heeded a thankfully persistent whisper of walser walser walser and fell hard. i’d heard the gossipy parts: how kafka dug him, how he lived his final years in a madhouse, how he died on a long walk in the snow, how he wrote in a pencilled hand so small that people thought it was a secret code but it wasn’t–it was just very very small.

i’d tried THE ASSISTANT, which is recently translated but earlier walser and could see the charm, but i was prejudiced against how its proto-modern style took too long to move things along (a similar feeling i got from zweig’s BEWARE OF PITY)… and so was wholly unprepared at how JAKOB VON GUNTEN broke me down and hollowed me out. it’s at times so shockingly beautiful i was, despite myself, moved to tears. not tears of empathy for some character caught in a melodramatic clutch–but tears for the friggin beauty of the writing. the dude writes like an angel–wherein modesty is one of the highest virtues, with pure charm, and with a scrambled semantic nonetheless crystal clear, which must be the emblem only of seraphim.

walser writes with the freshness and immediacy of a journal entry, but also with a constant self-consciousness that makes the entry have the permanence and art of a poem. christopher middleton’s translator’s intro is a good brief. here’s coetzee: “In Kafka one also catches echoes of Walser’s prose, with its lucid syntactic layout, its casual juxtapositions of the elevated with the banal, and its eerily convincing logic of paradox.” and elsewhere in the same review coetzee quotes walter benjamin who describes walser’s characters as like those from a fairy tale but after the fairy tale has ended.

[this book is a dream diary of a boys’ school and i kept thinking it was an unintended translation of hui neng’s platform sutra… or, it reminded me of the orphanage scenes in edward dahlberg’s BECAUSE I WAS FLESH… and i heard jakob as the flipside to mush tate’s equally pure sermons that extolled with the hypnotic, “think you’re in school, think you’re much, know you’re living…“]

[also suffering through a very real school’s very hectic end-of-the-year traffic jam, i was all too happy to read about this ideal school (where the teachers are all gone or asleep.)]

o i forgot to mention: it’s very very funny…

buy directly from the publisher or buy used or find in a library

stumbled onto this Stephen-Paul Martin interview where he makes this opposition: experimental fiction as legitimate alternative network to the corporate publishing world… or experimental fiction as a minor league system for that corporate publishing world:

from: http://www.longhousepoetry.com/kirpalgordon2006.html

SPM: I think the main claim to significance that avant practices can legitimately make is that they constitute an alternative network, as opposed to the small press scene, which functions more as the minor leagues for mainstream publishing. However, when avanties start to function as narcissistic egos desperate for recognition and power, the whole idea of an alternative network collapses.

KPG: So if the middle-browing, standardizing, bureaucratic process of “professionalizing” our poets, radical critics & experimental writers has insured them middle class salaries in our universities at the risk of betraying their roots, where is our sense of community now?

SPM: I hope you are not thinking of the downtown scene in New York City during the late Seventies and early Eighties because money—and the future—were so little on everyone’s mind.

KPG: I’m thinking of your non-fiction book, Open Form and the Feminine Imagination. published in 1988. You helped coax us into a variety of texts that were difficult to enter. You demonstrated how writers as diverse as Susan How[e] & Clarence Major, for example, were speaking to our condition, only requiring us to develop alternative interpretive skills, an act of transcending/seeing through limits that are culturally imposed. I’m wondering where that kind of encouragement has gone. I’m also remembering the impact of Central Park. I got bombarded by so many new ideas, challenging perceptions, contrasting styles & approaches. It was a beautiful thing. Put more plainly, has a lack of tenure & adequate health insurance, coupled with bourgeois fantasies of fortune & fame, compromised the avant garde?

SPM: Compromised in the sense of turning it into its opposite, my answer is, “At least to some extent.” Letting the text unfold (as writers and readers) may be the only real community we will ever have. Exchanges between people are the ultimate value of literature. Yes, there’s the undeniable value of the energies we invest in creating the work and reading it carefully. But then what happens? I think most writers, perhaps without fully acknowledging it to themselves, see their work in a career context: Where can the work get them in terms of jobs and recognition? This is the mainstream approach, with the work seen as a way to assimilate into the dominant culture. But when the work is seen mainly as a trigger for discussion, it pulls the writer and reader away from the condition of semi-consciousness encouraged by mass communication and into the shared contemplation of ideas that exist only because the intensity of the interaction creates them. It’s precisely this kind of dialogue that cannot be appropriated by capitalist culture. It helps us stop worrying about how “great” the work is and puts the focus on the depth of feeling and imagination the work can generate and encourage.

more at: http://www.longhousepoetry.com/kirpalgordon2006.html

for family, went to san francisco over the weekend–very happy to see the used book stores in the mission still there. ten years since i last saw them: abandoned planet, dog eared, phoenix, modern times. i buy almost everything online now, so few used bookstores left in NYC (adam’s unnameable books one of a few lovely exceptions). what fun to browse seven or eight cases of used books…

i found this one there. i’d seen it on the FC2 site but never bothered because, frankly, the cover art was ugly (or better(?) said: the cover was sending the incorrect market signal to its presumed target consumer)… this book shoud have this cover, some cutiepie wink wink smartypants cover–not this overly literal and overly busy collage.

point’s not to bash the designer though but to take a moment to lament the death of browsing–cuz at modern times bookstore i actually picked it up, read a few pages, and fell quickly for stephen-paul martin’s hilarious, risky, and meandering storytelling.

though called stories there is a narrator which is similar enough in voice throughout to achieve the continuity of a novel. the tales are interconnected by repeating image/phrase touchstones–a technique i like alot when done well and which fits perfectly with the book’s philosophy of mystical coincidence and witty skepticism.

it avoids plot while maintaining all the fun and development of storytelling. it also ends with a questionably successful story that nonetheless i enjoyed tremendously for the huge emotional gamble it takes to tell a “non-ironic love story.”

i think i’ve said the above too clinically. the book’s a lot of fun… like the wit and depth of reading a david antin talk without the spaces. if you liked lynn crawford’s SIMPLY SEPARATE PEOPLE or the dry humor of harry mathews’ CIGARETTES or JOURNALIST, try this one.

buy from FC2 or buy from a used bookstore or find it at a library

very cool book i stumbled onto in a bookstore (is that stumbling a fading pastime?)… at a slim but just-right ninety-two pages, it’s got the heft of something three times as big… this sounds like a power tool review all of a sudden…

if the title throws you off with its awkward ballroom alliteration, try to ignore it–an inaccurate indicator of what’s inside… the walserian part refers to robert walser, the swiss novelist whose biography and fiction hollander empties and then refills and then empties again with significance of his own design.

hollander has a great sentence style, both lyrical and pleasingly complex. the book is made up of short sections, and they vary from essayistic meditations on madness to very beautiful borgesian ontological fables to headspinning prose blocks that live on the borderline of comprehensibility a la the fiction of maurice blanchot… in fact the book’s personality disorder at times reminded me of a real favorite– coleman dowell’s ISLAND PEOPLE–another book that deals explicitly with insanity.

for me it required a certain silence to read it in. there’s little action to move things along, and what action there is is figurative, metaphorical. but one hopes it’s wise to be thankful for something that takes and rewards a little concentration. despite it being made up of sections, they do feel ’sequenced’ so that the whole feels like a complete work rather than a collection, ending also with a bravura flourish.

from early on:
“Robert had a thought and sat down. The thought had recurred throughout his life, assuming an abstract shape, and now, at the moment of his death, was no different. Though it helped to map the limits of his life, it had nothing to do with his death. Aware of its last rite in his brain, Robert sat down in the company of his thought. It happened in the mountains, in winter, when the mountains are are covered with snow. It was a thought he had always known, a shadowy trace moving inside his head like a sandwich-board figure without a message. It clung inside him as he sat down, as if to guide him on his final journey” (page 15).

buy from spd

more than any of his others, PLAYERS pushes dialogue to meaninglessness, an experiment in how far afield our hip and close-quartered patois can go, how completely empty of sense. a combination of zen cases, wiseguy assholisms, and andy kaufman-rejected punchlines, delillo tirelessly (but we may tire) explores the idea of city people talking endless shit.

but this arguably slightest of delillos still’s got its morsels, not the least of which is its famous 1977 prophecy of terrorism’s intimate relationship with the world trade center.

it reminded me–maybe because of their equally still plots, maybe because of their protagonists’ essential isolation, maybe cuz i think of the two as his most experimental–of THE BODY ARTIST. there the characters were modern ascetics, holy people of personal art. here our players are devout cynics. …it was the first time it ever really registered with me (to make a generalization) the essentially religious nature of finance people, their worship not of money but the flow of it through specific, ritualized channels. in this book that appeared to me for the first time, not as some weak extended metaphor, of god as money, but a real truth: a worship–an ongoing worship–of a deified system.

it has very few pleasures, is nihilistic in its intentions. its characters are the worst of us, the emptiest and thus the worst. the enjoyment you do get is from his gravel-made, manly poetic word play. …but that’s enough for me…

and even delillo’s minor novels are pretty good. this one followed by the also-minor RUNNING DOG, then his best (so says I) THE NAMES. strikes me in two different ways: 1) it shows how consistent he actually is and somewhat opposingly that 2) within an authorial life, there’s more fortune than progress. of the latter, here’s a quote from a delillo interview that i always loved:

from: INTRODUCING DON DELILLO:
“I think one of the things I’ve learned from experience is that it isn’t enough to want to get back to work. The other thing I’ve learned is that no amount of experience can prevent you from making a major mistake. I think it can help you avoid the small mistakes. But the potential for a completely misconceived book still exists.”

About the Crime of the Century! The Lindbergh Baby kidnapping! Aren’t you interested in the Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping?!?

extremely beautiful and attentive writing in this short story collection (billed as “a novel in stories”) sometimes stilted due to the iconic nature of its subject, written around the kidnapping and murder of the then Most Famous Couple’s firstborn.

[which, maybe today, would be the equivalent of shiloh pitt. pause to imagine the parallel sound and fury.]

precise and sustained attention to detail. the opening chapter has the layered density of absalom absalom. what’s most cool is the atmosphere achieved of depression-era america. it’s in her verb choice. not just the repeating of archaic brand names and gone places, but those acts and habits that people used to do and now do no longer…

but part of the challenge i think of writing this type of historical novel is getting away from the textbook narrative. it’s the somewhat contradictory act of hanging your book on the peg of history but making a reader forget that this is capital H History and rendering a more lowercase h personal history… so i liked the stories best that dealt with the more minor characters–the maid, the wife of the kidnapper bruno hauptmann character–where there was room for the author to move outside the iconic. in these chapters Ryder allowed herself to imagine interior lives, pasts, and the narrative gets more momentum going. in fact the real pleasure of the book for me was simply in fully entering german-american immigrant life in 1930s nyc. in contrast, in the chapters devoted to lindbergh and his wife, the two are somewhat reduced to their roles of action hero and socialite, and we’re left, somewhat stalled, at the surface of history.

(plus, since roth’s THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA i’m sort of ruined, unable to really see lucky lindy as anything more than a fascist antisemite, a george W prototype–and this aspect of the guy interestingly comes up zilch in the book.)

still, an enormous care is taken with the writing, always elegant, never purple and truly gorgeous at times. one to watch.

Consume directly from FC2.

didn’t finish it. but it did make me think a bit about johnson and the life of an experimental novelist… and, like pound sd to williams: “you don’t have to finish everything–don’t tell people i said so.”

skimmed though. and did check the index and read all the entries where beckett comes up. (he comes off rather well.)

one of the main conflicts in the book, introduced in full self-awareness in an early chapter, is coe’s conflict, his torturedness even, about the traps and hypocrisies of writing a literary biography. as well, and this is simplifying it a bit, but it felt like coe was also conflicted about his own method and proclivities as a novelist and the more transgressive tradition that b.s. johnson represents. it’s almost as if coe doesn’t want to admit the avant-garde, when it succeeds, is the only game in town. (or maybe better said: the advanced guard, when it survives, gets farther into the interior.) he has a hard time reconciling this fact with the more regular enjoyments he gets out of traditional narratives. it’s a real dilemma and somewhat enjoyable/educating/painful to watch it get worked out as he writes his book.

he has a nice digression, near the end, when he hesitates before writing about johnson’s death. very human and sad and dignifying.

because of the bio i took another look at ALBERT ANGELO and i thought a few things… i think i remembered johnson as a major minor writer… but then, thinking about that categorization, i thought it a weasley and probably wrongheaded bureaucratic-minded ranking… or–if it stands–that i *like* major minors. something about their failures and/or their often slightly off but great ambitions… anyway, looking at albert angelo, i remembered what i liked about it: the idea of the artist-as-a-young-man, someone hopeful but uncertain how to see his daily humiliations–as stations of the cross or the amassing proof of his ultimate unworthiness. the contender slogging through his days. …also, his portrayal of a school seemed, fifty years after and taking place in a foreign nation, very familiar to me.

(there’s a nice review by kermode, in the london review of book, of the bio and johnson. in his review, kermode has a terrific digression about literary risk-takers like johnson: “Many have argued that a book’s defiance of contemporary opinion and convention is itself an index of virtue, that some element of ‘estrangement’ or ‘defamiliarisation’ is a preservative, and that too easy a compliance with accepted norms is bound to result in oblivion. Literary transgressiveness, often reflecting radical social and political opposition, can thus be taken as a justification for rescue work. It may be, as Roman Jakobson believed, that its virtue lies in its power to protect us from ‘automatisation, from the rust threatening our formulae of love and hatred, of revolt and renunciation, of faith and negation’. Since the transgressive has this value it will be worth much effort to recover lost examples of it.”)

i love johnson for–this crystallized in the bio–his us versus them combative position. he called the majority of his contemporary novelists philistines for being mired in the techniques of the 19th century novel despite the examples of joyce and beckett. what can i say, even though this is kinduva schoolboy dichotomy of the barbarians and the keepers-of-the-flame, i sorta believe it. don’t tell anyone i said so.

…also i love him for his typographical rapscallionisms. prolly my favorite one is: in HOUSE MOTHER NORMAL, which takes place in an old folks’ home, he represents the senile with…blank pages! another, in albert angelo, he cut holes through several recto pages so a reader could, literally, see into the future. a human and very funny writer that b.s.

consume.

who’s aiming higher than Renee Gladman? her wrestling with the basic ideas of fiction–and its osmotic border with poetry–can lead to spectacular instances of art, passages at home in strangeness, maneuvering with uncanny grace in fields of indeterminacy and unknowing.

i knew her mainly from reading JUICE, a strong, sustained meditation where she stretched the connections that mended sentences’ semantic gaps to their limit… this latest, NEWCOMER CAN’T SWIM, is a collection of “installations” and i found myself taking a shine to some more than others. i liked those with a stronger narrative momentum than those that constellate various portraits or scenes (but it’s pretty radical stuff and i may be too poorly equipped to apprehend some of these seriously new approaches.) …in any case i thought “Untitled, Woman on Ground” was awesome, heartbreaking, and completely new. it might be a breakup story, it might be a story about rubbernecking around an accident. it repeats a theme of the book–the various ways we fail to communicate or only communicate in desperate and blunted ways. another favorite was “kingdom in three panels,” especially louie’s dog-mind…

some came up short nonetheless, where i both emotionally and intellectually couldn’t connect. but i did think what she’s going for is some incredible place that requires real inspiration each time. and it’s pretty hard to hit that every outing. people get blamed for that much ambition, and i’m not sure wrongly–but when she connects the transport’s pretty phenom.

consume directly from kelsey st press.

why sebald, with his perfectly balanced but unsexy sentences, achieves literary fame is a mystery to me. his world is slow to enter; its drama takes place by the revelation and connection of events told obliquely and without fanfare; his destroyed characters are almost entirely absent, save for the fractured shells that are the proof of their devastation… but somehow the world embraced him (beginning right before his eerily sebaldian death). crazy!

i too love him. i think he writes this incredible realism–despite the fact that these are constructed allegories (of? maybe historical processes). ‘all history is biography’ is one aphorism sebald takes up in this collection of emigrants destroyed by world war ii, but his biography isn’t the bulldozing narrative of false causes and effects, of specious psychological motivations. rather sebald’s biographies are documentations of the paradoxically essential detritus of these historical lives.

the photographs i think aren’t as much as they appear to be, just that their interruptions are a somewhat novel reminder of the falsifications of history. conceptually interesting, but i don’t think they’re why we read sebald. we read him for those sentences. how balanced and dignified they are! what beautiful ways his nested images flow into each other! how noble to choose the details that he chooses! how these sentences sag, like Ambros himself, under the depressive, massive weight of history–of existence!–but, again like Ambros, how they are duty-bound to stand as handsomely and as refined as their formidable talents allow.

passages i loved: finding dr selwyn in the garden, counting blades, the description of the tennis court. the idea of the perfect german country school teacher in paul bereyter, how he’d look through the windows, how music brought him to tears–and how he hid them. a sweltering lower east side summer where everyone slept out on the tenement balconies. max ferber’s studio. god, that studio! the heartbreaking description of a german-jewish family going about its high holy days’ rituals, hopelessly ignorant of how history would annihilate this scene in one short lifetime.

here’s sebald on america, more accurate and succinct than de tocqueville: “So I flew once more to New York and drove northwest along Highway 17 the same day, in a hired car, past various sprawling townships which, though some of their names were familiar, all seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. Monroe, Monticello, Middletown, Wurtsboro, Wawarsing, Colchester and Cadosia, Deposit, Delhi, Neversink and Niniveh–I felt as if I and the car I sat in were being guided by remote control through an outsize toyland where the place names had been picked at random by some invisible giant child, from the ruins of another world long since abandoned” (p. 105).

consume.

one of the best, genuinely experimental novels i’ve read in a long time… a daring and ambitious book, successful in its narrative high-wire act, oddly grounded in the current moment of apocalypse-always while circumventing completely the self-aggrandizing disaster movie poses. a consistent and non-sugary feeling of nostalgia, of remembrance of time just and long lost, sustained throughout.

structurally, this book’s the shit. or, to say it differently, it’s got beautiful answers to the novel’s problems of character and plot. why have we spent time playing with mobius strips and contemplating klein bottles? because their strange topologies are not only uncanny in their impossible possibility–but because they are metaphors for (or doorways to) the collapsed multi-possibilities of each particular existence. curran has composed an equivalent in prose, where doubles and ghosts and doppelgangers and recursive loops and variations on themes are all used to profound effect.

it’s a bit unsettling to not know where you are, which happens a fair amount, especially in the beginning, but the book slowly unfolds itself… and then refolds upon itself over and over… great books are worth reading again, but this one almost requires the second time through.

a close relative to two similarly slim, similarly cult-classic-y, dense episodic novels: david ohle’s MOTORMAN and jaimy gordon’s SHAMP OF THE CITY SOLO… but while i love those two books, MOPUS’ style, for better or worse, is less aggressive and confrontational than MOTORMAN’s and less pyrotechnic look-at-me than SHAMP. MOPUS is more straight-up lyrical, with rich and graceful passages describing place and nature. one downside: while in the midst of the book’s whirlwind, the characters’ emotional lives are rendered fairly straightforwardly, more surface-level observations and depictions than the deeper interiors one might expect…

but pretty damn great book. oh, and: after donald harington’s WITH and way better than auster’s silly TIMBUKTU–it’s got the best description of dog-mind i’ve ever.

consume directly from counterpath press.