the latest book from ellipsis press is by alan davies. more info plus an excerpt here.

ODES & fragments by Alan Davies presents a substantial collection of recent poetry, including odes and fragments as well as modes above and beyond. Ranging in length from a few words to twenty-plus pages, these poems vary widely, exploring love and fellowship, war and adversity, beginnings and endings (and the ongoing), instances of thought, feelings that flutter then fail, moments of apprehension (both senses), and our confrontation with the irretrievable.

Praise for Alan Davies

The kind of skill with handling language that can’t be rushed or faked, and that I only hear in the work of writers who have really practiced for a long time.
—Craig Dworkin

Alan Davies’s poems have such great sound and are open and situated and fearless in their response to what happens internally and in the big often ugly outside. A startling writer and very precise on whatever path he sets for himself.
—Carla Harryman

Davies hasn’t been publishing a lot in recent years & to see this much work at once, this much first-rate work, is completely bracing. He hasn’t lost a step & is every bit as uncompromising as ever. This actually can make Davies a difficult read at times, but it never is complexity just for the sake of showing off. He continues to be the Diogenes of the New York langpo scene.
—Ron Silliman

Davies’s belief in radical self-reflexivity has led him, in the course of his writing career, from a virtually opaque formalism to a continuity of text and life-world that is anything but aesthetic construction.
—Barrett Watten

[Davies] has suggested to me ways of thinking about connective possibility, ways through which ‘no one is absent anymore’…. how writing and reading matters, not just for its comforts or its eloquent aesthetics, but for the way it can take us through comfort and aesthetics into relations with others, for the way it can model thinking.
— Juliana Spahr

ALAN DAVIES IS THE ONLY LANGUAGE POET WHO HAS EVER HAD SEX. The rest of them are virgins, which, I know, is weird — I don’t know how to explain it, it’s just a historical fact. But because of this, Davies’s work stands out as addressing an aspect of life, of reality, and of vitality that other writers might not have had the experience to write about.
—Steve Zultanski 

read an excerpt here.

buy it directly from ellipsis press or through spd or amazon.

Norman Lock writes about The Strangers in the latest issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction:

To place the storytelling act at the center of a novel is a risky strategy: the stories must fascinate. Lim’s stories do (except those few that he deliberately effaces as if to give a graphic representation of self-erasure). They have the exoticism, emotional authenticity, and intellectual depth to ensure that the reader will be enthralled. Lim’s knowledge of economic theory, political science, art history and practice, the minutiae and mechanisms of businesses large and small is sweeping. His verbal constructions exhibit lyrical and playful strains, indignation and sensuality, and a genuinely hip, idiomatic flair. Lim’s ambition to relate “grand narratives”—to tessellate them within a mysterious, comprehensive verbal construction and, in so doing, to recreate in his fictional universe the entire world and its archetypical figures—makes his novel an uncommon artifact. The Strangers in its complex self-referential, multi-layered structure, anecdotal mass, and restless inventiveness demands and rewards more than one reading.

Read the whole review here.

convincing and moving portrayals of quiet, selfless valor told with a great textured, muscular writing:

“Towns flattened for miles, those civilians unable to flee living as troglodytes in cellars half-flooded with rain and sewage, making hopscotch forays to fund crusts or cabbage leaves in the rubbled gutters” (p. 33).

this novel on the surface is occupied primarily with two physical activities: being a sniper (during the second world war) and racing bicycles. but rose’s beautifully rendered description of these two (at times sinister) occupations make us touch our animal side — and by that we’re uncannily opened up to profound moral and philosophical quandaries.

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here’s an interview revealing, among other interesting bits, a sebald-related origin story.

pick it up at the library or through the publisher.

 over at

i’m today’s ditty provider
with one called
OLD MAN YELLS AT CLOUD.

different things get you: some sections romantic and conceptually smart, others filled with a carefully self-doubting and insightful political analysis. but the aspect that i most admired was an honesty and willingness for risk that’s hard to pinpoint but which was very moving.

____________________

get it from the library or order from amazon

I reviewed five fiction titles for the latest (and sadly, the last) issue of Harp & Altar: NONE OF THIS IS REAL by Miranda Mellis; A BREATH OF LIFE by Clarice Lispector; LEAVE ME ALONE by Murong Xuecun; SCARS by Juan José Saer; and GEORGE ANDERSON by Peter Dimock.

“None of This Is Real… manages to speak precisely to that helplessness and guilt permeating the simultaneity of the climate-changed, apocalypse-always zeitgeist and the rapturous technowonderful singularity as advertised on your hand-holding device.”

Read the reviews here.

__________________________________

This great issue of Harp & Altar also has: poetry and fiction by Tom Andes, Jessica Baran, Leopoldine Core, Ian Dreiblatt, Matthew Klane, Linnea Ogden, Jennifer Pilch, Michael Rerick, Jason Snyder, Donna Stonecipher, Sally Van Doren, and Tom Whalen; Jesse Lichtenstein on The Arcadia Project; Bianca Stone on Farrah Field; Michael Newton’s gallery reviews; and art by Adam Stolorow.

An interview I did with Peter Dimock appears in the latest issue of Bookslut.

Peter Dimock’s latest novel George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time is written as a letter to the former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — a lawyer who drafted and signed one of the Bush era’s infamous Torture Memos. While it’s true that a handful of soldiers who participated in the beatings, rape, vicious strappado hangings, and other savage abuses at Abu Ghraib were charged and convicted, the masterminds of the legal reasoning that allowed the torture, now euphemistically branded as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” of prisoners-of-war have never been held accountable.

Dimock’s slim fiction rages against this and a host of state sins while also deftly functioning as a sorrowful, secular confession for an entitled race and class. It does this in an altogether unique style, which one reviewer described as coming from a “speaker who may be in some kind of rapture, or who is ironic, or who is mad, or who is all three.” I met the author, a long-serving editor in the New York publishing world, at a restaurant near his home in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.

Both of your books are stylistic gambles. The purpose and direction of that style is not immediately recognizable. We don’t know why you’re making these stylistic choices. In your author’s note you write that the success of your ambition will “rest upon the reader’s response to [your] invention of a form… no matter how estranged or estranging the results may seem at first.” While writing, how aware are you of your gamble? Did it seem like a gamble? And how did you reconcile yourself to this risk?

My experience is the history I have lived through. I was born in 1950. And so I was eighteen in 1968. That’s a moment. I was draftable at the height of the Vietnam War. So I have a particular relationship to that time, like everyone who lived through that period. But I remember being overwhelmed — I still am — by the sense that we don’t have a language adequate to the history we’re actually living. I was brought up and trained — I had all the best education and the best positions from which to assume an intellectual role either as an academic or a literary critic — but always felt I never could actually assume any such role in good faith. I feel strongly that — with the exception of contemporary literature, I’m thinking of Morrison, Marquez, Pynchon, and Bishop — we have not as a culture yet truly grappled with the inadequacy of the language we have available to us for the history we are living. I think we are crippled by this lack of a language.

Read the whole interview here:

http://www.bookslut.com/features/2013_03_019928.php

http://apexart.org/events/double-take-4.php

I’ll be reading on Tuesday, March 5th with John Yau, Rick Moody, Tim Davis, Charles Bernstein and Elizabeth Willis. Please come!

 

Double Take IV

Tuesday, March 5: 7 pm

Three pairs of authors write original pieces about shared experiences.

organized by
Albert Mobilio

Featuring:
Rick Moody & Tim Davis on the dinner where they met.
John Yau & Eugene Lim on remembering the Robert Creeley memorial.
Charles Bernstein & Elizabeth Willis on the obvious.

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Watch videos from the previous Double Take program.

Charles Bernstein‘s new collection of poems, Recalculating, will be out this Spring from the University of Chicago Press, which also published hisAttack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tim Davis is an artist, writer, and musician. His photographs are in the collections of the Metropolitan, Whitney, Guggenheim, Walker, Hirshhorn, Brooklyn, Baltimore, and many other museums. He is the author of My Life in Policits (Aperture), and The New Antiquity (Damiani). Having written song lyrics for years for the band Cuddle Magic, he is currently at work on his first album of original songs, which will be accompanied by a set of music videos entitled “It’s OK to Hate Yourself.” He teaches Photography at Bard College.

Eugene Lim is an editor at small for Harp & Altar and is founder and managing editor of Ellipsis Press. His fiction has appeared in Fence, The Denver Quarterly, EXPLORINGFictions, The Brooklyn Rail, sleepingfish, No Colony and elsewhere. His first novel, Fog & Car, was named a finalist in Blatt Magazine’s 2007 Novel of Novels competition. His second novel The Strangers is forthcoming from Black Square Editions. He works as a librarian in a high school and lives in Queens, NY.

Rick Moody is the author of five novels–including The Ice Story and, most recently, The Four Fingers of Death—three collections of stories, a memoir entitled The Black Veil, and, most recently, a collection of essays On Celestial Music. He is a music columnist at The Rumpus, and he also plays in and writes songs for The Wingdale Community Singers. He teaches at NYU and Yale.

John Yau is an American poet and critic who lives in New York City. He received his B.A. from Bard College in 1972 and his M.F.A. from Brooklyn College in 1978. He has published over 50 books of poetry, artists’ books, fiction, and art criticism. Yau has received awards and grants from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation, the Academy of American Poets (Lavan Award), The American Poetry Review (Jerome Shestack Award), the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the General Electric Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Elizabeth Willis‘s most recent book, Address (Wesleyan, 2011), won the PEN New England Prize for Poetry and is just out in paperback. Her other books of poetry include Meteoric Flowers, Turneresque, and The Human Abstract. She is a 2012-13 Guggenheim fellow. She teaches at Wesleyan University.

Albert Mobilio is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and the National Book Critics Circle award for reviewing. His work has appeared in Harper’s,Black Clock, Bomb, Cabinet, Open City, and Tin House. Books of poetry include Bendable Siege, The Geographics, Me with Animal Towering, andTouch Wood. He is an assistant professor of literary studies at the New School’s Eugene Lang College and is an editor of Bookforum.

Please join us.
All events are free and open to the public.

apexart‘s exhibitions and public programs are supported in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Greenwich Collection Ltd., The William Talbott Hillman Foundation, Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

apexart
291 Church Street, NYC, 10013
t. 212 431 5270
www.apexart.org

 

Directions: A, C, E, N, R, W, Q, J, M, Z, 6 to Canal or 1 to Franklin.

Take the test!

Calling all PhD students, English professors, the slackjawed, public-library-lurkers, the learned and the unlearned: here’s a high-stakes entrance examination for your exexexmatriculation. Take “The Exam” by Tom Whalen in the Brooklyn Rail.

In Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” regarding the comparison of the rolling of the balls in the game of nine-pins to “rumbling peals of thunder,” why is it impossible to state definitively which comes first, the nine-pins or nature?  Offer three refutations to Sedgwick’s (“homosexual panic”) and Morrison’s (Afro-centric) remarks on “The Beast in the Jungle.”  How often did your parent(s), guardian(s), institution(s) read aloud to you before the age of five? three? one?  On a scale of one to ten, with one being “calm” and ten “psychotic,” how nervous are you?  Do you see the exam as a challenge or a threat, considering that if you do not pass, you will not be allowed to hold a teaching position in this country?  Compare your anxiety to that of two of the following: Ichabod Crane, Young Goodman Brown, the narrator of “The Black Cat.”  Hurry.  The exam has barely begun, and already you’re falling behind.  Perhaps the consequences of your failing are even more severe than you’ve imagined.

Read the rest of “The Exam” in

 .     .    .   

Tom Whalen’s novel THE PRESIDENT IN HER TOWERS is available now directly from Ellipsis Press, from Small Press Distribution, and from Amazon.

Whalen will read at Unnameable bookstore on Thursday March 21, 2013.

I’m very proud to have worked on this book, the latest Ellipsis Press title. Tom Whalen has written an incredibly beautiful and surprising novel, a sly allegory about power and bureaucracy that has a narrator with that saintly and cuckoo mix to whom Jakob von Gunten might be close cousin.

“The President in Her Towers is a deft, daft satire of bureaucracy, paranoia, professional envy, megalomania, the madness of specialization and the absence of transparency as they infect the university and, in general, our institutionalized existence.  But Tom Whalen’s exuberant, intelligent, and wryly allusive fiction is also an example – rare in our deadly serious literature – of the marvelous: a headlong adventure in storytelling, reminding us that writing needs no other justification than the esprit of a writer obedient to a high manic imagination.  To read Whalen’s book is a pleasure well beyond the ordinary; it is, in fact, to bear witness to a prodigious act of creation. ” —Norman Lock

Some more info, including an excerpt, here.

Available for order from SPD or from Ellipsis Press or from Amazon.

If you’re a reviewer and want an reader’s copy, please email me at: eugene at ellipsispress.com.

I’m happy to have a piece of fiction in the latest issue of The Brooklyn Rail. “Spooky Action at a Distance” is excerpted from a forthcoming novel called THE STRANGERS (Black Square Editions) about several sets of odd twins. Here’s how it starts:

It’s when the cop is punching my face that I make the decision. I decide to go look for my sister. My whole life I’d indulged in a stupid thrill, a very risky habit. In the middle of the night I’d sneak through the town and deface posters of the beloved president. Sometimes just a mustache over his beloved pudgy face. I kept it scatological or primitive. For fifteen years I’d done this and never got caught.

The cop is working me over pretty good. I’ve never taken a punch before. I worry about my brain and whether he’ll bust something inside me and I’ll die slowly as things that aren’t supposed to meet mix inside my sloshy guts. I’m a wet animal and I’m weeping like a child and very ashamed that I am and I’m scared.

Read the rest.

at work this week i was given seaton’s THE SON MASTER by a teenager who told me i’d become enlightened upon reading any page. and so i was.

peter seaton was a prose artist who, along with using subtle stepping stones of sound, mimicked and subverted common narrative strategies so that we had the shape, if not the exclusivity, of quotidian thought. (distant relatives might include rob stephenson’s recent PASSES THROUGH or the more abstract stories of Robert Creeley, e.g. those in “Presences: a text for Marisol“).

here’s a paragraph (which is a pleasure to type out):

Until the lean years of the revolution it’s usually the other way around — a man steals an idea circulating as a plan. Say there was slander, it was worked out in the parallel twenties. All the players left the country suddenly saying so you were hearing the actual sound. To prove dreamily I was a child, I think, the most truthful one. And the war, I don’t know, at the same time I like it very much. It’s easy to look at. The most popular saying or appropriate interest called the custodial style used to call it a search in an ancient city or a landscape clearing up and a woman walks by and says there’s some anniversary movement created by a hope monument made of brick and the bricks broke through and were just put back. And if you don’t dig around inside it wears off quickly, take that to the others sleeping at night and falling apart (p 47).

seaton died in 2010. nathanial otting has a great collection of links on seaton here, which includes a moving tribute by michael gottleib (who, by the bye, recently published a simply titled, lovely and bittersweet memoir and essay of the nyc poetry scene in the 70s).

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seaton page at pennsounds

w/ seaton reading parts of THE SON MASTER

nick piombino remembrance of the their student years at CCNY and subsequent friendship

3 seaton books scanned and available via craig dworkin’s eclipse site

buy THE SON MASTER at SPD

witty and elegant, what makes enrique vila-matas’s NEVER ANY END TO PARIS something more than a (witty and elegant) memoir of his literary apprentice years is the transformational yet thin veneer of fiction that coats this ingenious novel. the book follows a spanish writer (with a more than passing resemblance to vila-matas) who recalls — in a lecture spoken during a three-day symposium on irony — how in the mid-1970s he had moved as a young man from barcelona to paris to work on his first novel in a garret apartment rented from no less a personality than marguerite duras.

in paris the young writer lives off an allowance from his father and nurses his despair with a hilarious and familiar tenderness. along the way he bumps into a host of literary notables (e.g. perec, barthes, beckett), but the writer who haunts him the most is the Ghost of Paris Past: ernest hemingway. specifically it’s the hemingway of A MOVEABLE FEAST who recalled his own years in the City of Light as “very poor and very happy” — so unlike our irony man who, looking backward, can only say he was “very poor and very unhappy.”

papa hemingway seems to enthrall our narrator’s imagination not only due to the virile charisma of his exploits and writing but perhaps more importantly because of the clear limits his talent impotently struggled to overcome. he quotes julien gracq who wrote hemingway “knows he will never bore us; he puts marks on paper as naturally as others walk down stairs. His mere presence bewitches us; then we go outside to smoke and stop thinking about him.”

this assessment on hemingway leads to a division of the world into two types of writers: the ordered and bourgeois manner of a writer like thomas mann versus the chaotic disordered hurricane of talent à la rimbaud. while aging is the historical force that implodes this dialectic (our narrator realizes with a glance at his obsessively ordered writing desk that he has become what in his youth he had once disdained) there remains a potent yearning for the virtuosic chaos of a poet like the young rimbaud. it’s this bittersweet longing for an imperfect past that gives the novel its emotion; and it’s the advantage of hindsight that allows it its wit.

*  *  *

is the book a lecture or a novel? the book asks itself this question repeatedly and while no doubt existing as a kind of conflation of the two, collage is the name that might most tellingly reveals its structure. like benjamin’s collection on 19th century parisian arcades or the late novels of david markson, vila-matas is determined to make a work of literature through quotation. and while in an extreme sense all acts of fiction are collages, here the items chosen – from autobiography and memory, from literary history and anecdote, from criticism and gossip – are arranged less for the illusion of plot or even movement but rather in order to present a portrait of the artist as a young man. or, more specifically, the portrait given is of the artist as an older man looking back at himself as a younger one. it serves vila-matas’s purposes to portray his younger (fictional) self as a struggling poseur and plagiarizer of stances, so he puts his most learned lines in the mouth of his chief foil and best friend raúl escari. and on the very notion of unity in the novel he has escari say the key truth: “[I]t’s not a question of unity or a degree of tolerance for digression. It’s a more profound or complex matter than it appears to be. The paragraphs should be connected to each other. Nothing more and nothing less.”

the third in a series of translations of vila-matas into english by new directions (a fourth, DUBLINESQUE, is just out), all with a meta-literary premise, NEVER ANY END TO PARIS seems to me the most successful so far. in part this is because of the graceful translation by anne mclean, which allows the humor to come across intact, but as well it is because vila-matas’s irony works particularly well in this fictional autobiography—because it seems here so sincere. our narrator admits as much: “Everything I’ve said about irony is not at all ironic. The fact is, after all, art is the only method we have of pronouncing certain truths. And I can’t think of a greater way of stating truth than being ironic about our own identity.”

pick it up from the publisher or the library

an interview with vila-matas in the paris review

a bit plodding but in reality wonderfully so. like that wise, avuncular speech that gets tedious at times but which you nonetheless love hearing.

ionesco’s only novel tells of an everyman who is decidedly not an artist or a saint but one who nonetheless is struck forcibly with the great question of his own existence. as this narrator faces the familiar but unsolvable koans, a deep and growing sense of recognition and pity (for the narrator and for ourselves) arises:

I have never recovered from my initial surprise at making contact with the world, a feeling of surprise and wonderment that cannot be dismissed. We are told to free ourselves from the feeling of astonishment and move on to other things. But in that case, on what basis can we found any knowledge or morality? There is no way that basis can be ignorance, and yet we are swimming in ignorance; our point of departure, our foundation, is nothing but the void. How can we build on nothing? (57)

All we are, perhaps, is knots, ephemeral intersections of energies, forces, various and contradictory tendencies which only death unties. And yet these forces, these energetic events are ourselves; we are built, we are produced, we are acted upon, but also we make ourselves, we act and we act upon ourselves. Oh, if only I had some philosophical talent! All the things I’d understand! I’d understand the same things I know now, but I could explain them to myself better, and I’d also be able to explain it better to others and exchange ideas. (65)

one of the bits i liked the best is when the narrator actually does confront a scholar, a philosopher, who tells him his questions are quite ordinary, that there isn’t anything at all new to them… to which our isolato replies:

“Of course,” I answered, “I’m sure you’re aware of these problems; you’ve read a lot, you have a great fount of knowledge. But for me these questions are crucial, they take me and shake me. For you, they’re only cultural. You don’t wake up every morning with fear and trembling, asking yourself what the answers are, then telling yourself there aren’t any. But you know that everyone has asked himself these same questions. And you also know that no one has ever come up with any answers, because there aren’t any. The only difference is that for you the whole thing is files and catalogues… Despair has been domesticated; people have turned it into literature, into works of art. That doesn’t help me” (87-88).

[later on (actually the passing of time in the book is beautifully done, and years pass almost imperceptibly differently from hours), a civil war breaks out. and here the book could be argued to have a reactionary or anti-revolutionary point of view. for it has little faith in any progress of state. unfortunately this seems an increasingly convincing cynicism.]

the pseudonymous Meng-hu has a great review on the book here, which acknowledges the work’s tardy appearance ”in the sequence of existential literature” and speaks well of its narrator’s identifiable mental illness and alcohol-fueled escapism.

roy kuhlman — famous for his grove beckett book covers — designed this one. translated by the maverick publisher and editor richard seaver.

pick it up from your local library.

Click below to see poems read by Lewis Warsh, Lisa Jarnot, Joanna Sondheim and more… And give your $upport to the great-looking, new magazine: Staging Ground.