A Certain Kind of Sentence

Many thanks to Frances Madeson for this conversation about my novel, Human Wishes / Enemy Combatant, at her blog, Written Word, Spoken Word.

New Fiction at trnsfr

"This is not my hotel," I said.

"I have a confession to make," said my companion.

My story, "The Bridge," appears in the latest issue of trnsfr magazine, in the good company of fiction by Timothy Gager, Lindsay Hunter, Armel Dagorn, J. A. Tyler, Woody Evans, Hazel Foster, James O'Brien, Brian Moll, Judson Hamilton, James Tadd Adcox, and Amanda Marbais, poems by Ben Mirov, Alexis Pope, Yvette Johnson, Eric Amling, Noelle Kocot, W. Todd Kaneko, Brett Elizabeth Jenkins, Linda Nemec Foster, Paige Taggart, Russ Woods, Stephanie Barber, Nathan Logan, Purdey Kreiden, and Adam Moorad, and art by Joe Sobel, Calamari Press, Jeff Ladouceur, and Kim W. Fink. If that isn't enough for you, you can't be pleased. My thanks to editor Alban Fischer.

HUMAN WISHES / ENEMY COMBATANT

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, Russia 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

(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'

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

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

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