New Fiction at Dark Sky Magazine

Just in time for the holidays, I've got a new story, "Apple Seized," up at Dark Sky Magazine. It's a chapter from a novel-in-stories, Human Wishes / Enemy Combatant, which explores the ambience and anti-narrative possibilities of contemporary "non-places" such as airport baggage-claim terminals, highway rest-stops, shopping malls, and Gitmo cells. Another chapter is coming out in Harp & Altar in February.

On the Left Bank Group

"Clouzet considers the Left Bank group, 'not as a faction of the New Wave, but, rather, as a distinct group in opposition to it'. Clouzot’s is a literary emphasis; she takes 'authorship' literally in her discussions to mean the 'essentially novelistic preoccupations with time, memory, narration, and form that characterise the group.' It is, for Clouzot, that the Left Bank directors are to be seen as authors more than auteurs, as they were more concerned with responding to the traditions of literature and the nouveau roman (new novel), than with responding to the history of cinema: whereas the Right Bank-Cahiers directors are well known for being primarily critics and cinéphiles, and for their work being a response to the prevailing tradition of French cinema, labelled by the Cahiers group as, 'le cinéma de papa' or 'old fogeys’ cinema'. As shall be seen when discussing the films of the Left Bank group, Clouzot is quite right to foreground the literary preoccupations of the group, and to see it as one of the most important defining features: Marker, a writer and novelist as well as a filmmaker, famous for his exquisitely constructed and highly literary voice-over commentaries; Varda, for whom the Jean Astruc’s idea of the caméra-stylo (camera pen) is highly important, as is her own notion of cinécriture (cinematic writing); and Resnais, whose first two, and most important, feature films were collaborations with two of France’s most important new novelists, Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet."

from Robert Farmer's "Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left Bank Group," at Senses of Cinema.

Verso Defends its Radical Anti-Capitalist Copyrights

(Perry Anderson at Left Forum 2009)

From: Rowan Wilson
To: "someone@aaaarg.org"
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 2009 12:10:25 +0000
Subject: ATTENTION AAAARG.ORG ADMINISTRATOR

--

Attn AAAARG.ORG

Dear Sirs

It has come to our attention that you are hosting a website from which people can download illegally many of our copyrighted works:

We refer you to the url:

http://a.aaaarg.org/library/

The books listed on this url include many of our titles by Slavoj Zizek, Jacques Ranciere, Alain Badiou, etc.

Rights to these works have been reserved by the publishers, Verso. The publishers have registered copyright in many of the books found on your website, which represent also the result of considerable labour on the part of the authors.

The purpose of this letter is to advise you of our clients' rights and to insist that you immediately disable or remove ALL LINKS from all websites associated with AAAARG.ORG or related sites on which the Works have been made available for download.

We request immediate receipt of your organization's intention to comply with these demands, and your confirmation in writing that appropriate action as detailed above has been effected no later then SEVEN (7) days from the date of this letter. Please be advised that if you do not immediately cease and desist, we will seek all appropriate legal remedies, without prior notification.

We look forward to your immediate response and cooperation.

Sincerely

--------------------------------------------

Rowan Wilson
Sales and Marketing Director
Verso
6 Meard Street
London W1F 0EG
Phone: +44 (0)20 7437 3546
Fax: +44 (0)20 7734 0059
email: rowan@verso.co.uk
www.versobooks.com
http://versouk.wordpress.com
http://twitter.com/VersoBooksUK

See Wu Ming's website for their new novel: http://www.manituana.com/



Found Fiction

Book Club Discussion Questions - a story

by A. Publisher

1. Describe the structure of the story. Why does the author open with Hans moving to New York City and then quickly jump into the future with Chuck's death and then jump back? Do you think these flashbacks and forward leaps relate to the narrative arc of the story? Is this simply how we tell stories? When you tell a story do you tell it chronologically? Why?

2. Childhood often slips into the story - that of both Hans and Chuck. Early on in the story, Hans mentions that he doesn't connect to himself as a child ("I, however, seem given to self-estrangement"), then proceeds to produce numerous memories of his childhood and of his mother. How is this reconnecting with his heritage and his past important to the story? How is Chuck often the catalyst for these memories?

3. Chuck is more connected to his heritage than Hans. He socializes with others from the West Indies; he's married to a woman from his birth country, etc. How do flashbacks to his childhood differ from Hans's and how do they affect the story as a whole?

4. How does nostalgia play into the story? Who is nostalgic and for what? Why does the storyteller open the novel with someone being nostalgic for New York City?

5. Discuss the title. What does it mean and what do you think it refers to?

6. Chuck's motto is "Think fantastic." How does this both help and hinder him? Can you create an appropriate motto for Hans? How about for yourself?

7. What does the United States represent for Hans and Chuck? How are their relationships with their new country similar, and also polar opposites?

8. How are both Han's and Chuck's experiences typical of American dream of immigrant stories? Compare the story to other stories of the immigrant experience or to what you imagine immigrating to a new country to be like.

9. Is the American Dream the same after 9/11? How are Americans both united and divided after 9/11? How is the world of the story particular to the United States after 9/11?

10. Describe the narrator's voice. Do you trust and like Hans as a narrator? Do you sympatize with him and understand his motives? Do you identify with him?

11. Describe the Chelsea Hotel when Hans lives. How is it a character in the novel? How are the various inhabitants and the oddness of the place appealing and comforting to Hans?

12. Discuss the scene in which the author and his protagonist engage in "fisting." What is metafiction? Does it feel good?

13. What is Han's relationship with his mother? How does the relationship continue to affect him after his mother's death? How does it affect his being a father?

14. Discuss the theme of male friendship in the novel and its connection to sports.

15. This story is also the story of a marriage. Why is Hans and Rachel's marriage falling apart? What brings them together again in the end?

16. Discuss the theme of betrayal and forgiveness in the story. How do both Rachel and Hans betray each other and why? What about Chuck? Do the characters ever lead themselves astray and betray themselves? Does America betray both Chuck and Hans in the end?

"A Huge Untapped Market for Experimental Literary Fiction"

"There is no way you can send a fierce, exotic and brutally truthful hothead novel out into the British rain in a recession and expect a deal to be on the table with the scones, tea and Daily Mail. Editors are struggling with a toxic, cynical market of celebrity best sellers and even the braver ones are nervous. Contemporary readers are much more sophisticated than the whole mainstream publishing scene right now. There is a big counter-culture in the UK but it's in the visual arts, music and performance, not in literature. There is a huge untapped market for experimental literary fiction. I know this because I am invited to give readings of my own writing more or less every night of the week, some of which I take up, others I don't. My website is crammed with writers asking me to read their work - also students studying my own work and asking me how the hell to get hold of it. There is a big old-fashioned question to be asked here - to do with what books are for, and why we bother publishing, writing and reading them in the first place. It's likely that corporate publishing will eventually go the same ways as the banking system: it has lost it with new generations of would-be readers. Not so much a financial crisis as a demise of experiment - publishers do have to take risks that might make them vulnerable - that's the currency I'm talking about here."

Deborah Levy, interviewed by the indispensable Dalkey Archive Press for the release of Best European Fiction 2010.

UPDATE:

In an interview at the NY Times 'Paper Cuts' blog, Alexander Hemon says the following about editing Dalkey Archive Press' Best European Fiction 2010:

Q. What was the biggest surprise for you, editing the collection?

A. It was less of a surprise than a reminder: how unabashedly comfortable many of the writers are to engage with literary forms that would be perceived as experimental or avant-garde here. In turn, I was reminded how deeply conservative contemporary American literature is in terms of form. And that conservative bent is a recent development, I believe. The European form flexibility is not a consequence of some snotty, elitist aesthetic but rather of the fact that there are many stories to be told and many traditions to draw from.

[via The Existence Machine (via BLCKDGRD)]

Poetry / Empire / Pineapple / Everywhere

CUTTER FOR PINEAPPLE SEGMENTS

(US Patent Number 3557851)

An axially reciprocating shell contains radial knives which cut annular slices of pineapple into segments. A rotary tubular knife projecting axially into the shell cuts each segment while the segmented slices are still within the shell. The diameter of the tubular knife employed determines whether the inner, outer, or intermediate portions of the segmented slices are cut. The shell is reciprocated by an eccentric mechanism, with the rotary support for the tubular knife being interposed between the eccentric mechanism and the shell.

Fiction is 25 Years Behind Poetry

"Only when reality is difficult may we tell it apart from that which is designed for the purpose of being easy so that it is never investigated: LIES."

"Poetry keeps language accurate but also does the opposite and slows it down to the point where language is itself and itself is the world.  As such, we must reiterate:  where language is not poetry, poetry cannot be language.  Rather, it must be 'illegitimate', originating in everyday speech but as different from instrumental language as we can bear to understand, or perhaps more than we can bear."  —Josh Stanley 

Order the first issue of this new journal of poetry and poetics, Hot Gun! (here), read it, and then ask yourself why we have no journal comparable for new fiction and the poetics of narrative.  

If, as Brion Gysin said, "Writing is fifty years behind painting," then perhaps prose fiction is twenty-five years behind poetry, at least where it is most thoughtful, innovative, and oppositional. 

From a Kent Johnson Interview in The Argotist Online

Jeffrey Side: You’ve been critical of what you perceive as a tendency towards careerism in US avant-garde poetic circles, can you tell me more about this?  

Kent Johnson: I’ve spoken about this in other places, and my comments haven’t always been too popular, I suppose. Let me answer this one in a somewhat unusual way, maybe allegorically, if that’s the word, answering your question by quoting myself from a somewhat fanciful post I wrote for Digital Emunction blog—just yesterday, in fact. I’ve been writing at DE (the cabinet of curiosities of the lit blogs, I believe) the past few weeks, as you know. The post was rejected by the blog editor, Bobby Baird, who felt the points raised were “old news.” Maybe… Though “old news,” if so, of the kind that hasn’t been sufficiently discussed, I’d propose. But the reader can judge. I had titled the post “The Clinking Sound of the Avant-Garde: A Short Story”:  

In the 1980s, Language poetry was at its apogee. Its most prominent figure was Charles Bernstein. The most coherent and ambitious left-wing avant-garde formation in the history of American poetry was then under sustained attack from the literary establishment; the Language poets, with analyses of “Official Verse Culture” and its fraught complicities in the Ideological State Apparatuses of Literature and the Academy, countered the attacks with trenchant, withering critique.

 

This was during the reign of the Reagan Administration, which ended twenty years back. Soon after, the Berlin Wall collapsed and the First Iraq War began. Coincidentally (though perhaps not entirely), it was around this time that the first major studies of Language poetry began to appear in the most prestigious scholarly journals, and prominent figures associated with the group could be found interviewing for jobs at the MLA.

 

When Bernstein was editing (with Bruce Andrews) The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book and writing some of the brilliant, anti-Institutional essays later collected in Content’s Dream (1986), Donald T. Regan was Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Treasury and Chief of Staff, a central figure in the Administration’s murderous policies in Central America and the related sideshow scandal of the Iran-Contra affair. Bernstein would of course still vehemently repudiate those policies, but a little more than two decades thence, he is Donald T. Regan Professor of English at a major Ivy League School. His books are now published by Harvard, and his work is included in the Norton.

 

Language poetry, in general, is well down the road as a welcomed and apparently pleased fellow traveler of the Canon. Like Bernstein, numerous of the original members now profess at elite universities, industriously partaking in (indeed, often openly arguing for) the fuller legitimation of their work. A growing tenure industry of secondary critics occupies itself around study of the group’s theory and writing. Versions of abstract or “hybrid” lyric, genetically descended from the textual experimentalism of Language poetry, rule the roost in MFA programs across the land. The AWP and the MLA are now homes to “radically formal” poetry, and the Young Turks who write it make annual pilgrimage to these institutions’ gatherings, to network, read, present, and interview for academic position. All the major journals are open to such work. Even Poetry and the New Yorker now feature it.

 

All of this has happened very quickly, with a speed to awe the most visionary Futurist. Earlier this year, celebrating its 100^th anniversary, Charles Bernstein declaimed Felippo Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, angrily hitting, as he did, a hammer against a metal lectern. This was at the MoMA. There among the Picassos and the Matisses, the implement made a repeating clinking sound. A kind of death knell for things, one might say, though the gathered crowd of poets that applauded and cheered did not quite seem to see it that way.

 

It’s perhaps time, I’d propose, to think extra hard about the irony and velocity of this denouement, which is very much the “ontological” surround of the subculture we in the “post-avant” inhabit. Though as we do, we must grant that none of what’s transpired is a matter of ill-intent: In truth, the path that’s been taken is, and has always been, the “way” of the “avant-garde.” It’s nobody’s fault, and nobody, personally, need be blamed. And thank goodness, of course, for professors and scholars.

 

But to ask, if awkwardly, as this short story ends: Is this it, this seemingly natural “Where We Now Are”? Is this where we’re more or less to remain? Or is there an elsewhere, as it were, and how would we begin to imagine it, if so?

Well, in his rejection email to me, Baird, who is former editor of the Chicago Review and has an acute mind, to be sure, chastened me with the following good questions:

What do you, Kent, take to be the significance of the Langpos capitulation to the powers they once abhorred? Is it that Langpo (and its anti-OVC stance) was a sham from the start? Is it that Langpo wasn't a sham but was sold out by morally soft people like CB? Is it that the whole business of literary movements is just a game that we shouldn't get in a tizzy about?

 

Do you think there's a need for an avant-garde right now? Why? What should it do? What's it for? What's it against? Why is an a-g poetics better equipped to do what you want it to do than a non a-g poetics like [Michael] Robbins's or Josh Clover's? 

I have some opinions, of course, on factors that frame and enable the processes of cultural “recuperation” that Baird alludes to. But I don’t think it has much to do with anyone being “morally soft.” Younger poets can acknowledge a significant debt to the earlier thought and work of the Language poets, for example, even honor their important contributions, and still reflect honestly on their “sociological” transformation as a literary formation. So Baird’s questions to me in his “rejection” email are actually quite in sync with the ones I proffer, there, at the end. I ask them sincerely, because I don’t claim to have any easy answers. 

But speaking in broad terms, that the relocation of “experimental,” “oppositional” poetry to an academic habitus has had deep, denaturing effects on radical poetic impetus seems fairly clear to me. I'm aware that back in the eighties the Academy seemed for some an important site of contention and that this has been explicitly argued in defense of the "institutional turn" taken back then. But the novelty's long over, the pacts have been made, and a protocol of polite irascibility has well settled in.

There are admirable exceptions, of course, but the U.S. “post-avant” is fundamentally a professional phenomenon now, and the bulk of its verse, aesthetically impressive as it can sometimes be, is in no way culturally oppositional in our moment. For the most part it doesn’t even claim to be, despite humorously poignant declarations by someone like Ron Silliman, every now and then. It is a near-fully integrated formalist phenomenon, essentially vacated of any sense of resistant, agonistic drive or mission. And it stands to reason that this would be so.  

***********

full interview here.

Baird's response here.

Tricky Treat

"Severe but just"

Flaubert to Maupassant:

"You complain about fucking being ‘monotonous’. There’s a simple remedy: cut it out for a bit. ‘The news in the papers is always the same’? That’s the complaint of a realist – and besides, what do you know about it? You should look at things more carefully … ‘The vices are trivial’? – but everything is trivial. ‘There aren’t enough different ways to compose a sentence’? – seek and ye shall find … You must – do you hear me, my young friend? – you must work harder than you do. I suspect you of being a bit of a loafer. Too many whores! Too much rowing! Too much exercise! A civilised person needs much less locomotion than the doctors claim. You were born to be a poet: be one. Everything else is pointless – starting with your pleasures and your health: get that much into your thick skull. Besides, your health will be all the better if you follow your calling … What you lack are ‘principles’. There’s no getting over it – that’s what you have to have; it’s just a matter of finding out which ones. For an artist there is only one: everything must be sacrificed to Art … To sum up, my dear Guy, you must beware of melancholy: it’s a vice."

(via LRB)

WWJBD?

Today is the 150th anniversary of the raid by John Brown and twenty-one courageous others on Harpers Ferry that sparked the Second American Revolution, otherwise known as the "Civil War." We're still in need of a Third Revolution, one that abolishes white supremacy and wage slavery.  In that spirit, I'm reprinting a statement by Noel Ignatiev and the Race Traitor editorial collective that was read at Brown's gravesite at a memorial event in 1999 honoring the abolitionist's birth:

Renew the Legacy of John Brown

If the task of the nineteenth century was to overthrow slavery, and the task of the twentieth century was to end legal segregation, the key to solving this country's problems in the twenty-first century is to abolish the white race as a social category - in other words, eradicate white supremacy entirely.

John Brown represents the abolitionist cause. Nominally white, he made war against slavery, working closely with black people. Those who think it saner to collaborate with evil than to resist it have labeled him a madman, but it was not for his madness that he was hanged; no, it was for obeying the biblical injunction to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. For those who suffer directly from white supremacy, John Brown is a high point in a centuries-long history of resistance; for so-called whites he is the hope that they can step outside of their color and take part in building a new human community.

John Brown's body lies a-mould'rin' in the grave, but his soul calls out to the living. He is buried alongside family members and comrades-at-arms near North Elba, New York, in the beautiful Adirondack Mountains, which he often said had been placed there to serve the emancipation of the American slave. For many years African Americans and others celebrated May 9th, the anniversary of his birth, by gathering at his gravesite. We call upon those who share the vision of a country without racial walls to join hands there in 1999 (his one hundred and ninety-ninth year) to honor his memory and the memory of the others, black and white, who fought alongside him, and to rededicate ourselves to the fulfillment of the tasks for which they laid down their lives.

Signed by:
Russell Banks, Derrick Bell, John Bracey, Robin D.G. Kelley, Martin Espada, Herbert Hill, Barbara Kingsolver, Toni Morrison, Theresa Perry, Ishmael Reed, David Roediger, Sapphire, Pete Seeger, Dorothy Sterling, Cornel West, Howard Zinn, and the editors of RACE TRAITOR.

The Casualties of Peace

J.G. Ballard on Chris Marker's "La Jetée"

"Not once does it make use of the time-honoured traditions of conventional science fiction.  Creating its own conventions from scratch, it triumphantly succeeds where science fiction invariably fails." 

From a brief 1966 review published in New Worlds.  Full here (registration required).

The Little Miseries of Human Life

"In 1843 Grandville published Petites misères de la vie humaine, based on a text by his friend Forgues.  In a series of genially perverse illustrations, Grandville gave us one of the first representations of a phenomenon that would become increasingly familiar to the modern age:  a bad conscience with respect to objects.  In a leaky faucet that cannot be turned off, in an umbrella that reverses itself, in a boot that can be neither completely put on nor taken off and remains tenaciously stuck on the foot, in the sheets of paper scattered by a breath of wind, in a coverlet that does not cover, in a pair of pants that tears, the prophet glance of Grandville discovers, beyond the simple fortuitous incident, the cipher of a new relation between humans and things.  No one has shown better than he the human discomfort before the disturbing metamorphoses of the most familiar objects [. . .] Under his pen, objects lose their innocence and rebel with a kind of deliberate perfidy.  They attempt to evade their uses, they become animated with human feelings and intentions, they become discontented and lazy.  The eye is not surprised to discover them in lecherous attitudes.

Rilke, who had described the same phenomenon in the episode of the coverlet from Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, observed, with a revealing expression, that the ‘relations of men and things have created confusion in the latter’.  The bad human conscience with respect to commodified objects is expressed in the mise-en-scène of this phantasmagorical conspiracy.  The degeneration implicit in the transformation of the artisanal object into the mass-produced article is constantly manifest to modern man in the loss of his own self-possession with respect to things.  The degradation of objects is matched by human clumsiness, that is, the fear of their possible revenge . . ."

—Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas:  Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (1977)

He could have been writing about this:

New Story at Sein und Werden

When I read that one of my favorite publications, the ineffably weird and wonderful Sein und Werden, was planning an upcoming issue on the theme of “All Things Move Towards Their End,” I thought to myself, “Gosh, I have the perfect story for that!”  (Actually what I thought was “Jesus fuck!” but I like to avoid profanity on my blog).

My story, “The Scythian Idol,” I had an enormous fondness for, not least because in it I thought I had come closer than in any of my other works to the ideal of “lightness” that Italo Calvino speaks of so eloquently in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium.  I sent it to many publications, only to see its splendid fleetness waved off time and again by heavy editorial hands.  But I kept faith, and finally Neddal Ayad, one of the guest editors (along with Nicole Votta) of the “All Things Move Towards Their End” issue, sent me a note which indicated, in a few pithy words, his intelligence, taste, wit, aesthetic acumen, discerning eye, good looks, and courage.  In short, he accepted the story, and I can think of no better place for it, at least on this terrestrial plane, where

In this issue my humble story has the privilege of the following company: 

The Clock (L'Horloge): Annie Stephens

The Ending Tastes Just Like the Beginning: Roberta Lawson

Phrenology: John Brewer

Mark on the Wall: Louise Norlie

Swing: Neddal Ayad

I Sleep With a Dog: Matt Dennison

That Which is Lost: Brian Collier

A Dragonfly and Her Dead Shadow: Azucar Shoots

Dust: Matt Dennison

Tropical Estuary: Rochelle Potkar

Silver Umbilical Corded: Marc Vincenz

The Irksome Settee: Bobby Morris

The Immediacy: Matt Dennison

The Fog Rolls: Neddal Ayad

Borges' Escape: AE Reiff

The Mysterious Mustard Kings: Eugene Thomas

As She Tries to Feed the Stranger Inside: Chandra Kavanagh

Character Sketch: Neddal Ayad

I Bet You'd Like To Know If My Knickers Are Still On: Ludo

The Stars Will Have Their Way: Nicole Votta

(Thanks are also due to Rachel Kendall.)

Look, you can see yourself in the shiny surface!

Random House Towers, New York

More next door

“Writing is fifty years behind painting” – Brion Gysin, 1959

K E N N E T H   G O L D S M I T H 

sucking on words

Simon Morris [artist]:  “I’m suspecting you are not going to buy into Kenny’s line that he always likes to quote from Brion Gysin of “literature is fifty years behind painting” –  would you buy into that or not?” 

Bruce Andrews [L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet]:  “Oh, I generally would.  I mean, certainly, if you are talking about poetry.  Other genres of literature would be even more ridiculous and moribund, the idea of narrative or fiction, the idea of creating verisimilitude based on characters and plot situations - completely hokey Victorian notion.  The creative writing people are generally, you know, total, total hacks.  You know, they are living in another, that are living in some previous century, or living in some previous planet.  They’re still involved with this therapeutic, crappy ideology about letting students express their inner selves and these little epiphanies of lyric blubble, you know, I mean, it’s a joke, it’s a terrible joke.”

(via bright stupid confetti)

"Unending Duration" - Peter Gidal's "Clouds" (1969)

 Clouds (1969) 
1969, 10 min, silent, b&w 

"The anti-illusionist project engaged by Clouds is that of dialectic materialism. There is virtually nothing on screen, in the sense of in screen. Obsessive repetition as materialist practice not psychoanalytical indulgence." - Peter Gidal, November, 1975.  (via UbuWeb)

"The question of making things difficult for the spectator in my films is absolutely crucial and historically so, because that is where the break always comes. In the cinema, more than any other art form, the question of difficulty is always raised. With other things there are conventions: for example, it's okay to spend until two o'clock in the morning checking a difficult footnote in a book; difficult paintings are okay because you can walk past them in seconds. But film has an authoritarian structure built into its mechanism in terms of time, being held there for a period of time, which is why most film goes out of its way to avoid precisely that as an issue, whereas my work goes out of its way to raise it as one." - Peter Gidal  (via Screenonline) 

"It (unending duration) positions the viewer in a place of seeing, i.e. perception, without conflating that into knowing (as it is one extreme function, not the whole), without mixing the two up. The separation of the two underlies avant-garde film from Warhol on." - Peter Gidal, 1981.  (via Luxonline)

Gidal's essay, "Theory and Definition of Structural / Materialist Film" (1976), here.