one thing about lists, as sorrentino and warhol and now markus have taught us, is that they need never end (or begin), that they point endlessly.

we trust an incantation—that repetitive chanting—in part because of its self-impoverished language. thus markus’ song, in this moving, incantatory first novel, is not maximal or prolific; he gets away with only talking about fish and mud and brothers and fathers and sons because he talks only of them, doesn’t talk about them for long (though he projects length), and talks only about them in an unadorned (thus almost religious) way. not that this is his only or always method, but the care and focus of the output imbues the work with an unerring integrity.

plus the careful rhythm, perfect as a heartbeat:
“Bob is sitting on his boat.
Bob’s baits are not in the river’s water.
Bob is, at the moment, just sitting there staring out across the river at what I do not know.
Maybe this is Bob thinking.
What is Bob thinking about?
Fish.
His fish.
What if Bob never finds the fish that he is fishing for?
Is this what Bob is thinking?” (p.69)

“Been fishing.
Gone fishing.
Going fishing.
Be back when.
Be back whenever.
Be like Bob.
Go fish.
Fish after dark.
Fish in the dark.
Fish through the dark.
Be alive.
Be like Bob.
Be a fish.
Fish on.
Live fish.
Live to fish.
Bob lives.
In a boat.
On a river.
A man.
A fish.
Bob” (p. 115).

a book, in case it wasn’t clear, about men who fish.

buy directly from dzanc books or find at your local library.

despite all the homages and collaborations (the latter dubbed here her CoLabs) and her obvious interconnected-ness to her poetry community, Brown is a very singular, sonically super-powered poet.

the book charts the poet moving from a natural lyric with a consummate, perfect touch to a far-out experimentalism of sound (in a museme) which then seems to settle into (or temporarily rests, taking on the appearance for the moment of mastered maturity), in daybook, something teasingly wise and emotional.

early you get poems like the “Pledge” :

“I pledge allergy to the flail of the United States of Amigo
And to the reputation for which it stands,
one national park, under godmother, indivisible,
with lice and kabob for allegiance” (p. 36).

and then the defense/offense of her method in “To Jennifer M.,” :

“What’s with these people
boys or girls who tamp down
the lyric impulse, the heart
waiting in line, barefoot &
illegal. Old-fashioned emotion
is relegated to a loud radio
void sometimes, but Frank O’Hara
has faith in you & me even
though or because we’re girls” (p 67).

throughout you’ve also the talent for aphorism, as in:
“If we all looked alike
How would we fall in love?” (p. 120)

the “museme” pieces i don’t love, but it’s hard not to like things like this a little:
“O Oil Loci
I Loll, I Coo,
I coil olio.

Lo, O ill ici,
Cool C.O.
Col. Clio” (p.81)

by book’s end it seems a synthesis between the museme experiments and a natural lyric has been made, e.g. here’s the first bit of “Summery”:
“An undone tropic fell too lush
A canyon climb a bird a thrush
A tea before the ending hitch
The sprite from hell said smoke the bitch

I wandered lonely in the midst
of poets conversing not quite kids
and many lovers ex and all
chasing through the water

Fall

As leaf to leave to lavish to laugh
A gape gaffed taped onto dinner mapped
I batter the dough of those who wert
pommeled to structures suturing work” (p.171)

what she does (at least in part) is fulfill (or re-make or invent entirely independently) o’hara’s notion of personism. of which the great dada baby said:

“has nothing to do with philosophy, it’s all art. It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself)… It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born.”

but in the end brown is making her own way while working the old questions:

“Reinvent love.
Can we reinvent love.
Why reinvent love.
Crush as a way of knowing.
Is it the only way of knowing.
It is a good way of knowing” p.179.

so, yea & verily, i think polyverse crushes, crushed me. do, if yer able, give it a whirl.

_______________________________

click here and scroll down for henry hill’s beautiful impossible-yet-possible portrait of the poet.

the poet Interviewed by C. Bernstein on his show Close Listening

_______________________________

buy it used or find it at your local library.

maybe after you read it should you give it to someone? you should! you should! why not share: demons + zen art therapy + the dialog of your childhood rendered perfect-like.

Barry talking about her work: “We think that we need to have an experience in order to write about it… Actually we’re writing in order to have an experience.”

her meditating monkeys.

fun-fact: lynda barry’s quarter filipina!

fun-fact: she dated ira glass!

Buy it used or find it at a library.

bolano’s characters are some of the most beautiful. they miraculously avoid sentimentality while achieving a too-beautiful-to-speak-of romanticism — though reducing them so is an error, that quality he gets really does tear me up…

his characters remind me of the vow of poverty monastics make. it isn’t a negative vow–at least not for the nun. it is in fact a positive one, one that moves the renunciate closer to the divine. bolano’s poets and losers and mothers are an equal type. and one way to describe his natural, moving, ecstatic and elegiac style is to say that it simultaneously shows the mundane and profoundly human while it recognizes and manifests the divine (or maybe better said: the cosmic).

AMULET is a slowly shifting machine, moving from a narrative built first on a natural and sad and graceful character development into a kind of modernized persephone-in-hell myth then into a creepy symbolic tale (though for what is hard to say) and finally into a long description of an icy, abstract landscape.

i probably didn’t do a good job assigning the sections descriptions–and i missed a few–but there are distinct parts to this novel. and bolano gently leads the reader (and virgil and dante are explicitly mentioned) through these passages, a series of subtle changes. the book is one long song describing the horror story (that the narrator proclaims will not appear to be a horror story, but is, nonetheless) of living through history–in this case latin america’s revolutionary 60s and 70s.

here’s one paragraph, within which bolano seems to convey succinctly and impossibly some of the tumult of that era. a phone call is made asking about arturo (a boy who has gone from mexico to chile in 1973 to ‘take part in the revolution’) (and where he barely escapes execution):

“One night, at a party in Colonia Anzures, propped on my elbows in a sea of tequila, watching a group of friends trying to break open a pinata in the garden, it occurred to me that it was an ideal time to call Arturo’s place. His sister answered the phone. Merry Christmas, I said. Merry Christmas, she replied sleepily. Then she asked where I was. With some friends. What’s with Arturo? He’s coming back to Mexico next month. When exactly? We don’t know. I’d like to go to the airport, I said. Then for a while we said nothing and listened to the party noises coming from the patio. Are you feeling OK, his sister asked. I’m feeling strange. Well that’s normal for you. Not all that normal; most of the time I feel perfectly well. Arturo’s sister was quiet for a bit, then she said that actually she was feeling pretty strange herself. Why’s that? I asked. It was a purely rhetorical question. To tell the truth, both of us had plenty reasons to be feeling strange. I can’t remember what she said in reply. We wished each other a merry Christmas again and hung up.” p.76.

find used or find in a library

the intro namechecks both melville and giorgio de chirico and the book indeed is an odd combination of nautical metaphysics and surrealism’s insidiously creepy emptying out.

an intense mystery story, not unlike the slow build-up of a bela tarr movie. in places it moves at a wild pace like a murder story’s final confrontation or a chase scene; other times it lingers endlessly over each character’s neurotics and guilt and anxiety–everyone in it an active raskolnikov. (and maybe the book is one long crime and punishment minus the denouement–just accusations and guilt.)

i did find myself a little struck by tedium midway through, waiting as the horror story set up itself–but then man, did i get walloped by the ending. it certainly leaves an impression…

and other than this overall, final and somewhat crushing impression, which is weighty and mysteriously achieved, the sentence-by-sentence style is what i think’s also most memorable about it. (even so, it’s a sum greater than its parts.) but here’s but one early example:

“We have witnessed the horrible again and again, a transformation no one could foresee. A healthy body is run over by a truck, crushed. Blood, once secreted, once feeling its way blindly through the body, pulsating in a meshwork of thin streams, spreading the chemically charged hormones and their mysterious functions like a red tree inside man–this blood now runs out shapelesssly in great puddles. And still no one grasps that, in a network of veins, it has form. But even more horrible–the death struggle itself, in which the innumerable organs, which we believe we feel, take part. Terror is stronger in us than delight” (p. 32).

found thankfully through will schofield’s blog.

try to buy used or find at a library

a fearless work of intense integration, a continuous curve over infinite sums of personal and national history, the poem felt to me written with the urgency of the refugee in flight — but sculpted methodically, like a life-sentenced prisoner painstakingly making his case.

“the science of fiction” (p. 107).

what does it mean for the accented speaker to write non-accented english?

…especially, in the case of this book, which is not a narrative of “passing” (though, yes, one of immigration), where there is a smooth and awesomely fluent bricolage of multiple languages (accented english, the queen’s english, mandarin, political commentary, advertising language, bank language, ping pong tournament chatroom language, and certainly not least: physics and number theory language) into one unified language: the language of the poem

–which, in this case (”the world is everything that is the bookcase” is one of many lovely embedded puns), is a long-breath lyric of defiance and alienation and apologia.

from the rigid, exacting sentences of logic propositions and mathematical proofs, the poet makes confession and agony. how does he do it?

“…this rain never ends this ride has not and will never have an arrival this storm is in the room is the room this room is the black body radiating omnidirectionally at such a temperature that the maximum emission is at the wavelength of yellow this yellow room overlooks and pours into the moaning moat of the capital to find the Gaussian curvature of white heads of the decapitated geese the Green’s function and the false projection of the moon” (p. 130).

i don’t know how it is done, but at one point the poet does reveal his ambition:

“I have been secretly investigating the technical viability of and devising methodologies for, in the true literal sense of poetics, direct writing, which is maskless, therefore mask-related-error-free, sequential thus slow in throughput, and targeting only application-specific readers, who are numbered and whose reading patterns behave too erratically to justify the expense of mask production” (p.61).

________________

an interview

and do a search for “wang” in this pdf for the uncommon poet bio

get it from a local library or buy from SPD

here’s how handke describes the leavetaking from his father of a young man about to go off on a long tramp for the summer:

With sagging knees, dangling arms, and gout-gnarled fingers, which at that moment impersonated furious clenched fists, the frail, aging man, much smaller than I, stood by the wayside Cross and shouted at me: ‘All right, go to the dogs like your brother, like our whole family! None of us has ever amounted to anything, and you won’t either. You won’t even get to be a good gambler like me.’ Yet, just then, he had embraced me for the first time in my life…

easily categorized as a bildungsroman–but what is formed is various: a young man on a long searching summer, a family mutilated by war, or even a whole continent–europe–which exists as a flux of languages and landscapes and only intermittently succeeds in being a unified concept.

handke’s REPETITION is murky–and great. the language, while beautiful and careful, attempts deep or multiple refractions–symbols or resonances that are extended and embroidered and almost lost metaphors.

it’s strange and almost tediously complex to describe this book’s instinctive method. handke, for example, writes a long and devastating description of the brother’s orchard, before and after ruin–and you are swept away by, included in, the care and detail of an orchard farmer’s plans as well as the following relentless organic destruction of them, all the while aware of some underlying and alluded-to familial and national heartbreak.

the middle section’s entire plot is not unfairly summarized thus: a guy reads a foreign language dictionary. and handke makes this story, no joke, mesmerizing.

in an admittedly reductive and probably dumb way i began thinking, while reading this, that handke is the bridge between bernhard and sebald. that the monolithic and misanthropic monologue of bernhard, which eventually becomes the sad and careful and even sweet obsession with the lost swirls of history that is sebald, has to go through the step of handke–a rich but darkly-glassed casting about for comprehension of fundamentals like existence and identity.

pretty rad book.

buy used or get it at a library.

[learned here that REPETITION is a re-do of Handke’s first novel THE HORNETS (Die Horniseen, 1966), which is a text Handke’s stated he “wanted to re-write some day.”]

his plots have a comic-book-ness to them — if those comic books are the darkest and wildest of early era vertigo’s or have the zaniness of first comics’ AMERICAN FLAGG and BADGER… plots filled with the boyish wish fulfillment of sex and romantic alienation and isolating intelligence, all suffused with a self consciousness and self-regard about said wish fulfillment. ZEROVILLE’s (seemingly) effortless epic goes on and on, doesn’t let up for a moment, up to and including its spine-shivering finish. and vikar is as complete and unique a character as you’ll find.

erickson, who’s been called a science fiction writer excepting the science, takes us from cbgb’s to the whisky, from franco to reagan, from bogart to belmondo–and hits almost too perfectly, too nonchalantly or exactingly fan-boyishly, every cool reference in between.

this is mean to say, but erickson is so good it is a kind of praise: he’s been posing as an artist for so long the pose has become so natural he might in fact be one.

except. he writes his own judgment into the book. vikar and zazie know what art is: “no movie worth hating or loving has a comfort level.” and they know art is at first necessarily ugly–before it can be recognized as sublime: “Once Cassavetes told me about seeing A Place in the Sun when it came out. He hated it so much that he went back and saw it the next day and then every day for a week, until he realized he loved it.” and vikar knows movies are out of time and in all time: “fuck continuity.” …but erickson, while talking the talk, fails to walk it. ZEROVILLE, epic accomplishment and enormously fun read and rebel sexblast that it is, is very comfortable. and continuous. it fails to risk its coolness for terror and transcendence, fails to risk its storytelling for true mindfuck.

that meanly and pettily said, the book is a thrillride which i swallowed whole–in one dreamy day and night–and one which i loved inhabiting and thinking about. a ride i’m more than happy to have taken. erickson is the funnest of the contenders… a beautiful world if we could all fall short in such a hot-shit way.

erickson on ZEROVILLE: from a bookslut inteview:

It took me four months to write Zeroville, which is very unusual, I’ve never written anything even remotely that quick. I had planned to put off writing it for a year until I had a sabbatical from teaching, but the story was coming so fast, so many scenes filled my head, that I knew I better not wait. I almost feel I can’t taken credit for it — it was like the cosmos were saying, Here, you worked hard on all those other ones, so we’re giving you this one. It’s a freebie.

also on experimental fiction:

You know, I hear the word “experiment” and reach for my revolver. I don’t think of myself as an experimental writer. Experimental writing is about the experiment, and experiments per se usually are for their own sake. My interest is in whatever serves the larger story or characters. The numbers in Zeroville were a kind of Godardian conceit and just came to me, in the same way that Kristin “swimming” through Our Ecstatic Days came to me at the moment she goes down through the hole at the bottom of the lake that’s flooded L.A., and that she believes has come to take her small son from her.

find used or find in your nearest library

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

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