In the Shape of a Disappointed Publishing House

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a conversation with jeffrey deshell : part two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

part three of this conversation
coming soon . . .

rain taxi fundraising auction

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

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

For a full listing, please click here.

a conversation with jeffrey deshell : part one

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

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

On the one hand (and I haven’t yet listened to the podcast, as the word “podcast” frightens me), this seems like an adequate, working definition. There are a couple of words here that seem key: the word “knowingly” and the word “fiction.” In order to fit this definition, one must be (self-)conscious about the questioning, one must set out to question, as it were—the questioning is the project, the questioning is the problem. This questioning quality, I think, indicates the open(ing) and process(ing) of the fiction we’re talking about, its movement and restlessness. And it’s not just a questioning of its own status, it’s the questioning of fiction (and by extension language, reality and the self) itself (themselves). The question of What am I as writing? becomes the question of What is writing? becomes the question of What am I?

I’m curious, however, if we’re saying enough. Doesn’t all fiction, all literature, question itself on some very basic level? Isn’t even the most genre specific formulaic and trite mass-marketed trash, self-conscious? Doesn’t it demand (self)conscious (at least on some level) choice and effort to make a piece of writing fit the genre? Isn’t all writing, on some very basic level, an experiment? In the very act of writing, does anyone know, when they write the first word, what the last word’s going to be? When I wrote the word “When,” six words ago, did I know that the final word of the sentence would be “be”? No. And that’s just with a single sentence. Every word, every sentence, every page, every chapter etc.: all experiments.

Barthes wrote somewhere that writers are those for whom language is a problem. If you already have the solution before you start, it’s not a problem. This is something I’d like to ask a more traditional writer someday: do you really know how your sentence, paragraph, novel or chapter is going to end when you write the first word? One might have a general idea, a bright and shiny figure idea in one’s head, but in the translation to imperfect, dirty and stubborn language, doesn’t something get lost (gained)? Not to mention life getting in the way. The vicissitudes of writing something long, like a novel, when you have to live with the thing for years, and the kids are making noise, and you get sick, divorced, remarried, and it’s a nice day to go for a walk, and you want to watch all of Robert Mitchum’s movies, and you have to grade papers etc. etc. etc.: how can you say that you know what you are doing and what you will be doing? How can you say that you’ll know how your sentence will end? How can you say that’s not an experiment? So is it a question of degree or intensity?

On another hand, the word I’m most concerned with in the R.M.’s definition, and the one that causes the most trouble for me, is the word “is.” By saying experimental fiction is, aren’t we arresting its experimentalness, its contingency, openness and restlessness? Doesn’t the is stabilize the fiction, make it into a thing, into an object like other things? An object with use-value, with existence, with presence, with a status that is predetermined and fixed? This is why I objected so strenuously to the metaphor of fiction as architecture in a discussion a couple of months ago: can built (realized) architecture question its own existence in the world? I don’t see how (this could be my own blindness). To my mind, music, with its ephemerality, with its existence and yet non-existence, seems closer to literature. If we takes Berry’s definition seriously, the is is the first place we have to question. Does experimental fiction exist? Yes and no.

Still, on another hand, the western tradition often defines (advanced) human life as requiring self-consciousness, the ability to question one’s existence. I like that Berry’s definition connects experimental fiction with this human life, making it lively, open, animated, uncertain, indeterminate, indefinite. Experimental. Experimental fiction puts itself in play, as well as the self in play. And if we say that all literature is experimental, then let’s take that label off, and say that all Literature, indeed all Art (and I’m very invested in these terms), rigorously asks these questions: What is a text? What is a reader? What is a writer? Literature asks these questions (serves as the ax for the frozen sea within us etc.) while other, more “popular” forms of writing, do not.

Your turn. I know, from your posts and other writings, that you consider self-consciousness a key component to experimental fiction. How does your thinking differ from mine?

Lance: I very much like your troubling questions and caveats, think they’re right on the mark, believe in many ways we’re thinking along much the same lines about experimentalism—or, better, as I've mentioned here before, experimentalisms. Let me respond quickly to a few points you make, however, that may help delineate a few difference in our approaches. I don’t seem to be as convinced as you that all literature questions itself on some basic level. Or, perhaps, I want to assert that different sorts of writing ask different sorts of questions of writing. Authors of Harlequin romances, for instance, surely pose questions about genre to themselves, as you suggest, maybe questions about market forces, but for me the questions their texts pose are neither interesting nor enlightening about the nature of fiction and the culture/languages that speak through it. On the other hand, I don’t see a clear binary between experimental writing and whatever we might conceive of as the other thing. Would it be helpful, therefore, to think of experimentalisms as existing along a continuum? At one end, we would posit cookie-cutter texts like those romances; at the other, we would posit something called, say, Finnegans Wake. Other texts would then situate themselves somewhere in between.

Texts begin to become engaging for me at that point where they become much more than predictable, much more than texts I’ve seen before, where they begin to impede my easy understanding of them, where they begin to challenge me to invent a modified and fairly complex way of speaking in order to converse with them. So, yes, self-consciousness is a key component of experimental fiction, as far as I’m concerned, but, equally if not more important is a certain textual density and difficulty of imagination at the strata of language, structure, character, voice, vision, and so forth. Of course, my threshold for difficulty will be different from other readers’, and perhaps that’s enlightening as well: that is, not only are there different experimentalisms (Burroughs’ project isn’t Coover’s isn’t Diane Williams’s isn’t Shelley Jackson’s isn’t Jeffrey Deshell’s), but it is also the case, I think that I think, that different texts will strike different readers as more or less experimental at different times in their lives. One’s first engagement with Ulysses will not be one’s third or thirtieth. Moreover, different texts will strike different readers as more or less experimental at different times in the conversation across time and space called literary history.

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

part two of this conversation
coming soon . . .

The Shifting Literary Landscape

In reference to Lance and Davis's posts, Yeah, the nature of lit has changed a lot. Just look at what gets written about as if it were literary: the museum without walls as it used to be called in the visual arts where, after Duchamp’s urinal, anything could be an art object. Seems like the same thing has been going on in literature, though not necessarily in a liberating, or genre-expanding way as was the case with Duchamp’s FOUNTAIN, given that one is as likely to see critics expend their energy in analysis of Survivor, The Sopranos or Grand Theft Auto as contemporary lit (which raises a point Joe Amato makes elsewhere: when are critics going to start considering the ramifications of the choices they make in selecting the objects they do for analysis?). That Steven Johnson book Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter seems to be a popularization of an idea that has dominated literary studies/American culture for some time now.

But I digress. More specifically, when I think of the number of things all of us do now in comparison to say 20 years ago, I think it’s not hard to conclude that there’s been a seismic shift in what literature is, what is considered literary. It wasn’t that long ago that a monthly calendar of readings was alien. Readings were a thing that poets did in a bar. The reading fee was a free beer. Now in Chicago, to use a typical city, any month’s calendar is made up of authors of financial-advice books, cookbooks, history, etc. etc. That is, there seems to have been a real rise in the author as celebrity, or at least a rise in the importance of face time in literature. (It’s also odd how readings have come to dominate the hiring of faculty authors: as part of the hiring process, a visiting candidate’s reading is the one thing everyone in the dept. attends, and they vote on the basis of the reading, not the written work.) As someone who writes for the page, i.e, uses the page as a visual element that is part of the story, this emphasis on performance has caused me to make pieces that can be used in these performance venues—it’s shifted what I do as an author, and I only mention my own case as an example of how widespread this phenomena is, slam poetry aside. Then there are all the other things all of us do—creating pieces for the web, contributing to blogs, etc. and all the other kinds of creation that aren’t necessary writing or reading in the traditional sense.

Hand in glove with all of this is the market as coauthor. It’s been true for some time now that the movie that doesn’t play at the mall doesn’t play, the same is true in lit. As Trevor and Ted note elsewhere, poetry, experimental writing and other kinds of writing that don’t have mass market demographics are invisible to the commercial newspapers of record, and all of this has helped to redefine what counts as literature (or a movie, or anything ‘mass’ for that matter). This too has had a trickle down effect in terms of determining what is and isn’t part of the literary conversation: you can’t buy, teach, read a book you don’t know exists, and the narrow-view of lit taken by the mainstream reviewers/papers has certainly shaped what is read, or taught in schools, written about by critics (see above). (Not coincidentally this dynamic makes the few publications that have a broader view of what lit is and can be all that much more important, e.g. RCF, ABR, Rain Taxi).

But finally, and I guess this is what Davis is actually talking about, the word-image hybrids that dominate e-writing are certainly a different animal in every way from traditional print: the assumptions behind what is considered "literature," what is considered “writing” and what goes on during “reading” are certainly different. All writing is writing under constraint, be it the constraints of realism or OuLiPo, and electronic writing certainly has its own particular constraints: the reluctance of readers to go through dense prose on-line, for example; pressure there is for e-writers to basically think in terms of screens, chunks, or blocks of text that would fit on a notecard. The genre expectations that we bring to e-lit demand that it do something other than print-lit, have a sound track, move around. If nothing is happening, don’t we start clicking the mouse? These differing constraints and assumptions, not to mention the marketplace as co-author, allow a different kind of literature to emerge, one that is stunning for its ability to be multimodal, as the English call it. Check out Heavy Industries’s DAKOTA [http://www.yhchang.com/DAKOTA.html]. Check out the great anthology of e-lit just put out by ELO (Hayles, Montfort, Rettberg, Stickland eds.), Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. One [ http://collection.eliterature.org/1/]

(Anyone who still doubts how clueless/apathetic commercial newspapers are about the wider world of aesthetically-driven literature need only note how invisible e-lit is to their reviewers. Speaking of which, does anyone know where e-lit is reviewed in a meaningful way? Seems like I only hear about works I should read/look at by word of mouth or by stumbling across them, and there’s so much junk online I never want to spend the effort wading through it find the pearl. The great thing about the web is that it has no editor/the bad thing is that it has no editor.)

I don’t know if any of this is good, bad or neutral. There seems to be a diminishment in the appreciation of poetics. There certainly seems to a bleed over from one sphere to the other; as someone who also teaches lit, for example, I’ve noticed that students no longer come into a classroom understanding that poem or novel might have to be read more than once to be understood. Or as Silverblatt once said on Bookworm (to Gilbert Sorrentino, I think), not as many people can APPRECIATE ‘difficult’ books today (think Faulkner) because not as many people can READ ‘difficult’ books (think of NY Times ‘critic’ James Atlas who once wrote that Proust, along with Joyce, etc. bore him--this from someone who writes for the paper of record, not someone who lives under a rock). That seems to be the downside. The upside is that no one know what literature is anymore, and that seems exciting. This shifting literary landscape reminds me of an essay by Morton Feldman on the art scene at the dawn of abstract expressionism: “What was great about the fifties is that for one brief moment—maybe, say, six weeks—nobody understood art. That’s why it all happened. Because for a short while, these people [the artists] were left alone. Six weeks is all it takes to get started. But there’s no place now where you can hide out for six weeks….” Or as Dylan Thomas might have put it, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”?

happy new year

A very warm happy new year to all readers of and contributors to Now What, and many, many thanks for making this experimental conversation about experimental fiction the success it's been so far.

Back on 3 June 2006, one month after our launch, we had had 2,672 visitors. As of this morning, we've had 18, 804. We continue to see readers drop in regularly from around the country and from as far away as Norway, Turkey, and Australia.

Originally Ted Pelton and I conceived of Now What as a fairly stable entity. The plan was for us to invite a dozen or so innovative authors and publishers to be full-time contributors—and that, we figured, would be that. But this blog has proved to be deeply Heraclitean in nature. Because of time constraints, some of our initial contributors have had to bow out. Because of interest in our project, others have come aboard. Still others have remained more or less constant from Now What's inauguration. I suspect that this will remain the case, that Now What will remain a polyphony in process. I can't imagine a more perfect manifestation of its goals.

The same has seemed to prove true for Now What as for alternative prose and publishing in general—i.e., that there's a real and substantial audience out there for this sort of engagement, despite the fact that, as David Fenza, executive director of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, points out in the latest issue of Poets & Writers, our culture has

entered an era of trickle-down belligerence to artists and the arts. Congress cut the budget of the NEA by 40 percent in 1996. The NEA lost resources with which it could support small presses and literary service organizations. Many states cut funding for their state and local art agencies. This also limited support for nonprofit presses and literary programming. Private philanthropic support for the arts, including literature, declined. In 1991, the arts received 8.4 percent of all private charitable giving; that giving fell to 5.2 percent in 2005. The advocacy group Americans for the Arts estimates this decline to be a loss of $8.4 billion in support.

Despite, in other words, that even relatively mainstream art has found itself under attack over the last decade and more, there remains a real and substantial audience for what we at Now What do, what we care about, what we stand for. The only problem, from what I can see, is finding increasingly effective ways to reach that audience. To that end, let me start the new year by making a request of you: please continue passing the words.

And here's to a 2007 that makes 2006—one of the most dynamic and diverse years I can remember in the field of innovative writing, apparent proof, in light and in spite of Fenza's sobering statistics, that this enterprise is never ultimately about money, but rather in many respects about the very opposite of money—look downright flat and faded.

Sometimes this feels like a beginning.

Sometimes this feels like a first sentence.

the death of metafiction & other malicious rumors

I received an email from Marc Lowe this morning pointing me to a strong essay by Michael Boyden in ebr about American Oulipo writer Harry Mathews. Marc directed me particularly to the following provocative paragraph, which he asked me to post here so that those interested might engage with it:

In the conclusion to her chapter on postmodern fictions for the seventh volume of The Cambridge History of American Literature [1999], Wendy Steiner argues that the 1990s have signalled the end of the experimentalist period of esoteric metafiction in American prose writing. Whereas outside the U.S. such writings continue not only to be produced but also to be appreciated, Steiner claims that in America critical taste "has moved on" (Steiner 529). As a possible reason for this turn away from self-reflexive fiction, she notes the fact that several of the most renowned American experimenters, notably Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Robert Coover, John Hawkes, and William Gass, have passed their creative peak. A more compelling factor, however, would have been the so-called "culture wars" in the American academy which seem to have undermined the cultural validity and vitality of postmodern "high" fiction. According to Steiner, the controversies in the universities have resulted in the gradual erosion of the boundaries between "art" and "reality" (530). Further, the development of new media as well as dramatic changes in the marketing of books have made such distinctions between "high" and "low," or "popular" and "serious," even more precarious. More and more, apparently, novelists are moving away from elitist game playing and instead are drawing inspiration from mass culture and the lives of "ordinary people" (brackets in Steiner's text, 535).

Marc responds elsewhere in part:

Note that, as it says here, metafictional, or "self-reflexive fiction," is still popular in other countries, primarily Europe (and also Japan to some extent, particularly in the form of autobiographical fiction -- i.e. shishosetsu, or "I-novel"-inspired work). . . . To say that American "critical taste" has "moved on" to stories about the lives of Joe the mechanic and Jane the doctor says nothing so much as that American readers have gone from lazy to lazier.

While Steiner's comments were composed more than eight years ago, and may therefore be granted a certain by-default out-of-dateness, they nonetheless strike me, even for 1999, in equal parts preposterous and as strong evidence for her apparently parochial reading habits. (Much the same, by the way, could be said for Fredric Jameson's pronouncements about postmodern fiction, which are based exclusively—and, for an unflagging Marxist, ironically—on a small sample of texts produced by mainstream corporate presses.) I want to say, rather, that all experimental fiction—from Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy to this past year's The Open Curtain (Brian Evenson) and The Exquisite (Laird Hunt) and on to next year's Parabola: A Novel in 21 Inersections (Chiasmus) by new-comer Lily Hoang—is to some extent metafictional: to some extent, that is, self-consciously about its own processes, about the nature of language, about the structuality of structure, about its own (and hence the world's) uses of narrativity, and hardly "esoteric" or "elitist," hardly cut off from "reality," but rather deliberately challenging, difficult, against the narratological grain, profoundly political, oppositional to the status quo on the page or off by its very being .

Still, I'd very much like to hear from others on this, especially with regard to Steiner's comments about those so-called "culture wars" ongoing in the American academy.

back to the future : fc2 podcasts

Speaking—apropos of the link to the wonderful Bernhard interview Jeffrey Deshell provides below—of interviews, FC2 has inaugurated a series of monthly podcasts that will contain interviews with and readings by its authors.

The first takes the form of an extended conversation (55 minutes) with R. M. Berry, who will be stepping down as publisher of FC2 this spring after nearly eight years at the helm. Among other topics, he touches on the founding days of the Fiction Collective in the seventies, its present, its possible futures, the state of alternative publishing in the U.S., and how one way of defining experimental fiction is to say it is the sort that has always seriously asked the question: What is fiction?

You can download that podcast and forthcoming ones at the FC2 website here, or you can subscribe via iTunes by doing a search there for FC2.

Mad Hatters' Review Reading, 1/27, NYC

Madhatters' Review
Edgy & Enlightened Literature, Art & Music in the Age of Dementia

Poetry, Prose & Anything Goes Reading Series

Curated & Pickled by Publisher/Editor Carol Novack
5th Reading Friday, January 27th, 2007, 7 – 9 pm

KGB Bar85 East 4th St. 2nd Floor (between 2nd Ave and Bowery)
212-505-3360
http://www.kgbbar.com

Features

Norman Lock

Norman Lock is the author of The Long Rowing Unto Morning (Ravenna Press), A History of the Imagination (Fiction Collective Two), Land of the Snow Men (Calamari Press), ‘Notes to the Book of Supplemental Diagrams’ for Marco Knauff’s Universe (Ravenna Press), Trio (Triple Press), Emigres & Joseph Cornell’s Operas (elimae books and YKP, Istanbul), Cirque du Calder (Rogue Literary Society), and The House of Correction (Broadway Play Publishing). Two Plays for Radio is due fall '06 from Ravenna Press. His stage plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, in Germany, and at the 1996 Edinburgh Theatre Festival. Women in Hiding, The Shining Man, The Primate House, and Money, Power & Greed were broadcast by WDR, Germany. He wrote the film The Body Shop, produced by The American Film Institute. He is the recipient of the Aga Kahn Prize for fiction, given by The Paris Review. He lives in Philadelphia. Two of his book reviews and a short fiction can be found in MHR.

Terese Svoboda
Terese Svoboda has been described as “A fabulous fabulist,” in Publisher’s Weekly review of her fourth novel and ninth book, Tin God. Her writings have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, Atlantic, Slate, Bomb, Lit, Columbia, Yale Review and Paris Review, and her honors include an O. Henry for the short story, a nonfiction Pushcart Prize, a translation National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, a PEN/Columbia Fellowship, two NYFA Fellowships in poetry and fiction, an NYSCA grant, a Jerome Foundation grant in video, the John Golden Award in playwriting, and the Bobst Prize in fiction and the Iowa Prize in poetry. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence, Williams, the College of William and Mary, the University of Hawaii, the University of Miami, the New School, St. Petersburg, Russia and is currently Writer-in-Residence at Fordham. She lives in New York City and will be teaching in Kenya Christmas '06 and Bennington next spring. Her opera WET premiered at L.A. Disney Hall in December '05.

Deb Olin Unferth
Deb Olin Unferth's fiction has appeared in Harper's, Conjunctions, Fence, NOON, the Pushcart Prize anthologies, and elsewhere. Her first book is forthcoming from McSweeney's.

For info, email madhattersreview@gmail.com

Bernhard Interview

Here's a link to a great Thomas Bernhard interview, courtesy of my friend Patrick:

http://www.signandsight.com/features/1090.html

Happy holidays.
J

the best of 2006

I'd like to pick up on Trevor's post below and extend it by asking:

Which one or three works of alternative prose you encountered this past year most startled and/or delighted and/or influenced and/or infected you, and, in a sentence or three, why?

Note the works in question don't necessarily have to have been published in 2006. You just have to have engaged with them then—and not necessarily for the first time.

I'm naturally as leery as the rest of you when it comes to the simplicity and sucker's game of lists, yet think this one might serve us all well, both by bringing to our attention works that might otherwise be overlooked, and by generating a resource for readers and writers searching for texts The New York Times Book Review would like to pretend don't exist.

virtue, virtuosity, virtuality,

I recently had the pleasure of visiting Joe Tabbi’s graduate seminar on “World Fictions” at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Tabbi asked me to discuss my response to Ben Marcus’s scouring of Jonathan Franzen in Harper’s last fall.

My essay, “Notes from the Middleground: On Ben Marcus, Jonathan Franzen, and the Contemporary Fiction Combine” (Electronic Book Review) proffers that Franzen’s position—non-mainstream fiction (read: the stuff we talk about on this blog) is destroying American literature—and Marcus’s well-meaning response, to some extent, makes an aesthetic argument out of an economic problem. I ultimately suggest that the most interesting works express the tension between art and the market in their material substance, and cite Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland and good ol’ Tristram Shandy to this point.

I’ll leave the nuances of this to those interested, and instead comment on a provocative notion Tabbi articulated during the session:

Tabbi argues, quite convincingly, that the first generation of postmodern authors (Barth, Gaddis, etc…) focused on the literary work above all else. They may have indeed been/be great show(wo)men, as demonstrated by William H. Gass at the &NOW festival at Lake Forest College last spring), or by Raymond Federman or Kathy Acker any time those two, well, do/did anything at all…yet, Tabbi says, many current writers who have moved into non-textual environments sacrific this same intense attention to literary production.

Not that there is any less value in multimedia endeavors, but that these writers, if I take Tabbi correctly, are perhaps not writers in the same sense. And, just maybe, the literary tradition suffers, because literature becomes, well, something else entirely.

My first instinct, as one of these sometime-multimedia folk, is to recoil. I see my non-print, non-text work, really, as writing in different forms. But then I start to wonder if the technological transformations overtaking the work that we now do may not be fundamentally changing what is it is, exactly, we end up doing. No great lament from me about these changes, and if we take Gilles Deleuze seriously, the death of the book has been a long time comin'.

As someone who schedules many writers on the academic circuit, I must admit often considering entertainment value, in many different forms, before extending an invitation. This doesn’t mean that great writers can’t be damn entertaining, but perhaps reinforces Tabbi's claim that writing has lost real cultural ground in the age of the Xbox.

Against my better judgment, this takes me back to Franzen’s seemingly ridiculous claim that literature needs to compete with things such as extreme sports.

Bungee jumping while reading Swann’s Way anyone? Or am I just expressing the bowhunter’s fear of the gun?

--Davis

NY Times' best of 2006

Yet again, the NY Times Book Review's annual best-of list is a predictable yawner. All of the "best" fiction books are from NY houses (I list them, respectively: Random House, Scribner, Knopf, Knopf, Viking), and the only marginally innovative book on the list is Amy Hempel's Collected Stories.

Of course, this comes as no surprise, but it does tease a larger conversation: what *were* the best books for 2006? Here's my short list; most of the names should be familiar:

Steve Tomasula, The Book of Portraiture
Lance Olsen, Nietzsche's Kisses
Gina Frangello, My Sister's Continent
Alan Moore & Melinda Gebbie, Lost Girls

Others?

"What is a reading?"

A recent trip I made to San Diego to read at UCSD started me thinking about readings and audience and publics. And I found myself recollecting an anecdote by Richard Wright that Juliana Spahr relates in her book Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity. Spahr argues that “complex works” empower readers by granting the latter equal authority with the author, and among the works she focuses on are texts by Gertrude Stein and Lyn Hejinian. The anecdote occurs in a page-and-a-half end note discussing how what Spahr calls the “indeterminancy” of Stein’s race and gender dislocations (via the use of racialized language that she wished to defuse and disempower) in “Melanctha” has opened that text to charges of racism. Here is Spahr quoting from a magazine article published in 1945:

Believing in direct action, I contrived a method to gauge the degree to which Miss Stein’s prose was tainted with the spirit of counter-revolution. I gathered a group of semi-literate Negro stockyard workers—“basic proletarians with the instinct for revolution” (am I quoting right?)—into a Black Belt basement and read Melanctha aloud to them. They understood every word. Enthralled, they slapped their thighs, howled, stomped and interrupted me constantly to comment on the characters.

Spahr argues that often in her work, Stein, whose first (and even second) language was not English and whose childhood years in the US coincided with a great wave of immigration, explores “how people with different levels of fluency speak to each other” and “encourage readers to bring to them different levels of connection, of meaning, of resonance.” Using her immigrant experience, Spahr says, Stein is writing for everybody, not just those schooled in English conventions. (The latter are named as those “schooled in Dick and Jane” and trained to the mastery of “close reading.”)

Earlier, in her introduction, Spahr notes that her emphasis is “less on deciphering works, and more on what sorts of communities works encourage.” (5) Spahr means a variety of things by “communities.” In light of my reflections on readings that authors perform in public, I think it would be interesting to use her words as a different way of thinking about a problem we’ve been talking about on this blog since it began.

I wrote the following narrative during the first couple of days after my trip, then put it aside, for I thought it was a bit too much of a “day in the life” sort of piece to be interesting to anyone but myself. But I’ve decided that since my experience that particular day, however unexceptional, provided the focus for my thoughts, I’ll go ahead and post it and let people decide for themselves whether to bother reading all of it

Nov. 2-3, 2006. Waking up the morning after, it all seemed like a dream—flying down to San Diego for the ParaSpheres reading and stepping out of the terminal into sunlight so dazzling I had to grope in my bag for the sunglasses I’d remembered to pack; spending the day on the UCSD campus; going to the reading; and then flying straight back home. By contrast, it’s dark today in Seattle. The little light there is in the world seems to be located in the gold and red leaves that glow against the dark gray sky, swaying madly in the wind as rain spatters against the window. Indoors, lamps burn all day. Maybe it’s the contrast between here and there that makes it seem more dream than memory, or maybe my memory was warped by sleep deprivation (for by the time I arrived home, I’d been awake for 42 hours).

The long, disjunct day had an interesting shape to it, full of curiously parallel—or should I say mirror?—experiences. It began at 4:30 a.m., when I rose after a night spent sleepless but relaxed, to dress, drink coffee, and put in my contact lenses. Leaving the house and entering the frozen darkness, it felt like the middle-of-the-night rather than early morning, but even at that hour I-5 had a lot of traffic. And so with SeaTac. Expecting a quick pass through the checkpoint on my way to the gate, I found myself one of hundreds of sullen, anxious travelers crammed into the zig-zagging files of the coach-class queue at the security checkpoint. They were mostly silent, except for those who fretted in low voices about missing their flights or whether their hand lotion or contact lens fluid would be taken from them as contraband. (We are all school children now, it seems, endlessly subject to changes in the rules.) A tape loop blared interminably, oppressing our spirits with a stupidly hectoring male voice (what canthey be thinking?) delivering a barrage of instructions (including a new one that annoyed a guard when I slavishly obeyed it). Perhaps it was the hour, but as I stood in line watching my fellow travelers, gray and dreary and bleak, I couldn’t help thinking that all that was missing was an enormous image of the dictator staring down on us. Instead, an enormous banner advertising Toyota hung above the entrance to the checkpoint proper. The point wasn’t lost on me.

The crowning moment following forty minutes’ wait came after I had entered the checkpoint and managed to strip off the outer layers of my clothing (including, it goes without saying, my shoes) and get everything onto the conveyer belt while still holding onto my passport and boarding pass. I had to wait to pass through the metal detector for the family being processed through the adjacent station (which shared the metal detector with the station currently processing my shoes, coat, and carry-on bag full of books and papers) to precede me. The man and woman with a baby and small child, unfortunately, were being given a hard time. First it was the baby’s stroller: one guard yelled at them for trying to take it through the metal detector and ordered them (juggling babies, passports, and boarding passes) to collapse it and put it on the conveyor belt. And then it was the baby’s clothing: a second guard snarled at the mother because she hadn’t removed the baby’s jacket, and when she had done that snarled at her a second time because the baby was wearing a cardigan sweater that the guard said had to come off, too. The mother was so frazzled and worried they would miss their flight that she yanked at the infant’s sleeves in a panic. (Miraculously, the baby didn’t freak out.) By the time I left the checkpoint, I had the taste of acrid disgust in my mouth.

This was the first time in my experience since the institution of the airport checkpoint ritual that even the semblance of politeness had been absent. (Had I just been lucky? Or has something changed?) It seemed that the security personnel had been reduced to gray elements of a clunky, clumsy machine, brainlessly enforcing rules for no reason but that they existed, while we travelers had been reduced to the anxious herd, enduring what we must without protest, knowing only that if we want to travel, we must submit. Never had it been clearer to me that airport security personnel are mindless enforcers of arbitrary rules that have nothing to do with “safety”: certainly that morning at that checkpoint they knew it and we knew it. And surely of those many women old and young, so anxious about hand lotion and toothpaste, most knew as they shuffled in line that if they had the clout of the merchants who lost money when the Bush Administration decided to make bottled water verboten and now have miraculously been saved by the revised regulation permitting water bought after passing through the checkpoint, their problem with items of personal hygiene, would, like the merchants’, have gone away by now, too.

After all that, imagine my 5:55 a.m. chagrin when—rushing to the gate—I passed by the egress of another checkpoint I could have passed through: this one almost completely deserted of all but security personnel. Why in the world hadn’t the security personnel let those of us queuing for the other checkpoint know?

But the rest of my morning went smoothly. Although the shuttle I’d made a reservation with didn’t show, a driver for another company agreed to take me to the UCSD campus. Perhaps because I was the only passenger, he felt obliged to make conversation with me. We began (naturally!) with the weather, with my past visits to San Diego, and from there to the local issue of the airport’s expansion. (He favored a plan in which the Navy would share its base at Miramar with the civilian airport that he said the Government was opposed to.) After a brief silence, he asked me if I was a student or a professor. I said, simply, that I was just visiting for the day, to give a reading. And here’s where the conversation got interesting. What is that? he wanted to know. What do you do at a reading?

His question made me do some thinking. This man who was likely in his early forties really had no idea what a “reading” was: he was asking me because he actually didn’t know. And it occurred to me that “readings” aren’t often given representation in popular media (like movies and television) and how else would he have known? So I offered him a general description and added the comment that when readings are held in bookstores they also usually included book signing, where people buying the book ask the author to autograph it. He chewed this over for awhile, then said, “Does that mean you write books?” I said that yes, I did. Another silence set in, and I thought that was the end of it. But a few minutes later, he said, “I don’t read much.” I said, “I gather most people don’t.” Another silence, then: “I guess I’d never’ve heard of you.” (How wonderful that he didn’t ask “What name do you write under?” as strangers usually do.) He went on, “The last books I read were the Left Behind books.” I know these have been big sellers, but this was the first person I’d ever met who’d actually read them. I was glad I was wearing sunglasses, because I wanted to keep my voice and face neutral, and at that point I needed all the help I could get. “Were they gripping?” I asked, curious that he’d apparently read more than one of them, which from all accounts (bestseller status notwithstanding) were long and tedious and turgid in the extreme. “Did you get hooked?” “For awhile,” he replied. “But I stopped after the fourth book.” A fairly lengthy silence set in after that, and I thought maybe he’d let the subject of books drop now for good. But it seemed that he just couldn’t stop thinking about my being a writer (as though he’d discovered he had some exotic animal sitting in the van with him), for about half a minute after I’d decided that the conversation had dead-ended, he said, “So have you written many books?” He didn’t sound as though he was asking this just to keep the conversation going: rather, he sounded anxiously curious. (And of course it was the anxiety in his curiosity that made me curious.) “Yeah, I guess I have,” I said, not wanting to get too specific. We exited I-5 about then, and I knew it wouldn’t be far to campus. “What’s the name of your latest?” he wanted to know. That was a tough moment, because I had a hard time not breaking into giggles at the thought of a Left Behind reader picking up the next book (or indeed any book) in my Marq’ssan Cycle, parts of which take place in San Diego county. Tsunami, I said. It’ll be out in January.” “I’ll have to try to remember to look for it,” he said as he made the turn to enter the campus. And at that exact instant, the fact that I’d gotten no sleep the night before and had been through that surreal 5:30 a.m. scene at the airport and had shifted from 32F to 61F in the space of three hours clobbered me with a moment of impossible disjuncture as I tried to imagine what it would take to communicate the reality of the typical writer’s situation to this man who was both interested and reasonably intelligent but in no way equipped to understand.

This odd, awkward conversation and the issues it raised in my mind recurred to me throughout the day. In the end, I found my reflections on the conversation more interesting that the actual experience itself (which I’d characterize as stiff and halting in the moment and though not painful, not pleasurable, either).

After exploring the campus to satisfy my curiosity about its differences from the same campus eighteen years ago (when I’d last seen it), I settled at a carrel in the library for a couple of hours to jot notes about my morning, read, and think. At three, I wandered into the food court at the Price Center where I sat down with a bagel and iced tea. I’d planned to read but instead ended up observing the students surrounding me—talking on cell phones, working math problems, gossiping in pairs, or just passing the time in groups, laughing, joking, flirting. Several were logged onto the internet, and a couple were doing math homework on graph paper, but I didn’t see a single person actually reading a book. (But then I saw people online or reading magazines in the library, but not a soul reading a book there, either.) It occurred to me to wonder whether any of these people had any more idea of what a reading was like than the shuttle driver, which led to a what-if moment. As an undergraduate music major back in the 1960s, like every other music major, every Thursday morning I was required to attend a convocation that usually featured a recital. (We were also encouraged to attend several recitals a week. Recitals are, I suppose, the musical equivalent of readings. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, frequent attendance of recitals allowed me to be exposed to a wide variety of music. Sure, among the range of recitals given there were occasionally some stinkers, but it proved to be an easy and pleasurable way to broaden my musical experience.) What if, I wondered, attending readings regularly were a requirement of all English and composition courses? Might not at least a few students find their way to work they’d ordinarily not even know existed? And might not even a few of those few afterwards choose to attend readings voluntarily? Nothing is more important for shaping aesthetic and entertainment tastes than exposure, and of course we all know that there is little more powerful in one’s life than habit…

Since I’d arranged to meet Aqueduct author Kimberly Todd Wade at 4:00 outside the Visual Arts Performance Facility, at about 3:45 I headed in what I thought was the right direction. When I realized I’d probably taken a wrong turn somewhere, I stopped and looked around to take my bearings and contemplated cutting through one of the campus’s groves of eucalyptus trees still left standing. “Can I help you find your way?” a young guy called out (lanky, clean-shaven, articulate, and gay), and without further ado swept me under his wing and walked me to my destination. Of course he knew the Visual Arts Performance Facility. “It’s a perfect black-box space,” he said. He himself had attended events there when his organization helped bring in gay and lesbian authors and performers. He played the role of the responsible tour guide to perfection, for as we walked—necessarily skirting the huge construction site—he informed me that UCSD is constantly expanding and hopes to reach an enrollment of (gasp) 30,000 students. He waved his hand at the massive construction sites and blithely chattered of vitality and “growth.” The campus’s expansion filled him with obvious pride and excitement, which took me aback a bit.

I met Kimberly as arranged, and we chatted for about twenty minutes before we went in. The space the reading was held in was indeed a black box. Near the door a couple of women were seated at a table with a cash box and stacks of ParaSpheres. At the front of the room, in the far corner (to the left of the lectern), Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan (the editors of ParaSpheres and the publishers of Omnidawn) had loaded a large round table with fruit, shrimp, smoked salmon, cheese, crackers, raw vegetables, and madeleines. The second person I asked pointed Rusty out to me, and I approached her and introduced myself. I was given a form to sign, granting UCSD permission to record the reading and the rights over any recordings, audio or video, that might be made, and in short order met the other writers who were reading— Carol Schwalberg, Noelle Sickels, William Luvvas, and Mark Wallace. At once everything snapped into place, becoming familiar and comfortable, and I lost my sense of being a stranger. I hadn’t actually met anyone there in the flesh before (although I’d had brief email correspondences with three people present). But now I was among other writers, and that was enough to make me feel at home. Strange, isn’t it? Writers are notoriously solitary and independent souls. (“Organizing writers is like herding cats,” I recall hearing Vonda McIntyre once say.) The works we read and the answers to the questions the audience asked us marked us as very different in style, formative experience, and ideas about narrative. But after a day spent moving in a world in which readings and writers are exotic and alien (at best!) or irrelevant and invisible (for most), I felt a rare appreciation of what we shared in common. Adding to my sense of ease was the speed with which Rusty helped me resolve the problem of getting back to the airport (due to the shuttle company’s flaking out on me that morning).

As well all chatted and nibbled, an audience assembled around us. I spotted a few young undergraduates attending, but most of the audience was older people, likely not students. Anna Joy Springer spoke first and introduced Ken. Then Ken spoke for a few minutes about how ParaSpheres came about and talked a little about “New Fabulism” and “New Wave Fabulism.” And then I read, for the first few minutes struggling with a microphone that persisted in drifting lower and lower over the lectern until finally it blocked my view of the page I was reading and Anna had to come up to adjust it. Mark Wallace read next, and as he read, I imagined the shuttle driver in the audience. And I thought: though Mark’s story is “odd” by conventional narrative standards, the fact is, it’s both entertaining and accessible. Anyone whose literary taste hadn’t gotten stuck in a hopeless, habit-driven rut must surely enjoy hearing this story read. When Mark finished, Carol, who was sitting on my right, whispered into my ear, “His humor’s like Kafka’s, isn’t it?” And another moment of trying to imagine what the shuttle driver would make of the readings worked powerfully on me. And so, for the rest of the event, I listened with a sort of dual-perception. I especially loved the idea of him listening to Carol read about a woman who conducts an extramarital affair in serial dreams, night after night, with the husband of the woman she buys fish from. The dry wit of Carol’s performance would surely seduce just about anyone into wanting to read her story for themselves. I don’t know if Ken and Rusty just happened to get such a diverse stylistic mix of stories to be read for the event or if they planned it that way, but the range of styles represented in the five stories we read from offered a fair representation of the diversity of the anthology itself.

After reading, the five of us, joined by Ken Keegan, lined up in a row behind the lectern, facing the audience, and fielded their questions. Two different young people asked us questions about how we had become writers and when we had realized we were writers, and each of us offered answers testifying to just how different such stories can be. Though after so many hours without sleep I wasn’t exactly a model of alertness, the questions about non-realist fiction actually got my brain working. Anna Joy Springer commented from the audience that too much of the fiction we need is getting “thrown away” into the genres and expressed a sense of frustration that there’s little interest in the mainstream for fiction that doesn’t conform to realist conventions and forms. Echoing his earlier opening remarks, Ken said that that was one of the reasons he decided to publish an anthology of “New Fabulism” and “New Wave Fabulism” stories. He then said that such stories “transcend” their genres. I’m leery of “transcendence” generally, myself, but in the case of fiction, I think it’s a serious error to suggest that good work “transcends” its genre (though it’s a claim that many people—including Steve Erickson, for instance, in a recent interview in Black Clock with Samuel R. Delany—make, when work they consider first-rate uses genre conventions and requires genre reading protocols of its audience. Someone else asked what fables are, which led to a collective attempt to offer a description. Another question from the audience asked us to talk about the difference between “New Fabulism” and surrealism. And finally, someone asked if there was a reason why so many writers were writing fables or fable-like stories now. I suggested that we live in a time in which we find it difficult to speak the truth, and nonrealist stories provide us with the space to speak freely. William Luvvas asserted that such writing has nothing to do with the political. And Mark Wallace offered an interesting, complicated elaboration on the difficulty of breaking past clichés at this particular, postmodern stage of capitalism. In another context, this could have been an opening to a fruitful, possibly fascinating discussion.

I regretfully said good-bye to everyone—wishing I could stay long enough to join the Omnidawn contingent for dinner—and left with Eileen Miles, who had generously offered to drive me to the airport. We stepped out of the room into night, which I found a bit disorienting, since, living in Seattle, I tend to associate warm temperatures with long days. The talk flew so fast and easily between us that the drive to the airport from campus could be taken as the polar opposite of the drive from the airport to campus. Eileen is best known for her poetry, but she writes fiction, too. And she is one of those rare individuals who came new to the academy in middle age—someone suddenly inside the academic world after years of experience as a working writer outside. So we talked about the academy—my decision to abandon it came up during the Q&A—and cities and the pedagogy of writing, all with amazing fluency, considering we had just met. Afterwards, I was struck by the observation that we share a good chunk of the same language, as the shuttle-driver and I so painfully do not.

When I arrived at the airport, the terminal was all but deserted. Nevertheless, a woman security officer stopped me from entering the checkpoint in order to give me a mini-lecture about liquids in carry-on luggage; and she insisted that I trade my transparent sealed plastic bag for an identical one of hers. Surely this was pointless mystification! Looking from her bag to mine, it struck me that our world had taken a shift sideways, into a fantastic baroque dimension where officials wield arcane rules the ordinary citizen knows nothing about with bizarre, arbitrary inflections. Soon our fashions and architecture will begin resembling the rococo grotesquerie that rules Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. My head spinning, I entered the checkpoint and was greeted politely by name by a dapper little man in a suit & quickly processed: the mirror experience of 5:30 that morning at SeaTac. And whereas I boarded the plane almost as soon as I arrived at the gate that morning, here I ended up waiting for hours. The monitor said the plane was on time, but it did not show and did not show. Though the population around the gate remained sparse, as I tried to read I was constantly distracted by indiscreet conversations about office politics or intimate exchanges shouted into cell phones of the few passengers sharing the space around the gate with me. Finally, though, the plane arrived—the same one I’d flown in on—and the few of us taking it boarded, and I spent the flight stretched across the row of seats, lying in the dark, staring out at the stars, listening to music. And so, eventually, to home and bed.

****

Writers don’t live in “ivory towers.” Most of us write about the world we all live in, using language anyone willing to make the effort can grasp. And yet, the contrasts I experienced that day, outside my daily round, a thousand miles from home, argues it’s not that simple. (Big news: as though we didn’t already all know that.) Juliana Spahr gestures toward one possible way of refusing the gap, but her discussion is, in a sense, mostly a glorious assertion about what could be without any hint of how to get there. The fundamental problem, as Andrea Hairston told me when we faced the abysmal turnout to her reading in Seattle last April, is how to get people to leave their homes, their television sets, their computers, and physically into a performance space. She’s been running a theater for years and years: and the hardest part, she said, is getting people to attend performances that will give them pleasure, if only they could be coaxed into the theater.

I’m interested in the ideas Lyn Hejinian expresses in her essay “Who Is Speaking?”

At stake in the public life of a writer are the invention of a writing community; the invention of the writer (as writer and as person) in that community; and the invention of the meanings and meaningfulness of his or her writing…But the invention of oneself as a writer in a community is only part of a larger question; it should be accompanied by the necessity for inventing that community, and thereby participating in the making of the terms that, in turn, themselves play a crucial role in making invention possible (or, in bad scenarios, impossible)…

…Do we need community? Do we want one? One quick way to answer this is to say that, want it or not, we have it. And this is the case not just because the world is with us. To the extent that humans know about humans, community occurs. A community consists of any or all of those persons who have the capacity to acknowledge what others among them are doing…

I’ve understood different things in these passages every time I’ve read them. What I’m thinking now is that we alternative writers don’t just need readers, we need a more expansive invention of community than the one that just happens to form among and around us. How do we do that? I think many of us are working at it in diverse ways. (I know I have been doing so!) This blog, obviously, is one. I think it could be helpful to be more conscious of it, to conceptualize it more clearly.

electronic literature collection: volume one

The first volume of the Electronic Literature Organization's anthology of new-media work turned up in my mailbox last week, and it's simply stunning.

Edited by N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Monfort, Scott Rettberg, and Stephanie Strickland, the collection has brought together in one place for the first time 60 of the most influential and significant digital texts from the last fifteen years or so. Included are projects by Edward Falco, Shelley Jackson, Michael Joyce, Deena Larsen, Talan Memmott, Judd Morrissey, Stuart Moulthrop, Kate Pullinger, Jim Rosenberg, Alan Sondheim, Rob Wittig, and others from the U.S.A., Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, and Australia. Each work is prefaced by a brief editorial description and author bio, and tagged with descriptive keywords for easy cross-referencing.

The compilation presents a broad overview of the field of electronic literature: hypertext, kinetic language experiments, generative and combinatory forms, network writing, codework, 3D, and narrative animations. Sampling the results, you can't help sensing distinctions between such unicorns as "poetry" and "fiction" (even "text" and "image," or "language" and "film") seem ever blurrier and more anachronistic—except in the minds of marketing engineers, librarians, book sellers, and reviewers.

Interestingly, the anthology is being published under a Creative Commons License, so readers are free to copy and share any of the pieces—or, say, install the whole on every computer in a school’s computer lab—without paying any licensing fees.

E.L.O., established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of e-literature, is offering the collection in two formats at no cost: CD-ROM (which runs on both Windows and Mac) and web-based. For the former, the editors ask that you request a copy by writing to: Electronic Literature Organization, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), B0131 McKeldin Library, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742. For the latter, just click here. The collection will also be included with N. Katherine Hayles’s book, Electronic Literature: Teaching, Interpreting, Playing, forthcoming from Notre Dame University Press in 2007.