beckett and bernhard may be the basis of “Bee,” the writer whose suicide is the vacuum at the center of this novel. as such it makes sense that under the layer of gossipy bedswapping tales by intelligentsia and almost crudely titillating descriptions of common breakdowns and various life botchings is the novel’s real content–our natural state of depravity which makes such crudeness and vacuity our continued mode of being.

the book is either great because it shows how literature redeems the banality of our evil world or because it honestly depicts how our great arts are debased and fundamentally banal. a dark choice.

the articulation of the former by the book’s sometimes narrator: “But I believe in writing–nothing else; just writing. Man may live like a worm, but he writes like a god. There was a time when that secret was known, but now it has been forgotten; the world is composed of disintegrating fragments, an incoherent dark chaos, sustained by writing alone. If you have a concept of the world, if you have not yet forgotten all that has happened, that you have a world at all, it is writing that has created that for you, and ceaselessly goes on creating it” (97).

and while the book is about the impossibility of existence after auschwitz, the parts that affected me most were strangely those about the comparably negligibly-weighted topic of the literary life. but i think that’s the truth and greatness of keretsz: to speak unsentimentally and defiantly crudely. a crudeness that is only possible due to an elemental refinement, a rare ability to look sincerely at our limits.

here’s a long passage, capturing both the pleasures of literary life as well as the self-awareness of its vanity and foolishness:

“The fact is that in my nineteenth or twentieth year…a book came into my hands… I knew about the existence of this book only from other books, in the way that an astronomer infers the existence of an unknown celestial body from the motion of other planets; yet in those days, the era of undiscoverable reasons, it was not possible to get hold of it for some undiscoverable reason. I happened to be grinding through university at the time; though I did not have much money, I staked it all on the venture, mobilizing antiquarian booksellers, denying myself meals in order to acquire an old edition. I then read the bulky volume in less than three days, sitting on a bench in the public garden of a city square, as spring was in the air outside while a constant, depressing gloom reigned within my sublet room. I recall to this day the adventures of the imagination that I lived through at the time while I read in the book that the Ninth Symphony had been withdrawn. I felt privileged, like someone who had become privy to a secret reserved for few; like someone who had been suddenly awakened in order to have the world’s irredeemable condition revealed to him, all at once, in the blinding light of a judgement.

Still, I don’t think it was that book which carried me into my fateful career. I finished reading it; then, like all the others, it gradually died down within me under the dense, soft layers of my subsequent reading matter…

[A] person becomes a literary editor, and later a publisher’s reader, our of error in the first place. In any event, literature is the trap that captures him. To be more precise, reading: reading as a narcotic which pleasantly blurs the merciless outlines of the life that holds sway over us” (38-9).

johannah and i participated on an e-panel with several other new presses–organized by the mightily productive dan wickett of DZANC books. participants included:

Kathleen M. Rooney and Abigail Beckel – Rose Metal Press
Aaron Burch and Elizabeth Ellen – Short Flight/Long Drive Books, a division of Hobart
Johannah Rodgers and Eugene Lim – Ellipsis Press
Aaron Petrovich and Alex Rose – Hotel St. George Press
Giancarlo Di Trapano – Tyrant Books
Victoria Blake – Underland Press
Peter Cole – Keyhole Books

i get quoted from it on the LATIMES bookblog:

Why found an independent press? And why do it now? Ellipsis Press’ Eugene Lim has an answer:

I’d like to think an indie movement is going on. Twelve years ago there was an issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, titled “The Future of Fiction,” and edited by none other than David Foster Wallace. In it, there’s a hilarious and dead-on piece by Dalkey head John O’Brien, which stated among other things that the “end of literary books in commercial publishing is a historical inevitability.” And so it has come to pass. The bigger houses will cease (have ceased!) to publish literary fiction. It is not profitable for them to market and produce a title that will sell to 5000 people (even if Rick Moody strong-arms a National Book Award for them). S’okay though. The old publishing joke goes, How do you make a small fortune in publishing? Answer: Start with a large one. And then you and your crony get to laugh bitterly together. But it’s the wrong question. A small and lively (and one hopes resurging) group of people care about the novel as art. And with the new methods of production and distribution, it’s getting easier for writers to connect with readers.

here’s the panel in its entirety: http://emergingwriters.typepad.com/emerging_writers_network/2008/09/e-panel-publish.html

skimming blogs, i came face to face with the following verities:

Starting a small publishing company takes an angel’s combination of idealism, passion, unreasonableness, innocence, naiveté and blind obedience to an inner voice telling you to go heart- and head-long into something utterly likely to fail. It would in fact be a kindness if the venture failed, because success requires so much time and intellectual and emotional energy that it squeezes to death every last healthy impulse you had to start with.

& elsewhere:

Back in 1979/80 I remember talking with the publisher of Alfred A. Knopf after CORRECTION by Thomas Bernhard had been published. This guy reported to me that to date they had sold a combined grand total of around a thousand copies of all three Bernhard books they had published, GARGOYLES, THE LIME WORKS AND CORRECTIONS.

which reminded me of this from i believe the last, or one of the last, published stories of gilbert sorrentino:

But this was all he knew how to do. He wasn’t much good for anything else, and what he did know how to do — even when, he smiled ruefully — even when he knew how to do it, proved nothing, changed nothing, and spoke to about as many people as one could fit into a small movie theater.

but all that simply reiterating what, in 1941, edward dahlberg wrote in CAN THESE BONES LIVE:

“There has been no more clinkered land for the artist to live in than America. All artists, everywhere, are pariahs. However, some counties gravel them the more, and so hinder their fates that their lives, like the three throats of Cerberus, are brutishly peeled…”

dahlberg was talking about melville.

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and… later that same day i come across this nice dose of schadenfreude for the trades–but it too is bitter tasting. E.g. Roth might’ve been optimistic:

“Fifteen years ago, Philip Roth guessed there were at most 120,000 serious American readers—those who read every night—and that the number was dropping by half every decade.”

[but what that article doesn’t mention in its death-of-publishing prognosticating, is the renaissance of small presses, doing all the important work once done by the james laughlin’s and the barney rosset’s of yester-millennium. literary history of the 21st century probably will mention knopf and random house less, and maybe even FSG less, than that of the independents–both the more “established” like dalkey, fc2, green integer, and soft skull and the new and scrappy like calamari, dzanc, les figues, starcherone and clear cut.] [that is: publishing is dead; long live publishing; et cetera.]

a fascinating but subtly disappointing book, ann quin’s THREE is a formally radical novel. arguably more daring in form than her contemporary b. s. johnson–with whom she’s often lumped partly because they committed suicide in the same year–she’s here also more cagey and unfortunately more predictable.

the style innovations are daring. the book consists of several modes: a line-breaking poem-like stream of consciousness; a fast-cutting, alternating POV style that reminded me of donald breckenridge’s 6/2/95; and, reminiscent of both sarraute and gaddis, a skillful use of dialogue alone to reveal character.

and yet this book, which focuses on the bizarre love triangle of one airless bourgeois marriage and an interloping free-spirit femme fatale, somehow rang hollow. maybe because it was unclear how much of it was a critique of the malaise of middle-class marriage and how much of it was a self-pitying confessional narrative from that state. or: somehow it’s central content–which did seem central, not auxiliary–crippled the serious play of its language games. so i was left with a dull feeling, a disappointment at unfulfilled potential.

course i could be wrong. and the destabilized, unreliable narrative and narrators might have hidden reward which alluded me. plan to try her BERG soon down the line. despite what disappointed–another review called its style a “muted lyricism”–it’s definitely worth checking out.

a good overview of her work.

and, from an interview quoted here:

“Form interests me, and the merging of content and form. I want to get away from the traditional form. . . . I write straight onto my typewriter, one thousand words an hour but half will in the end be cut out. When I write the first creating parts of my book I can go on for three hours without a stop. When revising I can work up to seven hours, with breaks.”

buy from dalkey or find at your local library.

maybe not the bernhard book to start with, but very useful to see the young old master’s development–and the early, shocking bang of his talent.

AMRAS–originally published in 1963–shows the large ambitions of his theme and iconoclasm are already in place, driving the writing. this one literally breaks down. it begins coherently though darkly with the assessment by the sons of a family’s partially failed suicide pact (the parents were successful) and then becomes beautifully and infuriatingly fragmented. as if to document the approach to death or insanity…  if anything this earlier novella is more sincerely nihilistic than the later bernhard in that when bernhard arrives at his later method, at least there’s the minimal solace of continuous (albeit repetitive) form. and the dark jokes seem to have punchlines and don’t just break off into menacing silence like they do here. on the other hand, the devastation seems more complete and impressive in the (later) long, relentless, incantatory voice without the–in comparison–cheaper gimmickry of the fragmentation here.

on its structural self-decimation, brian evenson’s excellent, brief intro has this particularly good insight:
“[C]ollapsing into fragmentation… [AMRAS] opts for the modernist solution of using a formal collapse. GARGOYLES, on the other hand, offers a voice that tears itself apart from within while leaving the edifice of monologue intact. We have the sense that, like Becket’s Unnamable, Prince Sarau [in GARGOYLES] is probably only getting started” (ix).

PLAYING WATTEN i think is the most memorable of the three, maybe only because it has the most concrete central metaphor: four citizens travel to an inn–which is tucked into a treacherously disorienting wood–in order to play a card game (the eponymous WATTEN). dense, repetitive (and here, the repetition is boring in a way the later bernhard somehow manages to avoid), but also beautiful and (already) devastating. an early–maybe the first?–version of his unparagraphed style.

WALKING is at times (too) straight-forwardly didactic, so that bernhard’s fiction gets almost turgid (at least for me) carrying the freight of its philosophical rhetoric. but if it’s didactic, it’s also ambitious, marching uninhibitedly through its themes: the misery of existence; the baseness of the (austrian) state; madness; language, thinking itself.
the translation throughout seems incredible, almost transparent. WALKING in particular, with its dependence on abstractions and its recursive structures, would seem mind-bogglingly difficult to translate.

find used or find at your local library

though dubbed elsewhere the first lynchian novel, MARSUPIAL reminded me most often of cronenberg’s NAKED LUNCH, where an unflappable main character nods straight-faced through a bizarre and constantly morphing scenery. witty and — due to its sense of nostalgia for a just-left dream or a long-left city — oddly melancholic. a relatively simple story line anchors the book: a young man comes to Paris to work as a stand-in for his actor-brother during an arty-ish B-movie shoot. on top of that simple narrative’s foundation is built a complex, shifting and dreamy mis-en-scene perhaps as obsessively art-directed as one by richard foreman. white’s repeating concerns include: crayfish biomorphism of all kinds, lacanian fascination/alienation from our own bodies, mothers, brothers, sibling rivalry, paranoia, and the french. an obsessively rendered dreamworld that leaves a long-lingering aftertaste of heartache, MARSUPIAL is a fascinating read.

should be said too: derek white, the DIY master who runs calamari press, has done himself one better on this book’s design, which is graced with a beautifully gritty cover (and from which, his name is defiantly absent) and which also has his trademark collages interspersed throughout.

buy it from calamari press

after getting through this drug-blurred, blood-oily, post-sex sense-deracinating–i decided that DC is not so much a sadist or even really, fundamentally, a provocateur. that that’s not his primary impulse, but rather it’s indeed some kind of exploration of the ecstatic–in all its forms. and the ecstasy-explorer is searching out taboo and murder and drug-experience not out of a negative motivation, not for rage or violence against society, but much more basically out of a movement toward the transcendent.

that’s prolly too reductively dichotomous… another way: i wouldn’t think of his project as wish-fulfillment and certainly utopian isn’t the first adjective that crosses the mind–but that’s just what the DC character claims: “Then I remember what I do when I’m not stoned. You know, write novels that are essentially long, involved wishes for offbeat utopian worlds that I can’t realistically enter” (65), which might in fact be one way to conceptualize this novel of kiddie-porn snuff films and HIV-infected rent boys and rape of all kinds.

…part of how GUIDE functions as (a kind of) wish fulfillment fiction is by maintaining an aura of non-fiction. (the fantasy is best for the narrator when it seems real / the fantasy is possible for the narrator because it isn’t real.) and one very impressive thing about GUIDE is how its subtle structure effectively conflates reportage with fiction. as well, almost lost due to the virtuosic handling of its extreme materials is the sensitivity cooper has for tone-shifts, his beautifully efficient characterization, and the ability for just setting up and moving us almost breezily through his complicated apartment-scapes.

should say too: the feeling while reading it is pretty intense. “edgy” and “risky” seem too corporatized a language to describe it. i finished it maybe twenty minutes ago, and i still feel like it’s a little hard to breathe. a gut-punch of a book.

from this interview:

Q: How did you protect the kids?
DC: Well, I used my late, beloved friend George Miles as the model for all the major young male characters in the cycle because he’s the one person I would have protected at all costs. I think the way this protection panned out is that when most of the violence happens, the story becomes unrealistic and fantasy-like, as though it might or might not really be happening. Also, the young characters are always the most sympathetic. So I didn’t manage to completely protect them, but the books (and I hope my readers) always care about them.

and on method:

Q: Kathy Acker published first drafts of things, wrote at the point of orgasm in order to hit on something true, but you polish and refine. Would you ever go down the automatic, exquisite corpse sort of route?

DC: It wouldn’t work, because my first drafts are crap for the most part. I try to let myself go all out at first, then go back and rip apart what I’ve written then rebuild it, then shred it again, and so on. My real voice isn’t exact or careful at all, and I spend much, much more time refining my prose than writing it. On rare occasions, a piece will come out nearly perfect the first time, but almost never.

find it at a library or find it used

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.