckenridge, which has just come out from Hanging Loose Press, The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology.

Breckenridge has been running a very strong reading series in Brooklyn for at least three years I've been aware of; plus, as Fiction Editor at Brooklyn Rail since 2002 he's made over what might be just another alternative arts weekly into one of the most interesting venues in the country to read new work by and about innovative fiction writers. Says Breckenridge in the introduction: "As a self-taught writer and ardent reader of formally experimental fiction, my goal as the Rail Fiction Editor has always been to highlight the talents of emerging writers, many of whom live in Brooklyn, as well as to showcase the current writing of established authors who have been marginalized by an increasingly risk-averse, profit-driven publishing industry."

The 432 page Anthology succeeds in its mixture of established and emerging writers, and is as good as any anthology available in marking the territory of new fiction.

List of contributors: Diane Williams, Brian Evenson, Caila Rossi, Lynda Schor, Sharon Mesmer, Susan Daitch, Jill Magi, Leslie Scalapino, Douglas Glover, Jonathan Baumbach, Jacques Roubaud (Translated by Guy Bennett), John Yau, Kenneth Bernard, Michael Martone, Barbara Henning, Lewis Warsh, Bart Cameron, Aaron Zimmerman , Jim Feast, Will Fleming, Evan Harris, Blake Radcliffe, Meredith Brosnan, Pat MacEnulty, Martha King, Carmen Firan (Translated by Dorin Motz), Elizabeth Reddin, Jeremy Sigler, Constanza Jaramillo Cathcart, Marie Carter, Lynn Crawford, Johannah Rodgers, Robert Pinget (Translated by Barbara Wright), Jean Fremon (Translated by Brian Evenson), Doug Nufer, R.M. Berry, Albert Mobilio, John Reed , Thomas D’Adamo, and Kurt Strahm.

review: brian evenson : the open curtain

When I'm in a relatively optimistic mood, I start thinking maybe the last few years are proving that something fresh and important is going on in the precincts of innovative fiction. After all, several significant alternative writing celebrations—&NOW and The Writer's Edge among them—have sprung up and seem to be planning on staying around a while. Even the Associated Writing Programs conference, once the bastion of the bland leading the bland, kin to the Bowen essay Carol Novack cites below, has been hosting some energizing panels on innovative prose and some fine alt-readings.

Moreover, this past summer and fall have seen or will see—in addition to a number of exciting new texts from Now What contributors—publication of Thomas Pynchon's new novel, Against the Day (due out 21 November), which spans the two decades or so before World War I, the first titanic rupture of the 20th century; Mark Danielewski's ballsy followup to House of Leaves, called Only Revolutions (September), that takes the shape of a kind of wacked-out roadtrip in which the book (a sort of prose poem, of all things)—reminiscent of Milorad Pavic's love story, The Inner Side of the Wind—is printed on two sides, one telling the story from a male narrator's point of view, the other from a female's; and two of my recent favorites: Shelley Jackson's brilliant Half Life (August), the story of a 28-year-old bisexual, bi-headed narrator who, citing "irreconcilable differences," seeks divorce from her other self by decapitation, and Laird Hunt's wonderfully curious third novel, The Exquisite (September), which is both a response to 9/11 and paean to Manhattan—especially to its seedy, shadowy, cramped, and unhinged Lower East Side, where anything can and does happen. Set shortly after that rip in reality’s fabric half a decade ago, "when the gaping hole … was still fresh, and the air was still stinging everyone’s eyes," the novel conjures a universe that is as much feverscape as city. It is a zone, as one character comments, "of subtle simulacra, of deceptive surfaces, of glib and phantom shimmerings" that "falls under the rubric of the danse macabre."

Put that together with the advent or re-invention of a host of intriguing indie presses (including Chiasmus, Aqueduct, Starcherone, and the others listed to the right), and I start wanting to say, as I did a few days ago in my post about electronic book review's new thread, Fictions Present, that it's beginning to feel a little like a renaissance of experimentation in the U.S.

Brian Evenson's recent novel, The Open Curtain, which Coffee House brought out last month, adds fuel to this meme's fire. In it, a Mormon teenager named Rudd stumbles across three letters—two from a woman named Anne Korth, and one from his dad who recently committed suicide—that suggest the possibility of a half-brother from a liason between Korth and Rudd’s father. Rudd’s resulting research into that relationship, as well as for a high-school paper he's writing on a nineteenth-century murder of a young woman by the grandson of Brigham Young unfold into a narrative (as the novel’s title suggests) about deception, hidden things, the dark, blank, blurry spaces in meaning, identity, and, finally, existence itself that give the lie to the inflexible vision at the core of conventional religions that can’t bring themselves to accept, as Rudd realizes, that "nothing came unmixed."

Initially, The Open Curtain seems a mimetic departure from Evenson’s earlier avant-gothic fiction. Toward the end of the first of three sections that comprise the novel, however, Rudd begins to experience unnerving blackouts and temporal disruptions that unhinge the apparently traditional narrative tactics at play. The second section jarringly changes point of view to Lyndi, a teenager whose parents have been murdered in a gruesome ritual killing in which Rudd seems to be implicated. As Rudd and she move toward marriage, the narrative further disrupts, and by the third section it becomes clear that each movement in its architectonics has essentially troubled and unwritten the preceding one. The final section flickers between realities, histories, and cleaving selves, transforming what at first may have seemed a traditional murder mystery into a mystery of ontology and epistemology, a novel about undoing "realistic" novels, and an extended investigation into the inexorable violence and blindness shot through Mormon culture.

We have returned, in other words, to all that makes Evenson's fiction so engaging, accomplished, and consequential. In its impulse to investigate the rich possibility spaces between genres, that fiction transforms and extends our notion of what narrative is and what it can be and do. Its clean, understated, even rationalist prose is in constant tension with its transgressive content, its resonant irony and unexpected humor, its unblinking examination of psychological and narratological instability. Evenson's fiction rhymes with that of very few authors, living or dead. It perhaps shares the fierce and absurd stare of a Kafka, the existential and textual undoings of a Beckett, the critifictional and paraliterary engagement with its materials of a Delany.

But at the end of the day it is all its own sprightly menanced thing, and one of the most important projects currently being undertaken on what I want to say this evening seems to be the increasingly ascendant innovative scene.

Notes on Writing a Novel - Essay by Elizabeth Bowen

I don't think you'll be able to access the essay I originally hot linked to narrative. They're removing the hot link.

The following were (obviously) comments concerning the now inaccessible essay.


What do you inventive novelists think of this essay, with its LAWS about novel writing? Pro's & con's?

Mad Hatters' Review Reading 11/17 NYC

Mad Hatters' Review
(http://www.madehattersreview.com/)
Edgy & Enlightened Literature, Art & Music in the Age of Dementia
Poetry, Prose & Anything Goes Reading Series
Curated & Pickled by Publisher/Editor Carol Novack
4th Reading
Friday, November 17th, 7 – 9 pm
KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, N.Y.C.

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

Features:
Wanda Phipps, a writer living in Brooklyn, NY, and the author of Wake-Up Calls: 66 Morning Poems (Soft Skull Press), Your Last Illusion or Break Up Sonnets (Situations), Lunch Poems (Boog Literature), the e-chapbook After the Mishap and the CD-Rom Zither Mood (Faux Press). Her poems have been published over 100 times in publications such as the anthologies Verses that Hurt: Pleasure and Pain From the Poemfone Poets (St. Martin's Press) and The Boog Reader (Boog LIt). She's also curated several reading and performance series at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church as well as other venues and written about the arts for Time Out New York, Paper Magazine, and About.com.

Frederic Tuten studied pre-Columbian art history at the University of Mexico and later traveled through South America, writing on Brazilian cinema. He received his Ph.D. from New York University, concentrating on the Melville, Whitman period; for some years he taught courses in literature and America films at the University of Paris 8. For more than fifteen years he directed and taught in the City College of New York's Graduate Program in Creative Writing. He is currently giving graduate fiction workshops at The City College and offers classes on experimental writing at The New School University. He is the author of five novels: The Adventures of Mao on the Long March; Tallien: A Brief Romance; Tintin in the New World; Van Gogh's Bad Café; and most recently, The Green Hour. His short fiction has appeared in Tri-Quarterly, Fiction, Fence, The New Review of Literature, Conjunctions, and Granta. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing and in 2001 was given the Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Diane Williams, the author of six books of fiction. It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature will be out from FC2 in Fall 2007. She is the founding editor of Noon.

A limited edition of signed “Homeland Security” posters (our cover artwork for Issue 5) created by contributing artist & writer Marty Duane Ison will be on sale, as will books by our featured authors.


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

Text on the installment plan

Dailylit.com, which I’ve just come across, offers mainly public domain novels serialized through daily e-mail installments.

Below are a few of the more interesting offerings—seems like a micro-sampling of the same material available through the 19,000 titles at Project Gutenberg, but the digest idea makes for a twist.

I’ve ordered Edwin Abbott, which I’m sure would please Steve Tomasula, and so can now spend even more time tethered to my computer. This is the idea, it seems.

I suspect I will scan when the first of 37 parts hits my email tomorrow morning. Got 332 days to do Ulysses?

Implications for literature? Sure. Would it work with the texts we often write about at NOW WHAT? Maybe.

If so, what novels should be made available by this method?

****
A SAMPLING:

Abbott, Edwin
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions [37 parts]

Du Bois, W.E.B.
Souls of Black Folk, The [78 parts]

Joyce, James
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A [103 parts]
Ulysses [332 parts]

Proust, Marcel
Swann's Way [206 parts]

Stein, Gertrude
Three Lives [96 parts]


*****

Davis

Some Fictions of Kent Johnson

Election Eve, 2006 --

Kent Johnson (on the left, pictured with BlazeVox editor Geoffrey Gatza) was in Buffalo recently. He gave a great reading at Medaille College (my employer, which earlier this semester hosted our own Lance Olsen as well) -- work political, lyric, alternating langauges and moods, beautiful and full of truth. Johnson denominates himself a poet, but only because in the current world of poets "fiction" seems to have become a fallen, dirty word. Somehow experiments involving prose and narrative investigations, if conducted by poets, are being called poems these days -- as if, to bend the old saw, the dancer were now more essential than the dance. (I even had a writer recently tell me that she had written a book of prose poems, though she supposed that if we were in France it would be called a novel.)

Living in Buffalo, a city of poets, I am used to such (mis)constructions of fiction. But whatever Kent Johnson calls himself, he is partaking in the strategies and tactics of fiction writing.

Let me talk about his recent book in the ongoing Araki Yasusada project, Also with My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords: Araki Yasusada's Letters in English (Combo Books, 2005).

This work is a sequel publication to the alternately lauded & decried collection, Doubled Flowering ("the most controversial poetry book since Allen Ginsberg's Howl" - Forrest Gander), on whose title page Johnson appeared as editor (alongside Javier Alvarez) when the book was first published in 1997. What happened subsequently is the stuff of literary provocateur legend: Johnson was ultimately accused and (perhaps) revealed to have been himself the author of the poems which had been claimed to be the work of Yasusada, a survivor of atomic-bombed Hiroshima; accounts of the hoax appeared in Lingua Franca, The Nation, and elsewhere. The "perhaps" above ensues because Johnson has never (to my knowledge) fessed up, and instead we read such labyrinthine narrative positionings as this, from the more recent (2005) letters volume's introduction:

"In the poetry world, it is by now generally known that Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada is a fiction created by its 'primary translator' Tosa Motokiyu, the pseudonym of a writer who requested, before his passing in 1966, that his legal identity never be revealed."

Any attempt to try to stabilize statements of the authorship of Yasusada eternally encounters new self-cancelling fronts and evasions. Yasusada's Letters are likewise a maze of metacritical delights on the order of Nabokov's Pale Fire, which, of course, Yasusada and Motokiyu both have occasions to reference. The letters date from a year in Yasusada's early student career in the US, 1926, almost two decades before he was to be present in Hiroshima, and are written to a never-further-identified "Pal-Pen" named Richard. They are annotated throughout by the at-best pseudonymous and more likely entirely invented Motokiyu, as well as the sur-editors Johnson and Alvarez, with commentaries that are notable for almost invariably and frequently comically missing the most obvious significations of the lines they meant to elucidate. And the letters themselves are written in a deliciously imagistic and variously attenuated pidgin language which begins as naively attempted English before morphing into a gorgeous, if sometimes precious, poetic prose, over a period of months. Despite all of the circuities of Johnson’s framing device, one has the uncanny experience, confronted by the core textual materials, of seeing a young artist blossom, an accelerated, fragmentary, international 20th century kunstlerroman:

January 5, 1926. "I am writing the letter from this class of American English. I hope you are feeling lovely. Do you have a wife? Inside your nation I know there is hotness in months of August and July. Particularly there is hotness in my nation when in August. Now there is coolness. And much snow. I enjoy to travel upwards in mountains (yet especially downward on long clauses!) [...]and also the study of your tongue, English."

July 24, 1926. "Boiled tortoises are made to cool. Giggling geishas left bones with tweezers. Red dace make eggs in mussel shells. Eels are sliding in baskets of bamboo. A carp goes eaten by the bride. Inside Fujiwara and Manabe there are bandits. This is one silly song sung while tops are spinning."

November 7, 1926. "Each time I read Dr. Anzai's poem, 'Spring,'
A herring is about to be brought to the table, coming through a subway tunnel
I feel renewed and excited, as if I had been slapped awake by an Imperial courtesan with the thighs of a wrestler! [sic] And your own 'Horse,'
There is a naval port inside its intestines
reveals, if there ever was any doubt, that within a single turnip pulled up by a squatting man there are mountains, rivers, and a whole formation of rubber-capped subjects swimming across the Hokaido Strait! My death is coming; I am patient."

Sweetly, Yasusada signs each letter "I am sincere." Of course, the liar always sez he's telling the truth.

The slim volume closes with an essay and a personal reflection by yet two more characters, critic Mikhail Epstein and Hosea Hirata, the latter of whom claims lineage to another survivor of the atomic blasts. These people may be real, as Javier Alvarez also might or might not be; yet Araki Yasusada has an entry on Wikipedia and Johnson was asked and answered a question about the attempt to secure a University home for Yasusada's papers when I saw him in Buffalo, engaging now in a fictive game of such momentum that it has acquired players in his audiences. Where Johnson has been criticized (and I avoid here investigating further the blog wars in which Johnson and detractors evidently both descended to nastiness), it has been for exploiting the victims of this historical crime by authoring poems which are said to have issued from that time, place, and subject-position. There are both hard and soft critiques to be made from this perspective: Is Johnson’s Yasusada a reactionary “reverse-discrimination” experiment suggesting the limitations of “witness” poetry, that writings that would not have received such an audience when seen as written by a white American more valued when they are seen as the products of a now-dead Japanese writer, who perished as an indirect result of historical violence? Or, crediting Johnson with his own version of “I am sincere,” to what extent is the Asian “other” subject position rightfully claimable by one who has not lived in the society or had the experiences, but mimics identity for the purposes of art.

Johnson full body of work turns these types of questions inside out and every which way. A notable text in this debate is his story/poem, "Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz (Or, Get the Hood Back On)," which first appeared in Gatza’s online magazine BlazeVox and has subsequently appeared both in Johnson's collection, Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz: Eleven Submissions to the War (Effing Press) and in the anthology, PP/FF, published by my own Starcherone Books. Of these, the essential experience remains the BlazeVox publication, where Johnson’s text is presented under a montage of Abu Ghraib photos, musically scored and designed by Gatza to reinforce the contrast of casual colonial brutality and naive gringo enthusiasm that is a hallmark of Johnson’s text:

"What’s up, Ramal, I’m an American boy, a father, two children, graduate of Whitman High, where I was a member of the Science Club and Student Council, then I got to be the youngest elected officer ever in the history of my town’s Rotary Chapter, I’m in charge of fund-raising, which hasn’t been easy the past few years, what with the economy and all, but we’re hanging in there. I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, because I don’t want to assault your sensibilities, or anything like that, but I want to be up front with you because I believe that honesty is the best policy: So, I’m going to put a pointed plastic hood on your black and blue head, and then I’m going to stand your caped body on a milk box, with live wires taped to your outstretched hands, and then I’m going to count to ten, you witch-like Arab freak, and maybe I’ll flip the switch and maybe not, it all kind of depends."

“I think Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz is by far the most relevant poem for/in/about this War,” poet Ethan Paquin has about this text (about 15% of which is excerpted above). Paquin’s statement is one with which I am in wholehearted agreement, except perhaps for the part about “poem.” But whatever kind of text one wants to call this, the sense in which Johnson has made himself an actor in the service of national conscience should be emphasized. Always in Kent Johnson's work is the linger of American war violence -- whether it is the haunting flash-backward and forward to Hiroshima in the Yasusada letters, our devastation of Baghdad or the incomprehensible (and radically uncomprehended by its perps) tortures of Abu Ghraib. Johnson loves the interplay between the devastations wrought by US superpower and the naifs (young soldiers, young Yasusada) entangled in any deciphering of their meaning. Gander makes much the same point, in talking about Doubled Flowering:

"Using Modernist strategies, the author(s) [Johnson and Alvarez], steeped in translations of Japanese literature and feeling uneasy, even -- if they are Americans -- complicit with the U.S. foreign policy that generated such mass destruction, invented an imaginative, political and poetical act of empathy. To write poems concerning Hiroshima, they felt it necessary to imagine themselves as the other, 'the enemy.' They relinquished their own identities as authors and became invisible, as the Hiroshima victims themselves disappeared. It is an impossible gesture of solidarity, since one cannot truly imagine one's way into an actual culture considerably different from one's own."

I am interested in and sensitive to questions concerning the ethics of representation as similar questions as pertain to the Yasusada project may well be raised about my own novel, Malcolm & Jack, particularly where I fashion artificial constructions of the subject positions of such figures as Malcolm X and Billie Holiday. In answering these concerns myself, I would underline the sense that narratives are always constructions, and any verisimilitude created by fiction is an effect of the art form, in no way a speaking for the absent subject: verisimilitude is not verity. At the same time, what fiction writers DO is represent. That is the essential form of the art: it is an art of lying, invention, artificial construction, mimicry, semblance. I think it is a limitation on the practice of the art to say that there is some aspect of discourse, experience, or history that one should refrain from representing, as a hard and fast rule. Of course, one should not go into the minefields of representation unadvised or without respect for the significances of histories of racism, oppression, violence and the like. We should also expect the representations of others from assumed and masqueraded subject positions will be problematic -- that is the nature of experimental art. Fiction, by its very nature, is a practice which self-consciously presents itself as lies, thus leads us to reflect upon lying, both within deliberately designed aesthetic creations and upon the at-large practices of fictionalization at work in all walks of our lives. Fiction is that discourse that calls into question the truth-telling strategies of language even as it employs them. Airtight, airbrushed, sanitized lies are the ones we really have to worry about. I am a fiction writer, and so I lie, but my lies haven't been killing people. This distinguishes Kent Johnson and I and y’all (who’s out there?) from Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney, who lie and kill people, or who lie and make people killers. Fiction is lies that do not lie about lying. That distinguishes the art of lies that is fiction from the lies of power we are so much in the grip of in our national discourse today. We are distrusted and feared by the world and we have alienated our own youth so much that a majority have opted out of democratic agency even as we claim to be bringing this great gift to the rest of the world.

To summarize, then: Kent Johnson is (and is not) Araki Yasusada. Geoffrey Gatza is Superman. I am Jack Chapeau. George Bush is Bozo the Clown with 100 million vials of poison. And I guess tomorrow we'll start to find out if we can trust our voting booths.

"There was never a mistake in addition," Gertrude Stein once wrote. Or was that Antonin Scalia?

the electronic book review & fictions present

ebr, edited by Joe Tabbi, has just gone live with a new thread that should be of real interest to the Now What tribe.

Entitled fictions present, it includes, among other things, a summary of and engagement with the last &NOW conference by Ted Pelton, a narrative disruption by Rob Swigart, and a collection of sharp essays by and about edge writers (including Raymond Federman, Michael Martone, R. M. Berry, Lucy Corin, Harry Mathews, Lidia Yuknavitch, and others) that I've been gathering over the last couple of years.

In his introductory statement to the thread, Tabbi writes:

Everything that happens, happens now. The essays, narratives, and essay-narratives gathered under the thread title, Fictions Present, reaffirm the "presentist" bias in electronic publishing and in ebr particularly: our non-periodical, continuous publication is designed to keep the archive current and to present critical writing not as an afterthought, but as an integral element in the creation of literary fictions.

ebr has been relatively quiet for a while as it's been reinventing itself. The outcome is well worth waiting for—a digital venue at once beautiful, theoretically and aesthetically and politically engaged, and yet more proof (should any of us need it) that there's been an exciting renaissance going on in American avant-garde fiction over the course of the last four or five years online and off.

To check it all out, click here.

Notes from an Eastern Front

It seems Elfriede Jelinek had some trouble publishing her latest novel, Greed (in English translation). Once she did publish it, well, it got savaged:

A story of some sort emerges, but the thrust of the novel is really the most vulgar and stupid commentary imaginable about the murderous misogyny of men, the environment, the appalling taste of the kleinburgerlicher and so on. It is a novel to warm the heart of Viz's Millie Tant. Densely unreadable as it is, there is something terribly banal about every one of its intellectual propositions; as hopelessly banal in its attempted chic as its predominant present tense (The Telegraph). Read the entire review here.

I would love a review like that. Still, I don't think she has an American publisher. Her books are only available from Serpent's Tail, and Greed hasn't yet been released in this country. Lance, Ted, Lidia: this is our chance. Give her people a call, maybe Chiasmus, FC2 or Starcherone can pick up a Nobel Prize winner. Actually, I just wrote this as an excuse to post that photo.

why it is hard to have the conversation we're having

Apropos—at least in an oblique, if dazzling way—of our ongoing conversations about which texts to read and which to teach and which to write, this statistic I stumbled across today in the latest issue of Poets & Writers:

Last year a total of 172,000 books were published in the United States, a number that represents a ten percent decrease from the year before.

cam tatham : from the trenches : teaching pomo fiction

Hi, all.

Lance here.

Cam Tatham was having some difficulties posting the following response to our discussion about teaching contemporary fiction, so I'm doing the honors.

And, given how much food for thought is housed here, I didn't want it to get lost in the tadpole's tail of comments to Matt's provocative post below.

And so, without further ado . . .

=========

1. Unlike most (all?) of you guys, I’m coming at the issue with the p.o.v. of a teacher, not a writer. Maybe more accurately: while I’ve written critifiction, I’m not a fictionist. And as Lance points out, I’m no longer even a ‘real’ teacher, being retired, only coming back for the occasional course. Context is all.

2. One of the first courses I ever taught (going back to 1969) I titled ‘Anti-Fiction.’ Ihab Hassan hadn’t yet joined our faculty and nor coined the term ‘postmodernism.’ As I recall, I was teaching writers like Barth, Cortázar, Borges, Nabokov et al; quite soon, I began to become obsessed with the Fiction Collective gang: Federman, Sukenick, Katz, Abish, etc. Since then, I’ve tried to ‘keep up,’ regularly teaching a course I simply called ‘Postmodern Fiction.’ And in one version or another, it’s included some of you bloggers here: Lance, Lidia, Matt, Steve, and Jeff.

3. What draws me to you guys was and remains the emphasis placed on the telling of the story – self-reflexive metafiction: looking in a mirror as you compose the story of yourself composing the story while watching yourself in a mirror. etcetera.

4. Another frame I’ve brought to pomo fiction: existential phenomenology (esp. Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and especially Deleuze/Guattari), which reminds us that reality is always, in part but only in part, a matter of point of view. How large that part is is precisely the issue.

5. Mainly: I’m fascinated by the knife-edge between innovation that is ‘authentically’ (hear Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty) imaginative, and something that’s ‘excessive’ (hear Morrison). Isn’t there a point at which we have to say, to Federman (or Ron or Lance or Steve or whomever): oh, come on, that’s going too far! Morrison again: the terribly difficult gray area between that which is “too thick” and that which is “too thin” (Beloved).

6. This is linked to the struggle you guys constantly enact between the shaping power of the imagination and the pressure of intrusive ‘reality.’ Federman perpetually wonders: can pomo fiction address the holocaust? Okay, but what about his beloved daughter’s life-threatening cancer? Or even his own bout with cancer? On one level, you celebrate the release brought about by ‘innovation’; on another, you dance faster and faster, more and more desperately, over what you fear may be an alltooreal abyss. (Wallace Stevens as early postmodernist.)

7. That said, for me, the issue is less which texts to insert into a grad, or even an undergrad, course in pomo fiction, but rather how to insert the issues of pomo into a more ‘expansive’ syllabus likely to infect larger numbers of students. Like Matt (and, I suspect, a lot of you guys), I’m at this moment tinkering with my syllabus for a course next semester titled ‘American Literature: 1965 – the Present.’ Unlike Matt’s, however, this is an undergrad survey course, one that’s required of our English-Ed majors (future high school teachers), and because anything connected with “the Present” interests young students looking for what they hope is an easy elective, it draws from a variety of disciplines, not just English majors. Which means, to be blunt: I couldn’t include Steve’s VAS (which ‘worked’ wonderfully in a pomo fiction course) but I could use Lance’s 10:01. The socalled real world intrudes once again. For a Business student, VAS is regrettably too thick. In the trenches, compromises are also real.

8. Also influencing the selection process: it’s a survey course, we all have them in our departments, and we’ve all probably taught them at some point or another. And ‘survey’ usually means something linear: you start at 1965 and come up to yesterday, if possible. But I’m using that other sense of ‘survey’: to look over a field to see what’s there (epistemological issue: making v. finding ‘what’s there’). So whether I include this decade or that becomes irrelevant; more important: am I raising the issues of this vague block of time in a way that has an ‘authentic’ impact on the students? As Pynchon said of Robbins: I want to change their brainscapes, but it has to be done with a scalpel, not a broadsword.

9. And of course, another real world intrusion is simply the number of texts you can assign: I find that Matt and I pretty much agree on nine. So someone is always being excluded – as Jeff says, you can’t teach ‘em all.

10. So I start with war stories and end with 9/11 and terrorism, because I think that’s maybe the most important issue of our moment. But throughout is a preoccupation with perspective, p.o.v., in terms of narrative devices as well as mixed media.

11. So here’s the current version of my version of Matt’s course, in the order I plan to teach them:

Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
George Clark, The Small Bees’ Honey
Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Carole Maso, The Art Lover
Art Spiegelman, Maus I
Toni Morrison, Jazz
Lance Olsen, 10:01
Jonathan Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

I mean, it’s all pomo fiction, right?

Seminar in Contemporary Fiction

I'm thinking through what I'll teach in my spring grad seminar in contemporary fiction. My department's felt--up til now--that the course should introduce students to a variety of texts from 1945 to present, and that this variety should let them taste some realism, some minimalism, some postmodernism, some feminist literature, etc. Pretty standard, from what I've seen.

Certainly I want my students (mostly our creative writing MAs) to sample a range of texts. I feel they need this.

On the other hand, as I wrote in a recent email to Cam Tatham, I also feel that contemporary literature can no longer, in any context, mean post-1945, and I'm leaning toward thinking it doesn't even have to involve the 60s-80s.

And I don't feel like it's terribly contemporary unless it's in some ways innovative.

But I worry that I'm narrowing my students' views too greatly if I have a syllabus made up of Carole Maso and Lance Olsen and Kass Fleisher and Steve Tomasula and Shelley Jackson and Lidia Yuknavitch (my list to this point).

L. Timmel Duchamp reads at UCSD

Celebrating ParaSpheres,
fabulist and new wave fabulist stories

Wednesday, November 1 (4:30 - 6 PM)

University of California at San Diego

UCSD Campus in the Visual Arts Facility Performance Space, "The VAF"
San Diego, California

Readings by these contributors:

L. Timmel Duchamp
William Luvaas
Carol Schwalberg
Noelle Sickels
Mark Wallace

MCs: Rusty Morrison & Ken Keegan

Free hors d'oeuvres and sparkling water

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

I'll be reading from "The Tears of Niobe."

the writer's edge : 2007

fiction collective 2, in partnership with portland state university, presents:

the writer's edge
Second Annual Innovative Writing Conference
All Day: July 27, 28, 29 2007
Portland State University

includes
–Workshops on Innovative Writing
–One-on-One Conferences
–Panels on Multimedia Experiments, the State of Contemporary Fiction & Publishing, & More
–Readings
–Books & DVDs

applications
http://fc2.org/edge/edge.htm

deadline for applications
1 March 2007

registration
$275

credit available

the workshops

CREATIVE NONFICTION AS HYBRID MONSTER
Karen Brennan

In the 18th century, Henry Fielding famously observed that "the novel is a baggy monster." This class will assert that creative nonfiction is the "baggy monster" of the 21st century. To that end, we will explore hybridity in creative nonfiction; that is to say, we will read nonfictions that intersect with other genres--poetry, criticism, fiction--and generally explore (by reading and writing) the capaciousness of the nongenre of creative nonfiction.

SMALL FICTIONS IN A ROW
Lucy Corin

Our interest will be in small numbers of exquisitely and surprisingly arranged words. By limiting the number of words we use and consciously treating passages of text as blocks of sculptural material we can begin to relinquish certain forms of authority that tend to strangle prose. We’ll ask questions like: How many different ways can a writer, who supposedly has one “voice,” distill narrative and language within limited space? How “big” can you make a small thing? How is and is not a small thing a microcosm of some bigger thing? Is it interesting or not to deviate from standard paragraph form? Do we care or not what is prose fiction and what is some other genre like poetry or diary? How does patterning a number of pieces in a sequence create or change meaning? Does such a form have anything to do with wholeness or completeness? If not, then what’s the point or the pleasure? We’ll look at very short stories by writers like Lydia Davis, Diane Williams, and Kafka, write and revise several of our own small pieces, and explore a variety of sequential arrangements of the pieces we compose.


COLLABORATING WITH THE PAST:
INNOVATION VERSUS TRADITION
Brian Evenson

This workshop explores the variety of ways in which contemporary writers can and do respond to writers who have come before them. We'll discuss the way writers appropriate earlier traditions--for instance, the way Angela Carter or Robert Coover or Rikki Ducornet respond to fairy tales or the way Kathy Acker responds to canonical books such as Don Quixote--and think about how they simultaneously preserve and subvert past literary ideas. How can we both learn from the writers who precede us and still be working in an original space? Is Harold Bloom's notion of Anxiety of Influence something that still holds in today's postmodern literary field? We'll also do some exercises of our own, thinking about how retelling and reinscribing earlier ideas and tales can transform them and make them our own.


FICTION AS ARCHITECTURE
Lance Olsen

Usually the metaphor of architecture is applied to writing, if it is applied to it at all, in order to italicize the "craft" employed in its creation. Occasionally one might find mention of the use of architecture in fiction—the metalogical libraries, for instance, described in Jorge Luis Borges's stories. But what I'm interested in exploring in this workshop is the following 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? We shall look at how author William Gass and his architect-spouse Mary collaborate to find harmonies between sentences by Hemingway and houses by Frank Lloyd Wright, on the one hand, and those by Henry James and baroque palaces, on the other. We shall think about Milorad Pavic's distinction between nonreversible art (like music and conventional narrative, which can and must only fall forward) and reversible art (like architecture, some innovative prose, and hypertext, which can and must be entered through various portals at various times to various effects). We shall ponder what new-media author and theorist Michael Joyce means by saying that every innovative text is a liquid city. And then we shall try to imagine, via several writing exercises, new architectures for our own fiction.


CORPOREAL TEXT:
THE BODY & WRITING
Lidia Yuknavitch

There is an interstice between the body and writing where meaning is always in flux. When writers and artists attempt to render that space, their work slips quickly from the mainstream into its more dangerous, sensuous and hidden tributaries. But that kind of writing and art articulates perhaps the most exciting new forms available for writers hoping to liberate narrative from market and genre-bound static products. In this workshop we will explore the territory between writing and the body through mixed genre work by others, through now-time writing exercises, and through a bit of multimedia experimentation. participants will leave with new ideas and texts to inhabit and grow.

interview : l. timmel duchamp : part two

Lance: In nearly every story in your collection, Love's Body, a kind of gendered political possibility space opens up that reminds me, sometimes to a greater extent, sometimes to a lesser, of the one called the city of Bellona in Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren—a place, in other words, where anything can and should be tried and thought. In my favorite fiction of yours, "The Heloise Archive," an alternate-history novella in which Heloise (1101-1162) leaves her lover-teacher Abelard and eventually gives birth to the second Christ, a female one, you critique doctrinal religion's hypocrisy, dangers, and biases ("If the mass madness of the Church is not prevented from developing, not only women, but diverse peoples throughout the world will perish from its excesses."). How did that story come into being?

Timmi: Bellona is a splendid fictional example of how moments of possibility open up in the very situations most people would prefer never to find themselves caught up in. I noticed, when I was studying history, the way such spaces do open up, without notice, creating a momentary possibility for truly radical change. Sometimes radical change would occur, but most often it did not. In any case, all of the internalized social and social-psychological baggage we all carry around with us would be important factors determining the outcome of such situations, even when a massive ideological, intellectual, or spiritual shift was sweeping over just about everyone. Usually, of course, that baggage would win out, since post-adolescent humans tend resist change fiercely. The historical Abelard and Heloise did not, to my knowledge, occupy such a space, though each of them was unquestionably endowed with the Right Stuff to have made much of one, had the potential existed. But I had been long aware that Western values and attitudes shifted regrettably in the late twelfth century, with especially deleterious effects for women and Jews in particular, and for tolerance and more egalitarian values generally. The early thirteenth-century Pope Innocent III, whose mastery of centralized bureaucratic imperialism made the papacy rich, did not invent anti-Semitism or misogyny, but the virulence of his intolerance stamped itself indelibly on the Church for centuries to come and made itself official policy with the infamous Fourth Lateran Council. And yet just a century before, Abelard and other philosophers and theologians—like the great Abbess Hildegard of Bingen—developed new, critical ways of thinking. And women like Heloise and Hildegard held positions of authority. And so, although the first half of the twelfth century was in no way a utopia, it always struck as a temporal space pregnant with possibility.

I became interested in the story of Abelard and Heloise back in the 1970s, when I was in graduate school. First, both Abelard’s “History of my Calamity” (as he titled his open letter/memoir) and Heloise’s letters struck me as remarkable for the degree of psychological insight and analysis they offered: and of course they are amazingly vivid. Second, by all accounts, Heloise was an exceptionally talented scholar and very, very smart. For the kind of graduate student I was, she was irresistible. Third, Heloise has long figured as an emblem of what women philosophers in particular and intellectuals in general are up against, particularly since their mentors and closest colleagues have usually been men with whom they have close (even if not necessarily erotic) ties. (For those interested, check out Michèle Le Dœuff’s Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, Etc.) It was in the summer of 1992, though, that I began to think about writing about Abelard and Heloise; I actually came very close to writing a history-based novel. After all, they were the most glamorous celebrities of their day—the most popular teacher in France and the writer of love songs sung all over Europe, Abelard was mobbed by fans wherever he went, and his love affair with Heloise was famous all over Europe. Let’s face it, their story is gold-plated Big Screen material; just to mention a few of the high points: it’s the story of hot, passionate, star-crossed lovers secretly marrying and having a child while openly refusing to sanctify their union; of Heloise’s enraged uncle having Abelard castrated because of their refusal to marry & Abelard then ordering Heloise to a nunnery; of Heloise becoming the leader of a group of nuns kicked out of their nunnery and made homeless when a powerful ecclesiastic decided he had a use for their nunnery; of Abelard being tried for heresy; of Abelard being assigned the position of abbot to a house of “barbaric” rebellious monks in Brittany who actively attempt to kill him when he asserts his authority… But really, I could just go on and on and on!

The documents are rich and suggestive, and yet they leave a lot of room for one’s imagination to have a field day. But by August, 1992, my immersion in the documents—in their style and language, in the suggestive intricacies of the story they tell—drove me to rewrite the story of their relationship in a science-fictional way. I imagine that most writers choosing to imagine an alternate version of their story would prefer to intervene before Abelard’s castration since that event was, after all, what killed his love (if that’s the correct word) for Heloise. Maybe, if I had been younger, undoing the castration would have appealed to me. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more and more interested in working with rather than imagining freedom from the parts of history (personal as well as collective) that are painful and intractable aspects of who one is (individually or collectively). As a result, I decided to place the story’s sf conceit, an intervention from the future, post-castration. And of course what could be more perfect for open-minded scholars like Abelard and Heloise than to be confronted with the texts of Gnostic gospels? And since I’ve always loved playing with footnotes in my fiction, I especially enjoyed alluding to the resulting alternate history through the explanatory notes of a graduate student in that world’s future, rather than offering a fuller frame-narrative, as I had originally intended to do.

Lance: Does science or speculative fiction allow you a set of tools others genres don't to explore what you want to? What in your mind is the relationship between SF, oppositional fiction, and innovative fiction?

Timmi: To answer the first question, yes, I think that it does. Delany explains this probably better than I could: “Science fictional discourse,” he wrote back in 1975, vis-à-vis the sf novel’s important differences from the modern and postmodern literary novel, “redistributes the fictive attention between character and landscape (i.e., between subject and object) in a manner different from mundane fiction… To work within this reorganized fictive frame gives us, first of all, a basically better matrix in which to deal with the recomplications of modern ‘sign’ language. And I can think of no better place than science fiction in which to avoid ‘certain conventions of fiction’ that make so much fiction such a political disaster.”

Let me expand on this a bit by citing a clear example of this “redistribution of fiction attention”, viz., a story by Alan de Niro titled “Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead” (which appears in de Niro’s short fiction collection of the same name, published a few months ago by Small Beer Press). I remember that as I was reading the opening pages of the story, I became conscious that my keen interest in the story’s world, which the narrative reveals one tantalizing detail at a time, was driving me forward, rather than engagement with the ordinary geeky adolescent who’s the viewpoint character or interest in the plot. That is to say, my curiosity and pleasure in discovering the logic and parameters of the story’s world and mentally constructing it one image at a time was far keener than my interest in the more ordinary aspects of the character’s thoughts and feelings. This is not a complaint about characterization, but a recognition that first, as with many good sf stories, the characters of this story, being of a piece with their world, cannot be fully appreciated outside the context of the landscape of that world—outside its matrix of “signs,” as Delany calls them, meaning its social relations and politics and technology and economics and so on; and that second, the construction of an unfamiliar landscape or “matrix” is a deeply pleasurable aspect of reading good sf. Which is to say, science fiction stories place the objective register of the text on a par with its subjective register (i.e., the interiorized individuality of its characters).

Thus, writing science fiction, I can refuse the distorted image of the human as an almost entirely self-determined, self-sufficient individual for whom the world is a mere backdrop, an image that has resulted from the pernicious myth of individualism pervading US culture and is nearly de rigueur for Realist fiction, and I can insist, through my own fiction, that human beings can’t be meaningfully extracted from the complicated matrix that constitutes the reality in which they live. I do this by creating new matrices, or depicting changes in the matrix (which is always shifting and changing, regardless of whether anyone notices that it is). My matrices typically include economic conditions, ethical and moral values, social relations and mores, as well as concepts, patterns of language, aesthetic principles, and indeed, anything at all that occurs to me to take into account. Science fiction not only allows but even demands it! And that’s something that’s almost impossible to do when writing “Realist” fiction. Science fiction is not only open to any question, issue, or idea that one can think of, but also gives one permission to carry one’s speculations beyond the limits of what is likely or even possible. Plausibility means something entirely different for realist fiction than it does for science fiction.

Your second question is a tough one. I think the relationship between oppositional fiction, SF, and innovative fiction is fluid. A lot of SF is neither oppositional nor innovative; and obviously a work does not need to be SF to be oppositional and innovative. Nor is innovative work necessarily oppositional, or oppositional work necessarily innovative. In producing innovative work, the writer is forced to balance between the Scylla of unintelligibility that results when the reader is unable to make meaning out of unfamiliar concepts or points of reference and the Charybdis of triteness that characterizes utter transparency of meaning. (For an interesting discussion of this, see Rob Halpern’s “Committing the Fault (Notes Towards a Faulty Narrative Practice),” which can be found in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, ed Burger, Glück, Roy, and Scott, Coach House Books, 2004.) In producing oppositional work, the writer is forced to balance between the Scylla of a clarity that will strike ideological opponents as irksomely didactic and the Charybdis of being subtle to the point of obscurity—while also having to negotiate the difficulties of necessarily speaking one’s opposition in the language and terms of the very things one is opposing. Innovative or oppositional science fiction shares these same problems, but in my view generously provide opportunities for circumventing them. Because science fictional discourse values the objective register as much as it does the subjective, readers are primed from the first sentence to try to figure out what’s going on in the text. That is to say, the lack of determined (dare I say dogmatic?) naiveté of the devotee of Realist fiction. And I suppose that is why, when a work of SF is either innovative, oppositional, or both, it feels right to me that it is, precisely because the emphasis on the objective register invites innovation and provides marvelous opportunities for instigating critical thinking. Since I distrust attempts to make hard and fast definitions of SF (which are usually used to exclude work that one contingent or another finds an affront to own identifications), I would say simply that SF is fiction that places a high value on the objective register and is in conversation with other texts of fiction called SF.

Petition on behalf of Turkish Writers

Dear Friends,

We received the message and petition below from Seven Stories Press regarding free expression in Turkey. Please let me know as soon as possible if you would like to add your name to this effort. Thank you.

Best,

Anna Kushner, Freedom to Write Program Coordinator, Pen International (anna@pen.org)

***

Dear friend,

The recent government threats to a publisher, editors and a translator in Turkey have prompted the following statement to be circulated in these individuals' defense. It is being circulated widely in Turkey and internationally to concerned publishers and some writers. Please indicate via reply whether you would like your name and affiliation added to this list, which will then be released in the coming weeks.

Best regards,
Dan Simon, Publisher
Seven Stories Press

Publishers have a responsibility to defend the free flow of information, opinion as well as works of the imagination. And while standards for free speech in general and for books in particular may differ from country to country around the world, there are certain standards which must be held above those of any particular nation, including that no individual may be criminally prosecuted for the performance of his or her duties as a publisher.

As reported on Tuesday, July 4, 2006, Turkey's Chief Public Prosecution Office has decided to indict the Turkish publisher of "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. Named in the indictment are the owner of the Aram Publishing House, Fatih Tas, together with the editors Omer Faruk Kurhan and Lutfi Taylan Tosun, and the book's translator , Ender Badoglio. The indictment claims that certain extracts from the book fuel hatred and discrimination. Those charged could face up to 6 years in prison if found guilty. Tas was acquitted on similar charges related to a prior Chomsky text in 2002. The new Turkish Criminal Law (TCL) has become the sword of Democles over many authors and publishers since June 2005, and is the same law by which a journalist from Agos gazette, Hrant Dink, and the writer Orhan Pamuk were recently prosecuted. Charges against Pamuk were dropped in the light of international protest.

We the following publishers and concerned citizens wish to stand on record in solidarity with our colleagues in Turkey. We wish to remind the Turkish government that by criminalizing individuals at a Turkish publisher they are hurting the dignity and reputation of Turkish citizens everywhere. And we wish to demand that the criminal complaint against Fatih Tas, Omer Faruk Kurhan, Lutfi Taylan Tosun and Ender Badoglio be withdrawn.

Respectfullly,



Names and affiliations