an excerpt from the manuscript i’m working on — via the latest gimmick.

She said, “If I had a twin, and I’m not saying that I do, I would say we grew up in a simple house, squatting on a hill that overlooked a debased island, one used only as a trash dump.”

“Go on,” I said.

“If this were the case and in no way am I admitting that it is, then I’d say our mother and father were examples of a kind of utopianist, a type of idealist or religious seeker. In short, they were drug addicts and debilitated. My twin and I (should those two referents signify any aspect of reality) raised ourselves eating handouts from the market women and making toys and tools out of the junkyard, which was an ocean that seemed to us then almost as infinite as the real, but was not, no not nearly.”

“I see,” I said.

“You see what?” the captain said.

“No, nothing. Please continue,” I said.

The captain touched the tip of her tongue with her pinkie. I took out a pair of zebra-patterned sunglasses and placed them on top of my head. She said, “If this happened to have happened, and please understand I deny and affirm nada, squat, zilchy-zilch, then it may have occurred that my twin and I began experimenting, playing, fooling around with at first electronic equipment then computational devices and then daisy-chained elements and then nets within and without other nets and then highly personalized and only occasionally brought-forth, never-uttered languages. With this expertise, if one is to believe such a tale, an action I neither endorse nor condemn, my twin and I might have begun reaching out from our trash island to stroke the belly of far away commodity exchanges, purring stock markets, and deeply dreaming arbitrage centers. Twins of this type, in this manner of story, may have taken strange numbers from that ambush of bewildered and half-sentient financial tigers, may have taken unliving or savage or mystical or deformed digits buried inside calculations and data and spreadsheets never actually handled but whose shadowy existences were made necessary by other gravitational events, other more obvious and prosaic numbers closer to the minds of drone bankers. Twins of this sort, though it isn’t in my nature to speculate on their existential possibility, may have corralled these iridescent integers into more worldly shapes so that they, the hypothetical twins, could, should they want to (should they exist to want to), purchase not only the entirety of their own debased island but fleets of archipelagos and pinwheels of peninsulas and infinite itineraries of isthmuses for, in short, these perhaps possible twins were now—had become—bandits of an extreme order and therefore godly rich.”

i keep thinking maybe this next bolaño that i pick up will be somehow minor or irrelevant or merely clever. but it never is! it’s always consistently great and consistently surprising with thin yet deep connecting seams of evil and loss, tiny to large explosions of sex and examples of worldly power… structurally so genius and yet so natural, hopeless wisdom, sad beauty, perfect jokes…

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and parts to remember (spoiler alert if you believe in such) : the first visit to Farewell’s estate (for some reason, reminding of Zuckerman the young writer meeting Lonoff “the great man” in THE GHOST WRITER) (the repeating scenes in all the varying literary worlds); the build-up, the launch to (and the story of) heroes’ hill/helsenberg and the visionary aftermath scene with Farewell; the audacity of depicting the marxist crash course with the junta; the collapsing telescope of history intertwined with Fr Urrutia’s reading of the greeks; the basement of the maría canales salon (the basement of history being a torture chamber) — but he pulls off that rather heavy metaphor …how much he pulls off(!) …the falcons… and overall that our narrator is a right-wing critic, pinochet-collaborating opus dei cleric, haunted by the wizened youth who is himself or bolaño or the other or…

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and here’re bits from a sweet 2001 interview just stumbled upon:

“As to my writing, I don’t know what to say. I suppose it’s realist. I’d like to be a writer of the fantastic, like Philip K. Dick, although as time passes and I get older, Dick seems more and more realist to me. Deep down—and I think you’ll agree with me—the question doesn’t lie in the distinction of realist/fantastic but in language and structures, in ways of seeing.

…The truth is, I don’t believe all that much in writing. Starting with my own. Being a writer is pleasant—no, pleasant isn’t the word—it’s an activity that has its share of amusing moments, but I know of other things that are even more amusing, amusing in the same way that literature is for me. Holding up banks, for example. Or directing movies. Or being a gigolo. Or being a child again and playing on a more or less apocalyptic soccer team. Unfortunately, the child grows up, the bank robber is killed, the director runs out of money, the gigolo gets sick and then there’s no other choice but to write. For me, the word writing is the exact opposite of the word waiting. Instead of waiting, there is writing.

…Yes, plots are a strange matter. I believe, even though there may be many exceptions, that at a certain moment a story chooses you and won’t leave you in peace. Fortunately, that’s not so important—the form, the structure, always belong to you, and without form or structure there’s no book, or at least in most cases that’s what happens. Let’s say the story and the plot arise by chance, that they belong to the realm of chance, that is, chaos, disorder, or to a realm that’s in constant turmoil (some call it apocalyptic). Form, on the other hand, is a choice made through intelligence, cunning and silence, all the weapons used by Ulysses in his battle against death. Form seeks an artifice; the story seeks a precipice. Or to use a metaphor from the Chilean countryside (a bad one, as you’ll see): It’s not that I don’t like precipices, but I prefer to see them from a bridge.”

http://bombsite.com/issues/78/articles/2460

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PS and NB: according to this, “ Urrutia Lacroix is modeled on a real figure, the priest and right-wing literary critic José Miguel Ibañez Langlois.”

two times the amour fou! …a writing of passion and extremes not dissimilar to marguerite duras and georges bataille, karapanou’s RIEN NE VA PLUS tells a break-up story twice, completely shifting not only perspective but wholly changing event and characterization. the effect is more subtle than simply the apprehension of relative truth à la a he-said-she-said story — but rather something is revealed about our own ability (and desire) to be both brutalizer and willing submissive.

there’s something about this type of passion tale that’s inviolable, so evidently pure that it appears impossible to fake. it respects something, keeps something holy so that, despite itself, it maintains its integrity ….and yet karapanou’s novel is also entirely about the deceptions and lens of narrative, about the malleability of truth. it’s the congress of erotic truth with skilled and pointed artifice then that arguably gives this superb book its force.

also its immaculate style (beautifully translated from the greek by karen emmerich), e.g.

–I love you more than anything, Alkiviadis told me, eyeing the boys around him in the café, who returned his gaze.
–Alkis, are you only attracted to boys?
–Yes, but it’s you I love.
My cup of coffee spilled on the lap of the blond boy at the table next to ours. He was wearing green corduroy pants.
–It’s nothing, he said, catching Alkis’s eye.

pick it up from clockroot books or your local library.

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an essay on karapanou, who died in 2008: http://www.criticalflame.org/fiction/0110_fragopoulos.htm

Worn-out woods are invented
We read daylight in brooks.

a true mystic, jarnot writes her poems to some quantum-entangled self light years away. not to us — though we can understand.

her “ditty reel yam” does so dazzle.

the first part (of three) is very jabberwocky, a signifying glossolalia of demented or “touched” or graced neologisms. even there and crystallizing through the rest is a domestic and richly habited circumstance.

O LIBRARY O LAWN O CAROUSEL

O vocages of the dead,
o dead this one
and dead that one,
let me count the ways
that you are dead,
o people I used to know
who are married,
o people I used to know
with their children,
o broken line of
trees and branches
picked at by the squirrels,
o work and sleep
o work and sleep
o lighter fluid,
the cool of grass
in spring,
o forty, o flag, o
fantastic statue
staring back,
o famous historian
with birds upon your head
the sycamores in bud
abound,
the brilliance of the others
who are brillianter than I
o page-turning pigeon,
o felicitous husband,
o tourists, go away,
the somber stares of couples
and the somber glow of ties,
o ties of the living dead,
and the businesses of midtown,
all gone, with felicity,
all gone, with grace,
all gone, in this resistance,
erased encobbled space.

rumor just heard the other day says that the poet is taking a year off the internet. when i heard this all i could think was: GO LISA JARNOT. YOU ARE A HERO. YOU ARE A VERY BRAVE HERO… coincidentally i found this book dedicated to three poets, one i haven’t had the pleasure but two i quite have (here & here).

also i think all books designed by jeff clark is my new reading map.

What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?
I think that people think that I’ve read the Language poets, but I haven’t. Actually Ron Silliman sent me a chapbook recently and I read it and liked it. And I’ve read some Susan Howe and Michael Palmer and Rosmarie Waldrop, but I don’t really think of them as language poets. I’m a sucker for a good story and a lot of emotion. I guess I’m not cool enough for languagepoetry.

from an interview with jarnot here.

here jarnot read, from pennsounds hear.

buy NIGHT SCENES from spd or find it at your library or buy it from the publisher.

two titans of DIY industry, derek of calamari and adam of publishing genius, recently posted about the nature of small press economies here and here. thinking about accounting may be my least favorite activity, but one’s relationship to the means (and costs) of production are — if these accounts are typical examples — never far from a small publisher’s mind:

i guess i’m just TIREd of THinking about all these businessy things | at some point you just have to do what you do naturally & if people buy it great & if they don’t fuck ‘em | as a consumer you can spend all the time in the world contemplating the footprint of every piece of fruit you buy at your local market but at the end of the day what sells it [for repeat customers anyway] & makes it all worth it is the TASTE of the fruit itself | i’d rather concentrate my efforts on making tasty book & art objects that are true to their nature [with no additives or artIFIcial flavors] & not worry about the ugly business of marketing & selling the fruit | maybe that makes me a bad «publisher» i don’t know | this whole circle-jerk business of people promoting & selling themselves or their wares or their «friends» is what really gets me down about this book business | it’d behoove me to buy into all it but honestly i don’t see how most people live with themselves | i’d rather fail gracefully than succeed using such tactics | even measuring «success» by the number of BOOKs sold doesn’t make sense to me | Justin Taylor & his HTMLGiant entourage are imploring everyone to buy his new book so it will make the NY Times Bestseller list | that seems about a silly a reason to buy a book as i can think of | they say it will be good for him & the comMunity of independent presses & writers or some such thing but ¿will it really make us better writers? ¿will it really make for better LITerature? it’s a filthy business this trying to wag the dog with it’s tail.

The rest of derek’s post here.

i tend to agree with him but on the other hand, in terms of us versus them or dichotomies of complicity versus subversion — i’ve always taken this wisdom from creeley to heart:

Something lost in trying to kick against the pricks unless the vision, call it, is complete, and secures itself in its own inviolability. Blake says, I am Socrates. John said that in the act of non-adaptation to the demands of an economic system may lie a commitment to the system’s forms far more destructive an involvement than any simple-minded conformity. But such a long and dull sentence it had to seem.

From Creeley’s THE ISLAND.

for what it’s worth, i think ellipsis may look to getting non-profit status some nearfuture day. at least i keep debating that move… even while i dislike the idea of a non-self-sustaining operation and of trying to find handouts, here’s why i think i’ll do it: i don’t necessarily think acts of self-promotion like taylor’s are inherently base (though i admit it turns me off), but i think it’s a tendency or talent (or gluttony) unrelated to that of writing (or if it is related, it seems more negatively correlated than anything else.)

if you are the shepherd of someone else’s book into the world however, some kind of promotion seems to be part of the responsibility. or not. in any case the ellipsis press advertising and distribution plan — such as it is, what a laugh — has been to put up notice in a minimum number of places. enough so that if you were a seeking reader not of an escapist ride but of literary art  (of which i estimate there are about 1,000-5,000 such seekers extant in the u s of a), you’d be able to find ellipsis titles. determining that minimum placement hasn’t been easy, might be a higher bar than i realized, and could require more funds than i’m willing to fork over (thus the non-profit deliberating).  …which reminds me once again of this quote from Scott Walker formerly of Graywolf (which might seem like self-back-patting but is frankly more like a self-warning) :

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.

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PS from a profile of greywolf here:

[Graywolf Press director and publisher Fiona McCrae] delights in the opportunity to snatch up books a major publisher might ignore and says a Graywolf book can succeed by selling only a few thousand copies. “When we’re not having to pay enormous overhead or debt for an acquisition or that kind of thing, the numbers we need for a book to do well are much smaller. From Faber I learned, rightly or wrongly, that it’s not that books never make money, but that it takes time. Years after it was published, T.S. Eliot’s [Old Possum's Book of Practical] Cats was bringing in significant revenue. I saw the way publishing and art intersect. The market goes for something that’s done well before, but the most difficult thing is something that hasn’t done well before. When you’ve got this nonprofit structure, you can stick more with the art side. If it’s working artistically, we’ll make the numbers work.”

read the rest of the greywolf press profile at: http://www.citypages.com/content/printVersion/628801

samuel delany in a nice interview in the latest LOCUS:

“As my agent … says, this is the worst time for American writing in general, that anyone has ever seen. One of the ‘Serious Young Writers’ showed me a rejection letter from a major publisher that said, ‘Your book is much too well-written for us to publish.’ Those were the words! Literary publishing has changed entirely in the last 25 years.”

“When I talk to people with MFAs who are now working as editors for literary publishers, they say, ‘What we learned in college is a kind of writing that our current bosses do not want to let in the door.’ They want nothing to do with ‘good writing.’ These are places like Random House; Harcourt Brace; Knopf; and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, who are the epitomes of literary publishing in this country, yet they’re willing to say, ‘I’m sorry. That’s not what we’re interested in anymore. We have a couple of slots a year for novels like that.’

“This is not a healthy situation for writing in general. It’s not healthy for science fiction, not healthy for anyone. I think we have five publishers left in New York, and 25 years ago there were 79! So when we’re talking about ‘commercial’ versus ‘art’ publishing, we’re using a leftover vocabulary. We’re still looking at the world through 1955-colored glasses.”

Read more excerpts from the interview here. Full interview in the March 2010 issue.

a story told twenty-eight times (once each for all the days of february), harold abramowitz’s project of memoir as only one memory infinitely repeating and retold is interesting… but even more interesting, more mysterious — and certainly constructing a delicate and beautiful linguistic hermitage — are each chapter’s introductory flourishes of direct address. these seem to situate the text’s ambitions but end up just dancing (which could amount to the same thing) and demonstrate a rare control somewhat reminiscent of blanchot. here are a few examples:

And it is high time I made myself more clear. Forgive me for having been, thus far, obscure. In fact, I did not mean to lie. In fact, I meant to do the opposite. I mean always to tell the truth. It’s just that your line of questioning has been excellent and has allowed me an opportunity to reflect on the past, to remember that there are many different ways of viewing the past. Indeed, I have come to realize, yet again, that certain principles need constant restating in order to be understood. For instance, in violation of the law. Or how certain acts of indecency were, at first, construed. Hence, the page turns. The story continues. If even only in outline. Why, the mere mention of it causes me to shudder. But if one carefully studies the footnotes. And every word was an act, or rather, a movement towards persuasion. Rather put together, don’t you think? But let me put it to you still more clearly… (p. 36)

And the question quickly came to haunt him. The color of his umbrella against the sky. Or, its outline, so to speak. Or even a potion, or a serum, or some other kind of cure. In fact, a fixation on creating something perfect. A perfect day. The memory of which was just out of reach. It was spring and it was raining. The mockingbird sang. A beautiful day, nonetheless. There was an electricity in the air that reminded him of the time before the war. Flags and banners. The platform. Trucks in the streets with loudspeakers. He had managed to get everything he’d wanted then. And there was a buzz in the air. One question remained, however. And things were very different from that point on… (p. 70).

Eventually every mystery is solved. But without narration. And without a specific voice to guide the reader. However, without noise, without air and sound, there is no one left. No one. Eventually he was able to repeat everything he knew. And every irrelevancy was recorded. And the point was that between irrelevancies various truths could be discovered. The mystery would be solved. He had to get back to his house at some point… (p. 76).

buy it from the publisher or from spd or check it out of your local library.

for all CHRONIC CITY’s ambition and for all its frantic counterculture name-dropping and for all its borrowed and original wackiness (a giant tiger, love letters from a marooned astronaut fiancée, psychedelic ceramics) lethem’s latest is at heart a comedy of manners, gently lampooning a fundamentally effete manhattan. it’s also more page six than swiftian, the sting and focus of its satire sadly dulled and clouded as if in a solipsistic, self-entertaining mary jane fog.

which is both strange and unfortunate because the author here certainly seems to be going for more, working hard and well for significance and depth. despite its flaws it also seems in many ways a return to form, so one is left with a puzzling ambivalence. what happens? it’s hard to say… but i kept recalling a review for some wes anderson film — one that noted anderson, for all his lavish and cleverly particular art direction couldn’t help but make an airless movie. something similar happens here. all emotion, messiness, pureness and quickness of heart has been photoshopped out in order to make some cooler, shinier but more dead artifact.

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yoshihiro tatsumi, an innovator and long-heralded master of manga, draws a very moving doorstop (800+ pages) which entertwines his own history with the story of manga’s birth and the post-war development of japan. appreciateive for its many lessons, i was particularly happy to read the above, which was the most convincing argument i’ve seen in a while to say that certain changes in technology wouldn’t necessarily make obsolete older ones…

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PW interview with tatsumi:

PWCW: You owned and ran a used-books store for 18 years. Sometimes people would come looking for you, the founder of gekiga, but you would hide in the back.

YT: There were times when people used to come to the store, asking to meet me, but I would hide in the back. My wife would tell them “He’s not here.” Sometimes, I wouldn’t make it [to the back] in time and they would catch me and ask “Are you Mr. Tatsumi?” and I would tell them “No, that’s my brother.”

PWCW: Why did you want to hide?

YT: I was embarrassed. I liked thinking of myself as a successful manga artist, but running the book shop meant that I wasn’t. I was a very proud cartoonist and the thought of being the “comic book artist who doesn’t make enough money and has to run a bookstore” was embarrassing.