Joe Milazzo's debut novel Crepuscule W/ Nellie explores, via imagined as well as reimagined circumstances and incidents, the relationships between jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, his wife Nellie, and his patron and confidante, the Baroness Pannonica De Koenigswarter

Joe Milazzo, Crepuscule W/Nellie.  Jaded Ibis Press, 2014.

excerpt

Joe Milazzo's debut novel Crepuscule W/ Nellie explores, via imagined as well as reimagined circumstances and incidents, the relationships between jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, his wife Nellie, and his patron and confidante, the Baroness Pannonica De Koenigswarter. A work of speculative historical fiction, Crepuscule W/ Nellie does not attempt historical accuracy. Neither is it an ekphrastic experiment meant to mimic Monk's brilliance, with his signature dissonant harmonies and angular melodic twists. Instead, much like Monk's composing, Crepuscule W/ Nellie creates a whole new architecture in which to tell its otherwise untold story. (Crepuscule W/ Nellie is the first volume in the #RECURRENT novels series, edited by Janice Lee)

“The challenge in writing on behalf of Joe Milazzo’s fiction is finding the language to convey how special it is, but let us begin with audacious and fearless, lyrical and brilliant, superbly imaginative and assuredly accomplished—one of tomorrow’s great novelists on the cusp of his moment.” —Steve Erickson

“… [A] bountifully generative crumbling-down. Crepuscule reminds vividly of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, where motion is a collapse that does nothing but give back form to that very motion.” —Achraf A. El Bahi

“A polyvocal narrative that’s part Faulkner à la midcentury Manhattan’s jazz epicenters, part early 90’s avant-pop crossed with Black Mountain poetics, and part ghost, Joe Milazzo’s genrebending Crepuscule W/ Nellie boldly re-imagines the relationship between fact and fiction.” —Claire Donato

“Milazzo dug this lost recording of the Monk/Monk/Pannonica trio—dug as in figured, as in got into, as in exhumed—out that ‘dustbin’ folks talk about. And since the composition called Crepescule w/Nellie is this time a story storying history, the good mess Milazzo so expertly messes with alchemizes the linguistic odds-and-ends that make a vernacular both high-falluting and low-down; the factual scraps that member a fiction into a rich speculation; and the individuals ignored so long they must come back to us in books. Our author has given us a fascinating one. Dig it, dig it, dig it.” —Douglas Kearney

“Joe Milazzo’s Crepescule w/Nellie is a blast. So rarely do we get a novel this momentous, challenging, ambitious—Crepescule w/ Nellie transcends expectation. I’m moved by the fierce acuity of the maximalist prose, never less than adroit and vital as it parses a famous triangle between the maestro, Thelonious Monk, his wife Nellie, and the Bebop Baroness, Panonica de Koenigswarter, the most storied music patron of the 20th century. Triangulating the infinite personal declensions between struggling black musicians and the white patrons, between the women and their men, Joe Milazzo’s language brilliantly echolocates that essentially American distance, sounding out an American loneliness that is with us still.” —Sesshu Foster

“Joe Milazzo’s Crepuscule for Nellie takes as its great and original subject a care-giver’s, literally home-maker’s immensely improvising relation to a creative genius, a demanding, needy, powerful, enigmatic, often disappointing man who was her husband. That is what this long, intimate, painfully American, many-voiced rumination of a novel is about – though also, and indirectly, about much that is implied by its title, which was first that of Thelonious Monk’s shortest major composition, one of my favorites, with its outer, measured clarity and inner, off-balance infinities and shadows. Has Milazzo added the lyrics? I think rather that he has written a deep, interior book about lives that included jazz and everything else. A book that will last. “ —Joseph McElroy

“Milazzo’s work inhabits a place much like that between sleep and wakefulness—one is neither conscious nor unconscious, and the mind is free to chart a different terrain, where hallucinations are lucid, rational action is absurd, and the rigid metronome of what we understand as time is unhinged, giving rise to an altogether looser continuum where repetitions, breakdowns, and indeterminate codas are the norm. It seems unnecessary, while perhaps perverse, to make pointed mention of Monk—much less jazz—here. The term ‘jazz’ itself, which fittingly bears no formal etymology, was little used by so-called jazz musicians of Monk’s era. For these musicians, art was tagless. It strikes me that, with this debut novel, Milazzo abides by a similar guiding principle.”  —Laton Carter

“A supple weave of textures, voices, influences echoed and then amplified; Joe Milazzo’s Crepuscule W/ Nellie masterfully carries out the serious business of mapping out a collective consciousness in all of its layers, tangles, dense thickets and odd gaps. His subjects are many: creativity and sacrifice, patronage, women caring for men, women caring for each other. The book has its refrains, its passages that suggest impassioned improvisation, its tempo shifts, moments of melodic clarity followed by transitions that seek and struggle and finally—as much like Keith Jarrett as Thelonious Monk—explode into even freer terrain. It’s bold, challenging work that connects Milazzo back to a line of authors, like Faulkner and Joyce, who saw the novel as not just a tale well told but a place to inhabit.”  —Mike Heppner



Joe Milazzo, The Terraces (Das Arquibancadas), LRL Textile Series


“The Terraces” will eventually be incorporated into FROM THE FALLING LATITUDES, a fictional anthology of fake translations of non-existent texts by imaginary authors. Portions of this larger project have previously appeared in the journals Tea Party, Antennae, Lies/Isle and in the anthology Conversations at the Wartime Cafe.



www.slowstudies.net/jmilazzo/



“The Hungry Man.” In Dirty : Dirty. Jaded Ibis Productions. 2013.


[out of nothing] #0: “theoretical perspectives on the substance preceding [nothing].” [out of nothing] / Createspace, 2012.

“Another Tombstone Morning [Otra Mañana De La Peidra Sepulcral],” “Flare Filaments [Disparar Dissemenada Mudança Imprevista],” “Her Megaphone, the Muse of Caution [Espalhafatosamente, Invocação de Anúncios],” and “On From The Falling Latitudes, A Fictional Anthology Of Fake Translations Of Non-Existent Texts By Imaginary Authors.” In Conversations At The Wartime Cafe: A Decade Of War, 2001 – 2011. WODV / Createspace, 2011.

“1989 / Midnight / Texas.” In Chronometry: A Collection Of Time-Based Writings And Ephemera. Superchen, 2008. 27 – 43.


Other Publications
“Their Days Are Numbered: II.” Entropy. January 13, 2015.
“Decimal Cereus.” Leveler. January 11, 2015.
“‘If I choose to stare the world happens to my eyes.’ A Conversation With John Trefry.” Entropy. October 21, 2014.
“John Berryman and ‘Meta-Kitsch.'” Montevidayo. October 13, 2014.
“Elsewhere, Decontamination.” Entropy. October 7, 2014.
“Some Actual Writing Exercises I Have Recently ‘Assigned’ To My ‘Students.'” Entropy. September 19, 2014.
“Plates from a Forgotten Book: The Paintings of Kim Alexander.” Image 81.  Summer 2014.  29 – 35.
“Gabriel Blackwell and the Legacy of Metafiction.” Entropy. August 1, 2014.
“Normalcy Doesn’t Really Exist: A Talk with Nicholas Grider.” Entropy. July 1, 2014.
“Screen shot 2014-03-10 at 9.40.26 AM.” Fake Poems. July 1, 2014.
“The New Age of Kenneth Goldsmith.” Entropy. May 1, 2014.
“King Anecdote’s Illegitimate Questions.” El Aleph 1. 2014. 60.
“One, Something Like a Cloud, Peacefully Moving Along.” Alice Blue Review 22. Winter 2014.
“Damnation by Janice Lee.” The Quarterly Conversation 34. Winter 2014.
“Observatory Blue.” Every Day, A Century. October 21, 2013.
“Lindsey Hutchison’s ‘Mimesis.'”  Ilk. September 5, 2013.
“Notes To A Young Poet 3.4.” H_NGM_N. June 5, 2013.
“Bosom.” [Written in collaboration with Cody Ross.] Gritty Silk 1. May 2013.
“Embodied: A Psycho Soma in Poetry and Prose by Keith Nathan Brown.” The Collagist 43. February 15, 2013.
“Interview: Joe Milazzo & Karen Weiner.” semigloss. Vol. 1, No. 2. February 2013. 8 – 11.
“By Kelman Out Of Pessoa by Doug Nufer.” HTMLGIANT. January 7, 2013.
“25 Points: The Emily Dickinson Reader by Paul Legault.” HTMLGIANT. January 3, 2013.
“There Are Many Detours Between Information And Instruction.” SpringGun Press 7. Fall 2012.
“25 Points: The Mandarin by Aaron Kunin.” HTMLGIANT. December 13, 2012.
“3 from ‘A Picture of Bread [Una Imagen del Hostia]': 1) The Blood Orange; 2) The Mango; 3) Coffee \ Cherry.” summer stock 6. Fall 2012.
“I Feel a Song Coming On: Nate Pritts’ Big Bright Sun.” The Lit Pub. 2012.
“Joe Milazzo on Parker Tettleton.” > kill author. June 29, 2012.
“The Return of the Boy with the Renewable Organs.” > kill author 19. June 2012.
“The Sinecure.” Every Day, A Century. April 14, 2012.
“Salvage!” [Written in collaboration with Mike Meginnis.] Exits Are. April 9, 2012.
“Night Soul by Joseph McElroy.” The Collagist 32. March 2012.
“Our Friend Harvey Balsam.” ready, able. Valeveil Projects. 2012.
“12 Bars For Margaret.” Super Arrow 5. January 2012.
“Every Time One Speaks One Runs The Risk Of Making Sense.” H_NGM_N 13. November 2011.
“Degrees by Michel Butor.” [Part 1; Part 2.] HTMLGIANT. August 2011.
“Selections from ‘Aphorisms Become Anecdotes [Frases Feita Tornam-se Enredos.]'” Humble Humdrum Cotton Frock 4.  Summer 2011. 9.
“This Was About The Hour When People Should Be Thinking Of Going To Bed.” Compost 1. June 2011. 54 – 56.
“Accessible.” Super Arrow 4. June 2011.
“Notes For An Undelivered Lecture on Matthew Whitenack’s ‘Distressing A Manufactured Hope.'” Drunken Boat. May 6, 2011.
“Landscapes In Use [Paisajes En Uso.]” LIES/ISLE 5: “Silence.”  [Online journal.]  March 30, 2011.
“A Spray Of Bucklers.” Textsound 11. February 2011.
“Verb Captures Pronoun; Article To Preposition.” Everyday Genius. January 21, 2011.

“Eleven Questions Re: Eleven Clouds.” Drunken Boat. December 2, 2010.

“Interview: Paul Slocum.” Drunken Boat. October 28, 2010.

“A Long Talk With Lewis Shiner.” Black Clock Blog. July 19, 2010.

“Literally Rankling.” Black Clock Blog. June 7, 2010.

“Twitterature: When Moby Dick Became The Fail Whale.” Black Clock Blog. May 2, 2010.
“Record Of An Easter Sunday [Disco De Una Pascua Domingo],” “Bread And Joy [Pão E Alegria],” “A Fisherman’s Devotions [Um Pescador Da Devoções],” “Saudosismo,” and “from Slow Studies [Retarde Los Estudios Lento.]” Antennae 11. May 2010. 68 – 75.
“Excerpt from Visions Of A Mexican Wrestler.” Drunken Boat 11. Winter 2010.
“Monsieur Sourdine Replaces A Coat.” Black Clock 11. Fall 2009 / Winter 2010. 78 – 88.
Wounded Unwound: 25 Expandable Points Towards A Literature Of Violence. [Essay.] Valeveil Projects: Polemics. 2009.
“4 Origins Of The Articulate, Requiring Proof.” In Posse Review. Autumn 2009.
“After The Interfered Year (Após O Ano Intrometido).” Tea Party 18: “The Free Issue.” Summer 2009. 49.“Re-opening Hind’s Kidnap.” electronic book review. August 20, 2004.