THE CHAGALL POSITION

HUMAN WISHES / ENEMY COMBATANT

2012-01-28T10:36:00.000-08:00

Human Wishes / Enemy Combatant

a novel by Edmond Caldwell

He might be the dead-end flâneur of non-places like highway rest stops, airport terminals, and shopping malls, or he might be a Gitmo-bound enemy of the state. He might be the son of American working-class parents, or he might be the cousin of a Middle Eastern revolutionary the US labels a terrorist. He might be in possession of a lost Beckett play, or he might just have to go to the bathroom a lot.

“He” is the nameless hero of Human Wishes / Enemy Combatant, and he’s probably no more than a pronoun. With a looping itinerary that takes us from St. Petersburg, Russie to Salem, Massachusetts, from the Palestinian Nakba to a plot to replace New Yorker critic James Wood with a shadowy look-alike, Human Wishes / Enemy Combatant might just be the novel that explodes mainstream, corporate “literary fiction” from the inside out.

Praise for Edmond Caldwell’s Human Wishes / Enemy Combatant

“These ‘anti-stories about In Between places’ bristle with vibrant, fact-filled paranoia and good, old-fashioned self-deprecation, making constant, unexpected turns at breakneck pace. From St. Petersburg to Palestine, from coffin-shaped Joseph Cornell boxes to Monty Python doing Beckett, from reflections on the onslaught of Taylorism to violent, youthful misreadings ofAnimal Farm, the pure writerly intensity of the material, and the audacious panache of each new sentence, never for a moment flag.”

--Jacob Wren, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed

“Literary squatter . . . saboteur . . . an unreadable run-on paragraph . . . and unpublished, and, evidently, unpublishable novel.”

-–Norah Piehl, Director of Communications, Boston Book Festival

“Edmond Caldwell is right . . .”

--James Wood

Now available from Say It With Stones / Interbirth Books

also, inevitably, available here

New Fiction at Juked

2012-01-14T13:16:00.001-08:00

(Luis Camnitzer, 1966-68)

"It was the time when everybody was writing a memoir, so of course I began writing a memoir. I’d thought about writing a novel but nobody was writing novels any more. Memoir was taking the novel’s place, everyone said. And sure enough, at our local bookstore all the memoirs had crowded the novels over to a single corner of the New Titles table. You could still see this one guy who thought he was writing a novel hunched over his laptop in the bookstore’s Starbucks, but he typed much harder than he had to and had a funny smell when you got close. I didn’t want to be that guy, so I started writing a memoir instead..."

"My Memoirs," now at Juked. My thanks to editor J.W. Wang.

Acts of Desertion - Neil Addison's 'Apocapulco'

2011-12-10T09:21:00.000-08:00

The last we heard, comrade Neil Addison was rumored to be running guns in Abyssinia. From time to time, nonetheless, fugitive communiqués surface, messages in bottles wash ashore. One of these, the volume Apocapulco, published last year by Salted Earth, or Salted Wound . . . OK I can't remember the exact name of the publisher . . . anyway that book is now publicly available on the internet, viz.:

What you'll find in its pages is the only kind of poetry that matters anymore, poetry without faith in Poetry. Each entry is an act of diremption, repudiation, refusal, including the refusal of Seriousness, the refusal of the Grand Gesture that even words like diremption, repudiation, refusal imply. It is only by such desertions that we remain at our posts.

Writing and the Barricades

2011-12-09T18:36:00.000-08:00

John Hawkes, excerpted from an interview with Robert Scholes in The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers, ed. Joe David Bellamy (Univ. of Illinois, 1974):

SCHOLES: Jack, I know that in addition to being a writer you are a teacher of young writers, if there is such a thing, and I know that this question of politics and its relation to creative writing or the writing of fiction is a thing that worries a lot of young writers. They find it difficult to justify the indulgence in the personal satisfaction of writing at a time when the calls to the barricades seem to come more frequently and more urgently every month. What do you do to reassure young people, to keep them writing and off the barricades, or do you encourage them to go?

HAWKES: I think the acts of courage and the acts of creativity evident in the writing of fiction are similar to the qualities evident in revolutionary acts. I think clear vision, detachment, personal strength, selflessness – these are needed to change the world literally and, no doubt, are also essential to the imaginative act. The paradox is that the literary act can’t take place in the context of revolution or “real life” or world activity. I would be willing to give up writing (which I began to discover only as a young person and not at the barricade but in the midst of the primordial, fluid, slippery, messy stuff of the Second World War) – I would be willing to give up art if the actual barricade were before us. If it were literally a moment of attempting to participate in those human efforts of planning and action that had to do with political ultimacy and finality, I would want to be there.

SCHOLES: In your fiction are you working out of a consciously held theoretical position?

HAWKES: Recently I did formulate a kind of theory of fiction which can be expressed in a few words. It seems to me that fiction should achieve revenge for all the indignities of our childhood; it should be an act of rebellion against all the constraints of the conventional pedestrian mentality around us. Surely it should destroy conventional morality. I suppose all this is to say that to me the act of writing is criminal. If the act of the revolutionary is one of supreme idealism, it’s also criminal. Obviously I think that the so-called criminal act is essential to our survival.

SCHOLES: Recently I saw W.H. Auden quoted as saying that the world would be exactly the way it is if Shakespeare and Dante and somebody else had never lived, which suggests a sort of beautiful irrelevance to art or, at any rate, an existence apart from political, geographical, geopolitical realities. Do you accept Auden’s view?

HAWKES: Was he joking?

SCHOLES: I think he was serious. I assume this is a later version of his “poetry makes nothing happen.”

HAWKES: Then he’s filled with despair. I’m sympathetic with despair. I don’t agree with the idea. It seems obvious that the great acts of the imagination are intimately related to the great acts of life – that history and the inner psychic history must dance their creepy minuet together if we are to save ourselves from total oblivion. I think it’s senseless to attempt to talk as Auden talked. The great acts of the imagination create inner climates in which psychic events occur, which in themselves are important, and also affect the outer literal events in time and space through what has occurred in the act of reading.

Writers' Toilets 3 - Gavin James Bower on His Toilet

2011-12-06T18:54:00.000-08:00

There is no hot water in this room. Even the hot water pump - separate to the dual taps - is ineffectual in its lukewarm-ness. The watering can is a relic from a bygone room; perhaps a greenhouse, which once stood on this very site. Many an editorial conundrum has been cogitated in this commode. I also had my first professional student wipe here, while wrestling with exactly why a writer would utilise a second-person narrative. (And the lack of paper.) Enjoy.

@gavinjamesbower

Writers' Toilets 2 - Frances Madeson on Her Toilet

2011-11-29T11:48:00.000-08:00

What’s missing from this picture? Can you spot it? Right-o, no built-in toilet-paper dispenser in the master bathroom!

The actual toilet is from Levengers─their high-end Notabile model with the Lakota seat cover. I could go on and on about its familiar marbled composition and the ruggedly textured bison leather sure-grip seat (sorry you can’t really see it). Perched thereon, cheek to cheek with the gamey hide, I hit authorial pay dirt, and the below excerpt issued forth. It’s from my new forthcoming blockbuster, an experimental novel (temporally: it actually reads like it’s being written before you in real time just as you turn the page, possibly like the feeling of having one’s life flash before one's very eyes—imagine!) composed in episodes. I won’t bother to contextualize the scene, only to say this one’s about a third of the way in, and by then, you’re likely already half smitten with the fearless unconventional protagonist, with her brazen stools and loose-by-any-standard morals.

Happy reading!

Episode 72

I turned the hot water on maximum force in Hank’s plexiglass-enclosed shower stall and sat on the American Disabilities Act toilet that was surprisingly tall, feeling queenly on the elevated white porcelain throne. My piss didn't burn as it hissed out, and fears of an infection in my urethra from friction’s rub on the latex molecules that had emanated from Danny's condom-covered boner were happily unfounded. I voided my bowels in mere seconds, which frankly astonished me that I could be so at home in a near stranger's bathroom. I felt completely cleaned out, so that if “touching me anywhere” involved my anus, I could meet the moment with confidence.

*************

Frances Madeson is the author of the novel Cooperative Village (Carol MRP Co., 2007). The working title for her current novel is Kissing Booth. Thank you, Frances!

Writers' Toilets

2011-11-25T19:10:00.001-08:00

After the success of its Writers' Rooms series a couple of years back, The Guardian has just launched a more tech-sexy, new-millennium sequel, Writers' Desktops, featuring shots of authors' computer desktops and some accompanying chit-chat from the authors themselves in order to give us insight into . . . into . . . oh, I don't know. There's some language about having writers "show us around their working lives," and the suggestion that we might learn something about the relationship between technology and the "creative life" of contemporary writers. Writers in this case means a parade of Booker Prize short-listees and winners, as well as producers of the "better" genre fiction and "serious" non-fiction, all of whom will happen to have high profiles in recent literary journalism and contracts with the major corporate houses. In other words, here is yet another exercise in author-as-celebrity voyeurism, a gentrified and "distinction"-conferring version of something you'd find in a tabloid, like having one of the Kardashian sisters give you a guided tour of her thong drawer.

So, in the spirit of taking the piss, I'm launching this series of Writers' Toilets, starting with my own. The bowl and rim are a little cleaner than usual because we had company yesterday, but it still looks close to what you'd find on any average day when I might step across the hall from the room where I do my Literary Creating. The tile-work on the floor is attractive to look at but clammy and cold on the bottom of my feet - for some reason we still haven't purchased a mat. There's hardly any cabinet space; hence the case of TP on the back of the tank and the plastic storage box under the sink. Open on the plastic storage box is my reading for that morning's bowel movement, a recent issue of Chicago Review devoted to contemporary Italian writing. Like geological strata we can also see evidence of earlier bowel-movement reading peeking out from under the case of toilet paper - a copy of Dalkey Archive Press's Review of Contemporary Fiction (Vol. XXX, #3 The Editions P.O.L. Number, in fact). On a typical morning I have my bowel movement after my second cup of coffee and my first cigarette; afterwards I am ready to begin writing. At the end of the day I always read in bed before falling asleep; my wife pokes fun at me because I take my book with me to the toilet and continue reading while I stand there to pee. The toilet itself has a very satisfactory flush, something I had originally been worried about because the plumbing is quite old, and a definite improvement over the toilet in our previous place. We have only lived in this house for three or four months, but I have already had several fine story ideas while using this toilet.

Writers! Send me your toilet pics, plus any accompanying text and links, and I will post them here.

Writers' Toilets 2 - Frances Madeson on Her Toilet

Writers' Toilets 3 - Gavin James Bower on His Toilet

New Fiction at S/Word

2011-11-09T19:37:00.001-08:00

"Everyone was talking into their handheld devices, except those whose devices did not require hands, who were just talking. Alive to every permutation, I’d had a good day, I’d had a bad day, I’d had a so-so day..."

I've got a story "Devices," in the inaugural issue of a new webzine devoted to innovative writing, S/Word. Also appearing are Ben Nardolilli, Brett Elizabeth Jenkins, William Doreski, Ben Segal, Ray Succre, Francis Raven, Len Kuntz, Joel Mitchell, Matthew Davies. Props to editors Seth and Chelsea McKelvey for making it happen.

"Devices" is the third of my experiments playing with the inclusion of appropriated text to be published, along with "Valley of the Dolls" and "A Paper Moon."

#occupyculture - in which I kick Santa in the balls

2011-10-19T21:11:00.001-07:00

"Kicking Santa in the Balls: An interview with the Boston Book Festival’s Literary Squatter" is now live at the Boston Phoenix website and on page 6 of this week's print edition. Many thanks to Eugenia Williamson.

#occupyculture (or, the "One City One Story" Counterfeit)

2011-09-26T17:55:00.000-07:00

(link)

UPDATED!

My editor, Micah Robbins, was surprised to read in the Boston Book Festival's statement that I was "unpublished" and "unpublishable," so he kindly wrote a response and submitted it as a Comment to the BBF blog post. The BBF declined to publish the comment, demonstrating conclusively that behind the lie of a citywide conversation they are interested only in one-way communication. But what else could we expect from an organization whose corporate sponsors include Verizon, Bank of America, Target, and three of the "Big Six" media conglomerates that currently monopolize publishing? They and their ilk determine what is "acceptable discourse" -- silence and invisibility for the rest. So, along with my thanks, I am reprinting Micah Robbins' comment here:

I would remind you that many of our greatest writers, from James Joyce to Thomas Pynchon, have been accused of publishing "unreadable" prose fiction. "The Cruiser" is, of course, neither unreadable nor unpublishable. I've read the story & have agreed to publish it and the novel to which it belongs -- Human Wishes / Enemy Combatant -- under the imprint SAY IT WITH STONES. It's odd you would say it's "unpublishable" since Caldwell's author's bio clearly states that the novel is forthcoming from SAY IT WITH STONES. Human Wishes / Enemy Combatant will be released later this year; for more information, visit sayitwithstones.com.

I respect Edmond Caldwell's action against the sociopolitical homogeneity being celebrated by One City, One Story. & I'm pleased to hear his work has the power to upset readers' expectations. I'm sure he wouldn't have it any other way! What American literature needs is more resistant work, not affirmative bourgeois drivel like "The Whore's Child," which is -- exempting its title -- a total bore.

Finally, the tone of your announcement is commensurate with the reactionary cultural politics of One City, One Story. A recent study conducted by the United Nations found that over a billion people squat worldwide -- a sixth of the global population, the vast majority of whom are Asian, African, and Latin American -- and the numbers are increasing exponentially. To disparage Caldwell as a "literary squatter" reveals the mistaken aura of cultural superiority that undergirds One City, One Story. Only an institution fundamentally committed to and enchanted by western values, particularly private property in its many manifestations, could draw such a problematic comparison.

My only concern is that there aren't more Boston writers engaging in acts of cultural insurgency. Wouldn't it be a delight if every copy of Once City, One Story contained the work of a different author, none of whom were "approved" by the institutional power of BBF!

Long live cultural insurgency!

UPDATE 2:

And a thousand thanks to Kent Johnson for these words of support, which enjoyed the same fate at the Boston Book Festival blog as Micah's comment:

"Unreadable!" Well, anything that comes with that recommendation makes me want to read and see... There's a nice ancestral line, isn't there, of works that had that epithet thrown at them.

What's the Boston Book Fair in such a snit about? Because someone put Richard Russo's cover on his limited run, fine-press book? Horrors! The bourgeoisie, as they used to say, should be scandalized. Here's a suggestion: Take a page from the Poetry Foundation and Call the Cops! (Anyone in the fiction world following that fracas?)

I haven't read this Unreadable novel, but now I certainly will. I hope I can get a copy with the Russo cover, signed by both Russo and the fictional "squatter" Caldwell. What's on the cover? Is it really slick and pretty?

Kent Johnson

New Work at A-Minor

2011-09-22T19:18:00.001-07:00

I'm very pleased to have two new pieces of flash fiction, "The Lord Will Provide" and "Foxy Lady," featured at the revamped A-Minor Magazine website, now under the revivifying curatorship of writer-editor Nicolette Wong. Please visit and be vivified.

New Work in kadar koli 6

2011-07-16T20:28:00.000-07:00

"...as if at the very birth of language itself (the legendary Naming of Beasts) prepositions had to be invented next to account for the absolute everywhereness of the animals, maybe even before verbs..."

I got a prose thing, "Grandma's Box," in the latest issue of kadar koli, in the brilliant company of Zack Finch, Geoffrey Gatza, j/j hastain, Henri Deluy (trans. Jacqueline Kari), Micah Robbins, The Rejection Group, Sarah Jeanne Peters, Josh Stanley, John Hyland, Robin F. Brox, Brenda Iijima, and Morani Kornberg-Weiss.

And while you're there, check out the other Habenicht Press offerings, the beautifully-produced chapbooks and earlier issues of kadar koli.

New Work in SOUS LES PAVÉS

2011-06-29T19:09:00.000-07:00

»SOUS LES PAVÉS« no. 4 is now live and includes my essay, "A Tale of Two Cultural Centers (Istanbul, November 2010)." I'm proud to be in there alongside the outstanding contributions of:

Brooks Johnson
Rodrigo Toscano
Emily Critchley
William Fuller
Linh Dinh
Roberto Harrison
John Beer
Tyrone Williams
Tim Atkins
j/j hastain
Jerome Rothenberg
Hoa Nguyen
Mary Burger
Sotere Torregian
The Rejection Group
Brenda Iijima
Micah Robbins
Frances Kruk
Warren Craghead

»SOUS LES PAVÉS« is a quarterly zine distributed by mailing list only & supported by the generous donations of its readers. If you receive/read this publication and find it of some value or interest, please consider donating some small funds to its continued effort to produce and distribute an unvarnished, politically efficacious magazine of poetry & ideation.

Get on the mailing list & donate

Anti-Epiphany

2011-05-09T19:51:00.000-07:00

What follows is a strange, nameless state, in which the present, which is as wide as the whole of time is long, seems to have risen, from who knows where, to the surface of who knows what, and in which what I was, which in and of itself in no way amounted to much, now knows that it is here, in the present, knows it, without being able however to pursue its knowledge any farther and without having sought, in the fraction of a second prior to that state, by any means whatsoever, to catch a glimpse of it. This state is going away now; and now, in the darkness, the sounds, the murmurs, the chorus of cicadas, the barking of a dog at the other end of town, begin, gradually, to come unbound from each other, to separate, building up, out of the black, compact mass of night, levels, dimension, heights, various distances, a structure of sounds that produce, in the uniform blackness, a precarious, fragile space, whose distribution in the blackness continuously changes shape, duration, and one might even say, to put it into words somehow, place. But now it is gone: it is as if an errant wave, a phosphorescent image of many colors combined in a harmonious way, had been reflected, on passing, for a few instants, through me, and had then continued on its way, leaving me in that other firmer, more permanent state, in which everything is within reach of my fingertips, with the same accessibility as a ship inside a bottle.

— Juan José Saer, from Nobody Nothing Never (Serpent’s Tail, 1993), translated by Helen Lane.

Writing Against the Market

2011-05-06T20:12:00.000-07:00

In “How, and How Not, to Be a Published Novelist: The Case of Raymond Federman,” Ted Pelton reviews Federman’s publishing career. His contribution asks why a writer that is internationally regarded and has several major awards including the American Book Award “has never had a book published by a major U.S. imprint.” Pelton maintains that while Federman had a number of opportunities to publish with major U.S. publishers—for example, St. Martin’s Press was interested in Smiles on Washington Square (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1985) and Little, Brown, & Company was interested in Double or Nothing (Swallow Press, 1971)—the author chose not to publish with these major publishers. For Federman, the decision to publish with small presses (rather than major presses) was based on the author’s decision to maintain his aesthetic integrity, rather than to make concessions to the market-driven editorial suggestions made by the major U.S. publishers that approached him. Pelton observes that though a few of Federman’s peers had books published with major U.S. publishers, this was the exception, rather than the rule.

Pelton points out that in the case of Double or Nothing as well as other works, Federman “made the decision to rework his own manuscript precisely against marketplace feedback.” In this regard, Federman’s publishing career “serves as a unique measure of the nonparticipation of American publishing in innovative American fi ction.” Pelton maintains that the task of publishers should be to support the work of writers like Federman “whose texts bring us new understandings of what constitutes the art form”—not to dictate to them what they should write based on economic motives. Federman’s “refusal to write straight narrative,” suggests Pelton, against the wishes of major American publishers, provides us with “perhaps the most notable case in our time of the writer who growled at his purported master and, by doing so, became his own.”

_________________________

Emphasis mine. From "Other Voices: The Fiction of Raymond Federman," Jeffrey R. Di Leo's introduction (pdf) to Federman's Fictions: Innovation, Theory, and the Holocaust (SUNY UP, 2011).

Raymond Federman site.

Ted Pelton page.

The Muzzled Muse

2011-04-05T20:21:00.000-07:00

Every year the good folks at the Grub Street writing center host a literary conference here in Boston called The Muse & the Marketplace. When I saw the poster for this year's festivities, however, it struck me that it just didn't adequately depict the real relationship that exists between the two entities. So, with my crude photoshop skills, I gave it a wee tweak:

There should probably be a riding crop in there, too, you know, but you can't have everything. Just use your imagination.

New Fiction at The Medulla Review

2011-03-11T19:19:00.001-08:00

"Nobody Told Us"

SOUS LES PAVÉS III is LIVE

2011-02-24T21:18:00.000-08:00

from the Global Intifada . . . to your mailbox!

TO JOIN THE FREE MAILING LIST OR TO DONATE, VISIT

»SOUS LES PAVÉS«

New Fiction at West Wind Review

2011-02-13T11:44:00.000-08:00

In frozen piles around his feet is the old snow, the kind that layers of exhaust have dirtied to the color of an ashtray. Every day now the edges are a little more melted – like the slow withdrawal of diseased grey gums – revealing a moraine of pebbles, cigarette butts, malt-liquor bottle caps, cellophane wrappers, and unidentifiable scunge. The scunge is patterned in a whorl, like animal feces, rotting bandages, or the puckered orifice of a corpse. A bone sticks up from the scunge-whorl, from someone’s chicken dinner or else a squirrel run down by a car back before the snow . . .

That's just an appetizer from my story, "The Earworm," in the new West Wind Review. For the main course, you'll have to buy the whole 240-page issue, which includes work by:

Chris Alexander, Shane Allison, Brian Ang, Joe Atkins, derek beaulieu, Steve Benson, Gregory Betts, Mark Boccard, Sommer Browning, Dereck Clemons, Bryan Coffelt, Shanna Compton, Alan Davies, Luke Degnan, Tiffany Denman, Buck Downs, Patrick Durgin, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Micah Freeman, Kristen Gallagher, Drew Gardner, Angela Genusa, Nada Gordon, Plynn Gutman, Nadxieli Nieto Hall, Mike Hauser, Emily Hockaday, Janis Butler Holm, Paul Hoover, Uyen Hua, Jake Kennedy, Rodney Koeneke, David Lau, Emily Liebowitz, Jonathan Lohr, Travis Macdonald, Alana Madison, Adam J Maynard, Rebecca Mertz, Sharon Mesmer, Monica Mody, Adam Moorad, Rosiere Moseley, Christian Nagler, Chris Nealon, Jessea Perry, Adam Roberts, Steve Roggenbuck, Andrew Sage, Estee Schwartz, James Sherry, Josh Stanley, Erin Steinke, Christina Strong, Cole Tucker-Walton, Joshua Ware, Jeanine Webb, Elisabeth Workman, Timothy Yu, and Carolyn Zaikowski.

New Fiction at Mad Hatters' Review

2011-02-12T19:24:00.001-08:00

As the river delta began to disappear into the rising sea, Dr. Fortier noticed an unusual phenomenon...

There are two stories by me, "Greshlings" and "The Difference Between Strategy & Tactics," in the eagerly awaited Mad Hatters' Review 12, with a cool soundtrack by Paul A. Toth and illustrations by T. Motley. Special thanks to editor/publisher Carol Novack.

Press Release for a Dirty Bomb

2010-12-30T13:13:00.000-08:00

Press Release for a Dirty Bomb

Edmond Caldwell

A dirty bomb is set to go off in Boston this fall, and the clever evil-doers are hiding in plain sight – they have announced their act of terror in a press release:

“ONE CITY, ONE STORY”: BOSTON BOOK FESTIVAL

ANNOUNCES 30,000 COPIES OF TOM PERROTTA STORY

TO BE DISTRIBUTED FREE, CITYWIDE

(BOSTON) The organizers of the Boston Book Festival have announced that Tom Perrotta’s The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face has been chosen as the first short story in the organization’s One City, One Story program. 30,000 copies of this story, chosen for its accessibility, literary merit and ability to stimulate discussion, will be distributed as a bound booklet throughout the City beginning in late September. Festival organizers hope that thousands of Bostonians will read and discuss the story in the weeks leading up to the second annual Boston Book Festival, which takes place on Oct. 16, 2010.[1]

And the most sinister part:

Distribution will take place at Boston Public Library branches, subway stations, community centers, farmers markets, open studios and other places where people gather…

But let’s back up and look at how the plot unfolded.

Now in its second year of self-congratulation, the Boston Book Festival was organized in 2009 after Deborah Z. Porter, current president of the festival’s board, noticed that Boston was the only major US city that didn’t host such an event. A palpable embarrassment, because New England was home to such an unbroken line of book-culture excellence, from Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne to Doris Kearns Goodwin, Dennis Lehane, and Steve Almond.

Unfortunately book festivals don’t grow on trees, so Porter signed up some major culture-loving institutions to help bankroll the project, including Verizon (currently partnering with Google to keep the net neutral), Hachette (one of the “Big Six” global media monopolies that control most publishing in the US), and Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt (a subsidiary of another of the Big Six, Education Media and Publishing Group Limited, registered in the Cayman Islands). But the real breakthrough came with a generous grant from State Street Corporation, who was awarded the status of the festival’s “Presenting Sponsor.” Thus all the promotional materials for the first festival, from posters to programs, were effectively branded: “The Boston Book Festival, Presented by State Street Corporation.” Not as concise as a Nike swoosh, but it would do.

State Street Corporation is a financial investment giant headquartered in Boston, with billions in annual revenue and $1.7 trillion in total assets, and the 2009 book festival is not the only item in its list of good works. More recently, State Street helped Republican Scott Brown take Ted Kennedy’s seat in the US Senate. State and its other banking friends then successfully lobbied Brown and other senators to gut key provisions from the financial reform bill, including a $19 billion tax on banks which the senators insisted should be made up in spending cuts. (Who knows, maybe they’ll finally trim all that fat off the NEA budget.)

This year’s festival lacks a crowning “Presenting Sponsor,” but the list of patrons features some heavy hitters nonetheless, including the nation’s biggest bank, Bank of America, and one of its largest insurers, Liberty Mutual. How nice to see recipients of recent government largesse – the TARP bailout and the industry-friendly health care “reform” bill – give something back to the community. They’ll get a tax write-off, of course, and what Boston gets is a second middlebrow celebration of its professional-managerial class’s idea of itself in the company of poets such as Edward Hirsch and Elizabeth Alexander, fiction writers such as warhorse Joyce Carol Oates, hip youngster Joshua Ferris, and the inevitable Lehane, and nonfiction authors such as David Shields and torture apologist Alan Dershowitz. For the overall taste and texture of the event, think NPR: inoffensive liberal sweetness on the outside with a hard nut of “neo-” at the center.

What’s new about this year’s festival, however, is the dirty bomb angle – spreading the cultural radiation beyond the convention center via the pseudo-community of the “One City, One Story” program. In an otherwise cheerleading article about the city’s adoption of a read-and-discuss initiative like those already piloted in Seattle and Chicago, a Boston Globe writer inadvertently let the mask slip when he identified such programs as “cousins of the team-building exercises commonly staged at corporate retreats.”[2] And sure enough, Boston’s version does have a primary corporate sponsor, the Goldhirsh Foundation. Set up in 2000 by Bernard Goldhirsh after he was diagnosed with brain cancer, the foundation awards grants for brain cancer research and “social entrepreneurial ventures.” But the late Goldhirsh’s philanthropy goes back further than that: as a young engineer he worked on ballistic missile systems to keep us safe from communism and later moved on to found Inc., a business magazine best known for their annual “Inc. 500” list of fastest-growing companies.

The story itself was selected in bureaucratic back-room fashion by a committee made up of “a designee from the Mayor’s office, several branch librarians, several Boston Book Festival Board members and one or two other representatives of the community,”[3] in which Perrotta’s “The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face” – originally published in Post Road and reprinted in Best American Short Stories 2005 – somehow emerged as the consensus choice (Perrotta also sits on the festival’s “Honorary Advising Board”). In describing the story and its selection in the press release, however, the festival’s organizers strain to give the whole affair a democratic, participatory gloss. President Porter:

“Centering around that quintessentially American experience – a Little League game – Tom has crafted a story that is at once funny and poignant, exploring the universal themes of family, parenthood, adolescence, and intolerance in a fresh and absorbing way. The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face, as entertaining as it is thought-provoking, will appeal to men and women, adults and teens. It is truly a story to be read, shared and discussed.”

And the festival’s Executive Director, Emily D’Amour Pardo:

“We love the idea of many thousands of people in Boston reading the same story and talking about it against the backdrop of the Boston Book Festival . . . The huge success of our inaugural Festival last year proved that Boston has a passion for reading. We want to explore this further by uniting the City around a single story and examining it from the many different perspectives that exist here.”

Many of the “different perspectives” that Porter and D’Amour Pardo enthuse about, however, might find themselves entirely left out of the story, however “quintessentially American” and “universal” the organizers try to bill it. Set in a New Jersey suburb, its protagonist-narrator is a middle-aged, middle-management white guy who regretfully mulls over the failure of his marriage and estrangement of his gay son while he acts as umpire for a Little League championship game, pitched for one of the teams by an Asian-American girl with an amazing arm. It’s not a given that African-Americans in neighborhoods like Dorchester and Mattapan or the Latino/a community in East Boston and Chelsea, among others, will find their universe in this “universal” tale.

This shortcoming can be partially remedied, however, by the educational apparatus: it’s a sure bet that there will be plenty of special assignments focusing on the “One City, One Story” program in the region’s high school English classes, in which students will be coached to “discover” how universal the story is while being exhorted that they are participating in the city’s cultural life. And no doubt the program’s organizers will branch out in the coming years, selecting a Black or a Latina author at suitable intervals so long as their stories reflect the appropriate values.

And what are those values? Tolerance is one – the story’s main character learns to accept that the playing field of his community must be widened to include Asian people such as the pitcher and her father and gay people like his own son. Even though they are painted with an After School Special brush of middle-class, model-minority respectability (the Asian-Americans have strong family bonds, work hard, and achieve excellence, and the son’s homosexuality is signified by his desire to perform in musical theater), no doubt they will be read as standing for “all” minority or marginalized groups.

But the story has a further lesson as well: personal responsibility. The narrator recalls how the year without his family gave him, in his words, “a lot of time to stew in my own anger, to indulge the conviction that I was a victim too, every bit as much as my wife and son.” The turning point for our hero comes when he watches the star pitcher’s father, Happy Chang, punch out the opposing team’s coach for setting up his daughter for a dangerous bean ball when she comes up to bat. As Chang is taken away by the police, the narrator sees on his face “the proud and defiant smile of a man at peace with what he’d done and willing to accept the consequences.” Happy Chang isn’t going to spend any time feeling sorry for himself but rather instantly takes responsibility for his actions, even if it means assault charges; thus he represents an alternative to the narrator, who punched out his own kid and then wallowed in self pity. The story reaches its climax when the narrator, inspired by Happy, makes a courageous and lonely stand over the final call of the game.

The homiletic arc of the story curves from “victim” to “accepting the consequences,” key words that will no doubt find themselves highlighted in many of the copies of this “free” corporate-funded and state-blessed story that find their way into classrooms and book clubs. Ideologically, it’s a perfect “third way” narrative, thoroughly in tune with the values of the Democratic Party under the hegemony of the business-friendly DLC and the Clinton and Obama administrations: tolerance for those who can merit it in the “free” marketplace.

The story is aesthetically conservative as well, a textbook example of the “well-made” realist epiphany story that remains the dominant mode in many MFA programs and literary journals and in most of the “literary fiction” published by the Big Six monopolies. The chief function of such fiction is humanist apologetics for the “literate” professional-managerial class, to keep them on board with galloping inhumanity; readers find in it – along with markers of their cultural distinction – the narcissistic reflection of their “uniquely human” and “free, spontaneous” interiority and autonomy. With a slight shift in the angle of light, however, that reflection becomes just the sheen of the commodity.

Literature doesn’t fall from heavens, it comes to us thickly mediated, and those mediations are not merely “frames” or “contexts” but deeply braided into its very materials. Writing which is art – as distinct from “literary fiction” – is conscious of this and strains against it, against its own materials, and invites us to participate in that struggle, and its inevitable failure, and its inevitable next attempt. Literary fiction, on the other hand, goes with the grain, is easily consumed, and enjoys success.

Such success will now be enjoyed by Tom Perrotta’s “The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face,” and the organizers of the Boston Book Festival, and their corporate sponsors. In the pseudo-community of their “One City, One Story” program, a space is created for the discussion of artistic and social issues that is neither authentically dialogical nor democratic, but rather one in which some are invited to enjoy their profit and privilege, and all are invited to enjoy their alienation.

(originally published in SOUS LES PAVÉS 1.1, Nov. 2010)

[1] Press release. Ashmont Media. Boston, MA: 26 August 2010.

[2] Carlo Rotella, “Binding Boston with a Story.” Boston Globe, 30 August 2010.

[3] Jess Huckins, “Bringing Boston Together, One Story at a Time.” Blast Magazine, 19 June 2010.

Author Interviews and Other Police Procedures

2010-12-29T12:47:00.000-08:00

From a 1985 BBC interview with Jean Genet, filmed not long before his death. Watch how Genet's performance deconstructs one of the institutions of the "literature" industry -- the author interview -- to reveal its complicity with another practice of power-knowledge in the carceral continuum, the police interrogation.

Here is the transcript for this segment of the interview:

Jean Genet: I had a dream last night. I dreamed that the technicians for this film revolted. Assisting with the arrangement of the shots, the preparation of a film, they never have the right to speak. Now why is that? And I thought they would be daring enough – since we were talking yesterday about being daring – to chase me from my seat, to take my place. And yet they don’t move. Can you tell me how they explain that?

Nigel Williams: Yes. Uh… How they…?

JG: How they explain that. Why they don’t come and chase me away, and chase you away too, and then say, “What you’re saying is so stupid that I really don’t feel like going on with this work!” Ask them.

NW: Okay, sure. (He speaks to the technicians and translates Genet’s question into English.)

JG: The sound man too.

NW: (Nigel Williams asks the sound man, Duncan Fairs, who answers that he doesn’t have much to say at the moment, that the people who work every day lose their sense of objective judgment about what they’re doing and remain prisoners of their personal world. He adds that the technicians always have something to say after the filming, but that if they spoke in front of the camera it would cost a lot of money and would be very expensive for the film production company.) Is that what interested you about your dream: disrupting the order of things? In a certain way you wanted to disrupt the order that exists in this little room?

JG: Disrupt the order of things?

NW: Yes.

JG: Of course, of course. It seems so stiff to me! I’m all alone here, and here in front of me there are one, two, three, four, five, six people. Obviously I want to disrupt the order, and that’s why yesterday I asked you to come over here. Of course.

NW: Yes, it’s like a police interrogation?

JG: There’s that, of course. I told you – is the camera rolling? Good. I told you yesterday that you were doing the work of a cop, and you continue to do it, today too, this morning. I told you that yesterday and you’ve already forgotten it, because you continue to interrogate me just like the thief I as thirty years ago was interrogated by the police, by a whole police squad. And I’m on the hot seat, alone, interrogated by a bunch of people. There is a norm on one side, a norm where you are, all of you: two, three, four, five, six, seven, and also the editors of the film and the BBC, and then there’s an outer margin where I am, where I am marginalized. And if I’m afraid of entering the norm? Of course I’m afraid of entering the norm, and if I’m raising my voice right now, it’s because I’m in the process of entering the norm, I’m entering English homes, and obviously I don’t like it very much. But I’m not angry at you who are the norm, I’m angry at myself because I agreed to come here. And I really don’t like it very much at all.

NW: But your books are taught in the schools, right here in England.

JG: Oh! What are you talking about?

NW: It’s true. I myself studied Genet at the university.

JG: Hmmm.

NW: Do you like that?

JG: There’s both a feeling of vanity.. and at the same time it’s very unpleasant. Of course, there is this double… this double imperative almost. Is the camera rolling?

NW: Yes, it’s rolling.

JG: Good. Ask me questions then, since the system says that I’m the one who’s supposed to interrogated.

***********

Full transcript here. H/t.

SOUS LES PAVÉS 1.2 is LIVE

2010-12-28T14:47:00.000-08:00

FEATURING WORK BY

Dale Smith, Brooks Johnson, Keston Sutherland, Richard Owens, Debrah Morkun, j/j hastain, Sotère Torregian, David Hadbawnik, Tyrone Williams, Linh Dinh, Susan Briante, Vituper Ventures, Sommer Browning, Brenda Iijima, Mary Burger, Josh Stanley, Christopher Marlow, Felix Zapata, Kent Johnson, and Peter Davis

TO JOIN THE FREE MAILING LIST OR TO DONATE, VISIT

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New Work at Chicago Review

2010-12-16T12:33:00.001-08:00

The wheels of academic publishing turn slowly, but they turn. The new Chicago Review is out, including my piece on Dalkey Archive Press's Best European Fiction 2010. Read it here.

"The Great Library will burn down Rome": SLAG on the UK anti-fees protests

2010-12-09T15:22:00.000-08:00

A communiqué issued by the Surrealist London Action Group. I repost it as a fellow traveler of Surrealism, and because I think it makes a very important (and quintessentially surrealist) point that often gets overlooked in the analyses and agitational materials of the more conventional left: schooling is miserablism. We should fight off every neoliberal assault on the "educational" apparatus, the better to destroy it ourselves, in the same convulsion of the marvelous that abolishes the vicious, philistine society it was meant to reproduce.

New Alexandria

Sheets of paper, sheets of flame. The Romans are burning the Great Library again. Today the Liberals and Tories, the British ruling class’s oldest parties, are voting on their own plans to eat the young. Like the Labour government before them, they have realised that educating working-class youth is an unnecessary expense. University fees must rise, subsidies to support teenagers through school must go, and there need be no more pretence that education is for the benefit of anything other than capital.

While the MPs are voting, students will be protesting and resisting heroically, as they have been over the last few weeks, and the ruling class will once again send squads of riot police against them. Schoolkids whose future educations are being stolen from them will instead receive extra lessons in applied batons and horse charges.

As revolutionary Surrealists – and as students, ex-students and education workers, and people who have been taught to read and write – we hardly need to say that we are viscerally opposed to this assault on youth and education. We will fight these education cuts with all the means at our disposal. But we will not do so in the name of defending education. Britain’s education system in its current form is frankly not worth defending.

Cringing Liberals have been pointing to the post-1992 expansion of higher education to justify the fee hikes, arguing that the massive increase in student numbers has made the system unsustainably expensive. Many of those who oppose the rise in fees – including the so-called left wing of the very Labour Party which introduced tuition fees in the first place – say that this newly accessible university is precisely what must be ‘defended’.

But those of us who have worked and studied on these intellectual factory farms know that education in this country has been nothing short of a disaster, from Key Stage 2 SATS to the Research Excellence Framework. Children fed poetry that’s been reduced to the literary equivalent of Turkey Twizzlers; students told that politically flabby post-New Left bullshit is the way to make sense of ‘culture’; academics chasing ever-decreasing funding by publishing in elitist journals with ever-decreasing readerships… Defend that crap? Not on your life.

Where, in all of this, is the beautiful savagery of the mind? Where are the things that are appalling to know, that score the flesh with their uselessness and wonder? Learning is no commodity: it’s an acid to burn money. Bound in human skin, it’s the toxic arcane to be championed, explored, succumbed to, seduced by, conquered. It’s traced in golden words of fire that fall blazing from the page, flaring and dying as we read them, gone in an explosion of unknown suns.

The only library that we defend is the one that’s set alight by its own blazing. Sheets of paper, sheets of flame. The Great Library will burn down Rome.

New Fiction at Lamination Colony

2010-10-30T04:15:00.000-07:00

Lamination Colony 2010 is up, a throat-in-rags death rattle of a final issue, featuring 46 writers. Go and read it, especially if throat-in-rags and death rattle strike you as a contradiction in terms. My bit is in there, too, "Valley of the Dolls." Thanks to the editor for being cool with the formatting issues and getting it just right.

New Fiction at wigleaf

2010-10-27T14:03:00.000-07:00

Isn't it one of the best-designed sites ever for very short fiction?

Dead Markets

2010-10-17T13:42:00.000-07:00

Markets Updated (since last newsletter):

1. New York Times Book Review: Has closed.
2. Atlantic Monthly: Project cancelled.
3. The New Yorker: Website has not been functioning for over a month; emails to the editor bounce; we are declaring this a "dead" market.
4. The New Republic: Website hasn't been updated in over a year; editor has not responded to our inquiries; we are declaring this a "dead" market.
5. Paris Review: Website has not been functioning for over a month; emails to the editor bounce; we are declaring this a "dead" market.
6. Ploughshares: Website has not been functioning for over a month; editor has not responded to us; we are declaring this a "dead" market.
7. Missouri Review: Website has not been updated in quite a while; editor has not responsed to us; we are declaring this a "dead" market.
8. Iowa Review: Website has not been updated in quite a while; editor has not responsed to us; we are declaring this a "dead" market.

9. Esquire: Project cancelled.

"No Story and No Sin"

2010-10-10T11:03:00.000-07:00

Pierre Guyotat

Roland Barthes on Pierre Guyotat’s Eden Eden Eden:

Eden Eden Eden is a free text: free of all subjects, of all objects, of all symbols, written in the space (the abyss or blind-spot) where the traditional constituents of discourse (the one who speaks, the events recounted, the way they are expressed) would be superfluous. The primary consequence is that criticism, unable to discuss the author, his subject, or his style, can find no way of taking hold of this text: Guyotat’s language must be “entered,” not by believing it, becoming party to an illusion, participating in a fantasy, but by writing the language with him in his place, singing it along with him.

Getting in on the language, in the sense of “getting in on the act,” is possible because Guyotat produces not a manner, a genre, a literary object, but a new element (which might even be added to the four Elements of cosmogony); this element is the phrase: substance of speech with the qualities of a fine cloth or a foodstuff, a single sentence which never ends, whose beauty comes not from what it refers to (the reality towards which it is supposed to point) but from its breath, cut short, repeated, as if the author were trying to show us not a series of imaginary scenes, but the scene of language, so that the model of this new mimesis is no longer the adventure of some hero, but the adventure of the signifier itself: what becomes of it.

Eden Eden Eden constitutes (or ought to constitute) a sort of eruption, a historical shock: the whole of an earlier evolution of writing, seemingly double but coinciding in ways we can now see more and more clearly, from Sade to Genet, from Mallarmé to Artaud, is gathered up, displaced, purified of its historical circumstances: no Story and no Sin (surely the same thing), we are left simply with language and lust, not the former expressing the latter, but the two bound together in a reciprocal metonymy, indissoluble.

The strength of this metonymy, sovereign in Guyotat’s text, might presage a strong censure, which will find here its two favorite pastures, language and sex, united; but any such censure, which may take many forms, will be unmasked by its own vehemence: condemned to being excessive if it claims to censure simply the subject and not the form, or vice versa: in either case condemned to reveal its own essence as censorship.

Yet whatever the institutional peripeteia, the publication of this text is important: a whole body of critical and theoretical work will be carried forward, without the text ever losing its power of seduction: outside all categories and yet of an importance beyond any doubt, a new landmark and a starting-point for new writing.

********

Also:

Stephen Barber on Guyotat's Coma.

John Taylor's "Reading Pierre Guyotat" at Context.

New Fiction at A cappella Zoo

2010-10-07T05:50:00.000-07:00

I now have a triptych of stories about encounters with artists and art, a third panel to go with "The Scythian Idol" and "An Affair." This one's called "The Collector of Van de Voys," and since I consider it one of my best pieces so far, I'm especially pleased that it's found a home in the latest issue of A cappella Zoo, alongside work by Nancy Gold, Hayes Greenwood Moore, David Misialowski, Kate Riedel, Mike Meginnes, Alex Myers, Benjamin Robinson Jason Jordan, Phillip Neel, Theodore Carter, Melissa Ross, Tania Hershman, Catherine Sharpe, and Naoko Awa, and more. The entire contents of the issue will be published online by the end of October, but I hope that you'll order a print copy of Issue 5 of the Zoo -- or better yet, subscribe.

Update: "The Collector of Van de Voys" has now been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Introducing SOUS LES PAVÉS

2010-10-01T03:13:00.000-07:00

»SOUS LES PAVÉS«

. . . is a bi-monthly newsletter of poetry, prose, ideas & opinions, reviews, photo documentaries, b/w artwork and letters of all kinds. It is conceived in the spirit & tradition of THE FLOATING BEAR, FUCK YOU, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, ROLLING STOCK, THE REALIST, THE DIGGER PAPERS, INTERNATIONALE SITUATIONNISTE, THE BLACK PANTHER INTERCOMMUNAL NEWS SERVICE, PROFANE EXISTENCE and any number of lo-fi no-frills PUNK ZINES & COMMUNITY PAPERS. At a time when much discourse circulates amid the instantaneous push-n-pull of the blogosphere – some of which is sharp, but much of which is soggy pulp – we seek to slow down, pause, and cultivate thoughtful responses to our collective troubles before delivering a polemical flux of ideation via the hands & feet of the world’s postal workers

… in perpetuity …

However, to do so, and do so with regularity, we need your financial support. If you receive this newsletter and understand its value, please consider donating some small funds to our effort. All moneys will be used to produce and ship the newsletter to what will no doubt prove to be a growing number of recipients. As things stand at the time of the first issue, our mailing list consists of approx. 300 people, all of who will receive this newsletter gratis.

To donate, go the SOUS LES PAVÉS page at Interbirth Books

To get on the mailing list, write to Micah Robbins at: editor@interbirthbooks.org

And while you're at it, read contributor David Hadbawnik's post on the newsletter, "Print: Why Bother?"

New Fiction at Prick of the Spindle

2010-09-24T16:32:00.000-07:00

from "An Affair":

They watched as the artist had an exchange with a grizzled poet who had dropped by. Still pecking out pomes on yr Olivetti, homie? the artist tweeted. “Except when I use parchment and quill!” said the poet, flourishing a small spiral notebook out of his pocket. He opened the notebook, cleared his throat, and read one of the entries to his sudden audience (a poem later included, with one or two minor revisions, in his chapbook Regression Analysis). Everyone applauded except the artist, who rolled his eyes. “Litrachur is 50 yrs behind painting,” he needled, adding in the next tweet, Gysin said it, I believe it, that settles it. “You may be right, brother,” was the poet’s quick riposte, “but at least poetry is still twenty-five years ahead of fiction!” Then he rolled a cigarette and stuck it behind his ear for later.

Read it in the new Prick of the Spindle.

You and What Army

2010-09-07T19:51:00.000-07:00

Representatives of the Kenneth Koch Estate drop in on Punch Press

A few weeks ago I put up a post about a forthcoming volume by Kent Johnson, A Question Mark Above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem “By” Frank O’Hara, to be published in a handsome limited edition by the good folks at Punch Press prior to the release of a trade edition. The book is devoted, in part, to Kent’s exploration of the intriguing hypothesis that Kenneth Koch is in fact the author of one of Frank O’Hara’s canonical poems, “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” which Koch always maintained he discovered among O’Hara’s papers in 1966 after the latter’s untimely death. To me this is a valuable and interesting investigation, inviting us to widen our ideas not only about the direct participants but a host of issues such as literary mourning, authorship, "authenticity" and voice, influence, reputation, and even questions of textual editing.

Everything that Kent has written about the topic in advance of the book’s actual publication (for example here and here) clearly communicates that his project is intended as a thought-experiment, a reframing of the poem in the service of refreshing our awareness of it and the relationships and issues surrounding it, whether or not we decide that Koch, rather than O’Hara, was the poem’s author. Kent himself acknowledges that “the odds are still on O’Hara,” and adds, “I’d probably bet on him myself.” Nor does Kent impute any motive to Koch (who died in 2002) other than love for his friend, writing, “Such a ‘forgery’ would stand as one of the most beautiful, selfless, and idiosyncratically ethical gestures ever made in the history of American letters. It would ratify, and in singular, moving ways, both Kenneth Koch’s greatness as poet and Frank O’Hara’s greatness of spirit.” (For both quotes see the end of the article at the second of the two links above.)

It wouldn’t be surprising for a projected title with such a thesis to stir up a little controversy and some lively discussion and debate, but unfortunately it appears that the custodians of Koch’s and O’Hara’s literary reputations – which apparently aren’t robust enough yet to fend for themselves – have decided instead to assume postures of outrage and are now moving to stifle the discussion altogether. As Kent announced yesterday in an update at Isola di Rifiuti:

On 9/4/10, Richard Owens, poet and publisher of Punch Press, soon to release A Question Mark above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem “by” Frank O’Hara, received a certified letter from The Kenneth Koch Literary Estate. The letter unambiguously threatens “legal action” against the book.

The letter states, in part, that “Alfred A. Knopf (publisher of both Koch and O’Hara), Maureen Granville-Smith, executor of the Frank O’Hara Estate, and poets Bill Berkson, Ron Padgett, Jordan Davis, and Tony Towle [ . . . ] all are strongly convinced that this publication is a malicious hoax, one that denigrates Kenneth Koch’s character and dishonors his work.”

The claim that the book (which, it bears repeating, has not yet been released and therefore can’t have been read by the complainants) is a “hoax” is utterly without merit – speculation on a poem’s authorship doesn’t even fit the word’s definition – and the only thing “malicious” going on here is the bullying legal threat itself.

In a post at The Best American Poetry blog, David Lehman breaks down the network of relationships among the co-signatories:

Knopf publishes both Koch and O'Hara. Granville-Smith is Frank O'Hara's sister and the executor of his estate. Kenneth Koch entrusted his literary estate and legacy to a trio of persons including Padgett and Davis. Berkson was on very close terms with O'Hara, who addressed numerous poems to him. Towle studied with both O'Hara and Koch.

But the conclusion Lehman draws from this – that “if anyone is in a position to judge the case, it is they” – does not necessarily follow. The connections and shared history he cites could just as easily reflect an interest in maintaining a certain status quo. Note, for example, the insouciance with which the publishing company Alfred A. Knopf is included in the list of individuals’ names. Well, corporations are persons under the law, too, right?

But in this case it’s the 800-pound gorilla: Knopf is a division of the Random House Publishing Group, which in turn is a division of Bertelsmann Inc., one of the “Big Six” media megaconglomerates that currently monopolize commercial publishing in the US and elsewhere. So what we have here – in the name of Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch! – is a threat by a large corporation potentially to bankrupt a small independent press and drive it out of business if it dares to bring out Kent Johnson’s book, which in its turn dares to speculate on the authorship of a poem written over fifty years ago.

Punch Press, run by Richard Owens, is a publisher of a small number of finely-made and very cool poetry books, chapbooks, and broadsides, as well as the valuable journal Damn the Caesars. A lawsuit against such a press, with few to no financial resources, brought by a company such as Knopf – armed to the teeth with dollars and lawyers – has no need to prevail in court, or even come before a judge, in order to have its intended effect. No doubt the Koch Estate, Alfred A. Knopf publishing, and the other co-signatories of the letter to Punch Press are all anticipating that the specter of attorneys’ and legal fees alone will be enough.

This has plainly become an issue of free speech versus censorship. I have no doubt that the careerists will either keep their mouths shut or open them to side with power (after all, maybe someday they’ll be published by Knopf!), but those with their principles still intact have a responsibility to raise their voices, in whatever venues they can, in protest against this threat and in solidarity with Kent Johnson and Richard Owens.

UPDATE:

Some other responses of note, here, here, here, here, and here - most of them eloquent and reasoned defenses of the book and the publisher. What's interesting, by contrast (dip into the comments threads, for example), is how unable those who explicitly or implicitly support the book's suppression are to mount any kind of argument at all, offering instead only snipes, sneers, shrugs, and serves-you-rights. But then power is always its own argument.

Don't Try This at Home, Kids!

2010-08-17T13:02:00.000-07:00

an editor at Arcus Publishing prepares to appraise a work of metafiction

Comedy gold from the Submissions page at "Arcus Publishing":

FICTION: We will publish in our literary magazine works of prose up to 9000 words in length, but be sure to go light on the pretentiousness. We like stories that keep us interested, are well-constructed, have sympathetic characters, and avoid needless experimentation. An experimental work will be considered, but very carefully.

Maybe when these editors advance from the larva to the pupa stage, they can become interns at The New Yorker and write the “Briefly Noted” book reviews, like this one:

The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris

by Leïla Marouane, translated from the French by Alison Anderson (Europa; $15)

To disguise his Algerian heritage and land a job at a French bank, the narrator of this tragicomic novel has whitened his skin, straightened his hair, and legally changed his name—in short, declared “an ethnic war against himself.” Once a devout Muslim, he is now bent on losing his virginity at the belated age of forty. To that end, he abandons the home he shares with his mother in a project on the fringes of Paris and acquires a Left Bank bachelor pad. Bathos follows, in a series of hilariously inconclusive sexual encounters. Less compelling are the postmodern high jinks, as the hero starts to fear that a female writer—a stand-in for the author—is turning him into a character in a novel. ♦

I happened to read Marouane’s novel and found it delightful. The metafictional elements are integral to the narrative and not frippery at all; to dismiss them as such is utterly to miss the book’s point. Which means that this particular pupa has a bright future ahead of it, and might one day blossom into an organism such as Jiminy Critic.

New Fiction at > kill author

2010-08-04T20:13:00.000-07:00

The new issue of > kill author is out, this one dedicated to Vladimir Nabokov, who died of a viral infection in 1978 (and rolled over in his grave when The Original of Laura was published in 2009). It features new work by Andrew Roe, Cameron Pierce, Cezarija Abartis, Cheyenne Nimes, Daniel Carter, Daniel Romo, David Backer, David Laskowski, Elaine Chiew, Frank Hinton, Gregory Sherl, Jack Boettcher, Jennifer Spiegel, Jessica Newman, Lauren Becker, Matt Mullins, Melissa Lee-Houghton, Mitch James, Rae Bryant, Raymond Farr, R.L. Swihart, Ryder Collins, Sheldon Lee Compton, and Thomas Bunstead. Oh and a little piece by me called "A Paper Moon," one of my recent experiments with incorporating appropriated text.

Rubber Chickens

2010-08-01T08:05:00.000-07:00

Controlled atmosphere killing

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the method of slaughtering farm animals. For the proposed method of capital punishment, see nitrogen asphyxiation.

Controlled atmosphere killing (CAK) is a method for slaughtering animals such as chickens by placing the animals in a container in which the

atmosphere lacks oxygen and consists of one or more of argon, nitrogen or carbon dioxide, causing the animals to lose consciousness. Argon and

nitrogen are important components of a painless gassing process which seem to cause no pain, and for this reason many consider it more humane

than other methods of killing.

Portable units are available. Controlled atmosphere stunning has been used both within processing plants and on-farm for euthanizing poultry. One

portable unit type that costs US$2,500 can be pushed down the aisles of a barn, with 200–250 hens per load being placed inside a CO₂ enriched

chamber. Hens are unconscious within 20 seconds of being in the chamber.

Fall Reading by a Man for All Seasons

2010-07-24T12:14:00.000-07:00

A QUESTION MARK ABOVE THE SUN:  DOCUMENTS ON THE MYSTERY

SURROUNDING  A FAMOUS POEM"BY" FRANK O'HARA  

by KENT JOHNSON

TABLE OF CONTENTS  

INTRODUCTION: A Case for Reasonable Doubt  

CORRODED BY SYMBOLYSME 

1. The First Ring 

2. The Garden of Pembroke 

3. In the Wunderkammer 

4. The Bloody Plum Tree   

APPENDIX 

1. Tape-Essay by Tosa Motokiyu, Ojiu Norinaga, and Okura Kyojin 

2. Letter to Tony Towle 

3. Correspondence from David Shapiro 

4. Notes on an O'Hara Document

(from the Punch Press website):

While Punch Press has always been reluctant to disclose print run quantities, we are presently preparing to bring out Kent Johnson's critical novella A Question Mark Above the Sun in an edition of 100 copies. In order to maintain a level of quality commensurate with previous Punch Press publications, we are requesting that this book be ordered in advance to subsidize production.

The cost of this title is $20.00 for US readers and $30 for readers abroad. These prices are calculated strictly to cover the cost of production and postage-that is, these prices DO NOT include labor (i.e. editing, formatting, printing, assembling, packaging). The production cost of the cover for this title, which is pictured above and has already been printed, was approximately $450.00. The estimate for the book itself (not including the cover ) is $948.00.

Subscribe here; due out in October.

And while you’re there, click over and order the latest issue of Damn the Caesars, which also looks damn good.

ANOTHER PARADISE LOST!: A Surrealist Program of Demands on the Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster

2010-06-03T21:00:00.000-07:00

O octopus, with your silken look! whose soul is inseparable from mine…

-The Songs of Maldoror

We are through with the rational, reasonable, realistic and scientific solutions of faith-based positivism. Instead, we make the following demands and dedicate them to Judi Bari, an Earth First! liberator and lover of old-growth trees who was car-bombed by the forces of law-’n'-order twenty years ago on May 24th. Long live Judi Bari! Solidarity with Marie Mason, Oso Blanco Chubbock, Mumia Abu Jamal, and the Tarnac 9!

1. CLARIFICATION: It needs to be made clear that this is not an “oil spill.” This is a manmade disaster. Depending on which official version you chose to believe, millions of gallons of oil have been gushing into the ocean every day since April 22, 2010. A “spill” is what happens when a drinking glass of water tips over; this is and always has been an unstoppable, unpluggable, uncleanable, uncontrollable, unleashed man-made geyser of toxic disaster.

2. PEOPLE’S TRIBUNALS FOR ECOTERRORISTS: An injury to one is an injury to all! We charge every BP America executive and governmental overseer of offshore oil drilling with manslaughter and ecocide. The mansions, yachts, and private jets seized from these executives and bureaucrats will be converted into sandboxes, tree forts, rain gardens, greenhouses, and amusement parks. The accused must face a people’s tribunal and stand trial in the Gulf Shore communities that their actions (and inactions) have affected, particularly the families of those eleven workers killed when the BP rig exploded. Bussed in from the cities, the underground, and the countryside, members of Earth Liberation Front and Earth First! should be on hand to witness the proceedings, especially those who are currently serving harsh prison sentences for their work in defense of the natural world. The least that we can hope for as an outcome is that the accused will be tarred with their own petroleum wastes and feathered with the soiled plumage of murdered birds.

3. DISMANTLING OF ALL OIL, COAL, AND NUCLEAR POWER COMPANIES: The obscene perpetuation of environmental devastation and endless wars in the name of energy company profits cannot be tolerated any longer. In the name of brown pelicans, shrimp, frigate birds, marlins, sea bass, laughing gulls, octopi, and piping plovers, we demand an immediate and total cessation of the violent industrialized extraction of oil and coal from the Earth. We also call for the shutting down of all nuclear power facilities whose foul radioactive wastes threaten ecologies everywhere.

4. DISSOLUTION OF ALL MEDIA CORPORATIONS: Our friend in New Orleans, Max Cafard, reports that monstrous tentacles of oil measuring ten miles long and three miles wide continue to grow beneath the waves, yet tellingly the media industry remains focused on the multicolored “sheen” on the sea’s surface. News outlets dutifully parrot the oil company’s party line of official estimates and explanations. When one BP official said that this disaster was a good opportunity to experiment with pollution containment strategies, no news agency explored the implications of an industry that can trigger a catastrophe and then grope around in the dark for a way out of it. In another interview with a BP spokesman, the CNN reporter concluded the report with the sympathetic assurance that “We’re all praying” for the corporation. Clearly, the media serve only the interests of their stockholders and the State in their coverage of this atrocity. Therefore we call for all equipment and broadcast network technology currently used to disseminate these outrageous lies and propaganda (”We’re glad that you’re on the job, Admiral”; “Don’t worry-warm water microbes break down the oil”) to be collectivized and re-distributed on street corners in order to encourage more participation and free expression in the report and analysis of such tragedies.

5. EMERGENCY MASS ACTION: We call upon everyone to defend your homes, your loved ones, and the Earth from destruction. We have seen the graffiti in Mobile, Alabama: “When life gives you oil spills, make Molotovs!”

Penelope Rosemont
The Surrealist Movement in the United States

(h/t)

The Girl with the Personal Pronoun

2010-05-31T11:32:00.000-07:00

She sat on the worn sofa in her living room for one whole evening running through the situation in her mind.

She took three quick strides.

She frowned and bit her lower lip in thought.

She felt high, as if she had consumed some inappropriate and presumably illegal substance.

She was with an equally drunk and much older man.

She held up a DVD and slipped it into the player.

She could stand up straight there, just.

She shrugged.

She had a CD player on a shelf.

She was perfectly content as long as people left her in peace.

She sat on a park bench outside the church and read Leviticus.

She punched in the code and the lock clicked.

She looked at it, meditatively biting her lower lip.

She held on to him the whole time.

She lost sight of him for several seconds when they took several bends.

She went to her room, locked the door, and got undressed.

She had no wish to be shut out and would have gladly done the job for free.

She tried to understand.

She sighed with relief.

She had kept her eyes on the floor so they would not betray her exasperation.

She shook her head.

She went back to the kitchen and sat down on a chair, massaging her forehead until he joined her.

She did not betray with so much as a raised eyebrow that she was surprised, but she listened intently to every word that was said.

She waited patiently, answering all the questions he asked.

She lit another cigarette and pressed the remote.

She saw an unfocused image that showed clowns in the foreground of the Children’s Day parade.

She did not reply.

She did not doubt the accuracy of her reply.

She pushed him away.

She did not feel like getting up until Tuesday.

She nodded.

She had put together a questionnaire with ten questions, which she asked on the telephone.

She focused her gaze on the street lamp outside the window and sat still while her brain worked at top speed.

She felt satisfied with her day.

She stopped thinking and fell asleep almost at once.

She studied a newspaper photograph of him.

She minded her own business and did not interfere with what anyone around her did.

She had no idea how it had happened or how she was supposed to cope with it.

She went out to the car park through a side door.

She noted down the latest transfers.

She thought about the once-pregnant waitress whose head had been shoved underwater in her own bath.

She turned to him and saw that his face was the color of a tomato, his eyes were wide open, and his tongue was popping out of his mouth.

She sat down.

She stopped and let her eyes sweep over the car park.

She stiffened and at first she looked furious, but then she relaxed when she realized that he was laughing at the comedy of the situation.

She used a telephone in the lobby.

She could see who had gone past during the day.

She camouflaged the cameras with dark cloth.

She went over to his bed, took the book, and put it on the bedside table.

She was still silent.

She kept on paging through old documents.

She explained where she’d found them.

She booted up her PowerBook and uplinked to the Net through her mobile.

She understood how it worked.

She looked at him for the first time since she had sat at the table.

She felt him studying her closely.

She waited.

She went regularly to the window to see if there was any sign of him.

She tried to speak sensibly.

She was forced to make contact with him.

She considered – and rejected – various methods until she had narrowed it down to a few realistic scenarios from which to choose.

She laughed, an abrupt laugh that sounded almost like cough.

She decided that whatever else he might be, he did not seem like a malicious person.

She switched off the desk lamp and left the newsletters in piles all over the desk.

She was the one leading him to the bed, not the other way around.

She paused.

She realized that she was shouting and lowered her voice.

She looked around.

She would never be able to mend things.

She looked up at the church again.

She did so with some hesitation.

She had a dazzling view of Lake Zurich, which didn’t interest her in the least.

She paid her bills and could use her savings as she saw fit.

She raised her voice.

She arrived as the doors were closing.

She had been staring at the computer screen for almost eleven hours.

She tossed the cigarette end into the water.

She went to the church.

She frowned.

She tossed Elvis into a dumpster.

She took the papers and dropped them in a desk drawer.

She closed the book and looked at the photograph on the back.

She disliked having anyone touch her without her leave.

She could hardly breathe.

She had tried all the doors and windows on the ground floor.

She felt as if she had decided to start a new life.

She lifted a sports bag onto the kitchen table.

She wiped the door handle and the switch and turned off the light.

She drilled a whole right through the wall for the cable.

She had no faith in herself.

She did not have much to offer.

She reminded herself that she was the one who knew everything.

She didn’t want them to be eyeing her the wrong way, too.

She followed the path along the water where they usually took their evening walks.

She lay listening to him moving about in the kitchen, clearing the table and washing the dishes.

She had turned towards the village when she stopped and went back, all the way out to the point.

She was still in a terrible mood.

She gave him an arch smile and wrote an account number on the notepad on the desk in front of her.

She stiffened.

She smiled and took out another cigarette.

She had made an appointment, and there were no other customers in the shop.

She seemed to be skimming, spending no more than ten or fifteen seconds on each page.

She did not answer her telephone and she did not turn on her computer.

She sat down opposite him.

She lit two cigarettes and gave him one.

She did not know why she had lied, but she was sure it was a wise decision.

She realized with terrifying clarity that she was out of her depth.

She aroused very little sympathy among the teachers.

She held up a huge anal plug.

She dragged out a total of six black rubbish bags and twenty paper bags full of newspapers.

She looked him in the eyes.

She nodded.

She did not want to be disturbed.

She put the binders in a nylon bag.

She got a message saying that the subscriber could not be reached.

She chewed some of his toothpaste to get rid of the taste.

She awoke just after 5:00 in the morning.

She had no sense for interior design.

She looked like any other woman out for a weekend stroll.

She put the bike on its stand and loosened the strap that held her overnight duffel bag in place.

She put the key on the table between.

She neither wept nor changed her expression.

She bought all her computer accessories there, so they gave her a reasonable discount.

She pointed.

She went on stubbornly sitting there until he gave in.

She turned and got the first-aid kit from the cupboard; it contained two packets of elastic bandages, a mosquito stick, and a little roll of surgical tape.

She bought some aspirin at the front desk and ordered a wake-up call for 8:00 a.m.

She leaned forward and smiled sweetly.

She had a text message.

She felt a lot better when she came back in the bedroom.

She quickly sorted the material into different stacks.

She sat up in surprise.

She found the first connection in 1957.

She tallied up her expenses.

She had drunk four, no, five Cokes during the night, and now she got out a sixth and went to sit on the sofa.

She wandered up and down the corridor like a lost soul, fixing her eyes on every doctor who came near.

She had discovered a shortcut.

She put the empty Samsonite suitcase in an unlocked locker.

She heard him come in the front door and turned towards him.

She spent the time thinking.

She tottered to the bedroom and fell back to sleep.

She nodded.

She turned the pages mechanically.

She lit a cigarette.

She had quoted from a text that was only on his computer.

She had used red and blue ink.

She rode on, braking and thinking, for another 150 yards before she stopped and turned around.

She had never done it before.

She had not given him any Christmas present, but she knew what she was going to buy.

She handed him the soap and went back to the kitchen without a word.

She took a quick look around.

She had no real interest in the game, but after she learned the rules, she never lost a match.

She did not like that.

She nodded.

She zipped the pocket back up.

She was in a state of mental paralysis.

She had restored it, one nut at a time, and she had souped it up just a bit over the legal limit.

She had been doing it, in one form or another, for as long as she could remember.

She leaned towards him expectantly.

She put a third camera in a birdhouse above the door.

She sat down next to him without a word.

She did not like anyone touching her stuff.

She talked to a secretary and asked her to pass on a cryptic message.

She tried not to disturb him during the day.

She stood up, left the hospital, and did not return.

She cashed in fifty of the bonds and deposited the money in the accounts.

She did not remember falling asleep, but she woke up at 9:00 a.m. with a crick in her neck and her head leaning against the wall behind the sofa.

She shrugged.

She was no part of it.

She did not cry.

She shook her head.

She did not like awkward conversations.

She went to her work corner in the living room and looked at the notes she had pinned up on the wall and the papers she had stacked on the desk.

She said nothing.

She got up.

She put down the receiver.

She woke him that evening and gave him her opinion of the article.

She stopped at the first little house on the left.

She was really out in the sticks.

She actually looked guilty.

She did not reply.

She was doing 40 miles per hour as she took the curve of the entrance ramp.

She had a stubborn look in her eyes.

She stopped him just as they reached the house.

She leaned against the bathroom door and struggled to collect her thoughts.

She smiled.

She stood there for the next twenty minutes before she made up her mind.

She turned her head and looked at him.

She had a standing invitation to visit him whenever she liked, a privilege that she seldom took advantage of.

She looked at her watch: 11:40.

She lit a cigarette.

She had booked a private sleeping berth.

She ran through her checklist to be sure that she had forgotten no detail.

She was sitting there, dipping her feet in the water and smoking.

She turned on her heel and went home to her newly spotless apartment.

She felt a pang of concern and guilt.

She crossed the threshold, out of the apartment, and turned to face him.

She lay awake listening to him breathe.

She looked . . . different.

She put on some coffee and fixed herself a liver pâté and cucumber sandwich.

She studied herself in the mirror.

She would fold her arms and refuse to participate in any psychological tests.

She spent two days washing laundry, scrubbing, and cleaning up her apartment.

She shrugged.

She sipped her coffee.

She had booted up her own PowerBook.

She saw no traffic and accelerated to full speed and flew forward.

She braked and turned off the motor to listen.

She was ready for battle.

She gave him a thoughtful look.

She had learned to analyze the consequences

She gave him a resigned look and then nodded curtly.

She started reciting several series of sixteen-digit numbers without once referring to any papers.

She had never in her life felt such a longing.

She took a deep breath and went back to the kitchen.

She was more shaken than she would have thought possible.

She saw a total stranger.

She should have said something to him.

She put in an appearance at the front desk before she went up to her room and took off the clothes she had bought.

She had no chance to take care of her final transactions before the banks closed for the day.

She crossed the street and waited a few feet from the street door.

She was not afraid that she had missed anything, but she was not sure that she had understood how every one of the intricate connections fitted together.

She woke up late that night to find herself alone.

She saw the headlights of a truck approaching.

She made use of all the archives and public documents she could lay her hands on.

She wrapped a sheet around her and walked unsteadily to the hall to open the door.

She turned off the TV and sat in the chair for a good ten minutes without looking at him.

She put the paper down without making any comment.

She moved with the lightning speed of a tarantula and seemed totally focused on her prey.

She looked at him for a long moment.

She nodded again.

She felt almost awkwardly protective whenever she thought of him.

She realized that she was cold, so she reached for a blanket, which she wrapped around herself.

She gave the captain of industry barely a glance and a quick nod before she went back to her computer.

She got out of bed and stood by the window, restlessly peering into the dark.

She left his office with a feeling of disgust.

She picked up a crumpled pack of cigarettes from the windowsill and dug one out.

She had also learned that every time she tried to make someone aware of something in her life, the situation just got worse.

She never did anything without first weighing the consequences.

She felt empty.

She pulled out two much-handled and faded Polaroid pictures.

She ate her nighttime snacks on the sofa in the living room while she worked on the information she had gathered.

She wasn’t used to that, but it had been unexpectedly painless.

She gave a generous tip to a boy who carried up her suitcase.

She stayed home for two days.

She was told to be at his office at 7:30 that evening.

She paid quickly and got back on her bike.

She had let the sales girl make the selection.

She could not see his car.

She bought another blond wig, this one in a page-boy style.

She had booked it for one night.

She was at a loss to know what to do.

She felt faintly sick.

She always seemed to settle on the most obscure and contradictory details.

She stood up and headed for the door.

She played the whole disc for him.

She held up another finger.

She began in 1949 and worked her way forward.

She typed: “Have you got time?”

She was soon rolling across the bridge at a low speed.

She suddenly felt excruciatingly bored.

******************

Translated from the Swedish by Edmond Caldwell.

Mr. Caldwell is currently at work translating the astonishing sequel,

The Girl with the Direct Article.

Beckett – mode d’emploi

2010-04-28T20:15:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I tire of the curatorial hush that so often accompanies any citation of Samuel Beckett (although at other times, unfortunately, I have participated in it). So I was particularly delighted to find the following detournement of the famous ‘sucking stones’ passage of Molloy in the February 2010 issue of Holly White, a poetry zine out of London:

Good. Now I can begin to suck. Watch me closely. I take a cock from the right pocket of my greatcoat, suck it, stop sucking it, put it in the left pocket of my greatcoat, the one empty (of cocks). I take a second cock from the right pocket of my greatcoat, suck it put it in the left pocket of my greatcoat. And so on until the right pocket of my greatcoat is empty (apart from its usual and casual contents) and the six cocks I have just sucked, one after the other, are all in the left pocket of my greatcoat. Pausing then, and concentrating, so as not to make a balls of it, I transfer to the right pocket of my greatcoat, in which there are no cocks left, the five cocks in the right pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the five cocks in the left pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the six cocks in the left pocket of my greatcoat. At this stage then the left pocket of my greatcoat is again empty of cocks, while the right pocket of my greatcoat is again supplied, and in the right way, that is to say with other cocks than those I have just sucked. These other cocks I then begin to suck, one after the other, and to transfer as I go along to the left pocket of my greatcoat, being absolutely certain, as far as one can be in an affair of this kind, that I am not sucking the same cocks as a moment before, but others. And when the right pocket of my greatcoat is again empty (of cocks), and the five I have just sucked are all without exception in the left pocket of my greatcoat, then I proceed to the same redistribution as a moment before, or a similar redistribution, that is to say I transfer to the right pocket of my greatcoat, now again available, the five cocks in the right pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the six cocks in the left pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the five cocks in the left pocket of my greatcoat. And there I am ready to begin again. Do I have to go on? There was something more than a principle I abandoned, when I abandoned the equal distribution, it was a bodily need. But to suck the cocks in the way I have described, not haphazard, but with method, was also I think a bodily need. Here then were two incompatible bodily needs, at loggerheads. Such things happen. But deep down I didn't give a tinker's curse about being off my balance, dragged to the right hand and the left, backwards and forewards. And deep down it was all the same to me whether I sucked a different cock each time or always the same cock, until the end of time. For they all tasted exactly the same. And if I had collected sixteen, it was not in order to ballast myself in such and such a way, or to suck them turn about, but simply to have a little store, so as never to be without. But deep down I didn't give a fiddler's curse about being without, when they were all gone they would be all gone, I wouldn't be any the worse off, or hardly any. And the solution to which I rallied in the end was to throw away all the cocks but one, which I kept now in one pocket, now in another, and which of course I soon lost, or threw away, or gave away, or swallowed ...

Besides giving voice to some very interesting subtextual possibilities in the original passage – and, just as importantly, being funny – this little gem of conceptualist appropriation serves as an example of what Beckett should be to us: a Beckett-for-use, as opposed to Beckett-as-museum-piece.

No author is listed on the page the detourned Beckett passage occupies in Holly White. However, there’s a poem on the facing page with the author identified as Hidenoyama Raigoro, so I hazarded the guess that both pieces might be the work of this same writer. Raigoro, my research team soon informed me, was a notable nineteenth-century sumo wrestler. Clearly, then, the act of appropriation had gone the other way: while composing Molloy Beckett had lifted the passage from the work of a nineteenth-century sumo wrestler and homoerotic poet and substituted “stones” for the original “cocks.” The intrepid archivists at Holly White had merely disinterred and printed the restored version of the passage.

Yet surely Beckett would’ve had the stones to leave the cocks in, so there had to be another explanation. Who, then, was hidden behind “Hidenoyama”? I googled a snippet of the suckfest to see if it had ever appeared anywhere online. The search produced a single hit, which directed me to an internet forum: the Oral Sex Thread (“Who’s Up for Going Down?”) at the BUST Lounge. Auralpoison, for example, writes:

I point the cock the right way so it just goes down my throat. If it hits my tongue, it's a taste somewhere between the taste of musky mushrooms & a pool. There's an oddly metallic tang.

And geekchickknits has a suggestion:

Relax and think about creating space in the back of your throat - the root of your tongue melting into your voice box and your soft palette lifting up behind your nose. If you start yawning, you're on the right track. Don't force it, breathe, and don't let him push you down or hold your head in place - if he skull fucks you like this, you'll either have trouble breathing or your gag will kick in and it will not be nice!

There is a genial debate on swallowing versus spitting, dayglowpink recommends using condoms while blowing boyfriends with genital herpes, and, in an amusing interlude, ihateoly offers the following anecdote:

This reminds me of a girl that had a beer booth at the Seattle Octoberfest a couple years ago who was selling OPB aka Original Pussy Beer. Supposedly she used her own vaginal yeast to make the beer, but it turned out to be a joke. But still. In a sexual context, swallowing someone's come is fine, but mixing it with food seems just wrong to me.

Finally, near the bottom of the page, someone assuming the screen name larabuckerton posted the Beckett riff, signing off with a smiling emoticon and a postscript: “I’m new here obv.!!!” There’s only one more comment on that page after larabuckerton’s offering, a reader’s terse “Ummm WTF?”

The forum post was dated January 21 2009, predating the passage’s Holly White appearance by a year. I googled “Lara Buckerton” and found that a poet of that name resides in Newcastle. Well, there we had it – Lara Buckerton of Newcastle was the artist responsible for the marvelous Beckett detournement!

My search could’ve ended there, but the elusive Lara had piqued my inner Zhivago, so I decided to cyberstalk her a little further. Another hit directed me to Justin Katko’s “Report on the 2008 SoundEye International Poetry Festival / Cork, Ireland, 3-6 July 2008,” in Dusie #8. This piece turned out mostly to be about New Brit Poet types (e.g. Keston Sutherland et al.) doing readings and hanging out at the festival, which was cool with me because I’m just discovering the work of these poets and want to read everything I can find (what they’re doing is so much more vital and innovative than almost anything going on in prose fiction right now).

And here was where I finally caught up to my Lara – in a passage where Katko reports on an especially impressive reading given by Jow Lindsay:

Daily, Jow gains unheard-of powers as a poet and a thinker, his particular means of taking and deferring position (in the same swig) rivaled by no one I can think of; which is to say let’s make sure, as a community, that he doesn’t DISAPPEAR. Because I wonder, like, when he will finally put out a book of his poems. I think that it would do the Word some good; with or without his permission. People you must believe it, and act swift on this belief. Sure, there’s that Insane Dump of work (as Lara Buckerton) up on Onedit 10, but a book is something that can actually sit on different stuff anywhere you take it.

Oh. So Lara is after all only a pseudonym of Jow Lindsay, or better yet, a heteronym, since Jow has used a number of them. He might also be Francis Crot, Helen Bridwell, Kyle Storm Best-Chetwynde, Delilah Glaxo-Kleitmann, Axl Prose, and, for all I know, Samuel Beckett. For this he has my nomination for the Post-avant Pessoa Award (speaking of DISAPPEARing poets). And since folks in this crew have been known, in defiance of all accepted protocols of authorial hygiene, to actually share heteronyms, who knows if the “Lara Buckerton” who posted the Beckett detournement at the BUST oral sex forum was even the same “Lara Buckerton” who, according to Justin Katko, left “that Insane Dump of work . . . up on Onedit 10” and goes by the name – highly dubious now that I think of it – of “Jow Lindsay”?

My search had led me into a death-of-the-author mis-en-abyme, and it ultimately told me less about “who wrote the detourned Beckett piece” than it did about my own impulse to assign literary paternity: was this impulse not part and parcel, after all, of what had led me at other times to participate in the curatorialism that reified figures such as Beckett into museum pieces, into altars for worship rather than opportunities for divine profanation? Yet the practices of appropriation and detournement in conceptual poetics – the very practices that I had savored so in the Holly White “sucking stones” piece – implicitly disavow (or at least burlesque) this very same impulse. Here, then, was a contradiction in my aesthetic commitments.

But far from a merely personal tic, this contradiction, I think, is the local expression of a broader one that is constitutive of the modernism/avant-garde divide. Modernism does not reject the “autonomy” of art that has always been a mainstay of bourgeois aesthetics (Kant, etc.), but rather reflects its particular historic intensification, in which artistic means (i.e. form) increasingly become the content of the works themselves. As Peter Bürger puts it in Theory of the Avant-Garde, “the apartness from the praxis of life that always constituted the institutional status of art in bourgeois society now becomes the content of the works.” It is only with the appearance of the historical avant-garde in the first half of the last century (Dada, etc.) that the autonomy of art itself is effectively confronted with the possibility of its negation. Bürger again: “The avant-garde intends the abolition of autonomous art by which it means that art is to be integrated into the praxis of life.” The corollary of these two approaches to art is two opposed views of the artist, the modernist high priest versus the avant-garde provocateur.

“Apartness from the praxis of life” versus “integration into the praxis of life” – these seem as good a way as any to think about what distinguishes Jow Lindsay’s (or whoever’s) Molloy riff from so many curatorial citations of Beckett. We see this in particular with the passage’s appearance at the BUST oral sex discussion forum, where the integration into the everyday is quite literal. But it’s even implied to some degree in Holly White itself, which is about as basic and DIY as zines get (photocopied 8½ X 11 sheets, folded and stapled). And there’s a mode of reception that runs roughly parallel to this: rather than “aesthetic distance” and “disinterested contemplation” (those ancillaries of museums and alibis for the sheen of the “status” commodity), the Beckett detournment opened up an avenue for a more engaged relationship with the “work,” a series of defamings and reframings that continued through my own appropriation of the passage into this blog post. It reminds me, finally, of something John Berger writes in the first chapter of Ways of Seeing:

Adults and children sometimes have boards in their bedrooms or living-rooms on which they pin pieces of paper: letters, snapshots, reproductions of paintings, newspaper cuttings, original drawings, postcards. On each board all the images belong to the same language and all are more or less equal within it, because they have been chosen in a highly personal way to match and express the experience of the room’s inhabitant. LOGICALLY, THESE BOARDS SHOULD REPLACE MUSEUMS.

Emphasis mine.

Advance Praise for ROBOT RILKE:

2010-03-24T18:40:00.000-07:00

“Perhaps the most beautiful group of translations this century has produced.” — Chicago Tribune

“The best single-volume edition of Rilke available in English.” — Boston Review

“Robert Lowell once wrote that it was hard to imagine Rilke first written in English, that the poems were sealed in German. These robots are unsealing them." — Robert Phillips, Houston Chronicle

“The robots have rendered with great skill and accuracy a work both familiar and unknown, more complicated and more immediate than many have suspected, at once grave, mysterious, and beautiful.” — Edward Hirsch

“With these sorrowing and luminous poems . . . it is possible to gain, for the first time in English, a consistent perspective of Rilke’s difficult canon, restored and disclosed by the robots to stunning effect.” — Richard Howard

“Something of the non-vatic Rilke, poet of perception and sensation, is best conveyed in English by these algorithmic mediations.” —Harold Bloom

“The robot translations of Rilke’s most demandingly difficult and loveliest work instantly make every other rendering obsolete. No doubt about it, Rilke has at last found, in the robot version, the ideal poetics and the perfect translator.” — William Arrowsmith

“Excellent . . . it is easy to feel that if Rilke had written in English, he would have written in this English.” — Denis Donoghue, The New York Times

“These robot translations bring the qualities that I most cherish in the originals into English with new intimacy and authority. Rilke’s voice, with its extraordinary combination of formality, power, speed, and lightness, can be heard in the robot versions more clearly than in any others. This work is masterful.” — W.S. Merwin

AN EXCERPT from ROBOT RILKE:

Archaischer Torso Apollos

Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt, 

darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber 

sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber, 

in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,

sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug 

der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen 

der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen 

zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.

Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz 

unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz 

und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle;

und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern 

aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle, 

die dich nicht sieht. Du musst dein Leben ändern.

Apollo’s Antiquated Box

We did not know its dishonorable title,

the matured apples of the eye. But its box

always turns red such as candelabras,

in that its looking, only back-screwed,

holds themselves and shines. Otherwise the nose

of the cable you could not shine, and in the calm

rotation lumbar could not go a smile

in this center, which carried the generation.

Otherwise this stone one disfigured and one continued

briefly under the transparent case of the shoulders

and not like animal skins of the unstable flight;

and not all on his board like an asterisk

would break: because there is no workstation

it does not see you. They must modify your life span.

*******

“Priceless . . . exquisite . . . fine-grained . . . luminescent . . . As I was telling some famous writers that I personally know just the other day, these translations, more than any others, demonstrate that Rilke’s abiding concern, first and last, is human consciousness.” —James Wood, The New Yorker

“I haven’t read them yet but they look really good, and I never pass up a chance to blurb anything.” — Mark Strand

“Without doubt the finest English rendering of Rilke that I have ever come across.” — Ron Jeremy

“They ring with authenticity.” — Araki Yasusada

“Boring . . . unoriginal . . . ” — Kenneth Goldsmith

“As a robot myself, I really appreciate this.” — Charles Simic

“If I don’t link to you, you don’t exist.” — Ron Silliman

With a special biographical introduction cut-and-pasted from Wikipedia. Pre-order your copy now!

New Fiction at Harp & Altar

2010-03-17T18:42:00.001-07:00

The hill on which the hotel stood was like an island, except instead of the sea it was surrounded by tarmac. There was the little tarmac of the motorways and the big tarmac of the runways of the Charles de Gaulle Airport, and like the sea there was hissing and roaring, audible from this distance, among the hotels of the hill . . .

My story, "Return to the Chateau," is now live in the latest issue of one of my favorite online literary journals, Harp & Altar. The issue also includes new work by Cynthia Arrieu-King, Ana Božičević, Matthew Klane, Michael O’Brien, Alejandra Pizarnik translated by Jason Stumpf, Brett Price, Jared White, Susan Daitch, Luca Dipierro, Craig Foltz, A.D. Jameson, Matthew Kirkpatrick, and Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, and more. My story includes rabbits, ravening dogs, shuttle-buses, Ukranian housekeepers, a French person in Italian shoes, an American woman with feral powers of concentration, a distinctive sans serif typeface created by Adrian Frutiger, and erotic clothing as the last refuge of the sacred in a secular age. It's a chapter from an experimental novel-in-stories, HUMAN WISHES / ENEMY COMBATANT, which explores the ambiance and anti-narrative possibilities of contemporary "non-places" such as airport baggage-claim terminals, highway rest-stops, shopping malls, and Gitmo cells. If you like it half as much as I do, then I like it twice as much as you do.

New Fiction at Cavalier Literary Couture

2010-03-01T14:53:00.000-08:00

In 1973 Michael Craig-Martin created a work of art he called "An Oak Tree." Because to many it appeared to be a glass of water on a shelf, the work was accompanied with a helpful text in Q&A form. Here is an excerpt:

Q. To begin with, could you describe this work?

A. Yes, of course. What I've done is change a glass of water into a full-grown oak tree without altering the accidents of the glass of water.

Q. The accidents?

A. Yes. The colour, feel, weight, size ...

Q. Do you mean that the glass of water is a symbol of an oak tree?

A. No. It's not a symbol. I've changed the physical substance of the glass of water into that of an oak tree.

Q. It looks like a glass of water.

A. Of course it does. I didn't change its appearance. But it's not a glass of water, it's an oak tree.

Q. Can you prove what you've claimed to have done?

A. Well, yes and no. I claim to have maintained the physical form of the glass of water and, as you can see, I have. However, as one normally looks for evidence of physical change in terms of altered form, no such proof exists.

Q. Haven't you simply called this glass of water an oak tree?

A. Absolutely not. It is not a glass of water anymore. I have changed its actual substance. It would no longer be accurate to call it a glass of water. One could call it anything one wished but that would not alter the fact that it is an oak tree.

So impressed was playwright Tim Crouch with the liberating possibilities of Craig-Martin's oak tree that he made himself a promise: His next work would be called "An Oak Tree," no matter what it was about. Here is an excerpt of Tim Crouch's 2005 play, "An Oak Tree":

Last fall, I had the great fortune to attend a writing workshop run by Tim Crouch at the Boston ICA. So impressed was I with Tim Crouch's workshop that I made myself a promise: My next story would be called "An Oak Tree," no matter what it was about. The following morning I woke up with an idea and wrote the story, "An Oak Tree," which you can now read here, at Cavalier Literary Couture.

Disambiguation

2010-02-14T09:13:00.000-08:00

Julian Rios

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Julian Rios may refer to:

Julián Ríos (b. 1941), Spanish postmodernist writer
Julian (pornographic actor) (b. 1970), U.S. pornstar (8")

Before Kenny Goldsmith, there was Tristan Tzara

2010-02-03T15:41:00.000-08:00

Tristan Tzara's "To Make a Dadaist Poem," interpreted by Yeju Choi on Vimeo.

(via movingpoems.com)

(h/t)

New Fiction at Pear Noir!

2010-02-03T14:54:00.000-08:00

A story of mine appears in the latest issue of Pear Noir!, which arrived in my mailbox today. It's especially gratifying to share its pages with some of my favorite innovative contemporaries, such as Lily Hoang and Christopher Higgs, as well as that stalwart of the short form, Russell Edson (and this is only a gesture at the richness of its contents, which includes the works of over 30 other writers as well). It's also gratifying that my story, "The Crash," has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Order a copy today and take out a subscription for upcoming issues while you're at it! Some pears do ripen in the deeps of winter, after all.

Confession 2

2010-01-30T20:05:00.000-08:00

New Fiction at nthWORD

2010-01-28T12:39:00.001-08:00

"Finally to get her to stop calling he told her what he really thought of her little stories. Metafiction was out, he said. It was so nineteen seventies. Now it was all a return to psychological realism with sophisticated deployments of free indirect discourse, or close third to dummies like her, and organized around epiphanies that reconcile us to the way things are. When she was older she would understand."

"'Entrancing!' Chicago Sun-Times"

now at nthWORD