Frank Miller released the sixth and last issue of Ronin in August 1984. Not everyone was sure what to make of the limited series, but Miller and his colorist, Lynn Varley, emerged from the project emboldened. As Miller put it to the Comics Journal in 1985, “[W]e’re scaring the horses. They need scaring” (Thompson 37).
Their next opportunity to startle their editors, peers, and fans would be much higher profile: DC editor Dick Giordano offered Miller the chance to reinvent Batman, whose books at the time were suffering declining sales. (Indeed, by 1985 Batman’s sales had reached such a low point that some at DC had suggested killing off the character.) Could Miller pull with Batman the same trick he’d managed with Daredevil?
Marilyn Manson, the musician, painted ‘Trismegistus’ (Thrice-Great) in 2004. See how it both draws on, and departs from, religious iconography (as evidenced by the painting below it).
'Trismegistus' by Marilyn Manson (2004)
'The Veil of Veronica' by Domenico Fetti (ca. 1618)
A short piece by Tobias Hill in the Guardian Review cleared up something I hadn’t quite realised about this curious Lost Booker enterprise.
In case you missed it, someone has apparently noticed that a rule change for the Booker Prize in 1971 effectively meant that everything published in 1970 had no chance to be considered for the award. So they are running it this year instead. What I hadn’t taken on board was the judges are only drawing up the long list, the actual award will be decided by popular vote.
Which means, in turn, that any book no longer in print is automatically excluded. This results, for instance, in Lawrence Durrell’s Numquam not being included. Though, thinking about it, Durrell might have had a chance with a juried award but I suspect wouldn’t win a popular vote. Particularly not with Numquam, which is really only the second half of a novel. When I read it, in the summer of 1972, it was in a single volume with Tunc under the title The Revolt of Aphrodite, and I think it worked better that way.
Still, it is an interesting long list. Fascinating to see Len Deighton’s Bomber included (even if at least one newspaper described it as a spy novel) since it would not have got anywhere near a Booker Prize during the 1970s. And it is also cheering to see Mary Renault’s Fire From Heaven, another name that would never have got close to the prize at the time. I was addicted to her work in the 60s and 70s but I was under the impression that she was one of the sadly forgotten authors from that period (a view perhaps born out by the fact that so far I have not seen a single commentator refer to her). But there are also a lot of very familiar names on the list, and even given the vagaries of a popular vote system I strongly suspect that the eventual (belated) winner will come from one of them.
‘Fishing With John’ (John Lurie) was a short lived TV show on Bravo in the early 90’s. Tom Waits, Jarmusch, Dennis Hopper and Matt Dillon are in the other episodes.
Some years ago, we were in Berkeley, wandering from secondhand bookshop to secondhand bookshop. We had a good haul but, as always, there was one book I was looking for that I just couldn’t find. In one shop, as we chatted with the shopkeeper as he added up the damage, I finally asked about it. He looked blank. Then he said, ‘Hang on, I’ll check it out,’ and fired up his computer. ‘Ah yes,’ he said after a moment, ‘here it is. Oh …’
Even then, nearly a decade ago, copies of Big As Life by E.L. Doctorow were changing hands for a minimum of $600. So I suspect I may never lay my hands on one. It has been disowned by the author, it has not been reprinted since its first publication in the mid-60s, but I do want to read it. Big As Life was Doctorow’s second novel (after Bad Man from Bodie which was later retitled Welcome to Hard Times) and it is his only work of science fiction: why would I not want to read it? But I also, on minimal evidence (I’ve never even read a synopsis of the plot), have a sense of the novel as a cap on the trajectory of his work.
There is a very good review of Homer and Langley in the current issue of the London Review of Books which begins: ‘The historical novelist E.L. Doctorow …’, and this made me stop and think. I see Doctorow as charting a haphazard history of America from the Civil War (The March) to the present (City of God), but I have somehow never got around to translating that into thinking of him as an ‘historical novelist’. (That review went on to confuse me further by comparing Doctorow with Dos Passos and DeLillo, and I have to wonder if what binds them is no more than the coincidence of their initial.)
Vagabond(Sans toi ni loit), is a 1985 film by the Belgian director Agnès Varda. Varda was part of the French New Wave (with Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol, and Rivette), although her first film predates that movement; some critics regard as belonging more specifically to the simultaneous Rive Gauche (Left Bank) movement (alongside Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and others). Like all of those directors, Varda’s career outlasted the end of the Nouvelle Vague (c1967); her most recent film is The Beaches of Agnès (2008) (which I think the world of).
Since Beaches there’s been a growing consensus among film critics that Varda is one of our greatest directors, and that she’s been until now too overlooked, too overshadowed. The Criterion Collection recently released four of her major features (as well as a few shorts); that set includes Sans toit ni loi, Varda’s most successful and arguably greatest film.
I haven’t seen all of Varda’s films, and I’m no authority on her work, but I’ve been watching her movies since the late 1990s, and I’m now steadily (re-)making my way through what’s available. At the moment, Sans toit ni loi is my favorite film of the 1980s, so I thought I’d share a few thoughts on it. (But beware of the spoilers after the jump!)
Recently I’ve been culling the blogs I look at regularly, and adding some new ones. Refining my daily internet reading to create intellectual and creative clarity. The thing I find myself anticipating most each day is a new drawing from Renee French. If you’ve never seen her work, French is THE living master of graphite use. It’s all pencil, and her lonely, gray images are singular in their effect. Even when I read French’s comics, I find myself looking at each page (or panel) independently, more the way I would read an art book or browse a gallery. This is no slight to French’s sense of cartooning (she knows cartooning – few can express such mystery and complication with so few lines – her figures blank expression are particularly powerful), but each of her images read to me as a whole. As such, seeing one a day just makes sense.
It is interesting how the cover images affect our reading of the book. But equally influential is the author photograph. In discussing the under-appreciation of Alice Munro in the New York Times, Jonathan Franzen wrote, “her jacket photos show her smiling pleasantly, as if the reader were a friend, rather than wearing the kind of woeful scowl that signifies really serious literary intent.” Franzen makes a good point.
Below is a photograph by William Eggleston that I saw on the cover of a book called ‘How to Read a Photograph’ by Ian Jeffrey.
'Black Family By the Sea' by William Eggleston - used with permission: (c)Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
I didn’t buy the book (it was in a museum gift shop, and I was on my way out), but I was fascinated by the image, which is beautiful for many reasons. It has the odd, unreal quality of seeming both staged and unstaged. Notice how the family members appear as though they’ve been posed, though not necessarily by the photographer himself. They are looking into a distance that has nothing to do with the viewer, as if something has caught their attention. Perhaps they have seen something on the beach, or in the water, or have turned toward someone who has called to them from across the parking lot. Perhaps someone we can’t see is taking their picture. Or perhaps they are simply waiting. Who knows? What’s important is that this camera has caught them unaware, in an ordinary moment, yet it has framed them in such a way that their form – the actual shape they make together – becomes the focus of our attention. We tend to see them as a unit, a family, and the title of the photograph encourages us to dwell on what that means.
Christopher Higgs at HTMLGIANT recently posted this question: “If you were teaching a class on American experimental fiction, what texts would you choose, and why?” He went on to list a set of possible books for an “Introduction to American Experimental Fiction” course:
Ishmael Reed – Mumbo Jumbo
William S. Burroughs – The Soft Machine
Kathy Acker – Blood and Guts in High School
Carole Maso – Aureole
Jean Toomer – Cane
David Markson – This Is Not A Novel
Gertrude Stein – Tender Buttons
Ben Marcus – The Age of Wire and String
This post won’t be about adding or subtracting books from his list (although I’d suggest Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress over This Is Not a Novel, and Carole Maso’s The Art Lover or AVA over Aureole.) Rather, I want to talk about experimental fiction as a genre.
Because Chris’s question reminds me of a debate that comes up frequently in US experimental film circles…
I am in the throes of a new story. And it’s been the most patient I’ve been with a story from inception on. Part of that is due to the intensity of the topic, etc. But that’s not really the point. As I’m getting close, or close-ish, to final revisions it has me thinking about it’s title, as well as it’s ending. I posed one question on Facebook, but I thought it’d be interesting to see what anybody else thought about these questions I’m having.
1) How do you feel about titling a story after the opposite of what the story is about? For example and to steal a bit of something BL Pawelek said regarding the matter, if the story were called “Lucky,” but in effect is about a lack of luck, does that work? (I know that in cases it can work, I’m looking more to hear an array of opinions about how people feel about it).
2) How do you feel about ending a story at the height of the conflict? I don’t do this very often, but I feel with this story that if I take it any further than the height of the conflict that it will lose something. Thoughts?
I can’t thank Mathias Svalina enough for introducing me to Selah Saterstrom. Her first novel, The Pink Institution (Coffee House Press, 2004), offers up such stark, spare language as to mimic the fragmented, but forever life-altering, moments in the lives of her (many generations of) women, not one of whom escapes her own special brand of suffering.
“Willie called his daughters into the dining room. He picked up a dining room table chair and threw it into a closed window. The window shattered. He said, “That’s a lesson about virginity. Do you understand?” to which they replied, “Yes sir.”
The chapter — yes, chapter — above is the first in the section “Maidenhood Objects,” which follows the section “Childhood Objects.” Perhaps the following is the most representative chapter from “Childhood Objects”:
“Azalea sent Aza to Toomsata to see if Willie was there. Aza walked into the house. She asked Dunbar if her father was there. Dunbar said, ‘He’s in the bed, you jealous little bitch.’ On several occasions the children watched Dunbar masturbate their drunk father while their mother, also drunk, slobbered on herself sitting in the corner.”
Jimmy Chen is a writer. His flash fiction, “Footnote1,” engages the mental sphere, tolls the emotional chamber, and continues to unfold despite explanation. It is one of those pieces I’ll read and re-read again. Our interview appears after the reprint.
JA Tyler is the editor of ml press, which recently put out an anthology of its first year of flash-style chapbooks, including Jimmy’s “Footnote1”. With stories so singular and language so bright I sometimes find myself squinting while reading this anthology; it is a thing of beauty both inside and out. By courtesy of JA, Jimmy’s flash is reprinted below.
I went to school with a writer named Joanna Ruocco whose facility with language made me nervous and envious and happy. Everything she brought into workshop was wondrous and big-hearted and brilliant and funny and flawed in charmingly perfect ways. I’ve been meaning to write something about her book, The Mothering Coven, and I will sometime soon. But now let me just link to a story of hers called Unicorns you can read online at The Fanzine. The following appears within the first hundred words:
When I am not writing, I feel bad. But when I am writing, I am usually not writing. I feel bad. I sit in front of the computer doing small, surreptitious things to my body.
By the way, The Fanzine seems right up my alley: they’re expressly interested in publishing longer-form writing. As I’ve said here before, this is something web journals–lacking, as they do, space restrictions–should be doing more of.
Mel Bosworth reads an excerpt from Sasha Fletcher’s forthcoming novella WHEN ALL OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED MARCHING BANDS WILL FILL THE STREETS & WE WILL NOT HEAR THEM BECAUSE WE WILL BE UPSTAIRS IN THE CLOUDS.
Formalists are often accused of ignoring art’s morality, as well as its other social aspects. (Of course, artists are often faced with the same accusation—hence the logic by which legislators divert money toward math and the sciences. Whatever strange thing it is that the artist contributes to the culture, it is at best of secondary importance.)
In my last post, I tried to make clear that social value in fact formed the very center of the work done by Viktor Shklovsky and the other Russian Formalists:
Frank Miller released the sixth and last issue of Ronin in August 1984. Not everyone was sure what to make of the limited series, but Miller and his colorist, Lynn Varley, emerged from the project emboldened. As Miller put it to the Comics Journal in 1985, “[W]e’re scaring the horses. They need scaring” (Thompson 37).
John Madera
John Dermot Woods
Ryan W. Bradley
Michael Leong
Greg Gerke
Molly Gaudry
Leni Zumas
Jac Jemc
J. A. Tyler
Stacy Muszynski
Shya Scanlon
Nicolle Elizabeth
A D Jameson
Tim Jones-Yelvington
Danielle Adair
Kristen Iskandrian
Roxane Gay
Rachel Swirsky
Edward Mullany
Aya Karpinska
Paul Kincaid
davis schneiderman
