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David Pinner - Poetic and hallucinatory sequences: protagonist is slowly subjected to a spectacle of psychological trickery, sexual seduction, ancient religious practices and nightmarish sacrificial rituals

2012-01-30T13:40:00.001+01:00

David Pinner, Ritual, Finders Keepers, 2011.[1967]

The original seed from which grew the towering movie enigma The Wicker Man.

"Ritual's opulent dialogue, with the sickly richness of its countryside, and Pinner's decaying village, can stand alone from the book's illustrious successor. But, be warned, like The Wicker Man, it is quite likely to test your dreams of leaving the city for a shady nook by a babbling brook." - Bob Stanley

"Shrouded in the same brand of mystery and contradiction that forms its tangled plot, Ritual, the 1967 debut by RADA-trained playwright David Pinner is commonly recognised by cult cinema fanatics as the original seed that grew into the towering movie enigma The Wicker Man. Four decades since it first hit the bookshelves, rediscover this true modern rarity and historical keystone in the well-trodden bridge between occult fiction and cinematic pop culture. Set against an enclosed rural Cornish landscape, Ritual follows the trail of English police officer, David Hanlin, who is requested to investigate the murder of a local child. During the protagonist's short stay, he is slowly subjected to a spectacle of psychological trickery, sexual seduction, ancient religious practices and nightmarish sacrificial rituals. All these fantastical ingredients were used for the cinematic rewrite by Anthony Schaffer who, along with Christopher Lee, obtained the film rights to Ritual six years after the novel's publication. Pinner's poetic and hallucinatory sequences were transformed into the rural celluloid folk story for Robin Hardy's 1973 film, The Wicker Man, which has enthralled and inspired generations of British movie patrons andfolk-pop enthusiasts throughout the world. Original copies of Ritual's short print run have been known to command price tags as high as £600, rendering reading copies, in any form, to be virtually untraceable... until now. Finders Keepers debut print run sees Ritual painstakingly reproduced fromt he authors own personal copy, including its original striking wood-cut cover artwork and a new forward by The Guardian / The Times journalist and pop composer Bob Stanley."

"Originally the plan was to film the book that the rights had been bought for, only for director Robin Hardy to change his mind and make something altogether different (and more serious) under the name of The Wicker Man, though both book and film share some similarities. Instead of being set in Scotland, Ritual is set in Cornwall, and the relatively remote locations for the two are used as a convincing and no doubt authentic backdrop for pagan activity. Both share a sexually repressed and puritanical Inspector investigating the murder/disappearance of a local girl, and the local communities both run circles around the Inspector (in Ritual his inability to see what is going on around him is served by his medical need to wear sunglasses at all times). They also feature a naked woman cavorting against a wall with the Inspector clutching desperately on the other side, and both at one point have the locals wearing animal masks. So the story has several elements that were carried on to The Wicker Man, but at the same time you can see why Hardy/Shaffer picked up the story and ran off in their own direction, tweaking it considerably into something else more cinematic and satisfying. The tone of the book has a jokey feel to it, as if the author is saying that he isn't taking it too seriously (he has said that his story was meant to be ironic), and the prose and dialogue is often flowery and downright odd. The Inspector is gradually driven insane by the locals and the twist ends with him murdering one of the children, with the explanation being that he suffers from sun madness bought on by his eye condition; he ends up sent to the madhouse; a chump all along.
Christopher Lee, Peter Snell, head of film company British Lion, and writer Anthony Shaffer all chipped in £5,000 each to pay for the rights to the book. So £15,000 in the early 70s would have been quite a princely sum. Apparently (according to the book about the making of the Wicker Man), Pinner has complained about plagiarism to the point where Hardy said he wished Pinner would shut up as he got paid well enough at the time compared to everybody else (by all accounts Lee waived his usual fee; Hardy got £4,500 for directing, Shaffer got £11,000 for his script). Little did anyone then know that the film would go on to be a sleeper hit and a cult classic that grows in stature as time goes on. A decent enough book then, once you get used to the style after the 75 page or so mark. Pinner went on to pen left-leaning tv plays." - Folk Horror Review

"David Pinner's Ritual opens in the English village of Thorn where the dead body of 8 year old Dian Spark is found by an oak tree. Suspicion is stirred by the fact she is holding a sprig of garlic and the press raise the question of a ritual killing. Enter Detective Inspector David Hanlin, a no nonsense police officer despatched from London to investigate the incident, and whose eyes remain almost permanently behind a pair of shades as he suffers from sun blindness.
Hanlin begins with Reverend White at his church who insists the village is a Christian one, but David notices the altar cross is missing, to which the Reverend insists it often disappears and reappears again. However, the holy man is outraged when David finds a monkey's head and garlic flowers on the altar.
Events cut to a seance being conducted by Dian's mother to ascertain if her child was murdered. Meanwhile, David is exploring the wood and is taken by Gypo, the local nutter, to the oak tree where Dian was found. The monkey's head is back, along with two bats pinned along side it.
Back at the seance, Mrs. Spark claims there is witchcraft in the village and some of those present are involved. The accusation stirs up hysteria among the group, until the village squire takes control, suggesting the police should be brought in. Quite conveniently, he then makes the acquaintance of David Hanlin when Anna brings the detective back to the house to give him lodging.
Hanlin initially spends his time visiting and getting to know the leading village characters. He visits Lawrence Cready, a rather camp character who had bought Squire Fenn's mansion, when Fenn had become debt ridden. Although Cready does have a witchcraft museum in his manor, he insists to David it is merely memorabilia. However, Hanlin discovers a doll falls with a pin stuck through its abdomen and the name Dian written across the back, when it falls out of the pocket of one of the local children, Fat Billy. The child goes hysterical, claiming he hated Dian and that her mother is a witch, but denies killing her. The boy is later found dead by the same oak tree.
Events come to a head when Hanlin receives an invitation from Cready to be initiated in a moon worshipping ceremony the villagers are holding. He goes. The villagers are dressed as animals, including two march hares, while Cready is dragged up as a man-woman. The proceedings end up on the beach at a bonfire flanked by an altar of stones where a white horse is sacrificed. The whole thing appears becomes hysterical, setting off a chain of accusation and counter accusation, before Hanlin eventually struggles and discovers the identity of the killer in a twist that no one sees coming.
If Ritual is famous for anything, it is as the novel Anthony Schaffer first considered for adaptation before deciding to do his own thing, which led to The Wicker Man. Ritual is very rich in its language. The problem is that, at times, this richness becomes over opulent in terms of dialogue. Virtually everyone in Thorn appears to be a budding poet or raconteur. The dialogue, at times, is amusing in its perversity ("Bullies always get their comeuppance! St. Valentine's Day is always hanging around some old garage!"), sometimes distracting ("You shouldn't gallop about in Gods house, you know!...God usually has his midday hibernation approximately now. He has to work very hard!"), often unbelievable in its absurdity ( "Who would dare, during my angelical reign, who would dare place a shrunken anthropoid's head on my high altar! This is really removing Lucifer's trousers."). It is difficult to judge whether Pinner simply got carried away or is deliberately having a laugh, given that the writer himself has stated Ritual to be "blackly, ironically humorous".
Pinner's characters are interesting. David Hanlin is a trickster, a man who is not always what he appears to be. He hides his eyes behind sunglasses, though is more for medical reasons than shielding himself from others. Throughout the book, Hanlin tells lies in order to further investigation, yet keeps telling himself he does not like lying; a symptom/prefiguring of his split personality perhaps? The supporting characters resemble a Hammer horror rep of the day, missing only the "arr, ye be stranger around here." Lawrence Cready, the main protagonist, is a wonderfully repulsive old queen of a man and is the containment of the only supernatural element of Ritual. Mrs.Spark, the murdered girl's mother, rebounds between grieving desperation and hysteria. Anna Spark is not unlike Willow in The Wicker Man; a sexual temptress.
Like language, Ritual is enriched in imagery, though not as over opulent. The novel opens with a butterfly - a symbol of metamorphosis - fluttering around the murdered Dian. Pinner plants the suggestion that the insect is Dian transformed, floating around her own dead body like a freed spirit. This is reinforced later when the butterfly lands on her Mrs. Spark's breast during the seance, the child returning to the source of maternal comfort. The insect is subsequently killed by Fat Billy. He is later accused of killing Dian, which he denies but admits he wanted to kill her. Maybe he did in killing the butterfly.
Pinner invests the novel with some memorable set pieces, such as the ritual slaughter of the horse or Cready's invasion/manipulation of Hanlin's unconscious mind. While these scenes add colour to the proceedings, they remain incidental rather than integral to the story. Cready's mind contact with Hanlin, being the only supernatural element in Ritual, particularly stands out of step with the remainder of the tale." - Princes Spider at amazon.com

David Pinner's web page

Ben Katchor - Part surrealistic travelogue and part satirical treatise on the very notion of culture, it is a book about imaginary places with enough heart to make its very real social commentary easily digestible

2012-01-27T18:06:00.000+01:00

Ben Katchor, The Cardboard Valise, Pantheon, 2011.

"In this winsomely haunting graphic novel from Katchor—whose weekly strips have been collected into The Jew of New York and Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, among others—an overstuffed suitcase becomes a ripe, comic metaphor for modern life. Set in a world tilted about 45 degrees away from reality, Katchor's story follows a number of characters through their quirky obsessions, each of which highlights a uniquely curious take on modernity. A hunt in the "Saccharine Mountains" turns a BLT into a tongue-in-cheek metaphor ("the lettuce symbolizes the cost of living"), while the citizens of "Outer Canthus" each undergo a symbolic funeral at the age of 47, after which they are "allowed to shed the burden of responsibility." In this slurry of sketchy and gray-tinged surrealism, the titular valise stands out with a certain haunting magic: a cheap and disposable thing (Katchor tracks its construction and sale with a curiously socioeconomic exactitude) that can contain multitudes. Once its contents are unleashed upon the hopelessly modernized island nation of Tensint (Katchor relentlessly skewers affected bourgeois quests for "authenticity"), things go downhill fast—it's the end of the world writ small. Rarely have books that made this little sense made so much sense." - Publishers Weekly

"MacArthur and Guggenheim-winning alt-weekly cartoonist Ben Katchor uses simple two-tiered strips to conjure up whole worlds that never existed, in under 10 panels. The Cardboard Valise collects a series of those loosely related strips into a weird travelogue, taking readers on a tour through an island famous for its restroom ruins, a two-dimensional nation that exists on the borderline between other countries, and a metropolis where citizens pine for vacations in these exotic locales. Anyone who reads just a little of Katchor’s nostalgia for the never-was each night before bedtime is bound to have some remarkable dreams." - Noel Murray

"Katchor . . . does what every great artist does: clarifies things you knew but didn't know you knew, or didn't know how to articulate. Spend some time with his work, and then take a walk." - Newsweek

“Gloriously eccentric…the reader is befuddled, though in the most enjoyable manner.” –Booklist
“Artist and storyteller Katchor has achieved the goal Borges only imagined. Exiting this oneiric, shamanic, yet utterly naturalistic and sensual masterpiece, the reader steps out into a revitalized continuum richer and more exotic than the one he or she inhabited prior to the reading, a realm full of strange, alluring and bewildering lands, populated by oddball folks with odder customs. Never again will our common globe seem like a small, homogenous, boring place…The Cardboard Valise is worldbuilding on the order of Jan Morris's Hav, Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia, Brian Aldiss's Malacia, and Ursula Le Guin's Orsinia: places that are attached to our world by extradimensional roads, down which only the sharpest and most sensitive of literary guides can lead one. Get your ticket immediately!” –Barnes and Noble Review

“A surreal travelogue…a vast panorama of humane hamburger stands, exquisitely ethereal ethnic restaurants, ancient restroom ruins and wilds tracts of land that fit neatly next to high-rise hotels.” – Brooklyn Daily Eagle

“History, humor, and a generous dose of surrealness combine to make you think you’re walking down the back streets of Oz…Katchor is plainly steeped in the tropes of his craft, but ultimately he is uncategorizable, a man apart.”–Culture Books

“Anyone familiar with [Katchor’s] work will recognize his grotesque eccentrics (or maybe his eccentric grotesques), the off-kilter angles and depths of field in every panel, not to mention the banal objects granted strange value and the wonderful prose…There is an exhilaration and freedom here—a license to invent and destroy.” –Tablet Magazine

“Katchor’s work has the unusual distinction of being known…for its startling poetry, dreamily familiar urban landscapes, and revelations about the arcane systems and inner workings of city life…provocative, moving work.” –CriticalMob.com

“Katchor has made an entire world out of his narrow domain, and it’s as rich and vast (and sad and hilarious) a world as any writer or artist working today has concocted.” –Shelfari

“The appearance of a new Katchor collection is always reason to celebrate… Katchor is a true, rare, untarnished New York treasure — the kind of artist who can concoct a fantastical made-up world, but one that ensures you’ll never see the real world in quite the same way again.” –The 6th Floor blog

“His whimsical, mournful metaphysical verbal gags and scratchy visual poems are at once the most conceptual and conversational comics being made, and for my taste the best ever made…it’s only March, but surely Katchor is the automatic writer-artist of the year.” – ComicCritique Blog

“Katchor's magically whimsical vision is sui generis… a collection of richly imagined, lovingly detailed individual strips. Each is best lingered over one at a time, an invitingly exotic world unto itself.” –Philadelphia Inquirer

“Katchor is one of America’s great prose stylists, a writer possessed of an almost unequalled mastery of word choice and the rhythm and pacing of the American language…What finally elevates Katchor above not only all cartoonists, but above most prose writers, is the sheer beauty of his prose. In his finest tales, each panel, removed from its context, creates its own context, a world of its own; each is so evocative that the single panel, removed from its fellows, explodes with melancholy. The texts are gems, and when combined with Katchor’s drawings, with their washed shadows, their chiaroscuro streets, the result is a body of work of an almost unbearable sadness, of an almost unbearable beauty.” –Jewish Currents

“Part surrealistic travelogue and part satirical treatise on the very notion of culture, The Cardboard Valise is a book about imaginary places with enough heart to make its very real social commentary easily digestible.” –Straight.com’s best graphic novels of 2011.

"Ben Katchor is the best world-builder in comics today. This is true even though he does none of the things we tend to associate with world-building, be it visual or narrative in nature. He’s no epic sci-fi-fantasist, with a wiki-worthy cultural-historical framework underpinning (or overwhelming) every person, place, and thing that ends on the printed page. He hasn’t developed a personal visual vocabulary of forms and symbols from which a wholly alien world that nonetheless makes optical sense on its own terms can be constructed. He doesn’t use tricks with layout or beat-by-beat pacing to drag us through a contiguous, continuous spatial environment alongside his characters. And those characters don’t belong to a sprawling, interconnected cast whose lives and relationships grow and change and metastasize over the years, parallel to our own.
So if he doesn’t do any of those things — if he’s not a fantasist like J.R.R. Tolkien or George R.R. Martin, a demiurge like Jim Woodring or Jack Kirby, an architect like Mat Brinkman or Brian Chippendale, or a mass biographer like Gilbert Hernandez or Jaime Hernandez — how is it that The Cardboard Valise, his latest collection of loosely intertwined comic strips, feels like something you can open up, fall into, and stroll around in?
More than any other reason, perhaps, it’s because of the angle of entry he offers us. Katchor is the master of the diagonal. The entrepreneurs and officials, hucksters and glad-hands who inhabit The Cardboard Valise virtually never traverse the panels comprising Katchor’s strict eight-panel grids from back to front or side to side. They stride purposefully and gesticulate wildly from the left foreground to the rear background. They gaze up with wonder from the lower left to upper right. They follow sight lines that lead us not infinitely back into the panel but out of it, in whatever direction, even toward us. Katchor once told me that he draws his comics using the theatrical stage as a touchstone, rather than the flattened and cropped space of film or photography: “My approach is to construct a palpable space. Whatever happens in that space becomes believable.” Indeed, simply by staging his comics in such a way that the tile floors, shelf tops, ceiling fans, and side alleys of his cities are made visible to character and reader alike, he’s constructed a world that feels more livable than accrued detail could ever hope to convey.
Katchor’s micro-stories similarly expose forgotten, or more accurately imaginary, nooks and crannies of the urban experience. In the same fashion as his Julius Knipl collections, The Cardboard Valise is a catalog of made-up occupations, obsessions, and cultural artifacts just too picayune to be plausible, but only just: a seaside cellphone stand that offers paying callers the chance to hear the sounds of the shore for ten minutes at a time, courtesy of employees who walk to the water and hold the phones aloft; an heir to a reference-work empire who sells off the famous family name since its value outstrips that of the imprint’s accumulated, outmoded publications — The Marrowbone Backseat Bible of Contraceptive Techniques, The Marrowbone Directory of Commonly Dialed Wrong Numbers, The Marrowbone Desk Reference to Nauseating Food Combinations. In one bravura strip alone, a traveler discovers a panoply of unique customs observed by the residents of his island destination: black-market traders of partially eaten toast, discarded exercise equipment worshiped in fertility rituals, hotel employees who can deduce the personal traits of their guests from the dents they leave in wire hangers and who brag about the colds they catch from their charges, “an unwritten encyclopedia of postural gestures used to solicit tips.” Together these quotidian flights of fancy suggest a world of possibilities that are at once inspiringly limitless (cumulatively) and depressingly limited (individually) — a world, in other words, much like our own.
In the past, Katchor has used this technique to evoke the lost histories and specialties of the American city. In The Cardboard Valise, however, he’s tackling the theme of travel (echoed in the hardcover edition’s fold-out, suitcase-like handles), as it impacts his two protagonists—compulsive vacationer Emile Delilah, who’s so smitten with experiencing other cultures that he can hardly stand to be at home, and charismatic Elijah Salamis, a “supranationalist” who demonstrates his rejection of national and cultural boundaries by walking around in his underwear regardless of weather or disapprobation (“Today’s world market has us all in jeans and sneakers, so why not go all the way? Why not give up, once and for all, the crumbling façade of cultural diversity?”). This strips away the nostalgic veneer often found in Katchor’s comics, and reveals a sneakily satirical sheen underneath. The tourist-trap kitsch and played-up local color Delilah encounters, The Cardboard Valise argues, are merely the most obviously icky manifestation, and logical endpoint, of all nationalism — an inflation of trivial distinctions and accidents of history and geography into matters of all-encompassing aesthetic and political importance. This gives the book’s climax, in which an encounter between Salamis and Delilah leads to the public debunking of a religious charlatan who argues that it’s not our ethics or imaginations or faiths that live on after our deaths, but our acquisitiveness, real pathos and real bite. In the end, the world Katchor builds is a hall of fun-house mirrors. It’s fascinating and funny and endlessly enveloping to look at, but its delights and distortions alike are ultimately a reflection of ourselves." - Sean T. Collins

"At a dingy shop in downtown Fluxion City, you can buy, for only $29.95, the suitcase of a desperate man. It's no Samsonite: 56 inches but made of cardboard, staples and glue, guaranteed for a mere six weeks, it's a valise for people who need to get out of town in a hurry and need a case big enough, yet light enough, to carry all their belongings. Full, the enormous bag is so difficult to steer that it pulls the walker slightly sideways as it swings forward with each step.
"The Cardboard Valise," the new book by the wonderful cartoonist Ben Katchor, takes its name from this suitcase and is similarly overstuffed. Less a sturdy, self-contained graphic novel than a pleasantly flimsy repository for an inexhaustible imagination, "The Cardboard Valise" follows in the tradition of Katchor's long-running comic strip, "Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer," introducing us to a whimsical city and its logorrheic inhabitants, each with an unexpected story to tell. Like the traveler lugging the cardboard valise, the reader finds herself pulled in a new direction with every page, deep into a city far more interesting than our own, full of urban decay, old-world philosophizing in invented languages, and besuited men striding with purpose in and out of absurd workplaces.
In fact, perhaps the easiest way to acclimate readers to the pleasures of the Katchorian style is to provide a brief and incomplete list of the made-up companies and organizations appearing in "The Cardboard Valise." Sinkside Steel Wool. The Kanale Clinic for Prenatal Restitution. The famous public-restroom ruins of Tensint Island. The Sans Serif League, who picket offending businesses with signs reading, "Cut 'em off!" 1-900-CONCH, where sunburnt college kids hold the phone up to the roaring surf ($10 for the first 10 minutes, 75 cents for each additional minute). The Tre Colore fresh-salad truck, stuck in traffic, its siren wailing, as restaurant-goers impatiently await the crisp salads they ordered.
They're all rendered by Katchor in his simple pen-and-watercolor style, the angular faces of Fluxion City's inhabitants blending into each other, the backgrounds teeming with detail. Open to any page and you'll be surprised anew.
The free-for-all inside "The Cardboard Valise" stands in sharp contrast to the inevitable downward spiral depicted in "Special Exits," underground-comix pioneer Joyce Farmer's memoir of her years spent managing the decline and deaths of her elderly father and stepmother. At one point, her father, Lars - explaining how his wife became so immobile and dependent on him that she hasn't left the couch for a year - says, "Things get worse in such small increments that you can get used to anything." It's a potent description of the aging process itself, one that takes away tiny pieces of our independence and dignity until we no longer recognize ourselves.
Does this make "Special Exits" seem like a downer? Good. It is a downer. It's also funny and touching, and gratifyingly cleareyed about the messy emotions involved in caring for aging parents.
Lars and Rachel live in a ramshackle, cluttered house in south-central Los Angeles, and in busy, black-and-white panels, the book observes as their daughter, Laura - a stand-in for Farmer - cares for them through the late 1980s and early '90s. At first, the couple muddles along, making it through bad falls, a car accident and even a 44-hour power outage during the L.A. riots. But as first Rachel's and then Lars's health deteriorates, Laura arranges Meals on Wheels, cleans up "Hoarders"-worthy piles of junk and helps her parents reminisce about their pasts - and make tough choices about the future.
It's no spoiler to reveal that "Special Exits" doesn't have a happy ending. After all, no one gets a happy ending. But thanks to the hard work and loving care of Laura - and some heaven-sent hospice workers - her parents die more gracefully than many. And thanks to the thoughtful writing and art of Joyce Farmer, their lives and deaths will be a comfort to readers beginning to consider the end of their parents' lives - or their own." - Dan Kois

"I am feeling a little overfed, a bit unsettled, woozy even, as after a large meal of many dishes, all different but equally rich, none of which I could refuse. I have read through the new collection of what must be named comic strips, no other term available, by Ben Katchor, called The Cardboard Valise. I toss down the napkin, push away from the table cross-eyed, and swallow effortfully, trying to formulate a useful thought.
Of course it’s wrong to have read it all in a gulp, or even five or ten. Katchor has himself warned against this. The pages of the book are intended, or at least made, to be read one a week, with time between one and the next for digestion, reflection, eructation. They appeared thus in different papers from Miami to Baltimore to Philadelphia and on to the West, but living as I do in a hinterland, I saw none of them. Amuse-gueules could be found on Katchor’s Web site, alongside glimpses of four other of his continuing narratives, each as chock-full as the one here between covers. The man could have not one but two MacArthur grants, given all the value he produces.
The Cardboard Valise has handles inside the covers, which if folded out turn the book into a metaphorical valise, opening to allow its contents to be metaphorically unpacked, as so many different kinds of things are unpacked within it. It commences as young Emile Delilah, inveterate tourist and one of the book’s three protagonists, takes a brief airplane flight out of Fluxion City to see if his newly acquired valise is up to the rigors of airport luggage handling. For this test, he tells the cab driver, he has filled it with “a hundred pounds of old medical textbooks, back from when they were printed on that heavy, coated paper. I found them in a dumpster on Pitgam Avenue.” And indeed in a full-page frontispiece we have seen lucky Emile coming upon that dumpster outside the Cough Conservatory and leafing through a volume on “The Amatory Cough and its Cure” (“removing the patient to an open-air terrace where the object of his excitation is removed and his mind can turn to other less stimulating thoughts”).
On the next page we learn how Emile earlier purchased the valise, a $29.99 Fitzall “Ahasuerus” model; then we learn how the valise was made, “assembled amidst the glue fumes and staple-gun salvos of a loft in Cachexia, New Jersey.” Emile and his enormous suitcase head for Tentsint Island, with its pervasive dry cleaning industry and far-famed public-restroom ruins (“a lost world of glass soap-dispensers and electric hand-driers”). An enraged bellhop at the Two-Ply International Hotel, where Emile is checked in, rants against island visitors and their pointless impedimenta—“winter coats, pocket dictionaries, bottles of dried typewriter correction fluid, cut-rate multiple vitamins, monogrammed belts, zippered bibles and loose change”—and urges his fellow bellhops to revolt:
A young tourist has transported the entire contents of his home to our fair island. . . . our children are already addicted to ketchup and chewing gum . . . . Do you want your wives and daughters, in their capacity as cleaning women, to be exposed to the sight of this fellow’s accumulated bedtime reading matter going back to 1970?
While Emile tours, the bellhops relieve him of all his belongings except the valise and a change of underwear. And within a few pages, the soil of the island, “permeated by the accumulated runoff of twenty years of dry cleaning fluids,” suddenly turns to vapor, and the island “like a stubborn stain upon the face of the earth, is removed without leaving a trace.”
Only when you reread it do you see how this beginning establishes an opposition, a wrestle, between a delight in stuff—more possibilities, more complications, more things, more names—and a revulsion against the idea of more in itself, or indeed any: at bottom, against the idea of anything at all existing. This tension will at length create something more than a series of funny ideas vaguely connected in sequences long or short.
The origins of Katchor’s art, as he has said himself, lie in the city—not only the city of his upbringing, Brooklyn and the rest of New York, but in the past of that city. Most of the faraway places in The Cardboard Valise—from Tensint Island to Outer Canthus to Fluxion City—seem also located in a recent past, recent anyway to someone my age. To Katchor, ten years younger than I, such places were at least lying all around in his youth, the years when the visual and imaginative worlds of many writers and artists are built and where the lives that they imagine take place. And while the Katchor world is a visual world, it is as much a verbal world. Katchor’s city streets and shops would be flat without the thousand signs, appeals, ads, warnings, and dreams overwritten on them: Discards International, Mal-Grand Drugs, Mortal Coil Mattress, Puncto League, Play-Tink Toys.
The made world has for a long time been a world of words, of messages; Hazel Hahn in her book Scenes of Parisian Modernity notes that as advertising in the press and in public spaces became universal at the turn of the twentieth century, parodies of advertising began appearing, too, in comic papers, often indistinguishable in their absurdity from the absurdities of the real thing. Katchor’s eye and ear are attracted to the basement levels of this universal messaging, where the appeals are hopeless, the warnings outmoded, the ads for things no one could want, the names at once fatuous and poignant. I do not desire to eat in the Exegete Bar-Grill or in the Inamorata Coffee Shop, I am not glad to find the Lucky Stiff pancake house, I hope I never need a gray room at the Gravamen Hotel.
I used to believe that Katchor’s visual style, or, to be frank, his level of artistic skill, lagged behind his proficient and elegantly explosive language-spinning. He had limited success drawing bodies in action; his line seemed hesitant, scratchy, infirm; interesting and necessary details were constantly suggested rather than actually rendered. But I have come, over time, to see a closer fit between the words and images. His drawing has gotten better—the faces more varied, even verging on the expressive, and the panels more composed. Like many comic artists, Katchor draws on the vocabulary of German expressionist films as filtered through Hollywood noir, a mode particularly appropriate for his dark city blocks and industrial sites and gloomy hotel rooms, the spaces seen from low or high angles, reaching inward toward far corners and streets as though in deep-focus cinematography.
Substantively, though, his pictorial work is unchanged; the islands and towns of purported tourist destinations in The Cardboard Valise are like those false getaway places in crime films, black-and-white palms and verandas full of un-escaped threat. They continuously creep or migrate away from the beach to the same old shabby streets we have known since Katchor’s first collection, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: streets lined with the dim low-rise buildings and failing but persistent enterprises that Julius Knipl spies on and eavesdrops in. But unlike the American night city of the crime film or crime comic, the streets of The Cardboard Valise are safe, the populations harmless as moths. Though hilariously boring, depressed often, frantic occasionally, or full of mad but ineffectual excitement, Katchor’s visual world is somehow never sinister: maybe because every panel is so crowded with thinking and speaking, with so much this and that.
The inventiveness is in itself exhilarating. Katchor’s list-making and thing-producing is unceasing, rational in syntax and prim in grammar but only tangentially or abstractly connected to what we know as reality. Your gullet strangles in irrepressible laughter before you are halfway through one of his riffs, and you can barely make it to the end, only to find there is another on the next page, or the next panel. Emile, seized with intestinal trouble, occupies a stall in one of Tentsint Island’s restrooms and there “considers the dinner he just ate: A salad wreath, cemetery soup, grilled sardines in-the-net, and for dessert, a Health Dept. pudding, with horse-whipped cream.” In Fluxion City an observer stands baffled at the hopeless stuff on offer at Discounts International: “Sweat-suits in small sizes, ‘God Bless This Home’ acrylic doormats piled waist-high, . . . Cadillac-style video rewinders, doorknob cozies, tuxedos for infants, cans of ‘Danish’ butter cookies . . . . The list is endless.”
There are comic strips that are replete, whereas others are plain. Peanuts and Dilbert are among the plain, and so, long ago, were Nancy and Henry. Katchor’s are among the replete: those strips whose panels are crammed with amusements, odd people coming and going, wacky knickknacks on shelves and tables, pets or vermin underfoot, whimsical signage. In Walt Kelly’s Pogo, if a character is holding a book we are sure to be allowed to read the title (“Girl of the Limberwurst”); the walls in Smokey Stover were hung with pictures that changed from panel to panel, as well as punning or nonsensical remarks (“Notary Sojac”) from the artist.
Strips stuffed with stuff are often also stuffed with words (but not always; see early Little Nemo episodes). Katchor’s words—like those in Gene Ahern’s Our Boarding House, which Katchor has named an early influence—often use up more of the panel than the drawn things. In Katchor’s work, even when the speech balloons are sparse, the narrative bands at the top of the panels proffer elaborate descriptions and explanations in his refined and queerly learned language. Fans of the word, over on this side, roll around in it like delighted puppies, while the purist picture fans on that side shake their heads. It might be better if Katchor practiced his lettering a bit more assiduously, but the subtle match between picture and word, which is the highest goal of a comic strip, is perhaps aided by the slightly slovenly look of it above or within the seemingly slovenly drawings. No one, after all, is going to letter and draw the way Walt Kelly did in his prime, word and picture melded in exquisite complementary effects; that world, and those draftsman’s skills, are not so much lost as long-surrendered.
The Cardboard Valise also places Katchor’s work on one side of another distinction in comic-strip artists, the one between the jokesters and the storytellers: in the first, each day’s strip is a self-contained, punch-lined entity, a variation on a standing circumstance (Blondie, Beetle Bailey); in the other, a part of an ongoing adventure with at least a tentative conclusion, followed by another (Li’l Abner, Pogo). An intermediate form sets afoot a problem or dilemma that lasts a few days before evaporating, as in Peanuts or Krazy Kat. Katchor’s breakout strip Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer was organized, if that’s the word, only by the wanderings and curiosity of Mr. Knipl, and even he and his investigations vanished for pages at a time. Each weekly unit unfolded a little moment, told an anecdote, and though bits and scenes recurred, nothing really developed. The Cardboard Valise at first seems to be the same sort of thing, and indeed it is prone to idling and wandering, but as the pages turn it evolves, or coagulates, into true storytelling.
Maybe it was the experience of creating The Jew of New York—which was a graphic novel rather than a continuing strip, and a novel indeed, as chock-full of characters interwoven and bound together by shifting destinies as a Dickens doorstopper—that trained Katchor in the arts of integration, reflection, opposition, and entwinement that deepen The Cardboard Valise as it goes on. As in a Dickens novel, three or four characters generate around them, often by their occult connections to one another, a quasi-endless but actually endpoint-driven story.
First to be put in place is Emile, who, despite his desire to run off to far places and escape the circumstances of his life, is always dragging those circumstances with him where he goes or imagines going, accumulating experiences like new possessions. Weekly readers may well have forgotten that Emile was believed to have been lost in the Tensint Island disappearance when, much further on, his grieving parents turn his apartment (actually a more fitting and slightly better-furnished substitute) into a museum of their son’s life and wanderings (“All of his trips were planned in this very armchair—the macaroni and cheese encrustations attest to his monastic life-style.”) Emile’s not been dead, of course, but rather has been drawing on the lifetime paid account at Hoopus Travel his parents gave him as a boy. Emile-believed-dead is going to pay off in the accounting that makes a well-made tale.
Practical philosopher Elijah Salamis, on the other hand, never leaves home and is progressively shedding every permanence in life. His single room is painted “U.V. Blue No. 75—a color devoid of all historical connotations.” He has recently changed his name to Pylon Zoon: “Why associate oneself with hundreds of generations of Salamises—it’s time for a fresh start.” Rather than obey the meteorological dictates of Fluxion City, where he resides, Salamis dresses year-round in thin T-shirt and shorts—“Who looks anymore at an open fly? The missing buttons of the world belong in archaeological museums”—and believes in the dissolution of all qualities, distinctions, names, nations.
Just as nuts as Elijah but not so blithe, Calvin Heaves gathers “world-weary” crowds at the Quiver Tabernacle for his weekly “Sermon from the Mouth.” Calvin believes that the mountains of unsold and unsellable goods piled up at Discounts International reflect the unappeased and unappeasable commercial longings of the dead; he preaches man’s continued existence beyond death, but not the usual supernatural kind:
Upon death, the human appetitive urge departs from the body in the form of a twelve-inch-long section of colorless sausage casing. . . . This immaterial gullet, or soul, finds its eternal home in the shadow of the street curb where it continues forever in its peristaltic contractions.
For “demonstration purposes,” Heaves employs a realistic battery-operated toy esophagus, “The Voracious Maw,” manufactured in faraway Buccal Mucosa for the Sowtoy Company of Liebestraum, Ohio, and once shipped by the hundred-gross to Tensint Island for the spring Diarrhea Festival. With Tensint obliterated, they are snapped up by the Heaves cultists as their aegis.
The triangulation of these three, the opposition of their stances toward appetite, need, and the ceaseless proliferation of things, comprises the structural members of the work, though this isn’t apparent at first (how did Dickens’s first readers, getting his monthly installments, keep his plots straight? Did they take notes, or just not concern themselves with it?). But “structural members” is really too spatial a metaphor, because the essence of all fictional creations beyond the one-joke-a-day comic strip is movement through time.
Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer maintains to the end the dreamlike slippage between topics, the cabalistic or fractal branching-by-repetition, that can proceed nowhere. The Cardboard Valise, however, trends ever more visibly toward a solidly novelistic conclusion, in which (1) opposed persons, acting out the compulsions of their characters within the constraints of their social world, reach (2) resolutions of abasement or transcendence in (3) a carnivalesque climax, followed by (4) the promised though not completed instauration of a new-old world—in this case by means of a cardboard valise identical to the one we began with, the Fitzall “Ahasuerus” of New Jersey, Emile’s self-chosen burden and trust. The last image in the book is of it, as was the first.
So, in E.M. Forster’s well-known terms, while the earlier book’s a story, provisional and potentially endless, the other’s got a plot. I even wonder if it would be proper to reveal its ending—to perpetrate the spoiler that readers are now ubiquitously alerted to in reviews and blogs. It includes some rather non-Katchoresque elements, such as sudden death (“six deadly capsules of potassium chloride . . . he washes them down with a Cherry Swallow”) and violent overthrow (of false prophet Calvin Heaves: “The assembled crowd is awakened as though from a delusionary stupor”).
I am moved by the thought of Katchor brooding so long over the matters he has broached that the sense of an ending arose in him, and by his courage in carrying it forward. Simultaneously, I feel a reader’s common dissatisfaction in the closing up of a fictional world. As Forster perceived, the last third of a novel tends to disappoint even as it compels, because it must make its way toward the wrap-up, shedding possibilities as it goes: thus it becomes less lifelike, because actual life always opens up further, never shuts down, never aims toward a final paragraph.
It’s strange to think of Katchor’s work as lifelike, but there it is. Its lifelikeness is partly a function of the felt possibility of ongoing randomness inherent in the comic-strip mode. The Cardboard Valise finally refuses that mode, and that is perhaps why—delightfully full though it is of notions, places, and people—it’s not likely to displace the first Julius Knipl collection in my affections. That collection ends with what I still consider Katchor’s most sublime invention, the Evening Combinator, a city newspaper that chronicles not the daily events of life but the nightly dream-life of the citizens (“Mosquito Gives Birth to Sentient Safety Pin”). A band of Katchor’s obsessive crusaders, led by muscle-bound Ormond Bell at his Stay-Awake-A-Torium (“hot coffee, hard chairs”), opposes the creeping surrender to the pointless inventions of dreaming. But rather than pressing the story even to a provisional conclusion through this conflict, the volume just takes a deadpan turn around one more strange corner and draws to a close, like night." - John Crowley

"Ben Katchor is the Joseph Mitchell of contemporary comics. Mitchell, along with his close friend A.J. Liebling, was a pivotal early New Yorker reporter who famously made a speciality of describing the peripheral rascals, layabouts, and oddballs of the Big Apple, ranging from the denizens of McSorley’s saloon to Joe Gould, the often homeless bohemian who claimed to be working on an “Oral History of the Contemporary World.” With their cockeyed street-level view of New York and propensity for profiling loopy souls, Mitchell’s works were important precursors to the early Katchor who, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, meticulously chronicled the wanderings of “Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer” in the pages of the New York Press (and, later, syndicated in alternative weeklies across the country). The Knipl strips were mournfully muted surveys of a New York where you could still feel the ghostly presence of the older city described by Mitchell in the 1930s and 1940s.
In his new book The Cardboard Valise, Katchor pays direct tribute to Mitchell’s “The Mohawks in High Steel,” published in the September 17, 1949 issue of the New Yorker. In that article, Mitchell regaled readers with lore about the Caughnawaga Mohawks, “the most footloose Indians in North America,” many of whom worked as riveters building skyscrapers all across the continent. The Mohawk affinity for highrise construction can be traced back to the building of a cantilever bridge across the St. Lawrence River near their Canadian reservation in 1886. Mitchell quotes a letter from an official from the Dominion Bridge Company who noted that
as the work progressed, it became apparent to all concerned that these Indians were very odd in that they did not have any fear of heights. If not watched, they would climb up into the spans and walk around up there as cool and collected as the toughest of our riveters … These Indians were as agile as goats.
Katchor’s version focuses instead on “ceiling workers.” It opens with a paean to the music of shopping malls and elevators. “Today, no business can be conducted without a decent sound system,” the narrator informs us, and the group whose labor makes this Muzak possible, “the men who scale these high ladders to install our modern speaker systems all come from the village of Tufarwan in North Western Slippur.” An off-panel voice offers dubious anthropological explanations as to why Tufarwanians dominate this trade: “In addition to being fearless ceiling workers, they are completely deaf to the charms of western music.” Like their Mohawk counterparts, the Tufarwanians are nomadic craftsmen: “Most leave their families behind and live in the company of their fellow tribesmen in short-term studio apartment sublets.”
Spoofing a six-decade-old magazine article, even one as memorable as “The Mohawks in High Steel,” is not something that a typical cartoonist would do, but then Katchor has never liked dawdling down familiar pathways. He’s a brilliant artist but also a baffling one, supreme in his idiosyncratic creation of a baroquely dense fictional universe that has its own internal coherence while fitfully mirroring, in a fudged and misshapen way, the consensual reality we inhabit. As you read a Katchor strip, it is hard to ignore the tone of droll burlesque while being unsure about what, exactly, is being made fun of. This makes reading his work a heady experience, at times even surreal or psychedelic, since his strips induce a pleasant mental buzz even as they unmoor us from reality.
While respectfully evoking forebears like Mitchell and Liebling, Katchor abandons their romantic modernism for a more skeptical post-millennial perspective. Throughout The Cardboard Valise, Katchor questions the idea of authenticity, be it ethnic, geographic, or historical. In many of the strips, tourists head to far-off fictive lands like the Tensint Islands (home of “the famous restroom ruins”) in the hopes of making a tangible connection to the vanishing remnants of the historical and natural past. Katchor clearly sympathizes with their yen for the good old days, but raises doubts about whether, in our globalized world, it’s still possible to make sharp distinctions between the past and the present, local and the international, the natural and the technological, or the primitive and the modern. In one strip Elijah Salamis — a typically eloquent Katchorian obsessive — rants against a concert devoted to the folk music of Pelagia. “But it’s all a sham,” Salamis laments. “These out-of-work restaurant musicians may have had the poor fortune of being born on Pelagia Island, but grew up listening to rock-and-roll, eating imported goods and watching satellite TV. They’ve heard some old 78s, looked over a few 19th-century travel books, and cooked up a saleable semblance of Pelagian culture.” The strip ends with the sly Salamis, camera in hand, ready to expose the pretend-Pelagians as they enjoy an after-show snack at a local club.
The younger Katchor of the Julius Knipl strips was even more of a nostalgist, albeit more wistful and wry than schmaltzy. The nostalgic instinct, of course, runs strong in alternative cartoonists; it can be observed in everything from Robert Crumb’s collection of old blues records to Art Spiegelman’s loving tributes to precursors such as George Herriman and Harold Gray to Chris Ware’s celebrations of the architecture of Louis Sullivan. In his introduction to Katchor’s 1996 volume Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories, the novelist Michael Chabon astutely noted that the nostalgic impulse was being subverted by a plethora of knock-offs: “The mass synthesis, marketing, and distribution of versions and simulacra of an artificial past, perfected over the last thirty years or so, has ruined the reputation and driven a fatal stake through the heart of nostalgia,” Chabon argued.
Chabon’s observation helps explain the shift in the late Katchor’s work from the sensual indulgence of nostalgia in the early Knipl stories to the strenuous interrogation of false authenticity that permeates The Cardboard Valise. Hitherto, Katchor had not been an especially political artist. As the cartoonist once noted, his father, “a Communist Yiddishist from Warsaw, was so political that he used up all the space for politics in the family.” While The Cardboard Valise is hardly a polemical work, it is informed by a powerful anxiety about the relationship between the local and global, and Katchor, although still not straightforwardly a political artist, is a very civic-minded creator, and in quite literal sense: he’s obsessed with the fates of public spaces, be they restrooms, restaurants or trains.
In the end, all these abstractions — nostalgia, authenticity, politics, civic-mindedness — only have meaning and force because Katchor embodies them in pleasing cartoon forms. He remains the master of the ineffable, an artist who can bring to life ideas and experiences that exist at the sub-atomic level of consciousness. The sensibility of a Katchor strip is as hard to pin down as a quark or one of the hypothetical constructs of string theory. Who else but he could give us a convincing tirade against fortune cookies? (“You can get away with anything if you print it on a little slip of paper and then stuff it inside of a cookie! No one has the guts to say they’re all lies – barefaced lies! Nice way to end a meal!”) Elsewhere, Katchor plausibly theorizes that shower curtains are evidence of “the embryonic formation of a true world culture.”
Along with Krazy Kat’s George Herriman, Katchor is the only cartoonist whose language achieves the pitch of high artifice that deserves the name of poetry. As with Herriman, you have to read Katchor’s strips slowly, savoring every word and also that constant layered interplay between the art and text. And like Herriman, Katchor is emphatically not a graphic novelist: his strips shouldn’t be read from beginning to end as a continuous narrative, but rather in small doses of about four or five pages a time. You can overdose on Katchor’s richness if you don’t pace your reading.
Charmingly ungainly and obeying their own laws of perspective and lighting, Katchor’s drawings are a perfect counterpart to his words: both the language and the art are stupefyingly off-kilter. Gravity seems denser in Katchor’s world than in ours. How else to explain how low to the ground his people are, as if tugged ever downward? Katchor eschews the bluntness of conventional cartooning line drawings, achieving instead a murky, smudging effect by drowning his figures in a delicate gray wash. To appreciate his drawings you have to linger over them and suss out how they are linked to the words.
The Cardboard Valise is a worthy addition to Katchor’s already distinguished oeuvre, but it’s also a sign of an accomplished artist deepening and developing his core themes. Katchor-watchers should enjoy the book not just for its unique pleasures but also for evidence of the unexpected new direction in which a familiar artist appears to be heading. Like a Mohawk on a girder or a Tufarwanian on a ladder, his sense of balance never fails; he was born for this." - Jeet Heer

Interview by Malcolm Jones
Interview by Sam Adams

Interview by Alexander Theroux Ben Katchor's web page

Alfred Kubin fits loosely within an Expressionist/Decadent/proto-Surrealist tradition. The Demiurge is a hybrid: It’s almost as if the novel channels Apocalypse Now by way of Hieronymus Bosch

2012-01-27T17:07:00.002+01:00

Alfred Kubin, The Other Side, Trans. By Mike Mitchell, Dedalus, 2000. [1909.]

"Alfred Kubin (1877-1959) was one of the major graphic artists of the 20th century who was widely known for his illustrations of writers of the fantastic such as Balzac, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Gustav Meyrink and Edgar Allan Poe, of whom he illustrated at least 50 books. In his combination of the darkly decadent, the fantastic and the grotesque, in his evocations of dream and nightmare, his creation of an atmosphere of mystery and fear he resembles Mervyn Peake."

"One day as I was searching around the internet minding my own business, innocent and unsuspecting of any imminent peril, I stumbled upon a webpage called The Strangest Books Ever Written. There was a list for strange fiction and a list for strange nonfiction. Right there close to the top of the strange fiction list was The Other Side by Alfred Kubin.

After a bit of research I discovered that he was an early twentieth century expressionist artist and illustrator. He had a very gloomy life to match his macabre artwork. The Other Side was the only novel he wrote and it was widely considered to be one of the most unusual and macabre books ever written.
I was hooked, so I ordered it. It was available in a new english translation by Mike Mitchell from Dedalus Books.
In the beginning of the story a mysterious stranger arrives at the Munich home of a artist and his wife. After introducing himself the stranger explains the reason for his visit.

"I am not speaking in my own name, but for a man whom you, perhaps, have forgotten, but who still remembers you well. This man has at his disposal what is by European standards, untold wealth. I am speaking of your former classmate, Claus Patera. Please do not interrupt me! By a strange chance, Patera came into possession of what is probably the largest fortune in the world. Your old friend then set out upon the realization of an idea for which access to fairly inexhaustible financial resources is absolutely prerequisite. He resolved to found a dream realm. This is a complex matter, but I will be brief.

First of all a suitable tract of some 1,200 square miles was acquired. One third of the area is mountainous, the rest consists of plains and hills. A lake, a river and large forests divide up this small realm and add variety to its landscape. A city was established, villages, and farms. The latter were sorely needed as even the initial population was 12,000. The present population of the Dream Realm is 65,000."
He goes on:
"Patera, he continued, feels an extraordinarily strong aversion to all kinds of progress. To be precise, to all kinds of scientific progress. Please take this literally, for in it lies the main idea behind the Dream Realm. The Realm is shut off from the rest of the world by a surrounding wall and protected against any attack by strong fortifications. There is a single gate for entry and exit, facilitating strict control of people and goods. The dream realm is a sanctuary for all those who are unhappy with modern civilization and contains everything necessary to cater to their bodily needs. It is not at all the intention of the lord of this country to create a utopia, a kind of model state for the future. Although provision has been made to ensure there are no material shortages, the whole thrust of the principal aims of this community is directed less towards the maintenance of property and goods, the population, individuals. No, definitely not! ...But I see a smile of disbelief on your lips. It is difficult I know, almost too difficult for mere words to describe what Patera hopes to achieve with his Dream Realm."
The artist and his wife think it over and decide to go. They make a very long journey to the far east ending up finally at the outer wall of the Dream Realm. They pass through the single gate and board a train that takes them across dismal swamps and forests to Pearl, the capital of the Dream Realm.
On their arrival in Pearl, they immediately discover that all is not right in the Dream Realm. To begin with the sky is always overcast. Never can you see the sun or the stars. Everything looks drab and dingy in dreary shades of greenish grey. Nothing is new here. Everything from buildings to silverware is old and worn.
We later find out that all the buildings have macabre and violent histories. Structures where horrible crimes were committed have been moved to the Dream Realm from all over the world. Even the everyday objects seem to have an unwholesome past. It seems as if an unseen force is controlling both people and events in this bizarre place.
A village adjacent to the city is the home of a tribe of blue eyed holy men who are the Dream Realms original inhabitants. These people seem all to be in a perpetual trance. We learn that Patera visited these mystics before conceiving the Dream Realm.
Things become increasingly bizarre. People start becoming violent. Murders are committed with increasing intensity. Many people die of mysterious illnesses. Plagues of insects inundate the city. Wild animals start invading the city and attacking people. Then even domesticated animals become vicious and turn on their masters.
When our hero finally does find Patera, he seems to be in a trance, and his face keeps changing into first one person then another and another until finally it seems as if faces from all over the realm and even the entire world are passing across Pateras skull.
"His eyes were like two empty mirrors reflecting infinity. The thought crossed my mind that Patera was not alive at all. If the dead could look, that is what their gaze would be like."
Any attempt to escape from the dream realm is futile. The violence continues to escalate as the evil force controlling everything consumes the city of Pearl in a chaotic apocalypse.
The book ends with our protagonist finding the "real" world too much like the Dream Realm for comfort.
"When I ventured back into the world of the living, I discovered that my god only held half-sway. In everything, both great and small, he had to share with an adversary who wanted life. The forces of repulsion and attraction, the twin poles of the earth with their currents, the alternation of the seasons, day and night, black and white - these are battles.
Kubin adds a drawing of an eyeless morbid Patera like face on the final page with the cryptic phrase:
"The Demiurge is a hybrid."
The dystopia described in this book, published in Austria in 1906, closely predicts events that occurred in the decades following it's publication, with often uncanny and disturbing similarity.
The rise of militarism and nationalism resulting in the first and second world wars, the rise of Nazism, Hitlers omnipotent god like influence on millions, the holocaust, even the horrible final hours of der fuhrer in his bunker in Berlin are closely foreshadowed in this prophetic book.
Analogies may easily be drawn to ideas like Jung's collective subconscious, the cycles of change of taoism,and the karmic principle of hinduism and jainism, and alarmingly to events in the present.
This book is a definite must read. It should be required reading in the hope that the warning signs of violent psychosis shown by an entire society may someday be heeded preventing future bloodbaths and perhaps accomplishing homosapiens next great evolutionary step into a truly self aware being, no longer controlled by ancient demons and evil forces." - dxsuperpremium.com

"The work of Austrian Alfred Kubin (1877–1959) fits loosely within an Expressionist/Decadent/proto-Surrealist tradition. A highly praised artist, he produced only one major work of fiction: The Other Side, published in 1908, and excerpted in our The Weird compendium as an early precursor or influencer of modern weird fiction. Although still underrated, the novel has managed to retain a cult status simply because it has long been a favorite of a variety of writers and artists. It would be hard to believe, for example, that Mervyn Peake had not read Kubin prior to writing his Gormenghast novels. (The Other Side is perhaps most akin in tone to Peake’s Titus Alone.)
The details of Kubin’s life relevant to his fiction are these: his mother died when he was ten, he had a sexualized relationship with an older, pregnant woman when he was eleven, and his father was a tyrant whose death in part triggered the writing of The Other Side. Kubin, in his nonfiction, is amazingly frank about all of these personal issues, giving us rare insight into motivation and influence.
These events, as well as unhappy romances, contributed to his uneasy, melancholic state, which manifested itself in unique visions, which then manifested in his art as the truest way of portraying the nightmares occurring in his head. Kubin had no internal editor telling him “no, this is too much.” Moreover, he may not even have realized that what he was creating might startle people. Did it amuse or horrify him when gentlemen and ladies who viewed his art reportedly fainted?
There’s the sense, too, in reading the praise of Kubin’s contemporaries that they found him too rough, too flawed, and yet it’s impossible to separate out the “good” from the “bad” – a condition common to some of the best “weird” writers and artists. As Austrian critic Richard Schaukal noted in a 1903 review, “He has not studied drawing. That is clear at a glance. But what does that tell us when confronted with this stunning oeuvre!” Given these underpinnings of Kubin’s inspiration, it’s perhaps remarkable that The Other Side has as much story as it does; not merely a series of images strung together, it is a true masterpiece of rising tension and horror.
The Other Side tells the tale of a Munich draftsman asked by an old schoolmate named Patera to visit the newly established Dream Kingdom, somewhere in Central Asia. Patera rules the Dream Kingdom from the capital city of Pearl. The wealthy Patera has had a European city uprooted and brought to its new location, along with sixty-five thousand inhabitants. The narrator, after some hesitation, agrees to visit and travels with his wife through Constantinople through Batum, Batu, Krasnovodsk, and Samarkand—Samarkand being the last of any identifying landmarks on their journey.
The narrator soon finds that the Dream Kingdom is, well, a kingdom of dreams. People experience or live “only in moods” and shape all outer being at will “through the maximum possible cooperative effort.” A huge wall keeps out the world and “the sun never shone, never were the moon or the stars visible at night….Here, illusions simply were reality.”
Over time, strange rituals and aberrations have sprung up. Pearl also shifts in odd ways, and in this sense has a kinship with M. John Harrison’s far-future Viriconium, which also functions from more of a metaphorical than a chronological foundation. This doesn’t bother the narrator at first, but as the city’s changes become more and more grotesque, it’s clear that the Dream Kingdom is faltering, descending into madness.
Despite the claustrophic atmosphere and unseen horrors that form the emotional foundation of the novel, The Other Side is remarkable not just for its vivid imagery, laden with surrealistic subtext, but for how the relatively modern aspects of the novel—American tourists, for example—are perfectly integrated into a timeless, festering milieu. The battle that occurs between the irrational and rational as the Dream Kingdom disintegrates takes on an updated Grand Guignol quality that oddly enough has the texture of modern-day war. It’s almost as if the novel channels Apocalypse Now by way of Hieronymus Bosch.
Where did The Other Side come from, other than from Kubin’s visionary art? Consider this tangle of influence: Kubin had been commissioned to illustrate a book of Edgar Allen Poe novellas by a Munich publisher in 1907. At roughly the same time, Kubin met with Gustav Meyrink to discuss illustrations for Meyrink’s novel-in-progress The Golem. When Meyrink hit a snag in finishing The Golem, Kubin took his preliminary sketches and found ways to use some of them in The Other Side. Not long after publication of The Other Side, Franz Kafka read and enjoyed it, and then later used elements from it in the creation of his own The Castle. (Kubin might have been aware of Kafka’s early work, as well.)
Labels like “outsider artist” aside, Kubin was definitely connected to the creative communities of his day. Indeed, when Kubin arrived in Munich,Germany, to study art as a teenager, who should he be discovered by than the iconic Franz Blei, who was also one of Kafka’s friends.
Blei gives us a semi-amused description of Kubin as a “frail young boy who was always dressed in black and had a pale face that was always straining a little to grow dark and pretending to be as shy as a young world that had been dragged from a hollow into the light.” (Blei was a bit mischievous, his bestiary of modern literature describing Meyrink, for example, as “the only mooncalf who dropped to earth and which is now in captivity…Officers of the Imperial Austro-Hungarian Army and German Deputies wanted to ban the public exhibition of the Meyrink because, so they said, it gave a distorted reflection of them in its one big eye.”)
That Kubin was a creator who either “was compelled by forces that guided his hand,” or trained himself to be so compelled, is clear even from his description of his reaction to an exhibition of Max Klinger’s etchings in Munich in 1882:
I grew moody…And now I was suddenly inundated with visions of pictures in black and white – it is impossible to describe what a thousand-fold treasure my imagination poured out before me. Quickly I left the theater, for the music and the mass of lights now disturbed me, and I wandered aimlessly in the dark streets, overcome and literally ravished by a dark power that conjured up before my mind strange creatures, houses, landscapes, grotesque and frightful situations.
In that context for Kubin’s inspiration, there’s perhaps no finer evocation of the effect Kubin achieves in his art and in The Other Side than this 1903 description from the Berliner Illustrirte: “This art always dreams of the last things in apocalyptic fantasy; its beings and forms are not of this world, and you cannot measure them by the ruler of correctness or anatomical possibility; they are complete distortion, total gruesome exaggeration; just as their landscapes dream away in the eternal twilight behind time and space. But you will always find one thing in this art, which dispenses with every depiction, every illustration of being, it has a convincing power to make things present and will grip you and sweep you away, conveying to you ideas and moods of uncanny reality that will burn themselves into your brain as if with hot iron punches…the suggestion of this foreboding art of the soul, the rare, the distant, the lustfully dreadful…is always powerful and enduring.”
The Other Side still appeals to a modern reader because of these qualities, after many novels initially seen as more enduring have faded from memory." - Jeff VanderMeer
"A stunning exercise in subconscious dementia that preceded Kafka and the surrealists by nearly two decades. It was the only novel by the German artist Alfred Kubin, an adherent of the fantastic and grotesque best known for illustrating the works of Poe, Hoffman and Gustav Meyrink. THE OTHER SIDE, ably translated by Mike Mitchell, recalls all of those writers, but contains an aura that’s very much unique.
The concept is a grabber: Claus Patera, a deeply eccentric, supernaturally endowed individual, creates a dream-city in a remote region of Asia. I mean this literally: the city of Pearl is a dream-based community governed by the laws of the subconscious.
The story is told from the point of view of an artist, a former colleague of Patera who is invited to live in Pearl. The artist agrees and after a lengthy journey finds himself in a perpetually murky environ--the sun never shines in Pearl--with cobbled-together retro architecture and a populace of eccentrics. The protagonist quickly finds employment as a cartoonist at the Dream Mirror, the official newspaper of Pearl. He has trouble, however, affecting a meeting with Petera, who spends his days secluded in a maze-like building.
More immediate troubles include the “Great Clock Spell” that inexplicably grips Dreamlanders, and which the artist comes to share; it refers to a mysterious spell that draws Dreamlanders into a clock tower. There’s also a psychic disturbance called the “Brainstorm” that collectively afflicts the Dreamlanders, in addition to a plethora of miscellaneous sounds and hallucinations.
But things are changing. An American man turns up in Pearl and causes enormous discord. This individual may or may not be Patera himself in a different guise, as it’s established midway through that Patera can change his facial features at will. He also psychically controls the Dreamlanders and their surrounding environment, and is evidently losing his mind.
This latter fact causes the Dream Realm to grow increasingly irrational and nightmarish. Eventually the place implodes in a riot of violence, orgies and wonton destruction, not unlike a surreal variant on THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII. It’s in this section that the Poe connection is most evident, with the narrative overtaken by all manner of horrific grotesquerie.
But in my view the novel’s best portions come earlier, in the artist’s mundane yet baffling observations of day-to-day life in Pearl. These sections powerfully evoke the flavor of existence in this dream-country via a kind of subconscious travelogue, evoked with such astonishing imaginative vividness I couldn’t help but wonder if Alfred Kubin had actually visited this city and then reported back on what he found. " - Fright

"My knowledge of European weird and fantastic fiction is scanty, to say the least, and I haven’t, so far as I know, previously encountered Alfred Kubin. Based on this extract, I am already eager to read the rest of The Other Side, and I am curious as to how this extract fits into the broader picture.
Here we have the city of Pearl. We’re told that Pearl is ‘strange and oppressive’ in the introduction, but given no clue as to what form that strangeness and oppression might involve. However, we quickly learn that there is some sort of political struggle under way, and that Pearl’s inhabitants are also succumbing to ‘an irresistible sleeping sickness’, something that is implicitly linked to the political situation. An inexplicable desire to sleep often suggests either an unwillingness to act, or else an extreme retreat from a situation as it is; either way, one speculates that the sleeping disease is a communal response to the situation. It is notable, for example, that animals have not been affected; also, at least some animals seem to work alongside the humans.
But the sleeping disease is only a precursor to what comes next, though perhaps the catalyst, given that sleep is the relaxation of the grip of the conscious mind on the world. The sleeping mind can run riot in dreams, and at the same time, while the people sleep, the rest of the inhabitants of the Dream Realm (surely no coincidence there) also run riot, with animals of all kinds, the unseen denizens, suddenly becoming vividly visible, with plagues of insects sweeping through, large carnivores invading the houses. The presence of animals, literal as it seems to be, is inevitably also a symbolic embodiment of the fear of the townsfolk. Kubin’s narrator is very matter of fact about these invasions, and in that matter of factness perhaps lies the deepest horror. The factual recounting of this invasion, this sudden and ongoing super-abundance of animals renders the abnormal normal momentarily, before the reader mentally overbalances, trying to deal with the thought of suddenly finding fourteen rabbits in one’s bed, or snakes everywhere.
The encroachment of nature is, in science fiction, usually a more gradual process, but nonetheless is usually a signal that humanity is no longer in the ascendant. People vanish from the picture, buildings gently begin to decay; there is something picturesque, almost nostalgic in the return to pre-civilised conditions, with maybe a few people hanging on, living once more in sympathy with nature. In ‘The Other Side’, however, the speed of the changes, their simultaneity, is part of what makes this so terrifying, accentuated by the way that the human inhabitants of Pearl accept the situation, perhaps because they can do nothing else.
After the invasion of animals comes the ‘sickness of inanimate matter’, the decay of building materials, textiles, ceramics, those things that we invest so much in, without which life seems impossible. And the next threat is to life itself, as the narrator realises when he stops to consider the fate of his own body.
Is he assailed by madness as he runs through the palace, seeking Patera, to plead for his life? Or does madness lie in believing in the existence of Patera in the first place? Can one place all one’s hope in such power? The narrator’s realisation is that, effectively, it doesn’t matter what he does: ‘I took strength in the consciousness of my own impotence’, and this is the point at which he shuts out ‘doubts and anxieties’. This is where the extract finished, and I find myself wondering what will happen to the narrator; what will he choose to see or to ignore in the future, having calmly recounted everything so far. Indeed, what are the other inhabitants of the Dream Realm seeing?
This is an interesting story to start this collection, particularly the matter-of-fact tone of the recounting of extraordinary events, and the moment when the narrator realises he can no longer simply observe and narrate, but is a part of the story too, the abstract becoming personal. What does it all mean? It is unclear, except insofar as the whole extract is obviously a metaphor of sorts for the collapse of a regime, society, civilisation, a strange mixture of hope and despair." - Maureen Kincaid Speller

"Every time a man is begotten and born, the clock of human life is wound up anew to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations. - Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
While it has become quite an obscure book these days, The Other Side was pretty revolutionary at the time it was written back in 1908. In his narrative, Kubin combines philosophical ideas with decadence themes and both surreal and weird images to form the vanguard of early European Weird, predating both Kafka and Meyrink (who Kubin knew), and the French surrealists. The story revolves around a mysterious city in Asia built by its almost godlike ruler, but at the core it is really about both human nature, anxiety and the absurdity of existence.
The novel begins when the protagonist is visited by a man working in the employ of one of his old school friends, Claus Patera, who comes bearing a message. He tells him that since they were in school together, Patera has become rich through adventuring and has built his own city in Asia, Perle, within his Dreaming Kingdom, where the protagonist and his wife are both invited to join him. Despite being initially sceptical, he agrees to move after being shown a picture of Patera and is written a generous cheque of one hundred thousand marks. He and his wife travel over land and sea to start a new life in the city of Perle.
When he arrives in Perle, he finds that things are not like they are in the outside world. Firstly, the sun never shines there (it is only two years after the city is destroyed the he sees sunlight again), creating an atmosphere composed of browns and greys reminiscent of Kubin’s art. Under Patera’s wishes, nothing modern is allowed to be taken into the city, only old things, and progress is expressly banned, setting the city back over fifty years from the standard in most European countries. All of the buildings in the city have been bought from cities across Europe and as the protagonist later discovers, they all have rather sordid histories. They are provided with a place to live, money and the main character is provided with a job at the local paper (as he is an artist) but their initial good fortune doesn’t last. His wife, who was never a well person in general takes ill (eventually succumbing to her illness) and he learns that fortunes can turn from good to bad in a drop of the hat as absurdism seems to hold sway. A wealthy man can find himself destitute after a visit from city officials demanding he pays debts he has no knowledge of, and vice versa should a poor man find himself the recipient of some unexplained windfall. Those who retain their wealthy status have to suffer other forms of unseen misfortune, such as Melitta, the doctor’s wife, who the protagonist discovers begging in squalor on the street.
As Patera hand picks the people chosen to receive invites to the Kingdom and the borders are closed, the city’s population is composed of people predisposed to the strangeness of Patera’s new world. His neighbour is a good for nothing who terrorises them, being a general pain and banging on the door late at night. Under their apartment is a barber who is also a stoic and discusses philosophy with anyone who is nearby at the time, including his helper monkey. The doctor’s wife, Melitta, is quite scandalous as she cuckolds her husband with whoever she feels like and later in the novel takes to stripping in an erotic show. It is not unreasonable for see in her the unresolved feelings Kubin has about women due to his early experiences, as after the protagonist seduces her after his wife dies, it seems to be the first symbolic act of his decent into nihilism. Brendel, a friend to the protagonist, is obsessed with finding the perfect love and subjects each woman to a number of tests to see if they are worthy. He eventually falls for Melitta (despite her promiscuity) and continues to love her even following her death, removing the body from its grave. These are just a few of the interesting people who make up the city’s population. There is something about each of them, they are in some way disaffected, tainted, that serves as almost a precursor to the events that follow the arrival of the American.
Claus Patera himself is somewhat of an enigma. On arriving at the city the protagonist does everything possible in order to gain an audience with him but discovers that the administrative system in Perle is purposely an absurd bureaucratic nightmare. His wife claims to have seen him lighting lamps shortly before she becomes fatally ill and while he does not believe it is possible, when he finally manages to meet Patera, the ruler tells him that he has been watching him all along. One has to wonder how much of Kubin’s own father we can see in Patera. He is overbearing, controlling and all powerful as a father must seem to children when they are young. His absence and the anxiety that is causes the protagonist also seems like a common thread. After some begging, Patera agrees to help the protagonist in regards to his wife’s health and shortly after she dies, proving that you have to be careful what you wish for, and considering what follows in the novel her death may actually be a blessing after all. The extent of Patera’s power is ambiguous, but it is seems that he exercises an almost Nietzschean feat of will to create the city, both in the physical sense and the metaphysical. It is suggested that he is able to control the actions of everyone in the city and this is backed up by the fact that he is able to make everyone in the city (with the exception of his adversary the American) fall asleep at once. He also seems able to perform feats of almost godlike stature, although it is unsure if the things that happen to the city after the American’s revolt are caused by Patera, or if they are caused by the fact the population no longer see him as a god. Considering the influence of Schopenhauer on Kubin, it also gives us insight into an interesting occurrence when the protagonist finds him. Patera is a very handsome man and described as beautiful by Kubin in the novel, but when the protagonist eventually finds him, Patera’s face constantly changes from beauty to strange images that the protagonist finds threatening. It isn’t too much of a stretch to believe that Patera represents in some way the sublime as a symbol of turbulent nature, both in himself and the absurd way in which he runs the city.
As mentioned earlier, the arrival of the American, Hercules Bell of Philadelphia in the chapter The Adversary (perhaps a reference to the Hebrew Satan) acts as a catalyst for the destruction of the Dream Kingdom. The protagonist himself believes the only reason he is able to survive is that because after the shock of seducing Melitta on the day of his wife’s funeral, he ceases to care about anything and becomes almost nihilistic. Bell despises Patera and wants the Kingdom all for himself, his arrival causes an influx of immigrants and he lobbies to turn the people against their master. Bell’s rebellion leads to a plague of wild animals, the physical decay of the city itself and a descent into hedonism and grand scale violence as the city’s population destroys itself. Patera’s observation of the destruction, as well as the protagonist’s, may be an experiencing of those even fuller levels of the sublime in the realisation of the destructive force of nature and the insignificance of the individual in the face of existence. When all is said and done, there are very few survivors and Claus Patera is no more.
The Other Side is a very interesting book, as Kubin is clearly grappling with existential problems through his stand-in in the protagonist. One enduring feature for weird fiction seems to be the idea of the sublime, something beautiful but at the same time alien and utterly horrifying. Through Kubin, it is acted out in a tragic farce with almost Grand-Guignol scenes through the eyes of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and the decadents. It remains in my eyes a key text of the Weird fiction cannon and while it has been mostly forgotten by history, it seems to be having a little bit of a resurgence at the moment. It has been cited as an influence by Michael Cisco, was mentioned by China Mieville as one of the books that influenced The City and the City, and was recently announced of having the pride of place of being first in the VanderMeer’s upcoming Weird fiction anthology. Deserving to be read more widely, a great novel by a great artist. Currently out of print, but cheap enough to pick up an older copy; certainly worth both your time and your money.
After all, the demiurge is a hybrid." - Paul Charles Smith

"Alfred Kubin‘s The Other Side is one of the maddest things I’ve read in a long while. It’s mad in the way that Gogol’s The Nose is mad, or Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. That is, at times it seems normal, almost allegorical (you begin, at least, to feel there might be some meaning behind it all), but then just as you feel you’re getting a grasp on it, it leaps off again into incomprehensible madness.
The plot? – Well, it’s this. A man is persuaded by an old schoolfriend, Patera, who has since become immensely wealthy, to come and live in a closed society he has constructed, somewhere in northern China, called the Dream Kingdom. Billed as a sort of paradise which has forsaken the modern world, when he goes there he finds it doesn’t quite measure up to expectations. He becomes increasingly uncertain how (or if) the society is being governed, can never seem to meet with his friend Patera, and – well, after that things start getting rather weird: waking dreams, doppelgangers, unexplained plagues of animals, and a complete collapse not merely of moral fabric but seemingly all kinds of fabric.
What are the themes here, the ideas? – Maybe it’s about religion and the enlightenment, the lack of a guiding spirit in the world and how man can cope with its absence, the collapse of the ruling classes and the emergence of democracy, the revaluation of all values – yeah, that sort of thing.
Here’s a random passage, where he’s trying to get to meet with Patera:
Unfortunately, every sort of thing interfered, exactly as though some devil of mischance had taken a hand. First I was told that the Master was so overloaded with business that he could see no one. Another time he had gone on a trip. Then I heard that tickets for audiences could be obtained at the Archives. I went there. I walked through the gate, decorated with coats of arms, feeling as guilty as an anarchist. The doorman was asleep. I tried to find my way alone and entered a spacious antechamber. About a dozen officials were there.
For probably a quarter of an hour, no one noticed me at all, as though I were invisible. Finally, one of the functionaries asked me gruffly what I wanted. However, he did not wait for my answer but went on conversing with his neighbour. A somewhat pleasanter character bowed to me and inquired about my business. His wrinkled yellow face fell into severe furrows, he took a few puffs at his long pipe, and then motioned with it towards the next room. “In there!”
On the door was a notice: Do not knock. Inside, a man was asleep. I had to clear my throat three times before any sign of life came into his completely rigid, deeply reflective pose. Then I was favoured with a glance of majestic disdain.

"What do you want?” he growled. “Have you a summons? What papers have you brought with you?”

Here there was not the same curtness as outside; on the contrary, information came bubbling out.

“To receive your ticket for an audience you need in addition to your birth certificate, baptismal certificate, and marriage certificate, your father’s graduation diploma and your mother’s inoculation certificate. Turn left in the corridor. Administration Room 16, and make your declaration of means, education, and honorary orders. A character witness for your father-in-law is desirable but not absolutely essential.” Whereupon he nodded condescendingly, bent once more over the desk, and began to write with, as I could see, a dry pen.

If anyone’s thinking at this point that this all sounds very similar to a highly original and revered Czech writer who happened, like Kubin, to write in German, I would point out that these similarities must be found to be false, and for this very simple reason: that this certain Czech writer was highly original – possibly the most original writer ever – certainly the first person to write about the things that he wrote about – whereas Kubin’s novel was published in 1909." - Obooki's Obloquy

Andrew Zornoza - A prose-photo book: a cryptic collection of random thoughts, experiences, and photographs of the author's fictional journey through the Western US and Mexico

2012-01-26T12:34:00.003+01:00

Andrew Zornoza, Where I Stay, Tarpaulin Sky, 2009.

"In the process of constantly disappearing, the unhinged, unmoored and unnamed narrator of Where I Stay travels through a cracked North America, stalked by his own future self and the whispers of a distant love. From Arco, Idaho to Mexico City, he flees along the highways and dirt roads of a landscape filled with characters in transition: squatters, survivalists, prostitutes, drug runners, skinheads, border guards and con-men. Where I Stay is a meditation on desperation, identity, geography, memory, and love—a story about endurance, about the empty spaces in ourselves, about the new possibilities we find only after we have lost everything."

"Consider Andrew Zornoza’s Where I Stay a loose retelling of Werner Herzog’s 1974 march from Munich to Paris to try to save a dying friend—only set in the arid, ominous nowherescape of the contemporary Southwest and composed by a strung-out W.G. Sebald. Zornoza dedicates the book to “all those he's lied to” before prosecuting a narrative in stark photographs and crisp, lurid text that will make you wish we had more liars like him in the world." - Matthew Derby

"A gifted journey through borderlands between text and image, glassy prose and suggestively indirect prose poem, facts and fictions, sanity and the other thing, but most of all those borderlands crossed and recrossed on the West's back roads—the kind that always exist just off the grid, just below the radar, and always in beautiful pieces." —Lance Olsen

"Andrew Zornoza writes with the precision of a poet and delicately creates a haunting, glowing world of dreams and beauty. The language and images of "Where I Stay" make you want to step inside the pages, to travel down the road with the author. Books like this remind us of what true art really looks like." - Martin Hyatt

"Andrew Zornoza's Where I Stay bills itself as a "photo novel," meaning that text and images are combined here to produce one unified fictional narrative tale. And I have to say, although I found the written part only so-so (a sort of rambling Jack-Kerouac-meets-Studs-Turkel tale about the freaks and losers who populate the great rural areas of the US), as a publication I found it one of the greatest little basement-press photography books I've ever seen, which just by itself earns this book a decent score and recommendation. It's almost a case study of what smart yet cash-challenged publishers can do with a little forethought and some good design skills, something to be studied by fellow photographers as much as it is to be simply enjoyed." - Jason Pettus

"The movement of people and lives; chance meetings between strangers destined never to cross paths again; moments that can never be recreated; the uncertainty of people, place, relationships — all collide across culture and class, gender and race to form an anthem of displacement. The author deftly — and in spite of himself, seamlessly — weaves common threads that, by the end of the book, form a recognizable whole. Where I Stay is a story of a search for a home, for permanence, and ultimately for meaning." - Cynthia Reeser

"Open Andrew Zornoza's novel Where I Stay anywhere and you will be presented with a spread of two facing pages, each wider than they are tall. Given the amount of text and the subject matter—a hitchhiker traveling the American West—you may find them somewhat reminiscent of postcards: On the left will be a title consisting of a date and a location—"Aug. 2, Cheyenne, Wyoming," perhaps, or else, "Oct. 15, Deschutes, Oregon"—and below it a single paragraph composed of a couple hundred words, some slim sliver of experience related by a narrator as poetic as he is desperate, as much a seeker as he is someone trying to finally get truly lost. There is little narrative in these micro-scenes, but lots of resonant images and phrasings. Here is the entirety of one such section, "Sept. 28, Three Forks, Montana":
Two roads meet like a cross upon the earth and there stops a middle aged man and his father and their truck. A dog squirms between them, its tongue dropping pearls of spit upon the upholstery. the younger man gets out, jerks his thumb to the bed of the truck where a sofa is lashed to the floor with heavy chains. The chains are spray-painted gold. The old man runs his liver-spotted hands through the dog's thick black fur, his eyes not leaving the windshield. You'll be king, he says. Alright, I answer. The younger man lowers the bed door, tests the chains. He's right, he says, you'll be king for now. King of the road.
Each right-side page of the book contains a single black-and-white photograph, sometimes seemingly related to the block of text on the left, sometimes not. These too are accompanied by text, evocative captions generally only a line or two long—"I worked at a toy factory, I worked at a restaurant washing dishes. People gave me money. I was ashamed, but I took the money. I never did not take the money"—but sometimes ballooning to paragraphs of their own:
I went to the only friend I had. His parents were Mormon. With his family and other families we drove across the country in a caravan of mini-vans. We camped near the Teton Mountains. There was a three-legged race. I won a medal, printed on the tin, "favorite stranger: favorite new family member." Next year I got another medal, "Best loved hitch-hiker." One of the men worked in vice for the Salt Lake City police. At night he drank beer and I smoked cigarettes and his daughter plucked away at a plastic guitar while she sat on a log away from the fire.
More often than not, Zornoza leaves it to the reader to place these disparate pieces into mental order, to fit them into some understandable arrangement of narrative and photo and caption. The headings on the left, with their dates marching from August to November provide a linearity to the slim paragraphs below them, but this seeming five-month journey is contradicted by paragraphs like the one above, with their claims of a journey lasting not months but years. Without more full-bodied clues as to how the book should be experienced, each reader will invent their own system: Like me, you may find the captions making unbalancing claims to fact from their proximity to the photographs, which make their own claims to truth even in this age of digital manipulation and computer graphics. And so what? Are we faced with a fictional novel on one side, and a factual photo-narrative on the other? Or are there two novels here, one made purely of text, and one of photographs and captions? Or has it been one novel all along, but one in which the narrator is less than reliable, is int the end as fractured as the America he's traveling?
Even if it is a blend of fact and fiction, does that impact the truth contained in the book? Does the presence of the factual increase the truth content of the fiction, or does it detract?
Are these the right questions to ask? Are any of these questions even close?
I'm not sure that Zornoza has put the answers to these questions in the book for us to find. Or rather, I think that it's more likely possible that he's erased the answers, has lost them for us in the same way that this narrator seems to be trying to lose himself. "There are places I keep returning to," he says, in one of the captions from the middle of the book. Later still, the narrator sees a map taped to a wall, one where "lines have been drawn from spots on the map to the margins, each line ending in a crowded scrawl of letters and numbers, coordinates and temperatures, illegible words." The narrator says, "I wonder how long he has been out there."
The narrator says, "I don't know."
He says: "It all gets jumbled together."
He says: "It's all about to be swept away again."
He says: "[The] little home that I had had moved along without me."
He says: "There was nowhere to go, as long as I was myself."
The book closes. The left side—the fiction, the invented narrative beneath the forward march of dates—it folds into the right side, into the photographs and their captured truths, into the captions that illuminate or obfuscate that truth so that it matches or else denies the fiction that faces it.
And then what?
And then the book is inside of us, or at least its contents are, emptied from the fine container Zornoza has built for all of his narrator's contradictions and complications, his precise phrasing and beautiful mistakes. Like any long trip, the months of the narrator's journey and the years of Zornoza's photography that were compressed to make the fiction will probably not stick with you as a cohesive story, but rather as a series of fleeting images: A white dress wet from a river, a drawing taped to the side of a cave, a girl sleeping in an overturned refrigerator, and then many more beside them and also between them. And what's left in the cracks left between? The memory of a person trying to lose his identity a mile at a time, only to find it waiting for him at every destination, on the other side of each one of America's empty spaces as wide and yawning as the ones inside ourselves we spend so many of our years attempting to escape." - Matt Bell

"The ‘road novel’ might be one of the most maligned forms in storytelling, in that for a mold that by in proper handling could be kinetic, shapeshifting, and packed with an uncontainable kind of light found only in certain kinds of travel, too many books get caught up in minutiae and joking, leaving out the language and the true moving meat.
Thankfully, Andrew Zornoza’s Where I Stay, just out from Tarpaulin Sky Press, manages to not only wield that rare light while avoiding those common pitfalls, but to do so in a refreshing, pitch-perfect kind of steering that is innovative not only for the genre it might get called into, but for experiential and language-focused texts of every stripe.
Immediately striking for its beautifully designed horizontal 8”x5” shape, Where I Stay is a dual kind of amalgam. Each two-page spread consists of a one paragraph prose block tied to a sequentially moving date and location, as well as photo concurrently associated with the text, and a caption for the photo that often extends the prose into a further direction. There is violence and desperation. There is music and shithole buildings. Dirt. There is sky. Moments told for how they are and how they were in sentences that for their unassuming aura moreso sting:
“Laughing, joking with the children, they haul the garbage bags into the trucks, lifting the children by their armpits into the flatbed, everyone now laughing joking.”
While each graph and location could be self contained for Zornoza’s striking lines, meditative and rhythmic in the mind of Mary Robison mashed with William Vollmann, the prose in sequence forms a narrative of seeking, of looking for something familiar in so much splay. The unbounded point-to-point of the narrator’s surroundings, in which he works strange crap jobs, meets roadside strangers, deals with his life, contains no abject want for summation, and yet therein reaches beyond the narrative in beautifully and concretely rendered fragments evicts a true sense of drift, though within the drift, the body.
“I worked at a toy factory,” one of the images’ caption reads, just after a passage about a man finagling him for gas, “I worked at a restaurant washing dishes. People gave me money. I was ashamed, but I took the money, I never did not take the money.”
And yet for something seemingly so everchanging, there is a center here. A lock. The moments of pure human magic are abound. Certain page of Where I Stay, in their collision of texts and image, move in such a precise and startling way that at certain points it seems necessary to stop and close the book, to let its image sink deeper, strong in the head. Zornoza’s knack for rendering the momentary in timeless, syllabic lines, to cut to the blood of the line in an effortless, truly fevered sort of way, is not only refreshing, it is unforgettable. Though he is smart enough to keep the moment by moment phrasing quick and vivid, line by line, there are no exits pulled in the overall collage that results from all the wanting, from the haunting viscera there contained." - Blake Butler

"Where I Stay opens with a description of a stark landscape in movement: grain, threshers, wind, a hand raised in wave from a tractor, a girl who appears and disappears in the same instant; a barren image of an America we all know or have seen in a photograph. The few humans who populate this land acknowledge the narrator with minimal gesture, interpolating the poised but desperate voice that will insistently, though always somewhat privately, lead us through a road trip squarely situated between the ethos of Jack Kerouac and Walker Evans. Where I Stay is a novel of almost pure voice, told in diaristic fragments coupled with photographs whose captions are drawn from other moments in the time of the narrative. Here, nothing is anchored. Even the black borders of the photographs, those supposed documents of a reality experienced, are themselves unhinged and moving on a trajectory. The story, barely narrative, told to us by this voice, is of a young man moving aimlessly through an America moving violently through him. In and out of cars, of the arms of lovers, looking for someone he lost, for a moment of rest, the novel slides, falters and picks itself up again in the margins, the out of frame, the side of the road, the memory, the coming word. A year passes, days and weeks omitted, blank spaces where the lives of criminals, kind families, abandoned dogs and factory workers continue to be lived. By the end of this short novel, the voice of the narrator, not surprisingly, is failing. Those who filled his world he can now find "only in the cracks." The novel, in danger of never being written, becomes a letter, composed to one who may never receive it, for they may also have moved on, pulled by some love, some violence, some journey. But we, for the moment, are here, resting a bit before the next move." - Michelle Tupko

"How to impress me:
■Do something new.
■Do something unexpected.
■Break with convention.
■Do it well.
Andrew Zornoza‘s photo novel, Where I Stay, does all of these things and more, so, needless to say, I’m very impressed with it. In a nutshell, the book is about an unnamed wanderer traveling through the Great American West. To say it’s “about” a wanderer, however, is to belie the book’s complexity. As with Cesca Janece Waterfield’s Bartab, Where I Stay leaves to the reader much of the work of stitching together a narrative. Throughout the proceedings, Zornoza provides the reader with snatches from the wanderer’s life — a day on the road, for example, or a moment shared with a stranger — along with a series of photographs and their captions. Sometimes the photos complement the text. Other times, the connection may not be so apparent. The end result is that the reader is engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the book, and each successive reading has the potential to carry with it new meaning.
As haunting as it is gritty, Where I Stay has the feel of an impressionist watercolor and underscores the value of the small press in literary culture. Indeed, I hesitate to simply call it a book; its ambitions, beautifully realized, make it a hybrid of textual and visual arts. Like all of my favorite works of art, Where I Stay has the capacity to evoke something akin to an out of body experience, to propel the reader into unfamiliar territory and, in so doing, to make the quotidian world new again upon the reader’s return. To put it more plainly, Zornoza’s talent is to take us out of our day to day lives and to show us the world from a new perspective that allows us to see our own lives in a new, ever-shifting light.
If I have one suggestion for Zornoza, it’s to implore his publisher, Tarpaulin Sky Press, to come out with a deluxe edition of this book. While the photographs that appear throughout the current edition are certainly compelling, I can only imagine what a glossy, high-resolution edition might look like. Yes, the volume may be a bit pricey, but this is art we’re talking about. And who can put a price on that?" - Marc Schuster

"Andrew Zornoza's marvelous first book is hard to pin down. With dated and place-notated prose on one page and a captioned photo on the facing one, it seamlessly shifts its delivery from straight-ahead to a possibly unreliable photographer with captions that either expand on the text, or further question the reality and relationship between prose and picture.
In action that takes place between August 2nd and November 25th, the unnamed narrator wanders throughout the American Southwest and Mexico. Perhaps action is too strong a word, as everything seems to come across as notes written on unsent postcards. Even the dedication, "To all those I've lied to," says something about the veracity of everything that follows.
Here, in the middle of nothing, is a rusted bronze plaque: Incinerated Forest (Tree Molds). Taped to the plaque is a purple flower and a piece of paper. I pick up the paper and put the tape and flower in my pocket. A boy with a crown sitting on a rock orbiting the earth is drawn on the paper. Written underneath the drawing are the words, "What makes a desert beautiful, says the little prince, is that somewhere it hides a well."
Small moments like this one (Nov. 4, Craters of the Moon National Park, Idaho) give Where I Stay its authentic voice. The narrator repeatedly finds the last shred of humanity in the modern wasteland. If Chris McCandless, the ill-fated true-life wanderer Jon Krakauer wrote about in Into The Wild, had met up with shadier characters, and decided that instead of searching for a way to live true to oneself realized that no matter how one lived it was true to them, Where I Stay could be a smarter companion to his adventures.
Zornoza manages to capture that wanderlust that has caught anyone who ever read On The Road, or realized you can get on Route 80 West and drive from New York to San Francisco. It's sad and searching, filled with the desire for experience for reasons we may not even know. As Antoine de St. Exupery wrote in Le Petit Prince, "Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them." And Andrew Zornoza does it with style and grace." - John Findura

"Tarpaulin Sky Press has just published a new work of fiction by Andrew Zornoza, Where I Stay, which includes numerous embedded photographs. Unlike W.G. Sebald and most other writers that have scattered images in a sporadic manner throughout their texts, Zornoza’s book places a snapshot on every right hand page, setting up a visual rhythm with two sets of text. The left-hand page is a diary entry, complete with date and place, while on almost all of the right-hand pages, in addition to the photograph, there is an italicized text that is usually briefer than the diary entry. Part of the puzzling pleasure of reading Zornoza’s novel comes in attempting to triangulate these three components.
The book opens with a 1938 quote from photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975), perhaps most famous for his Farm Security Administration photographs of the American Depression and for his collaboration with writer James Agee on the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).
These anonymous people who come and go in the cities and who move on the land; it is on what they look like, now; what is in their faces and in the windows and the streets beside them and around them; what they are wearing and what they are riding in, and how they are gesturing, that we need to concentrate consciously, with the camera.
In spite of its title, Where I Stay is a restless book that moves all across the American West and even into Mexico. Time flows from August 2 to November 25, but otherwise there is no discernible progression. The narrator drifts, struggles, observes, and writes regular diary entries about day jobs, drugs and alcohol, death, loneliness, and brief attempts at friendship.
Compared to the diary entries, the italicized texts on the right hand page are generally more meditative and reflective.
Sometimes I wrote things down, fragments. But then I looked at them and they did not seem real and there seemed to be no purpose in writing them. There was nothing in them, other than things I did not want to remember.
The photographs, which are credited to five people other than the author, depict the bleak anonymous locales familiar to every hitchhiker: roadsides, truck stops, bus stations, laundromats, gritty streets. There are a few snapshots of people, none of whom receive the heroic treatment of Walker Evans’ sharecroppers. Only the occasional landscape image offers a possible solace – the open sky, the sunset, the forests that consume the old shacks and abandoned automobiles – but even those moments are undercut by the text." - Terry Pitts

"This is an cryptic collection of random thoughts, experiences, and photographs of the author's fictional journey through the Western US and Mexico. This definitely isn't the scenic route: Zornoza's travels take him to the edge of urban life, mainly concentrating on the rough roads and deserted highways that have been left in the past by time and progress. The landscape is grey, gritty, and jagged: much like the words he chooses to describe his interactions and his reactions to it all.
His observations are sometimes funny, sometimes tense, and often a bit obscure. You get the impression that he has x-ray vision and sees beneath the surface of the locations, as well as the hardened exteriors of the people he meets. He encounters the most diverse group of people imaginable, all lingering on the outskirts of city and suburban life, some intentionally and some without choice. The black and white photographs heighten the sense of distance and reminded me of a Dust Bowl migration. There's sadness within it all, yet the traveller continues. Much like an epic quest, he keeps pursuing that which he cannot identify.
"There are cracks in the country-in its families and highways, houses and rivers, factories, cellar windows, truck stops, in the sounds of chattering televisions, in the plexiglass booths of pay phones by bus stations, in the crushed glass of parking lots..."
"The prairie was my cellar door. I had removed everyone I knew or the people had removed themselves. I replaced them all with a vast plateau, then mountains, dry desert, broken pieces of landscape that didn't quite fit together. I found people in the cracks."
Zornoza's gift in this collection is the little surprises he throws out amid the descriptions of the raw landcape. In his diary-like entries, he may explain what happened and where, but he may also throw out a mysterious phrase: "because if someone was making a movie of her, the movie would not be good. She was a bad actress, but there was no movie, there was no acting." I really enjoyed the photographs but more the pictures his words composed. Sparse, with no unnecessary details or dialogue. An excellent collection....It reminded me somewhat of Sam Shepherd's Day Out of Days." - Amy Henry

"A couple of years back, Blueberry Nights, a film by Wong Kar-wai was released and it sucked. Kar-wai is known for his dreamy, gauzy, sensual films, which obsess over love, lost, place, identity and time-- all delivered in fragmented narratives. Blueberry Nights was his first Hollywood film so what better to make than a “road movie?” The movie not only lacked vision and contained some awful acting, it really showcased how the obsession with the road has become another cliché of Americana. If I think of the road as a literary trope I think Steinbeck, Kerouac, and McCarthy. So my question was whether Zornoza and Peet’s books could make the road feel fresh again. These are two drastically different texts yet both are united in the necessity of search and that ability to be in a place, or of a place, to pass through a place, but not possess or change the place—i.e. the anti-capitalist imperative, that is if Huck Finn sets off down the river to find a freer and wilder America does it exist? According to Zornoza and Peet the answer is yes and no.
Where I Stay is a prose-photo book, which sets up a rhythm by wisely having photos on every right-hand side of the page. This strategy allows for Zornoza to have a nuanced and complicated reading of his book because although the photos relate (sometimes quite loosely) to the text the photos tell their own story. So you have the opportunity to get one story from the text, another from the photos, and a third reading by combining text and photos. This allows a certain emotional resonance and mood to permeate throughout the book while challenging your intellect and intuition. Where filmmaker Wong Kar-wai failed with Blueberry Nights, Zornoza succeeds. Part of the success of Zornoza’s book is that he allows it to roam—despite it’s title this is a restless book traveling the American West, Mid-west, and Mexico. The prose gives us just enough information to remain engaged in both character and place, but Zornoza doesn’t try to define, instead allowing the reader to make associative leaps from Sept. 17, Albuquerque, New Mexico which begins,
“My older son don’t write me, but he’s a good boy, she says. We park in a diner parking lot and tilt back the seats to sleep. When I wake in the morning,she’s sewing shut the end of a pillow. A pocket with a tooth embroidered on it has been stitched in one corner.”
The next page has a photo collage of a pillow, photos of people and a newspaper. Below the photo the caption reads, “I worked at a toy factory, I worked at a restaurant washing dishes. People gave me money. I was ashamed, but I took the money, I never did not take the money.” The page after this it’s Sept. 20, Boulder, Colorado and the narrative begins,
“A man on a motorcycle with a Yorkshire terrier in the sidecar, a woman in a Volvo, and finally a water fountain, shade, a field of green grass.”
One of the reasons why Where I Stay is so successful is because of Zornoza’s ability to navigate and weave together fully fleshed sentences along with airy lines of staccato. Zornoza’s prose has range, which is what makes this book at times so beautiful and at other times so devastating..." - Steven Karl

Andrew Zornoza's web page

Christine Montalbetti - The world behind the clichés, where the much-anticipated violence of the plot is continually, maddeningly delayed, and no moment is too insignificant not to be valued. A daring theft of movie technique and subversion of a genre

2012-01-25T11:59:00.002+01:00

Christine Montalbetti, Western, Trans. by Betsy Wing, Dalkey Archive Press, 2009.

"Setting out to tell the story of a mysterious cowboy—a stranger in town with a terrible secret—Christine Montalbetti is continually sidetracked by the details that occur to her along the way, her CinemaScope camera focusing not on the gunslinger’s grim and determined eyes, but on the insects crawling in the dust by his boots. A collection of the moments usually discarded in order to tell even the simplest and most familiar story, Western presents us with the world behind the clichés, where the much-anticipated violence of the plot is continually, maddeningly delayed, and no moment is too insignificant not to be valued. Montalbetti’s daring theft of movie technique and subversion of a genre where women are usually relegated to secondary roles—victims, prostitutes, widows, schoolmarms—makes Western a remarkable wake for the most basic of American mythologies."

Read it at Google Books

"Western is Christine Montalbetti’s fourth book for the Editions POL, following Sa fable achevée, Simon sort dans la bruine [His tale concluded, Simon walks into the drizzle] (2001), L’Origine de l’homme [The origin of man] (2002), and Expérience de la campagne [Experience of the countryside] (2005). It is a curious novel and a challenging one, principally because events are so scarce. That is all the more disconcerting, since the narrative model that Montalbetti has chosen to work with is that of the Hollywood Western, a genre that invests so heavily in action. Here, however, action is reduced to a bare minimum: characters do amble down the main street of this cowboy town; a stagecoach does arrive; and, two hundred pages into the text, there is finally a gunfight. But that’s about it. There is thus very little story here; yet discourse is found in abundance. Indeed, the text is saturated with it, as if Montalbetti wished to test the limits—and exhaust the possibilities—of novelistic discursivity.
Montalbetti draws her focus closer and closer upon what few events she proposes, suggesting narrative inferences and hypotheses that compete for her reader’s attention and vex each other in intriguing ways. She solicits her reader’s attention constantly and directly, sometimes speaking in her narratorial persona, sometimes in her authorial one. She lays traps and false inferential paths for her reader, at the same time warning her reader to beware of just such ploys. There are moments of what narratologists call “disnarration” here, moments when the text refuses to tell us what happens; and Montalbetti exploits that technique lustily, asking her reader along the way to entertain questions that can have no answer. The flashbacks and flash-forwards that she offers seem to beg the question of narrative organization, in a text with no firmly fixed center. Yet that is undoubtedly one of the points that Montalbetti is making here. For, rather than a tale of cowboys and their adventures, Western is in fact a story of writing and reading, and about how stories are constructed and come to be in both of those dynamics, through a process that involves both wandering and wondering in equal measure. This is, in short, an obsessional novel—and thus it is well suited to please those individuals who might admit to being obsessive readers of novels." - Warren Motte

"In her first novel to be translated into English, French writer Montalbetti explores the classic tropes of the Wild West through the lens of metafiction in this clever but convoluted story of a silent cowboy with a secret past. Though most of the so-called “action” takes place in the 1800s American West, Montalbetti also jumps to France and contemporary times. The unnamed 30-year-old hero spends most of the novel ruminating on a porch, until a stagecoach appears carrying a significant woman from his past. Spurred on by news the woman brings, the hero rides off to a climactic confrontation. There are myriad digressions into the tiniest details of the setting, incorporating the viewpoints of ants and even droplets of water. While these interludes highlight Montalbetti's keen observational skills and vivid imagination, the almost nonexistent plot may alienate readers looking for a cohesive story. But those willing to work a little harder will enjoy the intellectual and sensual—if not emotional—rewards of the story." - Publishers Weekly

"This novel is a true western adventure—including a duel under the sun—written a la Perec or Claude Simon." - Technikart

"With flashbacks and multiple narratives, the author is a master of innumerable tricks that destabilize the narrative and turn the very possibility of its ever concluding itself into the novel's true adventure." - L'Humanité

"Would it be far-fetched to imagine that Christine Montalbetti was musing on the interior monologue of a certain cowboy president while writing her novel Western, a deconstruction of the classic American myth? In this postmodern pastiche—published in France in 2005, now ably translated by Betsy Wing—the narrator, named Christine Montalbetti, writes a novel titled Western, starring a generic cowboy hero, unnamed until the end. Given the associative spirit and self-referential nature of the text, perhaps such speculation is appropriate.
By imagining multiple scenarios and using a teasing second-person voice (as well as the first and third persons), Montalbetti implicates the reader in the narrative’s development. The standard western plot is endlessly delayed, finally materializing in a duel during the anticlimactic climax. Seemingly inspired by Christian Metz’s theory of film—cinema as a kind of language that involves the participation of viewers, who project their own associations onto the screenWestern takes detours through the narrator’s and the reader’s memories: “plus your footsteps and my own, both of us looking like Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock—sticking out in our city clothes in all this western scenery.”
Montalbetti also owes a debt to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s postmodern detective novels, especially his myriad perspectives and close-ups on physical objects. She imbues scenery with vivid internal life, such as a brown piece of paper that “thinks it’s a tumbleweed like all the others, and is doing its best to hop along in their midst.” An army of insects edging around the cowboy’s boot is personified as pioneers battling against the harsh elements. Occasionally, these stagings are undone by the author’s obsession: A cow, for instance, stares at the countryside with a “nyctalopic gaze.”
Often, the narrative mirrors Chinese boxes, one tale nesting within another. The narrator spies a painting, a still life of a basket of peaches, and begins to invent a monologue for the antisocial peach that resides on the table, “a poor little excluded thing hoping to return to its brethren, envying their placid sociability.” She then pictures the canvas in the reader’s living room—“over your mantel, it would give your place quite a nineteenth-century look”—and imagines crowds departing from a landscape scene not even in the painting, the waving handkerchiefs resembling a “cotton aviary, still undulating their avian fabrics at the ends of their arms and presenting the perfect picture of a thousand crazed and impotent birds, vainly beating their wings in a ballet whose choreography delivers their message of good will.” This goes on for several pages, the narrative’s sections collapsing in on themselves in delirium. Montalbetti, however, rescues her work from the potential pitfalls of formalism, crafting a novel that’s clever and pleasurable, if exhausting in its exhaustiveness." - Kate Zambreno

"If there is one genre of publishing that lived its entire life span in one century, it is the western. From the best-selling heights of Louis L'Amour and Zane Grey to its present obscurity, the mass-market western quietly went extinct somewhere in the early 1990s. Oddly, the genre, once considered one of the lowest forms of writing, now belongs almost exclusively to authors of high literary merit like Cormac McCarthy and Christine Montalbetti.
French author Montalbetti's most recent novel, Western, is a wonderfully Oulipian affair; she shoves the action of the piece—a gunfight, a man looking for revenge on another man—far into the background, instead focusing on details and characters that would otherwise be a barely described, terse sentence or two in a L'Amour novel. With page-long sentences laden with self-aware clauses, Montalbetti tells us about the insects on a fence post, or a lazy but semialert cow:
It was back in the dark of night when the bovid heard the erratic banging of the gate, the braided cord ordinarily keeping it shut apparently having come loose and letting out a little more slack with every new reverberation. The other artiodactyl mammals are asleep, but this one has its ear—the only part moving, as it hasn't yet bothered to move the rest of its carcass as yet, lying on the sand—pricked, aimed at interpreting the sound.
The result is a John Wayne movie filmed by a cinematographer with ADD and a wildly malfunctioning camera: We stare at the stitching of boots or are struck giddily by the blue of the sky for 5 or 10 minutes before wandering back to the horizon line and the characters we are following. Western is a challenging book to read because it strains at the limits of our narrative patience, but as with much French literature, Montalbetti's boundless curiosity and enthusiasm for her experiment makes the book an ultimately satisfying journey into a dead genre." - Paul Constant

"Christine Montalbetti is a woman after my own heart! For as long as I can remember, any attempt of mine to tell a story has been met by despairing cries of 'get to the point!' and 'is this relevant?' from friends and family who fail to share my fascination for life's smaller details. What a lot I have to learn, it turns out! I'm just a novice, flirting with trivial little bits of detail to pad out my main story, whilst Montalbetti has written a whole novel about those tiny details that never usually get told; in fact this is a new take on the action-based Western genre... without much action.
If you think about it, you'll realise that, in the telling of any story, an enormous proportion of 'what happens' is discarded. Not here! The novel opens with the main character, referred to until the last few pages only as 'our thirty-year-old', sitting on the porch at dawn—but don't expect a description of his appearance followed by a few lyrical sentences about the sunrise. Instead Montalbetti zooms in on the movement made by his leg to rock the chair: he 'relaxes the flexors of the foot, meaning, I think, the anterior leg muscle, and perhaps also, at the same time, the lateral peroneous longus, you can't exclude that possibility (I'm doing it myself, to try and feel what muscles I'm using, but even so, identifying them is not so easy).' After this we see the same scene again, this time from the viewpoint of the ants scurrying along the rail on which the cowboy's foot is resting—until he stamps his foot to get his circulation going, that is, leaving 'some of the victims [...] so deformed by the blow that you can no longer make out their features'.
As our cowboy (a mysterious stranger in town) goes about his day, Montalbetti constantly veers off, distracted by another tiny detail, maddenly yet wonderfully postponing the novel's climax (the action). Elements that usually exist only in the background are suddenly thrust into the limelight—the different-coloured hairs in one man's moustache, for example ("with hairs of both colours engaged in a merciless battle for priority on his upper lip"). Along with dizzying changes of subject, Montalbetti inserts endless changes of focus: What would characters in her other novels have made of this? What would other writers do now?
This is a not a relaxing novel to read; it demands that one sit up and pay attention, but a reader willing to make the investment will be whirled off into an exhilarating microscopic world. (The bad news for my family and friends is that it has made me even more interested in those "insignificant" little details!)" - Rachel Hayes

"Finally, all one can say about this - while the sapphire hue gradually becomes dominant - is that, among this troop of pitiful little thoughts, all bruised and indistinct, there's one that's steadier than the others, more robust, older, that fixes the gaze of our thirty-year-old on the wall in front of him, not because of any quality of the wall in itself, but because it is the ideal, neutral screen to project this thought upon; a thought unharmed by the jerky ups and downs of his rocking, a thought that was never made indolent by languid nighttime sleep, but remained strong and sure of what it wants, a thought whose power is at least partly based upon its longstanding and proven perseverance. We ourselves still know nothing about this key and almost authoritarian thought, but let's face it, it's not hard to figure out that said thought is what will provide the overall motivation for our man, explaining his days in this place and lending his mind a purpose that, unknown thought it is, no doubt forms the horizon of his life wherever he may be, and which - we can tell from the sort of tension persisting even in his early morning apathy - he must never let out of his sight.
You can see pretty well now, you can even see perfectly, the sky is completely blue, punctuated by the white fluff of small, neat cirrocumulus, a really nice effect, and so I think the action can begin. (pp. 21-22)
The Western perhaps is the Americas' gift to world literature. There is something awe-inspiring in the stark, bleak landscapes, in the actions of the rugged, fierce cowboys/vaqueros who populate its wastes and its lowlands, fighting for justice (or for greed). A good Western can invoke the best elements of a morality play, with the man with the white hat dueling with the man with the black hat. In between, there are struggles revolving around self-reliance, how to make one's way in an unforgiving locale. These stories, at least in their most popular form, did not originate in settled, cultured Europe, but instead were the product of frontier life and the sacrifices and (sometimes evil) decisions that the frontiers people had to make as they moved into a hostile environment, often peopled with natives who resisted their advance and who resented the depredations of these invaders.
Today, the Western as a genre is nearly dead. The frontiers have been tamed. The natives have been eliminated or subdued. John Wayne and Roy Rogers are in their graves and there is no need to retell their stories. We have seen it all, perhaps. We know how that gunfight at the O.K. Corral will turn out. We anticipate, before becoming bored, what it means when a man wearing a black hat walks into a saloon. We have satirized it in movies such as Blazing Saddles or reversed the myths in stories such as Cormac McCarthy's excellent Blood Meridian. What possible "new" ground could be trod in this desolate genre seemingly bereft of originality or interest?
French writer Christine Montalbetti in her 2005 novel (translated into English in late 2009 by Betsy Wing) Western manages to squeeze just one more ounce of water from that stone. She deconstructs the Western genre, both literary and cinematic alike, in an artful fashion. Instead of focusing on the "action," what she does so adroitly here is examine in minute detail those overlooked moments that serve to define the scenes that follow.
The plot, unimportant as it is to the story, is that of a gunman seeking his revenge and preparing for a shootout. But what's intriguing about this tale is that Montalbetti concentrates on things such as the insects in the soil where the man is standing, on the wall where he is staring, on those teeny-tiny details which add atmosphere to a story. In the passage above, a traditional Western writer might have stated in a sentence that the man was giving an intent stare while the sky was clear outside. What Montalbetti does here is invert the story, making the reader focus on the "close up." Here we see the troubled thoughts, the almost diffident way in which the gunman attempts to focus himself in preparation for the action to follow. It is akin to those ominous pauses in the movies before the showdown begins in earnest.
Montalbetti draws out these moments, turning what otherwise would be a humdrum, average duel into a psychological portrait of the gunman and of his surroundings. The attentive reader will find him or herself taking these insights and perhaps applying them to any Western book or film previously seen or read. This technique, although it can be wearisome to those who don't want to think about what they are reading, adds so many layers of depth to the simple plot that the reading turns into a reflective exercise that meditates on the semantics of the Western itself.
Western is a short novel at 192 pages, yet its brevity belies its content. Montalbetti takes us all the way through the course of the gunman's preparation for the duel, keeping our attention focused on the surrounding details just long enough for the reader to appreciation what is transpiring, rarely overindulging and thus risking tedium at the most critical juncture of the novel. Western adds so much to this nearly-moribund genre that it almost certainly will be a "fresh" read even for those readers who are well-versed in both the Western genre and in postmodernist literary techniques. Highly recommended." - The OF Blog

"Christine Montalbetti's books are innovative, compelling, and slyly enticing constructions that provide some of the finest readerly experiences that French fiction currently has to offer. They put on stage a wide variety of characters, situations, and events, yet each book testifies in similar ways to a profound reflection on narrative art, and each pays close attention to the critical dimension of contemporary writing. That this should be the case is logical enough, once one realizes that Montalbetti leads a double life. On the one hand, she is beginning to make her mark as one of the most intriguing young novelists in France; on the other hand, she is a professor of literature at the University of Paris, and the author of a number of important critical and theoretical works that have confirmed her as a scholar of narrative. Insofar as her fiction is concerned, its most salient trait is undoubtedly the manner in which it takes the reader into account. These are generous texts wherein the author invites her reader to inhabit textual space, and to participate in a meditation focusing both upon the book of the future and the future of the book. For my own part, I am persuaded that it is precisely in such texts that the contemporary French novel realizes its potential and seeks to renew itself. From their very first sentences, Montalbetti's books call upon their readers relentlessly, inveigling us, flattering us, cajoling us, attempting to persuade us that we have a role to play in the process of storytelling. Western, for instance, begins thus:
Call him anything you want, this thirty-year-old in the checkered shirt who rocks back and forth under the roof of this porch in what can only be called a makeshift apparatus, haphazardly, with nothing like the harmonious movements of an actual rocking-chair—the slow movement of its curves in an ergonomic unity conducive to day-dreaming—making do, under the circumstances, with this senescent chair, even being a little too hard on it, a chair covered in nicks and smudges telling of past carelessness (see that chipping, those splotches, the gashes on its rungs, the scars in its back), a rustic model;(notice how thick the rungs are, the clumsy spindles fanning out), pushing it just a little bit too far, having wedged its back legs into a crack in the floor, while its front legs, like the lone two fangs, if you will, in some scarcely populated jaw, bite erratically at the ground, as though that jaw were snapping shut.
An imperative in the first-person plural is one of the most characteristic signatures in Montalbetti's writing. It suggests a complicity between narrator and reader that she wagers upon throughout her work, proposing a narrative contract steeped in complaisance, one which guarantees that, whatever else may come to pass, author and reader are—and shall remain—allied. Yet that very complaisance serves a variety of purposes other than that of merely putting the reader at ease, I think; and it sets the stage for a series of canny maneuvers that Montalbetti practices elsewhere.
The key technique that she practices is that of "intrusive" narration, and it colors each of her novels and short stories. Narrative voice in her writing is utterly irrepressible; her narrators are unrepentant causeurs who condition our reception of the text in crucial ways. Yet to be fair, as intrusive as they may be, they constantly invite the reader to engage in dialogue with them, as if both narrator and reader were present in the story, and in position to shape it productively. Montalbetti uses a variety of effects intended to engage us, and some are less subtle than others. Flattery, for instance: she often positions her reader as the one individual who is capable of appreciating the kind of storytelling she is putting forward. In one of her short stories, she remarks, "you are the one person who may imagine flawlessly the particular trouble that the unlucky hero of this story experiences." Another translation of this passage, this time cast in barefaced blarney, suggests itself: You are a smart and resourceful reader, indeed an ideal one; I have foreseen your readerly responses and have predicated my own narrative strategy upon them; I shall tell you everything you wish to know in this, my story.
Another technique, one closely akin to flattery, is cajolery. Montalbetti resorts to that tactic when she feels that the reader's attention might be flagging, or when she senses that the reader might be unwilling to make the kind of interpretive leap that a particular narrative situation demands. In the middle of an especially garrulous passage describing a sunrise in Western, Montalbetti enjoins her reader, "come on, there you go, easy now, easy . . . I want you even more passive, more trusting, that’s good . . . you’re floating, you paddle around, come on, let yourself go, reading can be wonderfully regressive . . ." She strokes her reader here as one might stroke a golden retriever, fondly and benevolently. It is quite a different figure, then, from the one she habitually appeals to, a reader distinguished by intellectual acuity, by resourcefulness, and by active interpretive participation. Yet the manner in which she attributes shifting characteristics to her reader is very much a part of the game she plays in her discursive strategy, and its ludic quality is meant to be savored.
As she deploys the array of effects designed to grab and retain our attention, Montalbetti occasionally puts that very process on display, and asks us, with transparent sincerity, to consider it, as she does on one occasion in The Origin of Man: “But what wouldn’t I do to retain your attention?” What indeed? For her solicitation of the reader seems to acknowledge no boundaries, and the pact that she attempts to seal with us includes a clear hospitality clause, “because you’re my guest, after all.” Yet it nonetheless becomes clear—and indeed Montalbetti takes pains that it should—that such effects are surface phenomena intended to function on a first level (just as polite conversation renders a more purposeful dialogue possible), and that both writer and reader, working within the complicity that those effects help to establish, recognize them as such. As complaisant as they may appear, then, they are nonetheless intended to reinforce the notion of narrative authority; and each of those techniques is calculated to make us imagine that we are hearing the author’s voice in each instance where that interpretation is even barely possible—and to make us feel, too, that that voice is addressing us directly and without mediation.
Montalbetti takes her time in her books, and she calls insistently upon her reader to follow her through the dilatory meanders of fiction. These are “loiterly” texts (to borrow a term coined by Ross Chambers), which put forward the notion that we are fundamentally loiterly by nature, and that we take pleasure in digression. However else stories may come to be, they are certainly not made in an instant, Montalbetti argues, and they should not be told in an instant, either. In their final form, they bear the traces, more or less legible depending upon the case, of a lengthy imaginative process. That process is a wandering one, Montalbetti argues, rather than a strictly ortho-linear one. Stories are governed by teleological principles, certainly, but they proceed toward their goal in a crablike fashion, going this way, then that way, then this way again. In short, they take their time—and so should we.
Montalbetti’s fiction posits plot only to shy away from it, deferring plot while constantly whetting our appetite for it, playing on our desire to know what “happens.” In so doing, she practices a dexterous sleight of hand, playing a textual shell game, keeping us guessing about where narrative truth lies. Each of her digressions tells a story, one that may be related to the principal story at hand only by the most tenuous of links. They are anecdotal and offhanded, chatty, and apparently spontaneous on the surface; yet a closer reading confirms that they are also deeply calculated. Just in that light, then, Montalbetti’s digressions may be seen as fictions within a fiction; and as such they perform an intriguing critique upon fiction itself, destabilizing conventional narrative norms and enabling other, less conventional dynamics to come into play. The skepticism that they display with regard to tradition may prompt us to think about process issues in the text at hand, and to appreciate the manner in which those process issues adumbrate new narrative prospects. In short, Montalbetti uses digression strategically, as a critical tool, in fictions that adopt an overtly critical stance, casting a speculative gaze on their own conditions of possibility.
Montalbetti encourages her reader to consider the notion that the interest of fiction may not be principally invested in plot, but rather in elements of narrative that we usually view as being peripheral to plot. She launches one of her short stories, for example, in the following manner: “I don’t know about you, but for my part, when I look at a painting, it’s often not the main subject that I focus upon; rather, it’s the little scenes in the background, those secondary subjects, limned quickly by the brush, and positioned vulnerably apart from the central figure.” She is clearly attempting thereby to shape our reading of the text to follow, exhorting us to make the broad leap of faith that it demands—that is, to entertain the possibility that more interest may be found in the margins of things than in what we have always thought of as their vital center.
The idea of discursive freedom is pivotal here, I think. It is a principle that Montalbetti claims for herself, but it is also one that she extends to us, as if fiction were, more than anything else, an unfettered conversation between author and reader. The kind of conversation that Montalbetti puts on offer in her books is a suavely playful one; moreover, it is one that does not hesitate to call the boundaries that we normally erect between fictional worlds and real worlds severely into question. From time to time, she postulates wormholes connecting those worlds, inviting us to follow her through them, imagining for instance situations where a character speaks directly to the reader, or consulting us about which way best to tell her tale, or indeed positioning us as characters in a fiction that she has constructed. We implicate ourselves deeply in the stories we tell and the ones that we read, Montalbetti argues, and sometimes we may lose ourselves therein. “You too, to a certain degree, inhabit a parallel world,” she says, making a crucial move in the game she plays with us, suggesting that different worlds do in fact collide, causing temporary havoc and opening troubling, aporetic vistas perhaps, but also—and more importantly—enabling us to see things anew.
In such a manner, Christine Montalbetti seeks to remind us that narrative may be a construction, but that it is nonetheless part of our world, whether it be a case of the stories she chooses to tell, or that of the stories we habitually tell to ourselves. We inhabit those constructions happily, sadly, blithely, earnestly, in work, in play, turn and turn about—in fact, just as we inhabit our more obviously material edifices. If we have no quarrel with the idea that the world is played out in fiction, why should we balk at the notion that fiction may be played out in the world? In such a light, the future of fiction will inevitably be decided both in fiction and in the world, in a debate that shuttles purposefully back and forth between illusion and reality, causing the boundaries between those sites to seem increasingly dubious. For the most urgent message of Christine Montalbetti’s writing contends that fiction, just like the world of phenomena, is staggeringly unconfined." - Warren Motte

"Christine Montalbetti was born in Le Havre in 1965. She teaches literary theory at the University of Paris (VIII) in Vincennes-Saint Denis. Her academic interest in textual structures and elements and the relationship between language and reality also permeates her literary work, which consists of several prose texts and a recent play. In her oeuvre the text itself, not the plot, is the focus – as a result Montalbetti has often been classed as following the »nouveau roman« or post-modern style.
In her first novel, »Sa fable achevée, Simon sort dans la bruine« (2001; t: His Tale Concluded, Simon Walks into the Drizzle), the rather idle protagonist makes a full retreat behind the meandering narrative flow, the intelligent elegance of which earned critical approval. »L’Origin de l’homme« (2002; t: The Origin of Man) is an ironic play on the realist novel and uses the biography of Jacques Boucher de Perthes, an amateur scientist who, in the 19th century, made a revolutionary contribution to research on prehistoric man. In Montalbetti’s account, his life-story finds proper form – he is hero, star and protagonist at the same time.
»Western« (2005) focuses on that particular genre and its conventions. The classic Western film is modified through Montalbetti’s narration: snapshots, zooms and changing perspectives interrupt events, which nevertheless culminate in a typical duel showdown. The narrative voice forces dialogues between the characters aside and, in commentaries and reflections, moves through the familiar scenery as through the prop room of a theatre. By directly addressing the audience, the narrator shatters the fictional world of the work. A similar play on the expectations of the reader is found in »Petits déjeuners avec quelques écrivains célèbres« (2008; t: Breakfast With Some Famous Writers). The title and table of contents encourage the expectation that the book will be a portrait of authors such as Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Tanguy Viel and Haruki Murakami. However in reality, the history and sub-plots of the narrative voice, his commentary, thoughts, memories and feelings overgrow the portrayal of the meetings with the authors, and indeed the reality of these meetings is in question: »Christine Montalbetti, he says for a third and last time in a voice which suddenly seemed softer to me, certainly a little more tainted with that assertiveness which he had shown in the two preceding paragraphs, you know very well that we have never, never, had breakfast together. We would have needed to meet for that to happen. // What, do you think, should I answer to that?« - International Literature Festival Berlin

Christine Montalbetti, The Origin of Man, Trans. by Betsy Wing, Dalkey Archive Press, 2012. [forthcoming[

"The Origin of Man is the story of one man—and all humanity—waging a war against oblivion without ever quite winning the day.
With a name like Jacques Boucher de Crèvecoeur de Perthes, it ought to be easy to become a hero. Yet, how to go about it? A real-life nineteenth-century paleontologist and explorer, excavated here by Christine Montalbetti to serve as her protagonist, Jacques has tried everything: fighting off pirates, writing poetry, becoming a dandy, a man of culture . . . all without ever quite feeling he fits the bill. At last, when Jacques decides he’ll make his name by discovering evidence of early man, it seems we, his audience, will be treated to a novel about mankind itself—unless, of course, our putative hero gets shanghaied into a love story along the way. The Origin of Man is the story of one man—and all humanity—waging a war against oblivion without ever quite winning the day. It’s also a comedy about being immersed in heroic and fantastical events without one’s ever noticing."

Nikanor Teratologen - A series of queasy anecdotes concerning an eleven-year-old boy and his grandfather, a monster for whom murder, violence, incest, drunkenness, and philosophy all pass as equally valid ways to spend one's time

2012-01-25T09:28:00.002+01:00

Nikanor Teratologen, Assisted Living, Trans. by Kerri Pierce, Dalkey Archive Press, 2012.

"The Marquis de Sade is alive and well and living in Sweden—or perhaps author Nikanor Teratologen is the devil himself, sending the English-speaking world a Scandinavian squib to remind readers that such reassuring figures as vampires and serial killers are no more frightening than pixies or unicorns in light of the depravity contained in one quiet suburb. Reading like a deranged hybrid of Deliverance, Naked Lunch, and Tuesdays with Morrie, and rivaling The 120 Days of Sodom in its challenge to our assumptions as to what is acceptable (or not) in literature, Assisted Living presents us with a series of queasy anecdotes concerning an eleven-year-old boy and his grandfather, a monster for whom murder, violence, incest, drunkenness, and philosophy all pass as equally valid ways to spend one's time. Whether it's a study in excess, a parody of provincial proto-fascism, a clear-eyed look at evil, or simply a prodigious literary dare, Assisted Living is unlikely to leave you indifferent."

"Nikanor Teratologen (a pseudonym), born in 1964, is widely recognized as one of the most interesting and original of the younger writers working in Sweden, where his Assisted Living is a famous—and infamous—bestseller, provoking scandal, hatred, and veneration in equal measure."

"Assisted Living, by Nikanor Teratologen, was originally released in Sweden in 1992 under the title Äldreomsorgen i Övre Kågedalen (roughly translated: Caring for the Elderly in Upper Kage Valley). The book immediately caused an uproar, due in part to the book’s endless “Satanic” parade of rape, murder, sacrilege, bigotry, pedophilia, etc., but also the author’s use of a pseudonym, which led critics to accuse a wide array of major Swedish authors as the creator. The result was not only instant-cult-classic and controversial bestselling status for the book, which later would be credited to the novelist Niclas Lundkvist, but also a slew of varying takes on the book’s content, both praising its wild innovations in the way of language and stylizing, and predictably defaming it for its utter lack of reverence, apology, or “humanity.”
But that kind of hype can be a load of bullshit in a world where anything that is remotely taboo without redemption can stir the whining not only of religious moralists, but also of those who think the novel, as a form, must wear its redemptive qualities on its face. Upon receiving a copy of the frequently compelling Dalkey Archive edition of an English translation of the novel, I was both excited at the possibilities and dismissive of anything referred to as “not for the faint of heart.” But indeed, if anyone is capable of using these taxonomies not only for their immediate prowess but for changing language and image at once in how they get invoked, it is the Swedes, as I’ve learned from many of their authors who have recently been translated to English, including Aase Berg, Johan Jönsson, and Johannes Göransson.
Teratologen’s particular manner in manipulating revulsive fields feels different, though, than even those. The book begins with two installed frameworks to give the book a clandestine, contraband-like feel, with both a preface from the author revealing his usage of the pseudonym as a mechanism rather than a shield (“A dear friend with exquisitely cruel tastes entrusted me with the text you now hold in your hands.”), followed by another foreword from said “dear friend,” who proceeds to explain how the body of the book to come had been derived from a child: a child the dear friend kidnapped, tortured, and killed before finding a stack of wallpaper samples in the boy’s belongings that detail a series of acts between the boy himself and a character known only as “Grandpa.” The opening structure evokes the feeling of the cloaked narrative tunnels of Dennis Cooper, arranging other screens around the reader always floating even as we proceed into the book’s primary body, where the true trauma begins.
Basically what happens hereafter is a nonstop stream of human cruelty. In scenes that span a single page to more than 30, we are held in the skull of the child as subject to Grandpa, who is one of the more memorably repugnant characters put on paper. He actually kind of makes the Judge from Blood Meridian look like a sweetheart in comparison. Grandpa fucks the kid incessantly, rants in endless streams of hate jargon meant to demean anything and everything at all, rapes and kills animals and children for fun, and so on. What makes this onslaught even sicker is the way it is related, in a playful, blown-up way, almost like a serial cartoon. The language rams together its subjects with the same impious banging as the described acts themselves.
A short list of the ilk of what can be found on pretty much every single page in Assisted Living:
1. On Grandpa having abducted two boys who’ve come by selling gingerbread: “When he was finished with their mouths, he told me to get him a fistful of steel wool. Then he started playing Open the Locked Door with the first kid. The other one curtsied and bowed to Hilding, but a knee to the face took his breath away. After that, Royal showed him how to smoke Sumatra cigarillos and Hilding forced the kid to kiss him down there.”
2. Grandpa fondly reminiscing about his Nazi lifestyle for a kid at the bus stop: “It was a raw February morning in the Whoregod’s year of 1945, and me and Dirlewanger were partying in the orphanage’s ruins. ‘You know that Himmer’s balls taste like Apricots, right?’ he asked.”
3. Grandpa asks the boy to say a prayer for his own “old Grandpa in hell”: “He who knows what a child is, fuck me because I’m small, wherever I go in this world, fill my hands with shit, Satan comes, Satan goes, he loves sheepdick, that’s all, I recited.”
4. Not all of the book is pure onslaught or sick jokes, however. The moments sometimes fold briefly to reveal an underside, though only crammed between the mass, such as here, where we find the central child left alone without Grandpa for a while: “Sometimes I play the quiet game… sometimes I play dead… sometimes I draw old geezers I’ve met and then I pretend I’m them… sometimes I lay on my back in a September field and listen to the earth hurtling though space… to victims shrieking at all the evil deed wrought upon them… then I try to sink into the light, soft, fluid grass and become a part of its mystery…”
It goes on and on like this, taking a historical and cultural shit and wallowing in it and spasming around in the most costume-party no-blinking parade of ways. The imagined last words of Jesus, fake literary histories appended with real ones, Axl Rose jokes, destroyed anatomies, gross contortions, confabulated smut literatures: it accrues such a mass so fast it doesn’t even feel like reading. One after another the blows come and before you have a chance to even think about the context the next idea is in your throat. It’s somehow almost… refreshing, in how it comes on. The pages of images and juxtaposing sounds are addictive in their composition and how they fold together, and the burning of the sentences is fun, which in some way masks the true filth of the scenes. It’s not an atrocity meant to be wallowed in, but somehow vacuumed of its own judgment in the presence of itself, which, stepped away from, makes it even more dangerous and deforming. And in its current, you are not released but almost mocked for how smoothly it unscrolls.
“He’s the world’s best Grandpa,” the boy tells us right at the beginning. No matter what Grandpa does or says to him, the boy remains faithful, ready, in love. The flapless stream of shit matched by the unjudged eye of both the boy and the decided tone soon take on a feeling much like some kind of hyper newsroom running through the reams of blinkless horror. There is no apology for what humans do, have done, will do. That power, and how it flows past, held in the pages of a book, makes Assisted Living much more than a shock totem or even a vicious catalog. It is, instead, an object both aware of its world and its own work, less like a mirror or a mural than the shitty part of the skin that itches when you want to sleep." - Blake Butler

Darren Tofts and Murray McKeich - A manic dialogue of thought and image: cyberculture's hidden legacy in literary theory, surrealism, and semiotics

2012-01-24T09:39:00.003+01:00

Darren Tofts and Murray McKeich, Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture, Craftsman House, 1998.

"Memory Trade is a pulsating romp through the pre-life of our digitized age. It is a hybrid stitch-up of text and image going mano-o-mano page by page. It is hyper-caffeinated scholarly musing with a touch of lysergic acid. It is a world where Samuel Beckett and Roland Barthes trade cigars with Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick and Giles Deleuze while William Gibson and James Joyce talk emailia and cyberspace.
First published in 1998 in analog form, Memory Trade was conceived by Darren Tofts and Murray McKeich as a manic dialogue of thought and image. Like Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces, it is an ‘imaginary’ history of often unlikely, but all too accurate linkages. Memory Trade is an exploration, in text and image, of the unconscious of cyberculture, its silent, secret prehistory. From Plato’s Cave to Borges’ literary labyrinths, Freud’s Mystic Writing-Pad, and Joyce’s bairdboard bombarment, Memory Trade is an hallucinogenic palimpsest of contemporary culture."

Memory Trade rapidly sold-out and has been much sought after ever since. Fourteen years after it first appeared Memory Trade refuses to age or become irrelevant, thus 21C is proud to see it arise, phoenix-like, as an e-book that is as sumptuous as the original" – Ashley Crawford

“Darren Tofts and Murray McKeich have made a valuable contribution to an emergent field. The irony, of course, is that rather than recycle outdated ideas in fancy computer hypertext, they have come up with an original way of thinking and writing the world in the familiar form of the book.”– McKenzie Wark

“Memory Trade is directed against the new-fangled, self- important idea that, in our cyber age, "the book", meaning old-fashioned literature, is dead and buried, along with all rational, linear thought. This book argues that we are always in between the old and the new, between the historical and the possible – and it argues that the poetic forms we already have already contain the possibilities for the slow revolution that will beset us in future cybercultures.” – Adrian Martin

“To speak of the prehistory of cyberculture means to manufacture one such context, and simultaneously to look into our future-past in search of the questions that we need to ask of the present. It is important work, and I’m happy that this great book is now set to resume it.” - Giovanni Tiso Bat

“Memory Trade is an impeccably researched and stimulating book... Murray McKeich’s diabolically beautiful digital images reveal a clear resonance between writer and artist. The machine is firmly embedded within classical flesh in McKeich’s dark montages, echoing, but with more menace, Tofts’ arguments.” – Megan Heyward

“You should make room on your bookshelf next to Marshall McLuhan and Walter J. Ong because – love it or hate it – you will want to own a copy of Darren Tofts and Murray McKeich’s Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture. Any text that gives birth to so many possible areas of future investigation is a rare read and one that invites us to return again and again.”– Carolyn Guertin

“Memory Trade is a major contribution to the current debate. This is an elaborate, complex and compact book which is as remarkable for its splendid satiric posthuman illustrations and its high quality production as for the intellectual and perceptual richness and the intensity of its writing.” – Donald Theall

“Part coffee table book, part academic analysis, Memory Trade blurs some boundaries with impressive results. There is a kind of palpable glee at work in the book as Tofts embraces his ideas with the playful relish of an idea-hacker who has stumbled onto a cache of good info, breathlessly linking theorist to theorist, idea to idea.” – David Cox

“McKeich’s images echo the aliens’ fighting machine in the neo-Gothic Alien movies, the contorted dolls of Hans Bellmer, the graphic inventiveness of Svenberg and the acuity of photographer artist Frederick Sommer’s minutia. There is a sense of knowing here that amplifies the erudition of the text to produce an effect that counters the pundits and spin-merchants of the multimedia superhighway. – Mike Leggett

“In this tightly written volume, Australian author and academic Darren Tofts (internationally known for his essays with the fine science/cyberculture journal 21C) surveys cyberculture's hidden legacy in literary theory, surrealism, and semiotics. Tofts takes great care to critically reference his material, and the lavish artwork vividly conveys the book's high production values. Necessary reading to track the pre-World War II aesthetics and artistic culture that would give rise to Eisenhower's military-industrial complex, showing how artistic movements mutated as 'life conditions' (mass psycho-social, memetic, and economic baselines) changed into radically new forms.” - Alex Burns

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Lars Iyer - To read Spurious is to discuss Kafka's The Castle and farts in one exacting sentence - all the while reeking of gin. While it may seem like Laurel & Hardy at the End of Times, it is also a profound philosophical rhapsody playing out the culmination of the religious narratives of East and West

2012-01-23T23:53:00.002+01:00

Lars Iyer, Spurious, Melville House, 2011

"In a raucous debut that summons up Britain's fabled Goon Squad comedies, writer and philosopher Lars Iyer tells the story of someone very like himself with a "slightly more successful" friend and their journeys in search of more palatable literary conferences and better gin. One reason for their journeys: the narrator's home is slowly being taken over by a fungus that no one seems to know what to do about.
Before it completely swallows his house, the narrator feels compelled to solve some major philosophical questions (such as "Why?") and the meaning of his urge to write, as well as the source of the fungus... before it is too late. Or, he has to move."

"Forget crime-lit., or chick-lit., this is wit-lit. For Spurious is one of those rare little (quasi-) novels that is truly witty, not just funny or amusing. There is virtually no plot - simply a meandering account of two academic philosophers in search of truth, meaning and friendship, by way of gin and man-bags. But there is dialogue a-plenty, and shed-loads of wistful reflection, all of it expressed in the same kind of sparse but quirky humour that marked out Joseph Heller's Catch 22. In Spurious, the central character - Lars - is constantly and mercilessly lampooned by the imperious 'W', who claims that he, Lars, by his very existence has 'subtracted something from the world.' Indeed, Lars is so useless that a reflection in the waters around Plymouth is akin to 'the kraken of (his) idiocy', and he is so endearingly pathetic that 'W' likens him to a whining, 'sad ape locked up with its faeces'. Like two stage characters in a Beckett play, waiting for an end that may or may not come, they face life with stoicism and forlorn hope, whilst avoiding mould spores and dull conference speakers. Buy it, read it, and love it, for in these miserable times the laughter and the insights will sustain you for quite a while." - Paul Grosch

"Laurel and Hardy, Bert and Ernie, Withnail and Marwood... double acts have long delighted us. Couples, it seems, are intrinsically funny. Lars and W., the heroes of Lars Iyer's novel Spurious – and, in their own way, fighting damp, fighting their stupidity, squabbling with each other, they are heroic – easily join the ranks of the best of them. Two intellectuals – and not ‘would-be intellectuals’ either, our heroes are clever and well-read, but know, because of this, how little they know, how huge is their ignorance – who battle and bond, who gossip, grumble and gripe. W. castigates, Lars reports back. Their squabbles are incessant and repetitive, but there is no enmity here: “W. tests me on Spinoza: What is a mode? What’s a substance? What’s an atttibute? ... W. tells me ... ‘get The Idiot’s Guide to Spinoza, then. But that’ll be too hard, too. Start with these letters on a piece of paper: S-P-I-N-O-Z-A. Ponder that in your stupidity’.” Clever about how being clever is never that far from being daft as a brush, rarely ennobling, and mostly just beside the point, this is one of funniest books about friendship I’ve ever read." - Mark Thwaite

"The jacket copy on its back cover calls Spurious "raucous" and "hilarious" and the front matter labels the book “a novel.” These are not the first words that come to mind. “Provocative” and “narrative” would be more accurate. The substance of Spurious is philosophical debate, though, so my quibbling seems appropriate. Spurious consists of the musings of the narrator Lars and his (only?) friend W. There is some plot insofar as they travel together, and there is a brief conflict surrounding W.'s proposal to move to Canada, but the book is mostly talk without action. These obsessive men are both amused and depressed by the world, searching for some solace for the misery of existence through discussion, writing, friendship, and alcohol, all of which are treated as pleasures but also as subjects of philosophical inquiry. W. is the alpha philosopher of this tiny pack, a supposedly brilliant man who has spent his whole life waiting for an idea. Thinking is hard work, and it can't coexist with reading, writing, talking, or drinking. The characters’ discussions range from the esoteric to the mundane. They are particularly obsessed with “end times” and believe they are living on the verge of the apocalypse—W. exploring various religions to cope with this idea. They are also obsessed with Kafka and live in the shadow of his genius. The headiness of this philosophical dialogue is offset by W.’s casual put-downs of Lars about his weight, his lack of savoir-faire, and especially his apartment, which is plagued by a mysterious dampness that cannot be eradicated or even explained by experts. The damp is ominous, but also comical: a domestic conundrum that portends a vague larger doom. Other light touches grace the offbeat friendship between these pompous men, like their childish penchant for drawing male genitalia and their fussiness as they travel in Europe. It’s ultimately a buoyant (if not raucous) narrative floating on a dark sea of philosophical gloom." - D. Quentin Miller

"Lars Iyers’ Spurious is one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in a long time. It manages to pull off a unique achievement: presenting the characters’ struggle with philosophy in a charming and funny way, without for all that making fun of the philosophical enterprise as a whole. In that way, the ficionalized Lars and his overbearing friend W. may be the modern inheritors of the early Socratic dialogues—not the ones that lay out Plato’s elaborate theories, but the ones where everyone ends up more confused than before. I was among the readers of the original blog posts that Iyer used as raw materials for this book, and I am impressed by the way he has transmuted what could sometimes be morose or melancholic materials into an extremely humorous whole. A big part of this comes from the forceful presence of W., who seems to be a force of nature that strangely parallels the damp that threatens to destroy Lars’s apartment. The novel’s approach reminded me of Thomas Bernhard’s Correction, but Iyer manages to transform Bernhard’s sometimes grim claustrophobia into comedy." - Adam Kosko

"Lars Iyer's Spurious is, hands down, one of my favourite books of the year. Its two protagonists are a couple of woodlice à la Bouvard and Pécuchet (or Vladimir and Estragon) whose very failure to live up to the Continental thinkers/writers they so admire, turns out, paradoxically, to be a successful way of living up to them (and even living out their works). Time and time again, they fail successfully. Hilarious, erudite and often moving, Spurious manages to combine high-minded Modernism with a very English instinct to mock intellectual pretension. The constant oscillation between the two -- this fundamental ambiguity -- enables Iyer to have his cake and eat it, which is the very definition of literature in my book." - Andrew Gallix

"It's no secret that I love this work of fiction - I even blurbed it on the back cover. It is frankly one of the most brilliant works of fiction I have read in a long time. You know, we're told that novels shouldn't be like this, we're told that novels should be something else. But Spurious eschews this notion - and becomes a novel like no other because of it. Dripping in scathing wit, irony and deep, deep despair it pulls the reader in. Holding us close. Both laugh-out-loud-funny and achingly sad it seems to exist somewhere strangely in between these two extremes. Lars Iyers balances these opposites with all the vim and skill of a funambulist. But what strikes me most about Spurious is that packed within this flimsy, little oddity of a novel is a whole philosophical discourse that seeks to examine the rupture between eastern and western thought, the incurable obsession with our own endtimes, and the cyclical nature of the death drive – and Lars Iyers STILL manages to make all this a hoot! Wonderful Stuff." - Lee Rourke

"Any book in which the two main characters often seem to converse by drawing willies is always likely to find a place in my heart. And this did not fail to, although perhaps I was not as fond of it as some.
The good points. The characters are well crafted, realistic and honestly drawn. Their foibles are the same as all of ours, regardless of their austere professions and indulgent rantings. I defy anyone not to be in stitches as W continually berates Lars, but also touched by their genuine friendship that seems to know no dishonesty, which is perhaps a rare thing. W's often acerbic wit, whilst it might be cutting, does not seem to be made with a genuine intention to upset or undermine Lars. His remarks are nearly always followed up with a slight against himself, although he is always, of course, marginally superior in every way.
The only story that this book could be said to have is in regard of the spread of the truly horrific damp in Lars' house. But this is not so much a plot, more a metaphor. It spreads malignantly throughout the book and, towards the end, on every page. I read it as a metaphor for the underlying state of Lars' life as it spreads, unhindered and undiagnosed, through his house as it does through his life. To me, and perhaps I am wrong, W's concern was expressed in the only way he could, through his acerbic wit. But it was still genuine and still very touching.
Yet this book, although marginally the best in the Not the Booker, to me had some major drawbacks. I found it a little difficult to read. It is short, not running to more than 200 pages I don't think. Yet it took me a week to read. I found that I struggled to read more than 20 pages at a time. Each sitting was at the most 20 minutes, before I’d start reading a non-fiction book which I was reading concurrently. I didn't find that it hooked me. Perhaps that is the lack of a plot to carry me through. However, I think that it is mostly because, I believe, this was initially a blog written by the author. And it shows. No 'chapter' is more than 8, maybe 10 pages long. It is very episodic and very repetitive so that you don't feel like you are getting anywhere. Occasionally, one chapter will seems to be told again in the very next chapter, using different words. In fact one might say that nothing happens: nobody comes and nobody goes. But perhaps that shows its fidelity to actual life, rather than to imagined life.
Whilst I personally think that this is a fair criticism, others might point out that this is not a story. This is a portrait of two people and, in particular, of their friendship. And as just that, as a portrait, it is very touching indeed." - Anthony Dickinson

"That the two protagonists of Spurious are constantly asking themselves what Kafka would do in any given situation is indicative of their melodramatic intellectualism, one that this book burlesques in a highly comedic fashion. A fragmented, diaristic account of a dysfunctional friendship between two writers, Spurious emerges from a blog of the same name and is the literary debut of Lars Iyer (a Blanchot scholar based at University of Newcastle). Here 'Lars' and his friend W. endlessly decry their failures as humans, intellectuals and writers, in an atmosphere of gloom so pervasive that it enters a world of hysterical pathos, creating an amusing and occasionally moving piece of writing.
The pair's passion for other writers, expressed in conversations and phonecalls, only heightens their sense of inadequacy. Comparing their correspondence to that of Levinas and Blanchot, and lamenting that only a few letters of that relationship survive, Lars notes that: 'Of ours, which take the form of obscenities and drawings of cocks exchanged on Microsoft Messenger, everything survives, though it shouldn't'. Ominously, Lars's home is damp and festering with ever-growing mould: at times he fears the building will deliquesce completely.
What's left for W. and him to cling to? Only their pathetic excuse for a friendship. As Lars says, 'I am his idiot, but he is mine, and it's this we have in our joy and laughter, as we wake each day into the morning of our idiocy'. As the title suggests, these characters might only be a sham, a satire on intellectuals gone to seed. Nevertheless, the depiction of writers ruined by their own work rings true." - Laura McLean-Ferris

"Lars Iyer’s debut novel, Spurious, is about two British intellectuals who travel around Europe, drinking and talking about such topics as literature, continental philosophy and how they have failed to achieve their dreams—but if this description sounds dreary, it’s only an illustration of the inability of a plot summary to convey the actual experience of reading a novel. Spurious is a hysterically funny comic novel comprised almost entirely of conversations between its two protagonists, W., a sharp-tongued scholar who constantly bemoans his inability to understand complicated maths, and Lars, a portly, middle-aged academic whose apartment is slowly succumbing to an untraceable damp and who wastes much of his time writing down all of the things that W. says and posting them to a blog (and, indeed, Spurious began its life in a blog of the same name written by Lars Iyer, who is, of course, a scholar and an expert on the work of French author and critic Maurice Blonchot).
                For all of its intellectual references to Kafka, Blanchot, Kant and Schelling, the focus of the book is on the close-but-dysfunctional relationship of the two main characters (indeed the tone and form of Spurious isn’t entirely dissimilar to the film Withnail and I, and fans of that movie would almost certainly enjoy this novel). Most of their conversations begin with W. asking such questions of Lars as these: ‘When did you know you were a failure? When was it you knew you’d never have a single thought of your own—not one?’ and the joy is in watching their semi-serious attempts to answer these absurdities. W. and Lars belong to a long tradition of great comedic duos, from Laurel and Hardy to Vladimir and Estragon from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, but there’s also a good deal of fun at the expense of scholarly life in the grand tradition of academic satire, such as in this passage about the publication of W.’s most recent book:
                ‘W.’s book has come out, he says. His editor went down to dine with W. and brought him twenty copies of his own book... His book is better than him, W. and I both agree. It’s greater. What’s it about?, I ask him of a particularly difficult section. He’s got no idea, he says.’
                This book is full of wonderful, little comic scenes, most of them initiated by W.’s barbs at his friend Lars; indeed, this is suggested in the title Spurious, which technically refers to a false correlation or inference, but in this instance could similarly describe the book’s many verbal spurs—W. attacks and insults Lars in a way that’s only possible within the confines of a close relationship. And for all of its highbrow references, the novel is also written in a surprisingly plain and simple language and it’s not afraid to go lowbrow for a laugh (i.e. for a book that’s got a lot of references to philosophy, there are also quite a few dick jokes).
                Spurious is one of the funniest books I’ve read in years, and I can also say that I enjoyed reading Spurious more than any novel I’ve read this year—it’s just bad, unclean, mean-spirited fun in the best possible way. But Spurious also manages to find real warmth and humanity in the discourse of two marginal misanthropes without ever swerving into easy sentimentality. Buy one copy for yourself and extra copies for those friends you have who always end up talking about intellectual topics at parties—trust me, they need to read this book, if only to remember that the overexamined life is also not worth living." - Emmett Stinson

"Some of you will have noticed a curious phenomenon emerging across the country. I am talking about a new breed of philosophers; somewhat dishevelled-looking, ragged jumper but good shoes, a bike helmet under one arm, a not-too-demanding job (a bit of teaching, a bit of proof-reading), little money, a lot of ideas. And, crucially, a beard, not a full-blown one, just a designer stubble gotten out of hand. The image should be familiar to you, go to any literary do or political meeting and you will soon find yourself talking to one of them. They are alert, friendly, but not overly so, always keen to tell of their fresh thoughts urbi et orbi. Let’s come back to this movement later if, indeed, a movement it is.
If it is, and if there are rules for joining it, the author of Spurious qualifies, at least in the sense that he is a good talker, has plenty of ideas and, importantly, a beard (at the last count). His sidekick W. (whose real name Iyer inadvertently blurted out to a group of followers, but this is no place to disclose it) has his own facial hair ambitions: “W.’s impressed with my stubble, he says. Am I trying to grow a beard. We should both grow beards, we agree, and shake on it.”The book is a series of conversations between Lars and W., interspersed by the narrator’s accounts of damp attacking his house. They are seasoned discoursers, and to watch their verbal ping pong is equally amusing and educational.
W., Lars’ friend-cum-nemesis, seems to be the fiercer of the two. It is he who swoops on his interlocutor every now and again, urging him to admit a number of things, particularly that both of them are failures, and reminding him of their many spiritual leaders. The latter form an orderly queue; among them are Kafka, Béla Tarr, Franz Rosenzweig (who was, it transpires, Kafka’s teacher), as well as some unnamed visionaries. But it is Kafka the pair always turn to, worshipping him and blaming him for everything. Their story goes like this: … we opened The Castle. It was quite fatal - there was literature itself! We were finished.
After this brutal start, Literature [...] couldn’t help infecting our philosophysounds like the right diagnosis; however, when it comes to physical illnesses, the picture is more blurred. W. has been ill for most of his life, but never got a single thought out of his condition. He is, of course, disappointed - after all, it worked remarkably well for Kafka and Blanchot.
The friends never stop asking themselves, What would Kafka do in our place? - for instance, when contemplating whether to move to another wine bar while the night is still young. But that’s the point - Kafka would never find himself in our place, they eventually conclude. Being a beardless teetotaller, he naturally wouldn’t.
Both characters entertain plans to escape - into music, Hinduism, Greek -but these never take off. They do go on European trips though from time to time, and these palliative measures are mildly helpful. Here is an account of W.’s time in Germany: Morning to night, he drinks like a European. Steadily. That’s the secret. Sitting in Continental bars, talking to each other about the End Times and all things apocalyptic, the friends dream, for a moment, that [they] are real European intellectuals. When Lars develops a cough, his hope strengthens: “Perhaps I’ll become tubercular and that will be the making of a true European intellectual.”
Kafka’s legacy inevitably brings the conversation to Max Brod, so unselfish in his promotion of Kafka, yet so given to a vague and general pathos, [who] has always served as both our warning and our example. The narrative is, in fact, based on doubles - you are told that even the figure of the Messiah, which is constantly being evoked, is traditionally doubled. The characters themselves are no longer sure who is who in their tandem, a sense that is supported by Iyer’s apt use of third and first person. After much musing, W. declares: “We are Brod and Brod and neither of us is Kafka.”
It is, indeed, a cleverly written book, masking deep ideas - and you’ll have to read it in full for these I’m afraid -behind endless banter. You are bombarded with aphorisms in the spirit of the pedestrian is the true proletarian.The penetrating damp in Lars’ house calls for a Talmudic inquiry. It is a symbol, needless to say - whole religions have formed around less, so you stumble from damp returning to damp to a golem of damp, to, erm, damp dreams. And if W.’s crie de coeur, ‘Brods without Kafka, and what’s a Brod without a Kafka?’is a bit repetitive, his ‘Give me a sense the world’s about to end’is really uplifting.
Anyway, all this incessant chatter can get tedious, even in a slim book like this, but somehow it doesn’t. Iyer pulls it off helped by humour, and the reader happily trips over yet another joke each time the narrative becomes too heavy on ideas. The importance of humour in many things, from sex to DIY, has often been stressed, but I don’t recall anyone easing it into philosophy with such elegance. Perhaps that’s what this new movement is about - the bearded thinkers are manifestly cheerful and ply their trade without putting on their serious philosopher’s hat.
W. the ideologue sees their path through the apocalyptic towards the messianic, which will involve a lot of drinking, preferably Polish-style (apparently, Poles know how to pace themselves, unlike our boozers). Messianism and mathematics are W.’s pet subjects, although he is the first to admit he understands little of the latter - no more than the German of the book he is meticulously studying. Large quantities of Plymouth Gin are consumed during the pair’s conversations, on the rocks, no mixer mentioned, which may be the tipple to go for if you are pioneering something of this kind. There may even be a European tinge to it: while I never figured out what is that clear stuff Parisian intellectuals drink in their street cafes first thing in the morning, a friend assures me it’s gin, difficult though it is to believe.
The anxiety you feel about W.’s appearance builds up towards the end as you learn of his alarmingly hermitic habits. After all the suspense, it is a relief to find out on that he now looks increasingly “Talmudic [] with his beard and long ringlets” - it makes you want to pat yourself on the head for such insightful trend-spotting. You’ve guessed it, you’ve discovered it before everyone else has, this new European way to philosophise: grow a beard, book a budget flight, get some drinks in, interchange each sip with bite-sized wisdoms; above all, don’t take yourself too seriously, let the others do it for you. And don’t forget: for every two hirsute Brods there is a clean-shaven Kafka." - Anna Aslanyan

"While reading Lars Iyer’s recently released novel Spurious I had the curious feeling that he had somehow hacked my Gmail account and read the by-now-countless conversations I’ve had with my closest friends. My suspicion is, considering you lot keep coming around here, where posts untold were first given life in and left germs all over our respective chat archives, that if given the chance you’ll find Iyer cribbing from your conversations as well.
As with Beckett and Bernhard before him, nobody will be fooled by the apparent simplicity of Spurious. Two men, both reasonably intelligent academics, talk. And that is it, really. They talk on trains, on the phone, at the pub. There is talk of action, but no action as such. Well, no, that’s not quite true, is it? Talking is an action, too, after all. It may be more dull than, say, sex (one hopes), and more slow than a high-speed chase, but conversation, the simple being-with somebody else, is perhaps a more primal act than we, who are often bored with those with whom we have to spend time, might wish to believe. The main characters of Spurious, W. & Lars (the first-person narrator), are bound together in this primal act. They are, in fact, in talking, and I dare say only in talking, each other’s Messiah (149)—i.e., the (one) “to come” that “has come.” Fitting, perhaps, that the Messiah of a world such as ours should be so gloriously pitiful.
Throughout much of the novel, when he is not drunk, W. suffers from myriad sicknesses from which he only finds excuses not to work enough and never sufficient inspirational power to work only (i.e., to turn sickness into work itself), rendering him, he claims, very much unlike the true thinkers of old, for whom sickness and thought were indistinguishable. The only suffering his thought brings him is that borne of its (the suffering’s and the thought’s) inadequacy. For his part, Lars suffers from the debilitating promise of a sickness that is both present and not-yet present. While Lars is the foil of W.’s abusive accusations of stupidity, laziness, and cultural debasement, none of which Lars is quick to dispute, it is Lars’ sickness that provides physical form to the world in which they both live: that of the “the damp.” The walls of Lars’ kitchen, and increasingly (& eventually) his entire flat, are mysteriously wet—no expert can fathom how or why and no solution rendered. All they know is that it is coming from within the walls themselves, from between the brick exterior and plastered interior, and that it is growing; and that in growing, it is alive with spores and mold; and that in being alive, it promises only death. Money can be thrown at solving the problem, contractors consulted, etc., but is the damage already done by its having already lived? Indeed, this, too, is the question for W. & Lars, and it is one to which W., at least, believes he knows the answer:
Of course, I should take my life immediately, that would be the honourable thing, W. says. I should climb the footstool to the noose . . . But it would already be too late, that’s the problem, W. says. The sin has already been committed. The sin against existence, against the whole order of existing things. (31)
The solution to life, its cessation, as it were, always comes too late. An individual’s participation in and perpetuation of the problem, indeed, the embodiment of the problem, is both the reason for and reason against taking one’s life. There are no adequate amends to be made, only apologies.
It’s all our fault, isn’t it? The whole thing is our problem in some way, as though we were behind everything. Yes, we’re responsible. We’re resigned to it: we’re not just part of the problem, we are the problem.
The road is blocked—our road, everyone’s road. We should just get out of the way. But how can we get out of the way of ourselves? We should throw ourselves off the cliffs, we agree... But what good would it do, our bodies prone and bloody on the rocks, seagulls pecking out our eyes? How could we apologise then? Because that’s what we ought to do—we should spend our whole lives saying nothing but sorry: sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, and to everyone we meet. Sorry for what we’re doing, and what we’re about to do, sorry for what we’ve done... Who would be there to say that for us if we jumped from the cliffs? (127)
Okay, so, don’t get me wrong. For all this admittedly morbid stuff, the book is very funny. I’m not sure I’d call it “dark humor,” though. For starters, at the end of the day, if humor isn’t dark is it really all that funny? After all, even the stupidest physical humor is premised on somebody falling down or some other kind of physically violent contortion. More importantly, though, in the case of Spurious the humor doesn’t shine in spite of the bleakness but precisely because of it. You will laugh, and unlike most dark humor where the intention is that you feel a little weird for having laughed, Iyer betrays no sense that you should feel the least bit weird doing so. I laughed, for example, at the constant abuse heaped on Lars not only because in it I saw how I treat my own friends, but also because the true, eventual target of W.’s scathing comments is himself.
It’s our fault, it’s all our fault, we should at least admit that, W says. It’s our fault and particularly mine. My fault, W. says, because my existence couldn’t help but contaminate his. And his fault, somewhat at least, because he continues to allow his existence to be contaminated by mine.
But what can we do about it? To whom should we apologise? Each other? I should certainly apologise to him, W. says. I owe him a lifetime of apologies. But doesn’t he owe me an apology, too? Doesn’t he, by his continual presence in my life, perpetuate the disaster?
He gives me license, W. says. He gives me encouragement—but why? In the end, perhaps I’m only a figment of his imagination, a kind of nightmare, he says. Can’t you see I’m burning?, I ask him in his dream. But in the end, he’s burning, W. says. He’s the one who set himself on fire. (32)
The above quote does a lot of very heavy lifting, I think, and provides strong evidence that Iyer is not merely some blogger-philosopher “playing” author. (I’ve not actually ever seen that accusation, but my cynicism is such that I expect others are far more silently cynical than even I.) Throughout Spurious, one has to pay close attention to the use of quotation marks. Sometimes W. is explicitly quoted, whereupon he will refer to himself as “I.” Other times, and far more commonly, Lars is citing (but not quoting) W., and will, as such, dispense with the punctuational pretense of quoting his friend. Rarely is there prolonged confusion as to who is the appropriate referent, but there was, for me anyway, cause for a certain hesitation and re-reading or glancing ahead to make sure I wasn’t misdirecting things. The result is that the mutual “contamination” between W. & Lars mentioned above is played out in our reading about it. Iyers’ professional research on the aesthetic philosophy of Maurice Blanchot may even allow us to venture one further: that because such a practice forces a heightened investment and attention on the part of the reader to the relatively mundane, “mechanical” aspects of writing—punctuation, grammar, etc.—the very process of our reading itself highlights a similar “contamination” between the reader & the novel. If that is so, apologies are in order all around (mea culpa): so goes the infinite conversation...
Fortunately, the contamination/conversation with Spurious is very much worth it. I recommend it without reservation." - Brad Johnson

"Spurious began life as a blog, and its genesis shows: the chapters are short, like blogposts, and the consistency of voice and repetition of themes both emphasises and distracts the reader from the fact that there is not much directional plot. There is a little bit of plot, about damp growing in the narrator’s home (“The greatest experts on damp are completely baffled”), but a real plot would be unwelcome here. It would have driven me on and prevented me from stopping on almost every page to smile, think, or sense a cartoon lightbulb of understanding begin to glow above my head before popping out just as I concentrated on it. (With a plot, the lightbulb would never even have got going.) Instead, it has a spiral narrative – a Spirograph narrative! – turning on itself so you can see the same things passing over and over, a little closer or further away, from a different angle or level of familiarity.
Spurious is full of paradox. It’s about everything and nothing. It’s a funny book which uses exclamation marks (I know!). It provokes thought while evading easy understanding. Its characters speak simply about knotty concepts. The characters are the narrator, Lars, and his friend W. Most of what Lars tells us is reporting what W. says to him: we know more of what W. thinks than of what Lars does. W. speaks his mind (and Lars speaks W.’s mind too): “‘When did you know,’ W. says with great insistence. ‘When did you know you weren’t going to amount to anything?’” He is relentlessly critical of Lars. “It’s my fault, W. says. Everything went wrong when he met me.” But the lightness of touch, the artfulness in the repetition, means that it sounds not like bullying but an exaggerated, hyperreal version of banter between friends.
The conversations are short but feel like excerpts from one never-ending exchange, like arcs cut from a circle. Subjects and people recur: Béla Tarr, Maurice Blanchot, Franz Rosenzweig. Not mentioned, but all over the book, are Thomas Bernhard and Samuel Beckett. The narrative container of Lars reporting W.’s thoughts is pure Old Masters, and Vladimir and Estragon could not be more simultaneously comic and tragic. “These are the end times, but who knows it but us?” Lars asks. Still, cheer up:
W. and I never think about our deaths or anything like that. That would be pure melodrama. Besides, if we died, others would come along to replace us. Our position is structural, we’ve always been convinced of that. We’re only signs or syndromes of some great collapse, and our deaths will be no more significant than those of summer flies in empty rooms.
Also appearing through the book is Kafka. “Our lives each took a wrong turn when we opened The Castle. It was quite fatal: there was literature itself! We were finished.” Lars and W. define themselves by what they will never live up to. W. hopes that his regular bouts of ill-health will give him the genius of a Kafka. “But W.’s illnesses lead nowhere, he says. They always disappoint him.” Ultimately Lars and W. recognise that neither of them is Kafka, they are both Max Brod, whom they revere for rescuing Kafka’s works, and revile for his “stupid” commentaries on Kafka’s works. (Brod, like Lars and W., was no Kafka.) “‘But we’re essentially joyful,’ says W., ‘that’s what will save us.’” And they are: what Lars and W. represent is an endless intellectual curiosity, on everything from messianism to Peter Andre (though the pop cultural references for me were the least funny part of the book). Such interest in things can only ever be bright-eyed and vigorous, and funny even when it’s horrible. “‘Go on, tell me,’ says W., getting excited. ‘How fat are you now?’”
Lars and W. travel in the book, mostly from the south-west of England where W. lives to the north-east, Lars’s home. But they may as well stay in the same room, conversing all the time. What W. wants is for every conversation to be “something great, something life-changing.” His fantasy is “a group of friends who could make one another think.” He longs for “the twenty-second century, or the twenty-third, when things might start getting better again.” He wants all conversations “to go from the apocalyptic to the messianic.” He is insufferable, but inseparable from Lars. They are like two aspects of the same character, the warring mind of someone who acknowledges his limitations but nags at himself for accepting them.
How far apart, too, are the author and his characters? So far I have written about Spurious as though there was no author, so effectively does the book have its own life. Iyer has given an interview where he explains the origins of the blog and the novel, though I am trying to forget it as it imposes too much on my own reading. Anyway, when W. has a book published toward the end of Spurious, Lars agrees that “His book is better than him.” Writers suffer illness, get distracted, talk rubbish. Their books endure. Lars fears “the empty time which makes thought possible.” Spurious is fully attuned to our times, where thought is impossible because of our inability to stay off Twitter, and with no empty time we never properly think. W. wants friends who can make him think. Too bad: he will just have to make do with books that can be friends, books that make you think and entertain you at the same time, like this one." - John Self

“W. reminds me of the Hasidic lesson Scholem recounts towards the end of his great study of Jewish mysticism,” says Lars, the narrator of Spurious, late in the book. W., Lars’s unnamed friend, goes on to retell Scholem’s story of the four Rabbis: The first goes to the woods, builds a fire, meditates, prays, and the difficult task he hopes to achieve is accomplished. Three more Rabbis follow, but, with each passing generation, knowledge of the first Rabbi’s ways is gradually lost: first, how to light the fire, then how to say the prayers, and, finally, which spot to visit in the woods. The last Rabbi says, in Iyer’s words, “We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done.” W. moves Scholem’s story one generation further: “There was a fifth rabbi Scholem forgot—well, he wasn’t really a rabbi, says W. His name is Lars, about whom all too much is known. He forgot where the woods were, and that he even had a task.… He set fire to himself and his friend W. with his matches and the woods were burned to the ground. And then the whole world caught fire, the oceans boiled and the sky burned away and it was the end of days.”
Iyer’s twist on Scholem’s parable is a perfect microcosm of his debut novel: a humorous, devastated tale of obsession with philosophy, one that engenders the feeling that the moment for serious thinking has long since passed. Scholem details the gradual attenuation of a type of knowledge for which we might nevertheless find a sufficient substitute in storytelling. Iyer’s novel is about the attenuation of knowledge without recompense. In that sense, it’s about the apocalypse.
The dread in Spurious has something in common with the novels of Thomas Bernhard, though it’s funnier dread. Mostly, Lars just parrots his own cosmic inadequacy, as pointed out to him by W.: “As we look out to sea, a great shadow seems to move under the water. He can see it, says W.—‘Look: the kraken of your idiocy.’” W. and Lars are like Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, if Vladimir were the most withering member of Estragon’s tenure committee.
The two friends, beaten-down professors of higher education, are stuck in the academic hamster-wheel: making conference presentations, wheedling grants, and publishing unreadable books full of typos and misprints that nobody will read anyway. Still, they read Jewish mystics and wait for their own Messiah, a Kafka to whom they could attach themselves as Max Brods, whose works they can publish “piece by piece for a grateful humanity, with our stupid editorial comments that generations of scholars would read to one another in disgust and amusement.” Midway through the novel, Lars discovers that a damp mold has begun to eat through his plaster walls, shorting out his electricity—one more sign of the apocalypse of damp, pervading stupidity. He spends the novel searching for illumination, only to find he can’t keep the lights on in his own house.
True to its interest in Messianism and Jewish mysticism, Spurious is, finally, a book about waiting. W. and Lars wait, as Beckett’s characters do, as Kafka’s do. It might also be a book about salvation, about joy—unless salvation is impossible, and joy another symptom of idiocy. This novel has a seductive way of always doubling back on itself, scorching the earth but extracting its own strange brand of laughter from its commitment to despair. In time, a sixth Rabbi might read it and believe there is something left for us to know, stories for us to tell, even after the world has burned." —Casey Walker

In Spurious, Lars Iyer, a blogger and Maurice Blanchot scholar, explores the absurd and dysfunctional extremes of male bonding. Evoking literary duos like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and Othello and Iago, Iyer's portrait of two insufferable academics fumbling for enlightenment illustrates what the author comically calls the most honorable cruelty: friendship.
More dramaturgic than narrative, Spurious focuses on the prolix conversations of two supercilious Canadian critical theorists, W. and Lars, as they meander across Europe and sift through the history of continental philosophy. W., appropriately christened, in the high-modernist tradition of Kafka, as a single letter, is the alpha male—a pompous authority on German existentialism (though from Toronto, he considers himself "old European") who regrets his seduction by the novel, preferring the inviolability of calculus and God. Lars, on the other hand, is slovenly and undisciplined; his only redeeming trait, according to his best friend, is a total lack of shame. While W. pontificates, Lars can only muse; while W. aspires to "genius," Lars is content with his low-level academic status. To W., the only thing more despicable than Lars's mental and physical languor is his modest domicile, unkempt and lately infested with mold—a portent of something sinister for the frustrated existentialist. "You are the sign of the End," W. announces to his friend mockingly, with the apocalyptic drama of a Talmudic prophet.
In fact, religion, or the incessant need to discuss it, provides much of the wink-wink humor in Spurious. W. and Lars hash over religious anxieties largely forgotten in contemporary letters: the coming of the Messiah, the death of God, the categorical imperative, and mathematical mysticism, all discourses supposedly purged in the existential fires of Heidegger, Jaspers, Levinas, and Kafka. Neither scholar belongs wholly to the postcontemporary zeitgeist, so their anachronistic conversations are recycled ad nauseam, like a tragicomic illustration of Nietzsche's eternal return. Iyer writes these exchanges in the style of a schizoid Laurel and Hardy routine, sometimes to sardonic effect. "How has it come to this?" W. constantly asks, one foot planted in the past and the other hovering in midflight above the apocalypse. Lars, in the role of bemused idiot, is dutifully quiet. "We're fucked, everything's fucked," W. cries. He then backpedals: "But we're essentially joyful... that's what will save us." Meanwhile, Lars can only manage lines like, "Do you love me?"
Solipsistic and chatty, Spurious is a comedy in the vein of Bernhard's The Loser or Beckett's The Unnameable. Echoes of "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on" haunt every scene. But unlike those forebears, Iyer's caustic parody suffers from a reliance on a single shtick—the ridicule of ideologues—and the joke begins to seem like sketch comedy. It's as though Iyer were rehearsing W. and Lars for some slapstick colloquium, an event that, appropriately, we wait for but never arrives. A book devoted almost entirely to the undermining of ideas, Spurious too often gets stuck in its own head. For all its dialogue, it's hard not to feel like the book is talking only to itself." - Erik Morse

"Spurious is Lars Iyer’s debut novel, but not his first book – he’s published a couple of philosophy texts before – and it shows. This is a guy who knows his intellectual history; the novel is laden with references to Kafka, Tarkovsky, messianism, Bela Tarr, Rosenzweig, mathematical theory and more. Iyer’s narrator, Lars (just to get you thinking) and his ‘slightly more successful friend’, W, both writers and academics, wander back and forth across Europe and between their respective homes in Newcastle and Plymouth, railing against their professional and personal inadequacies, failures and fears. Or, at least, W. does; Lars is his sounding-board, his whippping-boy, his alter-ego – the Brod to his Kafka, as he keeps saying, before worrying that he’s also Brod, and there’s no Kafka at all. Lars, on the other hand, is more concerned with the toxic fungus that’s taking over his damp-riddled flat. And they’re both pretty worried about where the next drink is coming from.
So it’s a novel of ideas; a meandering and repetitive exploration of ennui, angst and booze as the two of them talk and exchange notes and make and break all manner of self-improvement plans. And, okay, it sounds bleak and overly intellectual and maybe a little stifling. And in some ways, it is – this isn’t one for somebody looking for a plot in their books. But Iyer manages to intersperse all the philosophical debates with brilliant flashes of humour – there’s a discussion about man-bags that had me laughing out loud – and because W. is constantly retracing the same debates, digging through his own thought-processes and insulting Lars along the way, the Godot-esque sameness of his diatribes becomes funnier as it goes along. And Spinoza shares page-space with Peter Andre; our heroes worry about their flowery shirts when everybody else is wearing black; they compare illnesses and get stressed about how few foreign languages they can speak – being able to read them doesn’t, apparently, count. If you’re getting bogged down by the heavier discussions, you can be sure the author won’t allow it to become too serious; W. will puncture the intellectual bubble by launching into a rant about the damning size of his friend’s belly. The chapters are very short, too, so despite the lack of any actual action, the book moves along quickly. The book started life as a blog, and many of the chapters were posted there, both before and after the book’s publication date, so that gives a sense of the digestible size of each entry/section (and gives you a chance to try before you buy).
W. is sure that we’ve reached the End Times, that he and Lars are witnessing the beginning of the apocalypse. He seems to mainly base this conclusion on Jewish and mathematical texts he has trouble decoding, and on his own lack of intellectual prowess, so it’s hard to take him seriously – but Iyer shores it up with the parallel story of Lars’ encroaching damp and mould. ‘I’m stranded in space between the armies of damp’, he tells W. And as W.’s sense of foreboding increases, so the mould advances, until Lars says, ‘I think it’s speaking through me, a word of damp from within, in my frosty, spore-filled breath and in every line I write.’ Although Lars is our narrator, the story he tells is W.’s in reported dialogue, and Lars himself is a mostly silent witness as well as the victim of his friend’s savage portrait of him – yet, if Lars is right, and the alien, poisonous damp is speaking through him, perhaps we’re not really hearing W. at all, but an actual apocalyptic voice as the fungus takes over… So Spurious is not only learned and funny, but kind of scary, too. The descriptions of the damp and its takeover of Lars’ home reminded me of Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas, with its poetic and repulsive descriptions of decay and entropy.
But maybe even more than the apocalypse or the impossibility of serious thought, Spurious is about friendship; W.’s complaints and critiques and insults mask a deep love for his friend Lars, a love that binds them together and lets them rise above the pretty awful circumstances of their lives (or, their lives as W. sees them – he’s got a nice house and a decent wife and at least two books published, after all). At the beginning we hear that Lars is a terrible influence on W., that he speaks ‘unending bilge’; at the end we see that their friendship is the foundation of everything: ‘But perhaps the plain is the friendship between us on which we are both lost, he says.’ So maybe not all is lost, despite the damp, despite their failures, despite their drunkenness and lack of ideas – they’ve still got each other, and they’ll still carry on.
Any Cop?: It’s definitely in the avant-garde corner of the ring, so I’d steer clear if you’re in the market for a rom-com or a nicely-plotted crime story. But it’s got such a great balance of the serious and thought-provoking (Kafka pops up everywhere), the bodily grotesque (digestive complaints, anyone?), and the bitingly funny references to contemporary culture, that I bet more of you will fall for it than you’d think." - Valerie O’Riordan

"Lars Iyer’s Spurious, based on the popular blog spurious.typepad.com, brings us into the relationship between the narrator, Lars, and his former professor, W. Lars and W. are colleagues yet W. always retains the upper hand in the relationship, belittling Lars constantly and reminding him of his own success as compared with Lars’s failures.
W., a pretentious, self-proclaimed thinker, reader, and writer, occasionally has moments of self-doubt and vulnerability in an otherwise narcissistic personal universe. He takes every possible opportunity to abuse Lars about his writing, lifestyle, lack of intelligence, wasted potential, and weight, even declaring that Lars will eventually need to wear elasticized trousers like those of American professors. W.’s obsession with messianism leads him to spend countless hours reading books he does not comprehend, traversing his life of self-declared intellectualism with his lion’s mane of ringlets and a manbag full of life’s necessities.
The duo travels quite frequently, drinking and discussing their shortcomings, alternating between highs of satisfaction with their intelligence and lows of accepting their failures. They are constantly seeking a leader, and have actually had three unwilling examples, to expand their lives and pull them along into a new intellectual realm.
Lars’s life is complicated by the intense, rare mold that is taking over every inch of his flat, damply weighing down on his emotions, furniture, and lungs. He makes halfhearted attempts to fix his flat as the mold threatens to leave him homeless. He calls in several experts, who are completely baffled by this hostile takeover, but he is mostly content to live in a moldy, unhealthy environment. It becomes a race against nature’s clock as W. harasses Lars to get some work done every day while Lars wonders if his moldy home will collapse around his coughing shoulders at any given moment.
Iyer has given us an anti-climactic novel about the dangers of complacency, with an amusing friend/abuser in the pretentious W. The relationship between W. and Lars has moments of harsh verbal criticism, tempered with some of tender concern between friends, and a white elephant of mold." - Tatiaana L. Laine

"Spurious is a novel of the rambling misadventures of W. and his sidekick/acolyte/protégé/collaborator, Lars. They travel about a bit -- in Europe and England --, they go for walks, but mostly they just go in circles. They have great ambition (well, W. says he does; Lars is a pretty hopeless case from the get-go), but little follow-through; they set themselves goals and don't even come close - they just fall flat, over and over and over.
       W. and Lars are of the intellectual class, but they're overwhelmed by the realization that they are not true thinkers. They aspire to an existence on this higher plane, but it is beyond them -- and what frustrates them is how keenly aware they are of the fact that it is beyond them. W. repeatedly tries to immerse himself in true thought -- tackling (or at least going through the motions of doings so) Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption or higher mathematics -- but he doesn't find he gets anywhere with it.
       Kafka is an ideal for them -- but an unreachable and hence also devastatingly disheartening one. But if not Kafka then they at least aspire to follow a thinker of Kafka's magnitude; instead, all they have is each other. "Which one of us is Kafka and which Brod ? W. muses", but it's not a serious question: W. has already relegated Lars to the position of disciple (i.e. he can not possibly qualify for the Kafkaesque-position) -- but W. realizes he can't either:
We're both Brod, he says, and that's the pity of it. Brod without Kafka, and what's a Brod without a Kafka ?
       This identity-crisis is compounded by their intellectual crises (as well as the occasional real-world concerns: W. worries about the 'End of Times'; Lars worries, more mundanely, about his sopping, mildewed walls, practically weeping water, regardless of what steps he takes). They recognize the importance of thought -- that abstract, intellectual ideal -- but also recognize that it is out of their reach:
We cultivate the external signs of thinking, W. says. We can do good impressions of thinkers, he says, but we're not thinkers. We've failed at the level of thought.
       But at least they have each other - even if: "A few days in my company, says W., and he feels iller than he's ever felt."
       It's an odd relationship they have, and difficult to explain:
     W. has thought up many excuses for me. He's had to account for me at length to his friends. Explain him !, they demand. What's going on ? And W. has to explain, as best, how it all started, how our collaboration began.
     But what can he say, really ? There's a limit to every explanation, which is to say to the sheer physical fact of my existence. There you are, says W. And before that fact, what can anyone do but shrug?
       It's also a relationship that is both competitive and mutually supportive (in a bizarre sort of way). W. constantly rubs in how he his, if not a true thinker either, at least a bit smarter, a bit more driven.
       Typically:
     'What time did you get up to work this morning ? says W. Five. - 'I was up at four. At four !', W. says.
       Why Lars puts up with the frequently condescending -- and always superior (even as he wallows in his own inferiority) W. - is not entirely clear; this is Lars' account, but the focus is largely on W. and his wisdom (or whatever it is he's spouting). Of course, sometimes Lars seems just to be trying to get W.'s goat, playing Doom on his mobile phone, or reading about Katie Price and Peter Andre in some gossip magazine...
       Spurious is an amusing take on intellectual frustration and anomie, its two characters going through the motions in a world where its unclear what the right motions are any longer. It's not like W. and Lars aren't onto something - yet those limbs they venture out on offer little support (or satisfactions). Occasionally they'll resort to excesses of drink and food (Lars is apparently quite rotund), but it's the intellectual sphere they want to lose themselves in -- but as they try they largely find themselves lost in the entirely wrong way, flailing for some hold which eludes them.
       They do have each other, less audience for each other than alter egos, and Spurious has much of the buddy-movie to it, with its pair of Laurel and Hardy academics struggling on the periphery.
       Spurious is good, fun intellectual slapstick -- even if it's constantly failed protagonists only get readers so far." - M. A. Orthofer

"Spurious (which began life as a blog) consists of a series of short, loosely connected chapters that generally concentrate on the sometimes lofty, often base pronouncements of a character named W.
"You should do a book, says W., if only so I can hear you whine. I like it when you whine in your presentations. Like a stuck pig, crying out! No, it's more plaintive than that. Like a sad ape. A sad ape locked up with his faeces."
The person to whom "W." makes this typically delightful suggestion is called "Lars Iyer" – and that's not the only thing he has in common with the author of Spurious. "Lars Iyer", like Lars Iyer, is an academic living in the north-east of England. He has done extensive studies on Blanchot. He is also capable, as he states in this book – and as this book also proves – of "moments of illumination". In these moments, W. says, "the clouds do clear… You manage to speak sense… or something like sense."
What this "sense" amounts to is a moot point – and one of the many pleasurably confounding questions in the novel. When John Self reviewed the book he described feeling a "cartoon lightbulb of understanding begin to glow above my head before popping out just as I concentrated on it." I know precisely what he means. Or rather, I understand his feeling for the imprecision of the book – and its fleeting moments of "illumination". Iyer gives us enough to think we can grasp the truth – but the truth always eludes us.
So is the author the same person as the narrator? In some ways, perhaps. But then, how are we really to know? And can anyone have lived, as Iver does, in a house so full of damp that he can hear the water flow and his walls have turned brown, then black, then pink, then produced mushrooms? Can he have a real friend as wonderfully rude as W.? Does it matter, anyway? He gives us clues, but no answers. Especially on the matter of "sense", he confounds us. W. himself claims that when those clouds clear and Lars Iyer does seem to make sense it is probably just "the usual pathos and hot air".
Elsewhere, W. is less complimentary:
"What's that name Hollywood directors use when they want to disclaim involvement with a film… that's how you should sign your work."
"Food's a gift, W. says. The greatest of gifts, which I desecrate every time I visit him."
"What are the signs of the End?, I ask W. – 'You. You are a sign of the End', says W."
"When I die, W. says he's going to be my literary executor. Delete, delete, delete, that's what he's going to do."
It's wonderful. I'd recommend the book for its insults alone. But there's more to it than caustic wit. For a start, by some indefinable alchemy, the ruder W. is to Iyer, the more loving he begins to seem. It becomes a touching testament to friendship – and to the charm of extreme rudeness. There are real insights into these struggling minds. Almost in passing, it explains W.'s and Iyer's unremarkable careers as academic philosophers, the satisfaction they take from Europe and each other's houses in Plymouth and Newcastle (places W. likes because they are "peripheral" and "shit") and their doughty over-consumption of alcohol. There isn't much of a story arc, aside from that relating to the ever-growing damp problem in Iyer's flat. Even so, by the end, there's a strong sense that the characters have developed, moved on – or at least stubbornly resisted change. There's a strong sense of knowing them. Or thinking we know them.
Meanwhile, even if it never quite makes sense, there's always a feeling that the book is, as the reliable Steve Mitchelmore effuses on the back cover, "a profound philosophical rhapsody". The two men worry over End Times, finding purpose, staying sane in a disappointing world. In the end it leaves you no real answers, just more questions. It doesn't add up to much that you can hold. But that too is part of its charm. It's a book about failing – and then failing better. W. and Lars amount to nothing – and their tragedy is that they are fully aware of that fact. As W. says, they're clever enough to understand what it means to be great – but they will never achieve greatness: a thought that would be thoroughly depressing, except that is presented (like so much else in the book) with such lightness and wit. W. likes to say when he comes to one of his depressing conclusions, at just the wrong moment: "We're essentially joyful. That's what will save us."
That – and the fact that the two men are so very entertaining. At one point, surveying the chaos at the back of Iver's house, W. brings up an alternative vision:
"Béla Tarr would discern what is absolute about my yard, W. says. He'd register every detail in a twenty minute tracking shot. The sewage, the concrete, the bin bags and rotting plants … the yard would mean more to Béla Tarr than all our nonsense."
What W says is possibly true. Béla Tarr would find more meaning than you can hope to from Spurious. But then, his films are dull: agonisingly slow, even if you watch them (as I have done) on fast forward. Spurious, on the other hand, is joyful. I loved it." - Sam Jordison

"There was a time some years ago when it began to rain in my apartment. I was eighteen, living alone in a large city, going to school all day and working all evening; distracted, in other words, and perhaps not as on-the-ball as I should have been when the shower started dripping. The drip turned into a permanent stream of scathingly hot water, and then the bathroom, being small and virtually airtight—neither of the apartment’s windows opened—filled with steam.
Steam, of course, condenses into water, and within a day or two the bathroom had turned almost subtropical. Raindrops fell gently from the ceiling; paint bubbled; water slid down the walls and pooled in the corners; a mushroom appeared in an unreachable corner. I imagined the damage being done to the paint job was irreparable, but this struck me as a reasonable trade-off for the landlord’s failure to do anything about the cockroaches.
All this to say that I feel some kinship with Lars, the narrator of Lars Iyer’s Spurious, a debut novel and a meditation on friendship, failure, the apocalypse, messianism, and mold. Lars’ apartment is being overtaken by a mysterious damp, something altogether darker and more sinister than the indoor rain I dealt with in Toronto all those years ago, originating from somewhere within his kitchen wall. Brown waves of damp spread over the plaster. The wall is wet to the touch. Florid mold blooms in patches and spores drift through the air. Water can be heard rushing somewhere behind the bricks. Experts in the field are baffled.
The damp, it seems, might be symptomatic of larger problems. Specifically, the world is coming to an end. Lars is a writer, as is his “slightly more successful” friend W., and they’re united by, among other things, the certainty that we’re living in the End of Times. It isn’t the easiest of friendships—“One of us is dragging the other down, W. and I decide, but which one? Is it him or me?”—but there’s a certain amount of shared history. They’ve been friends for a while now:
W. remembers when I was up and coming, he tells me. He remembers the questions I used to ask, and how they would resound beneath the vaulted ceilings. —‘You seemed so intelligent then’, he says. I shrug. ‘But when any of us read your work…’, he says, without finishing the sentence.
Lars and W. are oddly inseparable, despite W.’s fondness for peppering Lars with verbal abuse. He does it out of love, he says. (“‘Yes, I love you’, says W. ‘You see, I can talk about love. I can express my feelings. Not like you’.”)
They are somewhat obsessed with Kafka, although since theirs is a literary friendship, considerations of Kafka raise an unsettling question: which one of them is Kafka, and which one of them is Max Brod? They might both be Brods. It’s a possibility. Actually, it seems increasingly probable. They’re stuck in the End of Times, and they are neither the men nor the intellectuals whom they’d like to be. “’Compare our friendship,’
says W., ‘to that of Levinas and Blanchot’. Of their correspondence, only a handful of letters survive. Of ours, which takes the form of obscenities and drawings of cocks exchanged on Microsoft Messenger, everything survives, although it shouldn’t. Of their near daily exchanges, nothing is known; of our friendship, everything is known, since I, like an idiot, put it all on the internet.
It’s true, he did put it all on the internet. Spurious originated as a blog.
They aspire to think truly original thoughts, Lars and W., but also, they want to be led. They long for meaning, for direction, for better gin. They are mentorless, and they would like to find a guide through the intellectual wilderness. It isn’t that they’ve been unable to find one—they’ve gone through three leaders so far—but Lars and W. make the same misstep each time. Each time they find a leader they go and tell him that he’s their leader, at which point the leaders understandably distance themselves.
They suspect that if one of them were to have a truly original thought, just one, that might elevate them and change everything. This hasn’t happened yet, and they’re adrift and painfully aware of their shortcomings in a world that seems to them to have come undone; despite this, they’re “essentially joyful,” and the book has a marvelous lightness of touch. In the meantime, something terrible is happening in Lars’ apartment. If the world’s moving toward the end of days, the apartment’s headed there even faster.
The book’s flaw is its insistence on repetition. Several things are mentioned two or three times, and it’s not at all clear to me that the repetition serves the work. We know that W.’s friends prefer W.’s girlfriend Sal to W., for instance, because we’re told this twice. On the same page.
But the repetition is a minor qualm. Iyer has a remarkable control of tone. It’s the End of Times, the narrator and the only other character in the book ache with self-disgust, most of the text is concerned with Lars and W.’s endless yammering, there are chapters about mold. The kind of book, in other words, that sounds like it ought to be unreadable, but manages to be intelligent, wildly entertaining, and unexpectedly moving instead." - Emily St. John Mandel

"Friendship demands one expose oneself, or better, that one allow oneself to be exposed in the ecstasis that does not permit us to remain mired in tautology. - Lars Iyer, Blanchot’s Communism
Spurious cannot be reviewed like the books of so many dead authors, or even so many living ones. Lars Iyer is a blogger whose site is named Spurious, and now he has published a book named Spurious with a narrator named Lars. The book relates closely to the blog in content, in style, and in spirit. (It shares little in common with his two academic books on the French writer and philosopher Maurice Blanchot, however.) Some of the content from the book has appeared on the blog as daily entries, before and even after the book was published.
I am a blogger as well. We share some of the same tastes: Thomas Bernhard, Bela Tarr, Andrei Tarkovsky, Smog. Lars and I were both anonymous bloggers for a time. We did not want a public persona influencing our reader’s impressions of our work. Now we are not anonymous. I decided it was futile. Just ask Tao Lin. By signing up with Melville House, Tao Lin’s publisher, I gather Lars agrees.
Those who take Spurious the blog, and thus Spurious the book, as a pathetic intellectual burlesque are missing the great complexity offered by each. It is a subtle complexity, obscured by misdirection. But the richness in the book is available to those who let themselves be misdirected and then misdirect themselves. It takes some effort on the part of the reader to unsituate him or herself, however. Because this book does read like a sequence of blog posts on Spurious, and because it plays on the border between fiction and non-fiction like so many blogs, it demands a different sort of reading than one would give a novel that comes with nothing but a name attached. The chorus of Larses in the book, the blog, and Iyer’s interviews speak with greatly overlapping voices. But listen to this chorus of David’s and all will be made clear.
Stylistically, Iyer seems to be writing in a tradition that draws on an obsessive concern with the minutiae of language, not minimalism as much as pointillism, making every gesture apparent even as it is part of the gestalt. One thinks of some of the authors mentioned in Spurious: Beckett, Blanchot, Bernhard, as well as Rene Crevel. There is also the contemporary writer Gabriel Josipovici, who strongly shows Blanchot’s influence in his sparse, echoing fiction. Like Blanchot, he works with the most minimal of collateral indicators, trying to bring out through small repetition and variation the tremendous power of language. By contrast, Beckett was the most prodigious at this sort of language-work, but he generally operated at a higher level of abstraction and with a more absurdist sensibility. The others on this list work with recognizably human situations, albeit ones shorn of all but the most significant particulars.
Iyer brings a far lighter touch and broad humor to Blanchot and Josipovici’s approach. In so doing, he creates a more personable, human comedy in place of Beckett’s scatology and burlesque, resulting in a deadpan tone reminiscent of George Perec’s materialist 1960s comedy Things. In Spurious, the narrator and W. travel around Europe while discussing various angst-ridden intellectual matters. Life details are mostly elided in favor of existential generalizations. The narrator and W. like the sort of deeply serious art that another blogger friend of mine once described, not inaccurately, as “dopey”: Andrei Tarkovsky, Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, Franz Rosenzweig, Palace Music, Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Creators who are searching, reaching, profound, bombastic. Rather masculine too: Lars and W. manage to go the whole book without discussing a single female. (Recommendation to Lars and W.: Simone Weil.)
I like some of those artists and writers too, though I have to wonder about anyone who seems to consume them so exclusively. To see why, let me give an example from Blanchot’s “Literature and the Right to Death”:
But at the same time, a death that results in being represents an absurd insanity, the curse of existence—which contains within itself both death and being and is neither being nor death. Death ends in being: this is man’s hope and his task, because nothingness itself helps to make the world, nothingness is the creator of the world in man as he works and understands. Death ends in being: this is man’s laceration, the source of his unhappy fate, since by man death comes to being and by man meaning rests on nothingness.
This could read as either pompous nonsense or the deepest truth, depending on the day. One only truly gains from those mystics if one recognizes that, when imbibed in a less than melodramatically morose state, they must appear dopey. Relentless attraction to mystics who promise a Gnostic escape from the world is unhealthy, since the promise is always reneged upon.
Clearly, the narrator and W. have read too much Blanchot too frequently, for Blanchot, among others, only exists as a sort of superluminary, an unimpeachable authority to rank with the highest deities. They speak of Blanchot and their other heroes with a worshipful familiarity reminiscent of Pamela des Barres’ groupie memoir I’m with the Band. One wonders if this could be responsible for their plight, for, it is as though Vladimir and Estragon spent all of Waiting for Godot talking about what a great guy Godot was. It heightens the pomposity, and so W. and the narrator are always melodramatically morose. But frequently quite funny.
This is mostly a side issue, though. Like Monty Python’s invocations of Proust and Pasolini, the talk of these intellectual names and matters is not meant to require any knowledge of the source material beyond their being high-falutin’ names. (Most unlike, for example, Alan Bennett’s Bertrand Russell sketch in Beyond the Fringe, mostly constructed for fellow Oxbridgers.) The joke is the extent to which these names can be invoked in inappropriate, desultory, or trivializing ways. For example, one of my favorite bits:
W. reminds me of when I inspected his teaching. He drew diagrams for the students, two stick men. What was he explaining? Hegel and religion, he thinks.—”This is Lars,” he said, and drew a tiny cock on one of the stick men, “and this is me,” he said, and drew a huge cock on the other.
Cartoonist and New Yorker cover artist Ivan Brunetti was a master at this sort of humor, as when he described a new comic strip as “A neo-Sophoclean exegesis on the nature of morality, with subtle layers of epistemological subtext and not infrequent structural allusions to the novels of J.-K. Huysmans.” The title: “Grandma Farts Blood.” The narrator and W.’s relentless solipsism sometimes negates some of the intensity that makes this sort of rage so piercing, but when it connects, it’s hilarious.
A few of the particulars are important, however. Specifically, one is that the narrator is Hindu-affiliated in some way, whereas W. was raised Catholic by Jewish converts. W. talks about the Messiah and the apocalypse a fair bit, while pointing out that the narrator is exempt from the general framework:
But there’s no messianism in me whatsoever, W. acknowledges. I’m far beyond that. Some process has completed itself in me, he says. Something, a whole history has been brought to an end.
Not that it stops W.’s abuse. But W. does tend to assign the concept of infinity to the narrator’s domain. W. orientalizes the narrator, trying to turn him into an Other. W. himself doesn’t seem to know much about Hinduism; at one point he errs quite badly by mixing up Hinduism and Buddhism, though the narrator doesn’t bother to correct him.
The aforementioned W. is the domineering presence of Spurious, the top to the narrator’s bottom. He abuses the narrator relentlessly, who seems to take it mostly in stride, reporting it without affect, perhaps enjoying it. W. is quite catholic in his attacks: the narrator may be a shameless ignoramus who’s bad at Greek, but he is also a fatso with a small penis. W.’s voice seems to bleed into the narrator’s, as his direct discourse becomes indirect discourse and then spills into unassigned narration. Assorted riffs—on joy, the Messiah, seriousness, and others—repeat themselves with varying levels of attribution.
But the narrator’s exoticism, as W. perceives it, seems to wreck the comedy routine. W. is trying to do a sort of Jewish shtick with the narrator, but the narrator is a flat, inadequate straight man. Gordon Lish tried for this sort of tragicomedy at times in Extravaganza and My Romance, telling jokes that weren’t funny. But here one of the duo isn’t being helpful. There are two types of straight men: suckers and pricks. W. wants the narrator to be a sucker but he’d even settle for him being a prick. Since the narrator steadfastly refuses to be either, W. protests increasingly, but all he hears about is the rising damp that comes to take on more importance for the narrator than his conversations with W.
Aside from that one point, though, the intellectual stuff remains a prop. The two of them are having conversations about the pain of living and getting along with one another and the rest of humanity, and the intellectual accoutrements just happen to be their particular milieu. It is best not to pay too much attention to them, though Lars has compiled a helpful glossary on the Melville House website explaining the references for the curious.
And that umbilicus that connects the book to the Internet is what makes the book so odd, because the abstract narrator and the mysterious “Lars Iyer” take on so many more layers in its light. I can see Lars promoting his book online, and I can see that Lars has been reprinting
reviews of Spurious on his page. Lars seems an awful lot like the narrator. The back cover says that “Lars Iyer tells the story of a writer very like himself,” so that’s not just my imagination. I see that on Spurious, Lars has said of one review that “the critic hasn’t read the book closely, and is a bit of a show-off,” so I’d better watch out.
But is it Lars or the narrator who is commenting on the reviews? I don’t want to annoy either of them. One or the other may comment on this review, and then I’ll have to respond so that he won’t have the last word. Steve Mitchelmore, another literary blogger, calls Spurious a “profound philosophical rhapsody” in a blurb on the back. He recently called my blog a “pile of shit.” I want to title this review “PILE OF SHIT REVIEWS PROFOUND PHILOSOPHICAL RHAPSODY,” but I’m not sure Scott will agree. [Ed. note: as you can see, I agreed.]
My point is that a book like Spurious cannot be read, say, in the way that Lars and W. read Blanchot. Its characters are not Vladimir and Estragon. They are not Anne and Thomas the Obscure. They are anything but obscure. They are not even Krapp, Beckett’s most personable and seemingly autobiographical narrator, because Krapp was still an autonomous entity. I am sure that Lars knows this. I am sure that he also knows that the narrator and his friend W. may seem to be talking to each other in a vacuum, but are in fact talking to each other with an audience breathing down their neck. Perhaps not a large audience, but a far more present one than Beckett or Blanchot ever had. And so they know that no one (least of all me) is about to bend at the knee to them the way they do to Blanchot.
What about W.? He is so omnipresent both in the book and on the blog that he seems both larger than life and yet eerily real. And indeed, like the narrator, he has a real-life counterpart. The narrator drops enough particulars about W. that match a single, real person: William Large, also a philosophy professor, also the author of two books on Maurice Blanchot.
Now, this raises some peculiar issues. Lars has made it terribly easy to postulate Professor Large as W.’s counterpart. Whether or not he, in fact, is that counterpart, the trail that leads to his Internet doorstep is right there in the book, made trivial to follow. And the picture Lars has painted of W. is not flattering. He is a blowhard, a boor, and a bully. He seems far from happy, he repeats himself chronically, and he has a remarkable lack of self-awareness. He confuses Buddhism with Hinduism! He has a few moments of self-pity, particularly one in the dead middle of the book when W.’s wife expresses contempt for him and he goes on about how much better she is than him. “That’s why I abuse you—verbally, I mean,” he bleats to the narrator, “It’s a sign of love.” These moments are more pathetic than exculpatory.
W. is to William Large what the narrator is to Lars Iyer, at least according to Lars Iyer. We think that W.’s voice has been bleeding into the narrator’s, when really Lars’s voice has been bleeding into W.’s the whole time.
Who, then, is the bully here? On the one level, we have W. attacking the narrator for the two hundred pages of Spurious, while the narrator’s main faults seem to be restricted to being a glutton for punishment and having a problem with damp in his home. Yet Lars (at least one of the Larses) writes a book about W. recording the terrible things that he has said. We would not know this except for the trail pointing out of the book into real life. Perhaps these claims are not in fact true; perhaps Lars has written a slanderous roman-a-clef against an innocent man. There is cause for doubt. At one of the rare points where he speaks up, Lars makes a claim that he has “singled out” W. for “very special thanks” in his own book on Blanchot. But this is not true, for Lars gives merely “special thanks” to three people in Blanchot’s Communism, Large only one of them. Things do not look good for Lars.
M.A. Orthofer, another blogger, writes in his review of Spurious, “Why Lars puts up with the frequently condescending W. is not entirely clear.” I’m afraid it seems all too clear to me, once the metatextual legerdemain has been made decoded. The answer is the book itself. And is the book dedicated to its evident benefactor, William Large? Or even to W.? No, just to “Sinéad,” a figure privileged enough to go unmentioned in the text.
And so I wonder what poor W. (or Professor Large—the two are indistinct in my mind) must make of all of this, since if the fictional universe is to be extended to real life, poor W. is the butt of quite a big joke, much bigger than all the jokes that he makes at the narrator’s expense in Spurious. (Even if he is guilty of any of these sins, he has not even been given the chance to answer the accusations!) Lars, if he can be trusted, quoted “W.” in one of his posts on the Melville House blog:
It would seem that the book derives from conversations that Lars has recorded and put on his blog. Some of these conversations are fictional, W. protests: he claims not to recognise himself in everything Lars has written.
Shameless. I wrote to Professor Large, telling him I was reviewing Spurious, and did not receive a response. I can only hope that Professor Large will have his say in the already announced sequel to Spurious, Dogma, due in 2012. I hope Lars will give him the chance. In Friendship, Blanchot wrote:
How could one agree to speak of this friend? Neither in praise nor in the interest of some truth. The traits of his character, the forms of his existence, the episodes of his life, even in keeping with the search for which he felt himself responsible to the point of irresponsibility, belong to no one.
No one, it seems, except Lars. I think of Shem and Shaun, the two brothers of Finnegans Wake. Shem is the perverse, sickly Dionysian brother, filthy, genitally obsessed, dark and weak. Shaun is the bold, strong, morally upright brother, the knight in shining armor. But for all of Shem’s pathetic antics, Shaun is a moralistic bully who beats up on his brother and humiliates him, rendering him a pariah. Shaun then gets the girls and the glory. The trick of this book is that W. is Shem, not Shaun.
When asked in an interview why W. is so cruel to the narrator, Lars himself replied:
Cruelty is one of the few ways in which some of us can show affection in Britain, much to the confusion of many Americans I’ve known. It’s what makes us laugh, for the most part, even if we’re the butt of the joke.
I suspect Professor Large knows exactly what he means." - David Auerbach

Interview by David Winters

Interview by Mark Thwaite

Interview at Biblioklept

Interview by Tom Cutterham

Interview at Full Stop

Lars Iyer, Dogma, Melville House, 2012.

Lars Iyer's blog

Dylan Trigg - The eerie disquiet of the uncanny is at the core of the remembering body, and thus of ourselves. Post-rational aesthetics in which spatial order is challenged by an affirmative ethics of ruin

2012-01-23T18:44:00.003+01:00

Dylan Trigg, The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny, Ohio UP, 2012

“Genuinely unique and a signal addition to phenomenological literature... It fills a significant gap, and it does so with eloquence and force.” -Edward S. Casey

"From the frozen landscapes of the Antarctic to the haunted houses of childhood, the memory of places we experience is fundamental to a sense of self. Drawing on influences as diverse as Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and J. G. Ballard, The Memory of Place charts the memorial landscape that is written into the body and its experience of the world.
Dylan Trigg’s The Memory of Place offers a lively and original intervention into contemporary debates within “place studies,” an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of philosophy, geography, architecture, urban design, and environmental studies. Through a series of provocative investigations, Trigg analyzes monuments in the representation of public memory; “transitional” contexts, such as airports and highway rest stops; and the “ruins” of both memory and place in sites such as Auschwitz. While developing these original analyses, Trigg engages in thoughtful and innovative ways with the philosophical and literary tradition, from Gaston Bachelard to Pierre Nora, H. P. Lovecraft to Martin Heidegger. Breathing a strange new life into phenomenology, The Memory of Place argues that the eerie disquiet of the uncanny is at the core of the remembering body, and thus of ourselves. The result is a compelling and novel rethinking of memory and place that should spark new conversations across the field of place studies."

"Who is Dylan Trigg?
—A most interesting young phenomenologist man.
What has he done?
—He has published The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny, which I now hold in my hand, perhaps before he is doing so, which is in itself uncanny.
An insight on every page?
—Why yes, it looks that way. For instance, I just opened the book at random to see an excellent argument about the arbitrary divisions between history and memory.
What is most excellent about it, as far as you are concerned?
—Well I've only glanced through it. But what it does is to make the one thing that seems so obvious (the sense of place) become very weird. For instance, Harman on Lovecraft makes a special guest appearance. This weirdness is badly needed in ecological philosophical necks of the wood. I've been trying to make this sort of argument in my way for a little bit.
Is it the sort of book that makes you want to read it all the time, a not unpleasant, slightly evil compulsion?
—Without doubt.
On a scale of 1 to Fucking Good, where would you put this book?
—Oh, Fucking Good, definitely." - Timothy Morton

Read it at Google Books

Dylan Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay, Peter Lang, 2006.

"In The Aesthetics of Decay, Dylan Trigg confronts the remnants from the fallout of post-industrialism and postmodernism. Through a considered analysis of memory, place, and nostalgia, Trigg argues that the decline of reason enables a critique of progress to emerge. In this ambitious work, Trigg aims to reassess the direction of progress by situating it in a spatial context. In doing so, he applies his critique of rationality to modern ruins. The derelict factory, abandoned asylum, and urban alleyway all become allies in Trigg's attack on a fixed image of temporality and progress. The Aesthetics of Decay offers a model of post-rational aesthetics in which spatial order is challenged by an affirmative ethics of ruin."

«'Between sublimity and the dissolute, we discover the aesthetics of revulsion', writes the philosopher Dylan Trigg in his recent book The Aesthetics of Decay (2006). Trigg is the latest in a venerable line of thinkers to turn his attention to decay in general and garbage in particular. His book's contention - that the ruin or remnant embodies a mode of 'critical memory' at odds with the sanctification of official monuments and sites of collective recall - may be argued at the level of contemporary cultural theory, but its terms and tone are actually ancient. There seems to be something in the study of ruins, rubbish, junk and trash that means its enthusiasts can't help reverting to awed lists of defunct artefacts. They may begin with more rigorous and abstract ambitions, but time and again it is the details of decay that fascinate its theorists.» - Brian Dillon
«'The Aesthetics of Decay' challenges the common assumption that progress is rational. With analytical rigor and eloquence of argument, Dylan Trigg's book takes the reader on a journey through metaphysics, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, ethics, theology, and music to suggest the opposite: that the modern ruin redefines progress by embodying decline. A remarkable display of erudition and creativity, and written in an engaging and accessible style, this book is an exceptional foray into intriguing subject matter.» - Sally Macarthur

Read it at Google Books

The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason by Dylan Trigg

Aurelio Madrid: …notes on the aesthetics of decay

Interview by Mark Thwaite

Dylan Trigg's blog

Georges Rodenbach - Dream-like evocations of Bruges as a ghost city of silence and desolation, lost in time but nevertheless dictating the inevitably fatal events of the narrative

2012-01-21T14:21:00.000+01:00

Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, Trans. by Mike Mitchell, Dedalus, 2010 [1892.].

"Bruges-La-Morte, which first appeared to an unexpecting public in 1892, concerns the fate of Hugues Viane, a widower who has turned to the melancholy, decaying city of Bruges as the ideal location in which to mourn his wife and as a suitable haven for the narcissistic perambulations of his inexorably disturbed spirit. Bruges, the ‘dead city’, becomes the image of his dead wife and thus allows him to endure the unbearable loss by systematically following its mournful labyrinth of streets and canals in a cyclical promenade of reflection and allusion. The story itself centres around Hugues’ obsession with a young dancer whom he believes is the double of his beloved wife. Grotesque humour mingles with poignancy in this metaphorically dense and visionary novel, which is the ultimate evocation of Rodenback’s lifelong love affair with the enduring mystery and haunting mortuary atmosphere of Bruges. This is a new translation of the one of the great masterpieces of the symbolist period which also contains an illuminating introduction by Alan Hollinghurst. " - The Crack

"In 1892 Georges Rodenbach published his masterpiece Bruges-la-Morte. The short novel immediately was acknowledged as one of the greatest achievements of the "decadent movement" in French literature, a vision of the Flemish city of Bruges that once was a depiction of Jerusalem and now was turned to doom by the evil forces of Satan, whose Pope was resident in this town...
Ostensibly, Bruges-la-Morte was the account of a doomed love affair that culminated in a bizarre murder, but even more important were its dream-like evocations of Bruges as a ghost city of silence and desolation, lost in time but nevertheless dictating the inevitably fatal events of the narrative.
The widower Hugues Viane has turned to the melancholically decaying city of Bruges to mourn; in his disturbed spirit Bruges-la-Morte is the image of his dead wife. To manage and endure his unbearable loss, he systematically follows, in a cyclical promenade of reflection and allusion, the mournful labyrinth of streets and canals.
At the beginning of the story we see Hugues setting out from his big old silent house for one of his solitary walks. In the drawing-room of his house are the mementoes of his wife: some pictures and a long tress of her yellow-gold hair preserved in a glass case as a relic of love. Outside, his eyes "fixed on a very distant point, beyond life itself", he finds everywhere analogies to her and to his feelings about her: in the rain, the bells, the canals – until the whole city mysteriously begins to resemble her.
One evening Hugues goes into Notre Dame, where he is touched by the imagery of fidelity in the tombs of Charles the Bold and Mary of Burgundy. Out in the street he again sees his dead wife… but now as a living woman, apparently her exact likeness. He follows her into a theatre where he takes his place in the stalls. He can’t see the woman in the audience and he is barely aware of what is performed on stage: Robert le Diable, the extravagantly romantic and supernatural opera of Meyerbeer.
Hugues decides to leave after "the scene with the nuns", but then the mysterious woman emerges as a dancer, the nun Hélène, who rises from her tomb – as his lost wife, resurrected – like Christ. Afterwards he recalls the scene as "a setting full of magic and moonlight", but it is in fact a satanic ritual, in which the devil’s disciple Bertram summons up the spirits of the nuns who have died in sin.
Hugues is instantly obsessed by the vision of the dancer, like "Faust, reaching out for the mirror in which the divine image of woman is revealed". The relationship between Hugues and the dancer has something of a diabolic bargain, culminating in psychological torment and a deranged murder.
Bruges-la-Morte is clearly a poet’s novel, marked by hypnotic repetitions, working in rhythm and pattern, image and suggestion, metaphorically dense and visionary in style, musical in its fatalistic circling.
The novel was an ultimate evocation of Rodenbach’s fascination with the enduring mysteries and haunting mortuary atmosphere of Bruges. It was also a fable of the strange identity of the known and the unknown, of the mysterious equations of past and present, place and feeling, the visible and the invisible, one woman and another. It is the story of sexual imagination that turns on the fulfilment of dreams, of Flemish Catholic piety coexisting with pagan icons of female sexual power, and morbid eroticism.
Rodenbach included photographs in his novel and in the little preface he wrote to explain this, he described his work as "a study of passion" and "the evocation of a city as an essential character, associated with states of mind, counselling, dissuading, inducing the hero to act". The photographs were intended to help the readers to "come under the influence of the city, feel the pervasive presence of the waters from close, to experience for themselves the shadow cast over the text by the tall towers".
Though Rodenbach was Flemish, he was not himself a Brugeois. He grew up in Ghent, studied law there and spent a year in Paris. Before returning to Ghent, he published his first collection of poems, Les Tristesses. He worked ten years in the law, but got involved in Belgian literature, as a reviewer, essayist and poet. Then, in 1888, Rodenbach left Belgium for good, to spend the rest of his life in Paris.
Rodenbach gladly embraced his exile, married and became a kindly and discreet figure in the Parisian literary circles. He could have been the spiritual twin of his friend Joris-Karl Huysmans.
As his life flowered in Paris, an almost mystical nostalgia for Flanders and Bruges crystallised… and so Rodenbach evoked, from his Paris apartment, a dead city where he had never lived.
In those days, there was much talk of reopening Bruges to the modern world after the silting-up of its old sea-canal had resulted in centuries of decline, so many Brugeois, seeking a new commercial life, resented Bruges-la-Morte as Rodenbach did with the desecration of his imagined Bruges.
Georges Rodenbach was a distinctly "northern" type, with his light blond hair, pale complexion and blue-grey eyes, deep and distant as a mirror of his native skies, with the colour of the canals they had long reflected.
Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer painted the poet in a spectral close-up against a background of roofs and gables and with the great Gothic spire of the church of Notre Dame in wintry silhouette. His shoulders seemed to rise out of the shadowy waters of the canal behind him. He was an elegant and dandyish dresser, but the painter depicted him with a wide-eyed expression of reverie bordering on grief, as some sort of a double portrait of the author and his obsessive hero, Hugues Vianes, still haunting the deserted quays.
Rodenbach died in 1898, after finishing another prose masterpiece, Le Carilloneur, addressing the same theme: a city that had to be loved for its life or for its beautiful death, exploring the mysterious accord between the soul and the city, in a mood of lonely withdrawal and silent contemplation..." - The Lost Dutchman
"a Symbolist vision of the city that lays the way for Aragon and Joyce, and a macabre story of obsessive love and transfiguring horror .This is a little masterpiece." - Scotland on Sunday

"The translators remain faithful to the substance and style of the original, and Alan Hollinghurst's introduction is stimulating and heartfelt, explaining Rodenbach's idiosyncrasies without apologizing for them." - Daniel Starza-Smith

"I discovered the Belgian poet Georges Rodenbach because of his tomb in Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris – possibly the most nightmarish piece of funerary sculpture ever carved. It portrays the writer desperately trying to climb out of his own grave. My wife and I came across it when photographing tombs for a book we were doing on cemetery architecture. The tomb led to the books, which is what Rodenbach regarded his novels as anyway. He was obsessed with death.
His most famous novel, Bruges-la-Morte, has rightly attracted a lot of interest since it was republished recently by the excellent but now endangered Dedalus Books. First issued in 1892, it was a short but intense Symbolist novel about sex, lies – and Gothic architecture. The usually reliable Nicholas Lezard did a good review in The Guardian though he failed to mention that what helped make this book compulsive reading was the inclusion of 35 half-tone photographs (at least in the first edition). These depicted the shadowy canals, alleys and courtyards of the medieval city, and provided an atmospheric mise-en-scène to the events described. Mixing fictional text and documentary photography was resurrected a century later to great effect by W.G. Sebald. The Dedalus edition, translated by Mike Mitchell and Will Stone, dispenses with the original photographs and uses some modern photographs taken by Will Stone which work equally effectively. They are very effective.
The basic plot of Bruges-la-Morte – man’s wife dies, man later sees a woman who looks like her and recruits her to dress up as the deceased loved one, a fantasy game that culminates in murder – was adopted by composer Erich Korngold for his opera, Die todt Stadt, and Hitchcock’s Vertigo shares obvious affinities. It captures the heightened emotions and excesses of a certain kind of decadent fin-de-siècle literary style, and is replete with descriptions of gloomy bourgeois interiors and empty, funereal streets. The same is true of Rodenbach’s final novel, The Bells of Bruges, also republished by Dedalus, about a late 19th century Flemish nationalist and city architect, whose misguided marriage to the wrong one of two admired sisters again ends in betrayal, abandonment and self-destruction. The main protagonist is also the city’s bell-ringer, hence the title, and a man like Fabrice del Dongo in Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, who is only happy when he is high above the world looking down.
You could read Rodenbach alone for the architectural detail alone, a sort of Pevsner guide to Bruges interspersed with febrile sex and mordant Catholicism. For the city was filled with convents in this period – or Beguinages as they were called – as well as narrow streets and canal-side buildings offering the temptations of prostitution and drink. In both novels the dying city is really the main character, exuding a deep fatalism as it sinks into lethargy, now cut off from the sea by a retreating river, and trading on the mysteries of its ancient buildings carved ‘from blocks of night’. Dedalus and their translators have done a terrific job in bringing these intensely-wrought novels to our attention. Goths will love them, but so ought lots of other readers." - Ken Worpole

"There is something very familiar about this story: a middle-aged widower, Hugues Viane, moves to Bruges as it is the town most suited to his melancholy. He desperately misses his wife; and in the cloistral, muffled, moribund city of Bruges he finds the perfect analogue for his grief. And then one day he sees a woman in the street who appears to be the exact double of his dead wife. He obsesses about her, pursues her, and eventually begins a relationship with her. But it turns out that she is not the reincarnation of his wife ...
This 1892 novel has something archetypal about it, in the way that Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde or The Picture of Dorian Gray do. The chief differences lie in tone and the absence of the supernatural; there is also a far more ambiguous approach to metaphor. The Stevenson and the Wilde are indisputably great works, but no one's going to call them subtle. Bruges-la-Morte, though, edges away from allegory, or maintains a pious silence as to whether it is, or is not, allegorical.
It certainly is symbolist, though, in the sense that Georges Rodenbach's reputation is as a symbolist writer. He was an admirer of, and friends with, such Parisian luminaries as Mallarmé, the Goncourts, Villiers de l'Isla-Adam; Rodin offered to carve a sculpture of him in Bruges after his death. But the city fathers of Bruges, indignant that (a) Rodenbach identified the city with death and morbid religiosity, never mind how appreciatively and ecstatically; and (b) that he wrote in French rather than Flemish (although it would have been most difficult and counter-productive to do so at the time), refused. A note by Will Stone at the end of the book points out that this is still the case, and that you will have to go to Ghent to find a substantial memorial to Rodenbach. An admirer has put up a modest bronze plaque in Bruges, and that's it.
But there is so much to admire in this brief novel. Like many symbolist works, it has a modern feel to it, despite all those stylistic mannerisms we associate with the era - the most striking being those fainting-sensibility exclamation marks at the end of descriptive paragraphs.
But it is those descriptions that make Bruges-la-Morte so remarkable. As Rodenbach fully intended, the chief character in the novel is the town itself: and this, remember, was some time before Joyce had the same idea about doing the same with Dublin in Ulysses
It is fitting that Alan Hollinghurst introduces this novel, for he has used elements from it in his own fiction. His 1994 novel The Folding Star is itself a homage to Bruges-la-Morte, although he doesn't feel the need to declare so in his illuminating and sympathetic introduction. His narrator says of his lover: "I imagined a life consecrated to the image of Luc, a shuttered house, the icon of his extraordinary face candlelit in each room ..." Rodenbach imagines the mirrors in Hugues' house "needed only the merest touch with a sponge or cloth, so as not to erase her face sleeping in their depths".
This is one of the greatest novels ever written about grief, loneliness and isolation; and such subjects are, alas, always relevant these days. (Those suffering similar personal circumstances will find it remarkably consoling.) It is the kind of book, I kept thinking, that should have been turned into an opera by Debussy, along the lines of what he did with Pelléas et Mélisande, by Rodenbach's contemporary and fellow-townsman Maeterlinck. As it turns out, Erich Korngold did such a thing in 1920, but the Nazis banned it, and I'm not sure that he would have had the right musical attitude. If Debussy hadn't done it, Alban Berg would have been ideal.
I keep thinking about music so much because so much music resides in the words, even in (the very able) translation. This is a book which is not only richly, almost oppressively, atmospheric: it is about atmosphere, about how a city can be a state of mind as well as a geographical entity. It has its shocks and its melodrama: but it is a haunting, and a haunted work. Congratulations to Dedalus for reviving it." - Nicholas Lezard

"Bruges-la-Morte was written in 1892. It tells the story of Hugues Viane, aged 40, who came to live in Bruges after the death of his wife, five years before the start of the book. He likens Bruges to his dead wife; just as his wife was beautiful but is now dead, so Bruges was once a beautiful, vibrant city, but because of the silting up of the river that joined her to the sea, she too is now dead. Thus he wanders the streets of the city, constantly mourning his beloved wife. On one of his melancholy wanderings, he catches sight of a young woman who strongly resembles his wife; he eventually follows her, and sees her disappear into a theatre - she is a dancer. He begins an affair with her, a joyless affair, as he realises the likeness to his wife is only superficial. There is a sense of doom all through the book, and this is ultimately fulfilled.
Rodenbach was a Symbolist writer - friend of the French poet Mallarme, amongst other Symbolist figures, and imbuing his writing with the hallmarks of Symbolism - melancholy, loneliness, death, all evoked with great beauty. And the novel is certainly beautiful - it has that smudgy beauty of Symbolist paintings, and in evoking so wonderfully the streets and canals and buildings of Bruges, it has a strongly visual element to it. Interspersed throughout the novel are photographs of the city - not the ones, nor, apparently, the quantity, of the original edition, but black and white photos taken by Will Stone, one of the translators (who also makes an impassioned plea for a memorial to Rodenbach to be set up in the city). Rodenbach was Flemish, but wrote in French, since that was apparently the refined, educated thing to do, and yet the Flemish quality of Bruges really comes to life, its brick buildings, its association with the great Netherlandish painters of the past, its famous Beguinage. There is a lot about the art of the past, Van Eyck and Memling, the tombs of Mary of Burgundy and Charles the Bold, the Madonna by Michelangelo that was the only one of his sculptures to leave Italy during his lifetime - all adding to the sense of a glorious past now faded, a city in its death throes but with remnants of its former glory, as Hugues keeps the long braid of his wife's hair, cut off on her deathbed, in a glass casket and reveres it like an object in a museum - even the artistic glories are now displayed as objects from the past, they are no longer living contributions to the town's existence.
The novel has an intensity, again part of its Symbolist nature, but it is short, just over 100 pages. In the same volume is a short essay Rodenbach had written a few years beforehand, about 'The Death Throes of Towns', from which whole sentences are incorporated into the novel, and it foreshadows the novel in less blatant ways too:
'Towns are rather like women: they have their time of youthfulness and blooming, then comes decline and the cracks appearing each day along the walls, painfully increase the lines of their ageing. ...among such downfalls of history and that most lamentable distress that is a town in its death throes, it is Bruges, the dethroned queen, who today is dying the most taciturn and moving of deaths. For Bruges, now forgotten, impoverished, all alone with her empty palaces, was truly a queen in Europe in another age, queen to a sumptuous court of legend, beside the waves, a queen that Venice, envious beyond the far horizon, bowed down to like a less fortunate sister.'
It has to be said that it is 400 years between the demise of the Bruges he is describing and the writing of his essay! But clearly the image of Bruges as a dying queen gave him the inspiration for his novel, and it is a powerful metaphor in the book - the sense of place is integral to the mood and success of the novel. I do think it is a successful - a wonderful - novel, though it won't be to everyone's taste - it is gloomy, and the frequent exclamations about the grey streets of the town enhance this, it is intense, there is very little dialogue, it is a brooding, introspective novel, but one that does, for me at least, evoke sympathy and pity for Hugues Viane even in his misguided, self-pitying reaching out for comfort. There is a slight sweetness to it, but it is a melancholy sweetness, and some would lose patience, I am sure, even in only 100 pages!
One other thing to say about it is that it tied in unexpectedly and beautifully with another recent read. I had seen the film of Haruki Murakami's short story Tony Takitani, and then read the story itself - and that too deals with a man whose wife dies, and as part of his grieving he finds a young woman who resembles his wife, and gives her a job, on the condition that she wears his wife's clothes. Hugues Viane eventually asks the dancer to wear his wife's clothes, with disastrous consequences. Culturally, the worlds of Rodenbach and Murakami are far apart, but in both stories, this moment of the 'replacement' being asked to wear the dead wife's clothes is a crucial point, where the internal grief of the widower clashes with the external reality - both have projected their memories onto a living person, who is of course not a replica of their dead wives but an independent personality. This clash is quite differently rendered in the two stories, but beautifully done in each.
I love these kinds of links between books!
There is an interesting introduction by the novelist Alan Hollinghurst, and it has made me want to read his own novel, The Folding Star. I should also pay tribute to the translators - Mike Mitchell translated Bruges-la-Morte, and Will Stone translated the essay The Death Throes of Towns, and both have done a wonderful job. I bought this novel when havisham got us thinking about the crisis at its publisher, Dedalus, in the wake of cuts by the Arts Council, and I am glad to say that they did find new sponsorship and will survive, for the time being at least - I will definitely be exploring more of their catalogue, having only read a handful so far. I would like to read the other Rodenbach title, The Bells of Bruges (do you see a theme developing in his books...?!), but next is J.K.Huysmans' The Cathedral, which I already own - I will be visiting both Bruges and Chartres, the setting/inspiration for The Cathedral, within the next few weeks. The Rodenbach has given me a great feeling for Bruges and a longing to be there again, and some have called Huysmans' novel the best guide to Chartres Cathedral, so I am looking forward to reading that." - Big Readers

"The Belgian writer Georges Rodenbach (1855-98) is identified above all with the city of Bruges. It emerged early on as a subject in his poetry, and in his most famous book, the short novel Bruges-la-Morte (1892), a particular idea of the place - silent, melancholy, lost in time - found its most intense and influential expression. It led to something of a cult of Bruges in the Parisian circles that Rodenbach was by then inhabiting. Bruges became a destination, treasured for its antiquity and decay, and Rodenbach's novel, illustrated as it was with numerous photographs of the city's churches, houses and canals, sold very well there. In the following years other Belgian artists explored the richly desolate atmosphere of the city, and Fernand Khnopff, in particular, made a number of mesmerising paintings which combine photographic precision with a mood of lonely Symbolist contemplation.
As it happened, it was a moment when there was talk of reopening the city to the modern world after centuries of decline brought about by the silting-up of its old sea-canal (the new port of Zeebrugge would be the result). Many Brugeois resented seeing the epithet Morte attached to a city seeking a new commercial life. Rodenbach would address these dilemmas, and the possible desecration of his dream-Bruges, in his last novel Le Carilloneur (1897). Was the place to be loved for its life or for its beautiful death?
Rodenbach, as apologist for the beautiful death, was seen by Parisians as himself a sort of emanation of the city. In a memoir written by Paul and Victor Margueritte, who met him at Mallarmé's Tuesday gatherings, he appears as a distinctly "northern" type, with his light blond hair, pale complexion and "blue-grey eyes -the mirror of his native skies -those eyes so deep and distant, the colour of the canals that they had long reflected, the colour of still water and moving sky". In 1895, the French painter Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer produced an extraordinary portrait of Rodenbach, placing him in spectral close-up against a background of the city's roofs and gables, with the great Gothic spire of the church of Notre Dame in wintry silhouette. The writer's grey shoulders seem to rise out of the shadowy waters of the canal behind him. Rodenbach was an elegant, almost dandyish dresser, but Lévy-Dhurmer shows him with his shirt collar undone and with a wide-eyed expression of reverie bordering on grief. Anyone who has read Bruges-la-Morte is likely to see this as a kind of double portrait, of the author and of his bereaved and obsessive hero, Hugues Viane, haunting the deserted quays, in strange subjection to his chosen city.
In the little preface which Rodenbach wrote to explain the inclusion of photographs in the book, he describes Hugues's story as "a study of passion" whose "other principal aim" is the evocation of a Town, not merely as a backdrop, but as an "essential character, associated with states of mind, counselling, dissuading, inducing the hero to act". The photographs are intended to help readers themselves to "come under the influence of the Town, feel the pervasive presence of the waters from close to, experience for themselves the shadow cast over the text by the tall towers". This elaboration of mere atmosphere into a principle of action is certainly the central curiosity and mystery of the novel; though it may seem odd that the author should have wanted to supplement his own verbal atmosphere, in all its obscure Symbolist refine ment, with the illustrations of a Baedeker.
One needs to look at Rodenbach's own life to understand why the city was able to assume this power of suggestion for him. His connection with it was aptly both indirect and suggestive. Though Flemish, he was not himself Brugeois. His father was, and it is surely significant for the son's work that he spoke constantly of the place to his children; but Georges was born in Tournai, and grew up in Ghent, also a richly historic city, but one which had adapted itself to the possibilities of modern industry and commerce (Rodenbach père was an inspector of weights and measures).
Georges was educated at the Jesuit Collège de Sainte-Barbe, as were the poet Émile Verhaeren, a friend, and Maurice Maeterlinck, the Flemish writer who was to gain the most international renown, culminating in the Nobel Prize in 1911. (All of them, as members of the educated bourgeoisie, spoke and wrote in French.) Rodenbach studied law at the University of Ghent; he then went, in the autumn of 1878, to spend a year as a young barrister in Paris.
Once there he immersed himself in a literary culture which seemed to him a luxuriant antithesis to the sterility of Belgium. As he wrote to Verhaeren: "As for producing literature in Belgium, in my view it is impossible. Our nation is above all positivistic and material. It won't hear a word of poetry ... Whereas in Paris, one lives at twice the pace, one is in a hothouse, and suddenly the sap rises and thought flowers." Before returning to Ghent, he published his first collection of poems, characteristically titled Les Tristesses.
Back home, he worked for a further 10 years in the law but involved himself more and more in the emerging new movement in Belgian literature, as reviewer, essayist and poet. His fourth collection of poems, La Jeunesse blanche , published in 1886, was the one in which he himself felt he attained maturity; it is certainly the one in which the mysterious accord between the soul and the city, explored in a mood of lonely withdrawal and silent contemplation, is established: "To live like an exile, to live seeing no one / In the vast abandonment of a dying town, / Where nothing is heard but the vague rumour / Of a sobbing organ or a chiming belfry".
Silence, he later said, was the thread connecting all his work, his poems being décors de silence, his novels études d'êtres de silence . The bells that measure out the silence were also to be a recurrent motif, in his poems, in Bruges-la-Morte, and of course in Le Carillonneur , where the great carillon of Bruges seems to voice the subconscious of the Flemish people.
In 1888, Rodenbach left Belgium for good, and spent the remaining 10 years of his life in Paris. Here was the real exile, gladly embraced, and doubly rewarding. He married, wrote, as a kind of two-way interpreter of French and Belgian culture, for both Le Journal de Bruxelles and Le Figaro, and became a figure - discreet, kindly and punctilious - in Parisian literary circles. As his life flowered in Paris, the Flemish subject, the almost mystical nostalgia for Bruges, crystallised for him. The indefinable mood of his poetry, generated from recurrent imagery of empty provincial Sundays, solitude, autumn and winter nightfall, took on a larger fictional form in the light of distance.
Rather like AE Housman laying claim to an imagined Shropshire while walking on Hampstead Heath, Rodenbach evoked the dead city where he had never lived from his Paris apartment. "One only truly loves what one no longer has", he wrote. "Truly to love one's little homeland, it is best to go away, to exile oneself for ever, to surrender oneself to the vast absorption of Paris, and for the homeland to grow so distant it seems to die. [...] The essence of art that is at all noble is the DREAM, and this dream dwells only upon what is distant, absent, vanished, unattainable."
Such a dream dominates Hugues Viane, who finds in the dead city of Bruges a perfect setting in which to grieve for his dead wife. Rodenbach, in his quiet way the most monomaniac of writers, seems to have found in the unworldly Hugues the persona who could best embody his own obsession. At the opening of the story we see him, a widower of five years, setting out from his big old silent house for one of his solitary walks. Of the house itself we learn little, except that in its drawing-room are the mementoes of his wife, the pictures of her, and the long tress of her yellow-gold hair preserved in a glass case. Hugues, at the age of 40, has made a religion of his sorrow. Everywhere he finds analogies to his dead wife and to his feelings about her, in the rain, the bells, the canals, until the whole city comes mysteriously to resemble her, to be imbued, as it were, with her absence. He sees intensely but selectively, his eyes being "fixed on a distant point, a very distant point, beyond life itself".
This beautiful and refined analysis of grief is the stuff of a Rodenbach poem, but even a short novel needs an element of action, and it is this that is precipitated in the second chapter. Out on his evening walk Hugues goes into Notre Dame, where he is touched by the imagery of fidelity in the tombs of Charles the Bold and Mary of Burgundy, and then out in the street again sees his dead wife: not the etherealised figure identified with the dead city, but a living woman, apparently her exact likeness.
Hugues, himself unwittingly a legend of fidelity in the town, follows her, and then loses her; but we see that an insidious temptation has crossed his path. The pursuit is resumed a week later, when he sees her and follows her again, this time into a theatre, where, conspicuous in mourning, he takes his place in the stalls, unable to see the woman in the audience, and barely aware of what is to be performed.
In fact it is Robert le Diable, the extravagantly Romantic opera with which the young Meyerbeer had had his first huge success in 1831, and which had launched the vogue for the supernatural in operas of the mid-century. Hugues decides to leave after "the scene with the nuns", but of course he has left it too late. Rodenbach is shy to exploit the Gothic potential of the situation he has set up, in which the mysterious woman emerges as a dancer, the nun Hélène, who rises from her tomb, and seems to the suggestible Hugues to be his lost wife resurrected.
Afterwards Hugues recalls the scene as "a setting full of magic and moonlight", but it is in fact a satanic bacchanal, in which Bertram, a disciple of the devil, summons up the spirits of those nuns who had died in sin, who shed their habits and work themselves into a frenzy. Escaping from the theatre, Hugues feels himself led on by the vision of the dancer, like "Faust, reaching out for the mirror in which the divine image of woman is revealed". The relationship that follows is shadowed from the start by the idea of a diabolic bargain; though who will pay the price, and how, remains uncertain until the final scene.
Bruges-la-Morte is a very strange book, by turns both crude and subtle. One remembers it mainly for two things: on the one hand its distillation of mood, its poetic evocation of the impalpable, and on the other its bold, even garish fable of the sexual imagination. The two things are distinct, but not separable, and in a sense highlight the inherent paradox of the Symbolist novel: how is the inwardness, the fatalistic paralysis of Symbolist art to be wedded to the demands of narrative? Only perhaps in a story that turns on the fulfilment of dreams and a sense of the foreknown. There are of course many currents within Symbolism: the chaste northern reserve of Khnopff's paintings and Rodenbach's poems, with their hinterland of Flemish Catholic piety, coexists with a preoccupation, even in other Belgian artists, with pagan icons of female sexual power; and it is this tradition of morbid eroticism that Rodenbach, perhaps going a little against his natural grain, invokes in the figure of the dancer Jane Scott.
Some contemporary reviewers criticised what they saw as a vein of vulgar sensuality in Rodenbach's treatment of the affair between Hugues and Jane, which emerges as in essence that between a prostitute and an infatuated punter. But Rodenbach is characteristically discreet about the details of what passes between them; we are not allowed to witness any of those scenes between them that a more sensational kind of novel might have dwelt on. Similarly, Hugues's married life is recalled at the outset as one of unabating happiness, exploration and sexual fulfilment, but nothing concrete is ever said about what the couple did together, where they lived, or even what his wife was called. A deep privacy veils the very object of his devotions, which we are allowed to see only in symbolic form, in the proliferation of analogies.
Bruges-la-Morte was also criticised for the improbability of its subject, but a novel of this kind is not to be judged by its likeness to life, or indeed to most other novels. It creates a rarefied world, internalised and intensified by feeling. The conventions of realistic fiction are almost completely abandoned; the details of the modern life of the city - it has a theatre, shops, markets, gossips and scandals - seem to impinge on Hugues's dream world as if from another kind of novel altogether.
Above all, Bruges-la-Morte is the novel of a poet, who works in rhythm and pattern, image and suggestion. At its heart lies the essence of poetry: a simile. It is a book about resemblance, the strange identity of the known and the unknown, "the horizon where habit and novelty meet". The central resemblance, between one woman and another, is discovered by a man whose whole world is given value by resemblances, "mysterious equations" of past and present, place and feeling, the seen and the unknowable. The prose in which Rodenbach conveys such mysteries is marked by hypnotic repetitions and that liberal use of the exclamation-mark so typical of the period. If its effects are "poetic" they are also, in a loose sense, musical, and in its fatalistic circlings, its motivic repetitions, its tone both fervent and elusive, Bruges-la-Morte dwells, like much of the music of the fin de siècle, in an inner realm of refined and portentous subjectivity.
Since Hugues's first sightings of Jane culminate in the perfor mance of an opera, it is worth noting that the novel's last scene, with its off-stage procession, tumultuous church-bells and climactic murder, itself resolves a very inward drama in the conventions of grand opera. A fact not lost on the 23-year-old Erich Wolfgang Korngold, whose opera Die tote Stadt (premiered in 1920) is based indirectly on Bruges-la-Morte, and is now the form in which the novel is most widely known. Its immediate source was Le Mirag e, the four-act theatrical version of Bruges-la-Morte which Rodenbach prepared at the end of his life, but never saw staged.
In dramatising his book he found himself driven to just those kinds of explication through dialogue that the novel pointedly avoids. Korngold, in following him, and in wrapping the play in his precocious mélange of Straussian modernism and Viennese schmaltz, prolonged and broadened the fame of this recondite novel - but at the cost of what makes it so singular and so unforgettable." - Will Stone

E x c e r p t :

Every evening Hugues retraced the same route, following the line of the quais. His gait was uncertain, slightly hunched already, even though he was only forty. But widowhood had brought an early autumn. His hair was receding, with a copious scattering of grey ash. His faded eyes were fixed on a distant point, a very distant point, beyond life itself. And how melancholy Bruges was, too, during those late afternoons! That was how he liked the town! It was for its melancholy that he had chosen it and had gone to live there after the great catastrophe. In those happy times when he was travelling round with his wife, living as his fancy took him, a somewhat cosmopolitan life, in Paris, abroad, by the sea, he had passed through the town with her, but its profound melancholy had not had the power to affect their joy. Later on however, once he was alone, he had remembered Bruges and had immediately and instinctively known he must settle there. A mysterious equation gradually established itself. He needed a dead town to correspond to his dead wife. His deep mourning demanded such a setting. Life would only be bearable for him there. It was instinct that had brought him here. He would leave the world elsewhere to its bustle and buzz, to its glittering balls, its welter of voices. He needed infinite silence and an existence that was so monotonous it almost failed to give him the sense of being alive. In the presence of physical pain, why must we keep silent, tread softly in a sickroom? Why do noises, voices, seem to disturb the dressing and reopen the wound? Those suffering from mental anguish can be hurt by noise too. In the muted atmosphere of the waterways and the deserted streets, Hugues was less sensitive to the sufferings of his heart, his thoughts of his dead wife were less painful. He had seen her, heard her again more clearly, finding the face of his departed Ophelia as he followed the canals, hearing her voice in the thin, distant song of the bells. In this way the town, once beautiful and beloved too, embodied the loss he felt. Bruges was his dead wife. And his dead wife was Bruges. The two were united in a like destiny. It was Bruges-la-Morte, the dead town entombed in its stone quais, with the arteries of its canals cold once the great pulse of the sea had ceased beating in them.

Georges Rodenbach, The Bells of Bruges, Trans. By Mike Mitchell, Dedalus, 2007.

"There are three loves in the life of Joris Borluut, the town carillonneur of Bruges. He marries the fiery Barbe, whose dark beauty is a reminder of Belgiums Spanish heritage. Repelled by her harshness and violence, he starts an affair with her sister, the gentle, soulful, fair-haired Godelieve. When her sister discovers their affair, Godelieve enters a Beguine convent and Joris devotes himself to his first love, the old city of Bruges. His opposition to a proposal to sacrifice part of the old town to economic advance loses him his position as town architect, and he withdraws to the belfry and his beloved carillon that, for him, expresses the soul of Bruges."

"…then sometime in the late 19th century, an architect called borluut wins the coveted & secluded carillonneur post. his love of flanders is fuelled by a weekly coterie of enthusiasm. he asks for the red-lipped barbara’s dark hand & sees that her flaxen sister loves him more. rodenbach’s man finds a step ladder to observe the obscene ‘bell of lust’ circa. 1629, filled with its engraved green-lace of carnal-passions. van hulle an antiquarian & father of borluut’s new wife & her sister, can never synchronize his precious time-worn clocks. nothing’s perfect. …& our man borluut, champion of his newly renovated lace museum project, lost out of love & only to face the last words of the white-mantilla-shrouded van hulle: ‘they will chime!’ borluut sees the love for his wife dissipate. godelieve (his sister-in-law) replaces that with a new passioned life. while still maintaining a ferocious solitude in the belfry & with the bells. …& yet a spaniard as a spouse in rodenbach’s eyes, retains a fire of the inquisition burning in her heart, still branded with sadistic fury in the fog-dense town. joris borluut with an impossible-to-exit marriage pact, has his fidelity made even the more onerous around autumn’s ‘octave of the dead.’ he easily sees the wilting northern clouds overshadow the doomed dalliance. the sickened wife implodes & charges with madness at the discovery of it all, leaving the sister/lover to retreat to a obscure béguinage. borluut fights along with an artist bartholomeus against the dim city planners & loses to keep his town as-it-is (as-it-was): ‘the queen of death.’ everything continues to fall apart. openly reviled at his broken home & on the lost streets, he agonizes for the crisp quietude & false peace of the unearthly belfry, bells pealing or not.
…& joris borluut hastened the end, he brought it all down in the ‘bell of lust.’ the bell carried his soul—in silence—there in bruges." - Aurelio Madrid

Tom Phillips - HUMan docUMENT: I plundered, mined and undermined original text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems, erotic incidents and surrealist catastrophes which seemed to lurk within its wall of words. As I worked on it, I replaced the text I'd stripped away with visual images of all kinds

2012-01-19T15:01:00.000+01:00

Tom Phillips, Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel , Thames & Hudson, 2005 [1970.]

"In the mid-1960s, Tom Phillips took a forgotten nineteenth-century novel, W. H. Mallock's A Human Document, and began cutting and pasting the extant text to create something new. The artist writes, 'I plundered, mined and undermined its text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems, erotic incidents and surrealist catastrophes which seemed to lurk within its wall of words. As I worked on it, I replaced the text I'd stripped away with visual images of all kinds. I began to tell and depict, among other memories, dreams and reflections, the sad story of Bill Toge, one of love's casualties.' After its first publication in book form in 1980, A Humument rapidly became a cult classic. This new fourth edition follows its predecessors by incorporating revisions and re-workings -- over half the pages in the 1980 edition are replaced by new versions -- and celebrates an artistic enterprise that is nearly forty years old and still actively a work in progress."

A visual adventure, a peculiar space where the reader-spectator is invited to speculate on the meaning of words and images. - ARTnews

A wonderful entertainment...full of humor, visual invention, and the peculiar poignancy of unnoticed meanings. - San Francisco Chronicle

It may be the closest a paperback book has come to being an art object. - New York

One of the more winning and witty artistic experiments of recent times. - Washington Post

"I hope you'll try it for yourself. Just find an old book... any topic will do. Then visually scan the pages and look for words you can link together to form a whole new story or a clever poem.

Sometimes it's simple and sometimes it's more challenging. Sometimes the poetry is very naughty and suggestive. Sometimes it's just silly! Whatever happens, it sure is a great new way to play with art.

I have used the following mediums and have had fabulous success: Paint, gesso, gel medium, coloured pencils, pen and ink, crayons, permanent markers, watercolours, collage, embossing powders, rubber stamps, image transfers.... the sky's the limit!!!

A humument adds new dimension to an altered book!" - earmark-decorative-painting-studio

"For nearly twenty years, I have collected the artistic, literary, and musical works of Tom Phillips, whom I have known as a friend and as his patron. To express succinctly my appreciation and description of his work, I utilise the word "Humumentism," one that I coined from Phillips's seminal, visual-poetic artist's book, A Humument. Although it might appear brash to ascribe an art form to an individual rather than a group of artists, I feel pressed to do so on several counts, not least because his multi-leveled creative accomplishments so discomfort the critical sector that interprets them. Phillips has always worked in parallel styles and themes, in sharp contrast to most successful artists, whose art is easily identified by a single style of the moment with changes, if ever, progressing serially over time. Human beings generally feel more at ease with an artist who has a single style and are put off by having to adjust to an artist whose style, thematic material, and medium all abruptly change.

For those unfamiliar with the works of Phillips, a first viewing of a large body of his work in which disparate styles and themes appear side by side might bring about a sense of cacophony or awe. But if the effort is taken to delve into Phillips's oeuvre, then each of these styles and themes can be demonstrated to have a long-standing lineage in time. One does not need to become an art detective to enjoy Phillips's work; rather, his individual works can be visually and intellectually enjoyed if the viewer does not attempt to place the whole in the context of a single art movement. Herein lies the foundation for a partial description of "Humumentism": artistic creativity carried out in parallel styles and themes outside the popular conception of serial artistic presentations.
Our first encounter with Phillips's work took place at his 1975 retrospective exhibition held at the Kunsthalle in Basel. On a summer vacation trip to Switzerland, Ruth and I visited the Kunsthalle as an art-related vacation activity. We did not go there especially to see the Phillips exhibition, which featured works by an artist barely known to us. At first, we wondered whether Tom Phillips was an artist or a group of artists. But as we looked at the pictures more closely, we saw wonderful clusters of artistic styles bound to each other. We experienced an epiphany that has not been repeated in our artistic adventures: we recognised the unique artistic inventiveness of work encompassing all of contemporary and modern art history. This was evidenced by images representing visual poetry, abstract expressionism, constructivism, visual/verbal art, expressionistic portraits, pointillism, color stripes and calligraphic markings, among others. All of them touched favorably upon our personal aesthetic. We stayed several hours at the exhibition and returned the next day for several more.
For us the highlight of the exhibition were the pages of A Humument, an artistically treated 1892 Victorian novel by W.H. Mallock, A Human Document, displayed between two large panes of glass to enable recto-verso viewing and reading. This work imparted a profound delightful, visual and intellectual experience, and day-dreams about owning this work, which was well beyond our financial reach (the sale price was listed at the information desk of the Kunsthalle). We resolved to collect prints made by Phillips which we could afford and to meet this future star of our collection. Subsequently, on this same trip, we made our first purchase of Phillips, Ein Deutsches Requiem, After Brahms, a suite of prints, and A Humument as a series of prints. The next year we met Tom, later purchased the original pages of A Humument, and have continued acquiring revised pages as well as paintings, drawings, objects, books and prints.
I consider A Humument to be the most important artist's book of the twentieth century. It constitutes the basis for my definition of Phillips's work as "Humumentism". Phillips's artistic treatment of this book, in which each page has been painted, typed upon, drawn, or collaged to leave clusters of the original printed text as new poetry, is epitomised by the new poetry Phillips culled from the printed text of the first page. "The following sing I a book, a book of art, of mind art, and that which he did, reveal I." Fragments of Humument texts remain a prominent stylistic feature of Phillips's paintings and drawings to the present, including his illustrations for Dante.
Although Phillips leaves the impression that his selection of Mallock's novel was fortuitous, I believe its choice was deliberate, either as a conscious or subconscious decision on his part. For example, the story begins with the reading of an imaginary journal in manuscript, reminiscent of the imaginary tack taken by Phillips in producing A Humument. The title of the novel is relevant to Phillips's work. It recalls the idea of Humanism, which the German philosopher Schiller emphasised as the idea of creative individual thought forming the basis of personal truth. Humanism also implies study of the humanities, i.e., literature, philosophy, art, poetry, music, etc., as distinguished from the sciences. Throughout his artistic, literary, musical and poetic career, Phillips has excelled in these humanistic activities. Thus, "Humumentism" is an art form that integrates humanistic activities through individual creative though that falls outside the current popular conception of artistic presentations.
Phillips traces his artistic lineage from his teachers back to their teachers and so to Raphael himself, but I believe that his work is better seen as an extension of early twentieth-century art movements: the Russian avant-garde, Italian Futurism, and British Vorticism. These movements were marked by the integration of humanistic activities that provided visual, poetic, spiritual, and intellectual aspects of viewing and interpretation not unlike the multilevelled pleasures encountered in the works of Tom Phillips." - Marvin Sackner"Some pre-Socratic philosophers conceived the cosmos as contained in a ring of fire, so that there were no stars like bright stones sparkling in the sky; rather, night's dark sphere was colandered with holes through which the outer fire showed, and our spangled sky was illusory. Illusory or not, those holes through which radiance streamed formed constellations; meaning ran from point to point in every watching eye; and then the shapes assumed the features of Perseus and Orion, reflecting heroic lives alleged to have been lived here on our own fair fields. From windows of illumination through lines of meaning to a course of life: that's how I like to think Tom Phillips' extraordinary literary Elysium is cosmologized. There is initially the word board like the outer firmament of fire we cannot see, divided arbitrarily as the print fell, from page to page, with its prose going about its business in ignorance of anything else, telling its own dated tale of Victorian times, a story that has now disappeared from every mind: this is the word soil of Phillips' A Humument, W.H. Mallock's 1892 novel A Human Document, which Phillips tells us he fetched from a bookstall in Peckham Rye for three pence.

Influenced early on by William S. Burroughs' "cut up" experiments, limited by an arbitrary budget of three pence, guided by propitious chance to Mallock's volume (which, by the happiest of coincidental ironies, is a novel pretending to be a discovered journal), and finally favored by the fact that A Human Document was found in a popular reprint version that might furnish additional copies, Tom Phillips' A Humument comes rationally, arbitrarily, fortuitously, gradually into existence just about the way everything in life does. It begins the way an epic ought: "The following sing I a book, a book of art of mind art and that which he hid reveal I." A Humument purports to be The Progress of Love of its principal character, Bill Toge, the surname from letters found in the words "altogether" and "together," which alone contain it and sustain him.
The verbal elements that tell Toge's story appear in blobular spaces that seem to blend the figure of the cartoon balloon with the banderole or the ribbony scroll that sometimes issued from the mouths of praying figures in 16th-century engravings. These spaces drip or trickle down the page where most of the time we can still see traces of Mallock's original text, but occasionally they crawl amoebalike in muck and grow as germs do in laboratory jellies, or fly the way buffeted balloons might through a tempest, or float like used condoms on a wider river. Not infrequently, they seem like paths or roads or creeks. Many times they will be found to contain tender bursting buttons and other abrupt poems.
Some of these terse verses are proverbial, gnomic, erotic, surreal, silly, revelatory, prophetic. Perhaps it is just a phrase that surprises you: "reason under a ruined hat," for instance, or a brief command like "read on, emotions," or a caption for the painted page, "sixteen portraits hanging from a dream," but they are almost always cryptic, sibylline, and as arresting as "she folded her attention to the carpet," or as amusingly disconcerting as the announcement that "I am remaining in London for the death of my ambition." Just as words contain words (the "love" in "glove" has always amused me), these staid Victorian pages can conceal (hidden prudently away like weevils in a biscuit) a wittily raunchy moment: "Have one of mine,' said the lover, as he produced his owna gorgeous product of Viennaand offered it distended to the great Fanny."
Above all, however, it is the design of the pages themselves that astonishes the eye and amazes the mind. Although Toge will usually appear as a Playdoh figure, near his signature window or sprawled in a chair, most of the environments Phillips has designed are abstract in a dazzling multiplicity of ways, semantically suggestive more often than not and frequently serving as a commentary on the bubbles into which Mallock's (and several of his characters') words have been allowed to rise. There are crisply outlined and safely contained color rounds and rectangles; there are fanciful scribbles and simulated writing; there are parodies of popular painters; there are fractured images and spaces, regimented squares, rows of canceled words looking like squashed bugs, lines flying as furiously away as message wires, indistinct layers of smudge and grime, collages, cartoons, wallpaper, curves lying about like clipped dyed hair. The result as you initially leaf, skip, and bound through the book is pure exhilaration. It is a joyful thing to be in the presence of such a rich variety of form and idea, wit and resonance, color and figure, paradox and puzzle, where the profound is rendered rightly as a doodle, and the page is reentered to encounter a bravura'd new'd world.
A more thought lifting of layers reveals linguistic, artistic, metaphysical issues that are as many and various and essential as those in a text by Aristotle. Mark out A Human Document as much as Phillips likes, Mallock's words lie beneath his illuminations like weeds in a field, for they are still in William H. Mallock's story; still were written, printed, bound, back then, in those different, not so different, days; still are going on about their initial business. And the window that Toge mopes and dreams by, perhaps because he's been put together like Dr. Frankenstein's golem from pieces and parts, opens/closes onto/into what? Does it lead the eye to still another realm, or back to the earlier world the words came from? Or through it do we see the pages to be created next?
The field of collage, of color and line, in concealing Mallock's original, releases outbursts of words that find themselves in an altogether new syntactical space; and there, like notes, they sing a painted music." -William H. Gass

"This work started out as idle play," Tom Phillips writes of A Humument in his book Works, Texts, to 1974. He offers similar versions of this explanatory history of the conception and execution of A Humument elsewhere: for example, in the long discussion which follows A Humument in its 1980 trade edition.
"I had read an interview with William Burroughs in the Paris Review (Fall 1965) and, as a result had played with the 'cut-up' technique, making my own variant (the column-edge poem) from current copies of the New Statesman. It seemed a good idea to push these semi-aleatoric devices into more ambitious service.
"I made a rule that the first (coherent) book that I could find for threepence (i.e. one and a quarter new pence) would serve."
On a "routine" Saturday walk with his friend, the American artist R.B. Kitaj, Phillips found, for exactly threepence, a copy of W.H. Mallock's 1892 novel, A Human Document. This book seemed likely to serve for the project he had begun to form and, in late 1966, Phillips began to work on it. At first he "merely scored out unwanted words with pen and ink."
"It was not long before the possibility became apparent of making a synthesis of word and image, the two intertwined as in a mediaeval miniature; this more comprehensive approach called for a widening of the technique to be used and of the range of visual imagery. Thus painting (in acrylic gouache) became the basic technique, with some pages still executed in pen and ink only, some involving typing and some using collaged fragments from other parts of the book (since a rule had grown up that no extraneous material should be imported into the work)."
The heroes of Mallock's novel, Robert Grenville and Irma Schilizzi, both retained roles in Phillips's treatment of the work. But Phillips also added a new major character, Bill Toge, who could appear only when Mallock had written the words "together" or "altogether" on a page. These are the only two words from which this characters surname can be constructed.
The story of Bill Toge, Phillips writes, is related to the commonplace Renaissance neoplatonic tale of "the Progress of Love" and has deliberate parallels with Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1499). Elsewhere, Phillips notes the influence of medieval manuscripts. In fact, A Humument is self-consciously an anthology of the entire history of the book, especially the illustrated book, from the medieval manuscript through the early printed book to the experimental and avant-garde book of recent vintage. Phillips himself called it "a paradoxical embodiment of Mallarme's idea that everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book".
Phillips' emphasises the role of chance when ever he tells the tale of the creation of this book. He selected Mallock's novel for treatment, he repeatedly writes, only because it fit his sole major criterion: price. Its found nature seems to suit the new text and images Phillips found, re-envisioned, and then re-presented, all of which had lain embedded within the words already present on Mallock's pages. In an entry in his notebook for 1966, Phillips called A Humument a "personal I Ching." Together with Phillips emphasis on chance and the found nature of his art, that phrase locates him within one significant stream of the modernist aesthetic.
The I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of changes, was rediscovered during the 1950's and '60's by artists and writers, notably John Cage. Helen and Kurt Wolff of Pantheon Books, its American publishers, brought out the English translation for the Bollingen Series in 1950. They gave a copy to their son, Christian Wolff, a composer who studied with Cage and with whose works Phillips is familiar. After Wolff gave Cage a copy of the I Ching, Cage and several of those he influenced found it a means of pressing past the boundaries and against the supposed limits of their crafts. Dissatisfied with then still largely normative assumptions about the role of reason, rationality, and rules, even in the creative worlds of artistic modernism, they used the I Ching to subvert or avoid such assumptions in their work.
Consultation of the I Ching indicates certain chances, or fates, which a person may choose to embrace. For artists in Cage's tradition, subjecting aesthetic considerations to such chance operations serves to move their creative practices away from personality and towards anonymity. Seeking instructions from Tarot cards or from throwing dice might be comparable operations. Mallarme's coup de ds ("a throw of the dice"), an early statement of this view, became a standard reference point for later artists and writers working in this tradition.
Initially, a minor eddy within the many currents of modernism, this stream became increasingly influential as the century progressed. It has become one of those aspects of the movements we call "modernism" which have served to push in the direction of what we now call "postmodernism". Tom Phillips is among those modernists who can trace their aesthetic descent from John Cage (and, beyond Cage, from Marcel Duchamp).
Cage is a major influence on and inspiration to Phillips, in part precisely for his exploration and celebration of the ways in which the artist can absorb and use chance. Phillips's 1967 painting, Ephemerides II, makes explicit his sense of Cage's importance to his work. In Cage, Phillips discovered an articulate artistic spokesperson for an aesthetic open to the shifting pulls and changing balances afforded a work's various realisations by its creators sensitive response to the "found" - to the element of chance. Cage was also an artist who worked, like Phillips, in a variety of media.
Despite his endebtedness to Cage, Phillips does not follow him to the outer limits of chance. The chance emergence of Mallock's novel would not have prevented its deliberate rejection, had Phillips found it unsuitable. But Phillips did not reject it. "For.....my purposes," he wrote, " his book is a feast. I have never come across its equal in later and more conscious searchings...I have...yet to find a situation, statement or thought which its words cannot comprehend or its phrases be adapted to cover". However open he was to chance, Phillips had no intention of becoming its creature. Artistic control and authorial voice both matter to him more than they mattered to Cage.
However accidentally Phillips may have found the book, his use of it is usually only distantly dependent on chance. Mallock's text proved "a feast" rather for his conscious - deliberate and controlled - purposes. The amount of variation among his treatments of single pages indicates the workings of anything but chance in his creation of this work.
A reading of Mallock suggests that there are good reasons why Phillips found him such "feast," in addition to those riches of vocabulary, reference, and allusion which Phillips specifies." -Daniel Traister

"The following work, though it has the form of a novel, yet for certain singular reasons hardly deserves the name."
This, the first sentence of Mallock's A Human Document, opens an "Introduction" which is a conventional authorial intervention assuring readers of the fundamental veracity of the tale they are about to read. What follows, the "Introduction" continues, is based on the scrapbooks and documents of real people, given to the narrator by a real person, which arrived neither ordered nor composed in any way. Their author's very identities require concealment.
Because of the nature of these manuscripts, the woman who provides the narrator with them comments, they are" something which ...[he] will have to pore and puzzle over. The narrator sees, despite their inchoate nature, that "some single thread of narrative" runs through them, "broken by pages after pages of letters, by scraps of poetry, and various other documents." The manuscripts are, the narrator concludes, "fragments of actual life" characterised by "baffled and crippled sentences," "abrupt transitions," and "odd lapses of grammar." "Mere nondescript fragments," they nonetheless add up, the narrator continues, to a woman's "life, and the life of another, turned literally inside out."
Well before it had reached Phillips, in other words, Mallock's text provided any interested reader with a recipe for its own construction, or re-construction, out of allegedly prior fragments. The method it proposed resembles in many ways what Phillips was to do with Mallock's novel itself. A Humument is a literal re-construction of A Human Document which Mallock (or his narrator) had allegedly constructed in much the same way, using materials just as refractory - and just as malleable. "As they stand," Mallock's narrator tells the lady, these materials "are not a story in any literary sense; though they enable us, or rather force us, to construct one out of them for ourselves."
The choice of a late Victorian novel to treat improved Phillips's chances of finding an appropriate vehicle for his project, wittingly or not. Underlying the apparent stability of Mallock's novel, and of the late Victorian period generally, is an undertone of instability. Often manifested as fear and uncertainty, this undertone might also have formal implications. The cut-and-paste method prescribed for the construction of a novel from the manuscripts Mallock's narrator receives recalls a form later to gain great significance in modern art: collage.
Collage became part of the standard repertory of techniques used by Cubists, Dadaists, and other modernists. They valued the technique both for its recuperation for art of materials not ordinarily considered as "art" and for its special ability to yoke unlike objects or fields of reference together in one visual field. Thus collage, a shaky assertion of stability, orders materials with no obvious or stable basis for their relationship into a framed composition. Many otherwise different modern sensibilities found these aspects of collage appealing. The technique relies on elements both of chance (what the artist could find that might work in the final assembly) and control (the artist determining the form which that assembly would take). Collage is a modern technique but it has older antecedents. The Sackner Archive, for example, contains an anonymous scrapbook dating from the end of the eighteenth century. It entered the Archive independently of Phillips and has no relationship to him. Yet its curiously "collage" -like techniques, which resemble practices later developed, far more self-consciously, by various twentieth century artists, offer a precedent for his achievement in A Humument much older than his more obvious modernist predecessors.
On its surface, Mallock's novel appears distinguished only by its utterly unrelieved conventionality. Yet Phillips's decision to adapt, or to "treat," this book may well be (as Phillips has always claimed) much more of a true collaboration between related artistic temperaments than at first meets the eye. Throughout his life and literary career, W.H. Mallock (1849 -1923) consistently tried to construct a politically conservative and religiously orthodox sanctuary from a world increasingly defined by modern science. "Construct" is the operative term here. No refuge could be entirely satisfactory which is merely found. It must instead be made by those people it would serve.
Mallock's political and religious views were threatened by many aspects of modernity. He sought nonetheless to construct an intellectually respectable means of reconciling the conflicting ways of apprehending the reality he experienced. But neither Mallock nor his contemporaries, however clearly they saw these threats and recognised their significance, could contain or control them. Their very efforts contained the seed of their failure. The undertone of radical instability often characteristic of their works reflects their awareness of this failure. Man-made constructs remain vulnerable to the alternative constructs of other people. Mallock, like many of his contemporaries, sought a kind of certainty which, finally, no man-made construct could provide. His disappearance from modern consciousness is a not completely unfair measure of the success with which his efforts at reconciliation met.
But it is not the only measure. For years, Mallock's A Human Document has been forgotten, Phillips's appropriation of the book has given it a new life. He has even revivified some of the cliches in which Mallock's "Introduction" abounds. So thoroughly does Phillips seem to build upon hints and instructions which litter the very surface of Mallock's "Introduction" that even to refer to "Phillips's appropriation" of Mallock is misleading. Surely, in an important sense, Mallock has "appropriated" Phillips." - Daniel Traister

"Introduction to A HUMUMENT by Tom Phillips
Like most projects that ended up lasting half a lifetime, this work started out as idle play at the fringe of my work and preoccupations. I had read an interview with William Burroughs (Paris Review 1965) and, as a result, had played with the “cut-up” technique, making my own variant (the column-edge poem) from current copies of the New Statesman. It seemed a good idea to push these devices into more ambitious service.
I made a rule; that the first (coherent) book I could find for threepence (i.e. one and a quarter pence) would serve.
Austin’s the furniture repository stood (until it closed in 1995) on Peckham Rye where Blake saw his first angels and along which Van Gogh had probably walked on his way to Lewisham. At this propitious place, on a routine Saturday morning shopping expedition, I found, for exactly threepence, a copy of A Human Document by W.H. Mallock, published in 1892 as a popular reprint of a successful three-decker. It was already in its seventh thousand at the time of the copy I acquired and cost originally three and sixpence. I had never heard of W.H. Mallock and it was fortunate for me that his stock had depreciated at the rate of a halfpenny a year to reach the requisite level. I have since amassed an almost complete collection of his works and have found out much about him. He does not seem a very agreeable person: withdrawn and humourless (as photographs of him seem to confirm) he emerges from his works as a snob and a racist (there are some extremely distasteful anti-semitic passages in A Human Document itself). He has however been the subject of some praise from A.J. Ayer for his philosophical dialogue The New Republic and A Human Document itself is flatteringly mentioned in a novel by Dorothy Richardson. However for what were to become my purposes, his book is a feast. I have never come across its equal in later and more conscious searchings. Its vocabulary is rich and lush and its range of reference and allusion large. I have so far extracted from it over one thousand texts, and have yet to find a situation, statement or thought which its words cannot be adapted to cover. To cite an example (one that shows how Mallock can be made ironically to speak for causes against his grain), I was preparing for an exhibition in Johannesburg (May 1974) and wanted to find some texts to append to paintings; I turned (as some might do to the I Ching) to A Human Document and found firstly:
wanted. A little white
opening out of thought.And secondly:
Delightful the white wonder
To have the sport and grasses
The ancient dread
Judgement now has come
Judgement suddenly. Black from a distance
Expected hurrying on.
Take a new turn
Back to reason.
More recently, in working on an illustrated edition of my own translation of Dante’s Inferno I have managed to find a hundred or so parallel texts from A Human Document which act as a commentary to the poem. I have even found sections of blank verse to match the translation as in this fragment which forms the halftitle:
My story of a soul’s surprise, a soul
which crossed a chasm in whose depths I find
I found myself and nothing more than that
When I started work on the book late in 1966, I merely scored unwanted words with pen and ink; (it was not long though before the possibility became apparent of making a better unity of word and image, intertwined as in a mediaeval miniature. This more comprehensive approach called for a widening of the techniques to be used and of the range of visual imagery, Thus painting (in watercolour or gouache) became the basic technique with some pages still executed in pen and ink only, some involving typing and some using collaged fragments from other parts of the book (since a rule had grown up that no extraneous material should be imported into the work). In some recent pages I have incorporated elements of their printed predecessors.
Much of the pictorial matter in the book follows the text in mood and reference: much of it also is entirely non-referential, merely providing a framework for the verbal statement and responding to the disposition of the text on the page. In every case the text was the first thing decided upon: some texts have taken years to reach a definitive state, usually because such a rich set of alternatives was present on a single page and only rarely because the page seemed quite intractable. In order to prove (to myself) the inexhaustibility of even a single page I started a set of variations of page 85: I have already made over twenty. The visual references used range from a telegram envelope to a double copy of a late Cézanne landscape.
The only means used to link words and phrases are the �rivers’ in the type of the original: these, if occasionally tortuous, run generously enough and allow the extracted writing to have some flow so that it does not become (except where this is desirable) a series of staccato bursts of words.
Occasionally chance procedures have been used. One page (p.99) executed in this way was first divided into half, and, by tossing coins, every word except one was eliminated from each half. Once again the book spoke (like the I Ching). It’s two word, in a faintly Jewish voice said (in 1967) �something already’. The title of the book itself was arrived at by invited accident: folding one page over and flattening it on the page beneath makes the running title read A HUMUMENT (ie A HUM(AN DOC)UMENT), which had an earthy sound to it suitable to a book exhumed from, rather than born out of, another. According to Mary Ann Caws, who has written at length on A Humument this procedure is called crasis.
The numerical order of the pages is not the chronological order of their making. The initial attack on the book was made by taking leaves at random and projecting the themes that emerged backwards and forwards into the volume. In the end the work became an attempt to make a Gesamtkunstwerk in small work, since it includes poems, music scores, parodies, notes on aesthetics, autobiography, concrete texts, romance, mild erotica, as well as the undertext of Mallock’s original story of an upper-class cracker-barrel philosopher ex-poet and diplomat, who falls in love with a sexy prospective widow from Hampstead (her husband is out of combat, being a sick man and, being a Jew, beyond the pale in any case).
Many rules have grown up in the course of the work. Although Mallock’s original hero (Grenville) and heroine (Irma) have their parts to play, the central figure of this version is Bill Toge (pronounced �toe-dj’). His adventures can only (and must) occur on pages which originally contained the words �together’ or �altogether’ (the only words from which his name can be extracted). He also has his own recurrent iconography; his insignia include a carpet and a window looking out onto a forest and his amoeba-like, ever-changing shape is always constructed from the rivers in the type. His story, the Progress of Love, is a favourite neo-platonic topos and there are deliberate parallels with the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili the most beautiful of printed books, published in Venice in 1499.
As well as A Humument itself, Mallock’s novel has been the source for other ventures, notably the complete score of an opera IRMA whose libretto, music, staging instructions and costume designs all come from A Human Document.
Other offshoots include Trailer (published by Editions Hansjorg Mayer. Stuttgart 1971), which is in effect garnered from the cutting floor of A Humument though a self-sufficient work, and DOC, a series of affidavits and testimonies which attempt to build up the picture of a lecherous doctor. There exists also small paintings which make variations of wording and design from the book itself and catch up on some lost opportunities in the original. Texts from the same Mallock novel also appear as pendants to paintings such as the series The Quest for Irma (1973) and Ein Deutsches Requiem: after Brahms. In preparation is a ballet scenario (with score and costume designs) which could either be performed separately (as The Quest for Grenville) or an an interlude in performances of IRMA.
As work went on and ramified, a second copy of A Human Document became necessary. Curiously it turned up in the other branch of the same furniture repository (though this time it cost 1/6d). This copy had belonged to one Lottie Yates who had herself �treated’ it to some extent, heavily underlining passages that seemed to relate to her won romantic plight (occasionally in the margin she had sighed �How true!’). It seems also that she had used it as a means of saying to her beloved the things she lacked words for, passing the underlined copy to him as a surrogate love letter. Thus in 1902, someone has already started to work the mine. The first copy had belonged to a Mr Leaning and was unmarked save for his signature. I have since acquired fifteen or so copies, many sent gratis from well wishers (notably Patrick Wildgust, most dedicated of Mallock hunters). Most have no sign of their owners: one, however, which was purchased at the Beresford Library, Jersey in 1893, by Colonel J.K. Clubley, passed eventually into the hands of someone who merely signs himself �Hitchcock’. The most recent additionhas been a copy supplied by a well-wisher from the library of Sir Gerald Kelly, a past President of the Royal Academy, though how he got it from �Nell’ to whom it was presented by �Michael’ in 1901 is not recorded.
The recent find of the original three-decker first printing has been somewhat of a disappointment. Its letters are big and, with its broad type-rivers and wide spacings it lacks the tight look of the single volume. Each word seems to have fewer neighbours. Yet a new quest started: an even more recondite curiosity had come to my notice in the form of a one-volume American edition, also published in 1892 (by the Cassell Publishing Co. of New York). I have recently acquired a copy of this version which differs on every page as a result of some cutting (mainly of French words in the original). I need hardly add that reasonably priced examples of the ordinary English popular edition would still be exceedingly welcome. To help me locate certain key words (when tackling the Dante Project for example) I have, with some help from others, compiled a complete concordance to A Human Document.
Virtually all the work on A Humument has been done in the evenings so that I might not, had the thing become a folly, regret the waste of days. One kind of impulse that brought this book into slow being was the prevailing climate of textual criticism. As a text A Humument was not unaware of what then occupied the page of Tel Quel (and by now must already have ceased to be a fashionable feature of undergraduate essays). A Humument exemplifies the need to �do’ structuralism, and, (as there are books both of and on philosophy) to be of it rather than on it. At its lowest it is a reasonable example of bricolage, and at its highest it is perhaps a massive deconstruction job taking the form of a curious unwitting collaboration between two-ill suited people seventy-five years apart. It is the solution for this artist of the problem of wishing to write poetry while not in the real sense of the word being a poet…he gets there by standing on someone else’s shoulders.
Publication of A Humument was started in 1970 by the Tetrad Press with a box of ten silk-screened pages which made up Volume I. Other volumes (ten in all, containing varying quantities of pages) were printed by lithography, silkscreen and letterpress in a limited edition of one hundred copies. The original manuscript was completed in the autumn of 1973 and was shown within days of that event, in its entirety, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (in whose bulletin, then edited by Jasia Reichardt, it was first mentioned in 1967).
This revised new edition in book form differs from the private press edition in that several new pages have been substituted for these first versions – sixty or so in the first revised edition (green cover) and another hundred in the second revised printing. If this book finds favour (ie sells), and I live, it will need no more than two further editions to make the last Humument a complete replacement of the first, page for page.
In a sense, because A Humument is less than what it started with, it is a paradoxical embodiment of Mallarmé’s idea that everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book."

Samantha Power: A Humument explicatio

Official site for Humument

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Gretchen E. Henderson - A cabinet of curiosities of things deformed, disabled, reformed and enabled. A choose-your-own adventure that advises and counsels the reader how to change the work itself. Deformity becomes a modality of exploring the literary, the body, and the cultural

2012-01-17T22:23:00.004+01:00

Gretchen E. Henderson, Galerie de Difformité, Lake Forest College Press, 2011.

"Traces of many books mask themselves inside Gretchen E. Henderson s Galerie de Difformite. With the head of a novel and the body of a poem, this extraordinary work interrogates the nuanced concepts of ability/disability, voyeurism/exhibition, deformity/normality all with a wry sense of self-representational humor.
A lineage that bequeaths mysterious relics to an unsuspecting recipient, led through a textual labyrinth by Bea: a deformed reincarnation of Dante s muse.
The story-within-a-story takes shape through the mysterious Undertaker a perhaps reanimated-yet-disabled Beatrice, intertwined with the contemporary Gloria Heys and the presumed publisher, Gretchen E. Henderson.
An infamous brotherhood called Ye Ugly Face Clubb. Lushly designed with crowdsourced images, text deconstructions, and enough narrative tomfoolery to make Tristram Shandy blush, the Galerie is both funhouse and curiosity cabinet, art catalogue and choose your own adventure.
This bestiary of the novel-as-poem-as-essayas- art grows outside of the bounds of the Book and, in the process, redefines deformity for the digital millennium."

"Gretchen E. Henderson’s Galerie de Difformité is a deforming book that invites collaborative participation, as this novel-as-poem-as-essay-as-art migrates outside of the bounds of the Book and communally redefines Deformity. Her wide-ranging critical and creative practices and projects explore aesthetics of deformity, museology as narrative strategy, poetics, the history and future of the book, and literary appropriations of music."

"What a work!...The book explodes across distributed platforms and media, with a digitally networked existence that simultaneously builds on and destroys the integrity of the print object." - Johanna Drucker

"A totally enjoyable book! While the Galerie de Difformité speaks for itself, it does so in a raucous chorus—each page a patchwork of questions, prompts, ventriloquisms, and extra matter—the sum of which is uncountable—an ongoing challenge to the finality and good hygiene of the book. I love the messiness in Gretchen E. Henderson’s invitation to visit her, and any number of other ghosts, online, in galleries, and on the page. Got something to derange? Any miserliness a reader feels quickly mutates into an abundance of play." -Thalia Field

"Galerie de Difformité is a cabinet of curiosities of things deformed, disabled, reformed and enabled. A choose-your-own adventure that advises and counsels the reader how to change the work itself. Deformity becomes a modality of exploring the literary, the body, and the cultural through various lenses of historical periods and ideologies in which, for example, Dante’s Beatrice metonymically becomes the inspiration for writing ugliness in a series of displacements —a stolen part of remains is turned into a pen which then travels through history to inscribe various kinds of deformity. A book that combines the metacriticism of Tristram Shandy with the randomness of a complex video game, Henderson has created a unique work that aims at being extraordinary, arcane, and eminently accessible. A book you won’t forget." - Lennard J. Davis

"Cross the form of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book with fragmented, cut-up, torn-up, stretched, and unconventionally printed text. Skip the “of” of an English title and give it a French name, using the “de” form. Bend book into blog. Deformity here includes transgressing the boundaries of authorship and inviting “user-generated” fascicles. Work the book’s text into something despicable or respectable: Fill out the form. Click to put Ye Ugly Face on Facebook. The story’s play of conspiracies and resurrections resonate with the transformations of the reading process that book and reader enact. Further, the exercises in textual topology – and lettered exhibits calling for further deformation – show that remixing is not just for one-note works such as Dramatic Chipmunk. The book, and indeed this thoughtfully developed artist’s book, can also serve as seed for elaborate transformation and convolution." - Nick Montfort

"Gretchen E. Henderson's Galerie De Difformité is unlike any other book you are liable to find yourself reading this fall. If you were to throw the book into the air so that it came down face open downward and began reading, you would be starting exactly where the author would want you to be. At one point in the book the text reads,
Gretchen Henderson writes a-novel-that-deforms-a-novel about her fictional relative Gloria Heys and Gloria's fictional Galerie in which Beatrice is reincarnated as a fallen… angel. Bea (a.k.a. Gloria a.k.a. Gretchen – at least a fictional version of Gretchen) reimagines her story from shards of a perceived paradise. Writing straight with crooked lines, she tries to deform "deformity."
Got that? If so, forget it because this paragraph just deformed the paragraph that preceded it. Diving into the labyrinth at random is the only way to discover the structure of the labryinth itself, but in doing so, you continually change it. Fortunately, all is not lost. At the bottom of almost any page you were to find the book open to, you would see a list of options as to where you might want to go next.
For example, the bottom of page 48 reads:

To continue reading Gretchen's letters to Gloria, turn to page 69.
    To try on a second skin, visit page 57.
          If you don't know where you are, turn to page 6 or 185.
               For more options, see next page.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, recall those "choose your own adventure" book that you read as a child. Of course, in Galerie De Difformité, this technique is much more than a clever gimmick. By pursuing these various choices, certain patterns do seem to emerge that give shape to the book. (Note: probably the least successful strategy is to start at page one and insist on trying to read straight through.)
Of the patterns that emerge, three seem to predominate. The first is a series of epistles from Gretchen to Gloria in which the presumed author recounts how she came into possession of the galerie de difformite, events in her life that lead her to try to complete Gloria's project, and her attempts to develop a plan on just how she will proceed.
A second pattern running through the book is a series of "Exhibits," ostensibly belonging to Gloria's original gallery. These are labeled alphabetically "Exhibit A" through "Exhibit Z." They read like prose poems. For instance, "Exhibit C" begins: "Color is a chronicle of chemistry, fueled by desire." For "Exhibit M": "It's a matter of digging up a body. Digging up and into: a body, of myths, any legend…" Of course, in keeping with the spirit of the non-linear structure, these pieces do not follow in alphabetic sequence. For those who cannot free themselves from the compulsion to work through the "Exhibits" alphabetically, the author providesa key in the form of a rhymed acrostic tucked away in the text. That is one way that a reader might approach the book.
By keeping "Exhibits" unnamed (A-Z), they hopefully rouse curiosity about the curated collection and, secondarily, become exhibits with political implications (allied with "exhibits" in a legal trial).
One thing that seems to be on trial are constructions of (dis)ability and (in)accessibility: how these notions operate on bodies, even on the body of this book, in different environments.At one point,in a section entitled "How to Make This Book More (In)Accessible," readers are invited to transcribe ortranslate the text through assistive technologies,like speech-recognition software, sign language, Braille output, audio description, and related approaches. Through the Galerie De Difformité's playful process, our strategies for reading and writing both books and bodies are called into question and broadened.
Of course, the "Exhibits" do not follow an alphabetically sequential order in the book. For those who cannot free themselves from the compulsion to work through the "Exhibits" alphabetically, the author does provide a key in the form of a rhymed acrostic tucked away in the text, and that is one approach to the book that a reader might take.
A third major pattern or thread in the book is that of deformity or deforming. Throughout the book are scattered a number of pages with the word "deformity" in the title, such as "Deformity as Definition," "Deformity as Character" or "Deformity as Natural" There is even an examination in the book part of which asks the reader to create their own "Deformity as _______ page. The locus of this part of the book, however, is "The Destruction" room where directions are given to the reader for deforming the book. Deforming can involve any number of activities including cutting, adding to, reshaping, using as wall paper, making paper dolls from, or painting over any of the exhibits or, for that matter, any page in the text.
An interesting aspect of Galerie De Difformité is that it enlists the help of subscribers to carry the project beyond the bounds of the pages of the book. In "the Undertaker's" words:
I'm enlisting the help of "Subscribers". ~ a very minimal commitment, which need only happen this one time, more if you like. To participate download a copy of an "Exhibit" from the project's website http://difformite.wordpress.com/ to deform however you like. One you have materially deformed your "Exhibit," please email me a representation (e.g., a digital image) to post on the site with your permission.
Indeed if a reader goes to the !HOME page of the Galerie De Difformité website they will find examples of each of the exhibits that the subscribers have deformed. Early submissions helped to illustrate the book, and the online gallery and other offshoots will continue to grow as the project expands (or better said: deforms).
Henderson also stretches the bounds of the book in another way. All of the exhibits, and many other pages too, contain Quick Response codes. Better known as QR codes, these are square-like barcodes that can be scanned with an iPhone or Android that allows you to automatically enter that exhibit in the web site gallery. This breaking down of the conventional barriers between two traditionally discrete media is just one more way that the gallery deforms preconceived ideas.
Any way one looks at it, Galerie De Difformité is a prodigious undertaking. There is little wonder why the book form (now published by &NOW Books) garnered Henderson the 2010 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer's Residency Prize. The amount of research, the creativity and the sheer variety within the book. It takes the metaphor of the novel as a "baggy monster" to a whole new level. It even gives Henderson the opportunity to show her skills as a poet, as she does in the opening lines of "The Beekeeper's Apprentice:"
When she first appeared
she was whitewashed,
bandaged gauze

haze of clouds
collapsing
knit with frenzy

of bees. She was
buzzing. Limbs locked
in light-wire, quiver

ing, I watched
thick with trembling.
The emerging field of disability literature is not only about recording personal experiences of disability through memoir and poetry or even countering negative or paternalistic images of disability that have persisted in literature since the beginning of written language, it is also about using language and perceptions culled from the disability experience to create new forms. In that regard, Gretchen E. Henderson's Galerie De Difformité makes a real contribution. It provides a seedbed for new ideas of how disability might be thought about and the forms that it might take. Beyond any appeal to the post-modern sensibility, Galerie De Difformité is sheer fun and, addictive, at that. Whatever it is that drove you as a child to want to keep returning to those "create your own adventure stories" is going to grab you here as well, but on a deeper and much more multi-layered level. Go ahead and click on the website link above. Then go out and invest in the book." - Michael Northern

Exhibits - Extracted, Enacted, Embroiled, Embedded, & otherwise Exhumed from the Galerie de Difformité

Gretchen E. Henderson, On Marvellous Things Heard, Green Lantern Press, 2011.

"Derived in form from Aristotle’s “Minor Work” of the same title, this variation of ON MARVELLOUS THINGS HEARD explores a range of literary appropriations of music, in terms of translation and metamorphosis. Part investigation, part inventory, and part invention (in the musical sense: a composition in simple counterpoint), this poetically-driven essay assays the narrating subject as she assays the subjects of literature, of music, and of silence."

"A beautiful and evocative interweaving of short texts about music and language. The unexpected juxtapositions shed surprising light on this famously tangled relationship." - Joseph N. Straus

All those who have enjoyed Gretchen E. Henderson’s collaborative Galerie de Difformité will happily feel invited to assemble in their own way the marvelous bits collected in this chrestomathy of thinking about music and language." - Tom La Farge

“To prevent myself from becoming ‘earwashed,”’ Henderson writes, “I must again and again shift my listening.” Must listen to the act of listening; must, then, commit an act of the mind (volition, a choice) on the act of the mind of the body (the aural faculty)… To move through a mind thinking on this subject of silence, this subject of music, is to dance about architecture, to sing about economics—these structures of exchange, of raiment. We are not ourselves, or not only." - And G.C. Waldrep

“…smart and passionate…to read and re-read, a different way each time…” - Another Chicago Magazine

“I wish there were more like it.” - Small Press Reviews

"The pupil…having fallen sick, was dumb for ten days; but on the eleventh, having slowly come to her senses after her delirium, she declared that during that time she had lived most agreeably. (Aristotle)
Chicago-based Green Lantern is a non-profit press helmed by Caroline Picard and other artists, focused on bridging contemporary experience with historical form. The Press brings forth “emerging and forgotten texts” within a cultural climate where the humanities must often defend themselves. You may recall their notable release of last summer, Erica Adams’ utterly innovative The Mutation of Fortune. Blake Butler wrote in March, 2010: “Green Lantern Press is simply making some of the most beautiful, singular limited run book objects of anybody in the pack. If you haven’t browsed their catalog recently, it’s overflowing: such a wide range of things to dig in, from new translation of Rimbaud, to art space phone books, to indexes and collection, so on.”
Gretchen E. Henderson’s On Marvellous Things Heard is no exception.
Incited by one extant fragment within Aristotle’s paradoxography text, Minor Work, Henderson labels her book an essay: a slim, tidy, hypnotic volume of 178 prose entries grappling with literature’s capability of achieving the realm of music (178 being, fittingly, the number of Aristotle’s identically titled anecdote). Here begins a sumptuous tapestry, invoking sage fragments of Theodor Adorno, Thomas Mann, Anne Carson, Toni Morrison, Bruce Holsinger, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, John Hawkes, W.E.B. DuBois, and James Agee—for a start.
Henderson asks:
120. • Can we find better ways to listen? To music? To one another’s words? To the vibrations of our nerves and blood?
Ten entries later:
130. • In Silence, John Cage describes going into a soundproof chamber and hearing his circulatory and nervous systems. He came to realize true silence doesn’t exist.
And yet, On Marvellous Things Heard begins, solely, like this:
1. • Silence.
In her “Prelude” to the work, Henderson explains: “By trying to inhabit the essay’s interstitial spaces—literal, aural, and otherwise—I follow Umberto Eco’s concept of the ‘open work,’ as well as John Cage’s motivation for musical composition: not self-expression, but self-alteration.”
Such alteration means text as metamorphosis, a quest “moving beyond critical boundaries,” an elusive voice that “becomes permissive behind its theoretical veil, like the shape-shifting boundary between speech and song.” On Marvellous Things Heard steeps and stews in this threshold, this intermediary realm between binaries, this white space:
3. • With regard to poetry, Stéphane Mallarmé addressed white space in his preface to Un coup de dés, saying that verse demands white “as a surrounding silence.”
4. • Epigraphs work similarly with white space.To the between of sound and silence, black mountains of text amidst bloated white swaths of air, Henderson invites her readers: “to contemplate and respond in whatever form (even in white space: refuting, concurring, doodling, dreaming) about our world’s natures and nuances, volitions and vulnerabilities: its marvels.”
125. • What about these margins? Might writing in them be call-and-response? Or what else to call it?
The text quests to metamorphose, conjured in Federico Garcia Lorca’s duende:
134. • …which “insists upon the insufficiency, the essential silence of mere technical eloquence, stretching the singer’s voice to the breaking point. Surpassing the throat to start at the soles, duende (according to Lorca) “struggles from within” to yield “a radical change in forms.”The essay is thus supremely aware of its own form—178 prose fragments, white space—assaying the reader with its own awareness of itself, its inevitability:
26. • “And does not form have two faces? Is it not both ethical and unethical at once: ethical as the result and expression of discipline, yet unethical, even anti-ethical, insofar as, by its very nature, it is indifferent to all moralities, indeed sedulously strives to make morality bow to form’s proud and sovereign scepter?
Joachim Neugroschel said the above; and then, later, Henderson translates this from Christopher Maurer:
135. • Does not form have two faces? Is it not simultaneously moral and amoral—moral insofar as it is the ultimate expressions of discipline; amoral, even immoral, insofar as it automatically entails ethical indifference, aspiring to make all that is ethical bow down before its own proud, unchecked scepter?
The echoes: the call,
the response.
By definition, form is morally blind: its sole drive is to mean something. In its inevitability lies its indifference to assignation of value. Could one, thus, call the text silent?
81. • The spaces between translations and metamorphoses—of sound, of silence—may be more telling than what stories are told. Within these variations:
82. • How can we know the singer from the song?
In fragment 33, Henderson recalls William Butler Yeats: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
Henderson, trained as a classical vocalist and historian, engages in her literary works both music and visual arts; her first novel, Galerie de Difformité, structured as an art catalogue, won the 2011 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Prize from &NOW Books.
68. • There she is.
114. • But where is she?
In awareness of its form, On Marvellous Things Heard possesses a superabundant consciousness: nearly every fragment includes a footnote, which means experiencing the book sensorially, flipping forth and back, from product to originator, from expression to creator—a song-song, lilting effect akin to melody. Space and non-space, sound and silence. In that interlude of assigning a maker to the quotation is the echo of the self dismantling the self, and progressing through the work.
In this progression, we are consumed with process over product:
124. • …William Gass’ The Tunnel operated for nearly 30 years as a “performance which has not yet taken place.”
and
154. • September 5, 2001 marked the beginning—in silence—of an organ composition by John Cage, performed in an 11th-century church in Halberstadt, Germany. The concert will last 639 years.The experience of On Marvellous Things Heard is to be an interloper between silence, and one type of silence, and our silence, expressed in a form that demands acknowledgment even as it has no choice but to do so; and so creating cohesion within and between the spaces of text and paper, reader and author, listener and hearer, eye and paper, eye and sound of words in one’s head, dancer and dance, creator and created, form and content, even as it dissolves, like Orpheus, finding Eurydice and losing her again, following his inevitable
50. • …fate of dismemberment wherein his head continues to sing.
We are already there." - August Evans

Gretchen E. Henderson, Wreckage: By Land & By Sea, dancing girl press, 2011.

"Based in cartographic history ranging from colonial maps of Africa to medieval portolan charts, Wreckage: By Land & By Sea ranges across continents and consciousness, constrained and coordinated by bodies: of land and water, of mind and matter."

“Gretchen E. Henderson’s Wreckage is entangled as it entangles, netlike, the lonely history of the “wild surmise” (Keats) of colonialism. In ripe language saturated with serpent-like, sea-evoking sibilants, Henderson maps the deterritorializing territory of the ocean, the void, the voyager “In the shallows (wreck- / age) among shoals / of sheol, shell of soul.” In spite or because of the always-palpable pressure of horror, these poems move with abounding grace, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, into an ecstatic embrace of “happy living things! no tongue / Their beauty might declare: / A spring of love gushed from my heart, / And I blessed them unaware.” So too are we blessed by these gorgeous and mysterious poems.” - Joshua Corey

V.
Time passes without notice.
Above berth, you forget acanthus, rip-
tides, gulls. The portolano does not
feature this stretch, only dark
arcs suggest a flock. Birds, mere
blots. All coordinates may be
rumour. The inland is like that:
fabricated. There may be no rivers
or mountains. (Look above, no
gulls; nothing matches—the legend
included a dove.) If the voyage has no
end, maybe it was mistold from
the beginning—
Wind whispers & pivots
slowly, under cloudiness, filtering
curves, shavings, splinters in-
side stars. Compass roses (for eight
winds) cast arrows again. Culpa de—
rhumbs keep tracing moors, anchor-
ages, pointing toward alleged safe seas.

(Under the surface, serpents sleep.)

Gretchen E. Henderson, The House Enters the Street (novel, forthcoming from Starcherone Books in Fall 2012)

"Steeped in the visual arts and music, THE HOUSE ENTERS THE STREET is a novel of interwoven stories. Following constraints of music composition, seven narratives modulate, distinguished by voices and plots. As stories tangle and unravel, “She” wanders through the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking for “You” and “Me,” pondering the plasticity of timeworn artworks and of narratives. Wedded to a Futurist painting by Umberto Boccioni (entitled “The Street Enters the House”), THE HOUSE ENTERS THE STREET unfolds in parts, re-membering dismembered stories. Akin to an act of ekphrasis in prose, these fictions and a play confront (dis)ability and (dis)ease by evoking literature’s aural roots, to breathe life into some fragments of a broken modern world."

"THE HOUSE ENTERS THE STREET is beautifully written, confident and complex. I was appreciative of its language and intelligence, mindfulness and scope. The novel is unusual…" - Rikki Ducornet

"A startling and lovely configuration of stories, endlessly echoing and reverberating, haunted and haunting. Gretchen E. Henderson creates a sublime and mysterious music all her own." - Carole Maso

"Intricate and complex, but never confusing, this dazzling novel is as eloquent as it is original. As if content and form were singing in rounds, Gretchen E. Henderson’s vibrant characters—their voices and their stories—emerge with careful intent and true beauty to achieve what reads as almost miraculous." - Binnie Kirshenbaum

Gretchen E. Henderson's web page

Adam Harper brings the ideas of Varèse, Cage and other visionary 20th century composers to their ultimate conclusion, proposing a system for imagining music based on its capacity for variation, redefining both musical modernism and music itself in the process

2012-01-17T17:12:00.000+01:00

Adam Harper, Infinite Music, Zer0 Books, 2011.

"In the last few decades, new technologies have brought composers and listeners to the brink of an era of limitless musical possibility. They stand before a vast ocean of creative potential, in which any sounds imaginable can be synthesised and pieced together into radical new styles and forms of music-making. But are musicians taking advantage of this potential? How could we go about creating and listening to new music, and why should we?
Bringing the ideas of twentieth-century avant-garde composers Arnold Schoenberg and John Cage to their ultimate conclusion, Infinite Music proposes a system for imagining music based on its capacity for variation, redefining musical modernism and music itself in the process. By detailing not just how music is composed but crucially how its perceived, Infinite Music maps the future of music and the many paths towards it."

"A timely analysis of musical evolution at a moment when many practitioners have become fixated on the past and thinkers have found themselves unable to locate possible futures." - Steve Goodman

"Infinite Music is a super clear, open-ended philosophy of sound and music for the post-rave generation. Essential reading for sonic modernists everywhere." - Cristian Vogel

"In his new book Infinite Music, Adam Harper brings the ideas of Varèse, Cage and other visionary 20th century composers to their ultimate conclusion, proposing a system for imagining music based on its capacity for variation, redefining both musical modernism and music itself in the process.
From Indeterminacy to Ableton Live, from Alan Lomax's Cantometrics system to the timbral innovations of Burial, Infinite Music maps a present in which radical methodologies and new technologies have brought composers and listeners to the brink of an era of limitless musical possibility. We stand before a vast ocean of creative potential, in which all sounds can be synthesised into new styles and forms of music-making. But are musicians taking advantage of this potential? And how could we go about creating and listening to new music, and why should we?
Infinite Music proposes profound answers to such questions, mapping the future of music and the many paths towards it by detailing not just how music is composed but how it's perceived." - The Wire

"This book argues that musical modernism is not a state or a set of particular techniques or characteristics, but a direction. Modernism moves away from the strictures of tradition, progressively tearing them away piece by piece and leaving them behind as it travels towards an ultimately infinite potential for musical variety. In doing so it enhances the ways in which we perceive, imagine and live in the world. But there isn’t just one, general and absolute path towards the infinite point of musical modernity, an assumption that came to stifle modernist music until it became, ironically, a new orthodoxy. Rather, each path is relative to a different starting point, a different context of convention. Modernism is a multi-directional and multi-dimensional process, and there are as many paths toward musical infinity as there are ways of composing and listening.
Modernity is the challenge of the infinite within the capacities of the present. Musical modernists seek to maximise the possibilities of composition to the utmost degree, taking in equally both its broad and deep possibilities and those at the finest levels of detail (composers regularly lose themselves between these two extremes, ignoring or unaware of the entire range). This infinity of possible permutations in musical variety has often been a topic of discussion. In 1959 the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein gave a television lecture entitled ‘The Infinite Variety of Music’, concerned with, as its title suggests, the richness of musical variation. To illustrate this, Bernstein took a simple sequence of four pitches and gave a number of examples of how that sequence had been varied across different examples of (mainly Western classical) music. In a preamble he noted that the number of other possible combinations of pitches stretched to a number that was over a hundred digits long. With chords (i.e. more than one pitch sounding simultaneously) taken into account, this number increases to over three hundred digits. Of course, not only did this just describe the numerical potential of one variable – pitch – but it only took into account the twelve pitches of the Western classical system.
With the much finer possibilities and control over musical variables offered by recently developed and increasingly accessible electronic music technology, this number truly explodes. Since the nineteen-fifties (the heyday of Bernstein and musical modernism) countless musical performances have occurred and musical variables invented, used and perceived that cannot be counted within Bernstein’s number. Many of these came from an arena of music-making some still call ‘popular music’ – the term is quaint, in many ways incorrect, in some contexts has an offensive tinge, and will probably lose its currency over the next century. ‘Popular music’ can either mean ‘music that is widely appreciated’ or else music for ‘the people’ or by ‘the people’, regardless of how many people actually appreciate it. I’m referring to the third category, but either way the term is generally a catch-all category for music that isn’t thought to be Western classical music. Since the Second World War this ‘popular music’ has been increasing exponentially in diversity and complexity, incorporating new, technological structures and forms and becoming a powerful new site for musical modernism.
It hopefully goes without saying, then, that modernist music isn’t limited to one particular musical style or genre, but can and will manifest through hundreds and thousands of different styles. In any case, the main thrust of musical modernism has largely fallen out of the hands of Western classical music over the last fifty years. In its current state, it rarely offers those hungry for the musically new anything more than convention upon convention – a long, deep and undeniably rich tradition that Schoenberg never escaped from. These conventions are sonic, but in the end they are deeper still: the concert, the concert hall, the smartly dressed musicians playing age-old instruments of wire, wood and brass, the silenced audience. Too often, the elitism is social as well as artistic. Western classical music – we could call it ‘non-popular music’ – has long ceased to assume a place of absolute privilege and priority in musical culture as a whole. It’s given and may well continue to give us some of those works of art our culture has appreciated the most, but today its general tendency towards myopic traditionalism and exclusivity makes it tiny against the enormous backdrop of infinite musical possibility, which is calling more loudly than ever before.
A number of the cultural assumptions we make about music and musical concepts live on, however, inherited from centuries of Western classical music and its aesthetic ideologies. A ‘composer’, for example, is routinely held to be a specially trained person (usually a man) who writes music using Western classical notation, which is then given to an ensemble of specially trained musicians playing Western classical instruments. But technically the word ‘composer’ suggests anyone at all who might create music. In this sense, the term overlaps with the word ‘performer’. Composers may also come in groups that collaborate on the creation of music. In this book I retain the word ‘composer’ because of this fundamental meaning, but in no way should it be assumed that I am talking about classical music, or classical music composers, or composers who write for live or acoustic instruments, or specially trained or professional artists. No, with the word ‘composer’ I’ll be referring to any source of music at all, multiple or otherwise, including performers (be they singers or instrumentalists), producers, singer-songwriters, ‘artists’, sound artists, DJs and other selectors, artificial sources and even, in a significant sense, people who play music to themselves alone, with an instrument or the press of a button. We can all be composers, and we are all composers. This must not be forgotten as you read. Nor does the term imply any particular value or privileged position – all these figures are equal. To emphasise all of this, I’ve only used the word in plural form.
Similarly, when I talk of the possibilities of ‘music’, I don’t prioritise or ‘really mean’ classical music, as the term is often used in certain circles. Nor do I ‘really mean’ any sort of popular or Western music. I don’t even ‘really mean’ ‘art’ music, or ‘difficult’ music, or ‘serious’ music – awkward terms that have been used to differentiate, separate and territorialise musical activity in the past. I don’t even mean whatever we consider to be ‘good’ music. I mean music in all its senses, all its past, present and future senses. Music in senses that haven’t even been discovered or practiced yet. Music before categories and without prejudices, to the fullest possible extent of the word’s meanings and consequences.
How can music be infinite in such a way? Its possibilities can’t literally become actualised as infinite, of course, as long as the various systems that perform music are somehow finite, which will necessarily be the case since the universe itself is physically constrained. For this reason we should consider these possibilities virtually infinite. Besides which, an infinite variety of music isn’t necessarily desirable in itself. Even with the best intentions it can’t be denied that we appreciate some permutations of musical possibility more than others, depending on context, and that our capacity to appreciate music has some relation to the prior musical systems we’ve become familiar with. Does musical modernism fail to take this into account? Only partially – if modernism is a directional process, the music it creates is always somewhere between the old and familiar and the indiscriminate infinity of different forms, proceeding only toward the latter. It’s a relation between old and new, and any given moment of modernist music will present a mixture of what can be appreciable to a given audience to any extent as either old or new. So not only must modernism reject any one absolute system, path or final resting place, but it must also situate itself with respect to the familiar in some way, however small, and this link with or establishment of the familiar is what can facilitate appreciation. Here, perhaps, is a way to bringing more listeners to modernist music than it won in the twentieth century.
But why all this talk of modernism and infinity? Why does music need to align itself with the maximum compositional possibilities of its time? Aren’t things just fine the way they are? Why write this book? The issue is one of imagination. Music is one of the activities that can stoke it, and not just in some abstract, exclusively artistic sense. There is no absolute border between the musical imagination and the imagination of anything else in life. The widening of an imagination to accommodate a new and unusual idea or possibility can be a rewarding experience in itself, but this process is also the engine of our development and betterment as individuals and as societies. Sometimes ideas become difficult to imagine; often we can’t tell when our imaginations have become limited and we can no longer detect what might lie beyond their horizons, making us ignorant both of the way things really are and the way things might one day be.
I would argue that music, both in its composition and in its appreciation (not entirely differentiable categories, as we’ll see), often faces such a predicament and is actually facing one today. For many people it’s difficult to imagine the future of music as being anything very different to what it is at present. This is compounded by the notion that in the last century we’ve supposedly learned the lesson that radical musical innovation will only be unsuccessful. We might even lapse into an attitude of some cruel irony concerning matters of glittering, confident musical futures, an irony by turns tragic or mocking. Or else we ignore it, or remain ignorant entirely. Either way we’ve perpetuated the status quo.
Written ten years into a new millennium that has already seen widespread and significant technological change as well as scientific discovery, this book is not primarily a guide to what will happen in the next thousand years of human music-making (if we survive that long), although it does make a few predictions and suggestions, and its system is designed to encompass all possible musical change that may arise in that time. The word ‘millennium’ doesn’t just refer to a period of a thousand years, either, but also suggests a new era, one with generally positive connotations. My hope – barefacedly idealistic enough to rival those of the modernists of precisely a century ago – is that it will see the virtually infinite possibilities of music more easily accessed by humanity as a whole. If nothing else, this is at least a goal for modernist music.
Why human music-making? Are there other kinds of music-making? Perhaps – but here, ‘human’ is intended not so much as a qualification for or an all-too-tragic limitation on musical possibility than as an invitation to it. Humanity doesn’t equate to a set of given biological, evolutionary or social constraints, but is constantly adapting and developing from the old, familiar and limited humanity to new forms of humanity, using tools and technology and increasing its capacity for imagination and information as it does so. Music goes along with it, as a part of this process.
How will we come to compose and recognise this music of the future? By seeing it in terms of its most fundamental condition: change itself." - The Quietus

"The title of Adam Harper’s Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making appears to promise a broadly positive work about the continuing relevance of modern music, so to be met on the first page by the dour assessment that “serialism has all but died out [and] faith in musical modernism has subsided” is somewhat disconcerting. However, it quickly becomes apparent that Harper does not wish to sound the death knell for serialism but to recontextualise it, to rescue it from obsolescence. The trap that many modernist “composers” (and the definition of the term is contested herein) fall into, Harper suggests, is one of treating modernism as a series of conventions and techniques. What they should really be doing, he argues, is using the spirit of such devices as a means of reinventing every aspect of music-making.
Harper writes of an “old modernism” for which the groundbreaking innovations that once made it so radical—such as the 12-tone technique—have now become like the conventions they sought to undermine. Modernism has become trapped, subjected to the preservationism—the insistence on performing and composing in the “correct” manner—that afflicts many musical styles, from popular to folk to classical. What is more, the conventionalisation of the erstwhile radical facets of this “old modernism” further serves to highlight the aspects of musical performance that have been left uncontested. This has resulted in many so-called modernist performances that claim to be “explorational” whilst often tacitly preserving many of the trappings of the traditional classical musical world. Most in need of radical overhaul, the main body of Infinite Music suggests, is the conservatism surrounding performance and composition. For the former is often presented in the recognisable manner of a classical concert in which the audience sits in silent reverence as the artists “explore”, while the latter still maintains its air of prestige and exclusivity. It is these two facets of music-making that Harper aims to revolutionise.
“Where do we draw a line around what musical variables composers observe and potentially serialise?” asks Harper. “We don’t. That was the old serialism, the old modernism”. Harper is searching for a more holistic musical egalitarianism, one that treats timbre, instrumentation, and performance conventions with the same levelling hand as serialism did pitch. “No restrictions whatsoever” is what Harper demands of this new modernism, and it is a cri de coeur that is as meticulously and thoroughly explained as it is inspiringly progressive.
But in this utopian desire to rid the modernist musical landscape of all restrictions, Harper hints at two caveats that need adding. The first is that the abnegation of restrictions must allow for aspects of conventional musical language to be incorporated into the resultant sound world. Melody, harmony, and most importantly, repetition and recapitulation of ideas must be included in this new modernism, for it is these devices that facilitate a sort of real-time dialogue between composer (or musician) and audience. The opportunity to second-guess the flow of the musical narrative, and to have those guesses either confirmed or contradicted, is where one finds delight in musical performance. Harper suggests as much in positioning the music created by modernism “somewhere between the old and familiar…it’s a relation between old and new”. This liminality affords the music a chance to comment upon all conventions of music making, whilst seeking avenues literally to modernise their usage. Truly modernist music “must also situate itself with respect to the familiar in some way, however small, and this link with or establishment of the familiar is what can facilitate appreciation”.
But this facilitation of appreciation is not simply a means of forcing modernist music out of the cloistered, elitist world Harper suggests it now inhabits. Nor is it to popularise and heighten the influence of the music in a manner that modernism in its old guise, Harper claims, singularly failed to do. What this endeavour attempts is to rupture perhaps the most pervasive convention of music-making: the idea that the audience is a passive receptor of the musical meanings of the composer/musician.
This leads to the second caveat, one that Harper touches upon in his egalitarian approach to the definition of the composer. In broadening the definition of this otherwise exclusive concept to include all those engaged in music making, proclaiming “we can all be composers, and we are all composers”, Harper alludes to Christopher Small’s concept of “musicking” (addressed in greater detail later in the book). Harper explores Small’s notion that everyone engaged in the process of music-making—even (or perhaps especially) the audience—is engaged in a process of “musicking” that makes them integral to the creation of meaning.
The necessity to include the audience in modernist music is evident from the above example. A dialogue that includes the old but challenges the new must be established, and the role of the audience in not only interpreting but creating the music must be recognised and celebrated by modernism, breaking once and for all that most recalcitrant of conventions: the schism between performer and audience.
If there is a danger that a manifesto such as Harper’s—one that propounds a more egalitarian musical world and seeks to imagine the future—should drift into idealism and daydream, or worse, into the very type of proscriptive demagoguery that it seeks to dispel, then Harper counteracts it by providing a framework for reassessing music-making that is practical and thorough, wide-ranging and speculative, yet honest and humble in its intentions. In seeking new definitions of what constitutes the “space” of the musical soundscape, and by suggesting potential extensions of this space, Harper does not purport to have “solved the problem” of old modernism by defining precisely and entirely the space of new modernism. Rather, Harper espouses a view of modernist music as infinite. He provides the reader with:
not just a single system [for the imagining of music] as was offered by serialism, but a system of systems, an infinite system allowing for the creation of subordinate musical systems or what will be called ‘musical objects’, describing how they interrelate and how they’re perceived (or not). It sees music as a complex system of variables relating primarily to the production of sound, and takes this idea to its infinitely variable conclusions.
It is from this honesty—from not professing to have the entire template (and at not being able to even comprehend or imagine the entire template)—that Harper’s ambition of imagining the future of music-making derives its power. This is a manifesto of possibility, of potential and of limitless imagination. “Why shouldn’t we try to imagine another thousand years of musical history?” asks Harper, defiantly. And in imagining a music with infinite possibility, Harper sees an inspiring, albeit tentative, precursor of this future." - Tom Astley

Adam Harper's blog

Brandi Wells - Stories often disguised as instruction manuals, as apologies and confessions, as notes left behind. About the brutal violence by which we live and breathe, the uneven posture we pretend rendered on the page in all its forceful honesty and anger

2012-01-17T16:45:00.001+01:00

Brandi Wells, Please Don’t Be Upset, Tiny Hardcore Press, 2011.

"Please Don’t Be Upset is a collection of fifteen perfectly rendered stories–lists, instructions, yearnings, confessions, more–stories about imperfect mothers and daughters, women and men, strange stories about folded bodies and stalking deer, stories about the small, heartbreaking ways we fail each other, yet cling so tightly."

"In stories often disguised as instruction manuals, as apologies and confessions, as notes left behind, Brandi Wells creates a world of tempting baubles, each tiny fiction begging to be discovered, to be stolen away, to be secreted safe and treasured." - Matt Bell

"I read (and thoroughly enjoyed) an e-galley of xTx’s Normally Special, the debut release from Roxane Gay’s Tiny Hardcore Press, but Brandi Wells’ Please Don’t Be Upset was my first look at their physical product itself, and I must start this review by saying how thrilled I am at the values that Gay has put into her titles. The cover is beautiful, the size perfection – so easily shaped to the hand – and the typesetting makes for an effortlessness of reading that all avid readers seek. Tiny Hardcore Press makes a book that we want to read.
So then what is inside of Please Don’t Be Upset, the third release from this fine upstart press? Only the brutal violence by which we live and breathe. Only the uneven posture we pretend rendered on the page in all its forceful honesty and anger. Only the world crushing down around us in love and muscles.
The deer keep coming. They bend their legs and knuckle down onto the grass, the dirt and even the bottom of the porch steps. One of them sits atop the picnic table with its front legs hanging off the side and another one sits awkwardly on a patio chair. All across the yard, bucks and does and fawns are curled up against one another.
Brandi Wells is a surprising writer. She surprises us by a story about instructions for rape told from the victim’s perspective. She surprises us by making nonchalant lists that create heartache. But most importantly, Wells surprises her readers by creating stories that expand exponentially in comparison to their word count – in the smallest of spaces Wells is building relationships of vast complexity and yearning, and she seems to do so with ease.
Somehow the deer get into our house. I don’t know how. Maybe they ran up the back stairs. Maybe the back door was open. Somehow they get in and they come into our bedroom and watch us sleep. I wake, but I don’t move. They look over me, at Ben. They drag him off the bed, pulling him with their mouths. Whatever part of him they can grasp. His clothes, his hair, the loose skin on his arms.
Even if we’ve known the writer online or in print journals for years and years, a debut collection gives us the true writer, the one beneath the glimpsed skin, the one that will be evolving in book form for the duration of a lifetime. Please Don’t Be Upset, for Wells, shows us that for now everything about her writing is even-keeled and yet fraught, calculating in its word choice but vindictive and rash in its meaning. Wells is this tiny body wailing and railing, screaming with a voice that we didn’t expect, a voice that startles us down deep, and one that is raised in honest and moving literary prowess. Wells is telling stories, the most vivid vibrant ones.
I pick up the smallest fawn I can find. It’s heavier than I thought. I lean back and try to position some of its weight on my hip. I look around to see if I’ve disturbed any of the others but I haven’t. They’re all staring at the house. I climb the stairs, set the deer down and pull open the door. I drag the deer across the threshold. It tries to lean back, bear its weight away from me, but I am stronger than a fawn. I am stronger than a fawn.
‘Deer’, the text from which I’ve quoted for this review, is only one of fifteen stories in Wells' collection, each piece a new level of lust and shove, a new way in which Brandi Wells shows us her writer’s guts. But there is only so much we can show in the space of this space, even if Wells knows how to do otherwise. The bottom-line: Please Don’t Be Upset is representative of an up-and-coming author, one to pay attention to, one to seek out. The fiercest angle is in her words, and these sentences are a strangulation." - J. A. Tyler

"Do you love someone? Pause and take a deep breath – you’re about to get the shit kicked out of you.
“Please Don’t Be Upset and Other Stories” by Brandi Wells is a riveting collection of short stories, notable for its clean, clean prose and subtle use of imagery. The title story centers around a woman who attempts to stick her hand in her lover’s throat, something most of us have never tried. Why would anyone do such a thing? The narrator explains herself in an offhand manner – her man doesn’t let her drive the car and “yeah, it didn’t upset me” she says – but you know, you just know, that it really does.
Think about the times you couldn’t do something. You put on a sweater, and then a coat. You put on a scarf, and mittens, and boots. You walked outside in the snow. You couldn’t find it, whatever you were looking for, and God knows, you were looking for a lot of things those days. Every weekend you lost your cellphone, keys, wallet. Every weekend you lost a little bit of yourself – you threw it up and cried it out and other times, just gave it away. Here have this, you said, and no, it doesn’t upset me.
These narrators give their power away. The narrator in “Seven Things I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You” describes her neediness in metaphors: she infiltrates her lover’s closet, she saves his gray hairs (which she claims she will need one day), and she imagines wearing his body like a shirt. She does these things to prove that she can keep him, that one way or another, he’ll be hers forever. That’s sweet, you think – sweetly disgusting and familiar.
In truth, you can never keep anybody. Or rather, you can keep the memory of them, but little else. Their body and thoughts and feelings and tiny fleeting expressions are gone for you, and no amount of gray hairs in a bag will change that. But it doesn’t upset you. Other things upset you: skinned knees, overdraft fees, missed appointments. He doesn’t upset you anymore or ever again. You’ll never again -
The narrator of “Bald” has lost her hair. Has anyone else had that dream? You’re sitting with an attractive man and you bat your eyelashes and run your hands through your hair and suddenly, large clumps fall onto the floor. Dream dictionaries explain that hair represents sexual attraction and seduction. The subconscious mind is terrified of losing her power to entice men, or women, or anyone, into her bed; you dream because you’re scared, you dream because you no longer have him and can’t get him back.
You’ll never again hold hands, or talk about squirrels. You’ll never again giggle at night, kiss his cheek, touch his face with your hands as he tells you a funny story. You’ll never again wait for his texts. You never again discuss him with friends, because they’re sick of him, and you, and the idea of the two of you together. You’ll never again worry about his frown, follow him like a particularly stupid kitten until he smiles again. Such wild uncontainable love. All you want is to kiss his stomach, but this won’t ever happen again.
“A Dozen Notes to Ruben” is about a woman who has a man. She wants to keep him, because she loves him. She’s watched him, played games with his head and heart, made lists about him (as this story attests), but he’s not a perfect man. And yet who cares about perfection when you have someone to kiss in bed?
Maybe you never had him in the first place. Well, all right then; like the narrator in “Contortionist Ballerina” you try to make yourself small. She fits herself into a washing machine, suitcases, duffle bags. People are amused. What’s not funny about a young girl in pajamas, crying over ice cream and then regretting it? What’s not funny about compulsive gym-going or baggy clothes? Be small, be tiny; hug your knees as you balance on a ledge, under the stars alone. This is the dream. This is a better dream that the one where you lose your hair.
You have this dream because you couldn’t do something. Maybe your limbs were paralyzed by fear. Maybe you couldn’t speak any coherent words. Maybe you were caught in the web of your own experiences, stubborn hurtful feelings and the weight of time and memory. Or maybe you just wanted to drive a car. Brandi Wells will tell you. She’ll tell you about stolen wedding rings, blueberry pancakes, fucking him and fucking other people, cracked ribs and bent bones. She won’t teach you how to drive a car, but hey, you can’t have everything." - Nidya Sarria

"Brandi Wells wrote a book and I bought it. Well, the ebook version (I’m not a millionaire). I read all the words in the book on every page and when I got to the last, I was finished with the book. This is how reading works. I enjoyed this book. Throughout the small confessions, notes, lists and letters that make up the short stories of Please Don’t Be Upset, I found myself getting closer and closer to the speaker in the stories and consequently, the author. Wells’ tone always seems familiar, even familial. The voice in my head sounds like the voice of a friend.
I feel like a moron when I try to figure out what exactly it is that Wells and other women writers like her are doing so well in their short stories. I’m not some kid at a magic show trying to figure out how the tricks are done but more like a baseball fan at a game trying to figure out how the hell the pitcher can throw a ball over 100 mph or how Albert Pujols can hit the ball so damn far. Hyperbolic much? Perhaps, but the truth is that writers such as Wells leave their nerves exposed on every page. Her words are dripping with the hardest kind of honesty, a vulnerability on every line that looks you right in the eye.
Please Don’t Be Upset is from Tiny Hardcore Press. This is the second title I’ve read from them, the first being a very strong collection from everybody’s favourite pseudonym xTx entitled Normally Special. Tiny Hardcore Press is very new and very small, but there is already the feeling of a personal touch behind the titles they publish. They believe in their authors and they believe that they are providing strong contributions to the new canon of short fiction that is emerging every day through small presses and Internet journals. Brandi Wells’ book is a fine addition for the Tiny Hardcore catalogue." - Jason Lee Norman

Brandi's blog

Please don't be upset.by Brandi Wells

Deer by Brandi Wells