(The Merry-Go-Round is Beginning to Taunt Me[1])

 

1. Author As [not circus] Dog Trainer (Cris)

You can’t lie to a dog. Or you can’t lie badly. While training dogs, you need to be “telling” them, with both body-language and voice, that they are the center of the universe to you, and that what they do for you—and what you’re doing together—makes you happier, and means more to you, than anything else in the world. They can tell if you’re lying. If you’re unconsciously communicating to them that you’re disappointed or upset because you’re thinking about something else, something offstage—whether your life’s true dilemma or your most current disappointment—they take it on as stress. To dogs, it’s all about them. So the trainer has to be able to convince the dog of that, whether it’s true in the trainer’s larger life or not. Problem is, the dog can usually tell. A good trainer doesn’t have “a larger life.” It’s never “just a dog” and therefore easy to lie to.

Is an audience at a reading “just an audience at a reading,” and easier to lie to than a dog? If your true, or larger feelings, infringe on the party atmosphere, on your cheerful gratefulness that you have a book published and an audience to read to, will they also decide your angst is all about them and therefore have no interest in whether the book itself is worthwhile, interesting, important, or even possibly entertaining?

After finishing a series of readings for my 15^th book, I received this advice:

Be fun, vivacious, personable and amusing. Be substantial and invested, but leave them smiling. Everyone wants to be where the party is. If folks are kind enough to make a party atmosphere around your book [by attending a reading], then let people have a good fucking time at the party, and be happy and grateful for that.

I responded: “I wonder if being a fun-chameleon is really the way to give a book a better chance at some modicum of success. I mean, why can’t some of us have a different personality? And if I’ve lost some of my burn and zeal, I think I’ve had some of my corners worn down (to the bone, it feels) in an indie-press career spanning 20 years now. Has it come to this: I really need to act like a cheerleader?”

My advisor:

The reason I’ve given you any advice at all about how to “act,” which is presumptuous of anyone to tell someone else, much less a newer writer to tell a more experienced writer, is that a lot of people we know mutually have remarked to me over the past couple of years on how negative, depressed, anxious or bitter you have seemed. Taken individually, this doesn’t mean anything except that the person saying it may be judgmental or just wants to gossip. But taken collectively when I’ve heard it from 5 or 6 people, especially when I know some of these people really like you and aren’t just trying to be assholes, this is why I’ve given you the advice I have about not coming across as negative.

And when a couple of the occasions after which people remarked stuff like this to me were not “private” occasions, but after seeing you at someone else’s reading or sitting with you at a group table or something like that, this is why I thought I should mention it.

This is not surprising—you’ve had a few really hard years. The thing with [your last publisher] was very hurtful. . . albeit if none of the huge unearthing of issues in your life had taken place, it’s possible you would not have taken career things as hard. But, I mean, for a while you were clinically depressed. I know it’s very hard to give a shit about literary stuff, or to have optimism or “illusions,” when one’s personal life and psyche have been in an uproar.

I don’t mean you should act like a bubbly 25 year old. I don’t even mean to act differently than you have for the bulk of your career. I just mean that, whatever you have been willing to “put out there” over the past few years in terms of your mood or personal disillusionments / insecurities, I would recommend that you don’t put that out there anymore when promoting the book. And in case you were not “willing” to put it out there, but rather unaware that you were doing so, I guess I was trying to just give a subtle hint.

The subject here, then, is author as entertainer, as life-of-the-party (or life of the it’s-all-about-me-but-I-care-about-you party); as friendly, funny pal everyone will want to hang with; as popular girl (or guy) in the high-school halls with a peer group that now includes 3 or 4 different generations. Those pensive, faraway, or serious-thinker author photos had better also disclose someone ready with a hilarious quip for any occasion, the teasing nature of a camp counselor, the gracious vivacity of the party’s host, the beguiling animation of a really good tour guide. The subject here is a popularity contest.

The voices here will have to be anonymous.

All of the people I’ve spoken with are writers I admire, and friends, people I care about to one degree or another. If I disagree with anything they’ve said, I’m not here to embarrass or out them. They’ve caused me to think. I like that. If I have to think about my inability to be personally popular … it’s not their fault that’s my reality. Not their fault that I feel like an actor who joined a serious theatre group (even if only cast in bit parts) and over the years the company morphed into a circus without her realizing.

 

2. #AuthorFail (Davis)

If dogs teach us anything, it’s that our trusty domestic companions have come a long way from their wolf-roots. As my oldest daughter Athena says, “I’m evolving now, and it doesn’t hurt a bit.” Sure, even the toy breeds probably have the pack instinct and yearn to howl at the moon. Perhaps miniature pinschers everywhere wait their chance to turn on their benevolent masters and caretakers—us. This is why I’ve always been a cat person, and even though I had to put my long-time super cat, Cassie, to sleep some months ago, filmmaker John Waters reminded me recently that, “your cat hates you!”

Sure, Cris, we’re up against the wall as authors-of-a-certain-generation who can’t live 24-hours-per day on social networking sites and blogs and within the too-incestuous miasma of small-press book promotion that churns and churns and never stops but for the most part has the collective yelp of the chickapoo of whatever else these cross-bred former-wolves might now be called. Can you hear the French onomatopoeia for the dog bark: “jappe jappe”? Esperanto: “boj, boj.”

Sadly, or perhaps not-so-sadly, much small press/indie authorship serves within a matrix of production-for-producers. We write books that other small-word writers read or pretend to read or never read and never pretend to read and we review and cross-promote each other with a vehemence that makes Gregor Mendel seem like a pea-pod dabbler and we conspiratorially make like nothing untoward may be happening or better yet we call it “community building” and we really mean it—we do—this is more than rhetoric—but most of us also really do mean this in the same double breath that we’d like to break through the indie ceiling and cash a big check from a New York publisher even though we realize that path is almost never sustainable and almost never going to happen without a goodly amount of aesthetic give-and-take or take-and-take. Or just take. Let’s look at two types of writers in this matrix:

1) The Modern Romantic (MR): The type of writer who secretly (or not-so-secretly) craves a “wider” audience, and for whom—and this is essential—it is not enough to wish for demonstrable authorial “success.” Rather, the MR sees his or her exile to the small press world as either

a) A temporary state of affairs, or

b) A great indignity foisted upon her by a entropic universe concerned only with the marketability of books, a universe with little room for a new author to break into the pack, an author whose work is undervalued yet “better” that whatsoever appears on the spring list, will toil for an unspecified period below the surface of Manhattan’s wide Sargasso Sea.

Deep sighing breath. Get centered.

Namaste.

The MR author has also, unsurprisingly, been found guilty of some Kafka-esque sin, which given only the possible zyzzygy of lucky break, talent, and perseverance, might still upend the cruel fates. (There is a bit of good ‘ol Yankee boostrapism at work in this one.)

Of course, a certain version of the MR had some success at first with a book from a major label or a well-regarded minor literary press (Milkweed, Greywolf). Now, books later, this MR toils in the rear of the wolfpack, where her books are poorly copyedited, under-marketed, and forever relegated to the footnotes of a literary topography that has long since shifted its tectonic plates.

Where to spot the MR: You can find the MR in a writer’s colony or garret or subway car or coffee shop writing her way out of the world in the possession of a dog whose been kicked and left for dead and buried and whose book is pulped after a year in a warehouse and who goes back now, tail between legs, to the minor league small press world where she grows increasingly embittered[2] as the newer generation of MFA-bred cross-promoters “like” each others Facebook links until Facebook wets itself into some collective virtual orgasm where even Mark Zuckerberg gets his share of vicarious click-thrills.

2) The Young Turk (YT, and yes, the archaic term is meant ironically): This latter group, while certainly possessing some traits of the MR—and after all, how could any American writer schooled in an MFA or Ph.D. writing program not to some extent internalize the ideas of genius, authenticity, and old-style creationism internally programmed into the system?—also represent a new genus of the literary scene[3].

Defining characteristics: The YT lives online, perhaps not to the extent of the zapped-into-the-screen absurdity of Jeff Bridges in Tron, but the YT sees writing-as-networking, using new-media as an extension of the page, networking to the point where networking disappears and becomes something else: “living.” The YT has at least 1500 Facebook “friends,” can expect “likes” or comments in the dozens for postings on the order of “I’ve just had lunch” or “It’s on” or “Just finished writing a short story” and “The universe,” ad infinitum. The YT probably writes for a collaborative literary site such as BigOther, HTMLgiant, The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown (yes, I write for two of these), etc; the YT carries a smart phone and is live tweeting while reading this article; the YT’s website is miminalist and sharp, easy to navigate and positively airy (compared to the accomplishment-thick website of the MR, redolent in garish colors); the YT will respond to emails anytime of the day and generally until 2-3 am; the YT, despite being a publishing writer for less than three years, knows more people than the MR: the YT has published 100 or so creative pieces in journals edited by other YTs (whereas the MR has published 12 stories over her long career, and only in the “best” lit mags); the YT enjoys going to AWP and participates in bar readings that last 7 hours with a cast of thousands (each reader has 38 seconds to perform); the YT would love to teach or get a tenure-track academic job, and some do), while the others look to break into this work, which many MR’s have long-ago conquered only to be then defeated by the byzantine minutiae of administrative politics, committee meetings straight out of Dante, and a loathing of student papers that makes 1984’s Winston’s rat-fear seem like a soft phobia on the order of disliking wax beans.

 

3. The Ante is What? OK, I’m In (Cris)

Troubled by events where I felt overshadowed by not just humor, but something bigger than humor, I had various email exchanges with other writers. Some noteworthy comments and responses:

#1 But if you’re reading with 4 other people, it helps to stand out.

#2 … if we want to stand out, we have to stand out. Plain and simple. The work itself matters first, of course, but the quality or distinction of the work won’t “sell” the work, necessarily. So maybe just maybe, the …  public perception of a certain image or persona or personality or crazy multipronged marketing party-plan that’s somehow both honest and original could do the job. And that means something about it has to be radically different from the pack. That’s partly why I’m all into the transmedia/freakshow angle for [TITLE OF BOOK].

#3 This is offensive. It means that a group reading isn’t about experiencing different voices, different aesthetics. It means that it’s about competition, of one-upping, of being the “best of the bunch.” Which translates into book sales.

 Me: Like in high school, whether we knew it or not, whether we were aware of it or not, or whether we actually received the advice directly or not, there was an underlying understanding that boys wouldn’t like girls who were pensive and smart or who looked serious and intellectual, or worse yet, somber, gloomy, reclusive, or a snob (i.e. shy). Back then, I got labeled “the sad girl.” Is this like that? The bubbly, effervescent girls will succeed as writers too?

#4 Vivacious for girls, yes; however, for guys one option is the smarty-pantsiosity that becomes the know-betterism—a kind of unequal equal of muscle. I try to be clever and fun and instructive and usually end up also being fairly emotional (two of the poems I’ll read are about suicided friends of mine, and another is for my dead sister—though none is angsty). I have seen you be amused if not amusing at events here, but I want to know your thoughts on giving oneself permission to not be so amusing or clever and smarty-pants-ish.

How could I hope to express anything about this better than #4? (So … would I want to read with him? Well, I did once. Almost 3 decades ago. I’ll get to that. )

 

4. Are we even playing cards? Doesn’t matter. (Davis)

Some of my (recent) shameless reading gimmicks: A 100-foot rope threaded through the audience and clipped to my belt and then you-the-audience pull me pull me pull me and I pull back while I read; forgetting the rope and so asking audience members—six eager writing students—to push me or try to steal my text as I read and they chase me and I run and jump around the room; strobe lights set to the alpha-wave frequency and you listen with eyes closed while I read and, hopefully. you see stuff; shouting; dressing as a mime to read from my novel BLANK, a largely blank novel; pouring water all over Lidia Yuknavitch with you, Cris, as you and Lidia did the same to me; using Google Earth to geo-locate texts during a “Neighborhoods” Chicago Reading at the Chicago Cultural Center.

The last two, Cris, were more or less your ideas.[4] This proves that you are willing to jump into this strange pool of standing-out self promotion even if you want to be the quiet Svengali in the background and let others figure out how to do it, but that’s not exactly true because you even brought the pool to our reading with Lidia and a tarp to protect the floor of the gallery and this was damn thoughtful and then you laughed with everyone and you were in on the joke and you so thoughtfully left the pool at a bus stop in Chicago.

We went out for drinks and dessert afterward with the organizers of the Red Rover series and some of audience members—including the couple who drove over 100 miles to see us dump water on each other—and we basked in the afterglow of the deed itself and sounded pleased when we heard about the photos and the videos and the way this would not be merely an afterglow but have an afterlife beyond this table, this story, these people—and so live on forever and ever amen.

How would the pure MR respond to such tasteless gimmickry? With disdain (perhaps tinged with jealousy.)

How would the YT respond? By exploiting the event online in a much-more-effective manner than either of us are capable of doing.

Let’s take the example of the videos and photos of the Red Rover water-experiment.

Before the event: Jen Karmin and Laura Goldstein, the Red Rover organizers, insert us into the schedule and prepare their email announcement. I don’t know about you or Lidia, but I invite a few Chicago folks.

The event itself: You and Lidia meet at a coffee shop in Bucktown and I’m not sure I can even make the thing because my father, in his firth-year of advanced brain cancer, sits thick with a bacterial infection in the hospital. The day before, he shakes for a four-hour period in an advanced fever state. He tells my mother in a fit of delirium, “It’s because of Kennedy and Castro. That’s why I’m sick…” He takes a turn for the non-feverish and I truck down to Chicago from a northern suburb.

The three of us meet, laugh, and plan out the general water pattern of the event. We are three deeply wounded people. Maybe. Or not. We go out to dinner and talk more about mutual acquaintances in the avant-writing world. We leave for the event, and I arrive five minutes later, since we are only three blocks away. You drive with Lidia and somehow get lost and I panic and call and text both of you over and over while assuring the kind organizers that you are both on your way. I stand outside the venue, a nondescript third-floor walk up gallery space in Wicker Park, and discover you, standing in a trance state, lost, holding the kiddie pool. We move into the space and lose our breath walking up the stairs. We do the water thing.

We submerge ourselves.

After the event: Aside from the aforementioned dinner, there is documentation. A series of photos and a few videos appear on Facebook. People comment and then it all fades away.

What else have we done with this? Nothing. We are failed YTs.

Except in this essay.

We live forever now.

 

 5. Will You Do It For 10-Cents?

Whadda-ya Think I Am?

We’ve Already Established That, Now We’re Haggling Over a Price[5] (Cris)

Either it started to rub off on me, literary Darwinism took hold, or I’m turning into a conceptual reader (or book-promotion werewolf) and just don’t know it. I had some unfortunate (or advantageous, depending on who you’re asking) big ideas. Honest, I was joking. I was trying to survive.

In one, four writers from the Chicago area were going to stand on various places on a city map, drawn or projected onto the floor, and read pieces depicting some aura of their corner of the city. Whew, good thing no one could figure out how to draw the map. I’m from California and didn’t have anything to read from the exurbs of Chicagoland where I now live, and yet the bright idea was mine.

In another recent event, three of us are supposed to read from books that by some means involve water, while sitting in a filled plastic child’s wading pool. This possibly brings body image into the competitive mix, as in: if you’re not funny, maybe you look good in a speedo. Or maybe we’ll reduce this idea to squirt guns (supplied to the audience). I have to remind myself, stop having these reckless ideas. The water imagery in Waterbaby was never meant to be funny, irreverent or snarky. It was supposed to be Alice Munro’s “gray, deep, baleful, magnificent sea.” (Is this like disgraced former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich comparing himself to Gandhi?[6] Dan Quayle comparing himself to JFK?[7] I’ll say it first, Mazza, you’re no Alice Munro.) But is this idea akin to having Rosanne Barr read (perform) Alice Munro?

No, my fellow readers at these events are not caricatures, not clowns (at least not yet), not avatars. We meet before events to have (usually) sushi or Thai food, laugh over past events where the audience numbered one or two (and one of those had wandered into the wrong room then left after the first reader), then each of us turn our backs halfway to call home and tell someone there we love them. Real people with pathos, needs, fears and hope. Or is it hope and fears. Or is it just plain anxiety?

 

6.  Will You Do It For Nothing? Then you’ve already won! (Davis)

A farm boy follows a rainbow to its end within a ancient forest, and finds, to his delight, a small leprechaun with red-hair stuffed under his garnet-green hat. The leprechaun guards—no surprises—an overflowing pot of gold, fat with bullion.

I’m taking the gold, says the boy, because I found you here, at the end of everything.

Right is right. Take whatever you can carry, me boyo.

The boy stuffs his pockets with bullion, tucks in his shirt and proceeds to dump coins down his collar. He’s lousy with the stuff. And the gold weighs him down with an absurd flourish. Jupiter gravity. Pancake flat.

Too greedy, me boyo. Leave some gold here. Yer’ sure to be rich still with just a few pieces of me coin.

Your whole pot-o-gold is mine by rights, and I’ll get a wheelbarrow to take all the gold.

Listen to me, boyo, take what you can now, and you’ll be happy fat rich.

The boy wants it all, though, and convinces the magic leprechaun to tie a green ribbon around the tree so he can find the gold and the leprechaun again.

There, around an ancient oak, the leprechaun stands, misty eyed, as the boy tromps out the gate of the forest toward his small farm, away from the faded rainbow.

The stakes are so low in the world of the small press that they are at the same time absurdly high. In the same way that one can be so far to the left that she can come out on the right. In the way that the singer can be so avant, so non-authoritative, so Duchamp-like in her contortions and arabesques and willful un-marketability, that she comes out with the scarlet A: Author.

Author.

Author.

 

7. Not funny or all that clever, but maybe the original smarty-pantsiosity: a brief history of my readings (Cris)

So, that reading I referred to, almost 30 years ago. It was my first reading, paired with two poets, two of us graduate students, one a talented undergrad (now a published avant-garde poet). I chose a story where a forestry worker, sexually abused by a dirt-biker who’s ripping up the wilderness serenity, responds with frenzied superhuman anger, dams up the river and watches as the stranded fish “waited for someone to put them back into the water.” I chose to supplement my reading with a simultaneous slide show of tranquil home photographs of my siblings, as children, fishing in our beloved Sierras. My two peers simply read their work. What did they think of my show-offy special effects? Perhaps they were secretly glad that the slide projector jammed and several of the pictures only showed up halfway on the screen.

Six years later I was writer-in-residence at a public university in Tennessee, and began my reading there with a story about a dog-trainer’s obsessive interest in a Marine taking dog-obedience classes from her, and I read dressed in a student’s cammo Army fatigues. For the story that followed, I shed the uniform right there on stage, down to the black leggings and T-shirt I’d worn underneath. Amusing or clever—that can be debated—but smarty-pants-ish in a very literal way. At least I was reading alone, but still two decades ago, I had the notion that the event should be something beyond the words I had written read aloud.

After that I became more of a “straight reader,” (as well as the straight man for whomever was reading with me) except when I toured for my 1998 novel, Dog People, and perched my obedience-trial champion Shetland sheepdog on a director’s chair beside me. No tricks: all she did was sit there without attempting to leave. This encouraged many questions from the audience: mostly about how to get dogs to behave better at home. If I’d been touring with a dog-training manual, I might have become the dog-whisperer before Cesar Millan got there first. (Make no mistake, he deserves his title, a superior trainer, and never lies to his dogs, although he hides the electric collar and transmitter from the TV camera).

In the late ‘90s a group of writers associated with independent, innovative presses planned to read together to celebrate Banned Books Week. I thought we discussed what we would read: material that might have been banned in previous eras. So the reading happened, and I read a very short story titled “Hesitation,” from my collection Former Virgin. I vaguely noticed that other pieces being read didn’t seem to fit the “would have been banned in previous eras” theme. After the reading, the authors sat in the reading space, in chairs around the perimeter, and the audience circulated, bringing books to be signed, asking questions, expressing their pleasure or appreciation for the piece an author had read. Not one soul talked to me or brought a book to be signed. When anyone came to talk to the writer I was sitting beside, they did not look at me. To this day I don’t understand what happened or what code I broke.

 

8. The Code (or Writing as Data) (Davis)

Winded, the boy returns to his farm and keeps away from the questioning looks of his older brother whipping a scythe through a handful of wheat. The boy makes for the barn. In his eye, the barn may be already on fire; he must be of fleet-foot.

Pulling the wheelbarrow from the corner and dumping its load of fresh, steaming cow dung onto a pile of ragged hey, the boy runs back across the field and past his brother whose eye tears in the wind. The boy streams past the farmhouse and back into the entrance to the woods and through the path he just came pushing the wheelbarrow over knotted roots. He becomes a mouse returning through a lab maze to exactly, precisely, the spot where the leprechaun should be. There, as planned, hangs the green ribbon around the oak.

A fat, emerald bow.

Come out, leprechaun, I’m back with the wheelbarrow and aim to take your entire pot-of-gold.

The boy searches around the tree. No leprechaun.

He falls to knees, crying, traces of shit steaming from the wheelbarrow.

Every tree in the forest, were he to look up from his sorrow, stands marked with a garnet knot.

The pot-of-gold is not so much the book or the book deal, of course, as the sustainable “career” within the industry, also called the book business. Authors who operate in even a vaguely innovative or indie forest become conditioned to desire the pot of gold, but the trouble is their inability to locate or agree upon the nature of the “rainbow” the “ribbon” the “leprechaun” or the “gold.”

For the Modern Romantic, the rainbow spectrum meanders circuitously through thickets and brambles and glens and patches of poison sumac and the tortuous ambiguities of the writing life—the isolation, the static of non-writing life always threatening to interfere with and perhaps inflect or overwhelm the act of artistic creation—this leads toward not so much wealth as the frustration of losing the impossible to pinpoint pot-of-gold.

For the Young Turk, the path is to forget the forest and the leprechaun and the pot-of-gold and simply recreate new versions of these things, each moment, on Facebook and Twitter and in the data-sphere where it’s not so much about the object itself as it is about the discussion surrounding the object. For many YTs, there is no object at all in the sense that the MR supposes.

The pot-of-gold is simply the story’s method of recreating itself.

 

9. The literalized metaphor (Cris)

I once gave an unremarkable reading at a small conference for experimental fiction. I believe it had a fancier name than that. I sat in attendance for some of the “papers” also being presented. One was in the form of critifiction,[8] which at the time I understood to be literary criticism written in the form of narrative using familiar techniques of fiction (dialogue, character, conflict) etc. The same presenter would, in the next year or so, do a critifictional piece on one of my novels, with a literary critic narrator who has just been diagnosed with cancer while teaching this novel, so the critifictional narrative parallels his personal conflicts with class discussions on the novel. (The same critic died from cancer about 6 years later). The other presentation I remember was called “Writing on the Body,” and while I realized the meaning of the word “on” would be tooled, I was amusedly surprised (not aghast) that the mode of presentation included posing an undergraduate female on a dais, undressing her, and writing on her body. Another literalized metaphor in action. As is frequently my experience, I didn’t understand the philosophy or theory being illustrated with the literalized metaphor, but I do, these many years later, still remember the presentation. So perhaps this is the allegory for some of the “readings” I have helped plan and am still am facing pending participation. I remember she had a dog there, but don’t remember which novel she was reading from. I remember she was sitting in a pool of water but don’t remember the title of the novel.

 

10. The de-literalized metaphor/ the end of the book (Davis)

We don’t remember much of the past, really, and even less details from a reading we might attend. Ten years out from the best reading we’ve ever experienced—the most effective literary tour-de-force, gimmick free—will we recall the name of the book, the name of the author, a line that turned us on and for a moment cut into the stream of our wandering mind? On some level, the act of reading functions within the same paradox: reading Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling is no different than reading a well-crafted summary of Fear and Trembling once the endless march of time has steamrolled over the old-growth forest.

Certainly, the best books that stay with us—for me, recently, Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland, or Proust’s A La Recherché du Temps Perdu, which I recently finished for the second time—being two of the most memorable—becomes books that become experiences. Books that interface with our lives and our obsessions in some way that moves beyond the books themselves.

Tomasula’s, the more recent, epitomizes a move toward the non-book. VAS gestures to the network rather than the stream. This is a roman-glitch rather than roman-fleuve. To enter into discussion with VAS is to let go of your notions of the book almost completely.

Proust, the elder, by sheer virtue of its length and the time-commitment it takes to finish the damn thing, stands out in the way that we encounter a Modernist idea of mastery. We read such texts from start to finish and invest ourselves in their procession because we have no choice but to on some level internalize their aspects in order to finish. If you’ve just moved through Heidegger’s Being and Time or Joyce’s Ulysses or insert-title-of-massive-tome here…well, if you can’t get with the thing on some level then it’s been a colossal waste of your life. Sucker. It doesn’t matter if you’ve understood Heidegger or Joyce or read very word or skimmed or let your mind wander or whatever. You’ve finished. You mastered in. You’ve found a leprechaun. Congratulations!

Just try to find him again.

 

10. What If I Was Sitting in a Pool of Metaphoric Quicksand? (Cris)

This whole contemplation began when I was given the semi-solicited advice[9] I quoted at the start, including: “I know it’s very hard to give a shit about literary stuff, or to have optimism or ‘illusions,’ when one’s personal life and psyche have been in an uproar.”

Part of my “failure” to properly pursue promotion for my 2009 collection of fictions was a personal crisis and the darkness that lingered. I had a new book, yet I spent an inordinate amount of time lying on the floor of my study, not caring about anything.[10] I knew I had to do better in 2011. But among other personal dilemmas the literary world doesn’t care about, it seems my own life also caused me to not properly pay sufficient attention to others’ private lives. If this seems paradoxical, it’s because it is.

Author book-promotion includes (but is not limited to), readings—of course—but also class visits, interviews, blog appearances, book blurbs, writing reviews, etc., which we (most of us) earnestly try to keep from seeming to be quid-pro-quo[11].

We all know we’re supposed to contribute, heavily, to the publicity of our books. But the word self-promotion is still nasty. Some group blog sites have rules for posts: no self-promotion. We filter the most egregious self-promoters off our Facebook feeds. We don’t admit this. We’re caught in the middle, pretending not to be talking about our books while we’re talking about them. We don’t admit this. Whereas it used to be a book itself might create an “industry buzz” (often with the help of an agent or publisher), now instead the key is to “build a platform,” and spend time networking. We don’t admit this. And we’re all networking among other people networking for the same purpose—and, if lucky (no, it’s not luck, but we don’t admit what it really is), will become an internet or blogosphere darling, or will say or do something that goes viral. The marriage of these euphemisms would be: book publicity now requires that one become an internet virus. [12]

… or a trained bear.

San Diego Zoo, circa 1970: Chester is an Alaskan brown bear. He lives in a formerly progressive enclosure (without bars), with a pool for cooling off, a tree trunk (chained to the ground) for scratching or rolling around, and a cave if he absolutely positively had to go hide somewhere. But Chester didn’t hide because the tour buses came around every 20 minutes or so. The bus stops alongside Chester’s enclosure, and Chester is already ambling toward center stage, while the straight-man bus-driver begins the shtick.

Driver: Here we have our Alaskan brown bear, also known as a Kodiak brown bear or grizzly bear. Hello there Chester, can you show your guests how big an Alaskan brown bear is?

Chester stands on his hind feet, just on the other side of his moat.

Driver: The largest subspecies of the brown bear, Alaskan brown bears grow up to 1700 pounds, due to their rich diet of salmon. Give a San Diego Zoo greeting to these fine guests.

Chester raises his paw.

Driver: Brown bears also live inland, mostly in the Rocky Mountains, where their habitat has shrunk due to pressure from vacationeers and huntering. Chester, show us where you put the hunter.

Chester pats his stomach.

Now, the driver, at the same time he revs the engine to move on, frisbees a slice of wonderbread into the enclosure. Chester returns to all four feet, ambles to the bread and eats it. If the spectators are lucky, the bread may have landed in the middle of the pool, so Chester would slide in, suck the soggy dough into his mouth, then leave the water.

I remember Chester, that he was a Kodiak brown bear, a different, larger species than black bears. I remember that the San Diego Zoo pioneered cageless enclosures and Chester’s was one of the originals. I live in a society and culture where I remember these things because Chester put the hunter in his tummy then went to eat a slice of wonder bread.

 

11. Sounds Bytes that Speak to and Around the Key Questions of This Reading Experience. (Davis)

1. William S. Burroughs: Language is a virus.
2. Davis Schneiderman: Language is a virus.
3. The author-as-quipper must speak in the form of gregariousness that takes content to be a secondary function.
4. Content only works in so much as it serves the larger form of the communicative function.
5. Here. At a reading. Online…The message remains the same: look at the clever way in which I am participating in this game of authorship.
6. It’s not so much notice me, notice me, notice me, as look how competently I speak within the rules of the available speech act.
7. The source of the agon is that the rules are changing: time was, pre-internet, when the sole publicity duties of the author consisted of personal appearances at readings—and, thus, the events became one-of-a-kind moments, with little cyber-baggage to inflect the performance space.
8. Now, the event itself is secondary to its continued contextualization in the cyber-realm, and so, since everyone and anyone can comment and participate in these streams, each author who participates, even at the entry level in the game, begins to bark and bark and bark.
9. Put another way, it’s not the bark-as-message but bark-as-bark.
10. Bow wow.

 12. Of Course Eventually, Davis, You Quote Burroughs and I Don’t Understand (Cris)

 Instead I’ll quote Laura Miller of Salon.com:

People become writers because they’re introverted or awkward in personal encounters and have poured everything they want to say to the world into their work. What usually gets lost in the perpetual refrain about authors becoming their own marketers is that there’s no particular connection between writing talent and a gift for self-promotion.

I majored in journalism and never spent a day as a journalist because I didn’t want to go out and talk to people. I have spent more than a few days in a row, on more than a few occasions, without getting dressed and leaving the house—because I didn’t “have to,” so why would I want to? I decided to live almost 50 miles away from the campus in downtown Chicago where I teach. I have started four sentences in a row with “I” because I am sitting alone in my study and have not talked to another soul in-person today. I want to hug Laura Miller for understanding.

And yet, it won’t bail a teacup of the tide of change that occurred (and continues) my first book appeared in 1989 and People magazine called me to ask for a photo for a review (which never ran).

Despite my apparently hypocritical history in this matrix of production-for-producers, where the emphasis is “on being a writer, not the writing itself,”[13] I am sad … and tired.

 

Chester RIP

May your species live in natural dignity.  It’s too late for mine.

 

 

Credits:

Photo of Davis bound and gagged courtesy of Andi Olsen.

Photo of the “water reading” by Melanie Page

Photo of Cris Mazza reading with her dog by James Comunale

Photo of Chester by Cris Mazza

 

Cris Mazza has authored sixteen books, most recently Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls, a novel.  Her other fiction titles include Waterbaby, Trickle-Down Timeline, and Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?  In 1995 & 1996, Mazza was co-editor for the original Chick-Lit anthologies: Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction, and Chick-Lit 2: No Chick Vics.  In 2006, her essay “Who’s Laughing Now: Chick Lit and the Perversion of a Genre,” explaining the co-opting and corrosion of the title, appeared in Poets & Writers Magazine.  In addition to fiction, Mazza also has published a memoir, Indigenous: Growing Up Californian, and has another hybrid memoir, Something Wrong With Her, forthcoming from Jadid Ibis Press.  A native of Southern California, Mazza grew up in San Diego County.  She currently lives 50 miles west of Chicago and is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  She can be found online at www.cris-mazza.com.

 

Davis Schneiderman‘s bio is below.

 

---

In my darker moments, usually after being away from art for some hours, and, mind you, this doesn’t just mean literature, but paintings, sculpture, film, or whatever, I start feeling kind of jittery, but the darkness takes on an especially despairing hue when I start to think about the pronounced lack of ambition and its concomitant general distrust of virtuosity in the contemporary arts scene. Sure, I’m guilty as anyone else of romanticizing past eras, characterizing them as golden ages, when of course the amount of dross to gold has always been grossly disproportionate all throughout history. However, these necessary caveats do little to assuage my disappointment with the various contemporary scenes and milieus. That said, there are, of course, massive exceptions, and fortunately these examples do provide respite from our consumerist culture’s celebration of mediocrity, its wallowing in sloppiness. For instance, as I write this, I’m listening to Beirut’s odd fusion of folkloric textures from the Balkans and Eastern Europe with pop forms, all seamed together by Zach Condon’s plaintive, Jeff Buckley-influenced vocals (something which would normally annoy me but, strangely, as with Andrew Bird, the sincerity of the voice outweighs the obvious debt, and it might be because Condon also blends a bit of Robert Smith’s melancholy and Morrissey’s effete tonality). And during February, when New York City’s interminable winter and its resultant gloom invariably descends upon my household, well, upon my partner, but somehow it ends up being the primary theme anyway, I pulled through with books by William Gass, continuing my plan to consecutively read (and reread some of the books) his complete oeuvre. (I should mention that writing with music on is near impossible for me to do these days, and it is an incredible struggle for me to do this now, but there’s a feeling I want to stay in, and Beirut is helping me do that.)

I began this month with reading Gass’s The Tunnel, a massive tome that took from this reader as much as it gave to him. So what did it take? Well, first of all, it took time and an incredible amount of focus; it demanded patience with its catalogs, its fragmentary narrative, its thoroughly unlikeable narrator, although I must qualify this by saying that Gass ingeniously seduces the reader to like, well sort of, a despicable character by couching his rhetoric within a brilliant, inimitable lyricism. There aren’t many writers out there that attack a sentence with this kind of vigor, intensity of focus, and, moreover, with an easy virtuosity as Gass does. Who else? Well, there’s Mary Caponegro, for instance, whose attentiveness to sentences, and whose use of collage and less conventional narrative forms, and a sometimes fabulist sensibility, has marked her as an important contemporary stylist; and who also calls Gass, as any other writer with any sense would, “the master.” And then there’s Alexander Theroux, Rikki Ducornet, D.A. Powell, Joanna Howard, Gary Lutz, Carole Maso, Joyelle McSweeney, Lance Olsen, John Ashbery, and…well, I should stop there because this will end up flowering, or festering depending on your inclinations, into a massive list; and while I will hang on every word of a finely-crafted list, the kind of thing most readers, I’d guess, probably skip, I’ll spare you. Back to The Tunnel, there’s no way to do the book justice without addressing its innumerable delightful qualities, but I’ll just briefly say that the interplay between its form, its design elements, and its sundry typographical arrangements with the actual language and its refractive narrative achieves a kind of tactility, or, rather a kind of surface tension, and, in keeping with this idea of a liquid cohesion, here’s a representative (actually, this isn’t really true since the tenor and tonal shifts of voice would require numerous representative sections, so let’s just call this a section I like) section:

I would turn the garden hose on to a trickle and let the water leak into the street. Then I would follow its flowing down the road, noting how, as I’d been told, it sought the low path always; how, balked by leaves and twigs, the stream crept secretly underneath its obstacle or skirted ends and edges when it could, piling up puddles, running into cracks, forking as opportunity offered; but making manifest, as I realized, a collection of creek beds which had always been there, a system of incipient rivers, hidden in the concrete the way lines of poetry, perhaps, are hidden in the general terrain of a language, waiting only for a thought to take its course and gently connect one innocent word with an unsullied other till something repeatable, even memorable, is written, gets said, and a line is composed the way events, which seem fated to sing the do-re-mis of destiny, are linked: and to this extraordinary consequence shouldn’t we award a suitable name (after all, every baby gets one on account and before any earnings), so why not? a name, say, like Sandusky, which will certainly serve a fine verse or sentence better, and more appropriately, than its present place.

I followed The Tunnel with three monographs about William Gass’s works. Understanding William Gass, by H.L. Nix, is a pretty straightforward treatment of Gass’s fiction up to Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas, and also examines the general thrust of his literary theories. Next was Conversations with Gass which, because of its inherent looseness, was a lot of fun to read, well, once you get past its many typos. Gass is at his best here when he is cantankerous; he does not suffer fools lightly. There is, for instance, the classic clash, or what I would call the “clash of the titan versus the tyrant,” between Gass and John Gardner. Gass “wins,” of course. And there are innumerable glimmerings of his approach toward fashioning fictions:

That’s one reason why I spend a lot of time examining objects. They hold still. They aren’t threatened or embarrassed by your stare. I don’t regard as much as I once did, but I realized that I was looking for sources of language, and now my source of language is almost always other language instead of things in the world. Words are supreme objects. They are minded things.

This reminds me of what happens in Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” namely, that as the subject of the poem gazes upon the object, the object begins to look at the subject.

After Conversations, I read another of Gass’s essay collections: Finding a Form. As usual, it’s comprised of reviews and also extended meditations on a variety of subjects literary, philosophical, and political. Actually, I should stop to say that Gass treats his reviews—a much maligned form, and therefore a form that many writers, at best, don’t take seriously or at worst use as an occasion to parade their juvenile glibness—as he treats anything else he writes, that is, as pieces demanding all of his prodigious craft, and therefore creates works that transcend the usual utilitarian function of a review, and can be read for the sheer pleasure of his insights and his glistening prose. There are countless wannabe Dale Pecks out there swinging their hatchets in the air, but few critics who, like Gass, move their brush across the page. Other highlights include the titular essay wherein his admonishes:

So even if you hope to find some lasting security inside language, and believe that your powers are at their peak there, if nowhere else, despair and disappointment will dog you still; for neither you nor your weaknesses, nor the world and its villains, will have been banished just because, now, it is in syllables and sentences where they hide; since, oddly enough, while you can confront and denounce a colleague or a spouse, run from an angry dog, or jump bail and flee your country, you can’t argue with an image; in as much as a badly made sentence is a judgment pronounced upon its perpetrator, and even one poor paragraph indelibly stains the soul. The unpleasant consequence of every such botch is that your life, as you register your writing, looks back at you as from a dirty mirror, and there you perceive a record of ineptitude, compromise, and failure.

In his essay “Autobiography,” Gass outlines some pitfalls inherent to the form and posits:

It is healthy, even desirable, to mix genres in order to escape the confinements of outworn conventions, or to break molds in order to create new shapes; but to introduce fiction into history on purpose (as opposed to being inadvertently mistaken) can only be to circumvent its aim, its truth, either because it wants to lie, or now thinks lying doesn’t matter and carelessness is a new virtue, or because one scorns scrupulosity as a wasted effort, a futile concern, since everything is inherently corrupt, or because an enlivened life will sell better than a straightforward one, so let’s have a little decoration, or because “What is truth?” is only a sardonic rhetorical question which regularly precedes the ritual washing of hands.

I know of nothing more difficult than knowing who you are and then having the courage to share the reasons for the catastrophe of your character with the world. Anyone honestly happy with himself is a fool. (It is not a good idea to be terminally miserable about yourself either.) But an autobiography does not become a fiction just because fabrications will inevitably creep in, or because motives are never pure, or because memory will genuinely fade. It does not become a fiction simply because events or attitudes are deliberately omitted, or maliciously slanted, or blatantly fabricated, because fiction is always honest and does not intend to deceive. It announces itself: I am a fiction; do not rely on my accuracy, not because I am untrustworthy, because I am engaged not in replication but in construction. There will be those who will try to glamorize their shoddy products by pretending they are true, and then, when they fail to pass even the briefest inspection, like the movies JFK and Malcolm X, dodge that responsibility by lamely speaking of “art.” Fiction and history are different disciplines, and neither grants licenses to incompetents, opportunists, or mountebanks.

I’ve always wanted a book from Gass on the craft of writing, something that would, unlike most books that I’ve read about writing, actually prove useful to me. (I’ve read a number of them, many of them classics, and usually get very little out of them.) Since this book will never be written (although his promised book on Baroque prose where he concentrates his attention on John Donne, Jeremy Taylor, and Thomas Hobbes may serve), I thought of xeroxing all of his articles that are essentially about writing, well, largely about the construction of sentences. In that personally-compiled anthology I’d have to include the abovementioned “Finding a Form,” and also from Finding a Form: “The Music of Prose” and “The Book as a Container of Consciousness,” “Simplicities,” and perhaps even “The Baby or the Botticelli.”

Gass has talked about how his natural breadth, when it comes to fiction, is between thirty and forty pages. Even his novels are comprised of smaller sections usually within that same page range. So in Cartesian Sonata, a collection of four novellas, we find Gass writing in what is perhaps the best, or rather the more easily digestible showcase of his talents. Whenever someone asks me where they should start with Gass I usually recommend In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and On Being Blue. I’d have to add this book as well to the shortlist. There’s so much to admire in these novellas that, once again, a tiny gloss here will fail to capture the beauty and complexity of form, style, and language. While a number of Gass’s themes are manifested here, namely, the characters’ spooling webs of language and obsessions with the meanings of words; family squabbles and other tensions; allusions if not outright references to modern poetry, as well as recurring images like windows and snow; Gass also explores some new territory like clairvoyance in the titular novella and also like Emma’s desire in “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s” to make herself literally insubstantial. We also find some similar themes like the protagonist of “Master of Secret Revenges” who is, like many of Gass’s characters, concerned with the problem of evil.

Reading Rilke is an amazing display of Gass’s erudition and range, and actually one of the most unique works in translation. In it, he translates Rilke’s Duino Elegies, along with a healthy dose of poems from throughout the oeuvre, no small task, to put it lightly, and this alone makes the book well worth reading, but squeezed between the poems, like mortar between bricks, are Gass’s reflections on the difficulties he encountered while translating, giving tremendous insight into his process, while also highlighting some aspects of Rilke’s life and his creative, and otherwise, predilections. A portion of the acknowledgments page goes toward describing Rilke’s importance to Gass:

The poet himself is as close to me as any human being has ever been; not because he has allowed himself—now a shade—at last to be loved; and not because I have been able to obey the stern command from his archaic torso of Apollo to change my life, nor because his person was always so admirable it had to be imitated; but because his work has taught me what real art ought to be; how it can matter to a life through its lifetime; how commitment can course like blood through the body of your words until writing stirs, rises, opens its eyes; and, finally, because his work allows me to measure what we call achievement: how tall his is, how small mine.

I’ve always loved Rilke. As a matter of fact, it may have been “The Archaic Torso of Apollo” where I first encountered his poetry. This was followed by reading several (four, I think) translations of Sonnets to Orpheus, and two translations of Duino Elegies. I picked him up again a few years ago with The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, of which I’ve since read four translations, including Michael Hulse’s recent translation (more on that below). The meaning of Rilke’s poetry is often tremendously difficult to decipher and Gass’s glosses are instructive. For instance, this, an introduction to “The Second Elegy”: “It is the poet’s purpose to put the world into words, and, in that way, hold it steady for us. The poet can write of love, too, in a similarly immortalizing fashion. But love alters its lovers even as they love, so that their love is altered and the next kiss comes from a different mouth and is pressed to a different breast.” And later, we find one source of Gass’s thoughts about consciousness, or rather, how consciousness is altered by made things:

Rilke does not understand how the transformation of matter into mind works, but we should not blame him for that. No one does. After several thousand years of wondering, we still don’t know. Although materialists will be happy to explain to us how the nervous system functions, and hope we shall confuse this explanation, as marvelous and detailed as it is, with an account of the character of consciousness and how consciousness came to be, they are not a step closer to crossing that threshold. We may not know how our awareness got here, but Rilke believes he knows what its purpose is: to make the signals we receive from external things into inner, and hence invisible, manifestations–the invisible visibly invisible, if you like.

As with any of Gass’s books, I can’t help quoting liberally from Reading Rilke. There’s just so much here for the attentive writer:

Every line of fine literature forms a secure, seemingly serene, yet unquiet community. As in any community, there are many special interests and the groups which promote them; there are predominating concerns, persistent problems; and, as in the psyche of an individual, or in the larger region of the body politic, there are competing aims, anxieties, habits, anticipations, perplexities, memories, needs, and grievances. When the line is a good one, their clamor is stilled because its constituents are happy, their wants appeased, their aims fulfilled.

This seems to me a kind of appropriation of Hobbes’s philosophical views toward the construction of literature: the book as leviathan.

And there’s much for the attentive reader, too:

To read with recognition (not just simple understanding) is to realize why the writer made the choices he or she made, and why, if the writing has been done well (suppose I’d said “well done”?), its words could not have been set down otherwise. Our translations will make a batch of botches, but it will not matter, crush them all into a ball and toss them to the trash. Their real value will have been received. The translating reader reads the inside of the verse and sees, like the physician, either its evident health or its hidden disease. That reader will know why Hardy couldn’t come right out and say: “Someday we’ll have a roll in the hay.”

And more about the reader: “What proper reading confers upon the right reader is not merely an expanded vocabulary or its subtle understanding, or the ready use of forms and strategies, but also a sympathetic awareness of traditional attitudes and opinions, feelings and desires.”

Upon finishing this book I felt like detouring away from my immediate reading queue and embarking on a massive reading of Rilke. But I managed to stay true to this course by reading Gass’s penultimate book: A Temple of Texts. Often feeling like I’m reading too much contemporary literature, and also being sickened by writers who pretty much only read what’s contemporary, or worse yet, exclusively their peers (I won’t mention the writers who aren’t reading anything), I was happy to read Gass’s thoughts on the matter: “I think it is wise to approach a contemporary work with skepticism; it is the new work’s task to establish its authority, to persuade you to believe in its essential worth whatever strange or commonplace thing it may say or do.” Oh, but ideas like “authority,” “essential worth,” and “classic” are old-fashioned, unpopular ideas. Much better to slosh around in some solipsistic sludge, I guess. More and more, I’m feeling less inclined to even put the contemporary text to the test. But, often enough, something arrives that still proves that the contemporary novel can measure up to the classic. Also, contained in this book are brief discussions of his “Fifty Literary Pillars,” that is, those books that make up the house that Gass built, or rather, the books that built up Gass, or, better yet, and I think Gass would approve, the books that make up Gass. At the beginning of this year, in addition to committing myself to reading all of Gass’s published works, I decided to also read these “pillars.” Last month, I’d read two of them: Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium and John Hawkes’s The Lime Twig, and this month I read five more (more on that later). Much of the discussion in this book revolves around a number of Gass’s usual suspects: Rabelais, Gertrude Stein, Flann O’Brien, Gaddis, Hawkes, Coover, Elkin, and Rilke. Not to diminish the other essays, all of which, without exception, are spectacular, but the highlight for me is “The Sentence Seeks Its Form,” an essay that would also go into my imagined anthology of Gass’s essays on writing, an essay where Gass, who often deflects the notion that he has any advice to offer writers, offers wonderful nuggets like this one:

What can we do to find out how writing is written? Why, we listen to writers who have written well—wondrously well—because that self through which the sentence passes—those eyes, those ears, that nose—is made not of flesh and bone and their dinky experiences, but of pages absorbed from the masters, because that is what writing comes from: it comes from reading…

I recently attended a reading where a porn star was invited to read her scribblings, scribblings borne from experience, the kind of experience Jimi Hendrix demands from a possible inamorata in “Are You Experienced,” where he asks, “But who in your measly little world are you trying to prove that you’re made out of gold and, eh, can’t be sold?” but this professional sex worker, but, at best, embryonic writer’s experience, filled with all kinds of climaxes, ultimately added to nothing on the page; Gass’s essay, however, climaxes with an examination of a single sentence by Henry James that he reproduces as a “spindle diagram,” breaks down with such clarity; and, after gleaning much about this sentence’s architectonics, Gass writes: “Of course most sentences need not, nor should, be built like a palace, but built they will be, well or ill or so-so, and their paragraphs, like towns they partially comprise, will also be commodious or cramped–a Paris Texas or a Paris France.” It’s a useful reminder to me, because the danger of luxuriously constructing each sentence may result in a kind of monochromatic field, and uniform texture. And I haven’t mentioned Gass’s polemical essay “A Defense of the Book” where he discusses the vast differences between the materials that make up a book and the aspects that make up the information of electronic media. It’s an emboldening read for those of us still left who actually care about books as objects, about paper and the words made of ink printed on them, the way they’re bound together, their weight, their smell, their covers.

And now we come to this month’s first detour (followed, alas, by three more), but one still in keeping with the general spirit of my Gass marathon: Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Gass describes it as a work that “embodied what [he] held to be humanly highest, and therefore [is] made of words which revealed a powerful desire moving with the rhythmic grace of Blake’s Tyger; an awareness that was pitilessly unsentimental, yet receptive as a sponge; feelings that were free and undeformed and unashamed; thought that looked at all its conclusions and didn’t blink; as well as an imagination that could dance on the heads of all those angels dancing on that pin.” And as eloquent a description of the novel as this is, perhaps more illuminating is that, for Gass, there’s no other book that he “would have wished more fervently to have written than this intensely personal poem in prose, this profound meditation on seeing and reading—on reading what one has seen, on seeing what one has read.” The first translation of The Notebooks that I’d read was Stephen Mitchell’s rendering; this was followed by another translation, and then Burton Pike’s recent translation. I also spent some weeks in a discussion group about the book with Burton Pike. Structurally, it’s comprised of seventy sections that could easily stand as standalone pieces in so far as each one has some startling image and/or strange and beautiful reflection on some experience either past or present. In fact, Malte is a frustrated poet who is, as he says, “learning to see. Why, I cannot say, but all things enter more deeply into me; nor do the impressions remain at the level where they used to cease. There is a place within me of which I knew nothing. Now all things tend that way. I do not know what happens there.” Though he ultimately fails to bring together his hyperaware regard of his surroundings and his internal life with the fashioning of a poetics, there is no shortage of insightful thought:

No, no, there is nothing in the world that we can imagine, not the least thing. In everything there are so many unique details which are impossible to predict. In imagination, we pass over them in our haste, not noticing that they are lacking. But realities are slow and indescribably detailed.

[....]

When the time came, I would behave toward books as I would toward acquaintances; there would be time for them, a specific amount of time that would pass smoothly and pleasantly, just as much time as suited me. Naturally some of them would be closer to me than others, and I could not say for certain that I’d be proof against wasting the odd half hour with them now and then, missing a walk, an appointment, the opening scene of a play, or a letter that had to be urgently written.

You can’t help but fall for a person who treats books as people. But this book is not merely a compendium about the difficulties of seeing, or a series of sketches for some kind of manifesto or ars poetica. What you have are evocative vignettes on death and ghosts, heightened reveries on the city, on decay, on madness, wonderful meditations on art, on tapestries, and lyrical expressions on memory, family, loss, childhood, the imagination, and ruins.

Next up was Peter Handke’s Don Juan-His Own Version. My review of it is forthcoming in the Review of Contemporary Fiction so I won’t say too much about it here except to mention that it’s a fresh take on the familiar legend, and also to highlight some great sentences that didn’t make it into my review like the alliterative “And all week long, both when he was telling his story and when he was simply sitting there in silence, he sighed repeatedly.” There’s something about the sibilance here which seems to draw out the sentence much like a sigh (and I swear that my own alliteration here was completely unintentional). The book takes on the form of, echoing John Hawkes’s formulation, a “regressus infinitum,” that is, a writer writing about a writer writing, but in this case, it’s about a narrator narrating about a storyteller telling stories. Here is Handke’s narrator relating how Don Juan relates his story:

These images from that day precisely a week earlier came to life, presented themselves as they had not presented themselves at the time, took their places, lined up quietly, without the hoopla of self-conscious remembering, without making a show of reaching into the past, without affecting a resonant voice. If it had a rhythm, then that of an orderly progression free of hasty interruptions, with matters small and large weighted equally, nothing large anymore, but also nothing small.

Now it’s easy to rush over sentences like this without registering how masterful it, in fact, is. Here the alliteration of “precisely…presented…presented” seam the first half of the first sentence, and also introduces the first of many repetitions; the next one being the use of “without”: “without the hoopla,” “without making a show,” and “without affecting”; what’s more, the sentence that follows talks about the rhythm of the don’s storytelling style while mirroring that storytelling style with a punchy rhythm of his own that in this sentence is achieved through the repetition of the words “large” and “small,” while at the same time contrasting with the don’s “orderly progression free of hasty interruptions,” with a style comprised of many hems and haws, and all without coming across as mechanical at all. A favorite moment in the book is a brief set piece on whirling dervishes:

During a concert that the dervishes accompanied with their dancing, Don Juan sat in the very last row. After a little while he no longer heard the drums, the lutes, the flutes (or shawms) as a concert, or as any kind of music. He heard nothing at all, was entirely a spectator, his eyes glued to the dancers in their wide, bell-shaped costumes, with towering cylindrical hats on their heads. The dance consisted of bodies twirling around themselves, slowly for the most part; when it speeded up, it paradoxically gave the impression of slowing down, of majestic, imperious slowness, including the garments, which whirled along with their wearers, and their eyes, which gazed straight ahead, motionless, as the dancers spread their arms, one hand seemingly pointing to the ground, the other offered like a bowl, to the heavens. Ecstasy? Impossible to imagine anything calmer than these dervishes whirling themselves around and for moments almost invisible, or anything more inward-focused. The majority of the dancers were older, and for that reason the stillness that emanated from them was even less astonishing. Yet toward the end of the ceremony—for that is what it was, rather than a mere performance—a very young dervish, hardly more than an adolescent, took over the whirling from the old ones. He spun lightly and at the same time with extraordinary seriousness, projecting an aura of distance, but by no means emptiness, at eye level. And even at the end, when the spinning stopped, no smile, not even a flicker of one, at most an openness in his face.

These breathless sentences unselfconsciously mirror those whirling dancers almost as if it were standing beside them, following them carefully, and then spinning off into their own spins, or perhaps a better way of putting it is that Handke’s lines are much like the string that is unspooled from a colorful top, and what we see is the spinning top, all of it’s colorful, intricate decorations, in slow motion; and it is with passages like these that my faith in contemporary writers is restored, well, at least until I inevitably get disappointed all over again.

As I mentioned at the Chapbook Review, Aaron Burch’s HOW TO TAKE YOURSELF APART, HOW TO MAKE YOURSELF ANEW: notes and instructions from/for a father, winner of PANK’s first chapbook competition, may be as much an instructional manual on mourning as it is an examination of the imagination, wherein emotions are carefully reined in by taut prose; a collection of fragments that’s much more than simply the sum of its parts, that grows in both coherence and cohesion by accretion by way of its deliberate fragmentation, its picking up of the pieces, examining each one, and then puzzling them back together. Here and there Burch offers hints on how to piece his book together:

When stuck, lost, confused, frustrated: do as before. Don’t fear repetition. This can be used for other moments; use when needed. Use carbon paper, stencils, mirrors, projectors. Don’t forget the tools available to you. In fact, you may want to make note of these now for later, while you are thinking about them. Writing commits to memory and, when unsure, revert to rote.

I think the first thing I’ve ever read from Aaron Burch was “Molting” (itself released as a chapbook from Mud Luscious Press), and I was initially surprised, especially after all of the imperative sections, to find it in this collection. But, on further reflection, its fabulist and horrific departures (like the sawing off of hands) make it nest comfortably among the rest of these instructions, tales, and vignettes.

After these three books, I was back to Gass with Tests of Time, his last book. It offers more of what we’ve come to expect from Gass: sentences that are both adamantine and lushly lyrical, that are full of alliterative sprees, longeurs, and, sometimes, elliptical analysis. But there’s a difference here: Gone are the sections of reviews. In their place are extended meditations on single and singular writers (something, of course, that he’s done before) like Italo Calvino and Flaubert, but also these odd hybrid essays, hybrid in the sense that they play with the essay form and use elaborate narrative sequences. “Quotations from Chairman Flaubert” and “There Was an Old Woman Who” are quite different from anything I’ve seen from Gass. Also, while Gass has spoken about politics in his essays before, this is the first book to showcase his concerns. In the section “Social and Political Contretemps” we’re offered five powerful polemics focusing primarily on what Gass calls “the social and political plight of the writer in the contemporary world.” In “Tribalism, Identity, and Ideology,” Gass offers his take on the pact between writer and reader:

There is a bond between us, readers and writers—an ancient tie as old as writing is, if not as old as speech itself, a pact, a promise which the act of setting down sentences in a moving way implicitly solidifies—that what we shall say shall be as true to things and to our own hearts as we can manage with our skills to make them; and that what we read shall be free and unforced and uttered out of the deepest respect for the humanity all language represents, whatever its content otherwise; and that this covenant (broken, tragically, every day which history has been there to mark) is the model for all exchange of thought and feeling, and that this community, the community of unveiled countenance and free speech, must be sustained if we are to continue, either in the harsh and unforgiving condition of survival or in terms of every genuine enterprise of the moral spirit—in short, so we can say, though we may be here by genetic accident or a god’s decree, that we deserve to stay.

And “The Nature of Narrative and Its Philosophical Implications” (where Gass goes to great lengths to distinguish between story and fiction) would have to go in my writing craft anthology as well.

I had intended to write a review of The Abyss of Human Illusion, Gilbert Sorrentino’s posthumously released last novel. Alas, it never happened, primarily because I’d hoped to slow down on book reviews this year in order to concentrate more on my other writing, especially my fiction, but perhaps I can rectify that by commenting on it here. Sorrentino’s book is a novel in shorts, shorts that, much like Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, easily stand as standalone pieces. Narrated by a rather cantankerous old man, the book brims with sardonic and biting critiques, reflections on mortality, and also bits of armchair philosophy:

Mundane things, pitiful in their mundane assertiveness, their sad isolation. Kraft French dressing, glowing weirdly orange through its glass bottle, a green glass bowl of green salad, a bottle of Worcestershire sauce, its paper wrapper still on. All are in repose, in their absolute thingness, under the overhead alarming bright light of the kitchen. They may or they should, they must, really, reveal the meaning of this silent room, this silent house, save that they won’t. There is no meaning. These things will evoke nothing.

It’s a voice, marking itself with its numbing repetitions: “mundane,” “glass,” “bottle,” and “silent”; it’s alliteration: “glass bottle, a green glass bowl of green salad” and “silent room, this silent house, save that they won’t”; its almost Gertrude Steinian overloading of adjectives: that “overhead alarming bright light of the kitchen”; that indelibly marks itself on the reader, and because of its knowing and sad resignation. But it’s also an angry voice, expressing thoughts that could easily have come from one of Gass’s many “disappointed people”:

He waits for everything to what? To get tired, to disappear, waits for all the filth to disappear, every mean fucking cold-eyed bastard to disappear, to be obliterated along with their victims, along with the dogs and cats and whales and showgirls, along with all the mothers and sisters and priests, along with all the money, the computers, the radios and the television sets, the news, the news. BOOM.

Reading this and his other pessimistic, mean-spirited thoughts, it’s hard not to recall Tool’s song “Ænima” where vocalist Maynard James Keenan takes on the persona of someone looking forward to some kind of apocalypse:

Some say the end is near.
Some say we’ll see Armageddon soon.
I certainly hope we will.
I sure could use a vacation from this

Bullshit three-ring circus sideshow of
Freaks

Here in this hopeless fucking hole we call L.A.
The only way to fix it is to flush it all away.
Any fucking time. Any fucking day.
Learn to swim, I’ll see you down in Arizona bay.

Fret for your figure and
Fret for your latte and
Fret for your lawsuit and
Fret for your hairpiece and
Fret for your prozac and
Fret for your pilot and
Fret for your contract and
Fret for your car.

It’s a
Bullshit three-ring circus sideshow of
Freaks

Here in this hopeless fucking hole we call LA
The only way to fix it is to flush it all away.
Any fucking time. Any fucking day.
Learn to swim, I’ll see you down in Arizona bay.

Some say a comet will fall from the sky.
Followed by meteor showers and tidal waves.
Followed by faultlines that cannot sit still.
Followed by millions of dumbfounded dipshits.

Some say the end is near.
Some say we’ll see Armageddon soon.
I certainly hope we will ‘cause
I sure could use a vacation from this

STUPID shit, silly shit, stupid shit…

One great big festering neon distraction,
I’ve a suggestion to keep you all occupied.

Learn to swim.

Mum’s gonna fix it all soon.
Mum’s comin’ round to put it back the way it ought to be.

Learn to swim.

Fuck L. Ron Hubbard and
Fuck all his clones.
Fuck all these gun-toting
Hip gangster wannabes.

Learn to swim.

Fuck retro anything.
Fuck your tattoos.
Fuck all you junkies and
Fuck your short memory.

Learn to swim.

Fuck smiley glad-hands,
With hidden agendas.
Fuck these dysfunctional,
Insecure actresses.

Learn to swim.

‘Cause I’m praying for rain
And I’m praying for tidal waves
I want to see the ground give way.
I want to watch it all go down.
Mum please flush it all away.
I want to see it go right in and down.
I want to watch it go right in.
Watch you flush it all away.

Time to bring it down again.
Don’t just call me pessimist.
Try and read between the lines.

I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t
Welcome any change, my friend.

I wanna see it come down.
Come down.
Suck it down.
Flush it down.

But, the narrator is not simply a curmudgeon, an unapologetic misanthrope; these are aspects of a complex character; he’s much more nuanced than this. For instance, here is the narrator dreaming:

They get out of the car and sit under some trees at the edge of the beach farthest from the water. He says that he remembers that his father landed the largest blue marlin ever caught off the Florida coast, and his father smiles and nods, delighted that his son remembered this. He says that he told one of his students about his father’s catch and that she was very impressed. His father is looking at him with tender, impossibly tender love, and feels, at that moment, overwhelming, crushing sadness and loss, deep and irremediable, and he begins to cry and wakes crying.

No syntactical fireworks here but Sorrentino’s measured storytelling, his unsentimental eye, keeps this section from falling apart; and he masterfully describes how the character slowly falls apart, and, in turn, compels this reader to, too, while also compelling me to seek out and read Sorrentino’s entire oeuvre.

But no, instead, I returned to my plan to read books from Gass’s literary pillars and thus read Plato’s Timaeus. It puts forward Plato’s ideas of the nature of the physical world, the purpose and properties of the universe, and his rather complicated idea of the “World Soul.” Gass describes this dialogue as Plato’s “strangest, and perhaps his most profound—at once most mystical and mysterious, hardheaded and mathematical. Beneath the surface of this ‘likely story’ of how the universe was formed, Plato’s conception of our world, as the qualitative expression of quantitative law, runs like a river.” It might take another reading or so to arrive at a similar feeling about this dialogue as I often found it clunky and obtuse. Perhaps it was my unconscious, no, often conscious, unwillingness to suspend disbelief about the largely fantastic content, and/or because of the translation itself (I’m speaking of Donald J. Zeyl’s rather bland translation). That said, there were some imaginative moments:

Copying the revolving shape of the universe, the gods bound the two divine orbits into a ball-shaped body, the part that we now call our head. This is the most divine part of us, and master of all our other parts. They then assembled the rest of the body and handed the whole of it to the head, to be in its service. They intended it to share in all the motions there were to be. To keep the head from rolling around on the ground without any way of getting up over its various high spots and out of the low, they gave it the body as a vehicle to make its way easy. This is the reason why the body came to have length and grow four limbs that could flex and extend themselves, divinely devised for the purpose of getting about. Holding on and supporting itself with these limbs, it would be capable of making its way through all regions, while carrying at the top the dwelling place of that most divine, most sacred part of ourselves. This is how as well as why we have grown arms and legs. And considering the front side to be more honorable and more commanding than the back, the gods gave us the ability to travel for the most part in this direction. Human beings no doubt ought to have front sides distinguishable from and dissimilar to their backs, and so the gods began by setting the face on that side of the head, the soul’s vessel. They bound organs inside it to provide completely for the soul, and they assigned this side, the natural front, to be the part that takes the lead.

The eyes were the first of the organs to be fashioned by the gods, to conduct light. The reason why they fastened them within the head is this. They contrived that such fire as was not for burning but for providing a gentle light should become a body, proper to each day. Now the pure fire inside us, cousin to that fire, they made to flow through the eyes: so they made the eyes–the eye as a whole but its middle in particular–close-textured, smooth, and dense, to enable them to keep out all the other, coarser stuff, and let that kind of fire pass through pure by itself. Now whenever daylight surrounds the visual stream, like makes contact with like and coalesces with it to make up a single homogeneous body aligned with the direction of the eyes. This happens wherever the internal fire strikes and presses against an external object it has connected with. And because this body of fire has become uniform throughout and thus uniformly affected, it transmits the motions of whatever it comes in contact with as well of whatever comes in contact with it, to and through the whole body until they reach the soul. This brings about the sensation we call “seeing”…

Next up in the reading queue was the first volume of The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, selected, edited, and translated by Frances Steegmuller. In a letter to a school friend, he shares that his time recuperating from an illness may have “brought one benefit, in that I am allowed to spend my time as I like, a great thing in life. For me I can imagine nothing in the world preferable to a nice, well heated room, with the books one loves and the leisure one wants.” While I’d certainly add other things to that formula for happiness, including spending time with my wife and daughter, music, delicious food, some travel, I can’t argue with how satisfying a room filled with my books truly feels.

You can’t help but be impressed, inspired, chastised by Flaubert’s perspicacity, his devotion, his seemingly indefatigable work ethic:

Work, work, write—write all you can while the muse bears you along. She is the best battle-steed, the best coach to carry you through life in noble style. The burden of existence does not weigh on our shoulders when we are composing. It is true that the fatigue and the feeling of desertion that follow are all the more terrible. Let it be so however.

This monastic life he’d chosen for himself was not without challenges however:

Ill, agitated, prey a thousand times a day to moments of terrible anxiety, without women, without wine, without any of the tinsel the world offers, I continue my slow work like a workman who rolls up his sleeves and sweats away at his anvil, indifferent to rain or wind, hail or thunder.

Referring to his work on Madame Bovary:

Last week I spent five days writing one page, and I dropped everything else for it—my Greek, my English; I gave myself up to it entirely. What worries me in my book is the element of entertainment. That side is weak; there is not enough action. I maintain, however that ideas are action. It is more difficult to hold the reader’s interest with them, I know, but if the style is done right it can be done.

I was also impressed by how Flaubert would read aloud lengthy portions from his manuscripts-in-progress to his friends. In one of the more devastating moments in the letters Flaubert, after reading his complete draft of Sainte Antoine, his first significant effort at the writing of a longer work, was told by his friends to burn it.

Flaubert is willfully contradictory. One flagrant example is when he declaims to Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie that

Madame Bovary has nothing ‘true’ in it. It is a totally invented story; into it I put none of my own feelings and nothing from my own life. The illusion (if there is one) comes, on the contrary, from the impersonality of the work. It is a principle that a writer must not be his own theme. The artist in his work must be like God in his creation—invisible and all-powerful: he must be everywhere felt, but never seen.

And then, Art must rise above personal affections and neurotic susceptibilities! It is time to banish anything of that sort from it, and give it the precision of the physical sciences. Nevertheless, the capital difficulty for me remains style, form; the indescribable Beauty resulting from the conception itself—and which is, as Plato said, the splendid raiment of truth…

Flaubert is being slightly disingenuous here. While Louise Colet, Flaubert’s on again, off again lover, of whom he rather facetiously, yet paradoxically still accurately, if unconsciously, called “the Muse,” is not really modeled after Emma Bovary, he did draw from her life and his own, and their relationship for the novel. For instance, there is the moment in Bovary when Rodolphe after breaking up with Emma looked at “the signet ring [given him by Emma] with the motto ‘Amor nel Cor.’” Steegmuller reveals that Flaubert’s own “brutality to Louise is emphasized in a detail of the rupture he invented for Rodolphe and Emma: for Flaubert himself had received, as a gift from Louise, not a signet-ring but a cigar-holder, inscribed with the words ‘Amor nel Cor.’”

Steegmuller also points to the fact that Flaubert had “made detailed use of a strange document,” that is, an account of “old friend” Louise Pradier’s “debts and adulteries” by Mme Louise Boyé for developing the later chapters of Bovary, that is, “those dealing with Emma’s extravagances and promissory notes, and the resultant sale of the Bovary’s house…”

Although later he purportedly admitted: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi, d’après moi!” (“Madame Bovary is myself—drawn from life.”)

While he could be invariably crude, malicious, etc., to Louise Colet, he could also be endearing and offer reams of generally sensible, while still untimely, advice:

Read. Do not brood. Immerse yourself in long study: only the habit of persistent work can make one continually content; it produces an opium that numbs the soul. I have lived through periods of atrocious ennui, spinning in a void, bored to distraction. One preserves oneself by dint of steadiness and pride. Try it.

[....]

Why do you keep saying that I love the tinselly, the showy, the flashy? “Poet of form!” That is the favorite term of abuse hurled by utilitarians at true artists. For my part, until someone comes along and separates for me the form and the substance of a given sentence, I shall continue to maintain that that distinction is meaningless. Every beautiful thought has a beautiful form, and vice versa.

[....]

In the world of Art, beauty is a by-product of form, just as in our world temptation is a by-product of love. Just as you cannot remove from a physical body the qualities that constitute it—color, extension, solidity—without reducing it to a hollow abstraction, without destroying it, so you cannot remove the form from the Idea, because the Idea exists only by virtue of its form. Imagine an idea that has no form—such a thing is as impossible as a form that expresses no idea. such are the stupidities on which criticism feeds. Good stylists are reproached for neglecting the Idea, the moral goal; as though the goal of a doctor were not to heal, the goal of the painter to paint, the goal of the nightingale to sing, as though the goal of Art were not, first and foremost, Beauty!

Inundated by the waves of passable, competent short fictions online, I’ve begun to weary of much of the sameness, the lack of vision, scope, range. Flaubert offers some still pertinent admonition:

Work, meditate, meditate above all; condense your ideas—you know that lovely fragments are no use. Unity, unity, that is everything. The whole: that’s what’s lacking in all writers today, great and small. A thousand fine bits, no complete work. Compress your style: weave a fabric soft as silk and strong as a coat of mail.

For me, the letters detailing Flaubert’s trip with Maxime du Camp to “The Orient,” or, rather, Egypt and Palestine, and then Greece and Italy, were largely of little interest. The best passages, by far, are to be found his letters to Louise Colet while he was writing Madame Bovary:

There are in me, literally speaking, two distinct persons: one who is infatuated with bombast, lyricism, eagle flights, sonorities of phrase and lofty ideas; and another who digs and burrows into the truth as deeply as he can, who likes to treat a humble fact as respectfully as a big one, who would like to make you feel almost physically the things he reproduces. The former likes to laugh, and enjoys the animal side of man.

[....]

What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support; a book which would have almost no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible. The finest works are those that contain the least matter; the closer expression comes to thought, the closer language comes to coinciding and merging with it, the finer the result. I believe the future of Art lies in this direction.

[....]

…I envision a style: a style that would be beautiful, that someone will invent some day, ten years or ten centuries from now, one that would be rhythmic as verse, precise as the language of the sciences, undulant, deep-voiced as a cello, tipped with flame: a style that would pierce your idea like a dagger, and on which your thought would sail easily ahead over a smooth surface, like a skiff before a good tail wind. Prose was born yesterday: you have to keep that in mind. Verse is the form par excellance of ancient literatures. All possible prosodic variations have been discovered; but that is far from being the case with prose.

This last passage is an idea echoed in another letter to Colet:

What a bitch of a thing prose is! It is never finished; there is always something to be done over. However, I think it can be given the consistency of verse. A good prose sentence should be like a good line of poetry—unchangeable, just as rhythmic, just as sonorous.

Regarding sentences, Flaubert wrote that he liked “clear, sharp sentences, sentences which stand erect, erect while running—almost an impossibility. The ideal prose has reached an unheard-of degree of difficulty: there must be no more archaisms, clichés; contemporary ideas must be expressed using appropriate crude terms; everything must be as clear as Voltaire, as abrim with substance as Montaigne, as vigorous as La Bruyère, and always streaming with color”; and that sentences “must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance,” and in a letter to Colet he offers several of his most brutal: “Madame: I was told that you took the trouble to come here to see me three times last evening. I was not in. And, fearing lest persistence expose you to humiliation, I am bound by the rules of politeness to warn you that I shall never be in.” He then has the audacity to sign off with “Yours, G.F.”

I followed the Flaubert with reading William Butler Yeats’s The Tower. Interestingly enough, like Cormac McCarthy, Gass borrowed from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” collected in The Tower, but whereas McCarthy only took a bit for the title of one of his books, namely, No Country for Old Men, Gass used a number of its themes and used its sections to organize his story “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” In fact, we’re signaled to this debt from the outset of the story: “So I have sailed the seas and come… to B…”

This echoes, of course, the title of Yeats’s poem. I won’t go any further into detailing the parallel between these two great works of literature, nor will I go any further discussing The Tower; except to mention that I’d read it in its entirety aloud, and loved it so much that I’d read it aloud again as soon as I had finished.

The reading of two more chapbooks followed Yeats’s masterpiece. While Dana Teen Lomax’s chapbook is entitled Disclosure, and includes copies of various “official” documents pertaining to her like a nomination letter from the Peace Corps, a “Work and Earning Summary,” a checking account statement,” etc., what immediately came to mind as I read it was what was left undisclosed. Another version of this book, included in Kenneth Goldsmith’s anthology Publishing the Unpublishable, has a more accurate title: Disclosure: (an excerpt), and, while it includes x-rays of her teeth, a letter from a credit collection agency, a copy of her driver’s license, and the like, it still is only a disclosure in part. Flipping or clicking through these documents, I thought about how much paper we all have trailing behind us, the sheer ephemerality of it all, and confirmed for me the monumental meaningless of labelings by various authorities.

Philip Kolin’s A Parable of Women is hardly worth mentioning as it uses Christian imagery to little effect. Here we’re offered “choired silence and / Cloistered flowers,” “Orange and yellow lights…flicker[ing] like votive candles,” “Judas kisses”; a woman with Sunday school tunes earwormed in her mind; and references to prayers, scales (chromatic ones) falling from eyes, and “proclamations of angels.” There’s an aria from Mary, Jesus’s Mother, and a lament from Hagar, whom God had exiled, along with her Abraham-fathered child Ishmael, to the wilderness. It’s evocative subjects notwithstanding, I found most of Kolin’s treatments flat and rather colorless. Kolin can, however, draw a sympathetic portrait as in “Edith,” a poem about a woman stricken with illness, where that illness is personified:

I wanted a lover
And imitated every sigh
I heard in the cinema until
He came one night and took
The nom de plume of Pneumonia
Embracing me in a slow trance…

And he can fashion an arresting image. From “Moths”:

A palette of moths
Paints the glass
On the door
Embroidering a history of tongues,
Wings, assignations.

A pity these luminous moments are as fleeting as those moths’ lives.

Ever the completist, I sought out all the excerpts of Gass’s novel-in-progress Middle C. They’re all published in Conjunctions. It is an incredible work that I’d first encountered with “The Garden.” At the time I had no idea that it was part of a much longer work. In addition to that, I read two of his uncollected novellas: Charity and In Camera; a short story “Don’t Even Try, Sam,” a comic story about the making of Casablanca told from the perspective of the piano that the character Sam in the movie “plays”; and an essay “Mimesis”; all of which were published in Conjunctions. Reading these I was encouraged to find that at eighty-six and counting, Gass remains at the top of his game. He’s a marvel, really.

I rounded out the month with reading Paul Valéry’s Dialogues, an homage to Plato’s dialogues. In contrast to Zeyl’s translation of Timaeus, William McClausland Stewart’s translation is lyrical and pulsates with life, and makes me think, as with Gary Lutz and Gordon Lish, that the pupil may have surpassed the teacher. The reader is also treated to two prefaces by Wallace Stevens—talk about a perfect coupling! In “Dance and the Soul,” one of my favorite dialogues here, Socrates, observing the dancer, says “She struggles in the meshes of our gaze, like a captured fly. But my curious mind pursues her on the web, and would devour what she accomplishes.” I couldn’t help imagining Socrates sitting in front of a computer, of this curious mind pursuing this dancer on the worldwide web. The first gaze strikes me less as voyeurism but more as an insatiable hunger to understand the source of the dancer’s creative expression, the latter, my own blemishing of Valéry’s subject matter, is a cheap grab for titillation. Phaedrus, too, observing the dancer, says, “Dance must therefore, by the subtlety of its lines, by the divineness of its upsurgings, by the delicacy of its tiptoe pauses, bring forth that universal creature which has neither body not features, but which has gifts, days, and destinies–that has life and death; and which is even only life and death, for desire once born knows neither sleep nor respite.” And in a seeming echo of Plato’s ideas about the fire that makes up part of the human body, Socrates says that the dancer “seems to live, completely at ease, in an element comparable to fire—in a most subtle essence of music and movement, wherein she breathes boundless energy, while she participates with all her being in the pure and immediate violence of extreme felicity…” And this metaphor of the dancer as flame is carried throughout the essay. Phaedrus: “Dance seems to issue from her body like a flame.” And Socrates:

O Flame, notwithstanding!…Thing live and divine!…

But what is a flame, O my friends, if not the moment itself?–What is wild and joyful and formidable in the instant itself!…Flame is the act of that moment which is between earth and heaven. O my friends, all that passes from the heavy state to the subtle state passes through the moment of fire and light….”

 

Breathtaking stuff! The centerpiece of the collection, however, is “Eupalinos, or the Architect,” what Gass calls his “favorite essay,” and “one of the supreme works of English prose.” There’s much to glean from in this essay including paradoxical thoughts like this one on beauty where Phaedrus says, “Nothing beautiful is separable from life, and life is that which dies.” And there are also numerous comments about the use of language:

O Phaedrus, you have surely not failed to notice in the most important speeches, whether the matter be politics or the private interests of citizens, or again in the delicate language that a lover has to use at some decisive moment—you have certainly noticed what weight and significance are assumed by the very least of little words, and the smallest of silences that falls between them. And I, who have spoken so much, with the insatiable desire to convince, have convinced myself in the long run that the weightiest arguments and the best-conducted demonstrations would have had mighty little effect, but for the help of these apparently insignificant details; and that, on the other hand, mediocre reasons, fittingly linked to words full of tact, or gilded like crowns, can seduce the ears for long. These go-betweens are at the portals of the mind. They tell it what they please, and repeat it at pleasure, finally making the mind believe that it hears its own voice. The reality of speech is after all a melody and that coloring of a voice which we wrongly treat as details and accidents.

[....]

This, dear Phaedrus, is the most important point: no geometry without the word. Without it, figures are accidents, and neither make manifest nor serve the power of the mind. By it, the movements which beget figures are reduced to acts, and these acts being clearly designated by words, each figure is a proposition that can be combined with others; and we are able in this way, without paying any more heed to sight or movement, to recognize the properties of the combinations we have made; and as it were, to construct or enrich space, by means of well-linked sentences.

 

This idea of the critical importance of “well-linked sentences” is one I discovered carried out throughout my reading in February, that most darkest of months, and it is this desire for more of them that I keep reading, and I think this will increasingly mean my having to dip into the past, ironically, to find “fresh” sentences, “new” sentences, sentences that are “well-linked,” that is, constructed as much for the eye as for the ear, that are attentive to rhythm and rhyme, that aren’t afraid of expressive repetition, that are tuned to the key of, yes, life, but also to beauty, that is, sentences inseparable from life, recognizing, however, that “life is that which dies.”

 

Coming up with a name for something is always fraught, and so naming my column here at The Nervous Breakdown proved to be challenging. While definitely easier than naming my daughter (sometimes I think it makes sense to wait until a child has reached a certain age to give them their final name) it nevertheless was still difficult. What I’ll be doing here is sharing my thoughts about the books I’ve read over the past month, why I’ve chosen them, where they’ve taken me, how they’re impacting me as a writer and a reader, and also, perhaps, offering you some detours, the kinds that will tempt you away from the computer screen and, yes, crack open (but please, not the spine!) some books. They are our friends. With this focus in mind for the column, some of the names I came up with were “Silverfish for Bookworms” (it’s one I’d used for my own blog and wished to resurrect, but I really wanted something new); “Once Upon a Time They Lived Happily Ever After” (a good title, but since it potentially narrows down my focus to “stories” instead of opening to include all fictions, I dropped it); “Babbling About Books” (yes, it’s corny but it did lead me to think of the next one which I also liked); “From the Desk of Babel’s Librarian” (I’m always happy to associate myself with Borges); “Well-Read Man’s Float” (I really liked this one, too, but it sounded kind of cocky and while “Unread Man’s Float” seems closer to the truth, it also felt wrong); and lastly, “A Community of Words” (it’s what William Gass calls texts—more on him later). But I finally came up with “A Reader’s Log(orrhea)”. Beware! The writing here will be unapologetically excessive and wordy, and maybe even (gasp!) purple. Here we go!

Deciding what to read is, for me, always marked by a certain degree of anxiety. I feel pulled back by the past, from all those classics that inspired countless other worthy works, but also simultaneously pushed along toward or pulled by whatever’s being published now. There are other tensions. As a fiction writer, I like to read things that are connected in some way—either thematically or structurally, or, ideally, both—to what I’m currently writing. As a reviewer, I also have books that are sent to me and pull me in yet another direction. I’m also often yanked by the independent presses; their vitality is overpowering, sometimes. And then there’s the tugging from the incredible, and innumerable, new works in translation. For instance, there’s Michael Hulse’s recent translation of Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge that’s been calling to me. (I’ve read three translations of it already, so why do I feel this pull?) And, just like everybody else, I have to wade through the major press conglomerate’s advertising bombardments of their latest, and usually unsatisfying and empty, bombast; but even so, I still keep looking because… you just never know.

So I began this year with two immediate objectives in mind: First, to read every book listed in William Gass’s essay “A Temple of Texts: Fifty Literary Pillars,” and second, to read or reread every book Gass has published. My reason for the Gass project was borne of a weird premonition about Gass. Rather than getting into my morbid thoughts, let me instead tell you that I opened this year with reading Gass’s first novel Omensetter’s Luck. A powerful debut, it’s divided into three parts, each part narrated by a different person. Having affinities to Faulkner and Hemingway, it rises above their influence because of its peculiar, while also still beautiful, descriptions, and also by its depiction of three very different minds. Following this, I read Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. It’s definitely an oddity where you’ll find Gass overtly flexing his experimental chops; there’s a fusion of minds here, a profusion of voices; there’s collage, and typeface and spatial play worthy of Apollinaire. And there are Gass’s meditations on language (something that you find throughout Gass’s fiction and his essays):

In language, there’s no imagination without music, because music is the movement of the imagination. But who can take imagination seriously when it binds its words with threads of feelings like spiders fill their webs with flies. Not alone because they eat them.

I reread In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and was once again overwhelmed by stories like “Order of Insects” (easily my favorite story by Gass), “Mrs. Mean,” “Icicles,” and the title story. And the novella The Pedersen Kid is a harrowing tale that demands rereading as each reread reveals new symbolic associations.

Next was a reread of Gass’s Fiction and the Figures of Life, and I, once again, enjoyed every minute following his deep philosophical forays and then his extensive examinations of writers like Gertrude Stein, Nabokov, Borges, Henry James, and others. On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (another reread) is a short work, but no less inspiring, as Gass uses a primary color to lyrically explore metaphor, vulgarity, eroticism, and the imagination, and ultimately turns inside out conventional notions of the expository essay. Within the climate of mainstream media’s demand for concision, for easily digestible tidbits, for something that has a gist, On Being Blue is wonderfully out of place. The question is, do you have time for a sentence like this one?:

So sentences are copied, constructed, or created; they are uttered, mentioned, or used; each says, means, implies, reveals, connects; each titillates, invites, conceals, suggests; and each is eventually either consumed or conserved; nevertheless, the lines in Stevens or the sentences of Joyce or James, pressed by one another into being as though the words before and the words after were those reverent hands both Rilke and Rodin have celebrated, clay calling to clay like mating birds, concept responding to concept the way passionate flesh congests, every note a nipple on the breast, at once a triumphant pinnacle and perfect conclusion, like pelted water, I think I said, yet at the same time only another anonymous cell, and selfless in its service to the shaping skin as lost forgotten matter is in all walls; these lines, these sentences, are not quite uttered, not quite mentioned, peculiarly employed, strangely listed, oddly used, as though a shadow were the leaves, limbs, trunk of a new tree, and the shade itself were thrust like a dark torch into the grassy air in the same slow and forceful way as its own roots, entering the earth, roughen the darkness there till all its freshly shattered facets shine against themselves as teeth do in the clenched jaw; for Rabelais was wrong, blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; it is the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like the whorls of a shell, and which we follow warily, as Alice after that rabbit, nervous and white, till suddenly—there! climbing down clauses and passing through ‘and’ as it opens—there—there—we’re here!…in time for tea and tantrums; such are the sentences we should like to love—the ones which love us and themselves as well—incestuous sentences—sentences which make an imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye; that have a kind of orality transmogrified: not the tongue touching the genital tip, but the idea of the tongue, the thought of the tongue, word-wet to part-wet, public mouth to private, seed to speech, and speech…ah! after exclamations, groans, with order gone, disorder on the way, we subside through sentences like these, the risk of senselessness like this, to float like leaves on the restful surface of that world of words to come, and there, in peace, patiently to dream of the sensuous, and mindful Sublime.

Whew! Sentences, as Gary Lutz has written, may be lonely places, but they can (as demonstrated by Gass above) also be a place of solitude, a vast play space where you can sprawl. I followed On Being Blue with The World Within the Word. Highlights include “Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence” (an important text for anyone interested in Stein’s innovations), “Carrots, Noses, Snow, Rose, Roses,” and “The Ontology of the Sentence, or How to Make a World of Words.” Virtually every sentence by Gass dazzles, and each essay bubbles with his insightful extrapolations on whatever literature he’s examining. Habitations of the Word was next. I found his essay on Emerson (a meditation on the art of essay writing in general, really) was particularly useful to me. And I could go on about “The Soul Inside the Sentence,” “Tropes of the Text,” “On Talking to Oneself,” “On Reading to Oneself,” “The Origin of the Extermination in the Imagination,” and “The Habitations of the Word,” but instead I’ll rave about his essay “‘And.’” Demonstrating his virtuosic erudition (and his love of words no matter how small; thanks, Horton!) Gass examines this conjunction from many different perspectives:

The anonymity of ‘and,’ its very invisibility, recommends the word to the student of language, for when we really look at it, study it, listen to it, ‘and’ no longer appears to be ‘and’ at all, because ‘and’ is, as we said, invisible, one of the threads that holds our clothes together: what business has it being a pants leg or the frilly panel of a blouse? The unwatched word is meaningless—a noise in the nose—it falls on the page as it pleases, while the writer is worrying about nouns and verbs, welfare checks or a love affair; whereas the watched word has many meanings, some of them profound; it has a wide range of functions, some of them essential; it has many lessons to teach us about language, some of them surprising; and it has metaphysical significance of an even salutary sort.

With such rigorous attention to minutiae, Gass’s essay is, in fact, an object lesson in how much we, as writers and readers, take for granted.

In between my readings of Gass was any number of detours. Inspired by Gass’s literary “pillars,” I reread Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium. Gass believes “that genius and originality should be evident almost at once and delivered like a punch—in a paragraph, a stanza, even an image,” and as I reread Harmonium (aloud, of course), I was continually pummeled by the richness of syntax, the vividness of the imagery. I was so inspired that I decided to read Stevens’s entire Collected Poetry & Prose (it’s almost a thousand pages long!) twice. Having finished all the poetry and plays, I’m in the middle reading the essays now. So, if you’re exhausted by all the leaden sentences out there, all the poetry and fiction without any music, dip into Stevens, a still wholly original voice and challenging thinker. John Hawkes’s The Lime Twig is another of Gass’s literary pillars that I read in January. I will have to reread it, of course, since I found myself sometimes lost (surely not a bad thing?) in Hawke’s lusciously lyrical prose and could hardly be bothered to connect the plot’s dots.

After I’d mentioned famed grammarian Karen Elizabeth Gordon in a blog post at Big Other [an online journal I edit] about grammar, style, and usage, Andrew Borgstrom, another writer, sent me a copy of Gordon’s book of fiction The Red Shoes and Other Tattered Tales. Its original title, Intimate Apparel: A Dictionary of the Senses, actually intimates much more what her project is, that is, envisioning the novel as an abecedary. Each alphabetical entry like “Dark,” “Drawers,” “Dusk,” “Farewell,” “Fur,” “Honey,” “Jar,” “Lunch,” “Socks,” “Stockings,” “Time,” “Towel,” “T-shirt,” “Undershirt,” “Wall,” and “Wedding Train” is a colorful swatch pieced together into a quilt by the novel’s two seamstresses. Gordon’s gothic pyrotechnics and sesquipedalian proclivities are in fine display here as she re-envisions tales by Hans Christian Andersen and The Brothers Grimm, as well as creating her own (to interpolate one of her phrases) tangled balls of yarn.

I plan on writing more about this later somewhere, but Lance Olsen’s Head in Flames was incredible. In it, he collages three voices: Vincent van Gogh, his great grandson Theo van Gogh, and Mohammed Bouyeri (Theo’s murderer), and creates a polyvocal work seeping with anxiety, malice, fear, and doubt, as well as lyrical meditations on art, creativity, and the imagination.

I also read a few chapbooks including David Peak’s Museum of Fucked with its aching portraits of disturbed, hurting, and despairing people living in rundown Chicago neighborhoods. Lonely Christopher’s Satan is a compelling exploration of disjunction and stuttering repetition.

Some other quick, but no less significant, detours last month were the following:

Joyelle McSweeney’s Nylund the Sarcographer, Gary Lutz’s I Looked Alive, Gordon Lish’s Zimzum, Jason Schwartz’s A German Picturesque, and J.A. Tyler’s Inconceivable Wilson [Tyler is a contributor at Big Other]. What they all share in common is language that calls attention to itself as language, as something malleable, almost sculptural. McSweeney’s book is dripping with sinuous, luxurious descriptions:

The muddy carpet had looked like the Seine at night, streaked with pink muddy light from the sky, or like rosebank after heavy rain, or the aftermath of an allmale garden party: kinky. Nylund had walked by the large department stores and seen small nodes of women emerge wearing hats as if guiding a flotilla of flowery islands down a river of Nereids’ hair. The effect proved artificial like a Victorian’s night charade, each woman’s head gleaming with a prow-shaped coif which bore up a sheaf of flowers. It was afternoon as Nylund watched this incredible current emerge and pull to a thread in both directions down the sidewalk, then thin out completely and disappear.

After reading this, you might consider picking up Joanna Howard’s On the Winding Stair, a collection of stories that goes for baroque as well, and also explores a similar kind of fragmentary narrative style.

Lutz is the king of sentences so I won’t bother cherry picking. Suffice to say, any of his three story collections is worth picking up and living with for a while.

I liked Gordon Lish’s Zimzum, its unnerving repetitions, its self-reflexive aspects. It is obsessive and deranged, and contains language that is —as you would expect from this architect of a particular brand of minimalism—pared down and tightly wound. It’s best read in one sitting, I think.

Jason Schwartz’s A German Picturesque is another beautiful little book. In it is contained twenty-one delicately tooled fictions, each of which startles with its intricacy, subtlety, and poetry:

I would touch a spot on the sheet.

I would touch the windows and the grass, the rip beneath the trees, by the boat—which, indeed, was sinking. The mountain in the bracken was the face, and pleasant, pertaining also to the pitter-patter in the walls, to farce, that is to say—at least inasmuch as the headboard was oxblood, but not old, and the door, of a sudden was open.

Yes, all kinds of doors open when reading Schwartz’s book.

J.A. Tyler’s short works are ubiquitous online and so it was great to finally read a longer, self-contained work. Without getting into too much detail, as I intend to explore it at greater length at Big Other, it’s a delving into a heart of darkness, but a darkness illumined by Tyler’s painterly, expressionistic effects, and also his insistent repetitions:

White, so much white, too much white, white in dark, black, light, lighter, lightened. Planes, boats, and a wall of starving people saying to me about not going in, about not moving through them, to the next, onward. And I went onward because I know no restrictions, I wanted, I want. And it is beyond strange now to exist without existing, to persist in pieces and minor movements, being re-tuned, returned. A lathe turns pieces. I turn. I spin. Spin, spin. The world moves and spins, lullabies of plane engines and boat engines and cars in gear and my boots designing footprints in loose dirt, in gravel, stamping into new places I go. I go. I go. I went, have gone, am going. I go, I go. Go.

Lastly, I began reading Gass’s massive tome The Tunnel. I’m five-sixths of the way through, and though I’d hate to condense my thoughts about it in a sentence or two, let me conclude by saying that one thing it raised for me is the feeling that, in general, there’s a lack of ambition in contemporary literature. Sometimes size does matter, not only in the length of pages, that large canvas where a writer can spread themselves out rather than spreading themselves thin, but in the girth of ideas. Also, it made me think that virtuosity is another quality that seems in short supply these days. What The Tunnel proves to me, actually, or, rather, what most of the books I’ve read this month prove to me is, among many other things, that most writers simply need to try harder.