i’ve a story in an anthology put out by mudluscious press, collecting its first year of excellent chapbooks. includes ken baumann, shane jones, jimmy chen, brandi wells, blake butler, nick antosca, sam pink, james chapman, colin bassett, michael kimball, jac jemc, kim chinquee, kim parko, norman lock, randall brown, brian evenson, michael stewart, peter markus, ken sparling, aaron burch, david ohle, matthew savoca, p. h. madore, johannes göransson, charles lennox, ryan call, elizabeth ellen, molly gaudry, kevin wilson, mary hamilton, craig davis, kendra grant malone, lavie tidhar, lily hoang, mark baumer, ben tanzer, krammer abrahams, joshua cohen, c. l. bledsoe, joanna ruocco, josh maday, & michael martone.

pick it up from mlp.

I’ve a bit in the new Sleepingfish — edited by Derek White & Gary Lutz — along with Ryan Call, Anna DeForest, Sasha Fletcher, Nina Shope, Rachel May, David McLendon, The Brothers Goat, Lito Elio Porto, Adam Weinstein, Diane Williams, Dennis Cooper, Elliott Stevens, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Alec Niedenthal, Amelia Gray, Matt Bell, Eduardo Recife, David Ohle, Evelyn Hampton, Émilie Notéris, Ottessa Moshfegh, Cooper Renner, Christine Schutt, M. T. Fallon, Daniel Grandbois, Julie Doxsee, Terese Svoboda, Blake Butler, Stephen Gropp-Hess & Ali Aktan Aşkın.

Buy it from Calamari Press.

i haven’t read stephen elliot (whose memoir-ish latest is the much-praised THE ADDERALL DIARIES) though i just might after stumbling on this essay about why he writes. in it, he discusses MFA programs, publishing, process, and the economics of being a writer:

I realized that to continue as a writer I had to adjust certain expectations. My books have never sold in huge numbers and probably never will. But I can make enough while only writing what I want to write… I’m 37 years old and I can live off $30,000 a year, which is about what I make. It’s not a lot for San Francisco, but it’s enough. I try to do the best work I’m capable of, which is not the same as making the most money.

I’m at an age where my nonwriter friends are buying property, having babies, and moving ahead in their careers, while I live in a rent-controlled apartment with my young hipster roommate. I still go through heavy bouts of depression; it’s my nature. But I wouldn’t choose a different life. Time spent focusing on art is a privilege and a gift. The writing doesn’t make me happy, but it makes me happier, and it makes everything else easier to take.

…It sounds spoiled, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with considering yourself an artist. There are sacrifices as well as payoffs. When I was discussing my new book with two married writers, they kept asking how I could work without an advance. I didn’t see how they could work with one. They said they needed a certain amount of money and that they had children. They made their children sound like a tremendous burden, and I felt they were using the word need when they should have said want. There’s nothing wrong with prioritizing something higher than writing. The husband has sold a lot more books than I do and has plenty more money than I have, but being a writer seems to make him unhappy. One day, when he was telling me how easy I have it and about the kind of advance he needed, I snapped. I said his book wasn’t worth more than my book just because he has kids. We’re lucky to be writers. Nobody owes us anything.

Read the rest at The Rumpus at: http://therumpus.net/2009/08/why-i-write-2/

one definition of a novel, say, is that which honestly tries to organize the chaos of thought into a semi-satisfactory, semi-consistent semantic machine of about eighty-thousand words. this definition might help us understand a book that’s mainly digressive in structure or one that fails to draw a moral conclusion.

only the simple and the pedantic want an art that purports to teach you something. or, as robert creeley said it: “Had I lived some years ago, I think I would have been a moralist, ie, one who lays down, so to speak, rules of behavior with no small amount of self-satisfaction. But the writer isn’t allowed that function anymore, or no man can take the job on very happily, being aware (as he must be) of what precisely that will make him.”

a big [sic] to the genderizing, but you get the point.

one is drawn to susan daitch’s magnificent novel because a reader can feel, can sense, the writer thinking as she writes. both to the reader and herself, the author is unpredictable and surprising. she is gratifyingly clever; she is free.

i think, because of this freedom, the book is capable of mysterious and beautiful passages that are wonderfully unanchored and yet, which in accretion, create a trusted, consistent experience… passages like the following which describes a uniquely modern state of desire, a ghost of love — a momentary and unpassionate desire:

She looked at a photograph of an attractive young man, not an advertisement, but almost. It was something passed by quickly, flipping through the pages of a book or a magazine. Laurel was drawn to the picture, although she didn’t turn back to it. She put the volume down and left the store. Even if the man himself stood near her in the store, she would have left. That kind of pursuit, whether she was its object or the pursuer, seemed unfathomable to her. It was something she was no longer capable of, she’d lost the language. As engaging or as easy as he or any random person looked, she knew she’d only feel embarrassed about it later (200).

i re-read this book after about fifteen years and i think it feels even fresher than when i first came to it… susan daitch’s fantastic novel tells the tale of julie greene and her boyfriend, eamonn, a weegee-admiring photographer. julie is a colorist, one who colors comic book panels for a living — specifically a comic book about electra, a heroine who can make duplicates of herself.

electra’s doubles, the comic book industry, eamonn’s photography — all allow a focused but continued and varied meditation on the artifice of representation, its constantly shifting mimetic, mythic and mystic functions. this meditation meanders and digresses while slyly and courageously never coming to a conclusion.

late in the book, Daitch writes:

Electra’s world had turned into a house of mirrors. She reflected or mimicked every situation she found herself in. I considered this condition a kind of disease, one which had lain dormant for years: she’d probably caught it in space. The first symptoms were awkward polyphonic parrotings of other people. Residents of Allen Street avoided Electra because she copied them involuntarily. She would instantly look and sound like each random passerby in turn. Her reflexivity reached such proportions that Electra was, for all intents and purposes, invisible. She had no control over herself. People saw themselves in her, which was confusing to both parties, or she blended in with buildings. It was an anti-solipsistic condition, and it explained why Eamonn’s photographs of her were blank. In the early stages of the disease, the camera was more sensitive to invisibility and mimicry than the naked eye (212).

daitch’s style is never ostentatious, almost modest. and yet, using subtle juxtapositions and transitions, this work creates all kinds of new holes of indeterminacy, weird and new thoughts.

an opposing but related definition to the above for the novel might nonetheless also be true: the novel as a totem — a symbol to ourselves that the ineffable unfolding of the world cannot (and should not) be made into a reductive narrative. the novel then can only exist as a fractal, unresolvable piece of the whole. THE COLORIST is thus a brave type of paradoxical work — a powerful and almost impossible novel that attempts to organize the unknowable and yet also one that refuses to do so.

buy it used or find it at your local library.

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a nice interview with daitch by KCRW’s silverblatt (which takes place in 1990 and has great background from daitch — and also includes a historical bit …as silverblatt also interviews knopf editor robin desser, then an editor at vintage contemporaries, who speaks, it’s almost quaint, about the reasons a book would come out as a “paperback original”) :

http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw900724susan_daitch

BEST OF 2009

This book, ostensibly about a group of women missing one of their own, is delightfully strange, both in the way the plot progresses and the way Ruocco plays with language…

congratulations to joanna ruocco for penning this stunning debut. on only its fourth outing, a nice feather too in the cap for Ellipsis Press. won’t you consider picking up a copy of our first four titles at a special year-end sale?

…

At a time like ours, in which mechanical skill has attained unsuspected perfection, the most famous works may be heard as easily as one may drink a glass of beer… Should we not fear this domestication of sound, this magic that anyone can bring from a disc at his will. Will it not bring to waste the mysterious force of an art which one might have thought indestructible.

Written under the subtitle: ON REMOVING THE MYSTIQUE OF MUSIC

most days i so agree with claude’s pov, but ah well… my new favorite album only uses synth drums… que sera sera:

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not that you should care about the motivations of your humble correspondent, but breaking once the vow to myself never to blog about movies seems to have opened the floodgates as i now feel a sick need to write about arnaud desplechin. just re-watched his enormous KINGS AND QUEEN — the DVD of which has some incredible extras, including interviews with desplechin and others with the films’ incredible actors.

in the desplechin interview we learn one method that makes possible the density and overflowing of theme and idea and joke in the movie. desplechin had been reading truffaut who wrote to his scriptwriter once, “How can you imagine I will make a scene of four minutes to say one idea?” desplechin decided to make a motto (and one-up) his idol, by placing above his writing desk the following: “Each minute we have to be sure that we show five different ideas.”

the interview also reveals desplechin’s frankly weird idea of the specific possibility of cinema–one it turns out related to a very gendered idea of the psychology of romance. it came out of his re-watching VERTIGO.

I thought I was not a fan of VERTIGO. I thought that I preferred MARNIE. But when I saw the real film that Hitchcock wanted to make, I was crying and crying and crying… I thought the film was saying something, an awful truth about manhood, which would be that each time you love a woman, there is another hidden woman who died before, and that you haven’t been able to stop that. … It doesn’t have to be a particular woman, but there is this idea that as soon as you start your love life, there is a woman who died before and that you will mourn all your life. And all the women you will meet, they will be pale copies of this dead woman. …And I think cinema [in particular] …is able to describe that sort of feeling …which is typically …bizarre…quite abstract and concrete… I think that on the opposite side for a woman… I think that each woman has killed a man before the man she is loving now.

i’m really not sure about all of that. maybe it’s important, maybe not — but what a film! overspilling with gesture and idea and tragedy. totally artificial and yet utterly connecting with human experience. a completely new type of extraordinary epic built out of artificially and continuously contradicting characters’ psychologies.

saw sokurov’s latest, THE SUN, recently — and didn’t care for it so much… the super-controlled palette and dim lighting effects couldn’t win me over past the overused stillness and the poor casting. the latter had the very unfortunate effect of ruining the movie’s most important scene: a confrontation between emperor hirohito and general macarthur shortly after japan’s surrender. (hirohito was tic-ishly great, but the guy playing macarthur…)

however, seeing it did remind me of a movie i saw not so long ago, which was a very powerful comment on war and peace and on one’s ability to comprehend the abstract conduct of nations. it was sokurov’s ALEXANDRA, featuring the consummate babushka galina vishnevskaya (opera singer and rostropovich’s widow). a mother amidst the soldiers in an unnamed battleground, an enormous amount of commentary and tragedy is gracefully churned up by that seemingly simple juxtaposition.

one maybe for your queue.

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the amazing “joe” shows how we delight in light in his new short PHANTOMS OF NABUA here. turn down the lights to see it in full glory. thanks to paolo javier for showing it to me. not so long ago i was lucky to catch a rare screening of his campy spectacle THE ADVENTURE OF IRON PUSSY. if you’ve caught the mystical and beautiful SYNDROMES & A CENTURY you should try to seek this one out for, um, contrast.

his shorts in general are exacting compositions even while they showcase a very impish, light sense of humor. his ANTHEM is a glorious tour of a gymnasium, the best game of around-the-world you’ve ever.

the superhero in his own words:

three things i liked from the past year, posted at Big Other:

http://bigother.com/2009/12/15/eugene-lims-best-of-2009/