A nice, relatively brief interview with Chris Ware that is worth watching for two reasons—

(1) It spotlights Chris Ware, perhaps the single most important graphic novelist of, well…I think that’s it: the single most important graphic novelist (his epic masterwork, Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, being the standard case for legitimizing comics as high art/literature).

And (2) it places him in an interview with an awkwardly bubbly and funnily tenacious interviewer; that in addition to the kitschy background music and editing.

Ware’s responses—both verbal and nonverbal—are priceless. Enjoyable on multiple levels.

I am a native of Gelderland. Our property consists only of a few acres of briar and brackish water. Pines that rustle with a metallic sound grow on its boundaries. Only a few rare inhabitable rooms remain on the farm, which is dying stone by stone in solitude. We issue from an old family of shepherds, formerly large, now reduced to my parents, my sister, and me.

I was born in Gelderland, where our family holdings had dwindled to a few acres of heath and yellow water. Along the boundary grew pine trees that rustled with a metallic sound. The farmhouse had only a few habitable rooms left and was falling apart stone by stone in the solitude. Ours was an old family of herdsmen, once numerous, now reduced to my parents, my sister, and myself.

Many years ago, when I was first discovering science fiction, I came across a Damon Knight anthology called A Century of Science Fiction. It was one of those defining anthologies for me. It must be 40 years or more since I last read it, but it contained stories that are still vivid in my memory – ‘Sail On! Sail On!’ by Philip José Farmer, a selection from Worlds of the Imperium by Keith Laumer, ‘The Star’ by Arthur C. Clarke, ‘The Crystal Egg’ by H.G. Wells, ‘The First Days of May’ by Claude Veillot – along with one or two that now mean absolutely nothing to me (‘You Are With It!’ by Will Stanton??). But the story that stood out then, and continues to be one of the most fondly remembered stories I have ever read, was a piece called ‘Another World’ by J.-H. Rosny aîné (in a translation by Knight himself).

Recently I had the opportunity to review a new volume, Three Science Fiction Novellas: From Prehistory to the End of Mankind, by J.-H. Rosny aîné, the centrepiece of which was a new translation of ‘Another World’. And it was, indeed, every bit as good as I remember. And yet …

*

J.-H. Rosny was really Joseph-Henri-Honoré Boëx (1856-1940) and his younger brother, Séraphin Justin François Boëx (1859-1948), but around 1907 the pair split, and all the works previously ascribed to J.-H. Rosny were now ascribed to Rosny aîné. Rosny jeune did apparently write one novel on his own, after his brother’s death, but it seems not to have been very good.

So Rosny aîné was the writer in the family. He was born in Brussels, but in 1873 he moved to London to work as a telegrapher and stayed there for 11 years. During his time in London he was exposed to the debates on evolution that were then continuing in lively fashion (the same debates that young H.G. Wells would have been discovering about this time, though it is doubtful that the two would ever have met). Rosny also probably wrote his first novel, Nell Horn, in London before he moved to Paris, since it is a naturalistic novel set in the London slums.

Nell Horn was published, in French, in 1887, as was his first work of sf, the prehistoric adventure Les Xipéhuz. Thereafter he would divide his writing between realist novels and science fiction, and also wrote works of popular science (a career that seems to mirror that of Wells). He was an associate of Edmond de Goncourt and later became president of the Académie Goncourt, and was also highly respected among French scientists (it has been claimed that he knew the Curies and Einstein personally). Like Wells, he wrote prolifically right up to his death, on the eve of the German entry into Paris in 1940.

*

His place in the history of French language sf is unassailable, but his work is little known in English. Danièle Chatelain and George Slusser, who translate and introduce Three Science Fiction Novellas, mention only L’étonnant voyage d’Hareton Ironcastle which was loosely translated and effectively re-written by Philip José Farmer, and the Hollywood film of The Quest for Fire. Though they conveniently forget that two of the stories in their collection, The Xipéhuz and Another World, were previously translated by Damon Knight, while the third, The Death of the Earth, has recently been translated by Brian Stableford.

That, to be honest, in not the only questionable statement I found in Chatelain and Slusser’s introduction. Of Les Xipéhuz, they say it clearly drew inspiration from English evolutionary debates because ‘no analogues to the prehistoric extrapolation of this novel exist in the francophone world’. Oddly enough, in Nicholas Ruddick’s masterful account of prehistoric fictions, The Fire in the Stone (2009), he demonstrates that there was a clear tradition of prehistoric fiction that had started as early as 1861 and that was almost entirely French in origin.

They then spend the bulk of their lengthy introduction (over 70 pages, with only 120 pages devoted to Rosny’s fiction) comparing Rosny first with Jules Verne, then with H.G. Wells, to the disadvantage of Verne and Wells of course. The trouble is, given that we have not been given reason to trust them before this point, it is very hard to accept their arguments here. And little inaccuracies keep creeping in (‘Wells wrote at least one prehistoric tale’, they tell us, when he actually wrote two very well known examples of the genre). So when they compare the versions of the end of the world presented by Rosny and by Wells (in The Time Machine) I found myself not at all surprised, but not at all convinced, when they declare: ‘Wells’s treatment of these bold topics, compared with Rosny’s, appears surprisingly conservative.’ Really? They complain that the Time Traveller is confined to Richmond, though of course he has no means of travel in the future but still covers a very extensive territory on foot. They complain that ‘he apparently wore a Victorian day coat and socks … on his travels to the death of the Earth’, though given that he was a Victorian and a man of his era, what else should he wear? Targ happens to wear appropriate clothes for the end times simply because he is a native of those times. And they complain about ‘the dimensions of irony and satire’ in Wells’s novels, as if that is a bad thing.

No, honestly, I hold Rosny in very high regard, nearly as high a regard as I hold Wells, but this special pleading, this distorting of Wells in order to exalt Rosny, actually diminishes the man.

*

But if the scholarship dismays me, the translation disturbs me even more.

I must make it clear, I have not read the original, I can make no judgement on the accuracy of the translation. But there is something in the spirit of the work that falls flat for me.

At the head of this post I quoted the first paragraph of Another World as translated first by Chatelain and Slusser, and second by Damon Knight. Which do you prefer?

There are things wrong with Knight’s translation. The ‘yellow water’ is a mistake, since our narrator cannot see colours in the same spectrum we see, so yellow would be a meaningless term for him. Even so, I think that ‘heath and yellow water’ gets across more of the type of land this is than ‘briar and brackish water’. And Knight is, perhaps, wrong to cast the paragraph in the past tense. Chatelain and Slusser are so literal in their translation that I am sure Rosny used tenses the way they do. Except that the whole of the rest of the story is in the past tense, it is a memoir written some time after the events recounted. Chatelain and Slusser’s translation drifts into the past tense midway through the second paragraph; so I don’t think Knight is doing any damage to Rosny’s story by being that bit more consistent in his use of tenses.

These small quibbles aside, Knight’s translation represents a much more natural-seeming use of language. That ‘once numerous’ surely works much better than the rather stiff ‘formerly large’. And Chatelain and Slusser’s choice of a word like ‘inhabitable’ when Knight opts for the much more informal ‘habitable’ seems to speak volumes for the style of the translation. And when Knight writes that the farmhouse was ‘falling apart stone by stone in the solitude’ he conveys, in ordinary language, a process while setting the farmhouse in its solitary landscape. When Chatelain and Slusser say the farm ‘is dying stone by stone in solitude’, the dying seems to reach for a poetic language without quite reaching it, and ‘in solitude’ suggests to me an abandoned building rather than a solitary landscape, though we know that the farm isn’t abandoned.

In one of the notes that accompany ‘The Xipéhuz’ they say: ‘Sentences like this may seem awkward, but we have rendered Rosny’s austere, almost hieratic style as faithfully as possible, except in cases where it ceases to be English’.  I’m not sure this is doing Rosny any favours (and I’m particularly sure that pointing this out in a footnote is not the done thing). I suspect that Knight’s translation, while less academic, does a better job of rendering Rosny for a modern reader.

Rosny is a superb storyteller. The strange, geometric alien beings that flit obliviously through the pages of ‘Another World’ are one of the great inventions of science fiction. His work survives the rather stilted translation it gets in this new collection. But I am glad I first encountered it in Damon Knight’s translation, because that is how I still remember it.

Anima Mundi is Latin for “the shortest Godfrey Reggio / Philip Glass collaboration”—the third of their four “musical nature documentaries.” (The others are the Hopi-titled Koyaanisqatsi, 1982, Powaqqatsi, 1989, and Naqoyqatsi, 2002—although the less said about that last one, the better.) Reggio and Glass also sometimes get assigned Baraka (1992) but, beyond clearly inspiring it, they had nothing to do with it. (They were busy making Anima Mundi!)

Anima Mundi also means “the soul of the world,” although I think Reggio and Glass thought it means “animal world,” because that’s what the movie’s mostly about: animals. (That above image is the opening shot, a kind of counterpoint to the footage of people staring into the camera in Powaqqatsi.)

Anima Mundi (1992)

I’m being snarky, but Reggio’s movies kinda invite that. When I encountered them in college, they were popular—they were enjoyable and perhaps even highbrow (they had Hopi titles!)— but watching them was always accompanied by the frisson that they might be, you know, kind of pretentious and dumb (they had Hopi titles!). I do recall defending them as being trickier than they looked, and I recently showed excerpts of Koy and Pow to a friend who’d expressed an interest in associative editing. But beyond that, these days, I honestly don’t know where I stand on them, other than that they’re fun to watch and argue about (aka, perfect for college viewing). They’re also extremely beautiful and astonishing for what they show, and presumably quite valuable for that if for no other reason.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about Philip Glass as of late, as well as thinking about revisiting these movies. We’ll start with Anima Mundi.

Enjoy!

***

The premise of this essay is that criticism needs to play a central role in the revival of literature.

-Anis Shivani, “What Should be the Function of Criticism Today? Subtropics

***

Here are a few of the many facts strangers can learn from reading Lin’s blogs and comments on blogs: His penis measures five inches when erect, and he last had sex in December 2009; he regularly blends smoothies and is obsessed with hamsters.

-Joshua Cohen, Bookforum review of Richard Yates

***

You know when you’re at a party and there’s exactly one person you know there? So you talk to that person until you run out of things to talk about, and then, if you’re as uninteresting as I am, that person looks for the nearest other person he or she knows and leaves you standing there? (Is that just me?) What if there was no one else there that person knew? And what if you both had to stand there, blathering on at each other until you both just wanted to off yourselves? (And you wonder why I never say much in conversation.) That’s what it feels like to me, the big book.

-Gabriel Blackwell – “Your Basic Bore, or ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’”

***

In Scrabble, I’d know a man was the one for me if he ever spelled…
A two-letter word that got him over 40 points. Because I’ve done it, okay? If you use “qi” (that’s technically a word in Scrabble, which is insane) and you can put it on the triple-letter and have it going across and down—bam, you’re done. You’ve just won that game. You’ve won the game, and you’ve won the girl.

-Hannah Simone, Men’s Health March 2012

***

Christopher Nolan is a different animal entirely. I think he wants to be an artist—I believe he really does aspire to make today’s Godfather: Part II—and he even has some decent innovations (e.g., “tell the story backward”), although they’re never as defamiliarizing as he seems to think they are.

-A.D Jameson – “Viktor Shklovsky wants to make you a better writer, part 1: device & defamiliarization”

***

I detect a strain of embarrassment in some of the more hostile reactions to The Tree of Life.

-Kent Jones, Film Comment review of The Tree of Life

***

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and make it one’s own.

-Henry James, Preface to What Maisie Knew

***

Ford’s language is of the cracked, open spaces and their corresponding places within. A certain musicality and alertness is required of the reader; one has to hear it instinctively and rhythmically.

[Example:]In the night when I got up to use the toilet, I found my father alone at the card table with his Niagara Falls puzzle spread out like a meal in front of him.

-Lorrie Moore (and Richard Ford) “Canada Dry” New Yorker May 21, 2012

***

You finally discover that even the author you return to pads his sentences, hoards pages and collapses on an idea in order to flatten it, to stretch it out…The writer…always says more than he has to say: he swells his thought and swathes it with words…Let us write…, let us dupe each other.

-E.M. Cioran “Some Blinds Alleys: A Letter”

***

Teaching writing is a hustle.

-Cormac McCarthy “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction” NYTimes

***

The writers whose work is published are all writers who can somehow manage NOT to write for months, even years. There may be writers who HAVE to write, but if there are we never see their books: no agent would touch them. Mainstream publishers only accept submissions from agents. Indie publishers don’t pay the kind of money that would enable a writer to do nothing but write. Mainstream publishers pay money that could buy time, but won’t let the writer use the time. So the system selects for the writer who doesn’t HAVE to write.

-Helen DeWitt – Comment on The Paris Review Blog

***

Conscience is the bite of things known together, in remorse and in incentive; conscience is that unification of the sense of things which is moral beauty; conscience comes at many moments but especially, in James, in those deeply arrested moments when the will is united with the imagination in withdrawal.

-R.P. Blackmur “The Loose and Baggy Monsters of Henry James”

***

Hope you get this on time, sorry I didn’t inform you about my trip to Spain for a program. I am having some difficulty here because i misplaced my wallet on my way to the hotel which contained some cash, credit cards and some other valuable things. I am so confused right now.

-Spam email from Uncle Tom

***

I’m sure Henry James is a genius and all, but untangling his prose is like trying to talk to a verbose, over-educated person who’s drunk off his ass but refuses to pass out…The other problem with the book is that it was written in a time when Americans had a hard time believing anybody on Earth was actually fucking, since nobody in America was.

-Elizabeth Urello, Goodreads review of The Ambassadors

***

Beckett will not hear of being interviewed, whether orally or in writing. I fear that on this he is not to be budged. He gives his work, his role stops there. He cannot talk about it. That is his attitude.

-Suzanne Dumesnil, Letter to Jerome Lindon April 24, 1951, The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1941-1956

***

$10 IS NOT SO MUCH when you consider that each year Narrative publishes more fiction and poetry than any other literary magazine—more than 350 authors and artists last year alone. How do we manage to give our content away for free while paying writers well?

-email from Narrative Magazine May 21, 2012

***

[A guest post from Nathan Huffstutter. Nathan Huffstutter's work can be found at The Nervous Breakdown, The Collagist, and Emprise Review.]

Most of what I know I picked up on my feet. Restaurant work: dish pits and service patterns and then back behind the bar, where pretty much everything goes.

“You need to put something of yourself in the post,” Gabriel tells me. “I’m not interested in abstract thoughts or balloons of hot air floating above the surface.”

Though I’m somewhere in every word I don’t typically like talking about myself – unless I’m talking about myself, in which case I love talking about myself. But I had no intention of talking about myself here, here I wanted a subject with a little more get-up-and-go, here I wanted to cut loose and wax on about the magical waggle connecting the inner-ear to the central-nervous to the bass-end of the alimentary. Here, I wanted to talk about rhythm.

“Think of this as a prompt,” Gabriel suggests. “Your personal recipe for organization.”

Organization? Writing is, for me, entirely a process of giving order. Disassociated thoughts collect across notepads, snippets of dialogue or image or trait, and when all those scraps have gotten completely under my skin, I throw out the notepads, toss more balls in the air than I can possibly account for, and set about creating form. Words come out in the wrong order and need to be rearranged into sentences that sound right. Sentences come out in the wrong order and need to be rearranged into paragraphs that sound right. And so on, and so on, until there is a story, then stories, which in turn come out in the wrong order and need to be rearranged into a manuscript that sounds right.

Recipes? Never use ‘em.

On my feet, I soaked up how a sommelier composes a tasting: pairings, each successive bottle in conversation with the vintage or varietal that came before, all staged in a linear build that allows peaks and preferences within a greater progression. On my feet, I dug into the way a chef composes a new plate: something salty, something sweet, something decadent, something acidic, something mysterious, something classic, something crispy, something smooth, something colorful, something hot, all those contrasting elements assembled into a dish that can get forked from any direction. On my feet, I absorbed how a bartender composes a line of bullshit: play an angle and pour heavy.

But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself – or behind. The question at hand is the sequencing of individual stories into book form, and I’ve been informed that instinct, hot air, that magical waggle in your inner-ear, these aren’t enough to go on. And so – music. Make what you will of my own backstory, the sequential, the juxtaposed, the cocksure B.S., moving onward I’ve chosen three categories – The Debut Album, The Master Showman’s Set, and The Concept Album – which can be applied to a number of record and story collections. Why albums? Though music is often sold by its most consumable unit, the overall shelf-life of the stuff depends on jiggering a burpless relationship between Tupperware and tupped. And in terms of sequencing, music defies all frontal-lobed systems of order. Chronology alone can make a dull, dutiful listen of Curtis Mayfield. Taxonomy? Sure, some may choke on Swordfishtrombones and prefer their Waits boxed up in Brawlers, Bawlers, & Bastards: the same insensates who request sauce on the side, who segregate protein, starch, and green in a brisk squeak of cutlery, who pluck the Gruyere crisp from atop their dish and crunch into it like a fucking Dorito. We have a name for those people – it’s not complimentary.

But enough digressions – without further ado…

THE DEBUT ALBUM: Sharon Van Etten vs Amy Hempel

Because I Was In Love (11 songs) – Ordering Principle: Alternation/Linear.

Reasons To Live (15 stories) – Ordering Principle: Monomythic.

“I wish, I knew – what to do with you.
But the truth is… I ain’t got a clue.”

So begins Sharon Van Etten’s first official release, an album showcasing two primary song types: A) her naked soprano foregrounded over a campfire strum and B) multi-tracked vocals augmented with washes of percussion and instrumentation. In presenting The Debut Album, sequencing is no simple matter: the assemblage is often more a function of having sufficient quantity to assemble than pre-existing unity, and for the sake of first impressions, there’s the added pressure of not putting any wrong feet forward.

To establish rhythmic continuity, Because I Was In Love alternates its two song types in a repeating AB pattern, the call and response accentuated by alternating themes of seeking and recrimination: the opening melanchollabye, “I Wish I Knew,” leads directly into the dynamic, declamatory “Consolation Prize”: “The moral of the story is, don’t lie to me again…” Melodic highpoints are then tent-poled throughout the album (tracks #2, 6, 10), a sequencing that emphasizes twin linear progressions: narrative (from despair to determination) and tonal (from sparseness to fullness), each parallel building to the final cut (“Holding Out”) and its enduring refrain: “I’ll be holding out, holding out, holding out, holding out… for you.”

“Often I’ve started a story knowing the beat, the rhythm of the first line or the first paragraph, but without knowing what the words are,” said the very-groovy Hempel, and Reasons To Live opens on a skipped-beat: “My heart – I thought it stopped. So I got in my car and headed for God.” Like Van Etten, Hempel begins her debut in existential crisis – the narrator of “In A Tub” searching for the surest sound of her own heartbeat. From those bare, spare first pages, the stories are sequenced to maintain certain rhythmic separations: short-shorts (under two pages) are evenly staggered (#1, 5, 11), and with a dozen stories told first-person, third-person entries are also deliberately spaced (#3, 13, 15, a pattern abetted by the collection’s lone, male-voiced story being placed at #8).

Predominantly, though, Reasons To Live is sequenced along a master narrative: opening with the Call To Adventure (a summoning from the mundane frequently coupled with the terminology of conception) and landing in The Belly Of The Whale (“San Francisco,” an earthquake and its aftershocks); crossing The Road of Trials (“In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson Was Buried” – the collection’s “strongest” story conspicuously placed at #6 ) to The Temptress (gender-bent in “Pool Night” with the swoony lifeguard: “I knew girls who saved his chewed gum”) to The Ultimate Boon (the pearl of wisdom from “The Man In Bogata”: “he wondered how we know that what happens to us isn’t good”); finally, the over-narrative resolves in The Freedom To Live – “Today Will Be A Quiet Day,” returning to normalcy in a day with both palpable loss and the enduring perseverance to carry on.

THE MASTER SHOWMAN’S SET: Public Enemy vs Barry Hannah

Fear of a Black Planet (20 Songs) – Ordering Principle: Ali Fight Videos

Airships (20 Stories) – Ordering Principle: Hyperpyretic Heterotaxis

No existential perplexity here – the Master Showman is on top and taking on all comers. Think James Brown, Live At The Apollo – “Are you ready for Star-Time!” Think Muhammad Ali, circling, throwing bolos, proclaiming greatness before pounding it into the other guy’s head.

Flying high off Do The Right Thing and It Takes A Nation Of Millions…, Public Enemy groove into Fear of a Black Planet in no (bum)rush to present a proper song: the opening sonic collage pumps their own hype and presses Fear’s hot-buttons, zig-zagging between anticipation and paranoia until, POW – that filthy Prince lick of “Brothers Gonna Work It Out.” Straight in the chops and it’s on. From there, in addition to the continuous rhythmic backbone of “The Funky Drummer,” Fear is sequenced in “rounds”: intervals rung by the smarmy talk-radio voice in tracks #1, 4, 8, 12, 16. While those interludes control pace and personify opposition, P.E. keep a powerful core balance by striking in combinations: the straight jab (“Brothers Gonna Work It Out,” “Who Stole The Soul,” and “War At  33 1/3” at #2, 11, 18) the comic hook (“9-1-1 Is A Joke,” “Burn Hollywood Burn,” “Can’t Do Nuttin’ For Ya Man at #3, 9, 14) the testing cross (“Pollywanacraka” and “Reggie Jax” at #7, 15) and the massive uppercut (“Welcome To The Terrordome, “Power To The People,” Fight The Power” at #5, 10, 20).

“Everything’s a failure, when you compare it to music,” Barry Hannah once said, and with two novels under his belt, he opens Airships with his own brand of unhurried swagger: “Water Liars,” whistling Dixie through Farte jokes, big fish stories, and male fellowship, the old and new South sharing a hip flask over the messies of intercourse until, POW – “Love Too Long.” Straight in the kisser: “I want to rip her arm off. I want to sleep in her uterus with my foot hanging out. Some nights she lets me lick her ears and knees.” Forget fancy footwork or the sweet science, Hannah bulrushes, windmilling hard-cocked haymakers and snorting through the next five gonzo stories.

Even with berserker unpredictability as a method, Airships still has pluckable anatomy: POV’s collect in clusters and individual stories are mirrored in imbalance: “Love Too Long”(#2) has an atrophied duplicate in “Constant Pain In Tuscaloosa” (#18), while “Testimony Of Pilot” (#3) exults in the exact unspoiled boyish genius that hits a rut in the fatigued rallies of “Return To Return” (#7). Meanwhile, columnar order is maintained by the spacing of both Civil War narratives (#5, 13, 17) and dystopian grotesques (#6, 11,15).

Out of sheer exertion, Fear and Airships each sag down the home-stretch: P.E. lose the snap on their punches between tracks #12-17, rope-a-doping until they’re in position for the knockout finale, “Fight The Power,” and with Hannah, it’s difficult to say whether he gasses himself out or whether the material remains sharp and it’s the reader who’s pummeled into submission – probably a combination of the two. Still, after the big beating heart of “Midnight and I’m Not Famous Yet” (#9), the back end of Airships buys time until it can land with the epic finish, “Mother Rooney Unscrolls The Hurt” (#20).

THE CONCEPT ALBUM: Okkervil River vs Alan Heathcock

Black Sheep Boy (11 Songs) – Ordering Principle: Recursive/Rhythmic

Volt (8 Stories) – Ordering Principle: Thematic/Synergistic

In 2003, Okkervil River loosed an album (Down The River Of Golden Dreams) brimming with heady themes and diverse instrumentation, a release that featured a pair of truly great songs – songs situated back-to-back and dead-center, the end result being a pretty-good but ultimately diffuse record, slow out of the gate and meandering at the close.

Lesson learned. For 2005’s Black Sheep Boy, with only one great song in pocket (“So Come Back, I Am Waiting”), Okkervil River narrowed on an angle and sequenced a career-launching album. Few schools of thought would suggest leading off a record with a faithful, seventy-five second folkie cover, but the opening rendition of Tim Hardin’s “Black Sheep Boy” nails the conceptual foundation, providing the basis for recursions to prodigality, self-destruction, and faithful persistence. How much Hardin really resides in the subsequent words and music? Doesn’t matter – Will Sheff sings with Absolut Conviction and each successive song gains potency by being shot through with Hardin’s real life descent into fatal addiction. Rhythmically, the sequencing careens from highs to lows: the raucous bender of “For Real” (#3) comes to in the abject hangover of “In A Radio Song” (#4: “we’re fucked… we’re fucked… we’re fucked…”) and the horny-goat bounce of “Black” (#4) descends into the weary cuckold’s shuffle of “Get Big” (#5). Every number of Black Sheep Boy works in concert, peaking with the volcanic “So Come Back, I Am Waiting” (#10), which gives sinister play to the gypsy horns of “A King And A Queen” (#6), taunts the posturing power chords of “For Real,” and hurls the titular “unowned boy” and all his hoofed brethren to their climactic return.

“I feel I often take songs into the process with me,” Alan Heathcock said, and with echoes of Uncle Tupelo’s “Criminals”, The Felice’s Frankie’s Gun, and no small amount of St. Bob (“Mama, take this badge off of me…”), Volt goes from zero to Cormac in barely half-a-page, by which time a plowman has accidentally pulverized his own son beneath the tiller-blades. Few schools of thought would suggest opening a fiction collection with a 40 page descent into savagery, but Heathcock is all in, backing whiskey with White Lightning: after opener “The Staying Freight” hammers home the thin line separating civilization and barbarity, Heathcock trails with “Smoke,” a grim march where a mortally-wounded father enlists his son for the disposal of a corpse, the fatality resulting from two law-abiding men in an intractable situation: “Once things change they don’t never turn back.”

Scorching through eight stories and at least as many plagues, Volt’s narratives are of a piece: the same third-person voice, the same (brims)tone, the same town (timeless Krafton, even as stories #2 and #5 take place decades before the others). Like Black Sheep Boy, Volt draws its cumulative strength via sequencing. The Biblical flood of “Peacekeeper” (#3) testifies to the way buried bodies inevitably bob back to the surface, and immediately following, “Furlough” (#4) is stalked by dread, the threat rising not merely from the narrative of a young soldier walking an acquaintance into a potential ambush, but from the brutal precedent of the preceding stories. The same tension crackles through “Fort Apache” (#5), as teen vandals descend on a deserted main drag with a truckload of stolen bowling balls: shit just has to go bad. Woven throughout, major characters return as minor characters only to return again as major characters, and rather than a mythic narrative (in this heartland The Freedom To Live is a broken promise), the stories and suffering revolve around the Pastor’s words from “Lazarus” (#7): “Every day’s a new batch of crosses, all of us taking our turn.”

“You do what you do because of what is prior,” Amy Hempel said in that same Paris Review interview, which pulls us from the hot air and back to firm ground, back to that precipitating conversation with Gabriel about ordering in manuscripts. Back to myself. I’m somewhere in every word and I choose them deliberately – the stories I write, generally I spend 3-4 months completing a first draft, week after week of pre-dawn sessions, all trying to stay true to a particular voice. Towards the end of that span, the challenge becomes not only finishing the story but also holding the next voice at bay, which by then is clamoring to barge in. Because of what has come prior, that subsequent story is inevitably a conscious or unconscious reaction to the one that came before, I’m bursting to inhabit something – anything – completely different, resulting in an organic contrast of genders, methods, and styles.

“I’m not sure I have anything worthwhile to say about my own work,” I complained, full of excuses. “Not to oversimplify, but for my current project, I started with stories that already belonged together, I had natural beginning, middle, and end pieces, and I filled out the in-betweens based on my own sense of rhythm.”

“Right there – that’s the beginnings of a great post” Gabriel replied. “I’m just sayin’…”

And so here we are, in agreement on the basic ingredients. But how can there be any real talk of recipes, when where one sees the perfect beginning, the other sees the perfect end?

[Part 1 of this series is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 here. Do you have something to offer on the subject of order? A description? A plan? Even just another set of questions? If you'd like to contribute your thoughts on ordering short fiction, please get in touch: Gabriel [@] gabrielblackwell dot com.]

The Listeners, Leni Zumas’s new novel, has just been published by Tin House Books. The book is available at a discount through Powell’s. An interview with Leni is at Powell’s website. Publisher’s Weekly review. A review of the book is at Full Stop.

Her reading tour:

May 16 – Powell’s Books, Portland, OR
May 21 – Annie Bloom’s, Portland, OR
May 24 – Book Soup, Los Angeles, CA
June 4 – Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA
June 19 – Word Books, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY
June 23 – Politics & Prose, Washington, DC
June 24 – Juniper Summer Writing Institute, Amherst, MA

Zumas’ debut novel reads a bit like Faulkner. Fractured imagery, shifts in time and place, and a motley crew of characters—Fod, Quinn, Geck, and Cam, to name a few—lead the reader through a patchwork map of the marred childhood and failed adulthood of Quinn, a thirtysomething washed-up musician with a drinking problem. A former anorexic and adolescent “cutter,” Quinn is smart, witty, and filled with obsession and anxiety over the events of her sister’s death and its aftermath. Zumas plays with narrative conventions here, peppering the text with short chapters that are at times ethereal and disjointed but often tinged with humor. Readers looking for gritty experimental fiction in the manner of the late Gilbert Sorrentino will find The Listeners whetting their appetites for more from this promising new author.     —Booklist

Here’s Luca Dipierro’s animated short film for the book:

What is so horrible about a newborn baby? Why is that image (one that is seen many times a day in hospitals all over the country) so unacceptable, when much more horrific images are presented on television and the cinema, featuring murder and rape, but glamorized and made safe?

And thus he set out to make a film that would be exactly what he thought audiences wanted.

The Baby of Mâcon (1993)

Written and directed by Peter Greenaway

Starring Julia Ormond and Ralph Fiennes

Enjoy!

Update: Note that this version of the film was put up by its producer, Kees Kasander, himself! (Or by somebody on his staff.) You can see the other two films uploaded by Kasander Films here.

I’m not really that concerned about giving an impartial review here. Barrelhouse is great.

Barrelhouse 10 is out. It’s been out for a little while, actually. But when it first came out, I was in the middle of PhD exams – now passed, thankfully – and most of my reading was confined to like articles about Longinus and Burke and the concept of the frame and so forth.

I’ve since had the pleasure of sitting down with Barrelhouse 10. It’s lovely, duh.

Adam Robinson once told me that people who put out print journals are “doing the Lord’s work.” It’s basically impossible to put out a beautiful print journal and actually make back your printing costs. I know. I’ve tried. (Artifice, the magazine I edit, has moved to a quarterly, online format; we’re going to be focusing our print efforts on books for the time being.)

On the other hand, I don’t want to suggest for a minute that you should give Barrelhouse your money for their sake. That’s a ridiculous reason to support a magazine. Here are some good ones:

• Jessie Marshall’s story “Billy M.,” which, like a good ghost, sneaks up on you from the side, takes advantage of your blind spot:

“I think one of us is a ghost,” I said. “I think it’s you.”"Well,” he said. “You know what that means.”"What?”"No condoms.”I went to the mirror, said my name three times, and spun around. I closed my eyes and opened them, but I was still there.

• Sarah Sweeney’s memoir of what highschool girls did before the internet killed the prank call. Girls who “breathed heavily,” who said things like: “My panties are so wet,” or “What do you think about when you come?” Who “were experts, actresses, criminals”:

Josh, hello? Yeah, I’m here. It’s me, Margaret. You don’t know me, but I know you. I watch you. I like what I see, and I touch myself.

(I was in a class once with Sarah Sweeney, in Greensboro, NC: I can vouch for her, that she does in fact make prank calls to authority figures. Or did, still, in college, at any rate.)

• Melissa Broder’s “Arson Wife,” fuck damn:

I only want you to dance
on my smoking undergarments.

With G_D’s help the pile will re-ignite
each time you reach the door

so I can pinch a moment alone
beneath my iron skirt.

• Crime, duh. This is the Crime Issue, after all. Throughout the issue you’ll find mugshots, with fictionalized accounts of real crimes, written by Brian Evenson, Paula Bomer, Craig Clevenger, Randall Brown, Graham Jones, and Stewart O’Nan.
• Also, a really beautiful story by Emma Straub illustrated by Elizabeth Graeber, whose ink drawings are Quentin-Blakeish, mixed with maybe a little Gorey.

I read somewhere that Nabokov was actually a pretty terrible literature professor. He didn’t have much to say about the books that he loved. He had that problem, that I think a lot of writers have, of just wanting to point at something in a book and say: That. Pay attention to that. That right there.

This. Barrelhouse. This.

Big Bridge’s 15th Anniversary issue is now live.  It contains multitudes.

Jared Hayes’ new full length book The Dead Love: Hands and More Hands Together states itself as “an experiment in collage.” This “experiment” states that it is dedicated to and also somehow made of Paul Celan and Helene Cixous, Jack Spicer and Gertrude Stein and Ted Berrigan. In one of the blurbs describing the book Kent Johnson speaks of this work as “citational.” I am assuming that the of piece of Hayes’ dedication means that within it there are extracted or implanted pieces of Celan’s, Cixous’, Spicer’s, Stein’s and Berrigan’s own writings. That itself makes this book (from its inception) motley.

In the first of four sections that appear in TDL, narrative is embedded in enjoined fragments. This section is called: Into the Furrows and in it there is an oscillation between plain text and text in parenthesis. There are many ways that this type of delineation can be viewed: are one or the other of these any of the above stated (Celan’s, Cixous’, etc.) writings? Are these two different (dual/ dueling?) voices speaking toward each other as a way of proceeding? What I found was that the first section of TDL felt very psychically lubricating to me. Almost like a lullaby but one somehow applied from the inside out. So not sung onto or in relation to, but coming up from something that has already somehow been digested (Celan’s, Cixous’ texts?)

The following are some of what struck me as lubricating in Into the Furrows: “(imagine whatever you wish)” / “still songs to sing beyond” / “(there is more than one world)” / “(the hand leads to flowers)” / “cleft to the crest” / “portrait and replica”—all of these phrases imply vastness, expansion, curvature , doubling over or into and conjoining. Are statements (enactments of?) such as these, roots of invitation in the text? I can report that I surely felt invited by them!

In Act Two of the Gertrude Spicer Story the shapes of the pages, phrases on the pages and even the writing style itself differs from Into the Furrows. This is an interesting and stimulating thing to encounter as a reader. In this section of TDL we get access to some of Hayes’ brilliant work with sound/ ear-sculpt (“there is no commission. there is no ear chosen” / “sweating and lips locked on solace” / “spirit which was so kindly a sign was death” / “rimbaud’s cliff”)—this quality in Hayes’ writing is one of the qualities that I have enjoyed and benefited from (re proximity) for quite a long time. By benefit I mean I am uplifted by music–by Hayes’ work with what I heard him term his work (“the new pastoral”) quite a few years ago.

In Act Two of the Gertrude Spicer Story we are also introduced to phrase oriented lyric in a way that performs differently than Into the Furrows (“the change has come. there is no search. but there is that scar-tissue” /  “it is so important to have a season not to touch but to touch again”) In these phrase oriented lyrics we are introduced to figures in ways that we were not introduced to in the earlier section of the book (“new universe and the same eurydice with orpheus makes a change” / “a false image and no hero”/ “all that is a bed-partner and more sweating much more sweating together”) and this introduction makes richer, narrative impetus in the book. I am saying that being introduced to figures here makes me hope that they will remain as figures as we move beyond this section into the next.

In RecollecTed there are little scissor marks printed on the pages. Upon entering here I cut the pages where the scissor marks indicated, so that the book became a sort of flip, self-enabled replacement of singularity thing. That there are no suggestions or instructions for what to do when coming upon the scissor marks (are they implications? Instructions?) is an interesting point of agency in the book. I feel like this is a wise place to introduce this quality of agency in the book. I recorded some of the cut lines that struck me while I was reading them—to be clear, these were lines that were particular to me, were instigations of my pleasure, lines that I kept folding over as long as I could, while I changed the rest of the lines that surrounded them: “old prophets help me believe” / “the slick easy poet didn’t get to fuck” / “like an ordinary man in red weather”/ “remember the night we did glorious blow-job behind a curtain” / “feel your tongue begin to shred” / “and you tremble at the books upon the earth.” I am aware that what I am listing here, relates to my own feelings and sensations, but it is true that juxtapositions of “red weather” and “blow-job[s] behind a curtain” touch the place that is my reader identified body (“a mirror loves rapture”).

In the last section of TDL “there is no such thing as silence.” We are placed in here in the middle of a new tone (“imaginary zenith”) of a thing to “emerge against.” By moving through it we sense that TDL is not saying that love is dead, but that the dead (as figures) can be loving! I certainly sense this love while moving through Hayes’ engaging text. I feel embraced, encased. Somehow held on or into the “threshold of the individual [being] threaded.”

http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780982573198/the-dead-love-hands-and-more-hands-together.aspx