Miranda Mellis - World both on the verge of collapse and in midst of mutation, some absurd realm where men explode as car-crashes

   

Miranda Mellis,  None of This Is Real, Sidebrow, 2012.

"None of This Is Real imagines a not-too-alternate reality of philosophical children, reincarnating chimeras, mutant matriarchies, and kind seers adapting to affliction. These five fictions question what is knowable and what actions can be taken in the face of loss — of family, heritage, ecosystems, agency, and power. A face incapable of masking its sneering rebellions; young sisters in search of their missing mother; a page whose very body extracts meaning from occult readings in response to alienation; a never-ending line for coffee that becomes a surreal site of quotidian wars in miniature; a nightmare future of scientific subjugation and regenerate seekers — this first collection by the author of The Revisionist illuminates the gap between institutional powers and those failed by, or otherwise mortally at odds with, those powers. Drawing inspiration from absurdism, noir, fairy tales, and the occult, None of This is Real brings the playfulness of contemporary fabulism to bear on today’s pressing ethical and political issues, exploring the potential and limits of magical thinking with empathy, subtle humor, and an engrossing mastery of the fictional form."

"O, the subject of the title story of Miranda Mellis’s collection of short and long fiction, None of This Is Real, seeks solace (he has headaches—better to say “pain management,” then? we’ll see) in something called “Path to a Position™,” purveyed by its shadowy practitioner, Tiara Scuro: “She outlined for O the steps by which he would, with her, find his position. . . The old school believed the antidote for despair was courage, she said, but the real anti to the dote is a comforting distortion; this is what I call somatic realism.” “Somatic” realism? Is there another kind? Or do we deal in phenomenology?
“For years I had been removing the ground from under my clients,” she tells him,

But then I realized that what people really want is exactly what I was trying to subtract: a position, a Patch of Stability, a bit of personal ground in a time when actual ground is inaccessible for a variety of economic and environmental reasons, and in a time when positions, in the sense of steady employment, are scarce.

What she means is a pose, a posture (“standing in a curious way with his head turned all the way to the left and tilted slightly forward,” in O’s case), the steady ground of an unshakeable confidence (think of your least favorite Presidential candidate), the brute intelligence of complete insensibility—ignorance, in other words, an absence of empathy. An existence as inscrutable as an animal’s. This is the problem that Mellis’s characters confront, over and over: what to do with themselves, stranded somehow in their bodies by their suspicion that the something more that they are that isn’t corporeal is not just immaterial but unmanageable and inhuman.
For O, the carefree (thought-free, anyway) Position Dr. Scuro proposes is untenable. It does not cure—and may cause—his headaches. Something snaps, returning him briefly to thought, from stasis to story:

At the zoo there was an elephant doing what at first O assumed was an instinctual dance, her slate gray, finely wrinkled hide rippling like breathing lineaments of stone. She’d walk five feet forward, lift one great foot, swing her head, curl her trunk to the side, drop her head and trunk back down, place her foot on the ground, walk back five feet, and then repeat the pattern. He assumed she was performing an elephant ritual. He had heard of the intelligence of elephants, that they held funerals, that they mourned, and that they listened with their feet. But Sonia disabused him of his fancies, explaining that the elephant suffered from a form of post-traumatic stress syndrome, stereotypy, a compulsion to repeat certain movements ad nauseam. In this case, movements the elephant had been trained to perform while employed by Ringling Brothers. They stared in disappointment. He sensed his mother counting the elephant’s steps. Suddenly O yelped angrily, Ringling Brothers! He turned abruptly saying, I’ll go on.

Yes, we’ll go on. O, Sonia, Tiara Scuro — the story’s a study of how we go on, or rather, whether we go on. O has long ceased to do so despite his words, stopped in his tracks by this positional therapy. “Stereotypy,” “somatic realism”? In None of This Is Real, all the rest is a fiction. The O of O is just a story. Without O telling O, there is no O, or rather there is 0, a body: “he slumped down below the rodeo sign and shucked off his corpus, a specter rippled out, heading west to the sea.” And so he goes on. Or rather, doesn’t.
“Keep a picture of yourself outside your own head,” touts the photographer working the Cortazarian line to the coffee shop in “The Coffee Jockey,” but even when he has a taker (the “coffee jockey” herself), no one’s really buying it. None of this is real, remember? Or rather, what’s real is what these characters aren’t, their bodies moving through the world in advance of the stories that they tell about themselves (creating, in the process, themselves (and, of course, fiction: “what’s the difference between imagining and knowing?” wonders a character, and, well, there is none)): “The man stood and his leg lifted, then his other leg. The leg lifted and bent at the knee, he proceeded forward, then the other leg lifted. In this manner he walked. He placed one foot on the ground, then lifted his other leg and placed the other foot on the ground.” Mellis’s philosophical conundrum is that of Descartes: what to do with dualism, where to locate the self.
So maybe it’s not ontology after all. Maybe it’s something more immediate than being—the stuff of being, the fiction of the fiction. In “Triple Feature,” a young girl bargains with no one for a life (her mother’s) that is not in danger: “She had no clear sense of whom she was bargaining with, just that it was someone powerful and willing to barter, someone who would accept her pain in kind, even her body parts in exchange for her mother’s safety.” And yet her mother slips away. How do Mellis’s characters go on? By telling themselves stories. By telling themselves. The girl’s bargain might have worked, but she forgot to make it until it was too late, too caught up in her body:

Barbarella played next, the only one of the three movies the older girl liked. Barbarella had cleavage like the women in her mother’s adult comics. The older one often looked at those comics. . . She liked to imagine Zenobia chained to a rock, kidnapped by an enormous lizard. She’d slay the lizard and cut Zenobia’s chains with her hatchet but not before they had sex, the older girl in her favorite guise as a muscular, invulnerable, but kind and intelligent barbarian.

Bodies again—not only not selves, but not even part of the self, currency; the self can be embodied by any body, any body at all, or else what is the imagination? The transformer of “Transformer,” Moira, is a kind of Guy Montag of performance art, a spirit medium of motion: “Re-creating canonical performances had been her métier. . . She chanted, shouted, danced, flew, and deployed all manner of apparatuses to recuperate the art of her brief lineage.” Recuperate, not revive. There is no reanimation here, the body is long gone:

As if Lutz Junior’s eyes upon her made a sound, Amber Rose woke and looked around perplexed. She looked down at her body. The spaces between her cells had pixilated. Her legs disappeared. . . She held out her arms–she was dissolving. . . Everything vanished behind her. She leapt the last three feet, but did not feel or hear a sound as she hit the ground, though she knew she had landed.

And somehow this is cheering. The waste our bodies are is nothing to be ashamed of because it isn’t even ours. You might as well be ashamed of someone else’s big nose, someone else’s birthmark. Well, you might as well;  Mellis’s “somatic realism” is irreal, unreal, the actual artificial.
The sad somatic reality is that the body grows and falls apart at the same time. Time is the deus ex machina in all our stories, the shape that our stories all have: “Now she saw that the road she thought had moved forward was going back. It would not be possible to go on after all.” No, I guess not. Not for these characters. Not with a body. And what happens when you can’t go on?

It was as though [O] had had a letter to deliver, and had been on a mile-long line at the post office that had been moving one inch a year. Existence was waiting on that line. If expecting to get to the counter and buy a postage stamp and an envelope had seemed reasonable enough at the start, over the years he had simply forgotten that there was a counter, or even what he might require if he arrived there— he just waited without knowing why.

Why is it that so many existential metaphors seems to involve some kind of bureaucracy? It’s the body’s inexhaustible inefficiency, isn’t it? Because if the body worked the way our minds do, dualism never would have been conceivable. None of This Is Real depends on what This refers to. Or else what Real refers to. Or maybe Is. Or maybe I." - Gabriel Blackwell

"Miranda Mellis is of the breed of writers who I like to call “zippy” – page after page collides with one another like an existential car crash wherein instead of airbags, the drivers are sprayed with neon acrylic paint. The result is a reader (aka myself) who, following the end of one of the short stories in None of This Is Real , is suddenly filled with a violent urge to recreate the Scottish charge on Hadrian – to paint myself blue and run down the mountains screaming, waving an enormous stick. Except, unlike the Scottish berserkers, I wouldn’t have a real cause except for the confusion of my own psyche, and subsequent frustration.
None of this is real. I am carried away in a two-story Victorian house by the branches of the trees that surround me, dragging me up beige pinstripe wallpaper on crooked hands to deposit me who knows where. Or maybe this is just the front cover. Actually, it really is just the front cover of this bizarre little bundle of plant fibers coated in plastic. See, what this book really is, is something different – not the actual story lines (mildly fantastical) or the writing style (it follows standard conventions of imagery, voice, et cetera), but rather, the way the stories are presented. Abnormally constructed characters with normal characteristics do normal things in ways that are also normal but are presented so that you have to second-guess their normalcy. In other words, nothing is very unreal, you just think that it is until you realize you’re wrong. Bizarre indeed.
In one of the stories, I found myself attempting to discover reality on the gentle curve and tumultuous waves of my face. For you see, perhaps:
“We would walk right to the edge of high cliffs, a small crowd marveling at the vista. Beautiful? Opaque[…]My body was rejecting meaning, or so it seemed. At the very least, I had learned to refrain from complaining. Or even speech. In not speaking I became a plateau.”
A plateau, then, perhaps – where my nose would meet my ears on a flat plan and would rise above my neck where the words in my lungs struggle to haul themselves up the cliffs of my trachea. But once again, none of this is real. None of this is real, but perhaps, you would think there would be a straight narrative somewhere in this multitudinous collection? I’m afraid you would be wrong. Or, if not wrong, disappointed.  You see, as I quickly discovered after reading the pages of the work’s namesake story, “None of This Is Real”, Miranda Mellis is zippy. Zippy, do you understand? Zip-zap-ziggy-zaggy-zop. You think your finger has found its definition, but then the little letters run off of the microfilm machine and you have to chase them all the way over to the trash can, only to figure out that they aren’t what you’re actually looking forward. Elusive little epistles. O, the protagonist of this story, goes to get an MRI during one of the many erratic sections. This is what he is told:
“You have developed a growth, she said. O thought it looked like a kite or a feather. No, the doctor replied, it’s nothing like a kite or a feather. It’s rigid, cartilaginous, more like a fin[…] Ignoring him, the doctor got out her pendulum. Was he born with the errant flap or not? Where did it come from? Was it an organism, a mutation? The pendulum reading was indeterminate.”
I wasn’t aware that the origin of errant flaps growing at the base of my skull could be discovered through hypnosis. I don’t expect my protagonist to be like this: “In the same way that he spoke with enthusiasm about astrological signs while what he habitually felt was a droning confusion punctuated by political despair, so too did O seek hypoallergenic pillows when he meant to be writing his encyclopedic, world-historical novel.”
Now, the true question for a potential purchaser/reader: Is the thing actually any good? You, you dodgy reviewer, what is your criticism? Should I even bother? Why are you taking your time dilly-dallying around the point? You see, the true answer to that is that I don’t know, and I don’t think that it really matters. Sure, read it, why not? You’ll probably giggle as much as I did while doing so. Or don’t.  Your life won’t be incomplete.
After all, none of this is real." - Isaac Dwyer


"Miranda Mellis’s new collection acts like an unruly Greek Chorus—hard to discern individual voices; the work’s strength lies in its homophonic nature. The shared crisis of her characters is worth an intense study, all the more because Mellis is a rare bird who can mold complex existentialism into a respectable 115 pages.
None of This is Real is a construct of five short stories—none of which preoccupy themselves with elaborating on the surreal content of the book. Over time, the stories build upon a theme of disappearance, or nonexistence. As one of her characters claims, “I have a relative who disappeared and this caused irreparable damage to the immediate family, all of whom descended into various forms of addiction and personality disorder.” Similarly, three of the five stories consist of voices of children—either young or old—fixated with their mothers. The children seem to be searching either for their mothers’ physical presence or for a drop of shared parental/child understanding. Often, these narrators are faced with an emotional disconnect; the mothers have anxiety, pop pills, or are alcoholics. The child carries this disregard like a crucifix.
There are moments where Mellis’s turns to magical realism seem too elusive. But the fantastic happenings are less tangential, and more calculated and philosophical. People walk into the sky, become animals, or develop witchlike powers, yet there’s a frustrating, almost haunting resemblance of Mellis’s fictional world and our own. There is masturbation. There is abandonment. There are long lines at the coffee shop.
Mellis’s message emerges as the sum of the work’s parts. To Mellis, the family is a single unit, not a compilation of independent people. The irony is that the children in this single unit fail, time and again, to connect with their progenitors. When the narrator is perceived as a continuation of the parental body, any form of rejection is then a dismissal of self. The reader slowly realizes the collection is less about mothers and their children than about what it means to unconsciously reject, or unwrite, one’s self.

There are similarities between Kafka’s Metamorphosis and the titular story, None of This is Real. In Metamorphosis, Gregor is trapped in a bug-like body with a family that does not understand him—literally and figuratively. In the story, “None of This is Real”, O finds a dorsal fin growing out the top of his head. He very much wants to speak to his mother about his quickly developing lump, but cannot find the right moment. When he calls her on the phone, she doesn’t answer. It’s as if, by magic, some force prevents him from being able to speak about the problem at hand. They talk of other things, which only serves to irritate O. Otherwise, both Gregor and O greet their fate with an inhuman level of calmness. They’re more tormented by the accompanying physical disabilities—in Gregor’s case, injuries acquired from being assaulted by his father, and in O’s case, terrible headaches—than with the meaning of the sudden change.
I don’t mean to delve into a lecture in comparative literature, but it is important to note that Mellis is a well-read lady. The epigraph to “The Coffee Jockey” is a quote from Beckett’s, The Unnamable, which is perhaps the most helpful framework she could provide, as her book could be viewed as a homage to the last volume in Beckett’s dense trilogy. In the story “Transformer”, Mellis writes, “Still we live into the future via the shape of a word or letter…which becomes the geography—imaginary at first—of our destination.” It is no coincidence, then, that None of This is Real has a main character named O. His name highlights the conundrum of having a past that is seemingly the future—of being the embodiment of a clock face, something that, “…passes but never passes; is the traveler and the traveled; abides but doesn’t exist; makes everything and destroys everything.” Her characters subsist in a state of purgatory, and Mellis makes us wander, confused, alongside them.
This is not to say that reading None of This is Real is like entering a scary place. Purgatory is neither a heaven nor a hell, and somehow Mellis’s tone lands on strange contentment. As one of her characters says of herself, “She was of no use to the world but she found the world very useful indeed. Without the world, she thought, what would I have to look at?” In another story, a character states, “Her surroundings were what were left to remind her that she existed. They existed because she perceived them.” Reading Mellis’s work leaves one with a similar sensation; you quickly accept her dream-like language as something cogent and almost tangible. Reading the book, one feels as if you’re leading the characters to meet their final fate—as one vaguely controls a story during sleep. When you’re forced awake, or when the book ends, everybody is gone. The next question: without Mellis, what will I have to read?" - Molly Gallentine

"Next to read was Miranda Mellis, professor of writing at California College of the Arts, who has been quite prolific this year already with a novella The Spokes (Solid Objects, forthcoming in May 2012), and a story collection, None of this is Real (Sidebrow Press, 2012), just out this April. Tonight she chose to read from the title story of None of this is Real, which quickly showed itself to be a staggering and complex work. The story follows the title character “O,” as he cycles through his shifting and hostile world. O is a very anxious character, surrounded by others who unpredictably want to assist him or take advantage of him. He has lost his girlfriend (a therapist who had helped O “find his position”) and has booked a weekend trip to visit his Mother, Sonia, who is on a massive regiment of anti-depressives. Mellis’ vision of decrepit America does contain many typical tropes of dysfunctional suburban melodrama (anti-depressives, obsessive behavior, isolation, agricultural apocalypse, etc). However, where Mellis’ captivates is in her non-linear and carefully organized narrative voice that brims with descriptive imagination. O’s story could just be one clever postmodern joke after another but Mellis finds time to be emotionally varied and sincere when it counts. “[Y]our worries enclose my worries like a fence around a fence” O’s Mother tells him, right after O relates that “[f]actual records looked like frightening art when the tide went out on patriarchy, God, and war.” Hard-to-forget passages like these kept Mellis’ reading engrossing, and showed off her strength of emotional expression. Much like O’s oblong life in her story, Mellis’ turn seemed to be over before it began, leaving many listeners to later buy the book from her directly."- Turner Canty

"I was at work when I first met Miranda Mellis. I looked up from the register one day and there she was, standing at the bookstore counter, backlit by a beam of sun. In nearly a decade of subsequent conversations, I came to know her work as a teaching artist and co-editor of The Encyclopedia Project. Then came her first novella in 2007, The Revisionist, a beautiful, shattered parable of a man who goes insane because of the nature of his job—writing falsified reports on climate change.
With tenderness and dark humor, Mellis explores similar terrain in None of This Is Real, her new collection of short fables just out on Sidebrow Books. Detailing the psychic wreckage that results from political problems, Mellis writes:

It had recently been made clear that even though everyone had to work, most jobs were a waste of time. This was making people feel crazy, almost every moment. While appearing normal, their hearts kicked and kicked, invisibly, like the legs of a duck, underwater. “Creating jobs” was the motto, production regardless of need.

We might be in a metaphysical fairy tale, or a world just around the bend from our own, and indeed, the precarious climates and barely livable economies in these stories induce both wonder and terror as barometers of our shared, precarious moment. What proffers hope or agency is Mellis’s capacity to imagine “the possibility of another kind of relationship with mortality, as yet undreamed of.”
During her East coast book tour this spring, Mellis visited my freshman writing class at Pratt to discuss fiction as an especially apt instrument for this sort of efficacious dreaming. We continued the conversation over email for several weeks, and the result is the following conversation about fiction as a way of divining. As for what the future holds, I can’t wait to read The Spokes, Mellis’s novella (set in the afterworld) forthcoming in June from Solid Objects Press.

AD: Under the spell of your stories and the talk that you gave at my class, I’ve been flipping tarot cards with increased vigor over the weekend. This morning all the cards were upside down until the last two. A heart with three swords plunging through it plummeted downward. The queen of cups worked an upside-down manipulation and a devil glowered hugely over two chained lovers licked by flames. Above that, finally, an upright card: the three of pentacles. Its primary term is skill. You said (something like) readers can come to their own conclusions about the questions your stories raise. Meditating on your lecture as I swam laps this morning, it occurred to me that tarot functions like that too. You flip a sequence of images that seem to burst with somewhat open-ended narratives, and the reader interacts. I was swimming to burn off a recurrent anxiousness, and was thinking about or relating to O, the central character in the titular story, with his litany of “head problems.” I plowed my arms and legs. I thought the rhythm would help get the ideas into a place where I could access them without having to think. Or where I could think about them with another part of my body besides the head.
MM: That isn’t just a metaphor, right? Did you know the gut is called the second brain? Because it has 100 million neurons, major neurotransmitters like serotonin, and brain proteins. On the subject of materials to think with, be they our guts, cracks in mud paths, palms, cards, or bowls of water, any dynamic, motile, anamorphic surface can be used to foretell, or dream-read. I used the made up tarot deck in the divination scene in “None of This Is Real” to seed the stories proleptically with images, metonyms, foreshadowings (foretellings, pre-dictions) that have specific intentions and are there to guide the reader, if not O as the protagonist, forward to slowly build an understanding of what his symptoms portend.
AD: The story unfolds with an intentional, particular logic, but at the same time, in your talk at Pratt, you raised the idea that “the story sets up its own rules and you have to rigorously try not to get in the way.” Is this a variation on the idea that “language thinks for us”? Is it possible to describe the strange marriage between analysis and intuition that can happen when writing?
MM: Perhaps not getting in the way of the story has something to do with recognizing and accepting its nascent directions and potentials, which can mean not holding on to preconceptions—not just about the story, but about who you are as a writer, what you think you are willing to open up to in your work. Think of a writer receiving a tarot reading and getting some scary cards as O does in “None of This Is Real.” On the one hand (so to speak) the writer could accept, in order to study, the cards that are dealt. On the other, the writer could reshuffle and deal again to try to get different cards that feel more comfortable. But if a card comes up that shows some image of confusion, cruelty, or death and the writer puts it back to try to get another card depicting, say, luxury, peace, and love, then that severely limits the terrain one is analyzing and intuiting. Writing and teaching are so similar in this regard; they both require active receptivity. The “strange marriage between analysis and intuition that can happen when writing fiction,” as you so beautifully put it, requires steadily building the capacity to realize what’s in front of you to, in a way, bring into being what is already there, but occluded. It brings to mind John Cage’s idea of anarchic harmony: “Music is everywhere you just have to have the ears to hear it.” Intention is just one among many factors.
AD: Yes! The question of intention also becomes mysterious and compelling when considering reading. With certain genres, part of the pleasure, as a reader, lies in anticipating narrative climax and resolution. In other instances, I read to abandon intention and control in favor of an unknown outcome.
MM: Yes: to lose your way, not to read for outcomes, and perhaps even to relearn how to read, as a formally unfamiliar text teaches us how to read anew. Alexander Kluge has said that the best thing a book can do is stimulate the reader to independent action. There’s a continuum of formal possibilities vis-à-vis galvanizing readers’ independent action. In Mimesis Erich Auerbach places Homer at one end of the continuum and the story of the sacrifice of Isaac at the other. The Homeric is the utterly explicated legend, “uniformly illuminated” as Auerbach puts it. Though the legend can contain auguries, or omens, as The Odyssey does, the story itself doesn’t function like an augury: it isn’t open-ended and therefore doesn’t necessarily demand interpretation. On the other end, while proscriptive and moralistic, we have the biblical story which, by means of elision, stimulates exegesis, interpretative labor, oracular reading – independent action. (Depending on how crazy you are of course, it’s possible to do a literalist reading of anything. Or, depending on how real a story feels to you.)
The contemporary writer’s toolkit includes radical disjunction, attention to materiality (language as material like paint or film), conceptualism, and other such modes that galvanize reader’s independence. These techniques can lead to unprecedented cognitive pleasures, altered states, and insights. They can shift ideological ground, expose social toxins, remediate cultural habits and defamiliarize banalities. “None of This Is Real” is concerned with epistemological crises and so it cruises this continuum, rather than positioning itself firmly. In fact the story parodies taking positions, imagining the fixed stance as a cathartic but ultimately inadequate exercise.
AD: Your gift for code-switching is evident if we again consider O, who “cruises” from political theory to the scientific method to astrology and beyond, as in this passage:
Even as a question mark hung constantly over the idea of astrology, or any such system, O found himself resorting aloud to occult typologies as if he were a committed acolyte, all the while doubting in secret and secretly hoping to arrive at something he could not doubt.
One way O tries to synthesize these different systems of knowledge is by writing fiction. In fact, O keeps an “unbearable correspondences file” full of research for his unfinished novel manuscript (does every writer have a file like this?). You write, “He was paralyzed by the messy, sorrowful wilderness of all that content.” Instead of finishing his novel, O turns into a shark. Instead of turning into another species, you wrote this book. Can we talk about how fiction works?
MM: To speak generally about the kind of work fiction does, I would say it does the same work communities do when they have agency: fiction argues; it remediates; it exposes; it redeems; it alchemizes; it heals; it includes; it condemns; it mythologizes; it models; it detoxifies; it connects; it entertains and it trucks in prophesy. If we think of fiction as a special form of apprehension, an organ for detecting what otherwise goes unregistered, or antennae with which to try to detect the emergent, historical present (i.e. not in the business of replicating outcomes) then part of what I think I am registering on my too-little antennae is a culture pathologically lacking in justice.
AD: I love this idea of fiction as “an organ for detecting what otherwise goes unregistered.” Many of your characters possess just such finely tuned antennae—most remarkably, Lutz, Jr. in “Transformer,” the final story in the collection. I just finished reading that story, and I am devastated, devastated—but any other outcome would seem beside the point. “Transformer” seems to echo with fairy-tale remnants, not as a flat-out retelling but as a borrower of shapes, tendencies, figures, and traits. Can you talk about its genesis?
MM: Since you used the word devastated to describe your experience of the ending, may I talk instead about endings? I am coming to see the endings of these stories as precipices, rather than arrivals, or returns. It’s vulnerable to say, but this has to do with my lack of faith in closure, an ongoing experience of irresolution, and the suspicion that things won’t “turn out” as the expression goes, or at least that a kind of mortal falling off, rather than resolution, is honest. Endings can be abrupt and inexplicable, like a song that stops in the middle, you know? It doesn’t resolve, won’t be completed.
But I do want to challenge myself to reach further around the bend. I recognize that there is an enormous difference between a vanishing that is conceived of as a return to non-being, the unknown, and the unformed; and vanishing that is expressed as a kind of entropic failure of a system. I end The Spokes [the forthcoming Solid Objects book] with the sentence “Still, we should try.” That is more hopeful perhaps.
AD: I hadn’t thought of the ends of stories as precipices but that image—again, from “Transformer”—of Lutz Junior memorizing her mother’ s face before that world gets erased shot straight into my core. I want to say that devastated is a word I use to describe an amplification of being moved. I use it tenderly. Devastated means to be laid to waste. Being laid to waste at the level of perception and habits of feeling. I want to be devastated by a story; it’s why I read. Devastation as a prerequisite for insight, or for movement. For movements.
MM: What is the genre of devastation, of that which lays us to waste so that we can move, the genre of pity and fear? Tragedy. I was writing drama, I suppose, minus poetic justice. Yes, devastation as the prerequisite to movement; that is so acute. It has to be a survivable devastation. There is an art to surviving isn’t there? Perhaps work is the art of surviving. The children in None of This is Real are all trying to learn that art." - Interview by Amanda Davidson

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Click to hear Miranda read on KQED's The Writers' Block

Miranda Mellis, The Spokes, Solid Objects, 2012.

In lucid, utterly captivating prose, Miranda Mellis delivers a highly disciplined, deeply melancholy portrait of the living and the dead. I read it transfixed. It is a radiant piece of work. — Carole Maso

The Spokes is as elegant as it is daring, as arresting as it is mysterious. It seems to me a truly timeless story, which is to say not only that it removes itself from time—though it does—but that its pleasures, enigmas, and meanings ought to be as accessible fifty or a hundred years from now as they are today. — Kevin Brockmeier

 

"The Spokes starts with its narrator’s arrival in the ‘afterworld,’ the land of the dead, although it is not the one her preconceptions of heaven and hell have prepared her for. Instead the hereafter is a holding pattern, a moratorium, where the newly deceased drift around in an aimless ‘amnesiac hustle,’ absorbing music and movies, ingesting not lotus flowers but ‘cold green gelatin.’ Here Lucia Spoke meets Silver Spoke, her dead mother; a tightrope walker, possible suicide, and ‘the last performer in the Spokes family line.’

‘She looked just as I had last seen her, the day of her fall from the high wire… my mother in her Spokes Cirque Rêve costume, as colourful as a summer bird.’

Time passes, or perhaps not, as the afterworld is ‘a realm whose primary substance is not time.’ Soon Lucia’s mother receives a message: ‘Tell your living to remember.’ The pair then possess Lucia’s still-living father, Leo, during an epileptic episode. He drives (or they drive him) to a cemetery, where he fails to find either of their graves, but achieves a broader communion with the ‘thousands of bones underneath him.’ Later, Lucia suggests to Silver that they should attempt something similar, conversing not just with their fellow ‘recent arrivals’ but also with the ‘ancient dead,’ a vast and unknown population.

So goes the story of The Spokes, although simply to call it a ‘story’ would be insufficient. Any text that tells a story also suggests a situation, but The Spokes shows a story submerged in its situation, such that a silence washes over it. We see the ship sink, and then, where it was, we witness the waters that bore it. Miranda Mellis’s writing is driven not by narrative logic but by magical acts of disclosure, of world-revealing. The syntax of stories is syntagmatic, whereas worlds are holistic; The Spokes is both, a story untold in its telling so as to unveil an emergent whole. And for this reason it needs to be read all at once. As with any of Mellis’s works, to stop would be to break the spell, severing story from world. To resume after an interruption would be to read another text, just as we can’t return to our dreams in the daylight.

From its outset The Spokes is strewn with mythological symbols. Cerberus and Persephone are alluded to in the first few pages, as if to assert that the world of the work is not that of real life. Only somehow it is. In the truth of its experiential tenor this false world makes itself known as our own. Furthermore, such uncertainty can’t be safely explained by citing critical concepts—familiar theories of the ‘fantastic,’ for instance. Mellis’s fictions infringe Tzvetan Todorov’s rule that fantastic tales ‘must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons… and to hesitate between a natural or supernatural explanation of events.’ In this respect The Spokes recalls the stories in Mellis’s tellingly titled collection None of This is Real. There the fantastic is not an eruption in the everyday, a figure which reconfigures the ground of the commonplace. Rather, it is the other way around. Each story is a tissue of unreal events—from mutations to telepathy—into which intrude instances of the ordinary: health insurance; queuing for coffee. Mellis’s texts are fantastic tales in reverse, where reality ruptures the field of fiction. Here the real is what estranges and unsettles us; as Lacan remarked, the real is the impossible.

Whenever the real appears in a work of art, questions are raised regarding the work’s social or political weight. Mellis herself seems to see her stories as responses to ‘real’ problems. The press release for None of This is Real refers to ‘the loss of family, heritage, ecosystems, agency, and power,’ and the protagonist of the title story speaks of his ‘political despair.’ In Mellis’s case, perhaps the question of art’s political content could be cast as a question of allegory—that is, the kind of question we might ask of writers like Kafka. Indeed, The Spokes often evokes the Kafkaesque, with its bureaucratic tone, and its ghosts who await opaque messages regarding ‘where they were supposed to be and what they were supposed to do once they got there.’ Moreover, in Mellis’s work as in Kafka’s, social facts are made manifest as ambiguities: as what one character calls ‘occult typologies,’ obscure causes which seem to steer the narrative, yet which never arrive at an explicit meaning. Ultimately, and again as in Kafka, such ambiguities resist allegorical reading, since to specify their sense would be to reduce them back to facts; to strand them in factuality, whereas the truth of such facts is finally found in their fictionalisation. If the real world has, as Nietzsche proclaimed, become a ‘fable,’ maybe real unfreedom will only be understood when figured as mysticism, as fate.

Thus The Spokes transforms its constitutive terms, approaching a transcendent indeterminacy. Within the narrative, the question ‘what is it like?’ is always at issue, and is always eluded, exceeded. To ask what something is like is to cause a story to come into being, but this opening question is also what closes the scope of all stories, what puts a stop to them. The Spokes breaks through this logical circle: when Lucia asks Silver, ‘what was it like between life and death?’ her mother replies that ‘it wasn’t really like anything,’ in the same way that language qua ‘likeness’ can’t capture her complex motives for falling from the high wire. In short, some stories cannot be told; and The Spokes is a story about such stories. In this sense the text attempts to re-enter what it refers to as ‘reservoirs of silence.’ As suggested below, it does so by means of two inextricable themes: memory and family secrets:

‘The statement what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence had proven useful to us… A family naturally gives up on the insoluble, the unanswerable, the hopeless cases—they are like fossils or mythology. Such subjects are practically Palaeolithic in their indecipherability… For the Spokes, the subject of our silence formed an unacknowledged nucleus around which we orbited with backs turned, looking out at the universe, but never inward. If history brings us all together, secrets dwell on the underside of it, beyond the remedy, reach, and solvency of speech.’

Here the Spokes form a wheel whose hub is the secret of Silver’s unspoken, unproven suicide. Such secrets exist on history’s underside, alongside the ‘thousands of bones’ beneath the cemetery, and with the ‘ancient dead’ whom Silver says are ‘invisible to us, out of time, unrepresentable.’ But if the afterworld stands outside of time, for Lucia it opens onto a deeper ‘duration.’ This duration is, as she puts it, ‘pre-clock-time,’ an ancestral time in which all far-flung families are reconciled in memory. But it is also the deep time of the story; the silent world which rises within and around it. Frank Kermode once compared fictional time to the aevum, the time of angels. The ‘time-order of novels,’ he argued, partook of both movement and stillness, spanning the temporal and the eternal, ‘like a stick in a river.’ The same could be said of The Spokes, a story which somehow sloughs off time, so as to approach the pure time of fiction. A whirlpool with a whole world at its still, silent centre." - David Winters

 

Miranda Mellis, The Revisionist, Calamari Press, 2007.

«The title character of Miranda Mellis' The Revisionist conducts covert surveillance on a Saunders-esque city whose inhabitants are subject to uncanny transformations as a result of catastrophic weather, political corruption, invasive technologies and environmental degradation. Hired to spin, or 'revise,' the facts, the revisionist's perceptions in turn become detached and distorted - inevitably unreliable yet all the same, revealing. This civil scientist of a narrator sardonically observes a distressed landscape inhabited by mutant children, a seeing-eye dog, a centenarian with iguanas and constellations beneath her dress, brooding frigate birds, insurance love clones, a terrorist curator, a private investigator, and a little girl who's discovered the world's largest conch.»

"There's an uncanny lightness about Miranda Mellis's gliding techno-novella. It's slow and glimmery like steam punk - and wise about gender too. She's right up there (for me) with Bob Dylan, folk art, anime and all the kind and great animals and plants of the world. I love this book so much." - Eileen Myles

"Caught somewhere in that nexus of living, observing and manipulating from which our current American malaise most convincingly reveals itself, the conflicted narrator of Miranda Mellis' taut story telescopulates to capture and possess a variety of lives from a distance. The Revisionist is at once a beautifully simple fable and a wonderfully lyrical apocalyptic tale. Though its motion seems at first Brownian, it manages almost because of this to get to where few books ever manage to go." - Brian Evenson

"Like a panopticon of virtual dystopia, The Revisionist allows characters which seem human only by dint of a certain nostalgia. A world is wiped away, but leaves a smudge on the lens. This is the eye's response to the everyday workings of what no longer quite works. A jarring and beautiful book." - Thalia Field

«The first time I finished reading Miranda Mellis’s The Revisionist, I started to turn the book back to the beginning and read immediately again. The book is only 82 pages, many of which only house a paragraph or depict ornate black and white collagist imagery, and the overall effect, as I felt it, is to feel in want of more. The nugget at the heart of this bizarre and wicked fever-dream of a book is a depiction of a world both on the verge of collapse and in midst of mutation - some absurd realm where men explode as car-crashes and the threat of apocalypse hinges on one lazy girl’s duty to seal envelopes. But I stopped myself from rereading The Revisionist immediately. Instead I lay back on the bed and let it jar around in my mind. I found myself still thinking about it hours later, and beyond that, days, unable to shake the bizarre dreamlike imagery that'd so quickly been uploaded.
The frame on which this cracked riff of Kafka seems to ride is based around the observations of a woman, assumedly The Revisionist herself, who is assigned by an unnamed private institution to, “conduct surveillance of the weather and report that everything was fine.” The narrator watches from her observation tower, not so much recording physical weather as the weathered human ruin of a strange and unraveling world. She sees a man so confused that he turns into a conch shell by forcing himself into the ground. She sees people tearing off their own heads and running around with them. The world is made of flux. Even the forms of destruction aren’t fully palpable, or even natural. She says, “Buildings were curdling. The very air had faded, was pixilated.”
Mellis’s fresh portrayal of such a relevant-seeming kind of downward whirl of everything is not, however, the basis of a linear projection. Instead of an arc, we’re plopped in the middle. We’re made a witness to things left unexplained. The narrative weaves between a wide cast of helpless characters - dissolving fathers, daughters who wear their father’s head. As well, the illustrations provided by Derek White evoke a jarring swarm of information. Through most of the depictions, text and collage, I couldn’t help but think of an idea from Deleuze and Guattari’s text A Thousand Plateaus: "There are only multiplicities of multiplicities forming a single assemblage, operating in the same assemblage: packs in masses and masses in packs.” Indeed, The Revisionist seems not only to be an assemblage of ruin, but an assemblage of assemblages, each one weird and volatile in its own way, each slurping up and off the page and nesting in the brain like some wicked colony of dervished birds.
Indeed, in Mellis’s evocation, things come together and split apart, only to reform again another way, to burn and blip and blunder. Even the narrator herself doesn’t quite seem to know which way she’s heading. She leaves her position early on in the novel to join the masses fleeing to “Start Over Island,” a “dream getaway” sold by a get-rich-quick con-man as a solution, where, “One came to the island seeking a new identity, but found things the same as before.” Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of multiplicities becomes more and more apparent as we find that nothing in this ruined world is ever resolved, just reported over and over, reflecting itself to death: “For every event, there were multiple documents and artifacts, until there were more documents and artifacts than events.”
In the end, The Revisionist leaves the reader reeling, the brain glutted with wicked imagery expressed in looping, well-aimed prose. It seems less a story than a document itself, a transmission from not too far ahead. Perhaps a warning without answer, a photograph clipped from the center of some damaged splay. I have absorbed this document several times now, and will again, again, again.» - Blake Butler


«Miranda Mellis is one of the editors of the Encyclopedia Project, a collaborative collection of definitions, images, stories and crazy etymologies created by a host of poets, artists, and experimental writers. The first volume, which ranges from A to E, includes sections like Denouément and Erzulie... Miranda told me about her latest book, a lyrical and unsettling post-apocalyptic novella called The Revisionist. I bought it, read it, and its dreamlike tendrils almost instantly compelled me to immediately read it again. The revisionist in question, who largely narrates the story, conducts surveillance on the weather from a lighthouse and then issues falsely glowing reports. Early on she spies the nuclear blast that merely concretizes the flattening of affect and meaning that is Mellis' true subject. A host of hypnogogic images and half fables and delicate cognitive snapshots populate this slim volume, as if George Saunders was dreaming of Brautigan doing puppet theatre or something. An old woman vomits her bloody prayers onto the carpet; a guy digs a hole in the chips aisle of a convenience store in order to bury his shit, and then gleefully videotapes a robbery. It is a world where mutations have replaced transformations, where you lick and seal envelopes to help prevent the apocalypse, where kids only hear their grandma's stories "as text and/or some form of either marketable or unmarketable object." Where trauma is sold or simply forgotten.
Mellis's words, generally packaged in stand-alone paragraphs that gently collide with their neighbors like soap bubbles, are at once limpid, wry, and abstract. "Inherited ambitions distracted people from the surreal encroachment of death. Some suspected they did not know their true desires. They were entrenched in so many contracts it would take the dexterity of a contortionist to escape." Mellis seems understandably saddened by things but not moralistic, and long past the tears. But though The Revisionist comes from a place of quiet grief, its dada is also charming. Imagination and intuition still stitch and weave the void. At one point a girl and a rag-doll man, who she initially mistakes for a giant conch, share "the camaraderie of two marooned astronauts, their salvation, at the last hour, catalyzed by a series of events whose effects may be described at once—without any temporal contradiction — as both predestined and accidental."» - Erik Davis

«In her novella The Revisionist, Miranda Mellis plunges her readers into a looming, apocalyptic existence where the natural world resembles an ominous machine, and the local convenience store has become known as the new natural jungle. Complemented by the mechanical yet strangely beautiful artwork of Derek White, whose images seem to be almost motorized, Mellis’ story of a nuclear age weatherman paints a world without sensation, or truth, or reaction. Yet, despite the empty void felt between her characters, Mellis manages to transcend the predictable feelings of hopelessness, and subtly, tastefully adds an afterglow of promise to her story.
A short 82 pages, The Revisionist vividly observes the world through the eyes of its narrator, a weather surveillance reporter who documents his - or her, Mellis never tells us - findings from an abandoned lighthouse, seven miles outside the city. Ironically, Mellis emphasizes the heightened sensation that can be felt through the use of the narrator’s telescope - to hear another’s heartbeat, or to read another’s mind - and juxtaposes this advanced machinery with both a narrator who has significantly distanced himself from the subjects of his observations and a human population that fails to feel anything at all anymore.
From the blind to the hearing impaired, Mellis’ world is one in which, as the narrator claims, “nothing was felt any longer, or known through the sense portals, despite the fact that every part of the body was designed for contact.” Some fail to even notice that their bodies are dramatically mutated or gone completely. Indeed, Mellis also intends to highlight the fact that even the animals of this world are more engaging and receptive than the people. While “people howled and chirped at one another” in convenience stores, spiders, seeing-eye dogs, and birds give long soliloquies on selfhood and pain. A postmodern tone of human disconnection and a sense of lost wholeness seem to glaze the narrator’s panoramic view of the broken down metropolis.
The theme of sensation is further emphasized throughout the book, both by Mellis’ spatial designing and by Derek White’s vivid illustrations. Mellis replaces the conventional use of chapters with artistic spacing throughout her prose, almost as if she is leaving legroom for the reader to think, question, or simply stare at the lack of words or images and treat the blank page as an aesthetic experience in itself. The randomness of her spacing choices further accentuates the fragmentation of this world of hers, as if Mellis is forcing the reader to acknowledge the vast distances and spaces present among characters and their stories, refusing to let them be ignored.
As for White’s images, dispersed throughout the book, they not only add an additional aesthetic angle to Mellis’ already pulsating descriptions, but seem to evoke something of the sublime in the reader. When viewed in conjunction with the story, these images are both horrifying and beautiful, painful and pleasurable. Below is one of White’s images, construed from Mellis’ following description: “Through my telescope, survivors were running around in circles. Buildings were curdling. The very air had faded, was pixilated.”
Though the reader knows that he gazes upon a scene of nuclear holocaust when viewing White’s image, he sees horror only in the fact that he finds the image pleasing to look at. Perhaps there is also satisfaction found in the fact that the scene takes place from a distance, just as the narrator sees it. Untouched by the disaster, the reader therefore feels no remorse - and that in itself calls for horrified reflection. Not all of White’s illustrations portray such infernal scenarios, but they are all captivating in their intricate detail, drawing the reader in and beckoning him to study each image for its elaborate elements. One might argue that Mellis’ colorful imagery requires no supplement, but the graphic illustrations are difficult to pass up, and one finds oneself excitedly anticipating the picture on the next page.
The sublime emotion found in White’s drawings provides a reiteration of Mellis’ subtle ambivalence present throughout the story. Though hers is predominantly a tale of loss and absence, of a deteriorating human race, leaving the reader feeling hopeless and depressed is clearly not her aim. Instead, Mellis manages to extract the beauty - or what little, simplified part remains left of it - from the rubble, giving her piece a more optimistic outlook overall. Various pairs of characters find camaraderie or “mitotic love” through each other’s company. In defense of the monotony of the world, the narrator argues for repetition as a new art form, saying “you could pathologize the repetition, call it futile, but if you considered the aesthetics of repetition as such, you might actually begin to embrace eternal recapitulation.” Though Mellis’ sarcasm is apparent, the narrator’s ambivalence between false and authentic feelings presents itself as a constant. Often he deems human feelings and relations pointless, while other times he sways and thinks there is something to them; and this ray of doubt in the uselessness of human contact becomes the beauty behind Mellis’ seemingly sad story. Mellis also mentions an intuition that all humans share, one that helps them know when they are being lied to - perhaps the only sense they still commonly possess, and perhaps the most important one of all: the common knowledge of what it means to be human.
Such instances in the story, though often fleeting, provide evidence that Mellis has captured in The Revisionist an aura of both a slow deterioration towards an end and, perhaps, an eccentric new beginning, tailored from the past. Even the narrator feels unsure as to which direction his world is leading, and this seems to be Mellis’ point - that the questioning and doubting are what must remain after most everything else has ceased to exist. The Revisionist is a tangle of surfaces and images that struggles to undo itself before the reader’s eyes; and its attempt- not its failure - to do so is where its beauty unearths itself.» - Caitlin Brown


Christopher Higgs

What is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions: Miranda Mellis}

photo by Eirik Steinhoff

Miranda Mellis is the author of The Revisionist (Calamari Press); Materialisms (Portable Press at Yo Yo Labs); and None of This Is Real (forthcoming, Sidebrow Press). The Revisionist, illustrated by Derek White, has been translated into Italian and Croatian, was the subject of a 90-foot mural at Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis, and was short-listed for The Believer 2007 Book Prize. Mellis is a founding editor at The Encyclopedia Project and a recipient of The John Hawkes Memorial Fiction Prize, The Michael Harper Praxis Prize, The New Voices Sudden Fiction Prize, and an NEH Independent Research Grant. Her writing has appeared in Conjunctions, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Cabinet, Fence, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, Context, Modern Painters, Post Road and elsewhere. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Mills College. She also teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program at the California College of the Arts, as well as the Language & Thinking Program at Bard College.

Question #1
Experimental writing, as a category or concept, seems fraught with widespread confusion and misunderstanding.  How exactly would you describe “experimental writing”?  Or, to borrow a question from Kate Sutherland, “What’s Experimental about Experimental Writing?”
Experimental writing, as a category or concept, seems fraught with widespread confusion and misunderstanding.

Perhaps mainstream or genre fiction leads to more confusion and misunderstanding than experimental writing in the end, to the extent that confusion and misunderstanding are a result of not thinking for yourself. Rather than being confusing and misunderstood, I think experimental writing offers the possibility of ending mental states of confusion and misunderstanding. On the other hand perhaps that confusion you refer to is prophylactic – literally preventing pre/conception and reproduction of narrative formulae. The category, “detective mystery” (a genre that itself enacts the resolution of questions) doesn’t confuse us. If  “experimental writing” does, why? Because rather than re/solving its own riddle, it enacts indeterminate opportunities for thought. It has a drive we can’t take refuge in: an analytical aesthetic. Under the sign of “experimentalism” we can come at the detective mystery such that its philosophical terrors, traumas of class, gender, and power etc. etc. are tricked out, materialized at the level of form – cf Gail Scott or Laird Hunt – to heighten the genre’s metaphysics: affect and aporia. The etymology of write, btw, is not without its violence. Words for write originally mean “carve, scratch, cut”. Disambiguating a narrative mechanism or technique, as some experimentalists do, and really exploring it to exhaustion, to see what its features, functions, and effects are, to find out what it can do, as Robbe-Grillet did last century with description, is carving, cutting, scratching. Or, try to listen to the sounds outside your window without ramifying or extrapolating (i.e. x amount of traffic means its x o’clock; this or that song signifies this or that bird; I react in such and such way to that grinding/bellowing machinery…). Isolating the faculty of hearing in this way could lead to discoveries about space. We might have an aesthetic, emotional experience of place, mood, atmosphere, and we may be very moved by the interplay of sounds, without there being a narrative attached necessarily. In some of Beckett’s writings, when characters describe experiencing speech as incommunicative noise, that cordoning off of sensory experience from context reveals mind. John Cage’s merging of theorization and practice, his enacting of chance-as-score, provides a model for experimental processes in all the arts. All of which is to go back to the first point, that “experimental writing”, rather than being confusing, can be revelatory and clarifying.
How exactly would you describe “experimental writing”?  Or, to borrow a question from Kate Sutherland,”What’s Experimental about Experimental Writing?”

Experimental prose fiction, in its contemporary manifestation, as distinct from its historical one (experimental literature is a category whose received and conjured meanings morph in ways that other literary categories don’t seem to, or at least not as radically) indicates that I will encounter something I’ve never encountered before. Often it will make me conscious not only of the fact that I am reading, through its ideas or form or movement, but also of the historical/discursive conditions that make possible this moment of reading via all kinds of reflexivity, either authorial, or cultural, or formal. Its politics are its aesthetics and vice versa. Experimental prose fiction will tend to be thoughtful, un-solipsistic, non-normative, and can be informed by altered states, theory, political problems, history, poetics, literary criticism, and art although not necessarily consciously. It will tend to be emergent and obscure. It might be self-critical, or comment on the conditions of its own making. It doubts the conversion of person to character, courts digression and challenge. It will tend to be committed to the idea that rather than reflecting, writing conjures/makes realities. The ethical valence is clear: representation acts upon reality. Rather than constructing a “realistic” character, like a Frankenstein out of scattered, potentially functional, arbitrary parts, a given text itself could be understood as something like a person, or a monster (see Bhanu Kapil’s work). A text could resemble a city, a place, not because it describes one (though it could) but because reading is vividly being somewhere, or perhaps being (described as) someone/else. In “The Person and Description” in The Language of Inquiry Lyn Hejinian asks, “But is it, the self, a person?” Or as Pamela Lu quips in Pamela: A Novel, “the history of our lives was always the history of something else…there was no way to find “I” without by definition losing it, and therefore losing ourselves.”
Later in the same section she writes, “And our greatest fear was…that ‘I’ had been someone else all along.” Here “I” is not given but composed, inherited, historical, ontological, and weirdly serial, propositional. What becomes of the mechanism of first person, or character for that matter, if a given fiction lays them bare as mechanisms?
There is a canon of the university market. There is a canon of the supermarket. And there are those cunning writings that get made and circulate somehow in spite of markets. The writings themselves change positions, moving contingently through these spaces, they flow in and out of the sightlines of various demographics. To go back to etymology, the term ‘experiment’ in English originates during the Renaissance and constellates practical knowledge with trials and pedagogy, the term is highly refractive, from L. experimentum it relates to “a trial, test, proof, experiment,” and is a noun of action from experiri (experience) “to test, try”. Experiments, then, seem always to be connected with potentials, possibilities, the emergent. I take to heart Percival Everett’s point that all writing begins as experiment. Experiments are hypo/theses; wagers; fermentations or useless admixtures; mud pies and blood pies. You can waste a lot of time experimenting. Writing – even taking inventories which is how writing started – involves oscillations: losing and finding, locating and dislocating, delay and arrival, sleeping and waking, tracking and losing track. Experimental writers think of language as a medium and therefore do not ignore the fact that language, even univocal and transactional language (maybe even especially so) is imbricated with political life and systems: not neutral, after all, its what laws, mortgages, curses, roles, and rites of institution are made of.
Zola thought science offered literature the best possible model for achieving naturalism and [proto] realism via objective description. This will always be, in principle, a fruitful approach to writing: can we try to approach the object without preconceptions, in the spirit of curiosity and discovery? After new physics and quantum mechanics, however, it becomes common knowledge that the observer affects the observed (did she, before we knew of it?); experiments must then account for the experimenter. Thus 20^th century meta-fiction, though of course that insight into the intersubjectivity of subject and object was present in literature prior to empirical confirmation. Perhaps the composer of rigorous and playful fiction has always intuited the ‘multiverse’. Rather than making religions out of alternate realities, imposing beliefs, we fashion provisional, imaginative prolepses that can be put to infinite and unknown uses. We don’t necessarily read stories in order to become more certain about things, but for a range of (sometimes incipient) reasons, among them perhaps to come undone, or become other, or elsewhere, to “think our way into the being of another” (as Coetzee’s anti-heroine/avatar Elizabeth Costello put it). One of my students said yesterday that Moniru Ravanipur’s collection Satan’s Stones which we read this week made her uncomfortable but that she found she passionately cared about what was happening in the stories, about the characters, even as she lost her way temporally and wasn’t convinced as to what the “plot” was; she was fully alive in her reading, absorbed in the places Ravanipur conjures, made curious and hungry by the work. She said, “There was something new to understand and I sensed I could never exhaust that.” Pure joy to discover a book you could never exhaust, like finding a profound love.
Question #2
A few years ago, Marjorie Welish wrote an article for Boston Review about Raymond Queneau, which she concluded by claiming, “Experimental writing is by definition its own adventure, a way characterized most definitely with error yet also with discovery and potential conceptual originality, which in time may well prove significant.”  If we accept Welish’s suggestion that experimental writing is inherently connected to error and discovery, how are readers to determine the success or failure of a particular work of experimental writing?  Without established criteria for evaluation, how can we differentiate between gold and copper?

If Glenn Beck is telling you to buy it in preparation for the end times, if grave robbers rip out the teeth of corpses to get it, if rich people store it in vaults, it’s gold. If poor people have it in their pockets, if it’s said to cure arthritis and yet cause PMS, if its essential to fiber optic infrastructure, its copper.  That being said, may I rephrase the question? What is the ratio of rigor to pleasure in any given text? Why should we only learn to read once and then stop? Why not keep learning to read all the time forever? Even an unconsidered, mindless grub of a text can yield some amusement or spark an inquiry; just ask any teacher. Perhaps we ought to be wary of our metaphors of value and currency. What if instead of “criteria for evaluation” (is that corporate speak?) we turn to ye olde garden metaphor? What if rather than using gold and copper as our metaphoric representations of gradations of value, we used seeds in all their various potentials? In “The Succession of Forest Trees” Thoreau writes that seeds are “Perfect alchemists I keep who can transmute substances without end, and thus the corner of my garden is an inexhaustible treasure-chest. Here you can dig, not gold, but the value which gold merely represents.” If you wanted to compare hypothetical literary experiments, metaphorized as ‘seeds’, you would do so based on what the seeds encoded. If you wanted something that grew fast right away for commercial purposes, you’d mono-crop GMO seeds; what are the problems with that? Certain seeds require long periods of darkness before they can germinate. There the metaphor is, whatever you’re trying to make will require patience and darkness to metabolize, so while it may end up at the market, that’s not going to be market-driven.
Question #3
In his book About Writing, Samuel Delany suggests that many writers (himself included) “no longer see experimental writing as a way to deal with [crisis] aesthetically” (226).  Does this sentiment ring true for you as well?

This thought seems to point to the fact that formal disjunction or derangement is not what it used to be. The avant-garde aesthetic shenanigans of the 20^th century were linked to liberation movements and political desire. However, to describe “recuperation” straight forwardly, capitalism makes effective use of anti-capitalist aesthetics. In the US, art doesn’t get you in prison, though censorship is always afoot and seems on the rise (I’m thinking of the censorship by the Smithsonian of David Wojnarowicz’s ‘A Fire in My Belly’) but it does elsewhere, because of content. For example a writer like Shahrnush Parsipur’s work is banned in Iran not because of her fabulism per se, not inherently because of the dynamic complexity of her writing, but because her work makes visible the corrupt illegitimacy of the patriarchal regime. She uses her skills to transmit that trauma of living under that boot, so she is persecuted because of the political content of her work, the impacts of which, however, are certainly heightened and intensified by her mastery of her medium. And in this case, Parsipur’s writing, her daring at the level of form and content precipitates her into crises: the crises of imprisonment under two regimes (both the Shah and the Islamic Republic) followed by the crisis of exile.
With regards to aesthetics and crisis, the extent of impact re-conceptualizing a cultural practice or social institution will have depends on how willing the parties involved are to open up to the “unlived” parts of their practice and thought (where the crisis has become a callus, or the wound masked in pretense or unconscious ideology). At Encyclopedia Project, where I am a coeditor with Tisa Bryant and Kate Schatz, we decided when we started that wanted to do something with our publication that wasn’t already being done. One approach was to appropriate the gorgeous architecture of the canonical encyclopedia and to turn it inside out, privileging art and literature as expressions of expertise and knowledge, publishing excellent work in an unprecedented way. Another desire was to proactively publish writers and artists of color. We decided our books would be comprised of, at the very least, 50% people of color. Percentages/quotas are a fraught heuristics, on the one hand clinical, and on the other vulgar. However… whatever! – “50%” was a tenet that would enact our values and actualize our principles and hopes. We don’t assume that fashioning pluralist institutions is being done sufficiently by government or academe. What one writes, teaches, or publishes has effects. As I once heard Anne Waldman say to a group of students, “It’s not just you and the void.” Conceptualizing and making inclusive syllabi, editorial structures, and reading series’ is crucially important on multiple levels.
A couple of scattered thoughts on the crisis of money. Guy Debord made the point that the commodity has colonized social life. This is worth thinking about in relation to literary production. For many of us who come from poor families and backgrounds, literature has a built in poverty clause. (And let’s acknowledge the obvious, that poverty is insanely relative. To quote Hejinian again, from The Beginner, money “is both signifier and signified, and poverty is like the notorious gap between them.”) Perhaps people are equipped to “deal with crisis”, when they are perpetually in one of an economic nature. There’s everything to be gained by getting rid of zombie structures of life and thought (habits; dictators). We see all over the world precarity linked to acts of revolt, self-determination, and solidarity while luxury, entitlement, and the rhetoric of “security” goes hand in hand with police states, violent immorality, and highly exclusive muddle-headedness. To borrow post-Freudian psychoanalyst Adam Philips’ syntax, what kind of object is crisis, and what is it being used for? Etymologically it refers to a border, the turning point in the course of a disease, as well as “shut-door-panic”: fear of being on the wrong side of a closing gate.
Question #4
Given Amy King’s recent VIDA article on the under-representation of women in major literary publications, it seems extremely important to acknowledge the fact that gender issues continue to problematize the field of literature.  How would you characterize the relationship between women and experimental literature?

I’d characterize the relationship between women and experimental writing as one of reciprocal forms. I myself was first initiated into “experimental literature” – experimental forms in all sorts of mediums – by queer culture and among women. As a young person understanding of aesthetics was shaped by political, avant-garde and underground films such as Marlon Riggs Tongues Untied or Yvonne Rainer’s Privilege. I saw films like that in my neighborhood at the Roxie Cinema and I just absorbed this sense that composition was open, you could invent your form/ form could follow content, and/or content could be at once represented and analyzed by means of form. I was on tour with Sister Spit in 1998. Sister Spit was and is an important institution for young women writers experimenting with form. As a teenager discovering the irresistible Les guérillères by Monique Wittig (in a since-closed women’s book store) led me to the French feminists and the Situationists, then later on my understanding of the relevant work was shaped by the writings (and in some cases pedagogy) of authors like Thalia Field, Eileen Myles, Renee Gladman, Bhanu Kapil, Carole Maso, Rikki Ducornet, Gail Scott, Joan Retallack, Juliana Spahr, and others. I also learned a tremendous amount from male teachers/writers Anselm Hollo, Steven Taylor, Brian Evenson, and Robert Coover. All of which is to say, to try to answer your question and get out of this autobiographical vortext, that I tend to think of experimental writing in its contemporary manifestations and inflections (or, as we currently seem to identify it) as ecologically contiguous with performance art, queer theory, feminist, anti-racist, and anarchist discourse, as well as activist “identity politics” of yore (which, it is perhaps worth recalling were as much about questioning, dissolving, conjuring, and performing identities and self-descriptions, as about claiming rights and protections). I wouldn’t say the above epistemologies are universally required equipment for reading experimental writing, but I would wonder what meaning such writing could have divorced from these genealogies.
Question #5
Which are your favorite works of experimental literature, and why?
Grant me that it’s corny question to which I can only supply corny answers! One answer is, the ones I haven’t read yet. The second answer is a question: when you’re reading a fabulous book, isn’t it your favorite book while you’re reading it? One great book isn’t in a hierarchical relation with the other, they’re like friends, they exist together in a field, a feast, a gathering, a library, a commune (book prizes notwithstanding).
But here are some books I’ve taught recently that I’d love to recommend, and that will narrow it down: Touba and the Meaning of the Night by Shahrnush Parsipur, Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, Denny Smith by Bob Glück, Eeeee Eee Eeee by Tao Lin, Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee, Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, Beckett’s Trilogy, Jacob von Gunten by Robert Walser, American Genius by Lynne Tillman, Learning Processes With A Fatal Outcome by Alexander Kluge, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine, Alma, or The Dead Women by Alice Notley, The Activist, by Renee Gladman, Bird Lover’s Backyard by Thalia Field, Season of the Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih, and Khirbet Khizeh, S. Yizhar.
"I first discovered Miranda Mellis through her novella The Revisionist -- a poetic, unsettling, gorgeously illustrated tale, and one of those one-sitting reads whose imagery lingers and rattles around the mind for many sittings (walkings, dreamings) thereafter. So I was delighted to pick up her newest collection of similarly fantastic short stories, None of This is Real, and to see that it was published by the tiny local Sidebrow Books, and even more excited to frantically phone in an order for every copy in stock in order to get it in the hands of our Apple-a-Month Club subscribers for April.

Long story short, a tentative but effusive email correspondence ensued, and thanks to Miranda's kindness, local-ness, and professed love for Green Apple, last month we were able to send subscribers an extra special package, which included signed copies of None of This is Real as well as a three page interview with the author herself. Subscribers got first dibs on the hard copy, but here is the interview in its entirety. Welcome to the world of Miranda Mellis -- here lost souls grow strange appendages, a line for coffee becomes a sort of quotidian purgatory, children must contend and compete with the both the failures and the mysticism of their ancestors, and every word is at once startling and perfect. Enjoy.

Hi! What are you reading now?

Miranda Mellis: Right now I am reading The Weather in Proust by Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick; Ugly Feelings by Sianne Ngai; A Year From Monday by John Cage; Debt by David Graeber; The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead; Best European Fiction 2012 edited by Aleksander Hemon; Culture of One by Alice Notley; The Ravickians by Renee Gladman; and Satan’s Stones by Moniru Ravanipur. 

What were you reading while writing the stories in None Of This Is Real?

- I probably can’t do this question justice as the process of finishing these stories unfolded over several years and the reading list would be too long and hard to compile. I will mention a book that is definitely an influence on None of This Is Real and that is Touba and the Meaning of the Night by Iranian author-in-exile Shahrnush Parsipur, who is one of the world’s greatest living novelists but somewhat unknown outside of Iran. Touba, the main character in the novel, is an Iranian woman who longs to become a scholar and mystic but is hampered at every turn by gender oppression. The book spans over 150 years of Iranian history. This book really taught me something I’ll never forget about prophesy, knowledge and power. I urge everyone to seek her out and read her work. Other authors whose work has definitely had an influence on this book are Robert Walser, Bob Glück, and Thalia Field. Kafka, Beckett, and John Cage are constant touchstones. 

Do you bookmark or dog-ear?

- I bookmark, dog-ear, annotate, highlight, pencil, pen, sticky and post-it all over my books! They get very collage-d. The day after I got my copy of Ugly Feelings a few weeks ago it was accidentally submerged in a puddle of tea and it immediately swelled up. It was softened by its spill; now it feels more like fabric than paper to the touch. It’s all stained and bloated which seems perfect for what it is exploring, ugly feelings! 

In None of This is Real, the characters are grounded in realistic circumstances which are then turned on their head (or slightly tilted) by the fantastic or surreal. Do you start with the real and imagine ways to undo it or do you approach reality through the lens of the fantastic? Or does your process unfold in a different way?

- One definition of the real is that it is a delimitation of that which is legible and perceptible to a given being. That said, perhaps an absurd, extreme, surprising, or improbable metaphor, if it is apt, can work on multiple levels in a way that a more readily expected one may not. {Main character} O’s painful, confusing fin in {the titular story in} None of This Is Real, for example. The fin is real for the protagonist. I imagined the fin as both an adaptation and the onset of a premature reincarnation, and I committed to that conceit, and to that double-meaning, in the writing. 

For me, the fact that O can only discover what he is becoming by means of occultists {in the story, O visits a palm reader} describes an epistemological crisis and a kind of political paralysis in the face of the incredible gaps and the outrageously disproportionate distributions of knowledge and agency in a class-based society that protects the rich, and exploits and disenfranchises the rest. The fantastical, or absurd, is in this sense the real, or the everyday, in that our everyday lives are outrageously pressurized in ways that we become habituated to, that become invisible, and then rear up in all sorts of painful intensifications, symptoms and so forth. Forms of magic – magical thinking, magical transformations, and magical actions – represent reachable, alternative forms of agency and knowledge in lieu of political power for the disenfranchised, abandoned, and oppressed, and this often includes children and youth, on whom the stories in this collection are most focused. 

By the way, I’m not recommending magical thinking in this book! I’m just trying to think why it becomes a tool and how magic/magical thinking itself in all its complicated manifestations, from manic self-delusions of grandeur, to the clairvoyant, the synchronistic, the Gnostic, and the pagan, becomes useful. I feel dream logic and magic at work in the world, and there is a reason why O gets his information from psychics and books. But it is complicated isn’t it? People turn to prophecy when they feel out of control, when they feel they can’t understand or have a say in their future. What is the difference between seeking prophetic knowledge and seeking political agency?  I use the fantastical, the absurd, and the surreal to try to explore the contradictions there.

To your initial question about my approach to the interplay between the fantastical and the real, I can say that I don’t feel bound or beholden by any one genre, but see genre as a tool. What sorts of genres, or time frames, are available to contemporary storytellers to describe the utterly crazy-making conundrums of being a person? For my part, the purely imaginary is part of the real; it seems to me there are many realisms. One can always ask, Whose real? Which one? 

You co-edit a really cool thing called The Encyclopedia Project, described on its website as “part reference book, part literary journal {in the} form of the encyclopedia-from general layout to cross-referencing-as a venue for publishing new, innovative literary works.” What is interesting to you about the form of the encyclopedia, and what do you think is its importance and relevance in what is, for lack of a better/smarter-sounding term for this particular information age, the age of Wikipedia?

- The etymology of encyclopedia has to do with expanding circles of knowledge. We’re interested in doing that, and in the idea that a reliable source of information about a given term could come in the form of a story, a lyric essay, a hybrid cross-genre text, or a piece of art, and not solely from scientific, taxonomic, academic lexicons. We’re playing with ideas about canon, knowledge, and expertise, emphasizing the poetic, subjective aesthetics of the encyclopedic form as an expression of knowledge formation. We see the encyclopedia as a horizontal, community art form and knowledge itself as something collectively formed. Pluralism is at the heart of what we’re up to. Wikipedia is also a community-based form for knowledge sharing and acquisition, but our emphasis is on literary art and we’re committed to the print book not just as a fetish (though there is that!) but as an analog, affordable and accessible object that doesn’t rely upon electricity (after its been produced) to be read. 

What encyclopedia entry (one word or phrase) that could go in the upcoming installment of The Encyclopedia Project (which is the letters L-P) would best sum up your current state of mind? 

- Purposiveness without purpose.

Everyone´s hollering about the doomed state of the print book these days. Do you buy it? Are these the end times, or just the changing times, and if it´s the latter, what do you think is changing for the kind of writing and publishing you do?

MM: My understanding is that there are more books in print now then ever before. Perhaps over a million books a year are printed. But are there fewer readers? I don’t know. I think the kind of writing and publishing I do is likely to remain marginal, regardless the state of the book, but who knows? Perhaps I’ll accidentally write something popular some day.

If you could have a “staff favorite” on display at Green Apple, what would it be? 

MM: I’d vote for the recent reissue of another edition and translation of Women Without Men: A Novel of Modern Iran by Shahrnush Parsipur." - Interview at The Green Apple Core

AFTER—WORLD by miranda mellis

The agent’s slick, heavy hair slithered down around her shoulders. I picked up my bag on the other side of the first customs gauntlet and tripped. A uniformed young man on the other side caught me, handled me even, how did I feel to him, through his latex gloves?
As I laced up my black boots at the gray booth, a man next to me wearing a diadem of fake gems opened a case and examined his trumpet. He put his mouthpiece on and blew. Then he put his trumpet together and played a familiar tune. The Melodians, “It’s My Delight”: I love you, I love you, I really do.
I walked slowly, listening to him play all the way down a ramp, down a long hall, down, down another long ramp, down a flight of stairs, and finally the trumpet player was inaudible. I came to the dock, a wobbling ramp of looped planks. I boarded the great, black ferry splattered with ropes, rust, and bird shit. I found a seat on the deck where long benches faced the soon-diminishing shore. As the boat wended its way, I fell asleep in my seat.
I dreamed that I was in a bathtub. I had left the faucets on and the room was flooding. My mother came in and rebuked me for letting the tub overflow. She threw green towels on the floor and sopped up the water. We’ll have to take these to the laundry, they’ll never dry in here, in this refrigerated room, she said. The floor became a river.
Our bathtub was a refrigerator that we were sitting inside. We were cold. We wrapped the towels around ourselves. We rode the river but it was sinking. My mother bailed with her hands, her hair gathered and swooped back in a ponytail. I looked around for a rescue
ship as we sunk deeper and deeper.
I woke cold, unable to see, hear, or sense anything, not even my own weight. It was as if I was without a body. Then I saw a light, and then many lights; the other side. I observed the crowd as the ferry approached shore. They flickered into view like so many lanterns, straw-hatted, hair-feathered, archaic, modern, fresh-faced and weathered, smiling as they strolled, rolled, meandered, raced and bobbed.
Who were they? Indistinguishable from the living, various in their appearance and style of dress, both of their own times and places and finally, of this one, just another crowd at a ferry building waiting for loved ones, or waiting to begin their own journey to some other place.
I had no expectation of being met. I had not “sent word”. I wasn’t sure there was a way to do that. I only knew I was desperate to disentangle myself from the noise-and-rumor of living, and make this trip. The preparations exhausted me. I had had no spare energy to do other things, like try to find out if I could send notice ahead. Actually, “sending word” never appeals. I like to keep my options open, to appear or disappear, freely. The price of being so un-tethered is loneliness. If I have never belonged to or among others, at least I had once, to my mother, the salient one, whom I had not notified of my impending arrival, though I’d made the trip to see her.
As it happened, however, she’d known somehow, and she was there, on the dock. She looked beautiful, strong, and healthy, exactly as I had seen her last, when I was still a child.
She greeted me in the typically polyphonetic voice of the dead, like the eager, chaotic valence of a tuning orchestra. Like crying, and a drill, and a xylophone. You must be hungry? She said. I almost fainted with joy as I went towards her, but she was looking right past me. Who was she talking to? I turned around to see, behind me, a much younger version of myself, in a jaunty, orange corduroy hat. That hat…it moved me to see it. I’d worn it relentlessly for months after my first disastrous haircut. My mother had taken me to a neighbor who had good scissors, she thought, a woodworker who made Yo-yo’s. I had had hair down to my waist. When he was finished, my hair was the same length all the way around, two inches long, a Yo-yo like sphere.
My younger self was the age I would have been the year she died, 13, when my mother was the age she now appeared to be, 33. My mother petted her face, squatting down to gather her passionately into her arms. I watched my younger self and my mother embrace and both of me could not help but cry. I wrapped my unseen, unfelt arms around them. They held one another for a long time, and my mother cried too, just a little. Clearly my mother did not see me, though I was standing right in front of her. Instead she saw this other, younger me. I spoke, I gestured. Neither of them made me out whatsoever. I looked around. Was I the only invisible one here? Everyone seemed to be enjoying their reunions. But my mother was leaving. They walked hand in hand down the platform to a pretzel stand. My mother bought me a giant pretzel covered in mustard and relish, which she ate hungrily and quickly. I walked to the pretzel stand and ordered a pretzel but the proprietor did not see me or hear me.
[...]


Miranda Mellis' web page