January 21, 2008

The dialogue in Michael Rumaker's first collection of stories, Gringos and Other Stories, published in 1966 by Grove Press hasn't aged well. It hasn't aged well not because it isn't well written or doesn't carry the story forward but I think it hasn't aged well because dialogue doesn't age well unless it is stylized in the way Raymond Chandler's dialogue is hard-boiled or Hemingway's dialogue is kind of burnished and unreal and probably seemed unreal from the moment people first picked up a new copy of The Sun Also Rises. In "Exit 3" a beyond-drunk Marine says, "Don't 'buddy; me. I ain't no goddamned solider. I'll show you who the hell I am." The dialogue reads the way things read in the "Wild One," deliberately rough, and because it is deliberate, kind of false. And so the dialogue has aged like fake leather seats or plastic.

The other thing that was strange about the collection was that despite the sometime corniness of the rough dialogue the stories do not contain an interpretive track. The events in the story unfold in dialogue, action, and minimal scenic description. They lack, and it isn't missed, the interpretive track that seems necessary with most contemporary stories, that assures of the significance of what we are reading, of the moral weight. Instead "Exit 3" follows a man who had a very drunk, violent Marine foisted off on him by some soldiers. The protagonist follows the Marine around in an attempt to get him home safely. The Marine grows increasingly irrational until the protagonist realized there is nothing he can do keep the Marine safe. "He began to shiver and took out a pack of cigarets form the pocket of his coat and lit one. He stuck he cigaret between his lips and, picking up his suitcase, stepped off the curb and started over the street at a brisk pace, heading across town." Emotion and the significance of the events are veiled behind concrete action and objects. It is easy enough to know how the protagonist "feels." To name his emotions would be to some fix them, like a pin through the back of a beetle. In contrast toward the end of Anthony Doerr's recent and celebrated short story, "The Caretaker," we are given the feelings of the protagonist. "Everything feels very tenuous, just then, and terribly beautiful, as if he is straddling two worlds, the one he came from and the one he is going to. He winders if this is what it was like for his mother, in the moments before she did, if she saw the same kind of light, if she felt like anything was possible."

I found Rumaker's book when I was visiting my friend in North Hollywood. I picked it up because the dust jacket mentioned that he had studied at the Black Mountain College and I was wondering what the prose would be like from this school. I'm not so sure the book gives me many clues. Rumaker's writing is plain and direct and doesn't contain any inflections lifted from Charles Olson. While I was browsing among the books in the store, a man out of work because of the writer's strike was talking with a massive voice to the clerk. He was a voice actor who mentioned he'd been the narrator in Spaceghost in the sixties, Gary Owens. I'm not sure how he felt being out of work, but his voice was very loud. He should get voice work or something.

January 15, 2008

Przewalski's Horses are the last species of wild, rather than feral, horses. Mustangs come from escaped domestic horses. The Przewalski's Horse is named for a nineteenth Russian general and naturalist who went on a quest to find the horse. Przewalski's Horse, the recent novel by Eckhard Gerdes, is about a working class writer, a bar fly a postal worker maned Keith Fine in the midwest, who drops of his life and goes on a quest to rediscover his former writing life in Chicago.

Gerdes has written published six novels since 1986 and professes an interest in the occurrence of chance, the random divergence in plot. This novel, however, is mostly conventional in structure and tone. Keith wants to return to his former life. He drinks a lot. He had trouble. For example, he writes, "I really tried to be a good husband and a good father. After a while, though, it got harder to pretend that everything was okay. I had a large inner-world dying to get out. And now it's coming. It's been held back for so long. Now it's coming out in streams of freedom."

The doesn't read like an uncontrolled gush of imagery or language. The book instead uses a stunted style, like the kind of giddy drawings, or blueprints drawn by someone drunk on wine and rag weed, and wakes up the next morning to consult the illegible doodles thinking they will uncover a mind-blowing invention (not that I would know anything first hand about that.)

The book even addresses this:

One character, Jackson, says: "Alcohol's the anathema to good writing."

"What?"

"I mean the whole artist-as sufferer thing is bankrupt."

"Could you expand on that?"

And Jackson does.

Where the book begins to find a kind of logic for me is in the purely mundane slices of life that occur. Keith goes to pick up some coffee and cigarettes.

"Fine. Could you tell me where you keep your coffee?"

"On the right against he wall. See the canned stuff?"

"Oh, got it. Thanks." All they have is two-pound cans of Folger's and they want almost eight dollars apiece for them. Jeez. Oh well, you pay for the convenience. Seems an odd thing to be paying for. Qualifies as neither goods nor services.

Keith picks up the coffee, goes around the corner past the warm pop and comes back down the other aisle with the refrigerated section. Beer's on sale. I should get a six.

No. I don't want to drink. It'll just get in the way of the evening. It'll make me too tired. I'll drink lots of coffee. Of course, with the booze, I can put of my orgasm longer, and she can have more. But without it, I can come twice, so that's better for her anyway. No beer. Keith carries the coffee to the counter and places it down.

"$8.22 please."

"Oh, could I have a pack of, uh, Diet Menthol Ultradelight Benson and Hedges?" [Referencing the cumbersome cigarette name from an earlier conversation.]

"Soft or box?"

"Oh, jezz. Better give me the box. They're not for me."

"That'll be $9.72"

"And a paper."

"$9.97"

[And so on.]

This writing is perhaps flat, and I suspect many readers would find it unadorned to the point of poverty. This scene lasts three or four pages. It was for me one of the more vivid scenes in the book not because it necessarily moved along what plot there was (the plot kind of felt grudgingly put into place) but because it is precisely the interplay between choice, necessity and the random intrusion of detail that makes for narrative. The books is a story about a guy who comes into an awareness that his life is 7-11s and a prose style unadorned to the point of poverty and that is enough for a life.

In a similar vein:

Mr. Leapold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of a beasts and fowls. He liked thick gilblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in the kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning everywhere. Made him feel a bit peckish.

The coals were reddening.

[And so on.]

Show don't tell, writers are told if they make the mistake of taking a writing class from a teacher who diligently tries to teach the craft of writing. I think this is a useful to thing to say, but usually isn't also followed up with a joke to point out that it is perverse to instruct students who are learning to tell stories: "Show don't tell."

Then what are supposed to do: show stories?

But everything is written down, which is the point of telling stories. If writing students wanted to show stories, they would become mimes.

In the first Manifesto of Surrealism, Andre Breton wrote (he felt compelled to issue periodic confusing and contradictory proclamations): If the purely informative style ... is virtually the rule rather than the exception in the novel form, it is because, in all fairness, the author's ambition is severely circumscribed. The circumstantial, needlessly specific nature of each of their notations leads me to believe that they are perpetrating a joke at my expense. I am spared not even one of the character's slightest vacillations: will he be fair-haired? what will his name be/? Will we fist meet him during the summer? So many questions resolved once and for all, as chance directs.

[And so on.]

What difference does it make that Leapold Bloom likes "thick liverslices fried with crustrumbs?" Or that Keith's purchase is $9.72 without a paper and 9.97 with a paper?

The characters in the Gerde's book do not commit premeditated acts. many of the incidents in the book with Many of the inciting incidents in the book do not have premeditation. Keith does not live his live toward a master plan or motive. He has a sense of how he would like things to be and a sense of what he should do or shouldn't do to make these things happen. In turn there is no clear moral to the story aside from drinking too much is not good for your health. Getting into bar fights are even less good for your health.

In this sense things happen in the book but they do not happen in the way of novels where there is a tangible goal for the protagonist, a motive to achieve the goal, a readily defined source of conflict, something to work out. Rather Keith fine and the characters in the book are unsettled. Even when Keith tried to settle down and mediate, he is unsettled.

It is the minutia where things happen.

Roland Barthes despite observing that narration is not necessarily a law of the novel (what is Clarissa or The Making of American if not novels?) also observed in his essay "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives" that narratives may be composed of the larger plot elements that create suspense -- who killed him? -- but that the essential component of the narrative is composed of set narratives, of events arranged in sequences. A man gets a drink of water. There is a set procedure to pouring a glass of water from the tap. A man opens the cupboard. Finds a glass. Inspects the glass. Sets the glass on the sideboard because it has a slice of dried lettuce adhered to the lip. He retrieves another glass. It is clear. He turns the cool tap letting water gurgle through the pipes and then drops onto the white porcelain sink worn to a black divot where the water drips. He tests the water with his finger until the warmish, metallic water sitting in the house pipe clears and the water turns cold. He pours the cold water into his glass and then turns the faucet off. The pipes groan and then stop. Before he takes a drink from the water, he drops the glass onto the kitchen floor and the glass shatters. The water pools. The man runs from the kitchen, down the steps and into the front lawn.

The pattern of drinking water is known to the reader. It can be dramatized with the statement: he got a drink of water. But it is the breaks the known sequence that provide information in the narrative. Narrative is a sting of purely informative detail. If the purely informative style is virtually the rule rather than the exception in the novel form, it is because, in all fairness, the author's ambition is to tell a story.

January 7, 2008

In Alarm, Mick O'Grady is a young man who is struggling in a way familiar to anyone who has grown up working class or lower middle-class. His family, his parents, a context of where he came from, is absent. There is no one to co-sign for an apartment or cover tuition. O'Grady lived in another city before he moved to Los Angeles. His mother is maybe back wherever he came from, somewhere else that is not where he is at in the beginning of the novel. O'Grady is dirt poor. At one time he was less poor, at least wealthy enough that he has a library of books and CDs to sell when his money runs out. He sells his Sonic Youth CDs to buy vegan patties not because he is vegan but because vegan patties are cheaper than meat patties. Books and music and vegan patties are interchangeable to O'Grady; they are objects required for his sustenance.

O'Grady lives in a crummy apartment. The books opens with a sequence of brutally crummy jobs. He gets a job unloading bags of cement from a truck. Everyone at the warehouse unloads cement from the truck by hand for some inexplicable reason. My first job involved similar rituals, the warehouse work was less about performing something of use than merely doing what I was told. O'Grady unloads cement. He gets a job for several days putting together pens. When he gets enough money for food he buys some food, and he also buys a CD.

O'Grady is not into entertainment. Rather these objects provide contact with people who don't live the lives that he lives. These objects are not escapism, which is a kind of avoidance, but instead provide access to escape or liberty, I guess. He collects this work not in the way that consumers collect objects in order to have a collection, but rather he collects books and music in order to gain knowledge of the object under consideration that is, whoever produced it. This consumption is like scholar attempting to master the subject instead of a collector trying to complete their collection.

O'Grady manages to find allright work at a health food store and at a coffee shop. The coffee shop has open mics. O'Grady gradually becomes the host. Other people like O'Grady come through the coffee shop to take part in the open mics. They read poetry. They perform stand up comedy. They play music for their friends. These people are aware of each other. This all happens in Los Angeles, the epicenter of what is supposed to be the caustic, end-of-culture as we know it mass media. In this context, among people who do not have the appropriate professional certification from MFA programs or "industry connections," culture is manufactured and ideas are passed from poet to comedian to folk singer.

In the course of O'Grady's failing relationship and the open mic, he discovers a Portland, Oregon, writer named Kevin Sampsell, the same Kevin Sampsell who publishes Future Tense Books. Sampsell publishes zines and pamphlets and anthologies. Sampsell becomes the object of O'Grady's study. O'Grady writes Future Tense Books to acquire everything ever published by Kevin Sampsell. O'Grady becomes an expert on what he calls, Sampsenellia. In turn Sampsell replies to O'Grady. In turn Sampsell becomes aware of O'Grady.

Kevin Sampsell as portrayed here is just a guy who writes and publishes books. He publishes books in the way some people fix their cars or build their own electronic gadgets.

O'Grady decides to move to Portland. Oddly this isn't creepy. There is little (aside form his compulsive collector tendencies) of the fanboy or stalker to O'Grady, although looking the book out of the context, it seems like O'Grady might be excessively both. O'Grady isn't freakish because he remains interested in the public text produced by Sampsell in the same way he is interested in the discography of Sonic Youth rather assuming the private life of Thuston Moore by killing him and kidnapping the widowed Kim Gordon. If O'Grady began to wear a Sampsell suite or something the book would stray into the underground Mark Chapman Saga. Sampsell and Portland represent a kind of cultural grace to O'Grady where there is no clear division between writer and audience. Writers and audience mix. Writers read readers, and readers read writing. In the end, to give away the ending, O'Grady find a kind of cultural grace.

It would be remiss not to mention that fact that the book also comes with two CDs. The CDs are very well produced. The spoken word section contains large swaths of book performed by Mike Daily that while are spoken word are also a lot more musical than your typical person performing their poetry or prose of the microphone. Many of the pieces are outright songs and several parts of the book come out as pretty good songs. The entire book comes as a bundle of postcards, stickers, two CDs, and the book itself. While it echoes the commercialism or consumerism of a kind of mass produced object it an expressive object that is clearly the result of a single sensibility rather than the marketing arm of some media company. A bookstore, I suspect, would not know what to do with Alarm. Is it music? Is it a magazine? Is it a book? A reader however knows what is knows now to read it and listen to it and stick stickers to the backside of traffic sings or whatever it is you do with stickers. The book points to the fact that far from bookstores and print being dead, there are tremendous possibilities in what can be a book and what can be read as a book.

You can get a copy or find out aboutAlarm at Mick O'Grady.

December 31, 2007

Matthew Kirschenbaum posted early this month a lucid response to the hysteria around the lowering literacy rates in the United States. While the To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence and the initial report 2004 Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in Americapoint to a decline in literacy, or at least the kind of mass literacy as practiced by a large, compulsary education centered around the bound book, Kirschen draws out some interesting conflicts in this assumption -- and too points to the fact that Western Culture (with caps) was not born with mass literacy and nor will it die without it. These reports merely indicate there is a change in what it means to be literate, a change that has already been estatically hailed by the likes of Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong: a collective, externalized nervous system, a hot, connected culture.

Two choice bits from Kirschenbaum's essay:

• Walk into your favorite coffee shop and watch the people in front of their screens. Rather than bug-eyed, frenzied jittering, you are more likely to see calm, meditative engagement — and hear the occasional click of fingers on keyboards as the readers write.
• When I read [How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read] (well, most of it), the book provoked the most intense author envy I have ever felt — not because I too secretly enjoy perpetuating literary frauds, but because Bayard speaks to a dilemma that will be familiar to every literate person: namely, that there are far more books in the world (50 million or 60 million by the estimates I've seen) than any of us will ever have time to read. Reading, Bayard says, is as much about mastering a system of relationships among texts and ideas as it is about reading any one text in great depth.

The whole essay can be found here. Also, Kirschenbaum has just published a book named Mechanisms, which examines new media and electronic writing against the textual and technological primitives that govern writing, inscription, and textual transmission in all media: erasure, variability, repeatability, and survivability.

November 20, 2007

Brandon Stosuy, a writer for Pitchfork the online music magazine and frequent contributor to The Believer, has compiled a mammoth and graphically rich retrospective of underground writing from New York's downtown during the heyday of photocopiers, 1974 to 1992. The collection includes dozens of selections from writers such as Sharon Mesmer, Thurston Moore, David Byrne, Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Lori Anderson, Spalding Grey, Kathy Acker, Lynn Tillman, and Dennis Cooper.

Stosuy defines downtown literature within geographical boundaries, production limitations, and a specific aesthetic. The work was produced by poets, writers, and performance artists living below 14th Street, covering Tribeca to the lower east side. The work was generally self-financed and often produced with accessible technology such as photocopy machines. "Keeping eyes firmly focused on the muck," downtown writers created works that "breathed freely and remained connected significantly to the everyday."

The work presented in the anthology was often composed, published, distributed, and often read within Stosuy's defined boundaries. It's fresh to have an anthology organized around such a tight geographical ring. Work produced in Brooklyn or Hoboken isn't found here nor is work produced within the demarcation lines that bleed over into the wider world through the traditional channels of New York Publishing.

Pawing through the phonebook-sized volume, there are numerous spreads and reproductions of handbills, posters, and limited edition chapbooks. The flood of handmade publications followed the rise of punk in New York alongside the already entrenched visual art and poetry scenes, which had already experienced connections with literary practice during movements such as Fluxus or Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine. Cross-discipline collaboration had also been a long part of New York's art world. With punk, though, came a sense that merely creating an object or a manuscript wasn't enough, but that this creation must also involve getting the work in front of a willing (or unwilling) audience. Simultaneously, photocopy machines became widespread allowing cheap production. For a generation of self-publishers, the Xerox machine became a gateway drug. Using a photocopy machine, a poet could produce a reasonably professional looking copy without the fuss or smell of a mimeograph machine with its caustic ink and stencils. A photocopy machine is just a piece of glass that transforms anything pressed against it into a stark, black, and white image. Reproduction legitimizes scrawls, handwriting, typewriting, and collage. After a few Xeroxed chapbooks, a DIY novelist or poet could begin to consider the more expensive proposition of producing an offset book.

Up is Up But So is Down displays the evolution from the hand drawn and typewriter texts of the seventies to the early typeset texts of the mid-1980s, to the full desktop published books of the early nineties. In between, a few throwback publications make their appearance such as Between C&D, produced on a nine-pin dot matrix computer printer, embracing the high tech/low tech of early word processors. These old printers printed paper on a continuous roll with the left, and right margins attached to a strip of paper with holes used by the printer to advance the paper across the ink head. A finished issue of Between C&D was a thin stack of attached pages placed in a zip log bag (like a dime bag.)

The anthology almost exclusively covers the confessional narrative. This is the same style used by William Burroughs in his first two books in the 1950s, Queer (not published until 1984) and Junky, and is the style-of-choice for jailed bank robbers and death row inmates. These are often hard-boiled, mostly naturalistic tales of urban life, often juxtaposing "shocking" material with mundane slice-of-life. The style seems deliberately flat and easily executed in order not to detract from the edginess of the lives being documented. Frequently these stories deal with poverty, vice, or transgressive relationships.

Barbara Ess' tale from 1983, "This is it?" contains a typical paragraph:

I went back to the place I was staying--a small room in the artist's studio that reeked of the polyurethane casts of men's penises that were manufactured there. I was thinking of the first penis I had ever seen. It was when I was member of The Meatballs and Spaghetti Club, which met behind the garage down the hill from where I lived. There were three members: me, Richie R., and Kenny. We would make our genitals available for perusal until the club was busted as we all got punished.

On one hand, such a basic formal schematic makes the work sound superficial and unserious. In this case, the anthology serves as a natural history of the hipster, post-psychedelic and pre-geek. The gesture of cool is far more important in the majority of pieces than narrative innovation or literary trickery. This is not to say they aren't committed to their writing, but writing style, and lifestyle often seem just as important. As so-called serious writers continue to move into the staid, professional lives of academic positions, it becomes clear that nothing is as square (in the 1950s sense of the word) as a tenure track MFA instructor in their obligatory tweeds or gradually ill-fitting hipster gear. It is refreshing to find page after page of writers whose writing has little do with their source of income.

While the book is able to create a clear definition of what is downtown lit, and find more than enough compelling work to create a three-decade history, the book begs the question, "Is this kind of work is limited to New York?" Stosuy doesn't address the question. Michael Azerrad's book, Our Band Can Be Your Life finds significant DIY scenes in over a dozen cities including Portland, Olympia, San Francisco, LA, Washington DC, Minneapolis, and Athens. While the peculiar blend of big time visual art, early punk, and performance art created a peculiar brew of writer, similar environments fueled by the sixties counter-culture, mimeograph and then photocopy machines, were flowering across America during this same period. Even writers in this collection such as Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker belong as much to West Coast scenes or movements as they do to New York.

In any case, this is a kind of three-decade book celebrating the possibilities of a self-sufficient writing community right under the nose of the decaying, increasingly irrelevant empire of New York Publishing.

(Review published in The American Book Review this last summer.)

November 6, 2007

I wrote this review trying to follow what I thought was a new format for The Stranger's book section. Three months and no word, so here it is: In Dorothy Dieckman's novel (translated by Tim Mohr and published by Richard Nash), Rashid, a German tourist of Indian decent, using a Lonely Planet Guide to look for an adventure in the postwar zone of Afghanistan, finds himself rounded up by American soldiers under murky circumstances. The normally lucid handles of nationality and religion dissolve as Rashid finds himself bagged, tagged an enemy, and carted to a small cage stowed in rows alongside other cages filled with men with similar varied and confusing stories. Everyone imprisoned has been reduced to an enemy combatant. In turn, the male and female American soldiers who watch over them are also reduced to the role of interrogator.

Like Beckett's Malone, this novel spends pages dwelling on the mesmerizing physical minutiae of the protagonist. He is a bundle of frayed nerves trying to cling to consciousness in a situation where any sense of context has been removed by senseless forces. In Beckett, this might be an existential crises, in Guantanomo this is Dick Cheney's war without end. Rashid watches sunlight. A gecko takes up residence behind a plywood panel. The gecko, too, is in prison, and the protagonist's imprisonment makes just as much sense. Increasingly, national boundaries only make sense for the larger multi-national structures like the World Bank. For citizens of the world, whether they are workers being detained in the United States for lacking the applicable administrative paperwork or they are tourists traveling for dubious reasons in Afghanistan it makes as much sense to imprison these people as it does to lock up geckos, spiders, and moths. This excellent short novel directly confronts the confusion of citizenship and identity in the context of Globalism where terrorism, war, or even Lonely Planet Guide tourism are not constrained by national boundaries.

October 29, 2007

I wrote this very short review awhile ago for an some publication on domesticity. Odd. Nothing came of it. So here it is: In William Gay's recent novel Twilight, another nearly pitch-perfect Southern Gothic tale by the author of The Long Home and Provinces of Night, set in the piney woods, hollers, and decaying small towns of a 1950s Tennessee abutting a feral wilderness named the Harrikin. The home is the most dangerous place in rural America. Nearly everyone dies with a few yards of their front porch.

Kenneth Tyler, the son of a bootlegger, is working at gaining a degree of respectability in the small town of Center when his sister discovers that something is amiss with their recently buried father. The town undertaker has been molesting the town's dead. When Tyler and his sister attempt to extort money from the necrophiliac, the undertaker enlists the local thug to silence them. The thug, Granville Sutter, is also the son of bootlegger. Sutter has made himself invulnerable in his willingness to do anything. He even lives in a neat and tidy home. His "room [was] neat and austere. Yesterday's dishes washed and put away on the drainboard. Cot carefully made."

After Sutter menaces Tyler, Tyler burns down Sutter's home and seeks safety in the feral wilderness. What ensues is a long chase through a mythic landscape filled with backwoods homes. Tyler sits on an old goatherd's rickety porch, travels through the ruins of a plantation-era mansion, visits the parlor of a senile witch, and finally finds solace in the remote farmhouse of born-again bootleggers. But the house in the wilderness proves the most dangerous place of all culminating in a grisly mass murder. Like a great old-time song, Twilight is an artful arrangement of southern tropes revealing the domestic Goth of the American household.

August 25, 2007

Roberta Olson published a chapbook of poems, Some Numerous Dwarf Rippings with Flash+Card. I was happy to read these poems becaue they made me happy to be reading. Sometimes I am reading something that makes me unhappy to be reading mostly because I understand too clearly what the writer is saying and because I am reading a book I cannot object. I can only read or not read but by this time it is too late and I have read what has made me unhappy to be reading and if I stop reading, then I will be not reading and not happy.

I discovered a review someone wrote of a poetics book on Amazon.com via LibraryThing. The person wrote: "The English Language meets Cuisine Arte. If you like to see the English language --- the Queen's English, that is to say --- subjected to the most vicious of butcherings and pretentious, pedantic doodling, than I think this books will be right up your alley." No one speaks or even thinks in the Queen's English in America. The Englishness of English is now beside the point. The same staid grammatical sentiment might be said about Roberta Olson poems. they are composed of English sentences but they are not English unless you mean the English you might put on a cue ball. "My Niece on the Hill," is an example.

That's my niece on the hill
There are trees around my niece
Which make her happy
The hill my niece is on is three miles
Away but I know she is on the hill
Because she is my niece

Perhaps my brain has been damaged by growing up in a household infused with Keith Richards. My niece on the hill is a riff and Some Numerous Dwarf Rippings is a collection of riffs. I am agitated by riffs, by the insistent repetition of sounds. In the consumption of informative text I am inert. I receive informative text as the television receives electricity. These poems are fragments that require action on my part. I put them together. They do not tell me something, rather they tell me to do something.

Roberta Olson writes, for example:

He was humble in writing his obituary. Who are these people? They remind me of a kitchen in Memphis.

I put these pieces together the way I might use cards to make a house. I think this is what Andre Breton might have meant by the marvelous. And so these are marvelous poems because they are unexpected and compel me as the reader to take action not to decipher them (as if they are deliberately obscure code) but to create meaning from them as I would out of any kind of toy. The surrealism here is less of the flaming variety -- the pastiche of Salvador Dali, Magritte, or Leonora Clarington -- but the casually displaced oddness of close observation. Someone uses a figure of speech that you are used to hearing and maybe the way they say it makes you suddenly aware that you have no idea what they are saying despite having heard it many times and you know what they man to say even if they are saying something else. The book begins with the a metaphor title for a poem: Fire is the shadow of zero. This sounds to me like a figure of speech. It has that clipped and elusive meaning. Someone might say it after they lose their cat to a sudden diagnoses of cancer and put their cat to sleep. Fire is the shadow of the zero, they say as they return form the vet with an empty cat carrier. Or they are fired from a job they were good at after they discover their working place has been keeping careful track of their insubordination. Suddenly unemployed, escorted to the door by security, they go to a bar to get a drink in the middle of they day. They raise their glass of beer: Fire is the shadow of zero, they might say.

My daughter collects objects from the world. She finds fragments of sea shell in evocative shapes. She discovers stones flecked with unexpected colors. She owns a cache of trinkets harvested from capsule vending machines. Alone the objects are junk, but together they are a collection of the marvelous.

August 2, 2007

The Sky is a Well won Rose Metals Press's first short short chapbook contest. The book is beautifully produced: letter press cover and amazingly sharp typesetting. Claudia Smith, who lived in Seattle briefly, has published a whole bunch of stories in mostly online mags, including two issues I've also been in, The Mississippi Review and The Steel City Review.

I haven't read a collection of realistic stories since Christine Schutt's A Day, A Night, Another Say, Summer, that I've enjoyed this much. I think part of this is that Claudia Smith's characters don't live in a kind of tangential world. Schutt's novel, Florida, for instance is set in decrepit mansion of a wealthy family. Or Edisto by Padgett Powell has a professor mother named The Duchess. I have a completely unconfirmed theory that fiction about working class people, no matter how well done, if anyone will pay any attention to it has to have some kind of off-kilter angle -- fallen aristocrats, boot-leggers, drug fiends, etc. How to explain the obscurity of Well by Matthew McIntosh?

In one of the stories, a daughter receives fragments of a letter written on postcards from her father. The first card arrives, "I am in." the letter itself when it is finally constructed isn't as eloquent as the pieces. The father sends an envelope filled with petals. The narrator's mother cries. "She looks at me with shiny eyes. That's the way she cries, squinting so that her eyes don't run." The letter turns out be a sideways dig at the mother. The story ends with the daughter planning on looking at the solar eclipse.

In another story, Uncle Trip asks, "What is a symbol." His niece says, "I can't tell you, I explain. But, I know it when I see it."

These are operating principles in the collection. These aren't allegorical events, but observations of familiar objects written with unadorned, direct sentences that grow into stories as the narrator examines them.

The form of the short short, though, seems at odds with these stories. These are short stories but to call them shorts seems diminutive or self-evident. The short short is a clipped form -- a typically lyric story that has been cut or modified or blown apart by the severe constraints of length. Anthologies of short shorts tend to be an assortment of oddities. Writers can perform tricks that wouldn't be possible in short stories or sustainable for a novel. The stories in The Sky is a Well, however, are sober and deliberate and although each of them is complete, could easily become the beginning of a novel. I've heard a theory that one of the reasons that short stories books are not popular with general readers is that unlike a novel, a book of stories has a dozen beginnings: it is a lot of work to begin something. Because the setting of these stories are similar, the configuration of female narrator to troubled mother and absent father repeated, I didn't really feel as though I was beginning stories over and over again but rather hearing different takes of the same central problem. And the stories themselves are models of concision. I once read an account of a Gordon Lish class where he extolled the students to create stories that were like shops in bottles. After someone reads the story, they marvel at how such a large object fit into such a tiny space.

July 31, 2007

I think most people my age -- I'm 36 -- find talk of the weather the distressing and inane babble of strangers. Talk of the weather is the kind of talk you have with people in elevators, It is the kind of talk you have with store clerks with whom you don't want to exchange a single word. Grudgingly, the talk might touch on the weather. For the most part, especially in Seattle, there isn't any weather to really talk about. Most people work within sealed, environmentally controlled structures. For many years I worked in offices and cubicles without a window. I've pretty much always worked with an office computer with a Web connection and one of the first things I usually do is bookmark the University of Washington Web came so that I can see what I think of as the real world.

I like talk of the weather.

For me this is a safe topic in which my opinion for which I say things I probably shouldn't as tactlessly as possible in just about any other subject is neutralized by the fact that no one really cares about deeply about the weather and yet they all share a superficial connection to the weather became when they leave the sealed, environmentally sealed structure of their work place they may actually see the weather. The weather determines what they can do on the weekend. The weather is always present and something everyone observes. And through the talk of weather I can safely talk to strangers and learn how observant they are and hear stories related to their lives under the sky. Talk of the weather lets me understand who I am talking to before I talk to them about something in which I am liable to say something disagreeable.

I bought Folklore of American Weather by Eric Sloane from the best bookstore in the city where I live south of Seattle, a tiny used bookstore that carries an oddly great selection of paperback books. I didn't know who Eric Sloane was, but as I bought the book the owner of the store said that Eric Sloane was known for his books on

This slim book contains a dictionary of weather folklore and a brief explanation of both
the source of the wisdom and a brief explanation of the scientific validity of the wisdom.

For instance:
Insects

When the katydid says "kate," he announced ten days till a frost. (Possible)

Kate-ee-didn't --- 87 degrees
Kate-ee-did -- 72 degrees
Kate-ee -- 65 degrees
Kate -- 58 degrees
Ka -- 55 degrees
Mute below 55 degrees

Coldness numbs all insects and first slackens their calls. When 'kate-ee-did!" is reduced to a single "Kate!" it is because of the lowering temperature. The first frost might well be near.

The book is full both cant and tiny poems that work as mnemonics to explain the operation of the world. Cobwebs on the grass are a sign of frost.

Sloane writes in the introduction to the book that European, particularly English, settles on the Eastern Seaboard brought their weather folklore to the country. But the United States, while in general similar in temperature to England experienced widely different weather patterns that often varied greatly from morning to night and from day to day. England sits in a current. The United States is a vast land-mass.

Weather (except for weather disasters) has so little impact anymore. For most of the life of this country weather and the language to understand it were essential to functioning in the physical world. There is something drifting in my mind about a problem here between a separation of signifier and referent, but I don't know. I can't help but wonder if another effect of global warming will be more attention to the weather.

July 26, 2007

I saw Samuel Delany speak at the Science Fiction Museum as part of Clarion West's reading series. He read from his recent novel, Dark Reflections that has been called an alternate autobiography. (Steven Shaviro has a good review here.) It follows the story of Arnold Hawley, a gay black man and poet, whose ambitions, aspirations, and even sexuality becomes derailed not through any climatic event but through a lifetime of hesitation and observation. In his reading, Delany introduced the book as a kind of story to let the aspiring writers in the creative writing program where he works know what they are in for if they kept at writing and not paying attention to more wordily concerns. Although he made it sound like a kind of cautionary tale -- I suspect this kind of advice to writes in a writing program is like standing on the edge of a cliff and warning the lemmings that they are headed in the wrong direction. Lemmings don't even speak English -- the pieces he read portrayed a man at peace with just possessing powers of observation. Unlike the other science fiction writers I heard read at Clarion West's series, Delany portrays a rich, sensual world that is completely ambiguous in its meaning -- there wasn't a morality track or narrative track keeping the reader cued into the meaning of the work.

I had been mostly interested in just seeing what Samuel Delany was like -- like most writers I know him through his books, what other people have said about him, and his various jacket photos. In his jacket photos, he has a massive Melville or S&M style beard. He actually does posses this beard, but instead of being severe in any way he was kindly and handled the questions from the audience gracefully. After talking about his failed poetry career, one woman gushed about his prose, "but it is poetry!"

"I love you," Delany said.

Delany said a number of things that are probably documented elsewhere, but I thought interesting nonetheless. He said he named his novel Dahlgren by looking in the New York phone book and picking a name that didn't appear there. He had originally name the book after a friend. The friend had a falling out with his family, and told Delaney he couldn't name the book after him. So he decided he couldn't name the book after anyone.

Someone asked him about the difference between science fiction and plain old ordinary fiction, and I didn't follow exactly what he said. He said that science fiction analyzes the subject. Literary fiction criticizes the subject. In writing this down now I see that this might now be exactly what he said because this risks being a tautology.

The first of these makes sense to me: science fiction is at the root a proof of a proposition by assuming the result and deducing a valid statement by a series of reversible steps. Or, an examination of a complex and its elements and their relations. There is too, a reduction, "resolving complex expressions into simpler or more basic ones." Unlike say, fantasy, that is at root an allegory, science fiction is at root the proof of a proposition.

Literary fiction, however, he says is a criticism of the subject. In the dictionary, the meaning of criticism is almost completely controlled by the idea of evaluation. This makes sense after thinking about it for a bit -- I could never understand Wayne C. Booth's talk about morality in fiction. Fiction always seemed unconcerned with morality -- but in fact -- it deals exclusively in choices made by the author and characters and in fact this could be seen as the substance of fiction.

I can see the usefulness of this division, but I don't really buy it. Literary fiction like any lie is a proposition, too. Let me tell you story. . .

Doug Nufer who saw the reading as well, sent me this corection. He says Delany said this (which makes a lot more sense):

I think Delany said Sci Fi was mostly concerned with the object, while regular lit. fic. was concerned with the subject. In lit. fic., the world of the novel is a given, and the protagonist and other characters deal with it; in sci-fi, the world of the novel is not only open to question, but manipulation, by the author, who might adjust it to fit his characters' needs.

I do think that was closer to what Delany said. It sounds now to me like what he said. I don't agree completely with this either. (I don't have to I think agree.) I think all fiction is concerned with the object. The world of the novel is never really a given, but is something that is constructed. My frustration in fact with a lot of lit-fi (as opposed to sci-fi) is that the author relies on tropes rather creates it in the way that it must be created if the author is writing about the future or a distant galaxy. I think all fiction is essentially a distant galaxy. Are Dra-- by Stacey Levine, The Sex Offender by Matthew Stadler, or for that matter, Dublin on June 16th 1904 (Ulysses by James Joyce, are these sci-fi because they are include a word that seems a projection of the book's concerns rather than a the so-called given of the observed world? I don't think so. However, again, I can see the usefulness of making this division. Just not sure if really clarifies my understanding of sci-fi or lit-fi.

July 6, 2007

Future Tense Books has published a new book by Gary Lutz called a Partial List of People to Bleach. The cover is by Derek White of Calamari Press/Sleeping Fish.

In January of 2004, I somehow convinced Gary Lutz to come to Seattle to give a short workshop and reading. I had unused air miles. Lutz was willing to fly, although over email and then the phone he expressed his dismay at the idea of air travel. But something about Seattle was appealing to him. Diana George first recommend him to me and I had to track down his book which was out of print, then. It had been published in 1996 by Alfred A. Knopf along with several other soon to be hard to find, but influential books: The Age of Wire String by Ben Marcus and Diane Williams' The Supefaction. All were edited by Gordon Lish in his final years at Knopf. Diana G. eventually wrote a review of Lutz's first book when it was reissued by 3rd Bed.

It was kind of surreal picking him at the airport. He looked very normal. His stories, too, were normal but at first they didn't seem normal. At first they seemed experimental or put on (not a negative quality), but then gradually, they seemed perfectly reasonable. Gary Lutz uses language and syntax in a method perhaps suggested to him by Gordon Lish to shock the realistic story into something else. He doesn't write allegorical or fantasy stories. He doesn't write with OULIPO style constraints; rather his stories seem to me to balance both a perceived world and the nearly arbitrary difficulty of putting that perceived world into words. A similar effect occurs in a constraint novel, where the game of omitting something or following a rule in order to write throws makes the authors choices part of the story. However, where a constraint is a kind of operating parameter for the writer, Lutz exerts an aspect of mutilation. Gordon Lish was said to have gone too far in cutting down Raymond Carver's What We Talk about When We Talk About Love. Lutz, I think, shows a similar zeal for reshaping and cutting his sentences. I think, "too far," is a matter of taste.

In his workshop, Lutz selected a handful of opening stories from well-regarded sources. He chose well known literary magazines. We looked at the language used in these sentences. Lutz became agitated. He wasn't angry, but he seemed to summon the righteous wrath of a seventh grade composition teacher railing against the passive voice. The language of these writers, he pointed out, didn't communicate any perception. Instead they delivered what we already knew. They asked nothing of the reader. They didn't make any leaps, discoveries, or show the reader anything. He then presented a series of sentences from writers he admires: Dawn Raffel, Sam Lipsyte, and Amy Hemple.

He then walked us through the exercise of rebuilding a sentence. For example, a sentence might contain a number of expected words. For instance: The short boy leaned into the bat and managed to hit the ball. Bat, hit, ball, are expected words. A sentence can be a dwindling of a options. Each element in the sentence because of English's dependence on word order gradually eliminates expectations. We are presented with a sentence that begins with a boy with a bat, we expect hit (or miss) and ball.

This was a concern shared by Gertrude Stein (How to Write):
"Successions of words are so agreeable." and later the OULIPO. The OULIPO contended any literary form has one ideal expression. Original expression should be located in the creation of a form. A proof of the ideal is Raymond Queneau's sonnet. For an idea of the form, check out Italo Calivino's algorithm for If On a Winter Night a Traveler, "How I Wrote One of My Books." Most writers aren't exactly good at math, so a popular way of creating a form is to mutilate an existing form with a constraint -- say a detective novel where the letter "e" is omitted, Georges Perec's The Void.

Most writers are taught through the peer-pressure of MFA programs of trying to publish their stories in committee-run literary magazines not to defy expectations. There are no rewards in private jokes and obscure methods. Do not write: The short boy leaned into the bat and managed to smack the old woman with the outer rim.

Lutz however asked us instead to consider the words and their order (their succession) and how we could change the vocabulary to make something new. He asked us to reshape the sentences and alter their shape as if they were made out of a plastic substance. He wanted us not only to rearrange the words like plastic blocks, but then to melt them with a butane lighter.

Many writers he pointed out will use a thesaurus. Instead he used a cross-word dictionary. He had a favorite one. He identified the dead-wood in in a sentence and began to rebuild it. Lutz begins to rework using phonic elements as opposed to trying to maintain the function of the sentence to communicate something else--plot, or story, or character.

This method echoes Richard Hugo's:

This is probably the hardest thing about writing poems. It may be a problem with every poem, at least for a long time. Somehow you must switch your allegiance from the triggering subject to the words. -- The Triggering Town

Gary Lutz writes in "Spills," a story fromI Looked Alive:

The youngest of the girls had proposed herself out of the least promising of bodies and had ever after let her life take its line from the coercive slants and downturns of her sisters.

July 4, 2007

First three pages of a story I wrote about four years ago and I've been sending out to anyone who allows a story submission:

In the middle of the night, nine p.m., while Morris was in the living room reading The Systems Revolution and drinking a glass of beer, and while Truman knit a sweater from yarn he'd salvaged at a yard sale and listened to the BBC news, someone knocked on the door. "Morris?" Morris didn't answer Truman. Morris didn't want to get the door. Truman asked, "Who do you think that is?" This meant Morris was supposed to get the door. A scraggly creature stood on the stoop. Her neck came out of her torso like a tree trunk listing in a muddy hillside. Her hair hung over her ravaged face. Something had flattened her nose. The skin looked as if it had been soaked in battery acid; it was mottled with pink and peach colors, pitted, and shaped like a crushed rubber duck. "Can I look in your garage?" she asked.

Morris had forgotten about the outhouse. He'd already replaced it in his mind with his planned remodel. The outhouse rotted under a thicket. Morris assumed the outhouse had fallen over, and the only reason it retained the appearance of an erect building was due to the abundance of weeds holding the walls. It hadn't collapsed merely because it lacked the space to fall. Morris had put some things for lack of anywhere else to put in there covered under a tarp. It was a dry, if musty, space.

"Tina and Tim's Love Wagon," she said. "We were T&T. That's dynamite."

"I'm sorry," Morris said. The poor woman was lost and didn't know where she was. "But it's late."

"There's no need to come out with me," she said. "I just want to look. I just want to see it. T&T, man."

"I'm terribly sorry," he said.

She blinked at him. She raised a hand. She had normal looking hands. Neatly cut nails, smooth white skin, with faint blue vein. She had pretty hands. She brushed her hair from her face. "No?"

"Goodnight," he said, He closed the door and then peeped out the peep hole. She stood on the stoop for a full minute staring at the door. He thought she started to cry, but he couldn't tell looking through the tiny fisheye aperture. He wanted to open the door then and comfort her. Why not take her into the musty old place? There was nothing to steal. He didn't know her, though. He didn't know what designs she had. Truman and he had just moved in. It was still a strange place to them, and anyway something about her bothered Morris.

Morris wanted that outhouse replaced with a new building of his own design. He wanted the roof shingled properly. He didn't care what was there before he was here. Now this was their house. He had consulted with some friends in real estate. They said it doesn't matter what is standing on a lot, when you purchase a lot; you purchase the possibilities of the lot. This was a good lot, a double lot, a corner lot, a lot near shopping, near several parks, a lot, apparently at the source of the Piper's Creek. In buying the lot, Truman and Morris had bought their future.

And here was this person from who knows where? Who knows what she'd done to get to the state she was in?

Tina, if that was her name, moved down the steps and stood under the street light on sidewalk and she started to walk around the house.

"What is going on out there?" Truman asked him.

"There is some woman looking to get into the outhouse."

Truman scuttled beside him, and they watched her walk around the house. She looked around and apparently didn't have very good eyesight because she couldn't see them standing in the living room window looking right at her. She crossed the yard and stood in front of the garage.

Morris rushed to the back door. He had truly lost his temper now. She wouldn't listen. "Goodnight!"

"I just want to look into the garage. Just a single minute."

"Have a goodnight," he said back into the house.

"Fuck you, mister," Tina said. She turned and walked down the sidewalk. Morris waited on the back porch, listening to the leaves rustle in the alder in the back lot until he was certain she as gone.

"Did she need help?" Truman asked.

"I'm very unsettled," Morris said.

"Let me make you a cup of green tea." [...]

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

Received this note recently from a small lit mag, Our Stories:

Dear Matt---

First off, thank you for submitting to Our Stories, we're always excited when new material comes to us and we like to take our time going over it.

At Our Stories we do something unique, we give each person who submits to us some feedback about your story. Please know, what follows is just our opinion. It’s all subjective type stuff, what works for one journal may not work for another. The bottom line is keep working and keep writing.

Overall thoughts:

gosh, I'm just so lost on the first four pages that I had to read it three times. So help me out, we got two guys sitting in a house. Woman comes to the door and says, "I wanna see your garage" and then the guys are like, "no!" and they're talking about how they don't want anyone near the outhouse, I got all that? It's just unclear here to me, Is the garage the outhouse? What is going on? It's quirky but I don't believe quirky is quite enough here. My suggestion would be to try to make some of this clearer, you may detest this advice, but for the first couple of pages is crucial.

Right now we've decided that the piece isn't right for us.

Yours,
Alexis E Santi

Our Stories : A Unique Literary Journal
www.ourstories.us
submissions@ourstories.us

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

The late Alice Adams wrote about women magazine editors in her introduction to the Best American Short Story's in 1991 [although I think this could be applied to more generally]:

They have always wanted stories, and especially the endings of stories to be spelled out, explained, as though the women who read the are wholly uneducated and/or mildly retarded, incapable of appreciating a subtle or, God help us, an ambiguous ending. My own recent encounter with one of these magazines was so appalling -- I was pelted with questions like "Why are they drinking Perrier?" and "Why does he kiss her just now?" -- that I had to withdraw the story. For me this whole bout was extremely annoying and time- and energy-consuming; it surely would have been far worse for a younger, less experienced writer, say a young woman with a couple of part-time jobs and/or baby sitters to arrange for and pay. For such writers it must indeed be simply discouraging to send out stories, knowing how extremely poor their chances are. In a way I do not wonder that fewer and fewer good writers seem to be writing short stories.

Of course there is an entire site dedicated to sharing rejection woes. It would be better if there was a site that showed which magazines were reading and what the comments were like so writers could figure out where the intelligent readers were actually reading work. I've read slush piles and I've never found it that difficult. I've also written my share of cryptic and of no use notes trying to be helpful.

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

June 30, 2007

"The independents got fucked by the Enron of publishing." -- Richard Nash, Soft Skull

Although there has always been a certain amount of attrition in the small press world, the recent bankruptcy of Advanced Marketing Services, the parent company of Publishers Group West, which distributed books for more than 130 independent book publishers, has caused a mass kill off ofsmall press literary magazines and independent books publishers. Indie-credo aside, small presses depend on at least one corporate middleman, a distributor or wholesaler, who takes the book from the publisher and delivers them to book retailers, even independent book retailers like the Elliott Bay Book Company or Powell's World of Books.

There has long been an effort to create a small-press-friendly distributor. Some of them exist, such as the great SPD in San Francisco. Sadly, SPD Books are often difficult for independent book retailers to find. My theory is that it is the reliance on the BookSense Database instead of the more comprehensive Books-in-Print Database. This is probably due to the fact that the BookSense Database comes from the giant wholesaler Ingram.

To add insult to injury, Time Warner recently, successfully lobbied to have the bulk postal rates increased in a postal service policy that dramatically increase the rates of small-time mailers (i.e., the indie media).

Some of these publishers, such as McSweeney's, although they are taking on water, will probably figure out something. Other publishers such as Soft Skull Press have found arrangements by getting bought by larger publishers. But for many publishers this is it. Salon has a comprehensive analysis of the story. Punk Planet recently announced it closing. It also posted Eulogies of the dead presses.

This naturally affects writers. Editors of the surviving presses (who weren't associated with the collapse) are most likely inundated with both queries from writers who have lost their publishers, and the sudden restriction in places for new writers to send their work. Unlike large, commercial houses small presses depend on unagented writers sending them their work. To say depends is kind of funny because they generally receive hundreds of manuscripts a week already. Now they are likely to receive even more. But they still need these to select something, even if they are is a lot of something to select from. All of this leads to a restriction of traditional publishing options for writers and put more pressure on figuring out other ways of making it work (such as print-on-demand, short run printing, xeroxing books, and selling them on the street.)

March 15, 2007

After several years of lamenting slow death throes of book coverage in The Stranger and thinking the day's of Matthew Stadler's and Traci Vogel's books section would remain locked in nostalgia, memories of a time when I had to write "19" before the year, this week sees what I hope is a prolonged move toward making the best of two tabloid sized pages. Christopher Frizzelle's book column this week was actually a close approximation of a thee dot column with news. Hey, Clear Cut Press isn't dead. That's good news. Miranda July is coming to Seattle. There were four very short reviews and a one longer (but small) review. After years of starvation in alt-press books coverage in Seattle this seems like a feast. I'm actually looking forward to next weeks issue already.

February 21, 2007

"We estimate that out of every 10 hardcover adult books, seven lose money, two break even and one is a hit," [according to Albert Greco, a Fordham University economist who analyzes business trends in the book world.] "So, of course, this business is secretive about sales. Would you want to tell the world that 70 percent of your output is losing money?"

From an interesting article about the secrecy in sales in the publishing industry from The Seattle Times. I wonder, though, how this compares to the movie or record industry? It looks to be the same. One in ten records turn a profit. And, too, one in five movies turns a profit.

One in ten records turn in a profit. Here it is in in a FAQ for the RIAA

The recording industry is a high-risk industry in which record companies invest more than one billion dollars each year in new musical artists, most of whom are not successful. In addition, more than 90% of all recordings released each year fail to make a profit. Record companies absorb these financial losses. For the few artists who are commercially successful, record companies can only recoup their investment if albums are produced. Since an artist unilaterally controls the creative process and - even after accepting advances - can choose not to produce albums during the term of a contract, a record company needs to have the right to seek damages.

Two in ten movies turn a profit. Here it is in a reference to something Jack Valenti said in regard to pirating movies in 2002 via O'Reilly:

“Because making movies is so expensive, only two in 10 films ever retrieve their production and marketing investment from domestic theatrical exhibition. Distributors have to use other venues — delivery systems such as cable, satellite, TV stations, videocassettes, DVDs, international markets.”

January 4, 2007

Finally a reason to go to a bookstore, becuase when this thing rolls out, the bookstore will always have the book you want, they'll have the book you've written in stock, and if you are curious about the book written by your cubicle mate, they'll have it, too.

Another way of looking at this, is that the race is on betwen a beatiful handheld book reader using digital ink and a books-on-demand machine capable of producing beatiful handheld books.

In all of this racing though, it doesn't look look good for the old fashioned bookstore. I doubt though that the chains, large businesses, will be able to deal with the transformation of the bookstore. What will a bookstore look like when you can buy/download any book? Will it just be a box to choose paper, see a writer read, and meet with fellow readers? Will it be more like Cold Stone Creamery than a Baskin n' Robbins?

December 24, 2006

Why is it that one of the US's most visible literary critics feigns such a mumbling degree of articulation about books and the basic figures of literary discourse (the difference between fact and fiction)? In the current New York Times Sunday Book Review, sometimes People magazine reviewer Francine Prose spends more than a hundred words alluding to her easily more-than-a-hundred word mumbley exegesis on the difference between fact and fiction. Presumably this is the topic of one her seminars or classes. This does not bode well for her book, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them.

Here's my stab at it. Fact is true. Fiction is make-believe. Seven words.

When a writer uses nonfiction, they are constrained by the plausible and the verifiable (even if they cheat). Because the fiction writer can choose anything to tell, anything they do tell raises the question, "Why that red shirt? Why did that tree hit their house?" While the fiction writer isn’t constrained by the plausible or verifiable, they are constrained by the fact their language always means more than it says -- it least raises this question of why. Of all of things they could do sense they could do anything, why are they doing this?

I suspect that Francine Prose is her real name. I read one of Francine Prose books once but do not remember a thing about it. I looked through a list of her titles, and I couldn't pick it out in the line up. I do remember Francine Prose's essay that appeared in Harper's about five years ago lamenting the middlebrow taste of middle-American school curriculum. Prose retained special loathing for the canonical status of To Kill a Mocking Bird and Lord of the Flied. I was discouraged by her attack, not that it was elitist (who isn't elitist?), but that it didn't really take into account the nuances of the reading habits of teenagers. Not everyone is engaged by books. For actual readers, fthey are not going to be satisfied by any standardized curriculum; nor should they be, should they?

These standardized texts were much less about the text and more about developing our skills as readers. We read Lord of the Flies , Fahrenheit 451, the regular Shakespeare unit as practice reading. In the school I attended in the mid-1980s, my teachers still dwelt for the most part in a critical education given to them in the 1960s when New Criticism was such a monolithic given that my instructors didn’t think in terms of Feminism, Marxism, Deconstruction, New Historicism, or other forms of criticism. But like the thin layer of the standardized curriculum, I was aware there were other ways of thinking about a text.

As soon as I learned to read, I began to visit my library and the bookstores and I quickly escaped the rigid structures of the school system. I could have used guidance in terms of what to read or how to read what I was reading, but looking back I somehow managed to find my way to a great number of great books without the help of a teacher. I suspect a teacher would only have discouraged me if they had deigned to interfere with my reading habits anyway. I did read a tremendous number of Robert H. Howard novels, but also read a great deal of classic science fiction. I stayed clear of anything smacking of anything I might read in school because I had a sense I was supposed to read these things. I never wanted to do anything I was supposed to do. When I talk to people about what they read, they read what they read. What is taught in school is kind of beside the point when it comes to reading.

I have not read enough of Francine Prose to really have any opinion of her work or her criticism, but I am suspicious when someone who clearly knows something pretends that it is more complicated than it is.

November 23, 2006

Seattleite Laurie Blauner has been steadily releasing poetry collections in for years and I rarely see any mention of her work anywhere which makes me wonder how many writers like her are lurking in the kitchens and basements of Seattle? Cherry Grove Collections just released a book of poems, All of this Could be Yours. Her next novel, Infinite Kindness, will be released this winter. She’s will read from both books at Richard Hugo House next month ( Saturday, 20 January 2007 at 2 pm in the cabaret.)

I've been struggling through Michel Foucault's The Order of Things, a book that is actually pretty lucid compared to Discipline and Punish and compared to some post-modern or Marxist stuff I sometimes to try to read, Foucault is downright jargon-free(tm). My interest in this book has been learning how information is organized and how we came to develop our organization of symbols. The alphabet is a paradox to me. Why does C follow B?

Foucault’s book is pretty exhaustive on the subjects of syntax and taxonomy, and full of insight that at first seems a case of stating the obvious, but somehow he accretes startling conclusions. He writes, "Structure is that designation of the visible which, by means, of a kind of pre-linguistic sifting, enabled it to be transcribed into language." Through language and the structure of language, a system parallel to the physical world can be created to understand the physical world.

Foucault’s primary aim is to provide a language for the analysis of political systems. One of my frustrations with Foucault has less to do with his own work than how it has been lifted and simplified. Just as in semiotics, where there is a formal separation of symbol/referent, with Foucault there is a sense that this system because it has autonomy from the physical world. Even the back cover of my edition of the book moves this observation from a simplification into a lie, "The result is nothing less than an archaeology of the sciences that unearths old patterns of meaning and reveals the shocking arbitrariness of our received truths." The entire point of The Order of Things is the exact opposite of this statement. It is to show that our received truths are not merely embedded in physical reality but rather have a history and have progressed from century to century in the way that soil settles in progressive layers on the ground. It is a natural history of symbolic systems. But these systems are in fact in dialogue with reality, not isolated from reality.

I work now as a technical writer and have been interested in the startling amount of power that a standard operating procedure has over the mysterious physical reality of my work place. I've done other writing tasks before, but in creating user manuals or description of services, my work has had no kind of impact or change in how people do things -- however in the case of a standard operating procedure, there suddenly becomes the codification of what people do, how they do it, and a corresponding ability of the business to measure and monitor labor. In writing a procedure, though, I am aware of the gaps, the errors, the leaps because it would be impossible to capture all ways that someone performs labor. Nor would a document be able to tell them how to do everything they do. The creation of these texts and corresponding mechanism of measuring and adjusting them results in a great degree of control of the business over the labor. This control in fact comes regardless of the actions of the laborers.

This was my interest in Foucault at first. I was uneasy about creating procedures. It seemed kind of imperialistic to essentially document work and add them to a taxonomy of work performed at the company. Now I see it as less imperialistic and perhaps more in line with creating a structure. It is essentially then disciplining the physical reality of work. It represents the work -- and it is important to bear in mind that it is not literally the work. This structure, once created, can be include a dialogue incorporating both the management of the company and the workers. How the structure is used becomes a political argument -- the existence of the structure is independent of these concerns.

Mid-way through Laurie Blauner’s book of new poems, All of This Could be Yours, I came across this poem, “The Counterfeiter’s Belief in the Order of Things”:

Trees press their threads of bone against
My window, my wife’s face. We spend

Ourselves and depart like currency. A kingdom
Of acceptance and order. No superstitions,

Black cats or night. I think about
How a read apple absorbs everything but red.

A standard operating procedure is a chilly document, at the root of it scientific in that it uses method, tests for repeatability, and is concerned with usability. It is not an expressive document. Or an emotional document. In a similar way, these poems are cool, precise, and strike me as repeatable experiments in perception. They are devoid of the mystical mojo junk that often decorated a poet like YB Yeats’ poems with garlands of tinsel being passed off as fairy dust.

Compare her lines with some well known WB Yeats lines:

I made my song a cot
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat.

So much contemporary poetry contains at the root of this Yeat’s nostalgia, a deliberate coddling up with the past and received truths. Foucault was interested in finding a language that identified and understood physical reality (even if this reality was partly mental -- an phenomena increasingly understood as a physical one as well.) He understood I think that it was a kind impossible struggle because language is at the root, rotten and a lie, but nonetheless worth the fight to make it honest. Blauner, too, is struggling to find precision and accuracy in the language of her poems.

November 8, 2006

I don’t know what this means, but playing with Google's search, it makes me wonder if someone at The Stranger holds shares in Conde Naste or at the very least is earning extra money selling subscriptions to The New Yorker? The only problem in terms of this scheme is that the coverage for The New Yorkeris so pervasive in The Stranger, I feel as if The Stranger is a kind of New Yorker digest. I even let my subscription lapse because it felt kind of redundant to read the same thing in two places.

Here's what I came up in Google:

869 from www.thestranger.com over the past year for "The New Yorker".
640 from www.thestranger.com over the past year for "local band".
500 from www.thestranger.com over the past year for "Seattle band".
249 from www.thestranger.com over the past year for "Seattle artist".
105 from www.thestranger.com over the past year for "local artist"
56 from www.thestranger.com over the past year for "local writer"
41 from www.thestranger.com over the past year for "Seattle writer".
31 from www.thestranger.com over the past year for "Seattle painter".
31 from www.thestranger.com over the past year for "Seattle poet"
28 from www.thestranger.com over the past year for "Seattle musician".
3 from www.thestranger.com over the past year for "Seattle novelist".

To be fair, The Seattle Weekly

200 from www.seattleweekly.com over the past year for "The New Yorker”
177 from www.seattleweekly.com over the past year for "local artist"
162 from www.seattleweekly.com over the past year for "Seattle artist"
98 from www.seattleweekly.com over the past year for "local band"
57 from www.seattleweekly.com over the past year for "Seattle writer"
50 from www.seattleweekly.com over the past year for "Seattle band".
41 from www.seattleweekly.com over the past year for "local writer"
34 from www.seattleweekly.com over the past year for "Seattle painter"
21 from www.seattleweekly.com over the past year for "Seattle novelist".
15 from www.seattleweekly.com over the past year for "Seattle musician"
11 from www.seattleweekly.com over the past year for "Seattle poet".

Is this shared with out southern neighbors?

Portland:
367 from www.wweek.com over the past year for "New Yorker".
134 from www.portlandmercury.com over the past year for "New Yorker".

How about in New York?

Village Voice:

3,100 from www.villagevoice.com over the past year for "New Yorker".
153 from www.villagevoice.com over the past year for "Harper's"
90 from www.thestranger.com over the past year for "Harper's".

September 27, 2006

“For five summers we had a NORMAL LIFE,” Hugh Bones says in Peter Carey’s new novel Theft: A Love Story. He says this after a tranquil period of operating a lawn service with his brother, Michael “Butcher” Bones, a failed superstar painter. In this period outside of Butcher’s pursuit of his art career, he and his brother manage to live life. For my review at The WaterBridge Review.

August 13, 2006

Adam Zagajewski wrote of Corset, “Shannon Borg's voice is hoarse and seductive. She sings like Ella Fitzgerald. Bars and boats are her abode. She wins by saying ‘I am lost.’” Ella Fitzgerald is right. For my own taste, in the war of ancient jazz singers I'm firmly in the Billie Holiday camp, or even in the shotgun shack of Geechie Wiley. The cruder and more model, the better. However these are elegantly crafted poems and just as Fitzgerald never lets you forget that you are listening to first class jazz singing, Borg reminds you of the pleasures of first class poetry. You can find the book from the publisher’s web site, Cherry Grove Collections.

August 12, 2006

Kathleen Flenniken's first collection of poetry, Famous, is winner of the 2005 Prairie Schooner Prize in Poetry and has just been released by University of Nebraska Press. There was a largish stack of them at the Elliott Bay Book Company. Albert Goldbarth wrote of her poems, "There's a winning surface modesty here: it isn't Abraham Lincoln who merits the poem, but his oft-maligned wife; not Edna St. Vincent Millay, but her stay-at-home husband; not the Taj Mahal, but the everyday International House of Pancakes."
You can find the book on Prairie Schooner's site: or her site for a list of her upcoming readings:

August 5, 2006

John Olson has a new book? Who knew? Well aside from John Olson and Calamari Press. I just noticed that a new title had appeared in the list of his books on his bio and then looking at The Sleeping Fish magazine's web site, I found they had a press and that one of their books is this book by John Olson, The Night I Dropped Shakespeare on the Cat. I hope the cat survived or that it wasn't the The Riverside Shakespeare dropped on the cat.

Olson writes, "The night I thought I dropped Shakespeare on the cat I felt the reprieve of the man who accidentally goes through a red light without getting hit, the relief of the man who falls from a high cliff only to discover he’s been dreaming. But the relief isn’t immediate. It takes a little time."

I will purchase the book from their web site.

July 12, 2006

The two words in the title of John Yau's latest collection, Paradiso Diaspora are anagrams. The title creates multiple meanings: The book is as much about Yau's own diaspora into the ironic paradise of America as it is about the dispersal of paradise like water spewed from a sprinkler. [for the full review]

John Yau and Doug Nufer, book release party reading, at The Rendezvous Jewel Box Theater (2320 2nd Ave.) Thurs., July 13, 7:30 free admission

John Yau is the author of over ten books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism. He lives in New York, and is making a rare appearance in Seattle, en route to spending a week teaching at Centrum. His new book is Paradiso Diaspora (Penguin)

Doug Nufer writes fiction, poetry, and pieces for performance. John Yau's Black Square imprint published his novel where no word appears more than once, Never Again. His new book is a double novel in the old Ace Doubles flip-over book format, The Mudflat Man/ The River Boys (soultheft).

June 28, 2006

The Penny-Ante press of Los Angeles has just released an artistic labor of love in their 300-page Book #1, peppered with alternative musicians dabbling in a brainy collage of poetry, interviews, drawings and photographs. With artwork by Devendra Banhart, Josephine Foster, Tarantula AD, Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu and Don Bolles of The Germs, this outsider journal of creativity features short stories from Jim James of My Morning Jacket and Michael Cormier of The Volta Sound. Mysterious and full of a hundred "huh?" moments, this one's worth looking seeking out. -- John M. James (Positively Yeah Yeah Yeah)

This issue also contains selections from Shoot the Buffalo and Frances Johnson from Clear Cut Press.

Penny-Ante can be found online, here.

June 3, 2006

Christopher Frizzelle just published an opinion piece in The Stranger about Seattle’s lack of a great literary magazine like McSweeney’s. The gist of his piece, as I could make it out, was that McSweeney’s is not published in Seattle. An odd assertion, actually, since McSweeney’s is published where McSweeney’s is published and in fact their web page coder, Ed Paige, lives in Seattle. There are other magazines besides McSweeney’s and N + 1.

However, I actually agree with the gist of the opinion that a zeitgeist-type literary magazine has never been nor is currently being published in Seattle (except McSweeney’s). Close contenders have existed: Skyviews from the 1980s for local lit and in the late 80s/early 90s Zero Hour. Even the mid-1990s The Stranger might fit the bill. The Stranger once published a spread of Willie Smith stories. I doubt Frizzelle appreciates Willie Smith (an amazing spectacle when he reads) if he even knows who he is. My immediate reaction to Frizzelle’s article was, “yeah!” Seattle should have a McSweeney’s style magazine that isn't McSweeney’s. And then on thinking about it, I thought, well, there are a lot of very good magazines in Seattle and there must be some reason that a world conquering literary magazine hasn't been published here? For sure, magazines and small presses have a very hard time in Seattle. But, why doesn't Frizzelle spend his three hundred odd words talking about the difficulties of publishing a literary magazine, or what actually manages to get made here instead of what is not here? Why doesn't he figure out why Seattle fails to please his hankering for a particular kind of literary magazine? Why? Because, yet again The Stranger (and Frizzelle in particular) continues (albeit in a backhanded way) to dis local lit. This has become such a sustained assault on the part of Frizzelle that it makes me wonder what he really wants?

I would like to turn your attention to some really good literary magazine in Seattle:

The Wandering Hermit recently released issue #2 with work by Stacey Levine, Jesse Minkert, John Olson, and Mary Lou Sanelli. You can find this at Bull Dog News at Steve’s Broadway News.

Other magazines that I would recommend that are currently publishing from Seattle:

• Lit Rag: http://www.litrag.com
  
• Square Lake: http://www.squarelake.com
  
• Bird Dog: http://www.birddogmagazine.com
  
• Golden Handcuff Review: http://www.goldenhandcuffsreview.com
  
• Fine Madness: http://www.finemadness.org
  
• Swivel: http://www.swivelmag.com
  
• Cranky: http://www.failedpromise.org
  

Active Print Mags that are from the Internet (with a Seattle provenance) and may now be located wherever because the idea of a geographically-fixed-magazine in our era of Globalism is a bit bogus. (I recently discovered this architecture movement called Critical Regionalism, which explains this problem I had about regionalism. More on that when I can make sense of what it means to me):

• http://www.monkeybicycle.net
  
• http://hobartpulp.com
  
• http://www.opiummagazine.com
  

And there are also the sporadic, oceanic issues of The Raven Chronicles.

April 22, 2006

I'm reading tomorrow morning at Wordstock at 11 a.m. Jim Bertolino is reading at 10 a.m. Charlie D'Ambrosio's new book The Fish Museum has been published, and he's reading (on Sunday). Hathwthorne Publishing will have a reading. Gina Oschner is reading multiple times. Spork will release the print edition of their magazine. There are more things going on in three days then occur in Seattle in an entire season. Now, there are too many things going on Seattle, which is good, I think, to have too many things because then everyone can do something. But in Portland there is an orgy of literary activity that does not end. Mid-week before Wordstock, the mayor declared Portland, Poetland for a day.

Case in point, in Portland you can eat dinner with Gore Vidal and Matthew Stadler. In Seattle tomorrow, you can go to The Elliott Bay Book Company, order a brownie and coffee, and listen to Portlander, Ellen Urbani Hiltebrand read from When I Was Elena: A Memoir (Permanent), her account of going to Guatemala for the Peace Corps in the early 1990s.

I'm not sure what happened, but somewhere along the line Portland managed to develop a thriving, essentially indigenous lit culture that is completely lacking in Seattle.

They have a great bookstore (Powells), a slew of great small presses (Clear Cut Press, Hawthorne Publishing, Verse Chorus Verse Press, Evil Twin, Future Tense Publishing) as well as a good magazine (Tin House). Portland even has a good lit blogger, The Moorish Girl, the only "lit blogger," I belive to have actually published a book. And their annual bookfair, Wordstock, in its second year while it has echoes of the girth and weird connection to the so called book industry also contains large swaths of this indigenous lit culture.

Seattle, oddly, lacks all of these things, or if we do have them, they are kind of faded in comparison. The Elliott Bay Book Company, one of the great independent bookstores that came out of the 1970s, has never really made the jump to the Internet Age. The search function on the website is not even a good implementation of a standard Booksense search. I have my problems with Booksense anyway since in trying to create a sense of collective action, the collective identity of "independent bookstores" becomes a mass of bland, common dominator consensus. How else could The Historian become "The Independent Book of the Year? Elliott Bay has become a bit ratty and just doesn't feel that connected to the larger city of Seattle. Elliott Bay, like Powells, is generous enough to foster connections with local writers -- but unlike Powells it lacks long standing staff who are obsessive about the writing produced by its city. Powells on the hand with curated shelfs and a great online presence, and to enter the physical structure of Powells feel as if you've entered the well-used brain of the city. Elliott Bay on the other hand feels like finding your uncle's college books in the shed.

There isn't a single small press of note in Seattle aside from the sporadic (and I'll be biased) excellent Black Heron Press. The UW Press is good, but it is an academic press. Our literary magazines are almost as bad. The Golden Handcuff Review and Cranky are good, but they seem very specific to the tiny population of writers who are a community oriented. The Seattle Review is an academic journal and while these serve their function, academic journals, because they are staffed by students who rotate in and out, they never feel really connected to any kind of long standing discourse. I guess they do if they have a single, strong editor. I guess I'd say journals like the Chariton Review, and The Northwest Review of Poetry when it was edited by David Wagoner would fit this bill.

January 31, 2006

“I am lost,” Charles Boatman says in David Bergen’s new novel, The Time in Between, to a sympathetic expatriate, Elaine Gouds, who he discovers lost, herself, in contemporary Vietnam.

Book reviewed in The WaterBridge Review.

December 12, 2005

In 1907 the City of Seattle began to wash one of its seven hills into Puget Sound in a project known as the Denny Regrade. According to city engineer Reginald H. Thomson, the regrade benefited "The Seattle Spirit."

Read my review in The Belltown Messenger edited by Mr. Clark Humphrey

October 10, 2005

In Kitchen, published almost twenty years ago, Banana Yoshimoto collected two short works about life and death in modern Japan. She has since become internationally known with eight books of close observation about grief and the hesitant spirituality of young people.
Read complete review in The WaterBridge Review

December 4, 2004

On the somewhat damp sidewalk in front of a Twice Sold Tales, a local chain used bookstore outlet in Seattle on lower Queen Ann, a store front that used to house Titlewave Books and a reading series named The New Reading Series at Titlewave where I used to sit mum in the small regularly attending Sunday audience in the mid-1990s and listen to great local writers such as Stacey Levine, Dan Raphael, Willie Smith, Anna Mockler, Ron Dakron, Belle Randall, I found a copy of my first book, The Remains of River Names, in the $2.00 bin filed next to a thick guide to Microsoft Access 97. It does not bode well to be filed next to a guide to a nearly ten year old edition of computer software.

The Titlewave Reading Series, curated by Doug Nufer and for a time by Greg Burkman opened with music, usually a single acoustic musician including throat singers, bass players, a folk singer who wailed once that he was “Go’n to Bellingham to build a bridge.” Unlike the numerous open-mics in the city, the bookstore was quite except for the chimes outside that rattled in the breeze coming up from Elliott Bay. And so prose readers uncomfortable with reading could read their work. In any case, the bookstore was sold, a new one has appeared, and the reading series is now long gone and on my thirty-forth birthday on the damp curb I found a discarded copy of my first book, retail, $22.95, for two bucks.

My first reaction was a bit of shock that my book was this old (I’ve experienced no shock over my own age) that it hade made it into a cheap bin. It’s a small press book and so there are a limited number of copies in the world. Even so, I’ve managed to inspire even more limited demand for the book. After the initial horror of finding the book in the bargain bin, I picked it up. I needed a copy. I gave my last copy away over a year ago. And that copy had been chewed on my father’s dog. This copy, however, was in excellent condition. And was only two dollars. I looked for some more copies. And was then disappointed that it was the only one.

I checked inside for a signature. I’ve bought copies before that had been signed. For a time I thought if I signed them, then the bookstore couldn’t return them. So at every bookstore I did a reading at, I signed as many as I could. I spent an hour at a book festival once signing as many copies as I could, even though only one copy sold. Luckily this book was unsigned. I dread the day I find a copy signed, “Dear Henrico, my best friend—“
Despite my now low value, I wondered if I could haggle, and get it down to some fifty cents. A posted sign, however, answered my question. No Haggling. All Sales Final.

It was of moderate consolation when I bought the book that clerk shook her head. “What was this doing in there. This is a book by a local author. There is always a demand for this book. Someone is going to get in trouble.” And so I got a modicum of esteem back and was able to save twenty dollars and ninety-five cents on myself.

July 25, 2003

I enjoy The Red Sky Poetry Theater, the long standing open mike currently running at The Globe Cafe on Capitol Hill, because of the democracy of the readings; just about everyone in the audience ends up at the mike sometime in the evening.

I do, however, find it is good to sit near the door so as to skedaddle once the Kerouacs begin to show up. Last summer, Willie Smith read from his chapbook, Go Ahead Spit On Me, published by Portland’s Unnum Books. While Mr. Smith’s reading didn’t directly result in a riot, his percussive routine did get under the skin of one open mike attendee who not only occupied the floor well beyond the Red Sky time limits, but directly addressed Mr. Smith. At one point the drunken poet openly wondering, how Mr. Smith could ever have gotten this far in life without successfully committing suicide. The poet attempted to capture Mr. Smith's mesmerizing performance by duplicating Mr. Smith’s antics, and then by heckling and baiting the open mike host. This resulted in a riot. Asked for commentary on the violence that has historically been be associated with his poetry readings, Willie Smith had this reply:

The stories of the sordid violence that has associated me to Dr. Jesse Bernstein are mostly bullshit. I read with Jesse exactly once: February 14, 1981, at the old Glover-Hayes Bookstore down in Pioneer Square. It was an absolute riot. The only reading I ever gave where Detox attended. The van driver spotted Jesse reeling around in front of the bookstore during the break and at once began taking him into custody; but Jesse screamed and howled he had 35 people inside the bookstore who would come out and prevent their carrying him off. Somehow they threw him back; I forget; I was inside drinking with the rest of the scum. Oh, you don’t wanna hear this; nobody does; nobody did at the time. Monsieur X. (a locally famous artist and pot-thrower) went ballistic. He arrived high on glue and MD 20-20. He threatened me both verbally and bodily as I read. Jesse drew this ridiculous little knife and drunkenly threatened the audience with it as he read. I read first, and Jesse and his skidroad pals talked volubly the whole time, while Monsieur X. insanely screamed threats, including over and over: “I HATE JEWS! I HATE JEWS!” Then, when Jesse got up to read from his chap A Ghost of Himself, somebody in the audience whispered to her neighbor, and Jesse outs with the knife, starts screaming: “NOBODY FUCKING TALKS WHILE I GODDAMN READ!” Gary Minkler (you never heard of him: Seattle’s finest rock vocalist of the 70s & early 80s) said it was the greatest poetry reading he was ever privileged to attend. The next day, a band of militant feminists attempted to shut down the bookstore for tolerating such demonstrations of heathenism. As usual, I was blamed for everything. And why not - I was the guy who spent $30 arranging the show. Yeah, back then I hadda pay to read, because the “writing community” universally turned its nose up at me. Can’t say as I blame them. Like I say, I’m not a writer. What I do at readings is not fair. In the immortal words of Monsieur Z. (a long time curator of Red Sky), as he once explained to me why I can’t be allowed to read: “Willie, you just don’t know how to pull your punches.” Oh well, I’ll be dead soon enough; then all the embarrassment will cease.

Go Ahead Spit On Me
Willie Smith
Unnum Books
6735 SE 78th Portland, OR 97206
Raphael@aracnet.com

June 12, 2002

STORIES -- Formless as a tadpole egg-sack, Adrift in a Vanishing City by Vincent Czyz, floats untethered to any narrative foundation. Snippets of characterization, dialogue, and non-sequiturs float in the prosey soup, slowly revealing the relationship of two women and a working class wanderer named Zirque, an international menege-a-trois unconfined by time or space.

The shapeless form of the book, echoes the culture chronicled in these nine sections. This is the culture of international airports where hookers work both Milan and Sea-Tac; but, regardless of their Italian phrases, the same thing is for sale fresh from some trailer park in Butte. Despite chronicling this culture, without a structural spine, the book has a heft like a fist-full of Jell-O; although there is a certain amount of substance here, it resists anyone possibly getting a grip on it. The prose dissolves. For example, “Budapest Blue” opens:

I could have told you of photographs I kept locked away in a drawer of unanswered desires, black-and-whites of you through we had never met, though I had never seen you, so that’s not you -- but yes, you.

This self-nullifying statement destroys any literal meaning. I am not contending that every syllable of every sentence of every paragraph must contribute the big bang effect of the book, as if the book were a well constructed handgun (by this token Gertude Stein’s Making of Americans could be sliced down to a single paragraph ); however, the concrete quality of this writing is weak because unlike Stein’s “swing sing up into an apple tree,” the opening to “Budapest Blue” has the musicality of a quality assurance report for a multi-center public health study and so demands to be taken literally.

A book as an information object must have some form besides the arbitrary dumping of text into a sequence of pages numbered one through two hundred. The sections of Adrift in a Vanishing City could have be arranged in any order. However, in the second of the two prefaces of the book, the one titled as a challenge to the reader, “Are You a Finely Tuned Reader?”, the author tells us, “To bring [the stories] into sharpest focus, it’s best to read them in the order in which they appear.”

To demonstrate that perhaps I am not a finely tuned reader, as I am American and I was educated in a U.S. university, I xeroxed the book and cut it up into 158 individual sections and arbitrarily rearranged them; I prepared five copies in this manner. I left an equal number of books intact. I found ten foreign friends, all of whom had read at least one book by either James Joyce or Samuel Beckett. I gave the rearranged book to the foreign national friends with the following nationalities: a Canadian, two citizens of the UK, an Irish woman, and a naturalized American born and raised in Singapore. I then gave the five placebo copies to the following national mix: two Filipinos, a Swede, yet another British citizen, and a citizen of Mexico. With these readers, I found that there was no large difference, and maybe a slight preference for the rearranged books.

All right, I didn’t actually conduct a scientific study to find finely tuned readers. Readers can’t be selected scientifically, and once the book is in the world no matter how many prefaces and afterwards the author stacks onto the reader either finds meaning in the text, or he doesn’t.

In a sense, this book uses protective language. Instead of hiding behind the formal structures of a codified genre (a murder mystery that must fulfill the strict dictate of body-suspect-cocktail party) this book hides its meaning in neatly turned nonsense and fractured cause-and-effect as unlikely as a lesbian love triangle in a Harlequin romance.

When I began to piece together the text, instead of finding an original vision of the world, I found a sort of Bohemian love story featuring Zirque the tall, gorgeous world-traveler who throws away matchbook covers with the lyrics of pop songs written on them years before they hit the charts.

I also finally found myself asking some questions about the assumptions of Vincent Czyz.

1. Does the novelist do us a disservice by organizing his material?

I believe this is the largest service he does to his material. He shapes the raw material into a whole book. A pile of scrap metal is not a functional automobile.

2. Does the process of constructing a novel take away from the power of the raw material?

I am not sure why the quality of raw has positive connotations as if the process of cooking a story destroys its vital nutrients. I find raw data inaccessible. Open an image file like a JPEG in a text editor and you find a screen full of garbage, a literal translation of binary data into ASCII. We require an interpreter to construct the image from the raw data. Gertrude Stein’s writing, for instance, defines its syntax in the course of the narrative. Writers like Italo Calvino and Georges Perec begin with a new interpreter (using constraint rules or new logical formulas) and then create a new text by fulfilling interpreter’s rules. Both Stein and Perec cook their data. It is just that they involve the reader in what the cooking process (the syntax of the book) is doing to the raw data. Raw data is just too difficult to digest. Czyz, while admirable in his fidelity to this ideal of honest information, does not provide for syntactical control over his material. In imaginative prose the author tells the reader something they know not to be true but in such a way as to inspire believe in the story. Adrift in the Vanishing City refuses to engage language at this basic level, and so without structure all the reader has left is ink on a bundle of pages bound into a book.

REVIEW -- I., the protagonist in the novel I., shares the same biography as Stephen Dixon, the novelist. He's a writer in his late sixties working on the creative faculty of a preppy writing program in Baltimore. His wife is in a wheelchair. He has two late teenage daughters, the oldest heading off to college. Stephen Dixon tempts the reader to assume he is the character in the novel. At this near edge of fiction and autobiography, he plays up how fiction as a form of lying can also be a way of knowing. Stephen Dixon isn't a novelist so much as a chronicler of a serialized life.

The narrative wallows in the fact that things are written down. The ticks of style, the breakdowns of narrative sequence, and the closely observed intimate detail makes it seem as if these events could only be so carefully arranged if they came from actual, observed life. Several of the stories dramatize the writer at his desk figuring out stories, identical to the stories at hand. In "Shoe," I. tells his daughter about an inconsequential incident involving a woman he'd dated once and then he observed a week later after she stopped returning his phone calls. He saw her just down the sidewalk but before he could confront her, the sharp tip of her high-heeled shoe lodged into a sidewalk grate. I. watched her struggle to pull her shoe free. He was tempted to help, but he didn't know what to do since she was getting angry and he wanted to go out with her again. The heel of the shoe pulled off her shoe, and the woman, with only one shoe, hailed a cab, and disappeared into the midday traffic. If stories are labyrinths of possibilities, Stephen Dixon's stories are told by an acidic old New Yorker who can't make up his mind exactly which fork he wants to take.

In another story the narrator's disabled wife accidentally tips over in the her wheelchair while she's alone. Feces spills everywhere. I. catches her furtively trying to clean the mess herself. His wife wants to keep the accident private and to keep it private she has to keep it to herself. If I., the author, finds her, she risks not only his immediate frustration (and this is something to avoid), but in the longer term she risks exposure in one of I.'s stories. Throughout the book I. loses it over numerous minute domestic altercations. He loses it over the fact he tells his daughter he is sorry. He loses it over lost time and missed dinner dates. In the immediate scene, the delay of I.'s impending hysteria propels the story forward. His wife doesn't want him to get upset. To mixed results, I. attempts to use undiluted ammonia to wipe up the spray of fecal matter. When his wife explains that he should dilute one part ammonia to ten parts water, the solution works much better. The looming outburst of I. as his temper wears thin and exposes his split nerve endings contrasted with his wife's amazing patience -- perhaps due to her dependence on I., because of her disability and also because I. is most often affectionate -- charges each detail with imminent catastrophe. Amazingly, the clean up job and sustained pressure leads to them getting naked and about to get it on, but the scene is interrupted when I. discovers that he hasn't cleaned his wife's wheelchair. He doesn't have time to have sex and clean the wheelchair before his kids come home. Given the choice, sex waits, and the urge to turn anything no matter how trivial and private into fiction doesn't hesitate. Stephen Dixon is a confessional writer without shame.

I. isn't a novel even if McSweeney's Press labels it as one. The book is more a collection of chapters rather than a novel. At this late date the formal structure of the novel has been folded and mutilated enough that no one agrees on the definition anymore, but I think if at some point someone compiled all of the stories and chapters of Stephen Dixon into a database, few readers would pull out the 19 stories in I. to make this book. Fewer readers would assemble these stories in this order. This book lacks any cohesive form aside from its physical shape as a collection and as a book. Because Stephen Dixon deals with such uniformly similar themes using such uniformly similar materials -- characters with identical biographies to the author, a rushing, self-conscious narrative, a focus on the minutia of intimate, daily detail, I. reads as the next installment of Stephen Dixon, or I. or Gould, or any other Dixon doppelganger. Stephen Dixon, like Marcel Proust, constructs his story using a straightforward tool. Where Proust uses the sensual associations of his past, Stephen Dixon spins stories as a deliberation over what happened when. Both writers have written parallel fictions to their own, unknowable lives. And it doesn’t matter finally if they are stories or chapter or novels because their works build, finally, a ambiguous and total portrait.

REVIEW --

“Works of fiction contain a single plot, with all of its imaginable permutations,” Tlön, Uglor, Orbiris, Tertius - Jorge Louis Borges

Warren F. Motte has collected a series of critical writing from The Ouvrior de Littérature Potentielle or Oulipo (The Workshop of Potential Literature), a primarily French group organized around Raymond Queneau and primarily concerned with methods of creating new literary structures. Their ideas offer a welcome relief to the staid and stale conviction that literary forms have been handed down from the ancients along with the rest of language, as if structures like sonnets or mystery novels are as intrinsically a part of language as vowels or nouns.