Brit Lit Blogs

The Future of the Novel

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (3:AM Magazine) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:18:33 +0000

3:AM has been asked to promote this independent survey, on the future of books and shit. Your thoughts would be welcome and will contribute to the evolution of ver book, we are told. (pic: Philip Bond)

Not Sure Where I’m Buried (excerpt)

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (3:AM Magazine) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:17:42 +0000

By Alan Ramón Clinton.

Greek gods, which ones, watch over
the mill workers in the floor.
My grandmother gave them to me
before everything started getting stolen.
A paper city watches over me.
Not sure where I’m buried.
Or if the trains can get there.
Someone else’s Fedex exploding in my living room
Francis Bacon automatism—Contributors
We’ve invented a lot of different ways to poison ourselves.
The owl and Thoth made friends with Wellbutryn, with Paul Muldoon.
I saw Miranda again, those are pearls that were her lips.
Sprung from jail, Baudrillard chose spaghetti.
Such large mirrors for sensory deprivation
the holes in the wall that are the wall.
A familiar spirit lives in each one.
Only Bacchus is well taken care of these days
but he still calls in the middle of the night
refused at intake, to barter with despair.
My health insurance is sculpted (e.g. Maze),
everyone’s preoccupied with Daedalus.
I’m preoccupied with depositions,
the disintegration of letters
alluding to the layers of drowning.
Practical Joker under the pressure of phenomenology
gluon card one of the last additions
his pietà now the palace of tribulation.
Rustication that bends inwards, stone drapery rising
from concave spectacles, frame the U.S. scene.
Burden on the roof of a Volkswagen
vertical melancholy
graver in contact with Boltraffio
his mystic industrialism.
Subdued fragments of Unit I.
Specialized in scenes of the underworld.
A prisoner of war. A distinguished children’s book.
Eighteen pieces of lava. Rhymed.
Hunting scenes. Huge tomb of advice
representing the head.
I do want the moths to come inside.

Le Corbusier was a leach, fucked mass
(slight of hand), the city in 1919.
He was nearing abstraction.
His discoveries of working man.
He was a professor.
Smoked glass you can’t see through.
You’re not allowed to tap on it.
Not the best choice for a mental health clinic.
Shocked by his nurse he committed suicide.
Label realism.
His house is now a museum.
Probably born in early hesitation
necessitated setting up a workshop.
This grew larger and control diminished,
as did his name.
He was where he painted and rain destroyed the Revolution.
It is difficult to distinguish between them.
Peasants in their surroundings.
Back his rocks, more important than anything else,
his credit is known.
Under the light, until the Fall, only a prostitute
spoke to me, only a beggar touched me.
You’re here, while I’m waiting, to peddle
psychiatric wonders.
I just wanted to go fast, while the blade
was in my hand.
Not sure where I’m buried and some say
I am risen.
A man that thinks well will live well.
All my friends are suicidal.
Make the doors apologize.
Stopping the radios.
Autobiography in the form of a blank image.
The tempest again so practical, it’s all good
as a military engineer, the scientific rendering of depth,
of optical universities.
Tell the exquisite corpse to piss off.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alan Ramón Clinton is the author of a scholarly monograph, Mechanical Occult: Automatism, Modernism, and the Specter of Politics (Peter Lang: 2004) and a volume of poetry, Horatio Alger’s Keys (BlazeVox 2008). He currently lectures at the University of Miami.

To The Death

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (3:AM Magazine) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 07:54:09 +0000

Literary Death Match London, Ep. 1
July 21, 7pm
The Old Queen’s Head
Essex Road, London N1
£5 entry

“The pen is mightier than the sword, and ink will be spilt”

Opium Magazine is crossing the Atlantic to debut their award-winning literary event: Literary Death Match. Four writers, judged by three all-star judges, will compete in a rip-roaring edge of your seat read-off. Two finalists will then compete in the Literary Death Match finale, which trades in the show’s literary sensibility for an absurd and comical climax to determine who takes home the Literary Death Match crown.

Sponsored by PICADOR, it will feature a star-studded line-up that includes Nick Harkaway (The Gone-Away World), Salena Godden (of The Book Club Boutique and SaltPeter), Joe Dunthorne (Submarine) and Tim Wells (representing Pen Pusher).

And for the judges… Laura Dockrill (MC Dockers, author Ugly Shy Girl) and Tim Clare (Aisle16, and author We Can’t All Be Astronauts) joining us fresh from their top spots at Latitude Festival and Luke Brown of Tindal Street Press.

And all of it hosted by Opium’s editor & LDM co-creator Todd Zuniga.

Don’t give a monkey’s about Manolo Blahniks: Dale Tyler

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (3:AM Magazine) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 05:12:25 +0000

By Sophie Erskine.

3:AM: Thanks for agreeing to answer my questions, Dale! I interviewed your colleague Roger Frederick six months ago about his interest in post-punk fiction – he gave some fascinating answers here. What’s your view on post punk literature – are you as down with it as Roger is?

DT: I’m a big fan of anything that breaks the norm, tests the boundaries, and dares to be a bit left field, edgy and rebellious. Most books follow an almost template-like formula, so much so that once you’ve read one you’ve read them all. The characters are predictable, dull and not even that likeable. It’s time that literature got a shake-up!

I’ve always hated the abundance of mainstream, Stepford-wives-style novels that grace every shelf of every bookshop you go in. There have been so many occasions when I’ve really fancied sitting down with a good book on a sunny day, going to the library or bookshop, and every book I’ve picked up is about some woman who strives to find Mr. Right ‘with hilarious consequences’. Which are, let’s face it, not so much as mildly amusing in truth. It’s the same with chick-flick movies. You can tell what’s going to happen from about five minutes in. Let me guess – she’s going to marry ‘the best friend that was under her nose all along’ and the film will end with either her wedding, or her pregnant or pushing a pushchair. I always end up buying some crime novel instead – not exactly light summer reading!

I’ve always struggled to identify with the characters in those sorts of books, too. Speaking to other women I know, they all agree that there are hardly any ‘novels for girls who don’t like chicklit’. They seem to have us all down as living to find a man, go shopping and drink whichever wine is fashionable at the time. Which I’m sure is what a lot of women are into, but not all of us. With Out Of The Picture, I’ve tried to create something for girls like me – who drink Coronas, and play pool, and have male friends, and don’t give a monkey’s about Manolo Blahniks!

3:AM: Tell me about your work Out Of The Picture. What inspired it?

DT: I was going through a difficult relationship at the time. My partner’s ex-girlfriend was hanging around too much for my liking. She came around to the house one day and was standing at the top of the stairs. I was talking to my friend on MSN and I said ‘I’d like to push the stupid fucking bitch down the stairs!’ And in that second the whole idea for the book just came to me. I realised how many girls there must be out there like me, who had some nightmare ex still hassling their boyfriend. How many of them could have got themselves into a heated situation in a fit of rage and ended up lashing out? Usually, in books, it’s the ‘other woman’ who is the bad guy who gets their comeuppance. In this book I wanted to portray it from the eyes of the new girl.

There are cameos for a lot of people close to me in this book – in fact, Rocco is based on my own best friend.

3:AM: You started writing to combat the non-existence of women’s literature that wasn’t about romance, weddings and babies. I totally agree with you there and actually feel physically sick (well…) when I think of the number of samey chick-lit novels that are out there. Do you feel that you’ve changed that situation in your own way? Or do you think the situation has gotten better on its own anyway?

DT: I don’t think the situation is getting any better. I just think that sort of crap sells. It fulfils a certain market, because there are loads of girls out there that love mainstream romance tatt. But there isn’t anything for the rest of us. I’m still buying blokes’ books. Last time I went for a summer read I came back with The Dice Man! I’m hoping that one day writers and publishers will start filling that void. Hey, maybe I’ll start the ball rolling!

3:AM: Hmm, I wonder. Do you think it is your freelance journalism for women’s magazines, or your novel-writing, that is more effective in creating a healthy literary space for women? Which form do you think is more suited to the task, and why?

DT: Although I probably shouldn’t say it, I still don’t think that a lot of magazines out there set a good example, particularly for younger girls. There are too many features about so-and-so getting fat, and too much emphasis on looks. I’d like to think that my characters, flawed as they are, will help girls learn to accept that fitting a certain stereotype isn’t the way to go.

3:AM: I’m interested in your own personal experience but also your opinion of the world in general (naturally!), so I’ll ask this question in a general way. What do you think are the biggest obstacles that women writers face today? Are they different from those that men face?

DT: I don’t think it’s any different for women. I think it’s just really hard to make publishers and agents sit up and take notice of anything that isn’t the usual formulaic nonsense. It’s a risk for them – sadly enough woman + shoes + Mr Right + Baby = big sales.

3:AM: 50p from every sale of your book No Big Deal was donated to Breast Cancer Awareness. I think that’s a bloomin’ fantastic idea and wish that literature was more generally linked to directly helping the lives of others. What motivated you to sell your work in that way? Was it based on your own personal life experience of cancer, or a more general altruistic desire?

DT: I always feel that giving something back is important. We could all be there one day. I’m a big believer in karma, too, so you should always give out as much good as you can.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWEE
Dale Tyler pays the bills with freelance magazine writing and is studying to become a Cognitive Behavioural Therapist. She lived in France for two years, until the allure of KFC, decent conversation, and real proper pubs became too much and she returned to the homeland. Out of the Picture is her second novel. One too many formulaic chick-lit novels pushed her to decide that, if she wanted a job doing, she’d do it herself. She now wants the world to see that you don’t have to look like a librarian and wear tweed and elbow patches to be an author. Dale lists friends, family and being ‘a little bit rockstar’ as her biggest inspirations.

Nietzsche Source

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (ReadySteadyBlog) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 02:37:53 +0000

From The Mole:

Nietzsche Source is a web site devoted to the publication of scholarly content on the work and life of Friedrich Nietzsche. The contents of the site and its internet addresses are stable and can be freely consulted and used for scholarly purposes. Two editions are currently being published in Nietzsche Source: the digital version of the standard critical edition and the facsimile edition of the entire Nietzsche estate.

The genetic editions of two of Nietzsche’s works The Wanderer and his Shadow and Dawn, including the reproduction of all related manuscripts, are in preparation. The website is managed by the Nietzsche Source Organization (formerly, the Association HyperNietzsche), a non-profit organisation hosted at the École normale supérieure in Paris. Its main purpose is to continue work on the edition, commentary and interpretation of Nietzsche's work.

Homages to Georges Perec

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (ReadySteadyBlog) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:20:50 +0000

Via wood s lot: Homage To Georges Perec: An Entertainment in Six Univocalisms (several unpublished oulipian texts by Perec's English translator Ian Monk).

Worth noting, too, that the latest edition of The Review of Contemporary Fiction is dedicated to Georges Perec.

dovegreyreader asks...A.S.Byatt

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (dovegreyreader scribbles) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 16:15:00 +0000

Well, I asked and A.S.Byatt very kindly agreed to take a seat in the virtual armchair and answer our 'dovegreyreader asks...' questions. I think you're going to enjoy this and how grateful I am to A.S.Byatt for taking the time out to do this for us. If you've somehow forgotten quite how much I loved The Children's Book you can read again here.
Perhaps we sometimes mistakenly think of writers as inaccessible and remote from us as readers, but I hope you will agree that you will know A.S.Byatt (or Antonia as we settled on in the end) quite uniquely once you've read these wonderfully informative insights into her writing of The Children's Book, her working day and her favourite books. Have the printer plugged in or pen and paper to hand, because the reading suggestions create a must-have list and I've taken the liberty of linking back to a few that we've talked about on here, even our attempts at caffeine-loaded Balzac last Christmas.
And I'm afraid I know it all too well, sometimes I need saving from myself, I couldn't resist asking Antonia if she had thrown a pot in her research for this book, read on to find out.

Antonia, I've gone off on a frolic of my own with my reading of The Children's Book, probably many miles from the book's intention, and as I read I often paused to wonder whether a writer has intentions like this for their readers. Could you talk us through the genesis of this book, the germ of a beginning, its themes, what were the founding ideas and directions you wanted to take as you wrote and where did you want to take your readers?

I’m happy about the frolic. I don’t think novelists should have designs on or for readers – I have come to see my novels as worlds in which all sorts of things are connected in all sorts of ways. No two readers will read all the same words – the only people who read every word are translators. What’s good about writing novels is that one is writing for one person only – and each one has her/his way of reading and preoccupations. I have found that I increasingly use tales and fairy tale as a kind of underpinning structure – several of the plots in this novel are connected to the fairy story about the king who tried to marry his dead wife’s daughter (a version of Cinderella – Donkeyskin, Manyfurs, Catskin.) I began to wonder about children’s book writers – their children seem to be very unhappy people – there was a wonderfully funny tale about Alison Uttley (whose son drove himself off Beachy Head, which was not funny) in Saturday’s Guardian Review. I was intrigued by things I read about E Nesbit being a founding Fabian – how do fairy stories and socialism go together? I got a lot of help from Jack Zipes, the great fairytale scholar, who said the fairytale was the natural form for socialists. Novels are topsy turvy – the City of London got in because of a repeated image of gold and silver such as the gold and silver dresses the king gives his daughter-bride-to-be - and because of the father in Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows, who was preoccupied with bimetallism. That novel had a great effect on me – it started me thinking about the time when adults began to talk to children as grown-ups. I saw at the beginning that my own novel was going to have a large number of main characters – no one hero or heroine – but I did not see, at first, that children in 1895 were going to hit the first world war head on. So it’s only accidentally a war novel – which is a good thing – as I think that was an accidental war, that could easily not have happened. Re children’s book writers – there are bits of Kenneth Grahame, Kipling, Alison Uttley, and Evelyn Sharp in there – not only E Nesbit. I try not to make any of my characters a “portrait” of any real person – they move more freely if they have many originals. As one reviewer remarked, there is a lot of D.H.Lawrence in Olive Wellwood – E.Nesbit was southern and middle class, Olive brings with her the coal mines, and real poverty. And, as Philip does, the North. My own ancestors, on one side, were potters, from the Five Towns.

My reading gives me the impression that you had loved writing this book as much as I had loved reading it, the research into the arts and crafts, the potters and their work, the fabrics, the textures, the V & A, the puppets and fairy tales. Can you tell us what was involved in this research? (I'm actually desperate to know whether you threw a pot!)

I did indeed love all the research – this is not a period I knew a great deal about and it was all there to find out. I find I am increasingly interested in human beings who make things – glassblowers, weavers, and so on. I watch the Antiques Road Show and Flogit not for the human dramas and revelations of value but for the things – furniture, jewellery, silver, pots. I had slightly avoided pots, because of the family connection, before The Children’s Book but I became completely enthralled in finding out about them. I bought books about De Morgan and Minton, and books for would-be craftsmen, and reprints of the V and A’s textbooks for ceramics students and jewellery students. Amazon international and Amazon second-hand – and a great bookbuying research site called Addall – have transfigured the whole research process. My daughter lives next door to a great modern potter, Edmund de Waal, and so I was able to go to his studio, where he told me a great deal about the processes of preparing the clay, and the kilns. It was Edmund who made me understand just how violent and in a way haphazard making pots can be – that you have the two extremes of cold clay and heat and flames. He sat me down at a wheel and centred a lump of clay for me – so I did get my fingers in it and feel the wall rising before it collapsed. I read a great deal about the Martin Brothers and Palissy. Edmund gave me a copy of his book about the history of modern pottery – you would love it, if you haven’t found it – and it was Edmund who told me about Morris and Co’s irrational dislike of porcelain (his own is exquisite) and the general Arts and Crafts mystique from the inside. He was apprenticed to a rural potter and remarked dryly that many Arts and crafts vessels don’t hold water!

The V and A got in because of E Nesbit – who went to the British Museum in search of a plot and had a love affair with the expert who helped her. So I thought I’d set some of the story in the V and A and invent a Keeper of gold and silver. I was very fortunate to meet Marian Campbell who showed me the Gloucester Candlestick and took me on a tour of the basement – the shrine where Philip slept is really there. And I was shown the majolica and the V and A’s collection of Palissy – I was fortunate enough to pick up an imitation Palissy in the Furniture Cave – I pointed out that a dragonfly was broken and got it at a reduced price.

I could go on and on. My husband has a collection of books about the first World War. My German translator Melanie Walz lives in Munich and showed me the puppet museum there – and everything else – and told me about Richard Teschner whose Golden Shrine I managed to visit in the Vienna theatre-museum when I was lecturing there. And my daughter who was then at the Women’s Library introduced me to Jennian Geddes whose help with Dorothy’s studies was invaluable – you cannot imagine what trouble I had in correlating all the dates of all the exams etc. with the rest of the story (and history). I did get one thing wrong – not about Dorothy but partly because of her inexorable timetable – but I am not going to tell you what it was. It was picked up by the American proofreader.

We always love to hear about the workings of a writer's writing day. To know and and visualise the process that gives us the finished book somehow completes the reading circle here, so can we know about any special desk, pen, ink and paper, old typewriter or PC, room with a view or a blank wall, anything that helps us visualise you at work?

I write in an attic looking out at treetops (ashes and a sad eucalyptus someone has cruelly cropped this year. ) Although it is south London herons and parrots fly past – and magpies and jays and wood pigeons and all sorts of small birds. I like colour – so there are bright prints by Matisse and Donald Houston and Patrick Heron – and an ecologically improper case of Amazonian butterflies. Then there is the glass – a number of paperweights, old and new and a lot of American marbles in bowls. American glass is amazing. And then there are a lot of stones – phantom quartz with which I became obsessed, a chunk of Filey Brigg, boulders from the Boggle Hole…Most of the walls are covered by books –a working library – and there is a low semi-circular bookcase inside a bookcase round my chair which puts my working library for the book I am working on in reach – coalmines, Rye, Fabians, Germans and puppets, and the basics – bible (Authorised) dictionaries, place-names , Gray’s Anatomy, some maps…

I’ve banished the computer from my writing room. I write on narrow feint A4 with a Pilot fine-point (0.5) . I write fiction by hand and everything else on the computer. I was never any good with a type-writer and still rejoice in the computer’s wordwrap. But I think with my fingers through a pen. I write fiction in the mornings – or try to – I do my reading up there too – There are, even I admit it, too many books in the house. I fear the stairs may collapse. I should perhaps say that I suffer badly from SAD so I have a lightbox on the surface near the desk. Writing facing a blank wall would throw me into a real depression.

Could you try and imagine that none of us here read books at all, an unlikely scenario I know, but who should we read as a matter of urgency, who should we read for pure pleasure and who is writing now who we mustn't overlook?

Where to begin? I think I’ll start with a list of great novels of the world and then a list of moderns.

Tolstoi War and Peace Flaubert Madame Bovary (You really ought to have Anna Karenina for comparison but I love War and Peace more.) Dostoevski The Brothers Karamazov. Thomas Mann Death in Venice (for starters). George Eliot Middlemarch Jane Austen Persuasion Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby Saul Bellow Henderson the Rain King Henry James The Ambassadors. Chekhov stories – start with the collection in Penguin that includes Lady with a Little Dog. I am at the moment passionately reading Balzac but I don’t think I can ask anyone of you to take a run at him, especially in translation which doesn’t always work You could try Lost Illusions and its sequel. Dickens – what to include, what to leave out? Any and all. Bleak House and Great Expectations – one in the third person, one in the first person.

Moderns. Alice Munro’s short stories. Penelope Fitzgerald The Blue Flower but all her books are wonderful. Like some of you I am excited by Hilary Mantel. Lawrence Norfolk (not easy but if you get caught up in it, amazing) The Pope’s Rhinoceros. Julia Franck The Blind Side of the Heart – translation just out, knocked me over. I am very interested in Michelle de Kretser. Michael Ondaatje’s early novel In the Skin of a Lion. I am also watching Nadeem Aslam who writes wonderfully. His last book was grim and beautiful in equal proportions. Iris Murdoch – my favourites are perhaps her first Under the Net and maybe The Black Prince. Philip Hensher – both his elegant early short novels and the two big ones – The Mulberry Empire and The Northern Clemency. I read Yiyun Li’s The Vagrants and cannot get it out of my head. She and Julia Franck are my Books of the Year, so far. And Wolf Hall. As you can see I have mixed up two sections of the answer – moderns, and “who to look out for.” I truly enjoyed Dai Siije’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress – it’s translated from the French, and the French, who are preoccupied with style, say the sentences are not elegant. But it’s an amazing story, told with wit, and a way of seeing into a distant world. His second book is amazing too. A new way into China by a maker of fables who is both grim and funny and elegant. It’s not that I’m peculiarly interested in China – it’s because there are a few new Chinese writers who seem to be saying new things in new ways.

I could go on and on. Kafka is essential at some point. I love Ford Madox Ford – I think I’d recommend The Good Soldier and his first world war quartet before D.H.Lawrence and E,M.Forster – but I think this is partly reaction after having taught those two too much and reacted against their influence. This is a list of books that matter to me as a writer – and I write because I read. Which brings me on to my last point. I really write as I do because I was overwhelmed by Shakespeare as a girl. The English language is wonderful and can do all sorts of things both simple and complicated , straightforward and beautiful – and I do think much of its range and flexibility and breadth – for writers and readers – exists because he wrote as he did when he did. So you imaginary readers who have read nothing must at some point read him – the major tragedies first – Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet – and then things like Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure - and The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale – and then, the comedies, which are harder than the tragedies because the jokes and the vocabularies have dated – except perhaps A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is a must-read. And haunts The Children’s Book, so maybe I’ll stop there. Thank you for all the intelligent reading.

The smell of coal, like a pearl

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Eve's Alexandria) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 15:20:15 +0000

Service Announcement: This is post is written in a new way. That is: I have set myself a time limit - one hour - in which to write, finish and post it, no matter what happens. There are several reasons for this but the most pressing is that I have been having problems reviewing lately. I imagine this is a result of intellectual burnout after months of working full-time, teaching in the evenings, lecturing at weekends and completing an MSc in between. But I'm finding that even now all the major pressures have lifted - for a while at least - I still can't sit still long enough to finish writing anything. Meanwhile the pile of books to review grows and grows, and I become more and more frustrated with myself. This Cannot Go On. Thus I'm following the advice of one my distance-learning tutors, which is: Just write the damn thing. So here it is. No drafts, no edits, no fanciness. Just the way I wrote it first time. Eep.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The fledgling Desmond Elliott prize is off to an excellent start in my view. This year's winner, Blackmoor, is Edward Hogan's debut about post natal depression, bird-watching and the coal miner's strike of 1983; and it is fresh and dark and extroadinarily good. One of my best books of 2009 thus far? I should say so and then some. This is a novel with a lot of thematic bite, packing an emotional punch and written in a beguilingly different (if not entirely radical) style. What is there not to love?

It begins around 2005 with an act of violence born of pent-up frustration - an arbitrary attack on a group of cyclists - which sets the tone of the next 260 pages. George Cartwright, the man who throws the punch, is a widower with an awkward, dreamy teenage son named Vincent and a sad history. His life, such as it is, is devoted to repressing the nasty events of the past (including his wife's suicide) while also hiding them from his son. Feelings like love, sympathy or compssion have been avoided or excised at all costs, as symptoms of weakness and liability. It is a case of batten down the hatches. Shut the front door and turn out the light. It is George Cartwright against the world.

Not that you can blame him. His life began and was lived until the early 1990s in the pit village of Blackmoor, a shabby, shallow place, characterised by its narrow-minded claustrophobia. Since the untimely death of his young wife there, George has been battling to leave and while he has succeeded in one sense, having removed to a nearby town and cut all physical ties, he has failed miserably in another. When he stands in his suburban back garden at dusk, looking out at the horizon, he still sees something:

In the valley the lights blink behind the silhouettes of gently shivering trees. Sometimes as night falls, he believes he can see the other village, although this is impossible - Blackmoor is twelve miles away. Nevertheless, a thick black space the size of a postage stamp seems to appear against the pimply illuminations of the other towns and villages. He does not seek it out but sometimes it transfixes him, that tiny hole. Then he shuts it out and shakes the memories from his head, like a wet dog ridding itself of water.

Blackmoor is a haunting place. On the one hand it is a prototypical coal-mining village in the North of England, perfectly ordinary and familiar, at least to me. I grew up in Yorkshire, where my family have mined for generations, and know areas where there are still 'pit communities' just like it. Although the mines themselves closed down several decades ago, the atmosphere and the mentality are still perceptible in the older generation. The working man, with his 'pleasures' - the men's club, the footie, the dog races - and the wives, waging war against outsiders and eccentrics of any kind, shrieking at the gaggles of children running half wild in the street. There is something homely, if not kindly, about this side of Blackmoor; there is even a whiff of local history about it. (Which is ironically reflected when Vincent and his only friend unwittingly set about an English project on it.) But. On the other hand it is nowhere you could find on a map, in this world at least. It is grotesque; an Other, uncanny sort of place. Through the looking glass, under the fairy hill, you know the sort of thing. Edward Hogan signals this quite clearly in the early pages of the novel - he describes it with a disgusting, focused intensity:

Blackmoor is a tumour of grey roof tiles in the muscular hills of Derbyshire, its isolation exaggerated by the disused loop track that encircles it. The village consists of seven terraced rows, a pub, a church, a school, the Miners' Welfare Club, a recreational ground and a few slack heaps where the pit used to be... A simple plaque marks the capped shaft at the disused colliery. Dropping below ground, the tunnels remain, like one infinitely recurring mouth with herringboning for teeth, the tool-chipped ripples of the strata so similar to the veins and ridges of the human palate. These burrows are filling slowly with water and other, more sinister elements. No more the tock of hooves, or the shouting, or the gutteral rumble of machines. Just the hysterical emptiness of the flumed earth.

Reading Hogan's grandiose prose - which hugs close to a line he never quite crosses into verbosity - further alienates the place from us; forces the contrast between the beauty of the writing and the nastiness it describes. It is a world we know, and yet do not know. It reminds me most vividly of Nicola Barker's Ashford in Darkmans, the work-a-day town that harbours anarchic, dark spirits at its heart, where ordinarily men and women wear their own faces and horrible masks at once.

Of course, a place like Blackmoor, sinister as treacle, is not complete without an unspeakable evil. And sure enough, we have plenty of candidates to choose from. There is the earth and the mine itself, closed down in the 1980s, which lies quietly plotting a revenge against the men and women who have riped out its bowels. Gases and noxious water are gathering in its depths, leaking upwards to cause explosions and fires and deaths from suffocation. There is the mining corporation which has previously withdrawn leaving unemployment, desperation and poverty in its wake, only to return with bright, nauseous promises on the discovery of a new coal seam. There are the villagers , whose small-mindedness and petty jealousies create rifts and dispute in their community. And then there is Beth Cartwright, George's doomed wife. Early in the novel we learn how she died at Blackmoor after leaping from her bedroom window. We also learn that in George's opinion, the place killed her. Slowly.

Beth was an outcast in Blackmoor for many reasons. First, and strikingly, she is albino - a ghostly visitation, with long white hair and wandering eyes that won't settle. Second, she is married to George, who scorned work in the mine (when it was available) and made a way for himself in a white-collar job which brought a bigger house, a car and the withering envy of the village with it. Third, she is creative and sensitive. This last is perhaps the most disconcerting for the other inhabitants of Blackmoor. Beth makes her own clothes from bright fabrics. She acts strangely, interacts with her neighbours in unexpected ways. She sunbathes on her roof. She paints her fence in stripes. When she is pregnant, she eats dirt and coal; when her son, Vincent, is born she temporarily looses her mind. Her neighbours begins to wonder if she isn't unlucky, or worse, somehow unnatural. They begin to notice a confluence of disaster in her wake: a boiler explodes when she is passing in the street; a publican dies of monoxide poisoning after bad-mouthing her husband. And so begins a witch-hunt, analogous to the witch-hunts of 400 years ago. Hogan knows, as we know, that the human impulse to scapegoat is as strong today as it ever was. In flashbacks we see first hand the tragedy that George has fought so vigourously to hide unfold.

It has to be said that there are similarities between Blackmoor and Beth. Both have uncanny characteristics which can be explained away - Blackmoor is not malignant, it is an industrial wasteland; Beth is not a witch, she is clinically depressed - but which cannot quite be dismissed. Ironically it is this element of Beth's make-up which attracts George to her. He abhors what he perceives to be the monotonous cultural void of Blackmoor and relishes Beth's difference. He is drawn to her exocitism, which Hogan perfectly characterises as her 'scarcity'. He is faintly obsessed with the idea of loving her as an act of rebellion and, as the novel unfolds, it becomes clear that she is also a distraction from his manifold failures. If he can't leave Blackmoor behind, he can at least stick two fingers up at it all by marrying the half-blind albino witch.

I realise that is a very wooly, vague synopsis and commentary on a novel that is rich in symbolic complexity. It barely mentions the novel's real-time protagonist: Vincent Cartwright, George and Beth's son, who grows up without ever knowing his mother and with no memory of Blackmoor. But, bah, I'm running out of time and I want to stress other things. The most important is that Edward Hogan is a spirited new writer, by which I mean that he is playful with language. Not just the form of it on the page, but also the sound of it, the poetry of it. He turns puerperal (as in, psychosis) into 'pure peril'; microfiche into 'micro fish'. And he confounds our expectations with his similes - he knows how and when to puncture and drop a sentence like a stone. Like, for example, a bald man's head looking like a 'rubber-ended pencil'. But he also knows how to float them off, as when he describes the cool smell of coal as 'the warmth of the sun trapped in there somewhere, like a pearl.' There is an assuredness to his writing that surprises. True, there are moments when he feels like a beginner, with a clumsiness here and there where he overreaches or misses his mark. But for the most part the prose is delicious and invigorating. I couldn't repress the occasional yelp of delight.

I know that, like many other authors of his generation (which is also my generation), Hogan has been through an MA in Creative Writing and sure enough you can see the places where he has put what he has learned to good use. The narrative is tight and determined; the dialogue is sparse and realistic; the whole thing is closely observed; obviously revised, rewritten and rethought. Still, I don't believe that is the secret to Blackmoor's true success as a first novel. It is too alchemical for that. Dare I say that there is also a natural talent at work? A gift for writing that cannot be taught, but which can only be awakened. Hmmmm. Time will tell I suppose. When his next book comes out you will find me in the queue for a copy.

~~Victoria~~

(Who spent 1 hour 10 minutes writing the above, in contravention of very clear rules. Still, at least it got written!)

The Memory of the Drift

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (3:AM Magazine) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 10:18:17 +0000

By Richard Marshall.

Did Duchamp say he wanted to become an artist because art had become a cult or because it hadn’t? I can’t remember precisely but that isn’t quite the same as saying I can’t remember at all. Though it might feel that way to anyone who wants to know the answer if they feel it matters. And I’ve heard people sneer that poetry has now withered into being just a cult. The implication of this sneering stance is that being a cult is a bad thing and something that makes poetry something for prats who ought to get a life.

Well I suppose poetry is a cult at times but at other times, like here and now in this comment piece, it is more a capricious philosophical playfulness running through the wounded exposure of overhuman viroid duration like poorly remembered source material, a kind of echo. I think after reading that last line that the sneerers will have left me by now and that I’ll be labelled a cultish apologist who should also get a life. Nevertheless we might ask just what kind of a life these sneerers have in mind as a substitute? We could develop the question a little and ask what life they’d have me have in the future, as I move forward, as I evolve?

Keith Ansell Pearson is a philosopher who clears his throat over these matters, blending Nietzsche, Deleuze and Bergson to cast a new spell of questions over what post-humanity could and should possibly be. Ansell Pearson argues against a technological determinism about what possibilities face us, denying that our future must be and therefore should be framed in terms of machine innovation and silicon substitution. He is directly arguing against the point of view of, for example, Kevin Warwick at Reading University who contends that our evolution not only can be post-biological but should be, that we should embrace the machine without and become one. I think the sneerers are in the Warwick camp. They don’t want poetry because it isn’t that kind of a machine.

Poetry can also instantiate a position of resistance to Warwick by recognising that through operations of the tongue it becomes possible to involve ‘…the fractal/ silhouette of Pan’ and ‘… that an operation/performed upon the tongue/ must transform/ the world.’ Paul Holman’s poetic sequence emerges ‘…intent/upon leaving no/record of my life,/but an absence that any/fool might occupy in/capricious play.’ (Zigzaggedness) Keith Ansell Pearson challenges zietgeisty notions of a techno-cyborg, necessary future in his philosophical/autobiographical writings and Holman too traces out an alternative, a playful seriousness extending over a sequence of poetic breathings dedicated to something peculiar, far away from where the words are returning – but in pieces. I’m going to argue that his poetry is a kind of echo machine, not the sort of machine that Warwick and the sneerers would want to approve of, or even want to understand.

So Holman is partly intent on reawakening here, again and again, time as it is experienced, of each subjective duration rather than anything objectively measured, anything like a line sectioned off into periods, elements, clocks. His poetry is the language of how time seems to be to the person in its literal metaphorical flow, where lines flow according to the rythem and timing of breathing. Thus we are in Bergsonian time, the time that structures the dramatic world of Waiting for Godot and Proust, for instance. In Godot we are presented with the experienced time world of Estragon and Vladimir which is unfolded alongside, or inside, or outside, that of Pozzo and Lucky. Time can’t be understood linearly, that perspective can’t make sense of how it is affective, how it feels in terms of breathing and sensing.

Beckett’s play takes place over an impossible duration that is years, months, weeks, days, minutes, seconds but nevertheless all the same year, month, week, day, minute, second. Being born and busy dying are simultaneous, as we all are, as it were, ‘born astride the grave’. And as this connection makes clear, the weird coexistence of heterogeneous durations suggests a philosophy of time which magical universes often expound. As Ansell Pearson notes Deleuze noting, “The living is essentially a being that has problems and resolves them at each instant”. In this then is a connection between the modernist, and post-modernist, universe and the occult. Speech rather than writing is its medium, where writing has to become a kind of speech, but one that has become almost half remembered speech, speech spoken from somewhere else and transmuted into a written echoing.

Ansell Pearson is a useful philosophical guide here. Not that he talks about the occult. But he does talk about Nietzsche and the deeply uncanny truth about self Nietzsche proposes, which is that we mustn’t have a clue about what kind of a self we are. Autobiographical ignorance is the epistemic stance he recommends. Ansell Pearson links this to an adequate notion of time, which is that of ‘hetergeneous durations’ that we mentioned above, the Godot time, which enables a sense of identities in constant formation, of identities becoming rather than being, which is what Nietzsche’s going on about. Ansell Pearson says this: ‘We are essentially unknown to ourselves and the world is essentially unknown to us. This doesn’t mean we have to invoke the ineffable or appeal to the mystery of life. While I recognise the incredible force of Wittgenstein’s closing statement in the Tractatus – of that which we cannot speak we should remain silent – I hold to the exact contrary view: philosophy exists to give expression to that which we think we can only remain silent about.’ And this shuffles us to his thinking on Bergson and Deleuze and his reminding us of Deleuze reminding us of Kant’s project: ‘If you read the Critique of Pure Reason you see that Kant has criticized not reason in general, but a reason fashioned to the habits and exigencies of Cartesian mechanism or Newtonian physics…The doctrine that I defend aims to rebuild the bridge (broken down since Kant) between metaphysics and
science…’(Mélanges, 493-494)

Holman isn’t a philosopher but is a poet and perhaps, I don’t know the guy, but perhaps a kind of wizard as well. In this he wouldn’t be alone – famously Alan Moore is one of those too. And it’s also a position that gets nimbly excavated in the cunning of several pretty hard-core arti/cultural positions and summarised in the word ‘trepidation’ as used, for example, in the sub-title of ‘The House Of Nine Squares: Letters on Neoism, Psychogeography and Epistemological Trepidation’ by Stewart Home which Invisible Books put out in 1997, the publisher of Holman’s book. That book describes itself in terms of the John Berndt’s conception of the Neoist universe way back in 1986 which is ‘…based on the house of nine squares… The Neoist is the eternal traveller in the house of nine squares, a house which can never be left since it has no doors and seems to reflect itself internally.’

The poetics of epistemological trepidation captures the energies of this strange modernist/post-modernist tradition, one which blends quaintness with detonations, simultaneously affective and cognitive. Eliot himself recognised this in his re-appropriation of the term ‘metaphysical’ to recapture the idea for poetry, but Rimbaud made it explicit when he writes, again and again – ‘ I became an adept at simple hallucination: in place of a factory I really saw a Mosque, a school of drummers led by angels, carriages on the highways of the sky, a drawing room at the bottom of a lake; monsters, mysteries; the title of a melodrama would raise horrors before me. Then I would explain my magic sophisms with the hallucination of words! Finally I came to regard as sacred the disorder of my mind. I was idle, full of sluggish fever: I envied the felicity of beasts, caterpillars that represent the innocence of limbo, moles, the sleep of virginity! My temper soured. In kinds of ballads I said farewell to the world.’ And he starts all this off with ‘Poetic quaintness played a large part in my alchemy of the world.’ (‘La vieillerie poetique avait une bonne part dans mon alchimie du verbe.’ Une Saison En Enfer)

One thing you get from this, and so one thing that a reader has to settle down as she reads, is that this is a poem, or sequence of poems, or something that reminds us of poems, or of something else that poems bring forth, like a spell or like a hallucination, or like a dance – you might think of starting with Maya Deren who worked out of a kind of New York take on Voodoo but I’d rather go with the crazy Hijikata and the Ankoku Butoh dance he invented, especially his 1959 Kinjiiki performance which Stephen Barber anatomises in his book about the dancer Revolt of the Body ‘with its savage homosexual acts derived from Mishima and Genet, to the melancholy, prostitutional princesses and sexual doll-girls of his final spectacle.’ The reference to Hans Bellmer the surrealist doll artist is explicit in Hijikata’s work and therefore spooks up an immediate uncanny bridge to reading these poems.

This dance reference, though, is a useful connection, linking everything to what the Japanese media of the 60’s called ‘the dirty avant-garde’. This kind of avant garde, according to Stephen Barber, ‘existed as a contrary refusal to the ‘clean’ traditional performing arts of Japan (such as Kagura, Noh and Kabuki)…’ and explored ‘… the extremes of the human body, of social power and of sexual acts, unearthed and revealed materials that were perceived as abject and reprehensible: anatomical detritus and illness, transsexuality and imageries of male homosexuality.’ This was an art form that existed as a challenge to political forces of repressive conservatism as well as artistic ones, though this politically revolutionary and anti-reactionary impulse was not always of the political left. The inclusion of Mishima, for example, in the group of writers and artists supporting Ankoku Butoh and preventing it from being made illegal, reminds us that not all anti-repressive forces are benign, a point Stewart Home has repeatedly made when discussing the political spectrum encompassed by the anarchist movement. But that’s not to the point. The point is simply that the extreme necromantic and hallucigenic feel of this dance form and this movement can locate both that state of becoming that Nietzsche discusses and also a geography, history and sociological displacement and abjectness that it insists upon.

Holmans’ poetic apparatus exhibits an extremity of the solitary word that resembles the apparatus of a spell which is also memory and an uncanny form of echo. Systems of memory are at the heart of the occult neoplatonists’ sacred geometry as discovered in the texts, for example, of what Ted Hughes calls the ‘phantasmagoric reminiscence of Shakespeare’s last dramas.’ Camillo’s memory theatre and Robert Fludd’s too, these were all part of what Francis Yates has examined in terms of the ‘occult subterranean’ at the heart of an attempt to synthesise Protestant and Catholic religion. This under-river of influences has, according to Ted Hughes, ‘… stirred occasionally, where revolution cracked the crust of suppression, and reached up an arm to embrace Goethe – who was wondered at. And Blake – who was deplored. And Yates – who was ridiculed.’

The ‘uncanny form of an echo’ picks up Yates’ (WB, not Francis) idea of the poet being somehow possessed by ‘a clear articulation in the air’ but does not remain with Yates but returns again to the young Eliot who is the poet who, more than Yates, is our first poet of the modern world, the world without consolations, without meaning, the poet who first understood that the link between his poetry, done in this new idiom, this new position, this new world and that of the ancient world, was threateningly posthumous. The new poetry, that inaugurated by our first great modernist poet, is thus one that has to recognise this fateful metaphysical story. It is the story that closes-off our contact with our ancient gods, our ancient sources.

Well this is the kind of stuff that everyone knows by heart these days and the young Eliot’s ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’ works like an early prognosis of this story and one which he splices into ‘The Wasteland’. In the words of Hughes in his great essay ‘The Poetic Self’, this is a poem where ‘Eliot’s poetic self caught a moment of tranced stillness, and became very precisely aware of its own peculiar nature, inheritance and fate, and found for itself this image.’ What the self-obsession of Narcissus brings about in the well-known version of the Narcissus myth is the love of Echo. Echo loves him, but he can’t see her because of his self obsession and out of that refusal Echo fades away until she is just a voice. But there is another less well-known version.

In this version Echo doesn’t fade away pining for a rejecting love. Rather, she is loved in turn by Pan. She refuses him. Pan tears her to pieces. All that is left is her voice. ‘Adonta ta mele.’ Her still singing limbs. The Narcissus myth takes on here a maniacal, violent edge, one that picks up, and is picked up, in a rather more ‘dirty avant garde’ mode than the better known one. It is aligned to a madness, a terrible power and destructiveness, an all encompassing decapitation where the voices and memories, of thinking itself, is not just identified as being in the head but is rather scattered about in each part. (Something modern biological science is happily finding evidence of.) And the voice of Echo is one that doesn’t merely replicate the diminished returns of what is already spoken but rather transforms it, adding sorrow and other tinged meanings to the fragmenting remnants it throws back. As Ovid recognises, ‘She’s heard by all who call; her voice has life.’

It is this uncanny life that Echo brings to the voice and to the word of the modern writer’s decapitated, posthumous scribbles. The extreme anxiety, sorrow, accusation and sarcasm of the modern oevre is clarified for all in Borges’ story of Pere Menard who writes a word for word exact version of Cervantes’ Don Quixote which is yet deeper than the original in subtle meanings. Stewart Home’s discussion of plagiarism is another way of configuring this Echo myth, reminding us of how the myth can be worked as a shocking and mischievous element within a ‘dirty avant garde’ idiom . YBA Glenn Brown’s déjà vu paintings of other paintings, and American painters like Sherrie Levene and Philip Taaffe are also examples. Their work can be dismissed as dumb repetition but these dismissals tend to come from the cranky who tend to valorize romantic notions of the genius of individuality and have little sensibility for the uncanny, the spooky and the terrifying sublime at the heart of even the most mundane everyday imperfect repeat.

The echo works as a way of seeing, just as air traffic controllers, dolphins and bats use sound. The poetic voice then, isn’t actually seeing, it’s a strange thing, a kind of large seeing, the uncanny kind. So that picks up the idea of the uncanny as an echo. Heidegger is a nasty Nazi type and his philosophy an outworking of his politics so when I use ‘uncanny’ here I’m not tempted by his use of unheimlich. I want to echo his words in a way that adds to it an anti-Nazi life and destroys the Nazi bit. So it’s ‘largeness’ and ‘dreadful’ that I’m hooking it to, which Heidegger misses. Its voice is alien, exposed, unsettling, sinister and threatening. It inhabits Rilke in his poem ‘Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes.’ Unheimlich is here an echo of Unhemlich as used by Heidegger. As such, it comes back imperfectly repeated, but better, even if it is at times word perfect, like Homesian plagiarism. Hopefully, this plagiarised creativity would have pissed off Heidegger and those who develop copyright laws. These laws are the central legal manifestation of the attempt to censor echoes and stifle creative social acts of communitarian communication, mobilising the fetishised tropes of individual originality on wheels of profiteering and aggressive Austrian-style market liberalism.

Echoes work in the enormity of space. There can’t be an echo in any spatial chamber less than 56 ½ feet, or something such like. There has to be a delay. And without an echo in such a space there can only be silence. (So copyright laws would, if successful, create only impenetrable silence, a sort of absolute stupidity!). The outline of life’s space is what poetry is describing. In this sense the idea of memory comes with the idea of size and enormity of our life. Only in a huge space can there be an echo, a memory. This reminds us that the first architecture was for describing the shape of space. So too our use of the echo is as a form of echolocation, like that of a bat, the uncanny seeing of the space shape of our life.

And memory, as echo, is tainted, accumulates new material, new shape, new mood and meaning, is an act of creativity. It isn’t just a straightforward replica, like a handprint in wet sand, an imprint of the past. It is tinged with plenitude and erosion, sadness and sorrow, definitely, but it’s tinged with other things too. Sure, things are lost, but there are gains. The sarcasm and the threat of diminishing returns, word games, reinvented sounds that carry opposites or transcribe a very different take on the recall are all there too. Longing and desire are at the heart of the myth, but also decapitation, violence, refusal, struggle. Death. A whole uncanny dirty avant garde agenda, so to speak, where what is at one angle less becomes at another more. John Hollander has much to say on this in his ‘The Figure of Echo’ way back in 1981 – the Latin ‘decem iam annos aetatem trivi in Cicerone’ echoes back as the Greek ‘One’. ‘I’ve spent ten years on Cicero.’ ‘Ass’. And Athanasius Kirchner – ‘clamore’ echoes four times back – ‘amore,’ ‘more,’ ‘ore,’ ‘re.’ ( O outcry – love – delays- hours - king.) T.S. Eliot. Toilet. Etc etc.

Puns, metaphors and suffixes are one explanation of echo where by ranging further than literal renditions the echo becomes a way back from a divine source. Echo becomes the messenger, like Hermes, like Mercury, like Prometheus, bringing us news from divine inspiration. The rabbinical bat kol is ‘daughter of the voice’ which in modern Hebrew is echo which in turn brings in Milton’s ‘ God so commanded and left the Command/Sole daughter of his voice’ from book IX of Paradise Lost.

But the modern(ist) predicament is precisely that this contract with ancient illumination and inspiration is posthumous. And this then works in terms of an alternative reading of the Echo myth, one which takes the St John opening line ‘In the beginning was the Word…’ as answering the question as to why God created, in the Word, another reality, another universe that was other than God. The echo is that of the absence of anything other than God. The Word proves the void to which the Word of God returns, proof to God that there is only God. The shape of the space required for there to be God is, paradoxically, proof of the eternal silence, the meaningless of the silence that rebounds out of the creation of the dual universe. We become God’s echo. God is Narcissus. That is the wounded discourse out of which the modern poetic sensibility grows. Dali ‘s painting of Narcissus, which is a wonderland of echo, strikes me as understanding this theology astonishingly well.

Well, if nothing else, this gets us somewhere with the title. The ‘memory’ Holman signals is this echo, the modernist sensibility that recognises the alchemical past as being both ruined, dead, posthumous and yet required nevertheless. It is the Beckett universe; ‘I can’t go on. I go on,’ but in reverse, one that gives us the fierce, fragmentary ancient memories as echoes reconfiguring the realisation that our God is ourselves reflecting ourselves back through refracting echoes of what we can’t believe, can’t know but grow out of.

‘My co-walker

traced the lemniscus

around the two black-

bird eggs my daughter’s cat

had left out-

side the back door

I did not share

his delight in clouds

and unemphatic asexual

nudity but sank

down into the mud earth:

wet, humid, stagnant, occult.

Too wayward to heed

the slow thought of metals,

I adopted the death posture . . .’ (p 66 )

Holman ‘s language here is stiff, formal, and it reads like a necessary translation of an original source. Throughout then, the voice needed to read the poetry is one that senses this reaching back to an ur-moment. The idea of the occult as a world under our own is that ancient, posthumous ground for his poetry and so reading this takes us on the occult journey from the underground back home. This takes up that key figure of the echo again, where the echo returns us home from the distance rather than vice versa. Poetry of this kind therefore takes us back home from elsewhere. We don’t start out from where we are and explore what’s out there. We start out there and work our way back.

In this we can recognise the need for explicit and implicit references to what we are not and where we are not. My favourite modernist pop star Bob Dylan called this out explicitly with his seminal album Bringing It All back Home and implicitly in all else he’s knocked out loaded. Holman whose name is a half pun on Home-Man, and a half pun on Whole –man (which is funny and weird in that it plays with the idea of whole and half and the paradox of space which asserts that when you take away a half you’re left with a whole, and take away half again and still you have a whole, ad infinitum a la Zeno) and a half pun works as an echo where the loss of the exact repeat replaces the exactness with a new liveliness which is something that endorses what might be just a found coincidence which in turn links us up with the surrealist poetics of ‘psychic automatism in its pure state’ as found in Breton and Soupault’s Magnetic Fields of 1919 and The Communicating Vessels of 1931 where Breton writes: ‘the world of dream and the real world are one and the same’ developing the analogy contained in the title so that that the mind and the world are not separate but are continuously “communicating” like two connected “vessels.” Which is Whew! Trippy or what!

In one poetic slab, Holman writes:

‘the route home

from the underworld

is marked

by two feathers crossed

on the pavement

the clear

plastic tube

from a bicycle

lock a cigarette

packet and a drift

of spilled

matches a bus

ticket and another

feather’ (p 30)

The drift of objective chance here enables the voice to accumulate the scumble of found objects in a spontaneous juxtaposition that survives out of Lautreamont, Rimbaud and Apollinaire and translates into a poetic ‘found object’. The poem – and each of his poems work at this – seizes on a montage or collage of words that intersect with memory and desire, the echo out of space and time, in the way that early surrealists theorized into the notion of automatic writing. Automatic writing worked as found objects whereby the chance discovery gives voice in the form of an echo, rather in the manner of the children’s game of ‘the exquisite corpse.’

This game involves several people writing consecutive lines without seeing what others have written and was part of a whole set of ‘research techniques’ designed to discover an occult reality. Such writing become a sort of séance and reminds us of the work of Robert Desnos as well as how later psychedelic and chemical as well as alchemical approaches have been a constantly iterated agenda in the occult avant garde, often summarized under the rather tame nomenclature ‘syncretism’ and captured for a moment in the rather overworked idea of ‘ecstatic time’. In an interesting review of Holman’s Memory of the Drift in the on-line Geometer Magazine a couple of years ago we find this: ‘Ecstatic time can only find itself in the vision of things that puerile chance causes brusquely to appear: cadavers, nudity, explosions, spilled blood, abysses, sunbursts, and thunder. Georges Bataille, Propositions in ed Allan Stoeckl, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (Manchester UP, 1985), p 200.’ We also find under ‘syncretism’ a list of echoes: “Yaldebaoth, Sun Ra, Odradek Stadium, Faustus, Mark E Smith, Faunus, Diana, Tipharoth, Morgan le Fay, Asmodeus, Tara” which also helps support the reading that I’m suggesting throughout.

This is a poetry of returning, returning from the occult subterranean as a kind of echo. It requires to be read as a kind of translation, as if everything in each word echoes a place from which the word is coming back in a different language that nevertheless sounds the same. Like an echo, it is imperfectly rendered, misheard sometimes, headless at other times. There is no possibility of tidying the thing up, of housekeeping it into a finished, rounded up equation. It has the quality of sounds reverberating with other powers, places, tongues yet these occur without the taint of overblown rhetorical flourish that can sometimes ruin occult poetics and turn them into obscurantist rantings and self regard. This is a poetry that is tempered and disciplined but by energies that are older than the poet’s own experiences and knowledge.

There is also, then, a quality of humility in the poetic voice that serves to connect with the old ecological voices such as Snyder and McClure’s ‘fresh planet’ consciousness, Keroac’s second religiousness where ‘the land is an Indian Thing’, in fact with the whole Beat culture excavations where ‘ Everything belongs to me because I am poor’ which becomes a kind of lovely chief virtue. It also links with syncretic Sufi/Zen religious ideas such as Subud, for example, which Stewart Home’s mum in London’s swinging sixties was involved with and which Home discusses on his blog. Anyhow, like an echo, the voice in these poems is quieter, hushed, more delicate than its dreamed up sources but still capable of containing intimations of the gross power, strength and noise of those now lost origins.

So now there’s an interesting further element to reading this, and that is that of course the seemingly apolitical esoteric is not apolitical at all but links Holman, through another echoic force, to the deliberate politics of his poetics. His obvious poetic links with dirty avant gardeism and its American branch of Beat poets (see the Invisible Books backlist) couples him with the giant Olson who wrote that ‘When the police are after you, you can stay in my house’, who thought that all cops in the USA should be black or women (I’d like them all to be black women), and that ‘private is public, and public is how we behave’, the Olson who Allen Ginsberg placed in a time line of ‘Whitman’s time thru Williams and Pound to Keroac and Olson, Horace Trabel to Gregory Corso, early Eliot on to Ted Berrigan’, who is linked with the breath stop, line stop form of open verse (wherein the line ends when the breath ends) that helps you to get a grip with how to read Memory of the Drift. Olson also writes about field composition whereby the poet ‘has to behave, and be, instant by instant, aware of some several forces just now beginning to be examined’ and who explains how in a kind of ‘projective verse’ ‘one perception must move instanter on another.’

This links with the idea of poetry as an uncanny echo, where instants of perception have a momentum which can’t be retraced or repeated but just follow on. The hip mind then is a freed up mind – so surrealist Philip Lamantia’s early definition of ‘hip’ was ‘don’t get hung up’- something the poet John Duncan emphasized in his interest in reading Gertrude Stein. The echo captures the idea of immediacy blended with the idea of loose recall. As emphasized earlier, an echo is a creative memory, is an uncanny repeat, a doppleganger perception with a strange half -life of its own beyond the control of its originator. So this poetic sequence is like that, an echo that returns us home from some place where we’ve been where there’s no straight, retained direction but just a drift of rememberances.

It has an unearthly quality that returns us to ourselves in a different, headless, more expanded sense. Like Woody Guthrie’s message that he had written on his guitar, ‘This machine kills fascists’, so too there’s a dedication to a divine freedom of the word in this poetic sequence that is courageous and necessary in these bleak and cramped times. Consciousness needs to be transformed at a radical, social level and there’s an urgent need for our poets to discern and excavate the transforming words. Transformation is the key and as Holman reminds us and as we remind ourselves of something we noted right from the start, so it’s by now a kind of echo;

‘an operation

performed upon the

tongue must transform

the world.’(p 72)

Welcome to the cult.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Richard Marshall is contributing editor to 3:AM and lives in London.

Four Poems Japanese

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (3:AM Magazine) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 10:00:26 +0000

By Matthew Peipert.

Club No Style

A five a.m. genuflection,
To the predawn perfection
On the curb outside Club NoStyle.
Swimming in my shirt
In a pool of pill –
I am post-human, blown-open and
I’m glinting
The glamour inside,
Breathing the music alive
Trusting the one friend beside -
The one friend I need tonight,
Can’t lose tonight cause
We’re wasted wandering wantless wasters
And we see the sun now,
And we should go in now,
See there’s only so much time now
For this perfection,
This genuflection
In the creakjoint
Waking whalesong
Of Shibuya morning.

Tune-Out Tokyo

Once just one more visible visitor
In the frantic, epicanthic broth,
It’s been four years for me now
Lost in this fold of Asia.

It swallows, you know?
It tunes you out, Tokyo,
This glittering jewel
Of people and people,
This distant dream, but

Do you find yourself
Swept up in the sweet
Sweet potato vendor’s song?
The exotic in the everyday?
That’s why I stay.

Four years,
Pushing past the barcode baldies
And the tissue superstars,
The eggskin children
And the L-bent old raisinettes.
Sauntering behind
The stickbone bums of cooing coquettes
Clacking their heels,
Calculatingly naïve.
These roku-jo ojousamas,
Pretty preeners,
Processed and packaged
With their poodle men
Who went from hari kiri
To a hairadise of
Heroin-chested hipsters,
From bamboo spears
To brand-name gear.
This is not otousan’s Tokyo.

But it’s mine.
And I get the question a lot,
Been here long?

Um…yeah. Four orbits,
Three mamacharis.
Two poems that bombed,
Maybe more.

Many ways to mark
Time here, you know, life here
So that you don’t forget -
Four blotto birthdays
Three just-for-now jobs
Two terrible troughs
One half-forgotten friend’s funeral
Zero savings.

My stamen stiffens in desire
To parlay purgatory into paradise.
Though gone too easily,
My easy money evaporating in the
Endless ephemeral entropy,
In the nightly strobe of cerebral surrender.

But it’s the deep throb of possibility here
The glimpses you get here
The secrets you know here
The people you love here
The gems you germinate here
And the way you treasure up here.

Tunneling tetris-like
Though throngs of thousands,
These people amaze me,
Frustrate me,
Obsess me
With their contradictions.

Among them my friends,
Flinging feelers to the sky -
Where u at? What u doing? -
Gripping our gadgets like gonads
In hummingbird hands of communication.

I mean, we’re weaving our strands here.
In this anthill agnosias -
Free radicals in a colossal
Collective organism.

Snatches in batches of foreign tongue,
The drowned-out drone
Of ambient articulation,
Almost understood.

This is my Tokyo,
Plum-wine parklife
In a vibe of non-violence
And the gentle rhythm of jan ken Japan.

This is my Tokyo -
Despite the someday someday of no solid dream
The faded furniture future
Of intangible success and
The addictive apple
Of amplified image,
It is unreal, unlimited,
Unlike anything.

It’s hard to impart
Why I cannot depart.
Maybe someday I’ll be smarter,
A self-starter,
I’ll map it out, one day,
When I have it all figured out,
When I have it all treasured up.
But for now it feels nice
To take train after train here,
To tube chopstick tracks
Across the teeming terrain
Of this whirling wonder of the world
Which so weirdly, wildly
Wants to call itself home.

———-

Translation key:
Roku jo – standard size of a Japanese studio apartment
Ojousama – queen
Hari kiri –suicide by ritual disembowelment
Otousan – father
Mamachari – old lady-type bicycle ridden by almost everyone
Jan ken – rock-paper-scissors game commonly used to decide things in Japan

Avocado

Maybe I’ve lost it.
My timid turtle’s head
Pulling back from this and that,
A true master of nothing
But detachment.

I do my daily dailies:
Sit-ups,
Downloads,
Jack-offs,
Charge-ups,
Vitamins B and C and D
And a nightcap or three,
At least.

At my worst I’m a deadbeat daruma,
Who thinks too much
With one eye forever,
At my best a mighty mote,
Drum and bassing beneath brutal skyline,
Punk rocking in the palpable
Commercialism of the city – dancing to dying music
In a driftwood daze -
My mouthful of secrets
And a skeleton on my chain.

Sometimes I think I get it
Sometimes I almost understand.
For example,
An avocado heart,
Tight in my grip,
Is so substantial,
Says it all,
Could provide some kind of focus
To life but too many holes, hips, tits
Wisp by, wraith-like in their distraction.

It’s uncouth, I know,
But my imagination is ruthless
In its crudity
And anyway ambition is nothing more than torture
In a sexy wig and ladylips,
Or so I tell myself.

Now I’m thirty and so busy
Not making money
And so torn between continents
And other large forces
That I barely stop to notice
That thirty is where the riddles begin,
Thirty’s the scar you never knew you had,
A film of fucked-up feeling
Fronting some future
That I realize for the first time
Won’t necessarily get any better.

I’m thirty, with a bad tattoo
Called my twenties matching
The bad tattoo from my twenties,
And I’m just getting started
Going nowhere
Or somewhere, from here
So please lord
I’m asking you, once again,
For ten more years
And the hefty heart
Of a humble avocado.

———-

Translation key:

Daruma – A Japanese wish doll. Using black ink, one fills in a single eye while thinking of a wish. Should the wish later come true, the second eye is filled in.

Okutama

We drive the mountains,
Sloughing the city’s sour sebum,
Free for once from
The vending vex machine
Of vimvamp Tokyo.

Out here the world is tilting,
Bleeding itself beautiful,
Oxidizing our year,
Mollifying the fears
That forever together can bring,
And we drive on.

Curving this carved country
Of gullies and peaks,
We peek out speaklessly
At dying old dragon Japan.

Here’s a scarecrow, so
Oriental in its field,
And there a persimmon tree,
Its plucky plume of orange
Punctuating autumn’s auburn red
And mango yellow.

We find ourselves in nature, they say,
And finally there it is (and here we are) -
A twin lake so pristine,
So pure and palliative
That its strange and murky bottom
Can be forgotten
If only just for today.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matthew Peipert is a writer currently based in New York City. His work has appeared in Japanzine and Spork Press. More of Matthew’s writing can be found here.

Verandah Class of '09...about to graduate, and the winners are...

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (dovegreyreader scribbles) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 08:41:00 +0000

...and to take Rocky's mind off the prey we've done this week's prize draws too.

Copies of The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters for

25 Gillian Davies
46 Lis
60 Annie

and copies of An Education by Lynn Barber for

7 Tabitha
18 Lizzie
33 Joan

Congratulations one and all and usual form, addresses by e mail to dovegreyreader at gmail dot com with the title you've won in the subject line and nice things will happen.
Plus Jen Dee, you won a Little Toller Book ages ago now, it's waiting for you very patiently.

These Boys

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (3:AM Magazine) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 08:14:23 +0000

By Sean Kilpatrick.

These boys were rubber-smooth and white. The flowers in their hands gleamed like boiling teeth. They handled our drugs and our daughters too. These boys were polite and well-armed. We could have used their smiles to put the cat to sleep. When they filled our daughters, no pillows were cried into, and they beamed from matrimonial scripts, became so hot we had to walk them through the Sunday Car Wash. We had to load the truck with guns and call our brothers. All this felt incestuous, but so did waking up.

I broke my daughter’s teeth out of her skull with pistol fire because the strands one boy hid inside her clasped around her voice. The boy stood on my lawn for a week, wearing headphones and appearing vulgar without expression. He was sinking into himself, skeletal, swimming in the paste his body gave. He laid the foam sprockets of his music on my lawn, an anthem making the bugs work harder. Not to assist, in any way, the health or well-being of my property. Garbage workers carried that boy to heaven. A forever’s worth of flies had beaten him there. Boys are always mass produced in cities, as we say, clutching after the silver boom known as Between My Legs.

We formed a line around the nursery with free guns. We shipped baskets of what’s-left-of-her labeled Our Daughters. These boys weren’t old enough to polish what we sent them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sean Kilpatrick is published in No Colony, Fence, Juked, Action Yes, zafusy, Forklift Ohio, Venereal Kittens, La Petite Zine, Wigleaf, LUNGFULL!, Arsenic Lobster, Stirring, Wicked Alice, LIT, Forklift Ohio, Pindeldyboz, elimae, MiPoesias, Pinch Pinch Press, 5_Trope, Mustachioed, Sawbuck, Sir, Skidrow Penthouse, listenlight, Red China, FutureCycle, Epicenter, Southern Gothic, Triptych Haiku, wire sandwich, Unlikely Stories, Thieves Jargon, Cherry Bleeds, 2ndHand, Melancholia’s Tremulous Dreadlocks, and Exquisite Corpse, also e-books with Magic Helicopter Press and BlazeVOX[Books], and a book of short fiction forthcoming from Six Gallery Press. Visit here.

3:AM Reloaded

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (3:AM Magazine) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 06:51:10 +0000

What you (may have) missed on 3:AM recently:

Fiction: ‘To the World’s End’ by Cathi Unsworth, ‘The Truth About the Truth’ by Rodge Glass, ‘Penetralia’ by Adam Moorad

Poetry: ‘Three Poems’ from Mark Gallacher

Reviewed: John Houghton on the Terence Davies film Of Time and the City & Beth Harrington on Lydia Lunch’s Will Work for Drugs

Non-fiction: Andrew Stevens has some advice On Becoming a Cult Literatus, ‘Friday I’m in Love’ continues with Niven Govinden’s pick, Owen Hatherley spends ‘Saturday Nights at the Movies’ with Sidney Lumet’s The Offence & Ewan Morrison’s ‘Death of a Nihilist or Obituary for a nobody’:

It was once the case that to have your death celebrated by the media you had to have been a person who lived and died for their beliefs, or at least perished with those beliefs intact: a shining example to us all on the importance of steadfast convictions. One thinks of Ghandi, Jean-Paul Sartre, JFK, Martin Luther King or even Ayatollah Khomieni. In the last few years — due to the media’s requirement for such spectacles even when the substance is lacking — the death of lesser figures who stumbled blindly through life lacking all conviction has created comparable hysteria. In fact, it may even be that these figures-of-no-qualities have eclipsed the great believers in terms of attention. All of this was predicted a decade before by my old friend, the bedsit philosopher, it was a process he termed ‘the levelling of society to the lowest order.’ He saw in it ‘the ironic revenge of the plebs, the rise of the nobodies.’

Unfortunately, my friend’s death a few years back, passed entirely without notice in the history of world events. It was a non-ceremony to which even his closest friends were not invited — we did not in fact hear of his passing till almost a year afterwards.

You see, my old friend was a self-proclaimed nobody while being, ironically, perhaps the most extreme individual I have ever encountered. He was a nihilist who pursued the meaninglessness of everything to its zenith. Among the many things he did not believe in were ceremony, sentimentality and in his later years, friendship itself. As for funerals, I recall he did not even attend the funeral of another close friend, as he said such ceremonies were a breeding ground for ‘the worst kind of sentimental historical revisionism,’ although, inexplicably, he wept for days at the funeral of Lady Di. He was a man of contradictions (although he would have chastened me for the use of such a cliché), a man who made it his conviction in life to have no convictions and who once stated: ‘beliefs are for those who are too afraid to be caught in the act of changing their minds.’

Metaphysical Prison Literature

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (3:AM Magazine) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 04:16:32 +0000

By Richard Marshall.

Jana Leo, Rape New York, Book Works, 2009

Earwicker’s ‘the abnihilisation of the etym’ proposes a site for creative possibility that reaches out in two directions at once. A trauma wrenches reality, annihilating its meaning in one fist and creating matter ex nihilo in the other. The writer grasps the self-contradicting logic of her nihilistic moment and stages her pursuit in both directions, masked as both Vico of the recurring history and Bruno of the Proustian dialectic. And of course, the nihilistic moment of catastrophe is sudden and unforeseen, the costumes grasped on the hoof by a shocked ghost rising out of ruins.

The author was raped in New York. She describes how it happened. It is a levelled performance and without hysteria. She keeps the emotion out of the writing so that we can know what happened and feel it for ourselves. She explains the casual nature of the horror. It is a report written like scratching initials onto an old stone place, a step to keep the wrecked will alive. One step to own the event, another to displace it with a decisive act. The final step is annihilation of the act, clearing the space for the destruction of the will and the opening up of a new space. It is a form of flight, but not just in a single direction, thataway, understood as escape, but also of a flying over and above, like Icarus, a soaring up, a rising into the sun, which is a form of ripening.

The trauma comes when the description strangely twists round and seems to enter a repeating, endless loop. The end of the second chapter ‘How an Uneventful Day and Place Became Eventful’ ends with the beginning of the beginning of the first chapter beginning again. But this time the memory of what happened happens before the act. This is the first sniff that this book is the real Sterne, hounding its realist logic back into a Kafkaesque fundament.

The author explains what she did afterwards. Afterwards has been the fabled ever afterwards. The author tells what she did and what others did. One man came round when he heard what had happened and cried because he had lost his job that day. The crappy film Robocop is used to explain the scam that property developers use to make money from the city. Crime is a tool for bringing down prices of properties which are then taken over by the developers. The author presents us with the stats of crime that make the theory more than blag. The police dealing with the crime initially are not helpful but latterly an individual detective gets involved who ends up being very helpful. Similarly the lawyers initially aren’t very good and then she contacted one who was. The author develops a theory of domesticity as a trap and examines rape as a function of the home. She says the rapist is an individual caught in a whole network of machinery that makes the rape possible. These things include all the normal things you can’t avoid if you’re poor as not everyone is. In New York this is the line crossed when you go North of Central Park.

She writes about the difference between homes and apartments. She theorises. She expands the theory to explain how prisons and tourism are linked in this theory. New York is also explained in terms of its districts of poverty and wealth and crime. Violent crime is contrasted with non violent crime and these are related to her theory of the trap of the domestic. Violent crime is crime for the poor areas, non-violent crime for wealthier sections of the city. Interiors of buildings are analysed in terms of the cover they offer for criminals as they move invisibly across the city. Broken locks open up an alternative grid of interlinking routes, portals to interred private space. Flats and their corridors, lifts, stairwells and laundry rooms are spaces that separate themselves from public sight. Apartments enclose the woman into an invisible cube that holds them for the time men need to do them. They are private cells for criminals to act. All a rapist wants.

The reader reads. The writer has written. It is a text that insists there is a meaning. There are the facts. There are the theories that begin to sort out the patterns detected over time. Laws make the patterns stick like glue to the world. It all begins to make sense. The transcripts of conversations between the rapist and a lawyer, the facts about the slum landlords, facts about Harlem, about the years that have past, they coalesce into something law like, governed by something that finally after a deal of graft becomes visible, understood, meaningful.

When you ask for anything that would protect you like a lock on a door the reply in the book is always the same. ‘You might as well be dead.’ Even when the words aren’t that , its what is being said. So the reader is asking for something from the book. Because there’s a sense that the writer is willing something from the book too, a kind of erasure from the writing. Reading the book is an act of collaboration in that. And as every fact stacks up and every pattern gets identified and every theory sticks it all together a new sense emerges inside the writing and the reading. It stops making sense. It collapses into absurdity. The words are an architecture of a prison that is the opposite of everything that’s been written down. The flat-line tone of the piece is an echo of the response to the call for help. ‘You might as well be dead.’ The language becomes a code for something else at the extreme end of violent noise. The calm precise tone is exactly not itself.

So the book is a voice of the violated resisting the language of hysterical affect, a laser in the eye, burning out the confirmation that a screaming language might bring. The brightest most revealing light, an illumination designed to burn out your eyes. You’ll never see again. Only beyond speculation can we find Eden writes Beckett in a letter to Morris Sinclair back in the thirties. And the author of Rape New York is writing from the other side of speculation. There is no howling at the moon in this most violent of stories.

One in ten women in America have been raped. It’s a statistic that brings with it a hidden float of inevitability. When another woman is raped, a passing detail as the author works through the inevitable collision between official disinterest and personal obsession, it is described by her as being a matter to women of ‘here it comes.’ Floating about in the atmosphere, women don’t just feel the reality of rape hovering about, they anticipate it.

The writer drills a hole into the atmosphere. It writes to dissolve first meanings. It writes like a type of obliterating automata. The bureaucracy of report writing requires an officialese style that first drains away the scummy froth of affect but then, in so doing, leaves a vessel behind. The emptiness that this writing hollows out then fills it up. Jana Leo tells a telling anecdote: in part of the trial process she has to talk about her trauma to a jury. She tells it in the flat-line tones of this exculpated clarity, fearing that perhaps her audience wouldn’t believe her, would be put-off if she showed her feelings, if she revealed what lay behind the calm presentation, beyond what she was actually saying, in the terrible silence at the other side of the words. When she looked out at the end of her performance and she saw that they were all crying.

There’s nothing entertaining here. At first there’s nothing at all but the rape event outside of the writing. But then how is the writing ever going to reach that? How is a reader ever going to get there? This is not a book about the words and theories it uses, not even the word ‘rape’ but is about a particular experience of rape and its consequences. Maybe the author writes not because she wants to talk about it but because she wants her life back. It went away when she was raped. Where did it go?

She says it went into a space that her knowledge of architecture can begin to design. Are American prison architectures like the old London prisons? Prisons in London are peculiar. They’re impressive Gothic architectural structures that are huge and melodramatic. They suggest labyrinths, lavish traps of darkness. So they have a tone but their tone isn’t the tone of this writing. But then, when I’m thinking about the dual direction of this writing, writing towards a nihilism hell-bent to nowhere and writing alternatively out of nihilism towards maturing creativity, then there’s something about the trace of prison here in England that actually deepens what I’m thinking about what the author’s thinking.

So I think about Wormwood Scrubs in Hammersmith, my local prison, that is huge and visible to the eye but is erased by road signs that don’t say it exists because they don’t exist. It is next to the Hammersmith Hospital which is a leading London hospital and the hospital is rendered visible only by its signage because its architecture is flat. So the overall meanings of the signs for the prison and the sign itself are complicated, more complex than a single glance can pick out.

So it is like the writing in this book. The prison’s architecture is both gothic and horribly energetic with a dark overwhelming moodiness but simultaneously it is denied and erased by the signs. It is as if we are not supposed to know about this great space of moodiness. This is the way the author has structured the book’s effect. The event of rape is in terms of the denied emotions it involves. Nevertheless those invisible, sudden emotions are an essential part of the rape. They don’t depend on the author writing them out. It is a confirmation of the obvious fact that the event is a catastrophe, an ugly nauseous holocaust detonating, as always, everything in the blink of an eye. Invisibility rendered in plain sight, forever and ever, in a loop of ‘and vice versa’.

The script’s deadpan act sets up a Bressonian authenticity at odds with any notion of artiface . It frees itself from culture and art. This is a performance of writing without writing being acted out as style without style. Bresson did this by not having actors in his films. Instead of actors he had models. He therefore avoided acting. One of his best models was a donkey. So the paradoxical author is designing a space where everything can be discussed and felt without having to write. It reverses the Barthian idea that the author is dead and writing continues in a different relation to itself and its interpreters. Here writing is dead because it is the author and her rape that is being authored. Writing sure is in a different relation to the reader and to the author: but it is the death of writing rather than the author that is being executed here. The author has to survive for the trauma to exist.

And in this perversity and impossibility there is the something else of what the author is doing. There is an act of willful suppression in order to expose the fullness of the rape. Schopenhauer viewed the will as the very ding an sich and happiness as the mere abolition of a desire and extinction of a pain. He thought that empathy with our fellow sufferers reminds us of the most necessary things; tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity. The choice of architecture to accommodate the result of being entirely given over to willing links with Schopenhaur’s view that architecture considered as art only considers gravity, cohesion and rigidity. Regular form, proportion and symmetry are not its proper theme.

So this makes us think that by denying itself as art the architecture of the book climbs out of one space into another. All the theories and thoughts that are presented in regular form – where by regularity of features we also think of ‘regular’ as used in the phrase ‘regular guy’, the idea of the normal, the unsurprising, the ordinary, the banally reliable – and ‘proportion’ – in the sense that everything here is proportionate, unhysterical, contained, presentable - and symmetrical, so we might feel a just and balanced report has been submitted – all this gifts us a truth telling that was all we were promised in the first place and all we ever wanted.

Which reminds us of other textures lying beneath this form of writing. It captures the regular, proportionate and symmetrical bureaucratic reports of holocaust literature, Gulag literature and of Kafka’s nightmarish worlds where endless documents present in just those forms constitute the traps that hide a monstrous violence. Suddenly, reading this book is another reminder of how all advocacy is the Titorellian doortrap closing behind you.

Remember Titorelli in Kafka’s Trial: ‘I forgot to ask you what sort of acquittal you want. There are three possibilities, that is, definite acquittal, ostensible acquittal, and indefinite postponent.’ The nightmare logic of the advocacy in the metaphysical absurdity of innocence accused is of course something that Titorelli summarises thus: ‘The only deciding factor seems to be the innocence of the accused. Since you’re innocent, of course it would be possible for you to ground your case on your innocence alone. But then you would require neither my help nor help from anyone.’ So too for Jana Leo the issue is what acquittal will there be, and can she somehow write her innocence?

Reading Kafka reminded me that Rape New York is written as if the author were the accused. Raped, her response is to defend herself from the accusation of being the one to blame. And just as Kafka regarded his novel The Trial as unfinished, necessarily so because the trial was never going to reach the highest court, he nevertheless writes a last line; “‘Like a dog!’ he said: it was if he meant the shame of it to outlive him.” This sense hovers above the text. The loop that threatens at the end of the second chapter with its Tristram Shandy-like title, is the phantasmagoric Kafka/Zeno structure of infinity that pervades the novel posed as a joke of the damned.

The author of Rape New York is thus writing the kind of metaphysical prison literature. It seems that the kind of process she describes are exactly those faced by the protagonists in The Trial or Kundera’s The Joke. In fact she writes that the rape took away the means of her life. She describes what happened afterwards as like being in a state of suspended animation. This reminds me of the way Milan Kundera describes the effect of the Russians taking over his country. ‘When, in 1968, the Russians occupied my little country, I lost, at a stroke, any possible means of earning a living.’ The trauma of that invasion is not, of course, than that of bodily rape. So I am careful here not to think or feel of them as if they are the same but nevertheless they are both moments of sudden and inexplicable violent trauma. Both instantiate – one as a violation of a single physical body and the other as a political violence which also brought violence against bodies – the abstract mental logics of paradoxical metaphysicians.

The Kundera response to his trauma struck me as being helpful too. In the aftermath of the invasion some friends, trying to help, asked him to write a stage version of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot using Dostoevsky’s name. He rejected the project. ‘This world of excessive gestures, of obscure profundities and of aggressive sentimentality repelled me.’ Kundera cannot work with the ‘climate’ of Dostoevsky. Everything is feeling in that climate, ‘…feeling is elevated to the level of value and of truth.’ It is not feelings per se that revolts him. Just as in Rape New York, feelings run through trauma. They run and run and run. But to elevate them to the status of value and truth, to trust just feelings, that is what repulses him. The violent end of modernity demands a more persistent, hard-rimmed response.

Kundera rewrites Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste as an antidote to the trauma. So too with the author of Rape New York. She writes at her trauma, not out of it,or away from it, and so her prose is placed in the same tradition of picaresque riddling that includes Sterne, Laclos, Voltaire, Richardson, Diderot, Cervantes, Boccaccio, Marivaux, Mdme de LaFayette, Monk Lewis, Mrs Radcliffe, De Sade and Kundera et al. However she works at the fork in the road of that line which branches to where the abstracted Platonic irreconcilable metaphysics of the situation is explicitly the puzzle rather than merely a feature alongside all the tom-foolery within. This is the branch of such novel writing that includes Borges, Beckett and of course Kafka. The tragedy of the paradoxical metaphysician is also a joke played on a cosmic scale. The whole world is a joke, a great sick and irresolvable puzzle, a riddle, a conundrum.

And in the light of this thought the full weight of the book and its form becomes clear. The logic and theories of the book are but the mechanisms by which we are confronted with a metaphysical reality that traps the mind in an inescapable horror, just as the theories and asides are in Sterne’s masterpiece. The universe is the book, is a puzzle with laws that are self-contradictory and a logic that presents an impossibility as a fact. Just as when she writes about the way architects think of people all the time as pieces being moved through spaces and the spaces determine the moves, so too now the book is the game board on which the pieces are all being moved around. The rules are straightforward, in the open, agreed. The perversity of the situation rests in this fact. Nothing is hidden or denied. Everything is agreed and open. There is an absolute freedom in the prison. It is the mental Lacanian paradoxical jest that explains that now that God is dead there is absolutely no freedom. Absolute freedom is merely a condition of the best high security prison. It is a prison drawn by Escher.

The Semina series is a series that inducts us into this branching fork of the metaphysical picaresque. Stewart Home is himself part of this metaphysical picaresque tradition, at times offering a chance to update de Sade so that the boredom of Sadeian systems-building is replaced by the joke, the scandal and the fetish, his skillfully rendered pastiches of weird eighteenth century rationality retaining the lurid peccadilloes of vice worn by provocation governed by bravado antinomianism and mad logistics.

Jana Leo rewrites the internal story of Richardson’s gigantic Clarrissa. The rapist Lovelace is displaced. The vast panoramic picaresque is whittled down to this mimimalist Rubic-cube of a piece. It was de Sade who rhetorically asked the question: “Of what use are novels?’ and gave his answer: ‘ Hypocritical and perverse men, for you alone ask this ridiculous question: they are useful in portraying you as you are, proud creatures who wish to elude the painter’s brush, since you fear the results, for the novel is – if t’is possible to express oneself thus wise – the representation of secular customs, and is therefore, for the philosopher who wishes to understand man, as essential as is the knowledge of history. For the etching needle of history only depicts man when he reveals himself publically, and then ‘tis no longer he: ambition, pride cover his brow with a mask which portrays for us naught but these two passions, and not the man.’

And flowing from this, de Sade, brooding on the requirements for writing a decent novel, forbids the writer to stray from verisimilitude. She may take as many liberties with history’s anecdotes, yet the novelist must tell the truth. Jana Leo conceives her writing in the same light. ‘This book is a work of fiction because, like all texts, it is constructed. It is also fictional because it is self-consciously subjective: the reflections it contains are my personal thoughts and the narrative form I use is episodic. However, the core of the book is a detailed account of something that actually happened. It is the truth.’

Jana Leo veers towards the gigantic silos of Kafkaesque prison letter writing, describing the lunatic metaphysics of a world that quickly fails, catastrophically, to make sense. The secular customs of rape are written in an encoded text that reveals the corruption, hypocrisies and literal insanities that lock us all up in a systematic aberration. The picaresque episodic structure allows for the enumeration of the literary emission sans tedious conflatulation.

She writes a banquet of intelligence, in which lie scolding pleasures outside the sleazy charm of entertainments and sweets: refusing entertainments, the reader is placed in that relation described, by Beckett in a letter to McGreevy, as …’ humility before the doomed and the assumed.’ And again, from somewhere else in Beckett’s epistolary bog, we can say that what some may find cold is what others find, myself included, as final.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Richard Marshall is contributing editor to 3:AM and lives in London.

William Fiennes - Dartington 2009

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (dovegreyreader scribbles) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 04:00:00 +0000

Each year at Dartington I head for my favoured seat high up on the back row of the balcony in the Great Hall. I try and tuck myself into the corner seat and if anyone sits in the vicinity I always mention that I'll be scribbling away and I hope I'm not a distraction.
No one has ever said I am, but it's always one of those instances when a literary festival conversation happens with someone you have never met before and are unlikely to meet again, warm and friendly and a mutual appreciation of an event you are both about to enjoy. To get to the balcony is an endeavour involving the tightest of narrow spiral staircases which leaves me quite disorientated by the time I reach the top, so much twisting I'm not sure if I'm facing north or south, so it's always nice to get my bearings through this window at the top.
I think it's the window below the clock,
Fortunately I'm not too worried about being able to see, because right up here in the gods it becomes a focused listening experience which suits me nicely.
Up and away early yesterday morning to hear William Fiennes talking about the The Music Room and it was most certainly worth the effort.
You may recall it was a book I loved for many reasons including this,

'Books like this leave a feeling, a resonating mood, for me a pitch-perfect sense of optimism and goodness, I think The Music Room might possibly be one to put on the 'Roger Deakin' shelf and revisit every so often, there is something timeless and quite life-enhancing about it.'

It was of great interest to me to hear William talk about his struggles to find this book.
Several novels and writing projects had floundered since the success of The Snow Geese, largely because William, by his own admission, felt each one had no need to exist.
The sign of a very generous writerly spirit for which as a reader I thank him.
Settling on the themes for The Music Room happened when William realised that his own doorstep was a home that was a true island; a moated castle (a real moat, not an MP's expenses pretend moat he assured us) which encapsulated all the love, beauty and tenderness balanced with the pain, loss and sorrow; all the energy a writer needed was there for the asking.
Whilst The Snow Geese fell into the symmetry of an octave, so The Music Room settled into a quartet as the four strands were woven into the rope of the book, weaving a personal under-narrative about saying goodbye to a way of life. A book about presence and absence constantly co-existing and an elegiac tone which makes me want to read it again and again now that I've heard William speak about it and I know I will.
Not wishing to enter into any Great Hall one-upmanship (but very unassumingly William's Great Hall is bigger than Dartington's, and we laughed) William couldn't pass up the chance to read about a Great Hall in a Great Hall and we were wrapped in that pin-drop magical silence that happens very occasionally in this setting.
In my humble opinion book readings are often less than satisfactory at literary festivals and apparently all writers are warned not to read to excess at Dartington because the audience gets irate, which hardly bears thinking about with all that medieval atmosphere.
One now fears for the launch of a pikestaff from the back row.
Not all writers make good stage presenters either, but I now officially add William Fiennes to my list of top notch stars and, if you find that he is speaking at a venue near you, don't miss him because he has a quiet but luminous presence which radiated right up to the back row of the balcony and we were loving it. I think we'd have been happy to have him read the whole book and then I think we might have persuaded him to read the blurbs as well and then turned out a few shopping lists just to keep him going.
Asked in questions how his parents felt about his writing, it seems The Music Room has been well-accepted by Family Fiennes (I think the explorers and the actors are first and second cousins) who trusted their son to write sensitively and lovingly about something so intrinsic to their lives. Small matter of Mrs Fiennes Snr getting fewer mentions than Mr Fiennes Snr in The Snow Geese so two more mentions were added for the sake of family harmony (much laughter) but nothing more disturbing than that.
Great and generous heartfelt applause for a wonderful event and then, if I'd had my wits about me, I could have held an auction for Offpsringette's copy of The Snow Geese which I had taken along for signing.
It's out of print, supposed to be reprinting but no copies available yet and people would have killed and maimed to get their hands on mine.
I dashed it back to my car for safety because I plan to read it very soon.

3:AM A(ustrala)sia

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (3:AM Magazine) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 03:43:44 +0000

3:AM Asia’s Roland Kelts is down under, doing a number of book tour talks about Japanamerica.

July 13-16th: Sydney, JSAA Conference, University of Sydney
July 17th: Sydney, The Japan Foundation: Panel w/Susan Napier and Rebecca Suter
July 20th: Brisbane, The University of Queensland: Panel w/Susan Napier and Rebecca Suter
July 22nd: Melbourne, The University of Melbourne: Panel w/Susan Napier and Rebecca Suter

Dartington Sunday.

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (dovegreyreader scribbles) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Susie Boyt on My Judy Garland Life, joyous book.
Sarah Hall on How To Paint a Dead Man, a book I've read and loved but not talked about on here yet.
Saying hi to Amanda Craig who will be talking about Hearts and Minds and how excited are we for next week's Endsleigh Salon when Amanda is joining us for the evening.
Would like to manage the 5pm talk by Jill Dawson on The Great Lover but we'll see how much steam I have left.

The Selfish Genius

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (3:AM Magazine) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 13:58:34 +0000

By Max Dunbar.

I’m told that Richard Dawkins begins his speaking engagements by listing his ‘fleas’; books responding to Dawkins’s The God Delusion by riffing on its title, premise or cover design: The Dawkins Delusion, Deluded by Dawkins?, The God Solution, etc. You get the idea. Fern Elsdon-Baker’s The Selfish Genius looks like a flea book, but isn’t. In it she challenges Dawkins’s work on evolution from an atheistic and scientific perspective.

It is hard to judge how Elsdon-Baker fares against Dawkins from a layman non-scientist perspective, but her story of the establishment and schisms of evolutionary science is fascinating, not least because of the wonderful personalities that inhabit the field. There’s an amazing footnote on the geologist Reverend Buckland, who ‘decided to eat his way through the entire animal kingdom, serving up to his unfortunate guests anything from boiled sea slugs to roast panther.’

Elsdon-Baker empathises the point that nineteenth-century science and religion were not always competing antethesis: in many respects, they overlapped, with prominent evolutionists also committed Christians - and Darwin himself a tormented agnostic, his faith shaken by his genius. Darwin’s ideas were not new, and could be found in ninth-century Baghdad. She warns us against the simplicity of a Whig or Great Man version of the history of science. Fair enough: we must bear in mind Goldacre’s First Rule: ’I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.’

Yet there’s a sense of Elsdon-Baker investing too much in the overlap between scientists and religious believers. It is no surprise that even Paine and Jefferson shared the predominant beliefs of their time - or at least were not prepared to contradict them in public. I am reminded of Sam Harris’s point: ‘It is a truism to say that people of faith have created almost everything of value in our world, because nearly every person who has ever swung a hammer or trimmed a sail has been a devout member of one or another religious culture. There has been simply no one else to do the job.’

Like many of Dawkins’s critics, Elsdon-Baker has a strong focus on the tone, rather than the content, of his arguments: ‘I am not too concerned about the quality and validity of Dawkins’ ideas… What does worry me is the style of presentation.’ She criticises Dawkins’s ‘highly charged, political style of political advocacy’ which ’seeks to polarise’ and ‘can be very divisive and ultimately counter-productive.’ The way forward is ‘respectful communication’ - or perhaps, like Lafayette Proulx, we should just make endearing noises.

True, Dawkins is not a particularly good communicator. I have seen his documentaries and he comes off as a shy yet passionate schoolboy, with great and infectious conviction but lacking the articulacy to express it or the self-discipline to control it. He strikes me as someone who has had celebrity thrust upon him, and does not deal with it well. But I can think of no one else who has done more to advance the public understanding of science - indeed, I doubt the general public was aware of the Charles Simony position before his tenure in it. How does his rampant atheism undermine this? Oh, because we must ‘respect other people’s faith’. But why? What is it about faith - as opposed to actual human beings - that makes it automatically worthy of respect? What can it offer?

When Elsdon-Baker gets to the substance of Dawkins’s views on religion, she struggles. In a chapter headed, predictably, ‘The Church of Dawkins,’ she argues that Dawkins ‘reduce[s] the intense geopolitical situation to a clash of cultures - us versus them, the modern rational West versus medieval Islam’ and supports this by referencing an article Dawkins wrote on 9/11 that, as you can see, contains no trace of this Huntingdonian narrative and instead attacks religion as a whole. The difficulty with painting Dawkins as a kind of twenty-first century rational imperialist is that he strongly opposed the war on Iraq: his critics tend to work around it, and most do a better job than Elsdon-Baker does here.

There are better challenges to Dawkins in The Selfish Genius, but not enough to sustain a book. Often Dawkins’s words are quoted without comment, as if their worthlessness is so well established as to render it unnecessary. Fern Elsdon-Baker is far more than ‘an intellectual mouse nibbling at the feet of the intellectual giants’ yet perhaps, in channelling her talent and knowledge into an attack on one man, she hasn’t applied either as well as she might have.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Max Dunbar was born in London in 1981. He recently finished a full-length novel and his short fiction has appeared in various print and web journals including Open Wide, Straight from the Fridge and Lamport Court. He also writes articles on politics and religion for Butterflies and Wheels. He is Manchester’s regional editor of Succour magazine, a journal of new fiction and poetry. He is a co-editor of 3:AM and blogs here.

Salley Vickers - Dartington 2009

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (dovegreyreader scribbles) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 08:00:00 +0000

The first of many trips across high Dartmoor to Dartington in the next ten days.
You can hope for sunshine up top but yesterday was pewter skies and downpours en route, and mist of the 'fog-lamp-on' variety on return, plus daft sheep and horses sleeping in the middle of the road as usual.
Obviously it's quite a trek just for one event and I have planned a few full days later in the week, but I didn't want to miss Salley Vickers talking about her latest book Dancing Backwards and contrary to my preference for pre-reading, I hadn't read this one.
Salley Vickers, a Jungian psychotherapist and someone I have inadvertently let slip off my reading radar since her third book Mr Golightly's Holiday and for no reason other than this happens sometimes. Like many I loved Miss Garnett's Angel and actually feel up for another read of that now it's come back to mind.
Always interesting to hear a writer say they don't read their own books and can only get a feel for the shape of them once the readers have had their say, and for Salley this book, so recently published, has had little feedback yet and thus is still finding its place in her mind.
It's easy to forget and good to be reminded of the part readers play in this process, and as Salley elaborated in questions at the end, (all asked by fellow psychotherapists who seemed to be there in abundance) books don't come to life until they are read, it's the strange alchemy, that meeting at the crossroads between the writer, the book and the reader which will reveal so much.
I'm intrigued about suggestions that this book emerged during a period of tribulation in Salley's life seven years ago, was set aside unfinished and has been revisited again this year after another period of tribulation; this in the form of illness requiring a general anaesthetic and then completed in that recovery period.
Salley suggested that it was as if those arcs of tribulation somehow connected and brought Dancing Backwards to fruition.
The book's themes interest me too and I will definitely be reading it; a late-flowering return to creativity, forgiveness, coming to terms with being alone, and a proper assimilation of the past acting as a catalyst to these themes and there's apparently a cruise involved, so now I can't wait.
If you've been on one you'll know that life aboard a cruise ship is hugely and endlessly fascinating from lifeboat practice and all the iceberg jokes, to origami towels arranged on the bed each night, to the myriad of people trapped in this enormous floating world and on reflection a vast source of writerly material. Salley Vickers gathered hers from aboard the QE II but it all sounded very familiar, especially the napkin-folding tuition class and the food every twenty minutes.
Another comment to emerge in questions was in relation to Salley's forthcoming involvement with bibliotherapy and, as the venue is Liverpool, I'm thinking this might be in connection with Phil and Jane Davies and The Reader magazine, much loved and respected here. The suggestion that a great book understands us and illuminates parts of our soul gave me so much to think about and it will be good to welcome Salley Vickers to the dovegreyreader asks...armchair soon and find out much more.
A great start to the ten days, supper at The Warren House Inn on the way home, and sat by the fire that has not gone out since 1845, so think of that, before Jane Eyre was published.
Crackling away nicely t'was and mighty glad we were of it too.

Saturday Night at the Movies

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (3:AM Magazine) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 04:45:04 +0000

By Owen Hatherley.

It’s a truism that it often takes an outsider to truly find what is intriguing and unusual in a place, and for a time that was certainly the case with British film – and especially with the British city over the last half-century. We like to think of our cities as ‘crap towns’, nondescript wastelands except for the designated heritage or regeneration zones, and our films reflect this. It wasn’t always thus. In the ’60s and ’70s various non-UK directors, from Kubrick in Thamesmead to Antonioni in the Smithsons’ Economist Building, to Truffaut in the Alton Estate, ventured into the concrete cities we were building and, rather than harrumphing about the eyesores, found something darkly fascinating. Thus it occurred that The Offence, a veritable slab block of high modernist noir directed by a respected American auteur, was filmed in Bracknell New Town, Berkshire.

This might be a depiction of a new town, but it’s a million miles from the poignantly lovely Cumbernauld of Gregory’s Girl, or today’s austerity nostalgia. Sidney Lumet’s film is a depiction of a heartless, mean-spirited country in the midst of a collective nervous breakdown – where mental collapse is transliterated into Bracknell’s new spaces. Sean Connery, playing a brutal, tortured murder policeman, chases a criminal across the multi-level concourses of a modernist shopping precinct, investigates the murder of a young girl in the vast voids of a new low-rise housing estate, and lives in a slick, all mod cons apartment in Royal Point, a polygonal tower designed by Ove Arup. Throughout, the architecture itself creates tension, its straight lines running against Connery’s fraying psyche.

In the sequence here, we have all the familiar paraphernalia of the British city, a landscape now fit only for the dispiriting opening credits of The Office or the establishing shots of cheap, unfunny sitcoms, turned through Lumet’s eyes into a noir landscape as murky, intriguing and bleak as any in the paranoid masterpieces of Alan J Pakula, partly by making adroit use of a perennial of the British landscape – appalling weather.

There’s no cute period music here, no signifiers of 70s kitsch, but a ruthlessly atonal, crepuscular score by Harrison Birtwistle, made even more alien by punctuating electronics by Peter Zinovieff. Birtwistle once described his musical approach as being like a walk round the city, so it’s appropriate that these stabs and harsh, seedy atmospheres accompany a ride round the endless ringroads of the new town and through the protagonist’s mind – a montage of memories, all equally horrible. We start in a rain-soaked, geometrically severe carpark, and linger on lurid blue streetlights and rainsoaked asphalt. An old British Rail train slashes across these sequences, until a body is retrieved from the railway bridge. We have a montage of corpses, in debris-strewn rooms or in tangled woodlands. Eventually the policeman returns to an elegantly sinister carpark much like the first, and enters his luxury apartment.

Needless to say, The Offence was criticised by British critics for being too ‘arty’. It was a commercial failure.

The Missing Links

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (3:AM Magazine) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 02:15:33 +0000

“Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby [is] the person on the outside looking in, which is what I’m like as a writer.” Chuck Palaniuk in the FT. * Why do Pynchon, Ballard and Wallace provoke such online loyalty? * Stewart Home’s punk rock tunes & blogs that groove him. * Richard Hell to release re-recording of final Voidoids album via Insound ( via @ALARMpress) * Terry Gilliam on the genius of MAD creator Harvey Kurtzman. * The Book-club hustlers, new authors on the make (pity they’re a bit shit). * Hermaphrodite series for HBO (Jeffrey Eugenides‘ Middlesex) * Charles Burns New Yorker Tilley art from 1993 (via @forlornfunnies) * New York in film. * Bound for success, contemporary book-binding. * The art of book cover design. * Why do print-on-demand books have to be so hideous? * Two-Dollar Radio publisher Eric Obenauf on the revenge of print. * The NY Press on Who Killed Amanda Palmer?, a collaborative photography & story book between Neil Gaiman & Amanda Palmer. * Playboy will run an excerpt from Nabokov’s The Original of Laura. * Lost Graham Greene novel unearthed by Francois Gallix to be serialised in crime magazine. * Why do Scandinavians write such great crime fiction? * Tim Hall’s Uplift the Postivicals, “text-based comics, fontasies, soul sutras and shredded prose, rendered in bold, binary alphabetics”. * The “spirit” of Walt Whitman sells jeans (via Bookslut)

Gone to Dartington...

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (dovegreyreader scribbles) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:00:00 +0000

...Salley Vickers last night on her new book Dancing Backwards.
Today, William Fiennes on The Music Room and Andrew Motion giving the Ted Hughes Memorial Lecture on 'How Ted Hughes Became.'
Back later.

Hans Fallada: Little Man, What Now?

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Asylum) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 01:00:52 +0000

Following the success earlier this year of Hans Fallada’s rediscovered novel Alone in Berlin / Every Man Dies Alone, I was keen to read more. Step forward Melville House, who have obliged by reissuing Fallada’s most famous novels, The Drinker and Little Man, What Now? To me, the latter had always been a Morrissey song. In the song, the ‘little man’ is a faded star (a very Morrissey motif), whereas in the book, a glorious past is more than the central character could hope to attain.

Little Man, What Now? was a success on publication in 1932, serialised in over 50 German newspapers and selling half a million copies worldwide in its first two years, by which time it had been filmed twice. This was surely due to its forthright presentation of the woes of millions of Germans in the dying days of the Weimar Republic, with massive unemployment and hyperinflation; Fallada presents the latter in the confused words of an old woman, who has her own explanation for where all her money has gone (”Can a pound of butter cost three thousand marks?”)

‘I’m going to tell you. I now know that my money’s been stolen. Somebody who rented here stole it. But I can’t recall the names, so many people have lived here since the war. I sit and brood. I also realize it must have been someone really clever, because he falsified my housekeeping book so I wouldn’t notice. He turned three into three thousand without me realizing.’

Listening to this are our little man, Pinneberg, and his Lammchen (’little lamb’), his recently pregnant girlfriend with whom he now needs to set up home before their ‘Shrimp’ is born. He’s sure he’s in love with her: well, fairly sure. When she throws off his compliments about her prettiness (”Who’d want to dance with a nanny-goat like [me]?”), “[a] feeling he didn’t quite like came over Pinneberg. ‘She really oughtn’t to be telling me this,’ he thought. ‘I’d always thought she was pretty. Perhaps she isn’t pretty after all.’”

The main problems they face, however, are those which every little man of the day faced: the scarcity of work, the worthlessness of money, and the uncertainty whether their future would best be secured by the Communists or the promising-sounding National Socialists. The book was written before the rise to power of the Nazis, and they feature rarely in the book (Fallada would make up for that in Every Man Dies Alone). Instead, his concerns are the quotidian struggle. “Everything gets more complicated when you’re poor.” Even when Pinneberg finds work, and “he really is happy … behind that happiness lies the fear: will it last? No, of course it won’t last. So, how long will it last?”

Daily labour – one might say the pleasures and sorrows of work – is something which Fallada represents very well (and made me realise how rarely work is realistically represented in novels that are not explicitly about work). He gets a job as a menswear salesman, and the tedium, camaraderie, fear and occasional victories of working life are beautifully done. It has the ring of experience, as do Pinneberg’s struggles with fatherhood when (and just before) ‘the Shrimp’ is born: and my judgement on their authenticity is born of experience too.

The Shrimp screamed! The small bright room re-echoed with his screeching; his little voice was extremely loud and piercing. He was getting bright red. He’s got to draw breath some time, though Pinneberg.

There is comedy too – the essential comedy of hard times – with naturists, businessmen’s power struggles, and a surprising secret about Pinneberg’s mother. All that is seeded within the context of an immersive story, realistically appalling characters, and heartfelt empathy for the little man. Pinneberg buttonholes a famous actor who comes to the gentlemen’s outfitters, an actor in whose art he has found consolation, as millions of Germans would in Fallada’s book:

‘You know things aren’t going at all well for ordinary people like us, and it seems to me sometimes as though everyone and everything is making a monkey of us. Life in general, you see what I mean, and one feels so small…’

Included in this edition is an exemplary afterword by Philip Brady – at 20 pages, a mini-essay on Fallada and Little Man, What Now? which greatly enhanced my enjoyment of the book. It places the book in its social, political and literary context, and in a curious way was a highlight of my reading experience. As with their edition of Every Man Dies Alone, Melville House have done full justice to Fallada’s work.

One of the most affecting phrases in the book is not from the text of the story at all. After the slings and arrows suffered by Pinneberg and Lammchen (”Down the slippery slope, sunk without trace, utterly destroyed. Order and cleanliness, gone; work, material security, gone; making progress and hope, gone. Poverty is not just misery, poverty is an offence, poverty is a stain, poverty is suspect”) – after all this, after the relentless difficulty of everyday existence – particularly at this time, in this place – what most touches the heart is a chapter heading near the end of the book. it reads: “Epilogue: Life Goes On.”

Friday I’m in Love

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (3:AM Magazine) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:01:38 +0000

By Niven Govinden.

There’s nothing like art imitating life. This 1998 video directed by Wiz, shows a bruised and fractured band at the end of a twelve month promotional cycle for their eponymous debut album. It plays on tabloid perceptions of Shaz, Mel, Nat & Nic as muso, earth mother-to-be, and sibling party-animals-on comedown, respectively.

Brilliantly, ‘War of Nerves’ was also the first video to be shot at the Metropolitan Hotel, at the height if its pinaccle status as the übercool of übercool celebrity haunts. With the girls being papped falling out of the Met Bar so regularly at the time, the idea of setting the video there was both genius and also a contemptuous finger to those intrusive showbiz hacks who noted their every drunken stumble. Is it part vérité or part wannabe or just a simple extension of their West London ethos of keeping it real?

The vid also continues the 90s trend of next to no lip synching. Very telling that Shazney - the songwriter - is the only one who sings throughout. Her choice or the Director’s? No matter. It’s self-fulfilling prophecy shot gorgeously, and does nothing to quell rumours of tension in the band. It’s probably just the way they wanted it. In pop, you are nothing if nobody speaks of you…

On a final note, probably the most important thing, they look amazing and have good hair. London at night never looked better. Oh, and ‘War of Nerves’ is one of their most underrated songs. So there.

Will Work For Drugs

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (3:AM Magazine) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:31:29 +0000

By Beth Harrington.

“Yeah, right. I wish they made enough good drugs to reward the blood and brain matter I have splattered over these pages,” writes Lydia Lunch in the introduction to Will Work for Drugs, attempting to reassure readers that this collection of essays, fiction, poems, and interviews is not just another catalogue of punk-rock, narcotic exploits. Lunch sang in the underground band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and anyone who has heard her voice knows that it would be beautiful if it wasn’t so calculatedly ugly. The same can be said for her literature. Her last major book Paradoxia charted her hallucinatory path from sixteen year-old runaway to major influence in the 1980s New York City alternative scene. In Will Work for Drugs she examines our skewed world as an established insurgent against its ludicrous standards.

Lunch’s thesis is that certain people are destined to suffer in life and there is no way to prevent them from their preordained destruction: though cruel upbringings and a shallow, intolerant world do not help. “We have all been victimized at some point because of our gender, race, age, socioeconomic status, religion, or lack of,” she writes in the afterword “Sick with Desire.” However, such a blanket generalization contradicts itself. Plenty of people are walking around with iPods and designer handbags who don’t appear victimized. A parallel argument is that if everyone is a victim, no one is a victim in particular.

That Lydia Lunch considers everyone a victim is more mystifying when one considers the wounds inflicted on her in early life by forces far crueler than “The American Way of Life.” In “Canasta” thirteen year-old Lydia is deposited on her father’s doorstep after her mother’s “latest loser” makes a pass at her. Her father proves no improvement, gambling away his daughter’s virginity in a poker tournament. Yet Lunch refuses to pigeonhole herself as powerless in the hands of her assailant. “The first time he thrusts, it hurts. Him. ‘Easy! Easy! Easy!’ he wails at me. I giggle, amazed.” Like the gang-raped protagonist in Virginie Despentes’ Baise Moi, she learns early on that one way to resist abuse is not to be hurt by it.
As a writer, Lunch’s prose is distinct in its defiance of current literary standards emphasizing simplicity and restraint. Her text is infused with an electricity that sends her words kicking and punching off the page. She is not afraid to lay it on thick, but it works and it is hard to believe that someone who is pushing fifty can still get so fired up about life and her ambivalent quest to escape it. It is also refreshing.

If Lydia Lunch confessed that she had moved to the suburbs and found contentment as a wife and mother, some people might applaud her for growing up and settling down, but they were likely never her fans in the first place.

Lunch writes best on a clearly defined subject in which she demonstrates how her unorthodox perspective renders her both outcast and outlaw to mainstream society. “Motherhood: It’s Not Compulsory” is the bad girls’ guide to not having babies, laying out the crude truth about maternity so unapologetically that its gleeful irreverence borders on objectivity. “[Childbirth] seems the single most unnatural act that a woman would ever consciously perpetuate against herself.” In “Assume the Position” she reminisces on her lifelong vocation as a cop-tease. “I’ve never had a beef with the police. Never been hassled, harassed, or assaulted by the cops. They, however, can’t say the same thing about me.” Defying readers’ expectations, Lunch divulges that she has only been arrested once.

As Will Work for Drugs nears its conclusion, the fictional “The Devil’s Racetrack: Ray Trailer” takes place inside the mind and jail cell of a man imprisoned for killing a woman with whom he had a disturbing affair in public places. The story provides flashbacks of the obsessive past juxtaposed against the inert present until the killer acknowledges his guilt but not in the way he is expected to. “She set me up. But I was stupid enough to take the fall.” In Lunch’s worldview, every victim assumes their rightful place as perpetrator.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Beth Harrington resides in Boston, Massachusetts. Her nonfiction has appeare in BookSlut and Venus(online). Her fiction has appeared in Fifth Street Review (now-defunct), Kaleidoscope: Emmanuel College Magazine, and Cherry Bleeds: Literary Transgressions as well as its 2005 print anthology. She holds a B.A. in English Literature and was the 2007 recipient of the James T. and Ellen M. Hatfield Memorial Prize for a short story at Smith College.

An Education by Lynn Barber

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (dovegreyreader scribbles) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:15:00 +0000

Events kick off today at Dartington Ways With Words, Salley Vickers this afternoon, so fasten your seat belts and we'll be off across Dartmoor any minute and I'm meant to be reading all those books ahead of myself, so that I can nod knowingly as the authors explain the nuances of their narrative voice and their plot devices.
So on my way to the armchair for another session with Henry VIII and our 'ilary I was waylaid by the Women's Lives stack.
I'm doing a bit of gentle categorising of books-to-be-read these days, so I've got a great Crime Corner ready for when I fancy a bit of murder and a Women's Lives pile over on the edge of the Virginia Woolf shelf.
That's where I'd put An Education by Lynn Barber.
On top of Eleanor of Aquitaine, right next to The Marvelous Hairy Girls and Hot Flushes, Cold Science A History of the Modern Menopause and meaning to get to it all one day.
But as I walked past it has to be said the young Lynn on the cover has a very endearing smile, so having opened the first page and read,

'I know memoirs are supposed to begin with ancestors but alas, I don't have any, because I come from the lower, unremembered, orders on both sides, There is no Barber ancestral seat, nor even, so far as I know, any Barber ancestral village.'

I then barely glanced at the Tudors until I'd reached the end and now I discover that Lynn will be at Dartington on the final day too.
Lynn Barber (not quite a kindred spirit with Anne with an 'e' and this Lynne with an 'e') born in 1944 studied English at Oxford in the 1960s forging a career in journalism at Penthouse, then moving onto the Sunday Express, the Sunday Independent and Vanity Fair and now writes for the Observer and the Daily Telegraph.
An Education was certainly an education for me.
I think Lynn might have been the equivalent of someone we all knew in school, though I would only presume to speak for myself here; someone I could only emulate from afar and aspire to, but I was unlikely ever to come close.
You know, the one who makes the rest of you feel spotty, geeky and stupid.
Lynn was the bright, attractive, stylish one, exempt from the exigencies of the lacrosse pitch thanks to her 'weak ankles'. The one with the older, suave and sophisticated boyfriend of whom she asked no questions and, but for a last minute discovery of a roguish nature, may have married and thus given up any thoughts of Oxford.
I very briefly had one of those, not too roguish and thankfully marriage was never an option, but I did read Catch 22 to impress him and I'm always glad to have tucked that book under my belt at nineteen.
Quite astonishing too, and testament to Simon's con-man skills, is the fact that Lynn's parents, having encouraged her to aim high, were also completely duped by his charms and pressing her into the marriage.
For Lynn Barber, the lifelong effect feels profound. How can you truly know and trust anyone, including in this case her parents, and perhaps this was the unwitting catalyst for an award-winning career spent interviewing the rich and famous in an effort to know and understand .
Given that Lynn Barber has a few years on this Coronation Year baby and lived a far more exciting life than I did during the 60s and 70s, I had a great deal to learn, and having read Katherine Whitehorn's Selected Memory last year I'm thinking what a trove of fascinating and important insights these books are.
Women journalists staking their claim, adding a new and different dimension to a changing world.
Even writing the words 'I'm thinking' would have been off-limits to any journalist worth their expenses (eye-watering, forget MPs, the journos knew how to rack up the bills) back in those third-person days, but Lynn Barber successful challenged that 'great god objectivity' . First person writing was 'unprofessional' and 'girlie' in the eyes of the old school (male) editors but Lynn blazed a trail and set the bench mark.
I'm nerve-wracked lest Lynn Barber read this because she has an eagle-eye for the extraneous word and absent punctuation, as well as being the doyenne of the well-conducted interview, and there's me wanting to know about people's writing socks and asking A.S.Byatt whether she threw a pot in her research for The Children's Book, (I did honestly, just wait until Monday for the answer) but I've got an excuse, I'm a nurse not a journalist.
The nurse bit came in very useful towards the final pages of the book and in true litfest fashion I won't reveal exactly how because, apart from the use of past-tense with reference to 'someone' throughout the book, I still had no idea quite what was coming. When it came I understood it all only too well and though this episode constitutes a very small proportion of the book, almost too painful to examine too closely, I can only begin to imagine what a devastating event this has been in Lynn Barber's life.
The first chapters of An Education have been adapted for the big screen by Nick Hornby, with some journalistic licence employed in finding more filmic outcomes for this period of Lynn's life, the film due for release here in the UK in October, but I'd say read the book first, it's a cracker...should I have put that comma before that 'but'?

3:AM Top 5: Trev HAGL

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (3:AM Magazine) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:27:23 +0000

Something of a regional treasure of the North East, Trev HAGL is a punk rock institution. For 25 years he’s been churning out fanzines from the former pit town backwaters of Co. Durham and haggling with second hand record shop owners across the region. Like Paul Calf in a flight jacket, he has no time for trendy bands and his top 5 recent songs are:

1. ‘Tourettes,’ — Barse
This North East punk band’s third album If You Can’t Fuck Em Cut Em Up was a slab of demented genius equal to Psychoville. Picking one song is nigh on impossible but with lyrics like “Your brother is a prick/I cut the brake pipes on his bike/And idle threats don’t bother me/Bring who the fuck you like/Urgh urgh woof woof meow meow/I’ve got tourettes” we’ll go for this one. Cracking music and great loud and dirty production. And if the CD itself wasn’t disturbing enough, main songwriter Gash Flaps went the same way as Ian Curtis a month after the album was finished.

2. ‘16 On The Dole,’ — Running Riot
Boots & Ballads, the new album from this hard as nails (but equally singalong) Belfast Oi band is another one that is so full of classics it’s hard to choose, but this reworking of an old North East Miners Benefit comp LP folk song from 1984 just edges ahead of the rest. Imagine Ian Paisley fronting a punk band and talking sense for once. Great tune, brilliantly executed. You want one cheap? Contact me on trevhagl@hotmail.com

3. ‘Skinhead Not Bonehead,’ — Gimp Fist
With most new Oi bands veering towards the dark side (but not having Skrewdriver’s ‘honesty’), here’s a timely (and cracking) song from this Darlo Oi band who recently played with Last Rough Cause and Major Accident – and that gives you an idea what to expect. Great rockin’ guitars, singalong chorus and a message to match. Both their albums are chocca with anthems whilst this is out any minute on a split 7” on a German label.

4. ‘Time To Wake Up,’ — Lurkers
With a lot of bands dragging themselves out of retirement merely for filthy lucre, Arthur has been keeping the band going in some form or other more or less throughout. A smashing bloke, and well sussed. This is a fantastic tune pouring ever more needed contempt on corrupt politicians, whilst avoiding the usual clichés. They sound better than ever.

5. ‘DIY Till We Die’ — Sloppy Seconds
Their latest album Endless Bummer has been largely ignored, though fuck knows why – it’s almost as good as Destroyed. Great snotty punk with the usual sharp witted lyrics, taking the piss out of trendsetting record company whores , and finding the time for a bit self-deprecation along the way “it’s hard to sell your soul when nobody wants to buy… DIY till we die!”. A song that pretty much sums up the alternative scene of the last 10 years.

Penetralia

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (3:AM Magazine) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 01:59:59 +0000

By Adam Moorad.

Miracle thrusts her pelvis forward when her ankle rolls on a subway full of strangers. She locks her knees and tries to keep from touching any of the other passengers. She sits down in a seat, crosses her legs, and thinks, “I feel hot” so she pull her hair up and breathes through her mouth. Everything underground is hotter. The air bakes its own particles. At the next stop, everyone in the subway car seems to debark and Miracle is alone. She thinks, “I wish I lived in a neighborhood closer to my office so I could walk to work” then wishes she didn’t have to work at all. She gets off the train at her stop and walks to the grocery store. She buys a box of cereal and a gallon of soy milk. Miracle stands in the checkout line and reads a People magazine, examining the chests of many different female celebrities enviously. She studies the shape and location, the separation, and probable buoyancy of several different celebrity chests. Miracle thinks, “I hate my chest.” She goes home and eats breakfast for dinner. Afterwards, she takes a bubble bath and soaks for twenty minutes, wondering what other people are doing in her apartment building right now. She imagines families eating unhealthy, high-sodium food in an attempt to save money. These people have high-blood pressure. They will gradually develop a heart condition and die prematurely. She wonders why the world is arranged in a way that forces people to eat unhealthy food and she is overcome by the desire to do something to help these imaginary people live healthier lives. The bubbles in the bath begin to dissipate and Miracle can see her vagina through the water. She looks at it and feels sad. She thinks, “Sad lonely vagina.” She feels her hands and sees they have become pruned. Miracle feels cold. She waits for a few moments and climbs out of the tub. When she towels off she feels better. Her vagina feels better. She goes to bed. She thinks, “One day I will do something and will not have to work in the Human Resources department at a publishing company no one has ever heard of.” She turns on her air conditioner the goes to sleep.
_

At work Miracle stares at a picture of writer on the internet who committed suicide. She thinks, “What if I died?” People magazine wouldn’t notice. No one would notice. She considers the Cartesian Subject of Self and feels confused. Miracle tries to remember if she’s ever met a famous person. She is in her cubicle alone. She googles the writer’s name and reads his Wikipedia page. he discovers the writer was of the ego-masculine variety and hung himself in a penthouse in New York City. Miracle reads a list of all the books the writer wrote. She recognizes the names of a few books and sees many others that she doesn’t know. he thinks, “I should read more” and wishes the human species had the technology to download information onto the human brain like computer hard drive. She wonders if this technology already exists somewhere in a top secret government laboratory. No one would notice. She thinks, “Like Area 51” and feels vaguely paranoid. Miracle looks around to see if any of her supervisors are standing behind her. She stretches and tries to breathe normally. She closes her eyes and feels her leggings riding up her crotch. She tries to pick herself as casually as possible. She thinks her circulation is inhibited and has difficulty absorbing oxygen. She counts to ten and wonders what would happen if her heart exploded.
_

Miracle shops in a shoe store. When she sees the shelves of women’s footwear, she experiences an odd sensation and is unable to control her excitement. She tries on a pair of ruby red slippers with exposed toes and looks at herself in a full-length mirror. She thinks, “I love the way these slippers look on me and the way they offset the shape of my calves.” She wonders if she has a purse that will match the slippers. She takes the slippers off and carries them to the checkout line. At the counter Miracle tries to decide if she should buy the slippers with her debit card or credit card. She wonders how much money she has in her bank account and worries about incurring an overdraft fee. She buys the slippers with her credit card and leaves the shoe store. Miracle feels happy with her new footwear. She thinks, “I will get a pedicure and wear them tomorrow.” She walks to the subway. Ruby red. Exposed toe. Shape of calves. Miracle feels happy.
_

Miracle thinks she has experienced several mornings in succession where she has felt depressed and disillusioned, but not in an intense enough way to make her lash out in a reckless manner. She wonders if she is unhappy and thinks about different way acting out. She thinks, “Like being a bitch to other people.” She wishes she knew what it would be like to have hasty, anonymous sex or to do drugs trying to fill her imagined spiritual void. She feels inattentive and surmounted by the desire to completely withdraw from society. She thinks, “I am too scared.” Instead she speaks in a monotone voice with a latent sarcasm about menial observations of things with a neutral facial expression.
_

Miracle feels hot and shivers while looking at pictures of her friends on Facebook at work. She thinks, “I’m not doing anything wrong but it feels like I’m doing something wrong.” She wonders if she is behaving childishly and feels awkward. Miracle stands up from her desk and walks to the bathroom. She looks at herself in the mirror. She plays with her hair for ten minutes, wondering what to do. She thinks, “I want to not feel meaningless” then walks into the breakroom and fixes herself a cup of green tea. She walks back to her desk and looks at more pictures on the Facebook. Miracle sits in her cubicle and feels hot. She thinks, “If I was rich I wouldn’t have to work and could sit by a pool all day.” She rubs her eyes and yawns three times. She wishes she could yawn forever.
_

At Julie’s apartment, Miracle feels intoxicated. Julie is in Honduras on family vacation and Miracle is watching her cat. Julie will sit by a pool all day. She will bungee jump in the rainforest. Dark Latino men will try tirelessly to seduce her. They will breathe Caribbean air. Julie’s cat is blind and can only walk to its litter box from the couch and back. The cat lies on the couch. Miracle walks up to the couch to sit down and waits for the cat to move but the cat doesn’t move. She sits down beside the cat. She pets the cat.

It’s one o’clock in the afternoon and Miracle watches a reality show about competitive weight loss. She thinks, “I like this show because these people are working towards a collective goal.” A commercial for HPV vaccinations comes on the television. Miracle watches the commercial and sees a couple riding bicycles in the countryside. She thinks about riding a bicycle and wonders if she knows anyone who owns a bicycle that she could borrow for an afternoon so she could go for a ride in the countryside. Miracle is filled with the sudden, lonesome emotion. She wants to cry. She thinks, “Even if I had a bicycle I wouldn’t have anyone to ride with me.” Miracle feels sad and thinks, “I bet if I dress inappropriately more often I would attract more attention from the opposite sex.” Julie is riding a bicycle in the rainforest with dark, Latino men. She thinks, “I wish I was famous so I could have thousands of different people jumping at the chance to ride bicycles with me in the countryside.” Miracle is overcome with the desire to scream, then touches her face and realizes she is smiling.

She walks into her Julie’s kitchen and tries to stop feeling sad. She pours herself a glass of water then returns to the couch and watches another episode of “competitive weight loss.” She doesn’t pay attention and instead looks at Julie’s cat. Miracle thinks about having a disability like blindness and feels like crying. She sits on the couch and cries. She thinks she is behaving very strange and wonders what to do. She imagines if she was disabled, people who would see her crying wouldn’t think she is that strange because she would be interpreted as an innocent victim of an unfortunate circumstance. Miracle thinks about disabled people when they walk or talk or try to do the things that normal, non-disabled people do and wonders what living life would be like with everyone looking at her and treating her with an incorrigible understanding designed to make the her feel okay when she laughs or cries or screams indecipherable things or speaks in an unchecked volume. Miracle thinks this is kind of funny. She pets Julie’s cat. She tries to imagine how she would cry if she was disabled and wonders if she would be able to accept her situation if she was blind or paralyzed. Miracle thinks, “My life would be completely the same as it is right now if I was handicapped.” She pauses and thinks, “I really believe that” then says “But maybe I’m not sure” to Julie’s cat.

She looks around Julie’s apartment and tries to breathe. She thinks, “If I was paralyzed I wouldn’t feel any more alone than I already feel.” Miracle wonders there is something wrong with her. She tells herself, “If I was paralyzed it would be okay to feel this way.” She tries to envision how it would feel to push herself in a wheelchair while screaming things at people on the sidewalk outside her work. She wonders if these people would look at her as “that stupid paralyzed girl” or as “that poor, victimized girl.” Miracle feels oddly entertained. She imagines that most people would be polite to her but would secretly be rejoicing in her bodily affliction because all human beings are entrenched in a power struggle against one another. She thinks, “People, whether they want to admit it or not, need the weak to prey on.” Miracle considers the evolutionary hierarchies of the human species and wonders what role they play in her life. She closes her eyes and reflects on all the things in her life that make her feel uncertainty and despair, wishing she was blind or paralyzed. She thinks, “Then feeling the way I feel would be okay.” She touches her legs and pretends to be paralyzed for sixty seconds. After a while, she leaves Julie’s apartment and walks back to her apartment. She takes all her clothes off and looks out the window from her bed. She closes her eyes and thinks, “I don’t care if anyone sees me.”
_

Miracle thinks about the time she lost her virginity on a beach in Virginia her freshman year of high school. She briefly recalls feeling ironic and surprised she lost her virginity in Virginia. She gets distracted and climbs out of bed then walks through her kitchen. She thinks she feels crumbs on her feet then takes her mop out of the hallway closet. She mops the floor. She feels dirty and changes her clothes, then waits for the floor to dry. While waiting, she changes clothes again. Miracle tells herself she’s being melodramatic and wishes she was more self-aware. She thinks, “I need to be a stronger person” and wonders what stronger people do to remain unaffected by sentimental and melodramatic things. She thinks people who are immune to melodrama are people who have felt like shit for an extended period of time and have become less sentimental and melodramatic because they have successfully acclimated to feeling like shit and have forced themselves to think of life in a more realistic context in an effort to stops feeling like shit. Miracle tells herself, “Sentimentality and Melodrama are opposites of Reality.” She smells her fingers then decides people who are immune to Sentimentality are the way they are because they just feel so shitty and alone and hopeless that they no longer have the desire or the confidence to expend the energy to not feel shitty and hopeless anymore. Miracle considers brewing a cup of coffee. She stands in a moment of indecision for one minute, trying to remember her the date of her last period. Reality. Coffee. Caribbean air. She turns off all the lights in her apartment and walks to the subway.
_

Conrad calls Miracle and says, “Do you want to do something tonight?” and Miracle thinks, “Conrad is immature and only wants to have sex” and she is happy with her ability to differentiate between mature and immature people. She says, “Okay” and Conrad says “Alright” and Miracle rides the subway to Conrad’s apartment. When she arrives, Conrad is drinking beer with his roommate, Byron, and his little brother. Byron says, “Did you bring any beer?” and Miracle rolls her eyes. Later they go to a bar around corner in Conrad’s neighborhood and Byron and his little brother are already drunk. The jukebox plays 80s music at full volume and no one can understand one another. Conrad asks Miracle to go outside with him while he smokes a cigarette and they stand on the front steps of the bar. After two cigarettes, Conrad says, “Can I kiss you?” to Miracle and Miracle says “Yeah, okay” and Conrad smiles and puts his mouth on her mouth and begins to suck and Miracle feels startled, then thinks “We would make a good couple.” They kiss for awhile until Byron and his little brother walk outside and Byron laughs and says something to his little brother that Miracle cannot understand and Conrad doesn’t say anything. Miracle pretends to laugh and chews her fingernails.
_

Conrad and Miracle sit on a couch. Conrad watches baseball. It’s cold and Miracle feels uncomfortable. She looks at Conrad and wonders if he wants kiss her. She thinks, “He’s kinda handsome” and feels awkward. Miracle closes her eyes and listens to the humming television. She feels the need to do something with her hands and thinks, “I’m not making sense.” Conrad says, “Swing the bat!” He looks at Miracle and Miracle thinks Conrad thinks she looks happy. He put his arms around her and moves his face up to hers so that she will kiss him. Miracle says, “I think I should, I don’t know. You’ve been drinking. I think I should leave because don’t know.” Conrad doesn’t say anything then stands up. He looks at Miracle for ten seconds and pulls his shorts down. Miracle looks at Conrad’s penis and is speechless. Conrad wobbles and says, “I like you because I think you’re a really beautiful person and, you know, we are having such a good time together.” Miracle says, “Wow” and Conrad stands motionless, wondering whether or not he should do something his penis. He touches his stomach and Miracle says, “Wow, I just really. I don’t know.” Miracle waits for Conrad to do something then says, “We’re sitting on the couch and you take your shorts off.” Conrad says, “Yeah, it’s just that I wanted to get comfortable” and Miracle thinks, “I don’t like the length of his pubic hair.” She looks at Conrad then looks at the television screen and folds her arms. Conrad looks at himself. He looks at Miracle. He looks back at himself. He admires himself. Conrad says, “Don’t be mean” and Miracle says, “I’m not.” She wonders if she is a selfish person. She says, “I’m feeling sick” and walks into the bathroom. She looks at her face in the mirror and thinks, “I feel young in a bad way.” Miracle closes her eyes and feels like crying. She pictures a baseball diamond. Dark, Latino men are running the bases. She runs her fingers through her bangs several times. She wonders what the weather is like right now in Honduras. She closes her eyes.
_

Miracle walks down the street and comes to a liquor store. She goes into the liquor store and looks at the shelves of wine. She considers white or red. She decides on red then considers what kind. She buys the cheapest bottle or red wine and thinks, “Saving money is responsible.” She goes to her apartment and listens to B.B. King. She pictures B.B. King playing the electric guitar at a bar in Memphis, Tennessee and feels happy. Miracle drinks two glasses of wine and wishes she had a cigarette. She feels guilty for wanting to do something unhealthy. She pours herself another glass of wine. She turns the music off and the television on. She watches a movie starring Morgan Freeman where an asteroid is about to destroy the earth. She feels vaguely alarmed. She thinks, “What if that really happened?” and becomes depressed. She walks to her closet and looks through her old purses looking for a cigarette but cannot find anything. Miracle feels anxious and confused. She pictures B.B. King chain-smoking cigarettes at a bar in Memphis, Tennessee. She wonders if she should go buy a pack but thinks, “But I’m not a smoker.” She feels a little sad that she deprives herself of the small things that make her happy but she also feels sort of happy because the feels like an adult. She has another glass of wine and goes to sleep.
_

Miracle pages through an old yearbook looking for pictures of herself as a younger person. She doesn’t find one but sees many different pictures of people she used to know. She wonders if any of the people she went to high school with are dead or living homosexual lifestyles. She thinks, “I doubt any of these people remember me.” She closes the yearbook and turns on her computer. She logs on to her Gmail account and deletes several spam emails. She closes her email and wonders what to do. She thinks about checking her bank account but turns off her computer instead. She lies in bed and tries to make herself comfortable. Miracle reads Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger and wonders what excerpts are based of real life events the author experienced. Miracle reads for thirty minutes then closes her eyes. She feels happy.
_

After work, Miracle bought a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and now she’s eating it. She is glad she is alone in her apartment with a cardboard container and a plastic spoon. She’s happy that when she touches the cardboard and feels the cold condensation on her fingertips. She thinks about walking to the kitchen sink to get a glass of water. She eats the first spoonful of ice cream and looks at the wall. She sits on her couch with her feet folded beneath her. Her pants are off. It’s dinnertime and the sun is still out. She thinks, “Summer will be here soon.” It’s always summer in Honduras. Miracle turns on the television and watches a reality show about models competing to be supermodels. Some of the models are shouting at one another and some of other models are crying. Miracle envisions herself as one of the models and feels she can sympathize with their problems. She has the strong urge to help them but understands she is powerless to do anything for them. Miracle eats another spoonful of ice cream and wonders if Ben and Jerry are living a homosexual lifestyle. She begins to cry. She considers calling someone but isn’t sure of what she would say. She wipes her tears and tries to think about something happy. She eats more and more of her ice cream until only a quarter of the pint is left. Miracle stretches out across the couch. She looks at the television and wonders what makes her happy. After a while, she feels cold and pulls a blanket over her body. She closes her eyes slowly, retracing her day. Work. Ben and Jerry. Condensation. Summer in Honduras. Miracle rolls onto her face and presses her chest into the mattress.
_

Miracle lies on her bed. She feels bloated. She is wearing a white tank top and blue boxer shorts. She is watching What About Bob? starring Bill Murray on her computer. She turns her computer off. She thinks about getting a breast reduction surgery because she doesn’t like the attention she thinks she gets from other people. She think, “My breasts are the size of babies’ heads” and says, “But I don’t want to be a plastic surgery freak.” She wonders what her breast will look like ten years from now. She is afraid her breasts will stretch and hang over her belly button and people will looks at her strangely on the subway. She briefly fantasized about Bill Murray and wonders if there are different diets that could prevent her breasts from sagging. Miracle says, “I could always starve myself” out loud ironically. She feels the urge to giggle. She giggles. She thinks, “Breasts.” She stops giggling. She thinks, “Babies’ heads.” She feels melodramatic. She wonders if Bill Murray has ever been to Honduras. She presses her palms against her chest and tries to breathe.
_

Miracle takes the subway to Conrad’s apartment. Byron is smoking marijuana in the kitchen and when he sees Miracle he stops smoking. Miracle says, “Hello again” and Byron says, “Hello.” There is an awkward silence for five seconds and Byron says, “Conrad is in his room.” Miracle says, “Okay, thanks” and Byron coughs and adjusts his crotch. Miracle walks through the apartment towards Conrad’s bedroom, passing a muted television screen. She hears music playing and she opens the door. She finds Conrad lying on his bed sleeping. Miracle sits down beside him. Conrad wakes up and pretends to appear startled. He says, “What do you want to do today?” She says, “I thought we were going for a bike ride.” He says, “Oh yeah.” Conrad takes off some of his clothes and tries to make himself comfortable. Miracle doesn’t look. Conrad moves beside her and tries to get her to lie down beside him. Miracle can tell he is stoned. She looks towards him and isn’t sure if she wants to have sex with him or not. Conrad places his hand on the small of Miracle’s back. She closes her eyes and forgets about riding bikes. She counts to ten and waits for something to happen. When she turns around, she sees Conrad has fallen asleep. She stands up quietly and quickly leaves the apartment.
_

Miracle is sitting on her bed. Her face is sweating but she feels cold. She looks at the air conditioner and wonders if more cold air would blow out of it if she changed the filter. Miracle thinks, “If I didn’t have to pay for electricity I would leave my air conditioner on twenty-four hours a day.” She thinks she sounds wasteful. Miracle burps and wonders if she is pregnant. She closes the curtains and takes off all her clothes. She turns on her computer, opens iTunes, plays some music, and lies on the floor naked. She tries to find a song she likes but thinks, “I like all of them.” She walks to the bathroom to brush her teeth then realizes she is out of toothpaste. She dips her toothbrush in a bottle of mouthwash and saws her teeth. She walks around her apartment, looking at the ceiling. She notices her ceiling fan is covered in an inch of dust and wonders if she is tall enough to reach the ceiling fan to clean it. Miracle moves to the kitchen sink and spits. She hears ‘Pieces of You’ by The Cure playing from her computer. Miracle experiences a sentimental emotion as she listens to the song, feeling melodramatic. She imagines this song encompasses a number of different memories and feelings that are both happy and sad. She wonders how many other people love or have loved this song and other songs like it. Miracle pictures millions of people hearing this song and remembering good times. She wonders what this song really means. She thinks it would be great if she had written this song. She wishes she had written this song or a song equally as meaningful to millions of people. She thinks that if she wrote a song like this it would make her very proud. She thinks, “If I could make millions of people feel anything, it would be enough.” Miracle considers happiness and wonders what it takes to make other people happy consistently. She thinks, “I am only one person.” She walks back into the bathroom and spits.
_

Conrad kisses Miracle on the cheek and says, “I’ll text you later” and Miracle leaves. When she gets back to her apartment she sees she has a missed call from a strange international number she doesn’t recognize. She shivers and calls the number back.

Miracle says, “Hello?” and Julie says, “Hi Miracle.”

Miracle says, “How are you?”

Julie says, “I’m doing great.”

Miracle says, “Good.” Her reply is half-hearted and sounds sleepy. She hears people talking in the background in a language she doesn’t recognize. These people are dark, Latino men attempting to seduce her. Miracle wishes she was in a place where dark, Latino try to seduce her in unrecognizable languages. Conrad is not a dark, Latino. She says, “So, um, how is the whole family vacation?

Julie says, “I’m actually alone right now. Everyone left this morning and I decided to stay for another few days. How do you feel about that?”

Miracle says, “Nothing, I mean, I don’t know. Good? I feel good.”

Julie says, “What?”

Miracle says, “Okay. Your cat is okay.”

Julie says, “Okay. Good.”

Miracle says, “Alright, then.” She can hear the dark, Latino laughing in the background. They are asking Julie to bungee jump with them in a rainforest. Miracle feels distracted.

Julie says, “Thanks a ton” and waits for Miracle to say something then says, “You know where everything is so just let me know if you need anything.”

Miracle says, “Yeah, probably not. I’m not doing anything. Do you want to call me later?”

Julie says, “Okay, sure. Cool.”

Miracle says, “Alright. Enjoy your vacation” and Julie says, “Okay. I will. Good-bye.”

Miracle says, “Good-bye” and closes her phone. She sits down in a chair and feels exhausted and sick. She pours herself a glass of orange juice. She drinks the orange juice and feels better. She tells herself she isn’t sick in hopes that she isn’t becoming sick. She thinks, “The mind commands the body and it obeys” then looks out the window and sees it’s raining. She sits on the floor and watches the rain fall against the window, wondering when it started and when it will stop.
_

Miracle is at Julie’s apartment. She is watching one of Julie’s DVDs titled Raising Arizona starring Nicolas Cage. She eats sushi for dinner with a fork. She can feel cat hair sticking to her legs. Her legs are sweating. Nicolas Cage kidnaps a baby. The baby’s head reminds Miracle of her breasts. She pauses the DVD and walks into the kitchen. She takes a napkin out of a cabinet and sits back down. The cat’s litter box is clean and Miracle feels happy. After eating, she gets on Julie’s computer and checks her email. She thinks about vacuuming Julie’s couch. She wonders if using someone else’s vacuum without their permission is inappropriate. She looks at Julie’s bookshelf and tries to find a book she’s already read. Miracle can’t find one and isn’t sure what to do. She lies down in Julie’s bed and tries to fall asleep. She thinks, “Julie’s mattress is much more comfortable than mine.” She thinks, “I like everything about this place” and considers moving into Julie’s apartment permanently until Julie gets back from vacation. Julie will never come back from vacation. She will spend the rest of her life in the company of dark, Latino men. Nicolas Cage will attempt to steal the children Julie bares these men but he will fail. Miracle closes her eyes and wonders if there is someone within the same city block who feels the way she does. She wishes she could meet this person and be their friend without going through the process of becoming friends. She thinks, “But maybe that’s a selfish thing to feel.” She wonders if she remembered to feed the cat. She closes her eyes and counts the seconds as they pass. She loses count.
_

Days pass. Julie’s cat touches Miracle with its paw and Miracle wakes up. She thinks, “Where am I?” then remembers. She looks at Julie’s cat and feels as though the cat wants to say something and Miracle feels alarmed. She says, “Hello cat?” and wonders what to do. The cat looks at Miracle and Miracle feels vaguely frightened. The cat blinks. Miracle blinks. The cat does not move and Miracle starts crying. She looks at the ground then back at the cat. She coughs and snorts back mucous. She reaches towards the cat coaxingly and pets it. The cat raises its ass and begins to purr. Miracle holds the cat in her arms and lies on her back, cradling the cat like a human infant. She thinks about people, then stops. She thinks about a supernatural situation where she meets a version of herself from five years ago and neither she nor her younger self recognize or like one another. She touches one of her breasts. She starts to say something to herself then stops. The cat yawns and inadvertently brushes Miracle’s face with its paw. Miracle pretends the cat is attempting to wipe away her tears and she feels embarrassed. She says, “I’m sorry blind cat. For behaving this way.” The cat is silent. Miracle stares at the ceiling. Caribbean air. HPV vaccinations. She hears a bus drive past Julie’s apartment. She says the words, “Human Resource” softly under her breath. She feels sedated and unhealthy and cannot understand why. Everything becomes silent and stays silent. She tries to keep her eyes from closing then slowly allows them to close, wishing she had the ability to dissolve into the recesses of someplace warm, collecting her thoughts, trying to arrange them in a way that makes sense. Cat. Miracle. Silence. Blindness.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adam Moorad’s writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Underground Voices, Thieves Jargon, Storyglossia and Pear Noir. He lives in Brooklyn and works in publishing. Visit him here.

3:AM Asia: Paint Your Teeth

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (3:AM Magazine) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 02:29:34 +0000

Over at 3:AM Asia, David F. Hoenigman explains PAINT YOUR TEETH, an English-language literary event deep in the bowels of Tokyo’s insulated underground, in an interview by Jason Kushnir.

A Genuine Enslavement of the Attention

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (3:AM Magazine) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 02:22:09 +0000

David F. Hoenigman explains PAINT YOUR TEETH - an interview by Jason Kushnir.

It takes some big balls to mount an (ostensibly) English-language literary event deep in the bowels of Tokyo’s (ostensibly) insulated underground. Or at any rate it seems a bit, shall we say, hard-headed that one might aspire to making lasting inroads therein. But with PAINT YOUR TEETH cruising to its fourth installment in eight months, organizer David F. Hoenigman appears hell-bent on…something.

3:AM: Mr. Hoenigman, pardon me for being blunt, but what the hell were you thinking?

DH: I guess PAINT YOUR TEETH is the culmination of a pressing need for artistic community that has grown within me over the last few years. When I was writing Burn Your Belongings, I spent a lot of time behind closed doors as a self-precious tortured soul wadding up sheets of paper and banging my head on the desk. The book took forever to write and forever to finally come out. Once it did, I don’t know – I wanted some human contact.

3:AM: What sort of contact were you seeking?

DH: I wanted to interact with other artists, but I wasn’t interested in simply seeking out an existing group of expat writers and assuming my position within their hierarchy. I wanted something multicultural, something not cut off from the thriving Japanese underground, a connection deeper or more obscure than just a common language. I’ve always had a great time at noise shows in Tokyo and I wanted to tap into some of that energy. I once watched a performer eat four Big Macs in rapid succession onstage during his own short noise set and I thought he was onto something. I like the idea of a performance being interesting for two completely separate reasons.

3:AM: I found a PYT clip on YouTube. The dapper chap doing the reading struggles heroically to be heard above what sounds like John Zorn’s donkey getting sawn in half.

DH: The obvious problem with trying to attract a healthy mix of Japanese and expat attendees to a literary event is the language barrier. I’ve read with an interpretive dancer, with a sax/drums combo and while getting my hair cut onstage. I figure if someone can’t fully understand the meaning of the words they can at least appreciate the visual or musical aspects of the performance. Ashim Shanker (the dapper chap) has gone for all-out visual, audio mayhem when he reads. At the first PAINT YOUR TEETH, he invited a who’s who of the Tokyo noise scene to back him up: Cracksteel, Government Alpha, MO*TE (in his first performance in ten years!), Facialmess, TADM and Ezra Woolnough on sax -all joined Shanker in an acoustic noise performance involving chains, tin buckets, pipes, Styrofoam scraping across mirrors, etc. while he read from his novel Don’t Forget to Breathe. At PYT3, he read as performers re-enacted a scene from the novel with Kenji Siratori on laptop harshness, and Lulu Deluxe whipping and stepping on two diapered men as they squirmed across the floor of the club. Ted Richardson of the band Origami & Tea has a segment of their set where he tells a dramatic story of being lost in a dense forest for days, complete with corresponding sound effects (keyboards, toys, whistles, etc.) from the other two band members. What’s really great about this is that he makes the story bilingual—he reads the line in English and then again in Japanese throughout the entire song. I love all this and hope it continues, but I don’t want to discourage writers who’d like to simply come and read. Sarah MacLeod gave a stunning solo reading at PYT2 and Joe Zanghi had the audience mesmerized with his drunken hard luck story at PYT3 by simply reading over a blues CD.

What I really hope to happen is to draw out the Tokyo literary underground. With Japan’s proud tradition of amazing literature I can’t help but think that there’s a corner of Tokyo where the disciples of Yumeno, Dazai, Abe, Mishima, and Yumiko Kurahashi read for each other in some dank bar down a long corridor tucked within the red light district of an area of the city I’ve never even heard of. I want to find these people, or I want them to find me. Please come to PAINT YOUR TEETH and read your work in Japanese. We could stagger the performances – an English reader, a Japanese reader…etc. It’d be especially cool if we could translate some of their stuff into English and have an expat read it, and vice versa. I really hope that happens. I welcome anyone to contact me (in English or Japanese) if they can help in my plight to connect with these artists.

3:AM: Japanese underground musicians have long enjoyed the envy and admiration of their peers the world over, particularly for their commitment to crazy fucked up shit, tempered by an undeniable craftsmanship. Will we see some of this at PYT?

DH: The fliers proudly state, “a night of pushing the envelope of music, literature and dance.” So music is a big focus. Especially experimental music. I like the term “experimental” because it has such a broad meaning. I like bands and musicians who push themselves beyond what is classifiable into areas of chaos and of-thyself type honesty. Any genre is fine as long as the artists convey a willingness to drive the school bus off a cliff. Dangerously tottering solo sets are good, massive swarms of clang are good, visual gimmickry is good, sexy is good, freak folk is good, death metal, candypop noise, costume changes, avant-garde stylings, makeshift instruments, a certain aura, uncertainty, bravery, fear, etc. All this exists in abundance within the Tokyo scene, and I extend an invitation to you all. Please come. Please get involved. At PYT 3, Kenji Siratori made specially pressed CDs of a collaboration we’d done together to give to the first few dozen people through the door. That same night Herman Bartelen (owner of Gamuso in Asagaya, where PYT is held) closed the bar for 15 minutes and crawled behind the drum kit to join fire-breathing saxophonist Anthony Magor and myself for a short set of reading post-Coleman octopus din. Things like this add to the sense of community and all hands on deck mentality that I hope will define PAINT YOUR TEETH.

3:AM: PYT 2 boasted Origami & Tea’s memorable debut performance. Are you only looking for fresh faces just embarking on their quest for world dominance?

DH: No, not necessarily. If you remember, just after O&T’s set that night we had Kito-Mizukumi Rouber featuring members of legendary art-garage sludge band Aburadako. Those guys have been playing in the Tokyo scene for more than 25 years. They exude a sleek sophisticated showmanship underpinned by something very primal and unpredictable. They brought tons of fans, blew the roof off, they were awesome.

3:AM: Can any of these people dance?

DH: Hiroko Maejima is an absolutely amazing dancer who has graced us with performances at PYT 1 (above clip) and PYT 2. She can dance to a voice reading and make it seem like a war or a joyous festival, she commands the stage and the room like no other performer I’ve ever seen. In her case dance is high artistic achievement through years of study and discipline. I also encourage dance in the animal instinctive sense – a bout of spontaneity, allowing the body to become a lightning rod. Norwegian extreme noise experimentalist Lasse Marhaug happened to be in town to perform with Merzbow and Jim O’Rourke; he was so wrapped up in the moment at PYT 1 that he grabbed cinder blocks from the back room and smashed them in front of the stage. It sounded like a car crashing into a wall. Though I applaud the enthusiasm, it almost got us banned from the club (thanks again for your understanding Herman). So everyone please, if consumed by a need to set things right, please don’t take it out on Gamuso property. At PYT 3 a female audience member grabbed the whip from Lulu’s hand and administered a savage beating and kicking on the diapered men. She gave them exactly what they deserved. I could barely bring myself to watch. So yes, if consumed by a violent urge, please take it out on Soddy and/or Ezra.

Also, not exactly along the lines of dance, but still employing the visual and somatic creativity that we adore, was Taniori of Origami & Tea at PYT3. She wore eight or nine different pairs of waist-high tights under her skirt, one on top of the other, every color of the rainbow. Throughout the performance, one by one, she’d peel them off and tie them to the mic stand. The audience loved it. Apparently she got the idea shortly before they were due to take the stage and went out on a stocking run – dead cool.

3:AM: ￥1,000 (including 1 drink) seems a poor man’s pittance in the Tokyo market.

DH: Overpriced live entertainment is my enemy.

3:AM: So what’s on the ever-expanding PAINT YOUR TEETH horizon?

DH: I’m considering starting a small press called PAINT YOUR TEETH Books. My second novel Squeal For Joy would be the debut release. I need to finish writing the novel first, I hope to be done by the end of this year. I’d love to release PYT CDs, compilations of reading and music. I’d love to make a PYT movie, ask performers to send me four or five minute short films that I’d edit into a compilation DVD. Rather than live footage I’d want performers to make their own MTV style video clips, I think we’d get some interesting results. Other than that: coffee mugs, bumper stickers, baby clothes…etc.

3:AM: OK, so give us the scoop on PYT 4.

DH: PAINT YOUR TEETH 4 will be Sunday, August 23rd at Gamuso in Asagaya, Tokyo. Lulu Deluxe of the Defektretts is on the flyer (above). Doors open at 6:30PM, show starts at 7:00PM. ￥1,000 (including 1 drink). We have a killer line-up, for details please check out: www.myspace.com/paintyourteeth and click the links below. See you there!

PAINT YOUR TEETH 4 line-up:
IN MINOTAUR!!! – Ayler meets Sabbath’s rhythm section in this power trio. word is these guys live in the woods.
Yuri Kageyama – has collaborated with musicians, dancers and visual artists in performances of her poetry. she has read with Ishmael Reed and Shuntaro Tanikawa among many others.
Kei Kunihiro – death metal crooner and Internet sensation. 424,826 views and counting!
David F. Hoenigman – will read from his antinovel Burn Your Belongings
DEFEKTRETTS – no boys allowed incarnation of junk machine sound pioneers DEFEKTRO. one dj and two noise makers.
LIVING ASTRO – the Joe Meek adoring rock/sample/synth mutant pop duo.
SHIT – slapdash assembly of area experimental musicians on a burning ferris wheel: OWKMJ, Taishin Inoue, Ezra Woolnough + many others.

The Missing Links

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (3:AM Magazine) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:09:36 +0000

Dennis Cooper in the latest issue of Dazed & Confused on (among other things) refusing to do a Gap advert. * The excellent (French) Editions Inculte have revamped their site. * Monsieur Hulot revisited. * Joe Stretch the ladyboy. * Heidi James interviewed by Lee Rourke, plus an extract from Carbon, Heidi’s new novel. * Ben Myers reviews the new Britpop compilation. * 3:AM’s Lee Rourke reviews Caught By the River (which includes contributions from the aforementioned Ben Myers and Britpop luminary Jarvis Cocker). * Bad boy Geoff Dyer: “As I was putting on a pair of trousers - cargo pants, to use the correct sartorial term — I had not worn since the flight, I felt something bulky in my pocket: a large bag of skunk complete with pipe. Accidentally I had taken this through what is probably the most drug-alert airport in the world — Miami. There were sniffer dogs everywhere. I had walked though emigration in UK, sauntered through immigration in the US, strolled through US emigration, boarded a plane to Nassau, and entered the Bahamas. And nothing had happened”. * Hanif Kureishi on adapting The Black Album for the stage. * Good music journalism. * What is so elusive about music that makes generation after generation of writers argue that it can’t be captured by words? * Niven Goviden on ‘disco fiction’: “Nightlife has long been favoured territory for novelists. That is a given. F. Scott Fitzgerald jazzed us out in the Hamptons and along the Riviera. Patrick Hamilton smoked us out in backstreet Fitzrovia boozers. Colin MacInnes gave us caffeine induced palpitations in Soho Coffee Bars. But to my mind, the big gap comes from the late ‘70s onwards, specifically to do with music and dancing. Where is the definite nightclub novel, and who is going to write it?” * Stuart Christie, interviewed. * Alma Books’ Elisabetta Minervini is now a Chevalier des arts et des lettres. * Bostonist g-chats Brandon Scott Gorrell. * Occassional Pages (via @stml) * “When I enter the bank in the morning I wait for someone to announce something about either his cazzo, culo or coglioni (penis, rump or testicles).” James Joyce in Rome. * It’s got to have balls, Denise Oswald on Soft Skull’s future. * Etgar Keret & Nicholas Hogg stories in Litro. * Why Haruki Murakami’s bestselling IQ84 is worth the wait. * Dalkey Archive are launching an anthology series next year with the Aleksandar Hemon edited Best European Fiction 2010. * July’s Words Without Borders: Memorys & lies. * “I will one day live in Iran…or else my life will have had no meaning.” Marjane Satrapi (via @maudnewton) * Bookslut interview Shaun Tan. * Holgapalooza, the lo-fi photography fest. * Everything you didn’t even know you needed to know about the theremin. * 10 frequently challenged books everyone should read. * 10 ways to take a bad author photo. * 15 Sonic Youth opening acts who made it huge.

Heidegger and anxiety

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (ReadySteadyBlog) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 06:52:06 +0000

The latest Guardian blog article by Simon Critchley on Heidegger concerns itself with anxiety. Rhys has all the links to this and the other previous articles in the series. Of course, anxiety can't be understood if you don't understand the centrality of mood to Heidegger's thought, something Simon tackled nicely in the preceding article:

Furthermore, I am always found in a mood, a Stimmung. This is mood is the strong Aristotelian sense of pathos, a passion of the soul or an affect, something befalls us and in which we find ourselves. The passions are not, for Heidegger, psychological colouring for an essentially rational agent. They are rather the fundamental ways in which we are attuned to the world. Indeed, musicologically, Stimmung is linked to tuning and pitch: one is attuned to the world firstly and mostly through moods. One of the compelling aspects of Heidegger's work is his attempt to provide a phenomenology of moods, of the affects that make up our everyday life in the world. (More...)

More sad songs

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (ReadySteadyBlog) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 06:40:21 +0000

Just as a very quick follow-up to my Sad Music post from last week (and thanks to everyone who commented on that -- and, please, keep those comments coming), I note that there is a Virgin ad on the telly at the moment featuring the beautiful Mazzy Star (David Roback and vocalist Hope Sandoval) track Into Dust from 1993's So Tonight That I Might See. Now, that song is a real beauty...

L.J. Davis: A Meaningful Life

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Asylum) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 01:00:47 +0000

What a pleasure it is to write about a book that I loved without complication. For those academics even now preparing studies on whether or not the new social media can actually sell books, chalk one up for me. Already an admirer of NYRB Classics, I bought this book when they mentioned it on Twitter or Facebook or, you know, one of those sites. We owe a debt of gratitude to novelist Jonathan Lethem, who lobbied for its reissue, and to NYRB Classics editor Edwin Frank, who listened.

A Meaningful Life was first – and last – published in 1971, and until now had not even reached a paperback edition. Says Davis in this fascinating piece about the background to the book and its rediscovery, “It came out and nothing happened.” (Hugo Wilcken, take heart.) There really is no excuse for this, as it’s the most miserably funny book I’ve read all year.

The meaningful life of the title is sought by Lowell Lake, who one day shortly after his 30th birthday, wakes up with “the sudden realization that his job was not temporary.”

He’d found his level, and here he was, on it. He was the managing editor of a second-rate plumbing-trade weekly, a job he did adequately if not with much snap. It was, he realized with a dull kind of shock, just the sort of job for a man like him. Someday he might rise to the editorship, either of the plumbing trade monthly or of something exactly like it. Big deal. But it was all he was good for, and he was stuck with it.

Here we are then, in the territory previously occupied by any number of dissatisfied suburban workers: Frank Wheeler in Revolutionary Road; Sinclair Lewis’s George Babbitt; Bob Slocum in Something Happened; Tom Rath in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The ease with which I can recall examples indicates how much I’ve enjoyed these books; but do we need another? Did we in 1971?

Well, it didn’t hurt. Davis executes his tale with much more open wit than the others: Something Happened is a very funny novel but is “black humour … with the humour removed”, in Kurt Vonnegut’s words, as the author “cripples his own jokes intentionally.” A Meaningful Life is more straightforward, more seductive than that, and in that sense all the more impressive for allowing no light at the end of the tunnel for its ‘hero’. It is different from Something Happened in that there, the narrator makes his own miserable comedy; here, the jokes are all on Lowell Lake. But like Heller’s book – like the best comic writing – it comes unsweetened, tempered by an undertow – an overflow – of despair.

Lowell, an inadequate man, is surrounded by inadequates, such as his boss, Crawford, the editor of the plumbing trade monthly, who fears an office coup, “that someday they would contrive to get him no matter what he did to stop them.” Or his father-in-law, Leo, whose relentlessly droning smalltalk drives Lowell to distraction (”Lowell was afraid to open his mouth for fear of screaming in the little man’s face”). It even, in a nicely astute moment, begins to infect Lowell’s perception of his wife:

“Great”, said Lowell, noticing with a sinking feeling that her last sentence had been spoken with her father’s inflection and ended with her father’s phrase. He’d never noticed a thing like that in her voice before. He began to listen for it, and shortly his fears were confirmed. It was there all right, coming and going like the odor of burning tires in a rose garden.

This is how he got here. Lowell, frustrated in his job, silently bored by his marriage, decided to do a Frank Wheeler and move to a new life: not to Europe but to New York from his western home. Unlike Frank Wheeler, he never got around to putting it off:

There was no getting out of it. Afloat on a tide of events and furiously propelled by his wife, he gave notice at the library, renouncing his scholarship at the Berkeley, and told everyone in sight that he’d decided to go to New York, desperately hoping that someone would give him some smart-sounding and compelling reason for doing no such blame-fool thing, but no one did. On the contrary, the more people he told about it, the more it seemed like he was actually going to go.

As Lowell brings himself with him, the new life feels very much like the old life: and not a very meaningful one at that. What he does to try to overturn this is the central plot of the book: he buys a Brooklyn brownstone “of such surpassing opulent hideousness that Lowell could scarcely believe that someone was actually offering to sell it to him. It was just the kind of place he’d always really wanted with a powerful subconscious craving that defied analysis.” His project to refurbish the building is undertaken on the very good grounds that busy fingers are happy fingers; but it never occurs to Lowell that the question “How can I have a meaningful life?” is one which, once asked, cannot be satisfactorily answered.

The chapter which shows Lowell meeting the existing tenants of the building, who will need to be evicted, is the weakest section of the book. Davis is by far at his best when trapping Lowell in the crucibles of family and work. There are some brilliant set pieces, masterclasses in comic writing, including one where Lowell tries to bribe a city man during the planning process, and another where he is accidentally anti-semitic during an argument with his mother-in-law. Davis excels in taking the comedy of discomfort and stretching it further than it should go.

The prose in A Meaningful Life is fast on its feet and often surprising. You can read the first chapter here; if you like it, this is a book for you. In a book where the central character’s “concrete desires” seem to him to be “almost facts”, it’s a relief when hopes and expectations for a book are more than fulfilled in reality.

The Hospital Club 100 (again)

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (ReadySteadyBlog) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 01:07:47 +0000

I'm in the annual Hospital Club 100 list again ("The Hospital Club 100, compiled in association with The Independent, ranks the most influential creative and media people. Here are this year’s ‘Established’ and ‘Emerging’ winners in each of the ten categories "). If I'm reading this correctly, I'm the "Emerging" winner in the Books and Literary category. The Book Depository gets a namecheck as RSB's sister site (!) but -- regardless of how slightly squiffy their biography of me is -- it is always nice to be in.

Thanks to all those who voted for me!

Perhaps Britain’s most influential literary blogger, Thwaite has dedicated his site to reviewing the best in literature, poetry, philosophy and history, and offers a forum for sparky discussions on the merits of new publications. Thwaite also runs the sistersite, Book Depository, and has spoken at the London International Book Fair and been a panellist at the Oxford Literary Festival.

By the Numbers (of a d20)

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Eve's Alexandria) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 03:15:29 +0000

I must apologise for the lack of content from me; June turned out to be a fantastically busy month. I'll be back next week with at least one new post, but for now here's a reprint SFX review, from a few months back, to be getting on with: Rides a Dread Legion (2009), by Raymond E. Feist. After a run of good review books, it all went a bit pear-shaped...

Reader, beware: this may be the first in a new series, but there is a serious weight of backstory here. No less than twenty-four books written or co-written by Feist are set in the same universe. At times, during this instalment, it feels like the characters are going to synopsize the plot of each and every one.

It is easy to see why Feist keeps returning to the same well: it is a rewardingly complex creation, made up of multiple fantastical planets (and planes of existence) reachable by magical portals. The story possibilities are enormous, and glimpses of the ‘deep’ past are fascinating, like the fact that a community of elves living in splendid Lothlorien-esque peace, the eledhel of Elvandar, once built their power upon enslavement of other races. Unlike so many fantasy worlds, Feist’s is no static, pseudo-medieval society that has endured unchanging for thousands of unlikely years.

In practice, though, past books have generally boiled the story possibilities down to magical invasion – usually of Midkemia, home of human, dwarves and eledhel. The new series looks to be no exception. But Dread Legion spends most of its length in explanation and set-up, as an elven people called the taredhel flee the demonic ravaging of their home planet for Midkemia, and the usual suspects line up to defend the world once again.

Some of the set-up is plot-necessary, if inelegantly done. A handful of taredhel spend several chapters explaining their history to each other, and to an audience in Elvandar. The omniscient narration gives us the new characters’ backgrounds, generally in large chunks of text when they first enter the story. Elsewhere, though, the exposition only serves to highlight how entangled this story is with the existing continuity, as a seemingly endless litany of references to past adventures – many of which sound more interesting than the present one – slows the pace to a crawl.

There is limited action, and it tends to read like turn-based combat straight out of a roleplaying game. [Aside: The world of Midkemia began life as a roleplaying setting dreamt up by Feist when he was in college. So the very D&D fights are probably no coincidence...] Overly-precise information about the mechanics of spells and demon defences – and tension-puncturing language like someone receiving only “a nasty bump” after being magically slammed into a cave wall – get in the way of any thrills or grit. Certain characters, like troubled knight Sandreena, are interesting, but many are distinguishable only by name and backstory. Returnees like Pug, so fully portrayed in novels like Magician, are poorly served here.

~~Nic

Mystery in literature

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (This Space) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:20:00 +0000

People happily talk about the mystery of poetry and of literature. They talk about it ad nauseam. However, nothing is explained, I have to confess, by alluding here to magic or religious ecstasy, wishing stones or observant animals. To talk about the ineffable is to say precisely nothing at all. To talk about secrets is to confess nothing. Poets may indeed be devout, but to what are they devoted? Writers may know a great deal, but what kind of knowledge is it?

It is seventy years since Jean Paulhan wrote this, the introductory paragraph The Flowers of Tarbes, his study of literary language, and it seems pretty dated. After all, isn't everything in the process of being explained? Now it is clear they don't talk about the mystery of poetry and of literature ad nauseam. Mystery has been replaced. In the US, according to BookForum, "the enormous novel of technical, scientific, or historical knowledge [has] become the highest credential for male writers". The buzz in bookchat rises when fiction dramatises and enables discussion about current ideas and events, perhaps because this also encourages popular consumption and debate among those for whom fiction is so much play. The situation is due to many contingent factors - such as those outlined in Mark McGurl's The Program Era reviewed above - but the underlying trend suggests a fundamental disconnect with the origins and direction of art. While people still respond to the deep current of literature - why else are we stirred by fiction? - rationalism and commerce has drowned the happy talk. Paulhan goes on to accuse critics of neglecting mystery. But what mystery is there to be found?

Summarised crudely, Paulhan examines the place of mystery in literature by outlining the two opposing conceptions of literary language. One – which he calls Terrorist – that is at war with cliché as it seeks to bring the absolute immediacy of actual lived experience to the word, while the other – Rhetoricist – is content to work with conventional language to maintain clarity and order. While the implications go beyond literature, we can summarise its literary aspect with a reminder of the historical opposition of, for example, Joycean stream-of-consciousness and Edwardian fiction. To make it contemporary, we are all familiar with the widespread perplexity over the distinction between literary and genre fiction. Paulhan finds the Terrorist conception wrongheaded. After all, a word is also a sign - its referent's Platonic ideal perhaps - a cliché by necessity. The reader recognises unrefined, authentic language only by failing to remember its ideality. The war on cliché demands an impossible private language. Even when a populist like Nick Hornby complains about "opaquely written" fiction, he isn't claiming it's gibberish. Whatever we write, literature takes possession of it; thus "experimental" writing is as far from the ineffable real as the most formulaic genre piece. Mystery, it turns out, is in the illusion of literature's absence.

So how does the individual, uncontent with illusion and compelled to resist silence in order to capture the pressing matter of real thought and real experience, begin to write? Paulhan recommends ceding to cliché and working within its constraints - comparable today perhaps to Daniel Green's championing of literary aesthetics. We can see how this has been embraced in its crudest form in mass market book culture. Here the highest praise for a writer is that she does "a good professional job for the reader". The irony is that in the embrace of constraint, cliché itself becomes a elitist private language, indistinguishable from its sworn enemy. Unless one has been initiated into the true meaning of clichés, they can appear like cryptic clues to the machinations of an arcane world (hence the apocryphal nerdism of genre communities). One has to read very carefully before one can forget one is reading. Genre literature thereby performs a dual function - worldly and mysterious.

Given this happy double, it's no surprise that creative writers submit to the constraints of technical, scientific and historical knowledge. It also explains the emergence of autobiography – the so-called misery memoir – as a force in the literary marketplace. Shorn of artifice, the life story purports to be truth in the raw, closer to reality than the contrivances of novels. Of course, as the James Frey Controversy revealed, fiction is not so easily dispensed with. Oprah Winfrey's public admonition of the author is perhaps revealed as less an expression of propriety than one of distress and disbelief in the mysterious, illusory movement of the Book, the form she has otherwise embraced as a means of self-help and social empowerment.

Glenn Patterson: Number 5

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Asylum) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:00:37 +0000

A couple of years ago I enjoyed The Third Party, the latest novel by local (to me) author Glenn Patterson. When I wanted to read more by him, I went for his fifth novel, smartly titled Number 5, which is the only one of his books to be consistently in print by a national publisher since its first appearance. (His earlier novels had slipped out of print but are now available again through Belfast’s Blackstaff Press.)

Number 5 (2003) is a high-concept book: it tells the stories of the people who have lived in one house over several decades. It sounds like the sort of thing which must have been done before, though I can only think of books which cover different occupants of apartment blocks at the same time, such as Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual or Elif Shafak’s The Flea Palace. (Suggestions welcome.) Unlike those books, this is a relatively simple and linear story, though not without cleverness and bite.

Often reviews will claim that a building or place ‘becomes a character’ in the book. Here, instead, the building becomes the link between the characters and also what causes their divisions.

Each story of 50 pages or so opens with the estate agent’s brochure for the house: number 5 in an unnamed road. When the book begins, in the late 1950s, the street is a new development on the outskirts of pre-troubles Belfast (”Pleasantly situated in healthy rural surroundings, yet ideally convenient to shops and all four main churches”). By the end, at the close of the century, the blurb instead highlights proximity to the newest place of Sunday worship (”the attraction of this ever-popular development will be enhanced by the Little Lake shopping centre (with Tesco superstore) opening June 1997″). In between, we see the flow of change as gentrification, affluence and developing tastes alter the interior, from “dinette” and “attractive plastic cupboard tops” to “slate work surfaces” and “high-tensile steel shelf supports.” It reflects, too, as the residents come and go, changing domestic life: from the nuclear family to the house-sharing friends.

Naturally, the people living in number 5 change too, as do their view of what’s socially acceptable: when the Falloons live there, in the 1950s, Stella Falloon watches with caution as one neighbour “brought a kitchen chair out to the south-facing front of his house” and worries that this is too close to what she thought she had left behind. In the end she might be more concerned about what is yet to come: one might sigh at the prospect of the Troubles rearing their head in a Northern Ireland novel, but here Patterson manages to make it both key to the book and somehow incidental to the real life going on all around. A terrible incident will puncture Stella’s life, and punctuate the book at beginning and end, bringing back characters and providing a sense of completeness.

If this completeness seems a touch too close to neatness, it nonetheless works because of the book’s tone: it has a likeability and charm which comes through the ordinariness of the characters. It seems contrary to the spirit of such a book to say that it ‘deals with issues’ – but there is plenty here dealt lightly, incorporating nice plot twists such as a woman who gradually loses her family to Christianity, or the Chinese family (for decades, Chinese were the only ethnic minority in Belfast) whose experience of racism is not quite what it seems. When the son goes into his parents’ restaurant:

[a] few young men walked in out of the dark and sat at the tables nearest the door waiting for takeaways. I think they were disturbed to see so many of us in one place – there could be fifteen, twenty, sometimes more – and I imagined them waking in sweats from dreams where their world was reversed and they were the odd men out, the curiosities.

As in any book set in the recent past, Number 5 is not short of handy cultural references to the times. Occasionally these are heavy-handed (”You should consider yourself lucky,” says one woman to another who can’t get pregnant, “half the women in the world are praying for a pill to stop it”), but elsewhere brain-proddingly nostalgic (the mention of Gloy gum set off a chain of schoolboy memories for me: that brown gloop! The rubbery wedge tip!). Patterson also has a neat facility for evocative images, as with an alcoholic whose complexion “separated into a thousand broken veins and blood vessels, an intricate map of all the wrong roads he had taken.”

Finally it is not the locality, or the nostalgia, or the cleverness which pleases, but the strength in character-building: each story features several new people, and Patterson sets himself a significant task to create them all fully in a few dozen pages, but he manages it. Number 5 is Patterson number two for me, and makes me look forward to number three all the more.

Between night and day

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (This Space) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 03:23:00 +0000

On a Monday morning soon after sleep I wrote out a fragment of a dream. Its violence and purity provoked an impulse to record. Why was this apparent non-event so much more vital and haunting than the remote disturbances of consciousness? It's a question such writing asks between night and day.

The hope is that violence and purity will emerge in the scribbled commentary; words containing, as Beckett put it, "the integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind". However, once written, the breeze dies; estrangement from the purity of the dream is indistinguishable from that of the day. Conscious narrative can only reinstate the uncertainty that the dream itself terminated. In writing, experience enters the realm of possibility rather than actuality; only asking remains. This must be why I feel no pressure to write out lived experience nor to reproduce the dream narrative here; that is, no wish to make an object subject to interpretation. Perhaps actuality is the termination of objects.

What was written was interpreted. Rather than the written dream revealing a Freudian cliché of unconscious desire, the purity, I realised, was a product of the dream's dramatisation of two or more contradictory impulses and their distillation into one. For this reason, it was an event that it could never play out in actual existence. To make the truth known, it had to be a lived fiction. Conscious existence seems lesser because it cannot maintain itself without contradiction. No wonder there was an urge to record the dream. And while it could be said only the individual who dreamt could appreciate the urgency of the revelation, a dream also means this: the end of individuality.

There is an added consequence: dream writing, as a means of responding to the pure work of sleep, thereby becomes a form of literary criticism. However one writes out one's recollection of the dream, it is already a commentary, already an idea of the thing, an act of reception, not the thing itself. The primary event itself resists repetition. Yet the primary event, the pure work, is not the real thing either. The real thing takes its course and we are left to respond in the stillness of midnight. The dream's actuality is the actuality of art; writing upon writing.

Keep going wrong

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (This Space) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:37:00 +0000

In response to this post at RSB.

Cerise summer

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (This Space) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:21:00 +0000

A new online literary and arts journal Cerise Press has posted its first issue. The site says it is based in the United States and France and aims to build "cross-cultural bridges by featuring artists and writers in English and translations, with an emphasis on French and Francophone works."

Despite that, in this issue you can find translations of poems by the Russians Akhmatova, Mandelshtam and Tsvetaeva as well as those from the French of Apollinaire and Abdelwahab Meddeb.

Under fiction there's Robert Kelly's Letter to Thomas Bernhard, which begins by addressing an obvious issue:

I don't know why I'm bothering to write to you. You're dead, for one thing. All we really share is a love for Glenn Gould and long sentences, probably that's the same love in different forms. Forms of art. I think it's mostly because I want to borrow your complaining tone.

Sad music

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (ReadySteadyBlog) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:50:47 +0000

Indulging in listening to sad music is one of life's finer pleasures, I think. From Strauss's Four Last Songs, Schubert's Winterreise, Valentin Silvestrov's Silent Songs (the song based on Keats' La Belle Dame Sans Merci, sung in Russian, is -- almost literally -- to die for) through to David Sylvian's Let The Happiness In, the better (i.e. most melancholic) moments of This Mortal Coil, The For Carnation or Dakota Suite or parts of Jacaszek's Treny album, miserable music is a vital part of my armoury against the world. I'm always on the look out for me -- and this thread on violinist.com has pointed me to some new sad sounds to indulge in... but if y'all have any favourites please let me know.

Michael Jackson

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (ReadySteadyBlog) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 01:07:52 +0000

I'm certainly not the person to write anything insightful on Michael Jackson, but k-punk has stepped up to the plate:

The death of this King - "my brother, the Legendary King Of Pop", as Jermaine Jackson described him in his press conference, as if giving Michael his formal title - recalls not the Diana carcrash, but the sad slump of Elvis from catatonic narcosis into the long good night. Perhaps it was only Elvis who managed to insinuate himself into practically every living human being's body and dreams to the same degree that Jackson did, at the microphysical level of enjoyment as well as at the macro-level of spectacular memeplex. Michael Jackson: a figure so subsumed and consumed by the videodrome that it's scarely possible to think of him as an individual human being at all... because he wasn't of course... becoming videoflesh was the price of immortality, and that meant being dead while still alive, and no-one knew that more than Michael (more...)

Publishing Laid Bare Conference

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (ReadySteadyBlog) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 01:29:27 +0000

Last Thursday, I spoke at Legend Press's first Publishing Laid Bare Conference. Basically, I said, "the internet is good, bloggers are fab" -- so nothing particularly newsworthy there then! But thanks so much to the good folk at Legend Press for inviting me to speak and thanks to everyone for the warm reception I got from those in attendance on the day.

Marilynne Robinson: Housekeeping

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Asylum) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 01:00:49 +0000

In 2003, when the Observer newspaper compiled a list of “the 100 greatest novels of all time,” one title – Housekeeping – stood out. What? It was the only one from the last century that I hadn’t heard of. Who? Marilynne Robinson sounded like a new Harper Lee: one bang a quarter of a century ago and then silence. Now, six years later, she needs no introduction: two more novels in quick succession, a Pulitzer, a Bessie, and overall as much orgiastic praise as you can eat. I’ve read Gilead but not Home, but was pleased recently when a book swap project landed me with a copy of that (suddenly reprinted) debut.

My recollection of Gilead – perhaps distorted – is that a heavy religiosity pervaded each page, so I approached Housekeeping (1981) with doubts. There is a hymnal, if not quite biblical, quality to the prose: solid but lyrical, Southern without gothic. It sometimes overreaches (for a death we have “my grandmother one winter morning eschewed awakening”), but mostly it is what politicians would call fit for purpose. The first third of the book takes its time unpacking the opening paragraph:

My name is Ruth. I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher.

The aim, I suppose, is that the reader should itch to know what became of their mother and why they passed through so many hands. In creating this need, and then satisfying it, Robinson proves herself to be adept in aspects of literary magic. As well as providing aesthetic pleasure in her prose, the sort that begs to be rolled around in the mouth before swallowing, she sketches brilliant set pieces a page or two in length, little essences of storytelling – as when a train slides into the lake.

The lake is central to the story, and to Ruth and Lucille’s lives in the town of Fingerbone (the name so effortfully evocative that it’s almost comical). Unanchored to a fixed family, as the figures surrounding them change, the sisters develop an attachment to the landscape instead. The lake is “a place of distinctly domestic disorder”, surrounded by “uncountable mountains.” It seems from the outset destined to bring tragedy, but isn’t that what lakes do in literature?

Lake, woods, place: it can all seem a little literary-fiction-by-numbers, but that is not to deny the power of the telling. “Fact explains nothing,” we are told, so it’s a book of impressions and memories, informal but not unreliable. Robinson continues to display her best writerly skills, surprising us with comedy, as when the sisters-in-law Lily and Nona Foster first meet Sylvia, who they hope can take over care for the girls:

So when Lily said, with a glance at Nona, “What a lovely dress,” it was as if to say, “She seems rather sane! She seems rather normal!” And when Nona said, “You look very well,” it was as if to say, “Perhaps she’ll do! Perhaps she can stay and we can go!”

As that opening paragraph told us, she does stay; they do go. There is a fine touch too of character sketching in the traditional sense, witty and not too wordy:

Bernice, who lived below us, was our only visitor. She had lavender lips and orange hair, and arched eyebrows each drawn in a single brown line, a contest between practice and palsy which sometimes ended at her ear. She was an old woman, but managed to look like a young woman with a ravaging disease. She stood any number of hours in our doorway, her long back arched and her arms folded on her spherical belly, telling scandalous stories in a voice hushed in deference to the fact that Lucille and I should not be hearing them.

The accumulation of all these elements is impressive, because the writing remains low-key enough for it not to look like showing off. (Though perhaps such literary coquettishness is itself a form of showing off.) When the people and the town are associated so closely, it’s obvious that Robinson is pulling out another literary trick – foreshadowing – as when Ruth tells us, “There was not a soul there but knew how shallow-rooted the whole town was. It flooded yearly, and had burned once.”

What that leads to is a pretty dramatic last few scenes, particularly so for a book others have described as one where not much happens. One might say that the way events accumulate in the story is the same way that Housekeeping became a modern classic: gradually, and then suddenly.

Blackmoor Takes it All

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Eve's Alexandria) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 06:42:25 +0000

I haven't had time yet to finish up my review of Edward Hogan's Blackmoor, which I read as part of the Desmond Elliott prize shortlist (which I haven't finished entirely. No suprise there). But I'm very, very, very pleased to see the announcement that it has won the Award and the £10,000 that goes with it.

Hurray! I can't stress enough what a worthy and entirely beautiful debut it is. I will be writing about it very soon, but in the meantime you can see short reviews here and here. And of course, you could buy it and read it for yourself. Here is a blurb to be a-tempting you:

“You said once that Blackmoor killed Mum.”
“I suppose you don’t think that a place can kill a person,” says George.
Vincent shrugs. “I just want to know how.”
“Slowly, that’s how.”

Bird-watching teenager Vincent Cartwright lives out a bullied, awkward existence not far from the site of Blackmoor, a mysterious, vanished Derbyshire village. His mother Beth, half-blind and unknowable, and her life and death in that same village has always been a dark family secret, but as Vincent comes of age he begins to search for the truth.

~~Victoria~~

Blanchot: Political Writings, 1953–1993

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (This Space) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:29:00 +0000

In early 2010, Fordham University Press is publishing Zakir Paul's translation of Maurice Blanchot's Ecrits politiques: 1953-1993.

This posthumously published volume collects his political writings from 1953 to 1993, from the French-Algerian War and the mass movements of May 1968 to postwar debates about the Shoah and beyond. A large number of the essays, letters, and fragments it contains were written anonymously and signed collectively, often in response to current events.

While political writings as such do not interest me, Blanchot's are an inevitable exception.

When read together, these pieces form a testament to what political writing could be: not merely writing about the political or politicizing the written word, but unalterably transforming the singular authority of the writer and his signature.

Rex Warner: The Aerodrome

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Asylum) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:00:49 +0000

When Vintage Books relaunched their previously elegant Classics line a couple of years ago, they adopted the asinine branding practice of replacing the author’s forename on the cover with the word Vintage. Irritating yes, but also baffling when applied to writers who aren’t household (sur)names, such as Rex Warner. The Aerodrome was one of the first titles they issued in the new design, which by some form of logic I presumed that meant they thought it was one of the very best. Certainly it has its followers: Anthony Burgess named it as one of the 99 best novels written between 1939 and 1984.

The Aerodrome (1941) is subtitled A Love Story, though if one had to define it, sci-fi and dystopia would come to mind sooner. It’s set in a parallel England in the mid-20th century, where the war is not between the Nazis and the British but is internal, between order and chaos. It’s a singular book, an odd one, and about the best I can say for it is that I’m glad I read it because now I don’t need to wonder what it’s like any more.

Few, I think, would suggest that The Aerodrome is elegantly written. The first quarter of the book features three dramatic developments, each dispatched about as implausibly as could be: if you’ve had enough of master criminals detailing their plans by soliloquy, how about Warner’s variation, where a rector delivers a twelve-page murder confession to God, handily in earshot of his wife and adopted son? (Later, another character expires while making a deathbed revelation.) Aside from this carefree approach to credibility, there is sheer clumsiness (”I had been taking things very much too much for granted”) and a muddy willingness to use one sentence where two or three would be more welcome:

It was not until the end of the meal that there was made to me by those whom, up to now, I had assumed to be my parents a disclosure important enough to unsettle the whole basis of my thoughts and feelings; and it was the Flight-Lieutenant who, more than any other of those present, had seemed to understand how important to me this disclosure was, even though all his views on the subject were, I could see at once, wholly different from my own.

Nonetheless there is a canniness at work, as Warner confounds the reader’s expectations by introducing us to a seemingly typical English village, and only later making references to the aerodrome which will take over the villagers’ lives, with its “large hangars at the top of the hill curved in a way so like the natural roundness of this land, and yet in its perfect regularity so unlike.” There is a wonderful scene where the Air Vice-Marshal of the air force behaves abominably at a funeral, but the narrator, Roy, nonetheless joins the air force largely as a replacement for the security he has lost with the death of his father.

Yet it remains a curious and uneven book, where the muddy prose tends to block out any sense of development, and then the narrator Roy switches allegiances with head-spinning speed. The only evidence we have for Roy’s sudden conversion to the cause of the aerodrome are the rambling rants by the Air Vice-Marshal, who claims the air force and its cleanliness and purity as an evolutionary step ahead of the village it seeks to occupy and correct:

Please put [your parents and your homes] out of your minds directly. For good or evil you are yourselves, poised for a brief and dazzling flash of time between two annihilations. Reflect, please, that “parenthood”, “ownership”, “locality” are the words of those who stick in the mud of the past to form the fresh deposit of the future. And so is “marriage”. Those words are without wings. I do not care to hear an airman use them.

The threat from the aerodrome remains undefined, bar one or two shocking incidents. This nebulous sense of peril is apt enough – the reader can read into it at will – but it also feels like a lack of nerve on Warner’s part. He claims Kafka as an influence (a common claim: who doesn’t?) but, as Michael Moorcock points out in his introduction, there’s not much evidence of this in The Aerodrome. The analogy of the story is with fascism: the sloppy, deceptive, incestuous village is to be preferred to the clinical, orderly, dictatorial aerodrome, “designed to stifle life which, however misused, was richer in everything but determination.”

Moorcock’s introduction – more interesting to me than the novel itself – emphasises that The Aerodrome is “very evidently a novel of ideas” (though I’m not sure where he gets the plural from), and if that means there is not much consideration given to characters or story, then he’s got that spot on. There are plot points set up to engage the reader, and they are resolved, but the impression given is that Warner didn’t set much store by them, that they are little more than bait. I was put in mind of the fascinatingly sterile novels of J.G. Ballard – by no coincidence a Warner fan, according to the back cover of this edition. It has that same sense of promise, originality, frustration and disappointment. Moorcock also describes The Aerodrome as “Warner’s masterpiece” – bloody hell, are you sure? Not so much Vintage Warner, then, as Corked.

Stuff and links

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (ReadySteadyBlog) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 07:47:18 +0000

Oh, when am I not busy! Anyway, today I seem even busier than ever... So, a few web goodies to tide y'all over:

lots of Ezra Pound links from orbis quintus (I've always been an Eliot man rather than a Pound-head, but I'll be taking the Cantos away with me on my next trip to London so maybe that'll change soon...)
did Joyce coin 'blog'?
John Self on Zweig Stefan (as my bloglines feed has it!)
John Berger archive at the British Library
anyone else going to the TLS party on Thursday? email me if you are...

Dust to Dust

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Eve's Alexandria) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 10:18:45 +0000

The Desmond Elliott shortlist has gotten off to an incredibly good start. Thus far I've read Edward Hogan's wonderful, wonderful, wonderful Blackmoor (which is settling in my mind before I write about it) and Nathalie Abi-Ezzi's excellent long-form debut A Girl Made of Dust. I couldn't have asked for two more striking and ambitious novels. Both are predicated on a world composed equally of incredible violence and blessed grace. I think they both go some way to capturing that essential contradiction of our universal nature: that we hurt and even kill each other out of love. And they both do it with such compassion. In this sense they are 'big' novels, though relatively modest in terms of page count.

A Girl Made of Dust is set in Lebanon in the early 1980s, in a town in the hills above Beirut, at the height of the civil war that tore the country apart between 1975 and 1990. Its soundtrack is a horrendous cacophony of bombardment, shelling and screaming, at first in the distant capital and then increasingly closer and closer. At its centre is a family stubbornly clinging to their lives, suffering, as all families do, because of national tragedies and everyday griefs alike. Our narrator is Ruba, a young girl of maybe eight or nine years old, who tells us the story of the loss of her own innocence in a voice both hardened to terror and utterly naive. Through her we meet her parents - Nabeel and Aida Khouri - her older brother Naji, her Teta (grandmother) and mysterious Uncle Wadih, as well as a handful of other adults and children who make up her circle of acquaintance. Her mother's wealthy, haughty friend Juhaina and Ali, the crippled Muslim who roasts nuts for the local sweetseller, are just two particularly striking examples in a carefully delineated community.

As the novel opens Ruba is at that utterly guileless stage of childhood, when you begin to wonder why and how things happen but the answers that suggest themselves to you are wild and superstitious. Thus she believes that her Papi's depression - Nabeel Khouri has been slumped in his chair for as long as she remembers - is the result of a curse, cast by the witch who lives in the old house on the hill. Magic is the only possible explanation for such adult behaviour. The old glass eye she finds in the forest near their home is a talisman that has the power to free him. At the same time, and with the ironic, literal-minded insight of a nine year old, she cannot see how the little plastic Virgin Mary her Teta keeps on her dressing table could possibly be the mother of God. When it is suggested to her that the Virgin protects her from harm she shrugs it off:

She was really only a bottle filled with holy water that you could see if you unscrewed her crown and I didn't see how she could have saved me... I didn't really want to hear about the Virgin Mary unless Teta put her into a story and made her do something exciting like swim out to sea, or play hide and seek with God, or dig a tunnel all the way to Beirut and live in it.

The world of a child is complex in ways that an adult could never understand, and vice-a-versa. While Ruba's parents listen to the news of an Israeli invasion on the radio, celebrate the election of a new president and then mourn his assasination, all the while looking up at the Israeli and Syrian fighter planes roaring overhead with fear, Ruba has more important things on her mind. How will she release her father from his curse, for example? Why is her friend Karim different from everyone else at school? Who is the disquieting new girl, Amal, and why is she mute? A Girl Made of Dust articulates very well the mysteries of alternate perceptions. And Abbi-Ezzi does it, most impressively, without turning her tale on one single misapprehension between adult and child (as in, for example, Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men) but showing through the tiniest subtleties how we all perceive our own peculiar world.

If Ruba consciously thinks of the civil war going on around her at all, it is in relation to her brother Naji. He is increasingly disaffected by his father's pathetic inertia, and obsessed with collecting the spent shells of the militias who roam the forests. Ruba likes them too because 'I liked to weigh them in my hands, like large beads, or line them up end to end, or fit the smaller ones into the larger ones, if they were empty, or clink them together.' She domesticates them into toys, ornaments or beads like the ones her father constantly worries during his long chair vigils. She has very little conception of them as weapons, or at least not in a way she can articulate. The conflict is so natural in her eyes; the shells have been screeching overahead her whole life, like particularly noisy birds. When men go by in the street in their jeeps, firing their machine guns in the air she doesn't even flinch. She cannot know that the world is turned upside down when it has never been any other way. Similarly, she cannot express horror or hurt at the cruel death of people or animals, since it appears an inevitable part of life. True, she knows she would prefer if a parachute appeared from a plane going down; she would prefer that the older children did not tie birds to posts for the cats to eat; and certainly she knows it is upsetting for men to be dragged to death behind speeding cars. But she cannot say these things are cruel, or injust, or torturous. Her body reacts physically - she is struck dumb, paralysed, frightened - but her mind cannot rationalise or moralise it. Abi-Ezzi seems to capture perfectly the terrifying extents and limits of a child's compassion, of their sense of right and wrong.

I don't want to give the wrong impression that this is a novel about the horrors of the Lebanese civil war. Because Ruba is our window into the world we only ever catch sideways glimpses of its atrocities (although our adult minds, schooled by increasingly gory news bulletins, fill in the blank spaces). The domesticity of her mother's cooking and her grandmother's household chores are more real and solid for her, and so form the backbone of her narrative. A Girl Made of Dust is full of the warmth of baking bread, of the scent of herbs and spices mixed, of the sound of laundry pounded and plants lovingly tended. The novel opens, for example, with a scene so perfect it could be a memory. Ruba and her Teta are folding clothes fresh from the washing line 'that were stiff and bent in strange shapes from the sun.' Ruba struggles with a pair of trousers that 'didn't want to be made small', while 'Teta's hands were slow and heavy, and things obeyed them.' It is an incredibly comforting, soft beginning to a novel about civilian life in wartime, and it sets the tone for what follows: Ruba's family and their homelife is like a pair of warm arms encircling the story. Even when, by the end, they are reduced to huddling in their inner corridor as the bombs shake their house, there is still food and stories and mattresses to protect them from the outside. In its way the novel is a paean to the comforts of a home.

Which is not to say that the Khouri family isn't troubled from within. Ruba's house is not an entirely safe haven. Nabeel's depression, Naji's burgeoning militarism, Teta's dark dreams and Uncle Wadih's nefarious business dealings also run like threads through the novel. But there is something mitigating in the clack of knitting needles, and the kneading of dough, that reassures us of the essential heartspace of a family. There is a cliche hiding in it, which like all cliches is entirely true: what does not destroy us, makes us stronger. Ruba's family is well and truly tested by the conflict in Lebanon, but it reaffirms their determined love and compassion for one another.

Throughout Nathalie Abi-Ezzi writes within a strict emotional register, which makes for prose passages and dialogue stunning in their restraint. In the interview conducted with her at the back of the book, she admits that A Girl Made of Dust was a longer novel, but that she ruthlessly cut scenes that seemed unnecessary or which could be made more powerful by oblique references. You can see some of the scars where she has worked holes into the novel, in the same way that you can occasionally spot the editor's hand when watching a movie. But in each case she has made a judicious choice: to show us, not to tell us. More importantly, perhaps, she has excised all parts of the novel that Ruba could not have understood, or would not have considered important. A child narrator is a tricky ask, but Abi-Ezzi handles it deftly. Ruba only tells us so much; the rest we infere through her creator's skill. The voice, too, is lovely. It is eccentric like a child's voice is sometimes eccentric, but not cloying or affected. Ruba occasionally describes something in a perfectly memorable and entirely unadult way; the August sun, for example, 'shone like Jesus'. But she neither speaks beyond her years, nor like a puppet. I would most definitely recommend spending some time with her.

~~Victoria~~