SIMPLY SEPARATE PEOPLE was a delicious act of worldbuilding which viewed its characters through an unexpected slant angle. the result was a very familiar but hard-to-put-your-finger-on strange depiction of the every day. personable, a book easy to fall into, as its characters’ hardships and motivations are recognizable and crawford’s view of them is generous and refrains from judgment. here’s the beginning:

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and now, just published, is SIMPLY SEPARATE PEOPLE, TWO. less a sequel so much as a second variation on her theme of the quotidian mixed with the uncanny. the focus here is storytelling, our urge to be storytellers, and what stories tell about its teller. crawford has her suburban mother narrator retell stories by hemingway and henry james in such a way that our view of ourselves turns almost unconsciously satirical and/or creepy.

Here is what happens. One morning, a mom, pretty, dressed in a sweat suit, sneakers, approaches me at morning drop off. She tells me I look fit and wonders if I exercise. I tell her we have a swimming pool on our roof and, in warm weather, I sometimes swim there. But otherwise, no, not really. She tells me she and a group of mothers go to a nearby gym ever morning to triathlon train, and invites me to join them. Maybe tomorrow?

She points to the group. There they stand. Oh, I think, those women. I have, honestly, noticed them, admired them, felt dwarfed by them. They are not the professional moms, carefully dressed, with no time to linger. Not the tired looking moms carrying chewed up sippie cups, wearing sweat suits that they might have slept in, with strands of dog hair on the seat, huddling together, complaining about how dirty their kitchens are, how much weight they have put on. Not the moms in tunics and flip flops, dreamily heading off to yoga or meditation. No. these moms wear pony tails under sports caps, tinted moisturizer, clear lip gloss and seem to be (like the professional moms) in a hurry, or at least revved up (99-100).

SIMPLY SEPARATE PEOPLE, TWO is a magical machine whose innards are in plain view but whose operating principles remain profoundly mysterious. a dazzling feat of collage and reverse-engineering, crawford writes in a deceptively easy-going style that’s both critical of and generous to all our sad and beautiful scurrying around.

pick it up from SPD or the publisher or your local library.

The Prime Minister is in the vestibule, brushing his silk hat with his sleeve. He comes each night after the cares of state have been put away. He lays them in a drawer among maps and pairs of immaculate white gloves. To be here with us requires finesse; for the nation believes he is lucubrating, not waltzing — certainly not doing the two-step or tango with a rustling girl in his arms! A girl in a pale-yellow dress whose frou frou causes desire to rise up in his thinnest ducts. He left the ministry by the back stairs, eluded the stiffly standing military guard, tiptoed past the alleys where, since nightfall, men and women have come in search of contraband. Each night he slides a stack of crimson inflationary currency over the sill of the wire wicket, behind which a woman sits who hands him, in return, a loop of blue tickets. Always it is the same girl with whom he dances — the one in the yellow dress, which makes a crepuscular music. She whose hair is the color of certain sunsets. It is for this the Prime Minister lives — not for his wife or his countrymen, who pity him over their beer and sausages for his ceaseless devotion. I lift my glass to him as he passes near my table, but his mind is elsewhere — on a diagram of the samba he is now dancing, studied intently an hour ago (a map of movement through a space hostile to gracelessness). I know what is in his mind, for inside the hotel I have the gift of omniscience. Do not ask who gave me it. I don’t know, unless it is the bottle of clearest gin, the mermaid on the swizzle stick, or the strength of my own desire (52-3).

pick it up from the publisher or from SPD.

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more on m. lock here.

Bad Shadow Affair Reading series
at Lost Lake Lounge | 3602 East Colfax | Denver, Colorado

Saturday, May 7th, 7:30pm

Laird Hunt,

Tina Brown Celona,

Keith Newton &

Eugene Lim

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Queens Poet Lore Presents QPLo @ QL:

A Reading with
Paolo Javier,
Eugene Lim,
Christine Hou

Thursday, May 19
6:30 p.m.
Flushing branch of the Queens Library
Rooms A&B, Lower Level
41-17 Main Street
718-661-1200
Join us and celebrate Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month with a reading featuring Queens Poet Laureate Paolo Javier, novelist Eugene Lim, and poet/art critic Christine Hou. A short open mic will precede the reading, with sign-up at 6:00 p.m.  Books will be available for sale and signing.

like walser is an outsider artist.

(it’s not very helpful to say but: a book you don’t really feel like describing–but to say (nonchalantly) (or hiss) : “read it” …also a book that you don’t want to analyze overly much. at least not with logic. maybe a different, weirder, more hopeful tool.)

She went to art school in London where, for the first time, she discovered public libraries. “[I] read until I was almost drunk on books, but my own writing became imitative and self-conscious. In the end, with great strength of mind, I destroyed all the stories and half-written novels I’d written over the years,” Comyns wrote near the end of her life.

first page from THE VET’S DAUGHTER:

pick it up from your local library or the publisher.

and up in the near next: WHO WAS CHANGED AND WHO WAS DEAD

speaking with a friend today about documentaries of writers or the lack of good ones…  reminded me of this portrait which i love. by experimental video maker superhero henry hills

interviewed by emme bee bernstein.

another on susan howe here.

i let three trains pass on the platform so i could finish it. POV of a scorned bourgeoise. horror episodes of her total fury in sentences that sear and become beautiful. other times: accurate, intimate and desolate portraits of a broken self. a carefully balanced, patient plot that’s worth battling through its accurate depiction of thick monotonous depression. but despite its extreme emotions, not manipulative or fantastic. in those contemporary fictions with similarly traditional ambitions, ferrante’s hard-won poise and bitter realism are only palely reflected.

here’s a bit:

I was like a lump of food that my children chewed without stopping; a cud made of a living material that continually amalgamated and softened its living substance to allow two greedy bloodsuckers to nourish themselves, leaving on me the odor and taste of their gastric juices. Nursing, how repulsive, an animal function. And then the warm sweetish odor of baby-food breath. No matter how much I washed, that stink of motherhood remained. Sometimes Mario pasted himself against me, took me, holding me as I nearly slept, tired himself after work, without emotions. He did it persisting on my almost absent flesh that tasted of milk, cookies, cereal, with a desperation of his own that overlapped mine without his realizing it. I was the body of incest, I thought… I was the mother to be violated, not a lover. Already he was searching elsewhere for figures more suitable for love, fleeing the sense of guilt, and he became melancholy, sighed. Carla had happened then into the house at the right moment, a figment of unsatisfied desire. She was then thirteen years older than Ilaria, ten more than Gianni… Mario must have imagined her as the future, and yet he desired the past, the girlhood that I had already given him and that he now felt nostalgia for. She herself perhaps believed she was giving him the future and had encourage him to believe it. But we were all confused, especially me. While I was taking care of the children, I was expecting from Mario a moment that never arrived, the moment when I would be again as I had been before my pregnancies, young, slender, energetic, shamelessly certain I could make of myself a memorable person. No, I thought, squeezing the rag and struggling to get up: starting at a certain point, the future is only a need to live in the past. To immediately redo the grammatical tenses (91-2) .

pick it up from your local independent bookstore or your local library.

refashioning the detective narrative into something more art-y evidently is such a tempting strategy perhaps it’s a trap. note the murder puzzles of echenoz’s house-mate at les editions de minuit, robbe-grillet. or robert coover’s recent deconstruction of noir or pynchon’s neon vices or lethem’s genre mashups or haruki murakami’s career-long channeling of chandler… even bolaño wants to be a homicide cop in his next life… that ongoing and probably easily extended list suggests there’s not only something fashionable about this trope-slumming but that the mystery narrative is somehow deeply fundamental to the novel form. its searcher protagonists and elusive, ineffable obscure objects of desire might arguably be the nucleobases of the novel’s DNA.

reading three echenoz in a row – BIG BLONDES, I AM GONE, and CHEROKEE — made that thought pop again to mind as echenoz displays an intimate and scientific knowledge of the genre’s workings. he also does something that feels unique with it, stripping almost everything out — certainly as much interiority as he can — and leaving only plot. not that these are zippy momentum-gathering page turners — rather they’re drôle collages of event where a thousand peculiar items are glued together with comedic and/or convenient coincidence. cubist mysteries of fractured planes, they’re fun reads with, when the pieces come together at the end, an almost guaranteed mild let-down (maybe even a purposeful, subversive one). oddly addictive.

from a recent dj/rupture show : Rajah Rabo’s 5 Star Mutuel Dream Book

*

against the odds, the great jaimy gordon won this year’s national book award for LORD OF MISRULE, a gritty look at a 70s era down-and-out west virginia racetrack. its creation of character through dialect and its vivid rendering of a lost place and time is remarkable. she’s also the author of the gorgeous and virtuosic SHAMP OF THE CITY SOLO and the very different but equally beautiful and emotionally connecting SHE DROVE WITHOUT STOPPING.

i think this (slightly protesting) comment on plot in this recent interview on michael silverblatt’s bookworm reveals a bit about her method: “…otherwise it all goes into a kind of a slurry in my imagination… I just try to recreate the atmosphere and then kind of weave a plot into it. And I do like the element of plot very much. It doesn’t have to be an extremely complex plot worthy of a mystery story, but the element of suspense in fiction, the necessity of continuing to follow a narrative until you find out what happens to the characters whom you’ve come to care about. I just don’t see how any fiction writer could dispense with that, could want to. It’s what’s so entrancing about the experience of reading fiction for me, or one of the main things that’s makes it so necessary for me.” (15:10)

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as a bonus, at the end of the interview she lists her favorite under-appreciated novels:

Rot by Janet Kauffman
Compression Scars by Kellie Wells
The Leper Compound by Paula Nangle
The End by Salvatore Scibona
Hermine: An Animal Life by Maria Beig
Hell by Kathryn Davis
The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf by Kathryn Davis

is ON NEWS TODAY. * †

http://www.awpwriter.org/conference/2011awpconf.php

http://helllllen.org/

i’m happy to have an excerpt from a novel-in-progress (tentatively titled STRANGE TWINS) in the current Denver Quarterly

Μu’nisah drove us on her motorcycle where the city met the water and down the concrete and synthetic coastline, finally stopping by the ports. She got off and led me to the docks where a very large but somehow familiar-looking ship was moored.

“Do you recognize it? “Mu’nisah asked.

“Yes, but I can’t quite place it.”

“It’s the one where your sister works.”

“Ah ha! Yes, that’s it. But. How do you know about that?”

“Your sister and I are good friends. She’s never mentioned me?”

Embarrassed I had to admit, “The truth is, my sister and I are no longer very close. We used to be. But since we moved to the city, I hardly see her. For some reason we’ve begun to stay out of each other’s way, as if we don’t want to know too much about the other.”

“I see,” Mu’nisah said. “Well, your sister got permission for us to come on board tonight. You’ll have to thank her next time you see her.”

“Yes,” I said, “I’ll remember to do that.”

To read the rest  …why not find a copy at your local library?

2010 favorites from Andrew Borgstrom, Gabe Durham, Eugene Lim, Kevin Prufer, Cooper Renner, and David Shields here: http://bigother.com/2010/12/26/best-of-2010-part-2/