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

[Wisdom from Amber Sparks.]

Warning: my thoughts on ordering stories will almost certainly be incredibly unhelpful to you in your efforts to do the same. I really feel, after going through the process of writing and ordering a collection, (PLUG: My debut short story collection, May We Shed These Human Bodies, comes out in September from Curbside Splendor Press and is available for pre-order RIGHT NOW)  that there is almost nothing about this that makes any sense and what remains is a whole lot of magical thinking, personal preference, and random guessing. Nonetheless, take what dubious wisdom from this you can; glean whatever kernel of anything useful that you might be able to. I hope at any rate it might be more helpful than the dreaded ‘just make a mix-tape!’ advice that Gabe referred to in his previous post and that I’ve also come across, again and again.

The one thing that I decided right away was that there should be a sense of something building, of momentous climbing, just like in the best novella and novels. Think programs on the elliptical machine: more plateau than cross training. More tantric sex than drunken quickie. I wanted my readers to start off reading slower, languge-y but intense pieces, and be swept along to the next, a little longer and more intense, and then the next, a bit more dramatic, vivid, plot-driven, then the next, a fast hot white burn until the long shrieking plateau of a story and after that the glass of water and the cooling sweat and the lie-down-cool-down story. And so on.

Well. I sent out that collection and got collective snores back. Apparently (who knew?) people’s attention spans are rather limited. Apparently (who knew?) people were uninterested in a language experiment with no plot and no characters as the first story in a collection. Apparently the plateau was a poor choice for a collection.

Well, crap, I thought. Back to the drawing board. Cutting board. Whatever. Back to the index cards spread across the floor and the cats picking up random stories and hiding them in closets and under beds and maybe eating them. Were the cats on to something, I briefly wondered? Should I take their editorial advice and scrap that story, or bury it in the middle after a better one? Then I realized they were in fact beasts, and not experienced editors, and were both energetically licking their own butts right now with the same conviction they’d reserved for carrying off my stories. And so I went back to listening to and then rejecting my own instincts instead.

I tried the empirical approach. I rolled dice and reordered stories and sent the manuscript out, two by two, and two rejections meant a new order, a new role of the dice. I assigned numbers to each story based on placement in the manuscript and personal rejection of the manuscript or form or none when that story was number one, two, or three. I closed my eyes and pointed at a title page. I saved the best for last.

And then, after a year of rejections, of adding stories and subtracting stories and moving stories around and editing them down, up and inside out, I decided to try something new. I took out everything that wasn’t a story that grabs you. I took out anything that wasn’t the absolute best. I started the manuscript with the funniest story and then I went with another funny one, then a sad one, then a funny one, and each story was more grabby than the last. I built not in tone or intensity but only in grabbiness. Well, that and emotional instability because it would hopefully lead to dependence. I trimmed the thing further, and it became a greatest hits collection. I made it impossible (I hoped?) to stop reading it.

And then? I sent it out to a new batch of folks. And it was accepted within a month. With enthusiasm. With love.

Can I say that it was my ordering of the stories? Probably not. Though certainly I’ve learned that though I love language-driven stories, not that many people feel the same way. Probably it was just finally finding a press that I loved, that loved what i was doing, that was an incredibly good fit. Probably it was that kind of luck, and not the numerology kind.

But maybe it was the ordering. You never know, right? And what else are you going to do while you wait for publishers to get back to you about your book? Something productive? Please. Obsessive tinkering. It’s the only way for a good neurotic to pass the time before the initial and happy first foray into publishing.

[Part 1 of this series is here. Part 2 is 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.]

I put off seeing The Room for a long time. Some friends told me it was so terrible that it was good, and me, being a real smartypants, thought I knew what they meant by that, and ignored their requests that I join them for midnight screenings at the Music Box (some of them featuring appearances by writer/director/producer/star Tommy Wiseau). This was in 2008 or 2009 or so.

Then, some time after that, my friend Justin, over one of the holidays, sat me down in front of his laptop and made me watch the thing with him. (He couldn’t believe that I hadn’t yet seen it.) And I was, as so many others have been, immediately captivated. (Since which time I’ve seen it numerous times, including once at midnight at the Music Box. Tommy Wiseau was supposed to show up, but he cancelled.)

My friends were mistaken in one thing: The Room is not “so terrible that it’s good.” The Room isn’t terrible. It’s also not good. It exists beyond labels like “good” and “terrible,” in some other realm, possibly the realm of outsider art. You can see that Tommy Wiseau wanted to make a film, that he was able to amass many of the tools that people traditionally use when making films—but he used them to assemble something other than a film. It looks a lot like a film, to be sure. You can watch it, and should. But it is something very other.

Luckily, that thing, whatever it may be, is bewilderingly adorable.

The Room (2003)

Produced, written by, directed by, and starring Tommy Wiseau

What I like best about The Room—besides how inscrutable it is, and how inscrutable it remains even after numerous viewings—is its nature, which is warmhearted and good. Everyone involved is clearly having fun, and I believe Tommy Wiseau when he says that more than anything he wanted to make something that people would enjoy, in whatever way they wanted. He and the actors he’s assembled are, in ever scene, a total joy to watch, regardless of whatever it is they are doing (I’m not sure it’s “acting”). The whole thing is consistently charming, is basically what I’m saying—and that’s not nothing. It’s more than lots of other “actual” movies will give you.

Note that this isn’t the highest quality copy, but I’m glad there’s one online—and if you haven’t seen it yet, maybe this will convince you to seek out a real copy, or download the RiffTrax track for it, and—who knows?—maybe even attend a midnight screening. The best way to experience The Room is in the company of other people! Bring a football and plastic silverware.

And enjoy!

There was a time when I lived alone in the desert amongst many versions of cacti. There were cacti there, and there was heat. Cacti exhibit numerous types of adaptations (for the purpose of their conserving water in hot conditions (because cacti are in a constant state of drought)). Because cacti have spines (as opposed to leaves, leaves which over time have become in some ways, extinct due to context and environment) they have a sort of evolved protection on/ as their forms. Areoles (which are what (on cacti) tubular flowers bloom from) relate directly to the spines on cacti. So, the bloom relates to the prick.

For me, to go from a contextual solitude (because we, as human beings, move at differing paces it sometimes makes collaboration of even a moment, difficult or strained—in other words, I often find myself alone in the work of writing) to a collaborated setting, is a profound, yet jerking motion; a torque.  Such a torque was a bit of what I felt when I knowingly (by my agency) went into public hypnosis during Melissa Buzzeo’s offering at Naropa’s Violence and Community Symposium 2012. Buzzeo’s offering stated itself as hypnosis inducing so that those who did not wish to undergo such hypnosis could choose out of it. As with the cacti, slowly evolving toward what it is that might protect them, hypnosis is not something I would ever turn away from. I need to become this, even if by tension.

There, mid-hypnosis, as I began to drift amidst repeated phrases (“you are safe here”) as well as at times, jarringly divergent (from repetition) phrases (“you took the words from my body before I could write them” / “go back to the mirror at your solar plexus, the mirror which reflects everyone else’s mirror”) I experienced myself coming up into and through a very odd quality of light and air. This light was not particularly visual. It was more like a stimulation of a sort of body ease. Looseness? Yes, a saturate loosening. The sensation of that place of loosening was a lot like the space just before sleep (when it is possible to inhabit that place without being overwrought with visitations by specific images or the anxiety-based feeling that one is about to fall down some very steep stairs). What is it for a tightly threaded cactus, carefully and deliberately doula-ing its own ongoing relation to water regardless of what is happening (heat) exterior to it, to be knowingly (but without sufficient skill) placed in the center of a thick deluge? Of a feral desert storm?

I do not doubt that it is the way that we inhabit (which effects encounter) what it is that we experience, that ultimately shapes how we come through that experience. I am saying that I know that the non-visual body ease toward loosening was both a result of my engagement with the hypnosis offering, and a result of Buzzeo’s reoccurring and stabbing chant swirls—so, a collaboration. A co-created soak.

There are times when the richnesses of a deluge, create momentary sensation for me—but so, in ways wherein all of the saturateness of that soak, cannot be integrated fast enough, so some of it runs off, drains down the spines and areole tubes, lost. There is grief in what falls off of the form for me. There always has been. If wetness is what I hold (by evolutionary design/ volition) in my center, then of course loss of wetness because I cannot integrate it (by design/ volition) rapidly enough, is painful.

Due to this it is often the case that I benefit intensely from after-the-fact processing time re these types of inebriations. I find that if I don’t have that processing time I am left with a quality of alexia in the overlap of my psyche/ physicality. In other words, without the ability to process what falls away (as a way to possibly integrate it during that processing time as ‘other than loss’) I end up feeling even more of a lacunae-based clench in my form (see the cactus getting drier, even though just having been exposed to a thorough inspiration, a pour)–

These the effects of unintentional public seclusion?

Eerily thus…

Some of what I wrote during the part of the hypnosis when (because I was a “listener”) I was not allowed to speak:

Tender abrasions can be–

Tenderly abrasive, to turn the torsos. Torsos are made into more than midsections when they fly up from the Cave of Brahma. Torsos gleam, with their with our. Spacious gullets. Sapping carnal quills. A side view of quail eggs being slowly ravaged by a spring storm.

Spring storms were my preference when you stopped staring. Visceral replacements? Dried slabs of meat and stone babies.

The torsos are dripping liquefied amulets. Swear by me. Swear a day then a night then a day, without having woken. Swear by divergent. Vows. Trust ephemeral organs.

Conjugate having copulated with a bust.

Memory stolen or harvested?

It was that I knew I could fulfill you but found that I still couldn’t. Still life torso. Is a stone breast meant to come back into human form? Hold the breast, the stone hand, the unpronounced places. Hold to ensure these won’t be farmed until they are ready.

Nobody wants to eat from haunted stalk; to listen so deeply to atonal truths.

1.

I am feeling very excited to be engaging with you re this little interview in support of and co-investigation (with you) re your new book Narrative and Nest (Pre-Natal Architectures & Narrative Rituals)

(http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/narrative-nest/18789364)

I wanted to conduct this interview after you spoke with me a bit prior to inviting me to the gallery where your “Nests” were being shown. When you spoke to me about how you feel the nests and “pre-natal architectures” you have been working with have been helping you move into your nexts (or so I call them) I thought you might have some useful insight to share re writing process and writing praxis.

Not only is Narrative and Nest a deeply thoughtful and (in my opinion) beneficial document about integration and self-shape consideration, about how we coil with and into ourselves. About how we can identify with our own congealing–I also feel that it is an admittance of sorts. The making of loamy ground. Yes, a thready bust or strange torso made of soil. Making soil. Always disintegrating and always materializing.

Having read the book multiple times I want to just say here that each sentence, fragment and curved phrase feels sculpted to me. Not sculpted as in, rigidity, but as in deeply felt. Followed through. The somatic experience of reading Narrative and Nest follows a strand-like quality that moves and moves, gently wafting and distilling as the shape of the book is made.

This book gave me an atrial fibrillation, seriously. Narrative and Nest affected Megan Burns as well: “I think of wombs. I put the book down on the seat next to the tub now. I look at those bare, naked vessels with their needy mouths and I think about wombs cut open to let babies out and then sewn back. I think about my body with its scars and how I say when I say I had a C-section, again, and again, and again, how I feel the need to justify it, how I feel somewhere what is that, like shame. But it makes no sense. The body does what it does, and the terrible love pulled out there, it’s complicated. The body eats and eats sorrow, it swallows love in days that flee from me. And then I put the book down because I can’t read anymore.”

(http://solidquarter.blogspot.com/2012/02/reading-danielle-vogels-narrative-nest.html)

After all of my blah-ing here I have some questions based on some of your amazing quotes:

First, this is such a gift—to be here in this virtual conversation with you. I thank you. I think back to our years at Naropa University. How we used to leave letters for one another anchored beneath a large rock on campus. I will think of this space like that space: private, but vulnerable. Before I move into your questions, I want to unfold myself into some of these lines. They are intuitive. And I feel as if they are somehow seeing some secret inside me. I’ve been thinking a lot about shame. The shames I hold and carve out of and into myself. How these nesting—or nexting—places that I create for my manuscripts-in-progress are vessels associated with learning a kind of shamelessness. I put them in the world—my nests, the manuscript not yet complete. These are open mouths and bellies. These second mouths might be the sex between my legs. Open and having voice—visible, brambled. I think I told you once… O, yes, I confessed at a reading in which we performed together that writing, for me, is closely linked to desire—the allowance of feeling, wanting. The giving in. It is sometimes terrifying to write. Sometimes it is painful. Sometimes it is near orgasmic. And then the shame associated with all of that. The shame of the body and its voice.  I want to learn a kind of shamelessness. These nests let me look at these things on the other side of myself. I can put them on the wall. Stuff them silly. Unstuff them. And then stuff them again. They have become what has made writing possible. Pleasurable.

That you said the reading of Narrative & Nest associated with these swallow-like nests gave you an “atrial fibrillation,” and that Megan Burns said, “I feel somewhere what is that, like shame […] And then I put the book down because I can’t read anymore.” That these things are said through an experience of the body. They are said in response to reading and seeing a private—made public—ritual of revision and of writing. These things are said in response to witnessing something unbuckled in me, but also in yourselves. That Elizabeth Robinson said these nests looked like breasts to her, that they were maternal and inviting. That Dawn Lundy Martin said, while looking away from them, that she felt as if she were looking at something she was not supposed to see. That Lark Fox said they were like live barnacles. That Yanara Friedland said that she wanted me to leave the room so that she might quickly, and in secret, remove the nesting materials and stuff them all back before I returned. That Brian Kiteley and Selah Saterstrom confessed that they were, in many ways, terrifying. What is this? This bodily response. This is something I’ve become interested in—how people move through texts, both the reading and the writing of them. I’ve come to wonder if a person’s response to viewing a part of my process—either through the reading of this book, or through the viewing of these nests—reflects their tendencies while reading and writing.

2.

“Meditating with the necessary gestation period of a narrative”—do you think that this necessary-ness is inherent to narrative or inherent to your narrative? In other words, will you tell us more about what you mean when you speak of narrative in this way?

Narratives—and by this I mean all writing and reading—necessitate their own forms of gestation and midwifery. My friend and mentor Selah Saterstrom has said that each work arrives with its own blueprint—and by this I think she means that each work we encounter, either through reading or writing, has within it its own system of logics. Saterstrom—via C.D. Wright—explains that we need only learn to better see the constellation of logics within the thing we are encountering. We read the world and we write it as we move through it. As I move through these manuscripts I am composing, I am learning not only how to see these logics so that I might better serve the manuscript on its own terms, but I am also learning how I see—my tendencies as a reader and writer. I’m learning how to destabilize these tendencies so that I might see again. Seeing is encounter. It is a kind of gestation and midwifery and then a gestation again. It is also a kind of translation. How a thing reveals itself. And for me, that has meant slowing the writing process so that I might better understand what is happening there. This has meant that I’ve uncovered a kind of preciousness within myself. This secret, silent nesting place on the inside of my body where I weave the manuscript, where I nest it into myself before I can bring language to the page. By making these nests public, I’ve somehow subverted that. It’s changed writing for me. It’s made it more possible and pleasurable. I think of Carole Maso in her essay “Notes of a Lyric Artist Working in Prose,” where she explains writing as a “geometry of desire.”[1] It is exactly these geometries of desire that I am interested in bringing into focus through this work. I don’t think I’ve answered your question. I’m thinking through it. But in regards to necessary-ness. I believe it’s unavoidable: the gestation. But I also believe gestation takes on many forms. How a thing comes into focus. How it architectures itself within you, and then the often slow process of revealing that architecture through sound. What the body must undergo in order to let a sentence into the page.

3.

“Already the thread and clay have revealed so much about my tendencies and hesitancies not only as a writer, but also as a human moving and writing through space”—will you elucidate for us more of what has been revealed to you re this? Is this private? Of strictly the personal, human sphere? Or are there things in these revealings that might be useful for some of us to hear? Do you think some of this has to do with coax?

I don’t know what might be useful, but I do know that this again has to do with learning to see. And maybe, more importantly, it has been about learning how to let myself be seen both in and out of language, intentionally and un-. Practicing a kind of public vulnerability. I’m learning how to bring myself into focus—also how I may not have as much control as I might like. I think about coaxing. And I think about birth. Which, as Megan reminded us is at once terrifying and beautiful. I’ve not been gentle with myself. I’ve not been gentle with the clay or my manuscripts. I manipulate the clay until it tears, I cinch it back together, I blow in the muddy mouths of the nests to fill them with air until they burst, I cinch them back together again. I roll my fingertips along the inside of their silty mouths until they almost tear. And while I do these things, I think about language. I think about the body. How they perform together and apart. I think about how hungry and terrified I am for intimacies of all kinds. I whisper to the nests, please let me.

4.

“While creating these reliquaries, I synesthetically translate the flexing memory of each object to further divine their narratives”-can you explain more about the relation of objects to their narratives? What of you divining them? If you were holding your own organs up as the objects, then I could see how there could be a sort of purist relation between object you are holding and narrative you are divining, but I wonder how it works if you are holding an object that is not necessarily as close to you as your body might be? A pen? A page from the dead sea scrolls? The shell you peeled off of the back of your hermit crab? In other words, can you tell us more about how this divination (doula?) process works? I think that my question has a bit to do with this as well: “I hold this red clay pod, and it remembers me”—how? Can you talk about how this remembering works?

Maybe this is problematic, but I don’t see much difference between book and body. A book is an appendage of the body. The body, an appendage of the book. They are both architectures we inhabit, that we dream within, and that we grow. A book breathes through the prosthetic of the voice. A book can be a third lung. I sit at the divininatory lip of the voice and I see from there. There is an intimate and undeniably somatic relationship between book and body and voice. I’m thinking here of something else I’ve written in a companion piece to Narrative & Nest. In that piece, I write through ideas of the syntactic fields of language in relation to the synaptic fields within the body of a reader and writer. There is a direct relationship between the syntactic body of a book and the synaptic/nervous system of the writer and reader. Language engages the nervous system. Babette Rothschild, in The Body Remembers, a book concerned with bridging verbal and body psychotherapies, writes “somatic memory relies on the communication network of the body’s nervous system. It is through the nervous system, via synapses, that information is transmitted.”[2] It is through the muscle of the voice, and its own unique nervous system (syntax) that the body (also, the book) might suddenly recognize itself in the world. While reading Rothschild, and considering the therapies she is proposing, it became impossible to not exchange the word synapse for syntax. The synaptic patterns in our bodies, which create and recall activity and memory, are never fixed, but mutable. They have the ability to learn and yield, to branch and bend. Syntax is likewise mutable—a nervous system—linking the body with its book and reader. So you see, to me, holding up a book, any book, or holding up one of my nests, or even a torn piece of paper with my handwriting on it, is like holding a kind of organ. These sentences, their sounds, are altering my body’s chemistry. Just as they are now altering yours. You are creating synaptic patterns in response to reading. This page is latticed to my body but also to yours. I become dizzy thinking of this. And then all the outsourcing. Read hand again from above and a thousand synapses flare netting this hand to those.

I look again at your question and I just want to say that I am reading it. I see your having written “purist,” but I’m not interested in purity. I’m more interested in sedimentation. An accumulation of encounters. And maybe it is important to confess here that for most of my life, I have not felt close to my body. I’ve been disassociated from it. And only over the past five years, after being assaulted, did I find myself within it.

I want to say something about divination—the writer as diviner. Diviners unhook possible relations into composition. I think now of beginnings and desire. From where does the diviner—the writer—desire and dream? What shocks a text into becoming? What draws us to narrative in the first place? I think it has to do with vulnerability and a willingness to hold and to be held. Divination—and narrative—is a welcomed bewilderment. I think of the transfusion that occurs between the page, language, and the body. The erotics of this. The sensuality of relation is divinatory. All this at the threshold. And here I am defining threshold as the divinatory seam—the place at which narrative emerges. While reading and writing (which is divination) we become deranged. We desire. We transcend and exchange something with the thing we are encountering and creating.  

You asked me about: “I hold this red clay pod, and it remembers me,” and all this above is what happens in the exchange. I believe objects have a kind of muscle-memory. Language also possesses a kind of muscle memory. As we encounter an object something is conjoined and transfused between. This sentence remembers me because I composed it. Its syntax is my own. But it also remembers and recognizes you. There are an infinite number of yous stored within that you.  In relation to clay, I find myself attracted to it because for me it is a physical manifestation of language. I write a little about this in Narrative & Nest. Wet clay is malleable in a way that sound is. Manipulating clay, I can feel myself constructing sentences.

5.

In the book you mention your work with “isolation, reparation, and proliferation” re the nests and their hanging on the wall of your home—I wonder also if you have any thoughts on translocation, transduction and/ or torque? What about bifurcation?

I think so much about translocation—though not often through that term. I think this is inherent in language—the act of languaging. I understand translocation as an action of fragmentation and then a re-conjoining of parts to create a new whole. What I love about translocation is that there isn’t a loss of materials, just a reconfiguring. I think of sound into sentence. I think of my hands silted with clay. I think of words passed between mouths. I think of the nests hanging on my living room’s walls. Also my nests that are right now suspended, hundreds of miles away, in The University of Arizona Poetry Center. I think of the nesting materials spilling from the mouths. I think of the manuscripts from which those nesting materials originated. I think of the maybe eventual arrival of a reader here within this sentence. What does this say about the book and the body? I’m not sure I can language it, but it is a kind of furcation—more poly- than bi-. I’m thinking of transduction now. Transduction as the act of encounter in which translocation occurs. If I understand transduction, it is the process by which energies—or materials—are converted into another form. A book is a series of transducers. And my nests incubate transductions.

6.

You have also talked with me in the past about moving your writings out of the space of holding and into the world. Can you talk with me about how composing and living within Nest (and the nests, your architectures) has enabled this? Is it a bit like sending off your baby chicks to fly with the outstretched wings of empurpled eagles?

My nests, exhibited, are in direct correspondence with my manuscripts as I write them.

These vessels are gestation chambers for excerpts and earlier versions of my texts. They are also ducts of incubation where I nest a “problem” of the manuscript as I work through it. I arrived at my animal architecture research through investigations of somatic therapies in relation to language. Studying and practicing somatic therapies alongside writing manuscripts, in some cases, dealing directly with trauma, I suddenly understood that in order to fully recognize these manuscripts on their own terms, I had to take them out of my body and re-integrate them. These nests are residual energies, released, but contained. Through the physical contortion of language and clay, I recognized the somatic interdependence between synapse and syntax. Upon understanding this relation throughout my body, my private writing and editing rituals altered. I had to create physical bodies—outside of my own—to house the processes of writing. At first, I created textile nests composed of excerpts and failed sections of my manuscripts. Soon I began creating ceramic hives, nests, and pods into which I was midwifing these selections. And then the desire to have these rituals made public so that I might homage the contortion of writing through all its forms and not just the completion of a manuscript. These nests, made and then made public, are what makes possible the writing of these books. They’ve become interdependent. And each manuscript necessitates new forms. These darker, undulating nests are all in relation to one manuscript: Clasp, a hypnosis project, in which I “answer,” under hypnosis, a series of questions in relation to varying forms of incest. More recently, I’ve been creating a series of porcelain, near transparent, milk-weed-like pods which are all in correspondence with my manuscript Underwater Fragments.

http://daniellevogel.com/

In bed sick, but unable to sleep; I viewed a beautiful film, The Mill and the Cross, about the 16^th Century Pieter Breughel painting “The Way to Calvary.” For some years I have loved Breughel and to see this cipher put onto film (more is known about Shakespeare), portrayed with ease, and placed into a 16^th Century landscape with a fitting mise-en-scene of long takes and slow movements (form matching epoch) was an untold pleasure.  Most of the film was without dialogue or voice-over or music—a testament to the grand cinematography containing a dose of special effects to make the images unearthly, though fully rooted on the planet as it was 500 years ago.

As many of the wordless scenes transpired, I began to see certain episodes from my own life. Memories of people long gone, moments of living that had left my consciousness for some years. I am almost certain this bubbling up of our lives is what great art does to us as we age—the artistic experience acting as the vital fuse necessary to tie the time of our life into the specter of our soul. Watching this film by Polish director Lech Majewski I was reminded I didn’t always feel a certain circumspection at the joys and pain I’ve harbored. It used to be that I switched off when watching a film—I gave everything up to escape myself, but now thoughts follow me even throughout a major surgery. Now I knew I had a “quartz contentment”—a feeling I can ascribe to because a woman born in 1830 taught me so. Emily Dickinson pushed her verse to pondering the properties of emotion, her art acting as a slick for memories to fill out her faceless face:

After great pain a formal feeling comes—
The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs;
The stiff Heart questions—was it He that bore?
And yesterday–or centuries before?

The feet, mechanical, go round
A wooden way
Of ground, or air, or ought,
Regardless grown,
A quartz contentment, like a stone.

This is the hour of lead
Remembered if outlived,
As freezing persons recollect the snow—
First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.

Life in a chair is the life of the mind. Being with Emily we discover a mind racked by a paralyzing social awkwardness, but bewitching in its summaries of human feeling by way of muscular language, as in “After great pain, a formal feeling comes—” where the speaker queries how to go on living after enduring incredible hurt. How? We make. “The hour of lead” is the hour we have to change our lives and all the rest of Emily’s words and Lech’s images, particularly this one of protestant who was killed by Spanish Militiamen, suspended in the air on a wagon wheel for birds to eat:

…increase my lust for something better, while reminding me of what I had and how it feels to have lost it.

Is this a shuttered life? Is this how I thought it would be at age three, Legos in hand, food on my face? I have a stormy idea that what I make and what I do is foolish and futile but I will never know. Is that why I look at Breughel, read Stevens, and listen to Mahler? The highest art attained. I seek cause before satisfaction and to hold my head over a bowl, a golden bowl, a chalice, a stone—something beautiful is worth the walk to the museum or the trip to the shore.

Threats – LA Times Review

Is it actually controversial to say that you don’t get art?

People act like it is. And maybe it seems that way, for some people, if for example they’re surrounded by other people who do “get art,” or pretend to get art, or are part of the art world, or however you want to frame it.

That seems, at any rate, to be the case here.

On the other hand, someone’s announcement that they don’t “get art” seems to always be followed by rounds of back-clapping and (self-)congratulations. People seem to take a lot of pride in announcing that they don’t get art. It seems to be a particularly easy way of being culturally brave.

Dismissing art, full-stop, is a lot easier than engaging with it. Than, for example, making the argument that this art, or this particular tendency in the art world, is wrong or facile or misguided or whatever. Than taking some actual stand regarding what constitutes good art, and why.

I don’t particularly agree with Michael Fried’s stance on art, for instance, but it does give a reason why certain art is bad. It thinks through why some art is good, why some art is bad, and what the difference between the two might be. It doesn’t dismiss, it argues.

Likewise, there’s a pretty common argument that the contemporary art world is structured in such a way that art becomes a repository of abstract (financial) value, a form of currency, rather than a source of aesthetic experience. The Tracey Emin piece above, also mentioned in the Vice article, is obviously a comment on this – a particularly contradictory sort of comment, given that Emin’s photo is fully part of the structure that it is, seemingly, critiquing. Possibly you can accuse Emin of bad faith – of wanting to be “against the system” while receiving its benefits – but, again, such a perspective is an argument, not a dismissal.

I think what bothers me most about this Vice article is that I get the sense that the author is capable of making such distinctions*, but rather than doing so is opting to make the controversial, not at all very controversial, cop-out of saying that he doesn’t get art, and thinks that everyone else is just pretending to. What bothers me is that it seems designed to let people off the hook, to encourage easy answers. The author presents himself as an art-world insider who is telling his audience: Don’t worry, you don’t have to think about this stuff that seems strange or difficult, because everyone who does think about it is really just being a pretentious asshole.

It seems, ultimately, condescending. Not to the art-world or artists, but to the article’s audience, who apparently can’t be expected to think through why bad art might be bad, or that there might be a difference, even in contemporary art, between bad art and good.

*”I went to art school,” he writes, “wrote a dissertation called ‘The Elevation of Art Through Commerce: An Analysis of Charles Saatchi’s Approach to the Machinery of Art Production Using Pierre Bourdieu’s Theories of Distinction’” – I’m assuming, based on the title, that he’s pretty well familiar with the art-world critique mentioned above.