[Being a review of Krystal Languell's Call the Catastrophists*]

Personal anecdote followed by utterly shallow pop-culture reference. Sweeping claim of quality. Comparison to artist from another discipline. Description of content, return to pop-culture reference, return to personal anecdote. End of introduction.

Save These Instructions

Three men were not well and one died but not the one I thought would doesn’t matter now another cascade suddenness literally ashes not only is it possible it’s a fact if one dies then my entire family will which is obvious the next time I get a Google alert with my full name it better not be another obituary if so I will need someone to slowly feed me a handful of candy I will be childlike and difficult.

Extreme situational juxtaposition or incongruity followed by specific details then a short anecdote that brings in another voice or character. Rhetorical question or general statement. Return to specificity from beginning, but with modulation. Surprising use of simile or metaphor, disregard secondary characters in favor of meaningful interiority: idea, image, epiphanic zinger.

Labored explication of first line; labored explication of seventh line; eschewal of remainder of quoted poem. Repetition of first line for effect. Transparent attempt to cover up failed attempt at restatement of sweeping claim (cf. introduction): less grand claim, made with more conviction.

—————-

* A brief epic and we are in a land of Catastrophes: Hungary, Romania; missing Indiana. We’re swallowed in a language

She Doesn’t Understand

A neighbor across the courtyard threw a jar of tomatoes at guests leaving our apartment because locals are day drinkers on their national holidays they don’t like to stay up late in the morning Colin asked me to interpret the last time I was delighted by helping a man doors opened housewives scolded in French as well as if my Nem ertem meant I don’t see the problem rather than I don’t know the words you are using.

It’s interesting to explore the intricacies of this language, we think. There is novelty. Surprise. Horror, too; shadings our own language seems incapable of: “A process occurs when you give up your language and start calling things by new names but there’s not a term for how new phrases infiltrate your reflex it starts with gutturals and when you try to give it up try to back out the primal language dialects but you will understand shouts of surprise from the last place to wipe clean.” But by this point we have crossed the border of Catastrophes into Salvage. What are we making? We end the book with Continuum; those Instructions? They’re here. Not at the end– there’s air there, the lines lose their tangle and possibly some syntax is repaired. (“I understand; sometimes I’m at the zoo, and I am the zoo.”) But close to the end, where they might do some good. Here’s the end:

You’ll want to think the end isn’t your fault. Get organized. Go for a hike. Start a non-profit.

I don’t do that kind of thing, but I’m not the one who wants to live forever.

Generally, equinox refers to the poise of a dependent figure (Earth), inclined neither away from nor toward the sun. So–equinox is the short-term experience of a figure that is in usual relation to the sun (being held in correlation by the sun) becoming its own temporary primary—becoming abandoned, becoming the painful solitudes of a thing forced into the position/ poise wherein it has to be its own light.

Jill Stengel writes deeply of the losses and lonelinesses of the solitudes of such equinox realities in the Dusie chap dear equinox. This book is an unintentional prothalamion (“I am out here raw as the/ night sky waiting for you”)–a pouring song to a not yet found future beloved. This sweet little book is an agonizing, loving pitch that emerges by way of calling out to the night (“dear night [...] filled with longing and seek”).

Calling out to the night as a figure to relate to, pulls the sun toward us (“the sun always comes”), which is the power of a “passive chalice [being] ruptured.” I think of the sore nights in the cave where the tears were countless and no matter what I did the night seemed to thicken. It may seem dramatic, but moving from the hermetics of the cave into nomadisms with bare feet (until the feet bleed) in the darkest hours is worth—is something more romantic and vigilant than time merely passing in an awaiting bucolic zone (“there are tears there is ache there is such desire”). It is a way to promise presence to the not yet seen or not yet seeable (“and if the match is wet with tears I will find my own light”).

-j/j hastain

Embedding oneself in The Ambassadors by Henry James is like reading little else. I feel as if every time I start up again an unending endoscopy of my perceptions proceeds until I shut the book. Take this section of beauty from. Strether, the main character, is talking to Madame de Vionnet—a woman who has some hold on Chad. This young man is the son of Mrs. Newsome—it is she who has dispatched Strether to Paris to see what is keeping her son there for she wants him to return to Massachusetts and take over the family business. Mrs. Newsome is also Strether’s love interest and it is probable he will marry her if he succeeds in getting her son back to the old USA):

‘Well, I can bear almost anything!’ our friend briskly interrupted. Deep and beautiful on this her smile came back, and with the effect of making him hear what he had said just as she had heard it. He easily enough felt that it gave him away, but what in truth had everything done but that? It had been all very well to think at moments that he was holding her nose down and that he had coerced her: what had he by this time done but let her practically see that he accepted their relation? What was their relation moreover—though light and brief enough in form as yet—but whatever she might choose to make it? Nothing could prevent her—certainly he couldn’t—from making it pleasant. At the back of his head, behind everything, was the sense that she was—there, before him, close to him, in vivid imperative form—one of the rare women he had so often heard of, read of, thought of, but never met, whose very presence, look, voice, the mere contemporaneous fact of whom, from the moment it was at all presented, made a relation of mere recognition. That was not the kind of woman he had ever found Mrs. Newsome, a contemporaneous fact who had been distinctly slow to establish herself… (177-8)[i]

If what is happening is easy enough (a man is becoming attracted to a woman, comparing the kind of woman she is to the kind of woman he has back home), what joy comes is delivered by words and sentences that have never been quite so combined as to tell what happens when someone is taken with the one one isn’t with. “Deep and beautiful on this her smile came back, and with the effect of making him hear what he had said just as she had heard it,” is a sentence for the ages, a gold-plated locomotive with a built-in freezer. Let’s break it down, component by component.

Deep and beautiful – beginning the sentence with adjectives, a nice variant; I think anybody would follow such a sentence’s start, even if it lead to a goblin’s fundament—just because we all want what is “deep and beautiful” and need to know where it is

on this – this refers to Strether’s prior line of dialogue and if the reader chugs back to those easy words with the bat and ball at the end, they return to this sentence peeved—You aren’t just making me hug this sentence you big oaf, now I’ve got two to contend with!

her smile came back, – this would be a spectacular sentence by itself—it is so pregnant with meaning I’m ashamed to look at the words; James constructs around it to avoid sounding like 1980’s US fiction

and with the effect – here is live tape delay within the sentence; the smile has come back but it already has an “effect” while the reader has not had the pleasure of leaving this sentence (calm down, you can make it); James is not one for “cause and effect,” but “cause of the cause for effect of the effect,” as we shall soon see

of making him hear – let the shitstorm of h’s begin; also this periscoping from her cognition to her face to his sense of hearing begins to rev, only to end with him hearing himself (No surprise, ladies?) as she would have heard it (Is there any better example of animal attraction?) (Oh, I can’t get you out of my head)

what he had said – again reverberations extraordinaire, referring again to the “Well, I can bear almost anything!” line—now the reader has hip checked that sentence of splurge twice (He can “bear almost anything!?” Are you serious? Is James fucking with me? Had Henry picked this directly from a smut mag?)

just as she had heard it. – that “just” is a little unjust and maybe inexact; how can he hear something just as she can hear it?—maybe the greatest impossibility of human endeavor; but the narrator would have it so and so it is, if you want to believe it, but fight for the right and what do you have? something like the mystery of why you love your cat, or boo*, or bend in the river; if you can explain such without duress, I never writ nor no boo ever loved

Why read The Ambassadors? I honestly liked the cover painting of the Penguin Classics edition by the not so famous Paul Gustav Fisher. By the brunette leaning at the gallery outfitted in a fetching gray dress displaying her rear bounty was some place I wanted to be. And I wanted Henry James to tell me what it was like to be there. To be in Europe, to be in Paris just as the whole ball of earth was about to be blown by technological advances and that Yugoslav Nationalist.

Sven Birkerts says:

…if it was not a specific message or set of realizations that I took away from my reading of The Ambassadors, what was my payoff? What made the reading worth the many hours it took?…I have no hesitation now about marking the experience out as worthy, even important, both on the immediate “process” level, but even more in terms of what the great Italian poet Eugenio Montale called “the second life of art,” referring to the ways in which a work lives in us after we have finished our looking, listening, or reading. Indeed, for me the value of the novel lies mainly in its aftereffects, the residues it has left behind—residues that become subtle goads to new awareness. (153)[ii]

Since I’m only halfway through I can’t make friends yet with my residues—besides they’d dress up as Cheetos if they thought it would help me understand at thing or two about humanity. I’m reading The Ambassadors because it’s winter, people are sick, some are getting drunk, and I’m not too interested in money markets, Mcfearmongers, or the tears of Maria Shriver. I want the hair of the dog never to leave my blood. I’m occupying The Ambassadors because Annie Dillard said,

Henry James launched the century with a splash: The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl. It is hard to see why writers write anything else after James, and readers read anyone else, but literature persists. (58)[iii]

Just before the midway point, in Book Seventh to be exact, The Ambassadors starts to shoot forward and the page upon page of perception/reflection/reperception starts to melt over a plot that plucks from The Portrait of a Lady. What doesn’t change with time is how people play with each other—and play in a not nice fashion. Usually this has to do with money, power, and family. That is the world of Henry James. Older people’s sport is influencing the lives of the young, making sure they marry who they want them to be married to. It’s a delightfully heartless pastime and you don’t have to dress in black to understand it. It can even be fun, especially with this endnote from Professor Christopher Butler from page 63. He is defending James against a fusspot critic who asks if anything is adequately realized in the late works of the Master. Butler smotes him—thus:

…his argument is simply a plea for a more naturalistic kind of novel. But the reader who has got this far is probably not wishing he or she was reading something else. (443)

*colloquial for boyfriend or girlfriend

Friends–I wanted to post here regarding an Anthology of Queer Nudes that I am curating. The book is slated to be published in color by Knives Spoons and Forks Press in 2013. The premises of the book are honesty, nudity and ink (interpretations encouraged). There are already a few very exciting submissions in the queue. We have quite a bit of space to work with in the book so likelihood of being published is high (depending on quality of submission). The submission will need to include photographic images as well as a body poetics statement. Please feel free to forward my email (or post on other lists) to anyone whom you think might be interested:

julia_loveintention@hotmail.com

Sara Levine, author of the fantastic Treasure Island!!!, was interviewed in the Globe and Mail Monday. The article seems to treat “slow writing” (a “cute” coinage a la “slow food” — fuck) as quaint, eccentric. Disaster!!! I want to say (though I am in complete agreement with what Ms. Levine has to say):

As a teacher, the 41-year-old author says over the telephone from Chicago, she struggles to slow overeager students down, demanding they set aside their billowing reams to concentrate on the architecture of the sentence – “things like grammatical suspension, the difference between nouns and verbs, rhythm and sound.”

As a teacher, I remind my students that every word on the page is a choice, an opportunity. Writing is fraught, I tell them, more thrilling than they think. And not only for them, but for their readers as well.

I am not an adventurous reader anymore. I used to read books from all disciplines and genres; now I indulge my esoteric tastes only when researching. And when I indulge, I find so much to dislike. Lazy language, everywhere; garbage verbiage. I tell my students that they should accord the words in front of them the respect they are due — the writer walked these words out; they did not spill, they did not flow. (I complained about this once in a letter to one of my teachers — no flow — who responded: “Good.”) And so I am embarrassed when I encounter a spillage. The loose translation of Pascal we all know and quote, “I have made this letter long only because I have not had the leisure to make it short,” seems right because fast writing begets fast reading. The remark itself is careless (not as aphorism but in context, where it only adds to the letter’s length — if this had been all that Pascal had written, he would have been caught out as disingenuous), begs the reader to take less care in reading.

I want my students slowed. I fantasize often about teaching one story for an entire semester. A single story, read 32 times. It is a fantasy, as yet; I think I could do it with a year long course — the second semester, once I had battered their momentum out of them, they might be ready. In the meantime, I teach the same concepts, over and over, all semester long. I ask the same questions, over and over. Slow. Everything is spectacle until you get to the minutiae.

Mostly it is as reminder, though: I wish that respect upon myself. I am not and never have been fast as a writer. It takes me many drafts to even figure out what is meant, and many more to mean what is meant. And I have visceral reactions to fast writing. It is offensive to me in some way. My time as a reader has not been respected.

[N.B.: I might have written a longer post, but I have not had the leisure to do so-- this by way of benison, not apology.]

(Click through for a larger version.)

Notes:

1. There are also various “best ofs,” which largely repackage the singles.
2. The Complete box set (2011) contains all of the studio albums, plus the live album Rank, plus Hatful of Hollow, The World Won’t Listen and Louder Than Bombs. Which is basically what you need to have just about everything (minus the oddities we covered in Part 5, as well as some random edited versions of some of the songs).

The critical establishment’s dogmatic popism eliminates any consideration of the philosophy surrounding the creative and commercial genesis of music and elevates the aesthetic, so whatever sounds best must be best, and now somehow independent music has wound up in a place where Beyoncé is on the same purely aesthetic playing field that Sharon Van Etten is, because it makes you powerfully, stinkingly uncool to point out that Beyoncé is a meticulously calculated, choreographed, and focus group-approved product of the same system that Sharon Van Etten’s forebears in independent music rose up as a direct response to. Suddenly Sharon Van Etten sounds a little thin without the help of a billion-dollar machine.

Since I first encountered the above quote from David Shapiro (courtesy of the Village Voice‘s Pass & Jop ‘Personals,’ via fourth time around), his words have come to mind anytime I’ve listened to Psychic TV‘s “Godstar”–and lately I’ve been listening to “Godstar” an awful lot.

I’m sympathetic to Shapiro’s complaint, despite basically believing that the aesthetic does trump all other variables in the evaluation of a song. But more than that, occasionally a preoccupation with (and maybe illusions about) the “creative genesis” of a pop song will overwhelm every other consideration for me, which I’m not convinced is a good thing, and which is a problem that rarely extends to Shapiro’s targets anyway.

Taking as given that pop music is performative; that by the 2000th time Elvis Costello plays “Alison,” the feelings that stirred him to pen the song have been refracted beyond recognition; there’s still something uniquely chilling about the song that begs us to ask, ‘What if he/she means it?’

In the case of “Godstar,” that ‘it’ is Genesis P-Orridge’s elegy for Brian Jones, which in its hurt-sounding weirdness, in the occasional crudeness of its poetry, marks itself as a product of no guile or calculation. (Who is this song even for?) This is the territory of the self-styled artist, the cult act, and aesthetic grounds on which the “focus-group approved” artists Shapiro refers to cannot compete. At least I find it very easy to think that way in practice. It’s maybe a form of self deception, but although I often quite enjoy Beyoncé songs (“meticulously crafted,” sure, but so successfully–!), I’m not compelled to wonder with her music –as I am with Psychic TV– just what could have prompted a song into existence.

“Godstar,” incidentally, sounds lousy on laptop speakers (the version on YouTube, but particularly the file that plays on my iTunes), which no doubt lends to it an added aura of authenticity in some confused place in my mind–the fidelity issues making it sound closer to buried treasure, found, rusted over, and irreplaceable.

A Very Bad Story

At first when I read this in Tech Crunch, I was depressed:

The appeal of Instagram is, for lack of a better word, simple; the world is moving too damn fast and we don’t want the cognitive load of figuring out what we’re looking at — we just want to see simple pretty things. This simplicity is what makes services like Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest a joy versus other entertainment offerings.

The truth is that on any given day, I’d rather check in on Instagram than watch a movie.

I felt despondent. I love movies. When I say I love movies, you have no idea how much. Almost as much as books. Almost enough to make me wish I could have been young in 1939. Almost enough to make me wish for silent movie stardom. I mark the major events of my life with film. Time passes with each new movie. Eras become genre: the year of the spaghetti western, the year of the Godzilla movies (all of them), the years of Universal Horror classics. The fall I fell in love with Bergman. The spring I watched Vertigo ten times in a row. This is not, of course, novel. I’m guessing most writers feel the same way.

Do people no longer truly have the attention span for stories?

I hope not. I live for stories. I love LOOOONGG, epic, twisty, turny, big, bold stories. We all love stories. Of course.  That’s why we do what we do.  Sure, I’m as guilty as the next person of checking my phone way too often, reading stuff on my iPad while I’m watching a movie (at home), etc. But if the story is good enough, then I can’t be distracted. It’s a simple as that.

That thought made me happier. Because then I read this:

The war for attention leaves Hollywood at a disadvantage. Box office returns are the lowest they have been in 16 years. Why pay $10 to commit to watching something in a theatre when you can watch it at home for much less with the added bonus of being able to check your email? And, why even bother spending two hours of your time sitting and absorbing a complex narrative that isn’t connected to you, when you can pop open your iPhone and get a quick hit of rarefied entertainment from people you actually know — who you can actually relate to as opposed to just project on.

I thought, oh! Well, then! There’s your problem. What Hollywood puts out now is mostly junk, right? Filler and fluff and foreign DVD sales, yes? 3D rehashes to make money and that is it and all? These are all stories we’ve seen before, ridiculous rip-offs and terrible car explosions with stories kind of made up to fit around them.  So of course people are distracted, bored, fidgety. Of course they’d rather just check Instagram.

A Very Good Story

And a story can still draw you in, in the most unlikely of ways. I saw The Artist on Christmas Day. In a theater packed with people carrying brand new iPhones and Androids and distracted by family and kids and the turkey they had to go home and cook and making their flights the next day. And yet. Dead, dead silence, rapt attention, uproarious laughter, and a collective gasp like I’ve never heard from a theater before at one particularly suspenseful point. And it was a SILENT FILM. MY GOD. Americans (okay, yes, East Coast liberal elites, but STILL) fell silent and rapt before a SILENT FILM. Why? Because it told a very good story. In a simple, beautiful, interesting way. That’s what Hollywood has to do to get people back in theaters. Tell more stories. Tell them silent, tell them sound, tell them black and white and color and backwards and forwards and any which way but tell a story that we care about, Hollywood. One we haven’t heard before. Or maybe one we have, and keep retelling and remolding and refitting, through the ages, because it’s a true and good and honest and beautiful story.

Maybe then we’ll stop checking our email and return to movies once more, the willing captives of stories on the big screen.

Susan Daitch is the author of four works of fiction. Her short fiction has been included in The Norton Anthology of Postmodern Fiction, Tin House, Guernica, Bomb, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, The Brooklyn Rail, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Ploughshares, The Village Voice, and elsewhere. Her work has been the recipient of two Vogelstein awards. Her novel L.C. won an NEA Heritage Award and was a Lannan Foundation Selection. She teaches at Hunter College.

Paper Conspiracies, Susan’s new book from City Lights Publishers

David Cooper’s review of Paper Conspiracies at The New York Journal of Books

Tim Horvath’s review of her story “The Restorer” on Matt Bell’s homepage

Larry McCaffrey’s interview with Susan at Dalkey Archive Press

Brian Evenson is the author of ten books of fiction, most recently the limited edition novella Baby Leg, published by New York Tyrant Press in 2009. In 2009 he also published the novel Last Days (which won the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel of 2009) and the story collection Fugue State, both of which were on Time Out New York‘s top books of 2009. His novel The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an IHG Award. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Slovenian. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University’s Literary Arts Program. Other books include The Wavering Knife (which won the IHG Award for best story collection), Dark Property, and Altmann’s Tongue. He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, Eric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine, and others. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship.

Contagion and Other Stories has just been reissued by Astrophil Press

Brian’s new translation of Gérard Macé’s The Last of the Egyptians from Burning Deck Press

John Madera’s interview with Brian at Rain Taxi

Ryan Call’s review of Fugue State at The Collagist

Bradford Morrow’s new novel, The Diviner’s Tale, is available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the United States and is out in England with Grove Atlantic (Corvus). His earlier novels are available as e-books from Open Road Media. With David Shields, he co-edited The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death, published by W.W. Norton in February 2011. The Uninnocent, Morrow’s first collection of short stories, has been published by Pegasus Books, and a new novella, The Fall of the Birds, has been released as an e-book by Open Road Media and a Kindle Single by Amazon.com as a Kindle Single. He is completing work on his seventh novel, The Prague Sonata, as well as a book of creative nonfiction works, Meditations on a Shadow. A Bard Center fellow and professor of literature at Bard College, he lives in New York City.

Order The Uninnocent

“Bradford Morrow creates beautifully dark and soulfully intimate stories in his first collection, featuring characters who, though hardly citizens of virtue, reveal their true colors with little remorse. Morrow’s stories are hauntingly honest and linger in the consciousness.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred Pick of the Week)

Gabriel Blackwell’s review of The Diviner’s Tale

Stephen O’Connor’s interview with Bradford at HTML Giant

vs.

vs.

(“Freebird!”) Were these movies produced, the rest of their running time would be more or less exactly what we’ve just seen, repeated over and over and over. When is that exhausted? Isn’t it before the film is even produced? If the audience knows they want it, it’s only because it’s something they’ve already seen.

“I like things that make me laugh.” “I like dog commercials.” “I like chimpanzees.”

buyacomputer

That an audience wants something is a measure not of need or desire but of imagination (lack thereof). The echo created has no resonance because what it began as was also an echo. Thought is an extension of what the body handles, what the senses sense– if a thought is entirely new, unanchored in experience, it is usually counted a sign of illness: voices in the head; alien invasion; possession. It only becomes palatable when in another’s mind, in another’s mouth. Healthy, we are synthesists, subsisting on the recycled, the regurgitated. We are assimilation machines, our mental fuels fossil too.

“Ideas” about what we desire are only expressions of nostalgia, a form of folding the mind in upon itself. What form does that folding in upon itself take?

Hollywood succeeded because it was narcissistic: Imagine yourself, only prettier, larger, all-powerful. You hardly need to imagine it, and the imagining of it adds nothing. When it no longer appeals, when mental blocks refuse to bust, is it because Hollywood’s technicians have miscalibrated their own sophisticated gauges? Or is it because the echoes of echoes of echoes have finally quieted?

Is it all elegy? I am interested in failure. “Interest” is a mild expression for that emotion– I am fascinated by failure. Mine is not the bully’s delight, though; it is not the cultist’s cultivated obscurantism, either. I consider myself a humanist. Failure is an evolutionary technology. Success is conservative, reactionary. It advances us not at all.

[What is wanted here, at the end of this introduction, is a conclusion. It is practically demanded. But is also therefore imaginable. For me, failure always seems to come from providing the wrong conclusion, not from failure to provide a