Adventure comic. Artist David B.’s Incidents in the Night unveils a conspiracy that involves the Napoleonic Wars, an ancient god of nothingness, and the enigmatic founder of an anthology that shares the book’s name. Our lead and narrator, meanwhile, shares his name with David B. The in-text David learns of the conspiracy as we do, and a narrative through-line like this—the pursuit of answers—is probably pretty essential to the project’s not going off the rails. David B.’s ambition seems to grow geometrically as the book advances, but Incidents is fundamentally an adventure story, and its strengths and weaknesses wrap around that structure like the snakes of the caduceus.

Bookstore elegy. It reads like one now, anyway. Incidents in the Night was first published twenty years ago in France. In the intervening years, bookstores have diminished in number, in their share of the bookselling market . . . These are things you already know. Our protagonist’s journey begins in a bookstore, and he visits other shops while collecting volumes of the Incidents anthology. Although David B. (the creator) drafted his story at a time when bookstores enjoyed relative security, he imbues these places with a sense of mystery, endless potential—a gesture that grows more poignant with time.

Collaboration between David B. and Brian and Sarah Evenson. Uncivilized Books has just released the first English-language edition of Incidents. The Evensons’ lean translations of David B.’s prose complement the book’s visuals: “The streets seemed to me so many shelves carrying books of stone and brick. Letters looked at me through the windows.” Whenever I think about books in translation, I think of Leslie Hill on Beckett’s reworkings of his own catalog: “Just as there is no universal tongue, merely competing fragmentary versions of it, so there is no true story but many possible accounts of what might be.” This new edition of Incidents in the Night belongs to the Evensons as well as to David B., and if it has a translated work’s occasional murmur of a string bent slightly off pitch, it also has Brian Evenson’s gift for capturing the macabre.

Dream art. David B. begins his book with a dream sequence, perhaps drawn from life, and as with a dream, the strange events that follow have the façade of the logical for as long as we’re all in the moment.

Example of the features of comics as a storytelling medium. Incidents in the Night is a treat for medium-specificity nerds; David B. is at his best when making abstractions viewable (and thus readable). Early in the story, in-text David meets some fellow readers in a local bookstore, not between the stacks but while traveling across a mountain of books—Incidents‘s first attempt at making the struggles of research literal and tactile.

Nearer to the end of the book, David B. depicts the transition from waking life into a dream state.

At the risk of over-generalizing, comics are an exceptionally good delivery system for this sort of imagery. In film, the appearance of an object usually comes with assumptions about the object’s tangibility etc. In comics, what we see has more interpretive latitude—readers can understand the meaning of an image, as with the books staring back at David, divorced from assumptions about the objects’ existence in real space. Incidents makes use of this phenomenon pretty much constantly—signifiers coexist with objects of actual presumed volume and weight.

French. Very French. Incidents is cool to the touch. Death is a frequent conversation topic among the story’s characters, but few of them seem to regard it as the eventual endpoint of their own lives. At worst, the detached sensibility slows the rising of tension. Not until the end of the book, when the narrator stumbles upon a pile of headless corpses—rendered with uncharacteristic gristliness—do readers accept that much is at stake. But in the meantime, we can at least share in David B.’s sense of play. The in-text David learns that Emile Travers, publisher of the Incidents in the Night anthology, has evaded the Angel of Death, and Travers’s escapades share the defiant bounciness of the gunplay in Bande à part.

Ghost story. Broadly speaking. Incidents contemplates literary immortality, with Travers attempting to extend his life through literary endeavors, in ways both figurative and not. While researching Travers, David discovers that the man “jumped into a letter like into a lake and took its form, thus escaping the angel of death.” (At moments like this, Incidents nods to the Kabbala and its notions of “fusion with the letter” while also keeping one foot in pulp territory.) In the same way that David’s search for information makes research into something resembling a hero’s journey, Travers’s aim as a writer/publisher is to (literally) prolong his stay among the living. (Travers being a sinister lunatic, obviously.)

Historical artifact. Because of its foregrounding of bookstore culture, but also because it predates better known David B. works such as Epileptic; it is kind of bizarre Incidents didn’t reach the US sooner.

Indie comic. David B. published his first comics in the mid-1980s, which places them near Raw magazine on comics’ great transnational timeline, and Incidents reads convincingly like a post-Raw work of cartooning. Much like Art Spiegelman, David B. uses a thick line, nervous at a glance and deceptively controlled. He accomplishes characterization with a few simple shapes and one or two exaggerated features. Most pages feature chiaroscuro compositions, heavy enough with black to evoke woodcut prints. This style is the great unifier throughout Incidents—it’s what keeps the story coherent as the plot swivels and bucks.

Juxtaposition of numerous mythological traditions. By his book’s end, David B. has created a mosaic across his story, drawing not only from Jewish mysticism but also mythologies from Mesopotamia, sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere. There’s a winning, adventuresome attitude to the way David B. pulls this all together, even if the story’s magpie-nest qualities sometimes make sustained reading a challenge.

Incidentally (har har): the book is most exciting when David B. explores comics’ and mythology’s shared power to reduce concepts while exaggerating them, to make complicated concepts more legible. His art acquires a sudden charge when, midway through the book, an old bookseller shares an ancient creation story with the protagonist.

Kinetic to a fault. See next passage for details.

Lesson in pacing (and/or the perils of dream art). Incidents in the Night jumps arrhythmically from one of the lead’s revelations to the next, and this jumpiness often reads as perfectly in the spirit of the story. Occasionally, though, the experience is close to hearing a friend share his or her half-remembered dream.

Matryoshka doll. In the sense that it’s a book called Incidents in the Night about a series of books called Incidents in the Night, and also because the Incidents anthology in turn aggregates tall tales and false-sounding field reports. But the book goes further than this, making readers detectives—as any decent mystery story does—and imposing its reality on ours too.

Nonverbal storytelling. Maybe this is obvious? But David B.’s cartooning makes Incidents an infinitely browsable book. A beginning-to-end read has its rewards, but the comic is something worth swimming around in, too—it’s a work, fittingly, in which readers can get lost.

Wouldn’t it take an outsider to aptly critique the American scene, the American people, the American culture? Hugh Kenner, a Canadian, did this at the end of a section devoted to Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams in his book A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers. A book dedicated to Guy Davenport. A book on Donald Barthelme’s syllabus.

Kenner is the great explicator of literary Modernism and one of Ezra Pound’s, James Joyce’s, and Samuel Beckett’s most important commentators. John Jeremiah Sullivan told readers to read Kenner’s The Pound Era. Michael Silverblatt said he “had the best ear that I’ve ever encountered for poetry, prose, and nuances, for hidden tickles inside a sentence…”

When Kenner asks why Stevens’s poems aren’t populated by people, he answers thus:

One might sketch notes toward an answer by observing how few people, how little speech, the products of the American imagination have typically contained. People in a very large country, nomadic people, people who spend much time operating machinery (“lending it to no one,” wrote Faulkner…”), people whose communication is shared work, not shared speech, in fact so self-conscious about their speech they needed persuading (by Mencken, in the 1920’s) that they had a spoken idiom; people inheriting the possibility that one might spend six months in one’s cabin without sighting anyone fit to be spoken to; people who find nothing strange in the life style of Thoreau, who throve on the self-containment that drove Robinson Crusoe nearly mad; people whose sages almost within living memory shuttled from lecture platform to lecture platform, and who spend more of their lives listening to schoolteachers than any other people in the world, and who are addressed all their lives as audiences by the politician, the columnist, the barber; people who did not grow up anywhere near the neighbors they have at present, and approach them (when necessary, about a dog or a lawnmower) with embarrassed colloquial ceremony: such people find it easier on the whole to shape their emotions to the abstract or the inanimate. The legend of American violence means that trespassers on the psychic Lebensraum* are most effectively addressed as settlers once addressed as Indians, with a projectile. The legend of the inarticulate American hero—Nick Adams or Li’l Abner—means that the precedents for addressing someone are scanty…Pin down an American and he utters a quotation, said Ezra Pound after living for some time abroad; and the characters of that master of the urban colloquial, Scott Fitzgerald, make even their small talk out of quotations from magazines: just such magazines as printed Fitzgerald’s stories… speech for the writer is fieldwork, something external…Communication is a “subject,” formally studied; universities have Departments of Communication Skills. In no other country would it have been plausible for the telephone to be invented, which allows one to enter another’s house without the ceremonies of entrance or introduction, and moreover without actually going there… (84-85)

* space required for life, growth, or activity

There isn’t much to add to this. It’s melodically presented, learned, entertaining,  and uncomfortably correct. Maybe more so now. The book contains close readings of the two poets mentioned, Marianne Moore, Hemingway, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald–including an excellent parsing of The Great Gatsby.

As many critics continue to play paddy-cake with texts, Kenner alights from a different promontory and, not surprisingly, ends up in a different stratosphere. Like William H. Gass, like Guy Davenport, he was not an academic commentator (though all three worked there), but a poet-philologist of the people. The Pound Era contains more nuggets including:

As finches on three isolated islands will slowly change until we have three species of finches, so Latin south of the Alps becomes “Italian,” south of the Pyrenees “Spanish.” (367)

Good news: Dalkey Archive is reissuing his book Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature.

Bonus: Kenner on Buckley’s show:

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: A Homemade World, Charles Olson, Donald Barthelme, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Guy Davenport, Hugh Kenner, James Joyce, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Louis Zukofsky, Marianne Moore, Marjorie Perloff, Michael Silverblatt, Samuel Beckett, The Pound Era, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, William F. Buckley, William Faulkner, William H. Gass ]]> http://bigother.com/2013/06/12/hugh-kenner-hits-a-home-run/feed/ 7 greggerke http://bigother.com/2013/06/11/interview-with-joyelle-mcsweeney/ http://bigother.com/2013/06/11/interview-with-joyelle-mcsweeney/#comments Tue, 11 Jun 2013 23:43:09 +0000 John Madera http://bigother.com/?p=30961 ]]> Madera: Many of the fictions in Salamandrine: 8 Gothics engage mothers, motherhood, and the Mother as figurations, sets of attitudes, as loci of language, as interlocutors discussing other mothers. Would you talk about what I read as interrogations of conventional ideas about mothers, iconoclastic takes on the Mother?

McSweeney: This book of mine is a war against capitalism through the body of the culturally vaunted (but actually exploited) figure of the mother. Here the mothers are totally undone, desperate, weaponized, vacant, bloodthirsty, deranged, or ingenious as hell. None of them is what you’d call wholesome—and neither is the writing.

Motherhood made it clear to me that there is just no way to survive the capitalist endgame that is the Anthropocene. Capitalism hearts mothers and it hearts poison and its hearts fear. As a new mother I was always being sold products to make my baby daughter “safer,” such as a crib, a cushion, or a bottle-sterilizing device, which would be recalled weeks later because it posed a strangulation hazard, caused cancer, or was covered in lead. To become a mother is to become a delivery system for such corporate and environmental poisons. This is literally the case since the chemical poisons in our environment—like pesticides, flame retardants, even jet fuel—pass so handily into breast milk.

So Salamandrine is largely a toxic and fatal book, but also a little intoxicated, full of novelties and chemical mirages and costumes and pretty language and dream actions. I’d say the meta-thesis is: things are so bad on earth that you have to freak out and be a vampire—or a revolutionary, or a poet—just to endure it. Therefore each piece employs a “B-movie” or subliterary genre – vampire tale, bodice-ripper, Green Zone thriller, etc.— that is not destined to be literarily “able-bodied” or to propagate literary convention or to “survive.”

Madera: Connected to this are any number of defamiliarizing depictions of children, about sons and daughters. These aren’t cute, cuddly creatures, but largely phantasmatic projections that invariably increase anxiety.

McSweeney: There’s that Coleridge line in “Frost at Midnight,” where he refers to his sleeping family as “the inmates of my cottage/all at rest.” When I was writing this book I did tend to think of my kids as fellow inmates, fellow creatures, fellow organisms trying to improvise a survival, or else be the place where the clock stops, like an IED. I think that’s reflected in the opaque, magic, unstable, uncanny, resourceful, and dangerous role of kids in the book. They aren’t protagonists or antagonists but they might be antigens.

Madera: To what would attribute the fact that fathers are often absent, or otherwise alienated from the other characters, in these fictions?

This book is such an intense meditation on the desperate and impossible role of motherhood in a doomed world that the father figures almost seem to be on another planet. IRL, I don’t think those assigned “male” cultural roles are any freer of the nooses of our contemporary moment than those assigned “female” roles but that’s just not the focus of this book.

Madera: Your gothics limn the interstices between poetry and prose, blurring the distinctions between them through fracture, erasure, evocative enjambments, or sentential decomposition as composition. How did you come to this form, this way of forming?

McSweeney: The lyric push is the most intense motivation here, whether in the “prose” sections or the verse-lineations. This is a Goth book, so there’s something Romantic and doomed about the trance-y way this writing moves the language around, attaches phrase to phrase, inverts sound, and pushes the speaker into sentences of almost asphyxiated length. The sentences are supposed to be predicaments. Since they are narrative, they push the speaker into impossible positions she can barely survive, and then she has to twist back through the syntactic loop to undo the hex and survive the sentence.

Madera: Who are some influences on this facet of your writing?

McSweeney: Well, Poe, of course, both his insane rhythms and obviousness of his poetry and the sleepwalking unkillable women of his prose. They seem linked to me—the music of Poe’s poetry is almost the “entrance music” for these undead women—Art herself—to waltz right into the chamber of the story, dressed to the nines. Her entrance is always an event, THE event that brings the house down. And I guess I always feel the music of the writing is like a spectacular weapon for forcing this kind of entrance, the entrance of the spectacular event.

Also Joyce; once you’ve read Joyce it’s hard to think that anything but sound should steer the sentence. And the sentence steers the plot! King Sound! Bound for Arcadia!

Madera: I connect your tendency toward parataxis with the paragraphic modes you’ve chosen here, whether as numbered sections or as “mosaic-tiles,” where the spaces between them invite many readings. How did you decide upon this way of structuring?

McSweeney: I think this is a rhythmic choice; I want the reader’s brain to get tranced out on these rhythms so that the impossible events happen with a kind of inevitability. At the same time, the white space is part of the composition. What cannot be related is the “real” event—the impossible event, the event that’s outside language, outside rationality, outside the part of our brain that’s always watching the in-flight film called “consciousness,” AKA “the plot.” Something else is going on, and that something else is the “real.”

Madera: Would you talk about the poetics of hybridity, whether of genre or identity?

McSweeney: I would say that I think of all texts as compositions, with more and less lyricism, more and less events, different rhythms, different levels of linguistic floridity, different levels of rhetoricity. I don’t really experience texts as “poetry” or “prose” much anymore, and I don’t really write them with those two qualities in mind. Instead, when I’m writing I try to tolerate this unbearable sonic shape, as it pushes itself into existence. And once I’ve got it I deploy it on the reader by making choices about line breaks, title, etc.

Madera: You mentioned to me that these gothics were “written in b-genres (however dismally/ecstatically) so it’s meant to be entertaining!” Would you talk about this some more?

McSweeney: Sure! As I mentioned above, these stories are Gothic because they are filled with my sense of panic and doom and fatality, but that’s not all. The Gothic is also exciting, sexy, kitschy, irrational, full of clothing, weather, architecture, hair, music, skin. The Gothic is fun to read. The Gothic is no respecter of persons or literary technique. The Gothic goes all the way. Similarly, b-genres are so fun to read, they almost read themselves. They almost evacuate the reader from herself in a vertiginous or maybe virtual way. What a scary and wonderful erasure Art can perform. Where are you when you are reading it, what other place have you fallen in to? Where are you going and where have you been?!

P.S. I also chose b-genres so that these stories would not be “literary fiction.” They are not about divorces, attending class reunions, maintaining wealth or weight, having midlife crises, or coming of age. They do not participate in the status of the genre “literary fiction.”

Madera: I think of your characters as unstable territories or functions, as vehicles or collections of uncertainties, as effects producing affects. What are your thoughts about characterological construction?

McSweeney: Wow, I love your description! This makes perfect sense to me! For me, the characters are almost the grounds or conditions that allow the events to happen—the events of language as well as the narrative events. They are as much the weather as anything else. But the weather is really important! The weather is going to kill us. All the storms this year were killer storms and they all had the best names and looked so terrifying on the satellite view…

Madera: Would you talk about what you’re hoping readers will experience as they encounter these characters?

McSweeney: O I hope it differs from story to story, and surely from reader to reader! Some of the characters are chagrining, some are deranged and bloodthirsty, some are sad, some are plucky and like sex, some are going to make it, some aren’t, some shouldn’t. I should add that some—as in “The Warm Mouth”—aren’t human, or even carbon-based lifeforms. These are the easiest for me to empathize with.

Madera: It’s often left unclear just where these characters are, where they exist in time and space, whether they exist in time and space, at least in conventionally understood ideas about such a continuum. Would you talk about the localities within which you situate your characters?

McSweeney: My muse-en-abyme is the Rust Belt, specifically northwest Indiana, where I live. When I moved here in 2006, the economic pain of the place was just palpable: everything was out in the open, from the foreclosed buildings to the SRO motels to the contagious violence that seemed to move around the city to the expressions on people’s faces, people’s postures. In a few years the rest of the world would reveal that it, too, was suffering. In the East Coast suburbs where I grew up, everyone hides their debt behind a façade of affluence. In fact, affluence is debt—you can afford a bigger house, bigger car, second home, new bathroom because you are managing a debt. Here there’s no façade. Capitalism has cracked here, left buildings up and left the ground and water poisoned and the community drained of resources due to rapacious attacks on the tax code. It’s reverse Wizard-of-Oz here—I fell asleep and woke up someplace made of pain, a place that couldn’t hide its pain. In this way it turned out to resemble the majority of human habitations on earth and most non-human habitats, too.

Madera: References or nods are made to other texts, like the Bible, the Duino Elegies, the Waste Land. And there’s at least one direct quotation: to John Donne’s idea of being “a little world made cunningly.” Why is reference and quotation important to your work?

McSweeney: Again, I have to go back to sound. For me, while I’m writing, sound is the hyperlink, sound links one text to another, one word to another, one language to another, one syntactic gesture to another, across time. That’s what allows me to sing these texts when I perform them, to sing out these strange propositions so that they have a weird cohesion, a sound body, a momentum. Maybe readers should sing these to themselves. Maybe that would also be entertaining.

Madera: I can’t help but see texts as always in dialogue with other texts. Besides the ones mentioned above, which texts helped shape your own gothics?

McSweeney: Joy Division. Yoko Tawada. Almodóvar. Kara Walker. Bolaño. Claire Denis. Joy Williams. Yi Sang. Kate Bernheimer. James M. Cain. Lovecraft. Kafka. Aase Berg. Jean Genet. Aimé Césaire. Samuel Delany. Jack Smith. The Velvet Underground. Nirvana. Maria Negroni. “Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?”. Andy Warhol. The Weimar Republic. Fascist Italy. David Lynch. Jane Eyre. Emily Dickinson. Marguerite Duras. Clarice Lispector. Kim Hyesoon. Fi Jae Lee. Marosa Di Giorgio. “The Turn of the Screw.” MIA. China Miéville. Wong Kar-Wai. “Puce Moment.” Wikileaks. Translation. Johannes Göransson. Plath. Sailors.

Michael Leong’s recent blog post pointed me to another take on a recent literary debate: Evie Shockley’s “Shifting the (Im)balance: Race and the Poetry Canon.”

Julie Buntin, the Director of Programs & Strategic Outreach for CLMP, says, “We’ve got a lovely reception planned with enough food and drink to feed an army of starving writers–or just hungry ones.”

I hope that the refreshments–along with the diversity of poets and presses represented–will provide enough incentive to go. Do come by if you’re free and around.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 12 AT 7:00PM
Housing Works Bookstore Cafe
126 Crosby Street
New York, NY 10012

This celebratory event features short readings from exceptional emerging writers supported through CLMP’s FACE OUT program, which grants publisher/author teams funding for technical assistance to help spotlight independent, experimental titles. Readers include: Cynthia Cruz (Four Way Books), Farrah Field (Four Way Books), Michael Leong (Black Square Editions), Albert Mobilio (Black Square Editions), Jon Leon (Futurepoem Books), Francis Richard (Futurepoem Books), R. Erica Doyle (Belladonna Books), LaTasha Diggs (Belladonna Books), Dan Magers (Birds, LLC) and Ana Bozicevic (Birds, LLC). The FACE OUT program is supported by a generous contribution from The Jerome Foundation and the New York Community Trust.

…in “The Logic of Substrate,” the first and strongest chapter of the book, Dworkin provides a definition that affords us a more elegant and refined, if not novel, understanding of how media operate: “Those objects that are casually referred to as ‘media,’ … are perhaps better considered as nodes of articulation along a signifying chain: the points at which one type of analysis must stop and another can begin; the thresholds between languages; the limns of perception.” In this sense, the title No Medium acts as a kind of homophonic and edifying mnemonic: to realize that there is no medium — or better yet, to put the term “medium” sous rature, that is, under erasure — is to know media in a richer and, to use Dworkin’s own phrase, “more robust” way.

I notice that Amazon lists the book with a significantly different cover…as if it were deliberately supplanting what appears to be a polaroid photograph with the older medium of monochromatic painting, a kind of lighter version of Yves Klein’s blues.  Can anyone account for this difference?  

The image is embossed on the cover and I’m guessing that might have something to do with it…

It begins this month and it looks unusually good–so sign up for a session, donate, and/or spread the word!

In a series of seven sessions, invited artists and writers, along with interested members of the public, collaborate in writing on the interior of an out-of-use house on Governors Island. Writing On It All enacts the physical as well as social nature of writing, with a materialist twist on contemporary conceptual art practice. Just as writers are embodied, so do we write with concrete tools, in and from particular locations with particular histories and functions. Mindful of this materiality, Writing On It All takes place in an early 20th-Century house that used to serve as senior officer housing when Governors Island was a military base.

Writing On It All puts these ideas and this history into play with a number of poets and visual thinkers, a graffiti artist, and a movement improviser, who will facilitate sessions designed to invite different forms of engagement with the empty old house, from listening to dancing to a range of collaborative writing activities. The project foregrounds process over product, which means that we don’t know quite what to expect, and that our collective focus is on acts of writing rather than on the texts we produce – nevertheless, the house will be available for viewing after each session. Ultimately, the texts themselves are ephemeral; they will be painted over, rinsed or sanded off, and the house restored to its original condition, at the beginning of July.

EVENTS

June 15 – Kundiman Poets – Writing Race & Belonging: A Live Monument
June 16 – Al Diaz – WET PAINT PROJECT 2011-2013
June 22 – Wendy S. Walters – Out of Regiment, a Project in Personal Mapping
June 23 – Carla Gannis and Justin Petropolous – legend / legend
June 23 – Jovanina Pagano and Rachel Levitsky – Against the Wall: Migration / Habitation / Erasing / Tracing
June 29 – Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture
June 30 – Anne Carson, Robert Currie, and Ébauche

The encore had ended, you could tell there’d be no more music because the earplugs had come out, and the audience began leaving fairly quickly. Roadies started disassembling the stage, and one of them threw something way up high and out towards us. I looked up, it might not even have been seen by many others, and thanks more to luck than skill the yellowish-pale object — could it be a rag, a headband? — landed in my left hand. A crumpled piece of paper. Three guys behind me said, “What did he catch?” and I decided not to look. We left. Out in the street, our ears blocked with music, and under an old-fashioned street lamp near a building that went up in 1847 and which has stones springing out from the exterior, but is finally the object of long-delayed restoration and repair, I uncurled the damp ball. Here’s what it was:

Cool. Everyone in front sang along to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axIVVxsGOsY

Walt Whitman

*

“[T]he internet…is the greatest poem ever written.”

Kenneth Goldsmith