First published in
German in 1919, Potsdamer Platz was Curt Corrinth’s first novel to
employ an Expressionist, frenetic prose and presented his excessive
vision of free love. Inspired by Freud’s controversial disciple,
Otto Gross, and his theory on sexual relations, Corrinth took this
outlook to new extremes to preach the sexual orgy as a means to
salvation and universal copulation as a new world religion.
The book’s
provincial protagonist, Hans Termaden, arrives in Berlin, where he
quickly evolves from city rube to sexual messiah as he converts
prostitutes and virgins into sensual warriors and frees men of sexual
inhibitions. As word of his exploits spreads, people throughout the
city flock to his headquarters in Potsdamer Platz, turning all
buildings into brothels as Berlin itself swells with an influx of
population from England, France, and Mexico. Police and army attempt
to bring order but themselves defect to take part in the spreading
copulation as Corrinth’s prose itself begins to fragment and melt
on the page.
Decried in its time
as tastelessly over the top and more erotomaniacally obsessed than
ecstatic in its vision, Potsdamer Platz today reflects its turbulent
era and can be read as a portal into the cultural excesses of Weimar
Berlin. This first English translation includes the original
illustrations done by Paul Klee for the book’s 1920 deluxe edition.
Potsdamer Platz promises Ecstatic Visions, and it certainly
delivers. Curt Corrinth's short novel is one of almost comic
expressionistic excess
The story is
simple: Hans Termaden comes to Berlin from the provinces, gets a
taste of (and for) the big city, its freedoms, and, in particular,
sex -- and he runs with it. He becomes a Messiah, his guiding
principle sexual gratification -- not just above all else, but simply
as all. It's not a hard sell: "he created more happiness than
any human law was previously able to do".
His message
quickly catches on:
all, all, all:
praising the new covenant of the new messianic world: they blossomed,
ardent, toward the higher purpose.
Everyone
flocks to Berlin -- "Express trains thundered, incessantly, the
awaking ones to paradise"" --, eager to follow the new true
way:
Paris was
depopulated, deserted; London mourned the Queen's abandonment; harems
in the Turkish capital crumbled and emptied before sobbing eunuchs
[...]
Berlin, on the
other hand, our beautiful stronghold, registered a tenfold increase
in population.
Of course,
there are those who can't get with the programme -- and who come to
threaten its happy success:
I name for you
the weak-spined, sapless, aged, bloodless, marrow-less, dead to
desire. They poisoned, slandered, practiced their antique morality,
went on and on, panted, whispered, undermined, raged, swore, bore
false witness, stormed about with buckling legs opposing lawful
brazen events.
These were the
danger.
And so,
indeed, comes the counter-revolution.... Can the Messiah triumph
over the: "old order, surviving in a corrupted state" ?
Yes, it's all
very over-heated. The initial sexual release leads to a gush and then
a torrent -- so also the narrative itself, reflected also in
Corrinth's language, the account often a frenzy of words. It's all a
bit -- and then much -- too much, but some of this does work well --
not least that first dawning of what sex can be and hold in
Termaden's first experiences:
"I dare !
I want !
"Berlin,
city of my dreams — Europe — the world —: wait, I am coming !!
——
Corrinth
tries to drown the reader in this ecstatic excess, his writing a
breathless rapid-fire flood of language twisted solely to these
higher, baser purposes:
Hymnic new will
boldly set out lived and living truths before the squealing ones,
openly giggling and blushing, secretly triggering whirling carnal
excitement and lechery-soaked visions.
Grammar
itself is too conventional and rigid for what Corrinth wants to
express and convey, and so he constantly pushes against its
boundaries and even breaks some of the rules -- an effective
technique (ably reproduced in W.C. Bamberger's translation), helped
by the fact that Corrinth doesn't take things too far.
It is all
quite ridiculous, too, and, honestly, not really good, even (though
it certainly has its moments). But seen in its historical context it
is certainly intriguing: Bamberger quotes Otto Karl Werckmeister's
observations on the novel in his Introduction, specifically on the
(potential) publication-date, and how the book can be seen
differently depending on when it is placed: wartime Germany in early
1918 (when it could be seen as: "an act of cautious subversion
under the threat of censorship"); the fall of 1919 (when it
might be seen as: "a convenient mockery of political failure");
or in between, during the German November Revolution, when it might
be seen as a commentary on those events.
Corrinth's
vision of an ultra-decadent Berlin prefigures the Weimar image of the
city, suggesting just how much was already bubbling under the surface
even in that exhausted, impoverished time immediately after the war;
it would seem much more a text from well into the 1920s than 1919.
Paul Klee's
accompanying drawings are the main reason the work is still
remembered, and it's good to see these here as well, a neat
complement to the story -- capturing much of the unbridled wildness
to it (if not so much the sex).
Potsdamer
Platz is a curious work, and it does have the appeal of something
taken to absurd extremes, in its language, philosophy, and basic
plot. Short and brisk, it doesn't get mired in its own excess (though
it can at times seem that excess is all there is to it ...); it does
perhaps suffer some from its story being a bit underdeveloped. Still,
Corrinth seems very much to have managed what he was going after --
blindingly bright ecstatic visions of a world in which sexual
indulgence is the highest and overwhelming guiding principle. -
M.A.Orthofer
Curt Corrinth (1894–1960) studied law until serving in the military
in World War I, which resulted in his embracing an antiwar and
anti-bourgeois stance through his poetry and then through a series of
frenetically composed novels. Influenced by Freud’s maverick
disciple, Otto Gross, Corrinth took Gross’s doctrine of free love
to further, near parodic extremes in these novels, three of which
would be banned by the Nazis in 1933. In 1955, he moved to the GDR in
East Berlin, where he died five years later, his work all but
forgotten in the western world.
‘A surreal,
slapstick nightmare set in the end-times of countercultural
journalism.
‘In search of
France’s superstar philosopher who has mysteriously vanished,
Lester Langway, a young, bedraggled freelance reporter for the
failing London style bible Down N Out! magazine, is sent to Paris to
solve a hallucinogenic detective mystery involving demonic Kantian
philosophy, identity politics, the history of Surrealism, secret
societies and mind control. Both a scathing satire and a sincere
romance, My Week Without Gérard is so squarely at odds with the
culture it mercilessly lampoons, it’s little surprise the author
writes under a pseudonym.’
“Any book with
bathroom drugs, coffin sex, awkward romance, conspiracy theories,
thinly veiled characters based on people I know in contemporary euro
society, and my bloody death scene, has a spot on my bookshelf.” —
Rick Owens
“It is rare to
encounter people who not play a role, even when they are alone.”
‘A great piece of
fictional journalism that drags you down the twisted road of drug and
occult mania, stuffing you full of satirical philosophies and
dadaistic nightmares along the way. Boris’ cultural references are
as far-ranging and eclectic as they come, but even the artists and
intellectuals that are usually placed on pedestals are not safe from
his scathing criticism of middle-class self-flagellation. This truly
was a fun piece of work to read and try to decode; very digestible
and with no shortage of humour, it makes for an impressive debut
novel.’ — Elliot Carter
‘Hilarious,
compelling, a countercultural classic. A work of sublime order. Fear
and loathing in occult Paris. The author has created a world that is
profoundly humorous, while managing a deep sincerity throughout. Join
Lester Langway, a British Journo, for an odyssey into the bowels of
the Parisian occult-underground. Walk deep into an eclectic
textual-tapestry; one that is both hallucinogenic and fulfilling. As
a reader, My Week Without Gérard is an extremely pleasurable
experience.
‘It is a fine
novel, one that deserves much more contemporary attention. I mean,
where else can we go and see Breton, Uri Geller, and Arsène Wenger
all in one place. If you have sense, all Morbid Books releases should
be on your radar.’ — Callum Berry
‘Darkly comedic,
absurd and disorientating My week without Gerard weaves surrealism
and the occult into a journalists bizarre investigation throughout
Paris. Reminds me of Inherent Vice if it took place in the modern
day, but centered round a deplorable human being.’ — Laurence
Like the greatest
mystery stories, the pseudonymous writer Ivan Boris’ excellent new
novel, My Week Without Gérard, is a labyrinth without a center.
There is nothing to unravel here. There is no secret knowledge to be
unearthed. No, instead, the mystery’s essential unknowability IS
its only revelation; its ineffable enigma, its fluid arrangements of
scenarios, characters, and even timelines, is its mesmeric allure.
And not unlike other mystery or detective novels that similarly
experiment with form and generic style, My Week Without Gérard
demonstrates a stunning clarity about the culture and political
economy that it was written in. The empty mystery that holds the
novel together, is the same mystery that perplexes us all in liquid
modernity. None of it makes sense. None of it seems real. If so much
is happening, then why are we in stasis? While it skirts neatly tied
up narrative implications, there is a profound – even disturbing,
perhaps – philosophical insight here,
Similarly to Thomas
Pynchon in Inherent Vice, Boris utilizes the generic structure of
detective pulp fiction as raw material that he can deconstruct,
fragment, and imbue with a freewheeling experimental sensibility.
Inherent Vice has been written off by some critics as Pynchon’s
detour into light reading, and that criticism isn’t exactly false.
But Pynchon also managed to subvert the well-worn genre tropes of the
detective novel in a way that materialized his pseudo-philosophical
cultural critiques more legibly than any of his masterpieces had
prior: paranoia, conspiracy, social change, drugs, and more. Boris
employs the structure to similar ends, and the mystery “plot”
becomes a thread that he uses to tie together a hallucinatory and
temporally fractured literary space. The novel is hilarious at times,
and transgressive throughout. But unquestionably its greatest
strength is in its conception of the world we live, or at least, the
phantasmagoric simulation of a world that we live in. And the anxiety
we feel in it. And the desire we have to escape it.
The novel follows an
ambitious and unusually art historically sophisticated – if
generically narcissistic and drug-numbed – journalist named Lester
Langway, who works for a failing, formerly hip style magazine
(similar to Dazed or The Face). Lester heads to Paris to locate a
Foucaut-level famous philosopher named Gérard Derenne, who has gone
missing. Lester encounters problems in his search for the philosopher
almost immediately. First, it appears that his editor from Down N’
Out! magazine has no recollection of assigning Lester the project,
and has ceded control of his publication to his authoritarian, clout
chasing assistant. His interview with fellow philosopher and
Derenne’s best friend “Jacques Dutronc” (cleverly named after
the French pop star of the same name, emphasizing the fluidity
between intellectual life and fame in post-digital capitalism) goes
disastrously. And finally, Lester finds himself at the center of a Me
Too! Scandal when a female associate of Derenne’s goes to the press
and describes the prank phone calls that Lester has been sending her
way as “abuse,” and – in a brilliant satire of the cowardice
displayed by bourgeois creative institutions’ failures to protect
their artists from unfair smears (Jon Rafman, anyone?) – Lester’s
union doesn’t even attempt to protect him from the character
assassination or the media distortions around the accusations. All
through this, there is a femme fatale of sorts, Anaïs, who signs on
to Lester’s project as his photographer, and the two embark on a
very bizarre, but rather erotic, romantic journey together, that
keeps the deeply bizarre story grounded in mercifully familiar
images.
The more calamities
that befall Lester throughout the story, is the further that Boris
drags us down into an abyss of surrealism, temporal slippages, and
the depths of a drug and literature-soaked mind. At a certain point,
the book becomes less of a tale of mystery and investigation and more
of a psychedelic and opioid-spiked fever dream residing within the
subconscious of the artist who feels like he was born in the wrong
era. The second half of the novel is to the first what Twin Peaks:
The Return was to Twin Peaks: the warped, mirror-image phantasmagoria
of it. It becomes a poem of nostalgia, and a mourning for the radical
avant-garde of early modernism that has further collapsed in the 21st
Century.
My Week Without
Gérard is a French modernism bibliophile’s wet dream. Throughout,
there are bountiful references to Bréton and other surrealists like
Artaud and Bataille (both of whom were eventually ousted from the
group, but whatever). The Bureau of Surrealist Research, which was
historically opened by Artaud in 1924, is reimagined as a kind of
museum, or is possibly still in existence somehow (in the context of
the novel), as an echo of time, or a murmur of Lester’s vivid
imagination (but more on that later); it appears throughout the novel
that in this Bureau of Surrealist Research, a Pandora’s Box is
waiting for Lester to come and open it. The Bureau becomes centered
as the portal between our world, strange as it already is, and the
one that Lester enters, which seems to follow a slippery logic
similar to the Polish town depicted in Bruno Schulz’s The Streets
of Crocodiles. A fog of uncanny emerges from the Bureau that renders
all the events and locations that follow it strange… There are
references to psychologists, from R.D. Laing to Jung to Wilhelm
Reich. And then, there’s the magic. The occult. Colin Wilson’s
The Occult. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Psychomagic. Peter Haining’s
The Necromancers. The literary references allude to a rich
interiority attempting to escape outwards. The mind. The imagination.
Magic. And that’s where Boris forces us to ask: “What is really
happening here?” Is this an occult voyage into the heart of a
mysticism-saturated, modernism-haunted Paris? Or is it the
psychological landscape of an alienated, drugged out, tragically
nostalgic, and literature obsessed psyche? The joyful psychosis of
the novel is in making no such distinctions between these two notions
of its content. Just accept its unlogic. “In the 21st Century, a
schizoid personality can be an asset,” says Lester to Anaïs at one
point in the novel. Too true. In fact, it might not just be an asset,
but a necessity, suggests Ivan.
There is a
deliriously reactionary sensibility that courses through the novel.
Lester longs for the poets and writers of Surrealism and of early
modernism. He drifts through a Paris that only exists in the recesses
of his imagination, a Paris that he has embedded into his interiority
through his reading and made his inner world. I identify with
Lester’s condition. He’s out of time. He wants to be a kind of
artist that simply isn’t allowed to exist anymore. He missed
modernism by decades, and even the cheap postmodern imitation of it
found in “radical” British style magazines is on its last legs.
He came in at the end of art’s dilution and just before there was
no more art to dilute at all, just “visual culture” to dispose of
and ignore. Where do you go from there? He has no choice but to
retreat inward. This is, quite often, a book about the collapse of
art itself. Boris unearths black comedy in the digital graveyard of
post-postmodern art and literature. Derenne in the novel is a
philosopher, sure, but he’s even more so a celebrity and a vulgar,
neoliberal elite. Boris suggests that the only artists that are
gifted with any kind of cultural presence or platform are those that
metaphorically (or physically) fellate the encrypted forces of power
that dominate beneath the shadows of conspiracy.
In one of the most
unforgettable sequences of the novel, there is a peculiar tragedy in
Lester’s attempt to hex three unnamed conspirators that have
plagued his project and his quest (Derenne, perhaps? Dutronc?). In a
nothing short of ecstatically fucked up sequence, Lester performs an
erotic blood rite with Anaïs and an occult knowledgeable supervisor,
who guides the couple through the process. “Lester entered Anaïs
smoothly and held himself inside her, blood squelching,” writes
Boris. “Mike lay his hands on her head and instructed her to suck
the light from Lester. Lodged inside her with his eyes closed, it
took a great deal of Will to keep from releasing his power. ‘I’m
going to cum,’ he said more than once.”
And yet, despite all
that “power” flowing through Lester, the ritual gets him no
closer to his goal, no closer to Derenne, and no closer to
understanding the world or rationalizing his own place within it. But
Lester isn’t just lost in his own interiority. His fantasies of
early modernism aren’t even built on anything resembling historical
reality. At a later point in the novel, for instance, time starts to
collapse and come undone. Worried about Anaïs’ psychological state
after the ritual and a bad psilocybin trip, Lester brings her to a
mental health facility, that we learn is Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone
Institute. Lester’s encounter with the famed psychoanalyst and
Marxist “free love” theorist is presented as neutral, as if
Wilhelm is exactly where he ought to be; like it’s not strange at
all that a man who died decades ago is taking patients into his
hospital in the 2010s. And while Lester is excited to meet him at
first (who wouldn’t be?), Reich quickly reveals himself as a quack
doctor who imparts his untested theories onto vulnerable patients,
sometimes irreparably fucking them up. It turns out that the radical
ideas that make The Orgone Energy Accumulator, Its Scientific and
Medical Use such wonderfully weird reading are also what make him
functionally terrible as an actual physician. So not only does Lester
long for something that has already long since passed, he longs for
something that maybe never was. His contempt for his own epoch has
made him uncritical towards the history that he has imbued with a
near supernatural importance. He’s so alienated from his own
reality that he has to imbue his own aesthetic and ideological biases
onto a former era that he fetishizes. Is that not the very definition
of reactionary?
But Lester is,
nevertheless, empathetic, and his reactionary tendencies are
presented as perfectly logical in the context of the novel. Does
Lester eventually find Derenne? He sure does, but it’s so besides
the point by the end of the novel that it feels like it barely
happens at all. Lester gives new meaning to the term “unreliable
narrator,” because he is too lost within his own fascinations,
perversions and fantasies to give an accurate account of anything.
But given the world he lives in – cancel culture, shadowy elites,
the collapse of meaning, a decadent empire in steep decline, abject
cynicism masquerading as coherent politics – can we blame him?
Lester presents
himself as something of a surrealist journalist, or at least that is
his goal at the beginning of the novel, and the world no longer has
any tolerance for an artist with that kind of ambition. The only
publisher that will work with him is a failing style bible, and even
they are losing patience with the ideas that he brings to the table
(“We don’t do philosophy!” says his editor, at one point).
Humorously, Rick Owens is depicted throughout the novel as a pillar
to the kind of artist that Lester on some level wishes he knew how to
be. Owens – a fashion designer with a ruthlessly specific
viewpoint, a sculptor of brutal forms with a seemingly limitless
imagination – simultaneously embodies the unhinged creative id of
an earlier modernism while also still maintaining a massive cultural
presence and the material riches that fame coincides with in
post-digital neoliberalism. Rick is both a “sexual personae,” and
a pop media superstar. To maintain that level of artistic integrity
AND world wide recognizability is nothing short of astonishing. Rick
Owens is an artist that belongs in the here and now. Lester doesn’t.
Lester envies him. I envy him. I am Lester Langway, and like Lester,
I retreat into my interiority to escape the alienation that subsumes
me. Like Lester, I would rather waste away forever in my own “Library
of Babel'' than slowly go insane in the schizoid landscape of a
broken culture that no longer places any value on creativity,
iconoclasm, or freedom. The world within. The world I’ve built. The
material world around me is just too cold, and too ugly. - Adam
Lehrer
A C U T - U P –
C O N S C I O U S N E S S - n o v e l.
????¬¬¬¬¬¬``````?????????/???????//////////\\\\\\\\\\\\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/I
T I S P E T U L A N T. `/`/`/`/`/`/`/`/`/`/`/IT IS RAW. IT IS
UNDEFINABLE. IT IS PURE
EXPERIMENTAL-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism
AUTISTI-CLITERATU\\R\E
-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism-ism...for
better or for worst.
Zak Ferguson’s
debut novel Eat Your Keyboard was released at the beginning of 2017,
and before, during and after its release he was working furiously at
writing the final two books of what Zak fully envisioned as a trilogy
of books. The writing process was hard going – the book continually
evolving – warping. The whole experience has been hard.
Heart-wrenching. Zak wasn’t happy with it, nor felt much confidence
as to the future books’ safety and the works integrity with the
Press it was with initially.
Eat Your Keyboard
was and continues to be a novel that has infected those of whom have
read it. Many have enquired as to whether there are follow ups. Zak
has reassured many, for the last two to three years, that the book
was forthcoming. Alas, it wasn’t. So much had gone on between the
first book and the ever changing two books that were bristling in
anticipation, to mess up the readers it knew it could corrupt – Zak
was undecided about the books fate.
After much turmoil
and strife, both professionally and personally, Zak burnt out. The
only thing that kept him going was the notion that he could now set
up shop and continue on his career as a writer – but, wishing to
add Publisher to his resume. And the Eat Your Keyboard cycle was not
going to fade, it was going to be at the epicentre as to why he
wanted to publish his own works.
Since then, starting
his own Press, Zak has released 7 novels – though, no signs of the
EYK follow ups/re-issues were made clear – to anyone, nor himself.
Over the past few
years Zak has worked almost every single day on his 600-page
experimental novel – that collects all three books of the EYK
trilogy.
The difference is,
the book is one big compendium, with new art exclusively made for
this books release by Carlos Davila, and special adverts shoved in by
DB Spitzer – to lend this book a whole new identity. And a few
crappy pieces of artwork from Zak’s end, but, lets see if you can
spot them?
If you have read
EYK, not only do you get a new, expanded, re-written (like the best
re-released experimental cut-up novels) novel, you get both of the
follows up, DESTROY YOUR KEYBOARD and DISGORGE YOUR KEYBOARD - a
wholly NEW huge beast of a book to weigh down your children when they
won’t keep still, or to hold open a bank vaults door as you steal
its contents – that, or it just makes your already heaving
bookshelves bow under its madness.
As a person with a
diagnosis of Autism, Zak strived to create a book that gives the
reader the closest thing to an autistic experience, as possible, a
roller-coaster ride that Zak experiences on a daily basis, a
psychological and mental challenge that has been shaped into a
physical form. The reader will feel most things associated with
Autism by immersing themselves into Zak’s world and writing.
"Zak Ferguson's
writing is like letting an electric virus invade your central nervous
system. Nothing is left intact. You are left wiped out and ready to
reboot. It's wonderful." – Seb Doubinsky
“The System
Compendium is far and away the most ambitious thing I can remember
reading for some time, and certainly one of the most ambitious
contemporary books I’ve read in a number of years. Maximalist to
the hilt and as expressive as a gob of milky spit in the face of a
court-ordered psychiatrist, this is a book to live within and with,
an author to keep close.” - Grant Maierhofer
“Not often does
new fiction come to this world so fully formed and peculiar in its
execution. Zak Ferguson’s work confuses me on the deepest levels-
and I would not have it any other way- as it twists a thread of
visceral narrative layers only to break it and start anew. Ferguson
dredges the most specific and proscribed shapes and images to page,
stilting and rendered through oblique and haunting vantage, riddled
through to the baser aspects of the conscious and condensing as
something more. Writers like this are born to it, when one might
suspect a heritage - Bataille, Lautréamont, Bulgakov, or Burroughs - but also with a surprisingly delicate touch. Manic images somehow
increasingly specific, like intimate sea-divers setting off a
light-pulse from within a leviathan, merging with genres like science
fiction or metaphysics and rant. It is writing that burns itself”.
– Jared Pappas Kelley
Zak Ferguson, T E X T U R E Ss,
Sweat Drenched Press, 2021.
"So it begins, book-objects emerging from the Covid-19 UK
lockdown and beyond. Artbook. Yes. That word.
I pause. I like it. Gordon Lish famously said literature is
retrograde. Why are we not trying harder? Zak Ferguson is.
[Text] in TEXTURESs is immanent… already there. Bugger all images.
Even the text is an image. Hieroglyphics of HTML. The negative space
of text. Negentropic text. Keywords emerge: auto-fact, auto-fiction,
IKEA meatballs, channel 3, channel 4, loneliness, boredom, vacant
lots, tin-foil cocks, bubble-gum girls, ruins. Yes, ruins.
Lish also said: You don’t even have to make it up!
The opening & closing of a laptop computer… like a giant clam!
This is Brighton, after all. And Eastbourne. The grunt-groans of
existence are here. Existence as a cut-up experience. This book
claims to be an accident.
It is. A big, beautiful fucking accident. Like the Universe itself.
Electronic waste. E-waste. TEXTURESs reminds us everything is made of
particles. Box text. Text in boxes. Language prisons. Good luck, pal.
A writer reading a writer is something, eh? A writer reading a writer
reading a writer… probably what you are doing right now. Am I
right, pal? John Trefry famously said he is okay with Inside the
Castle books only being read by other writers. That is what you have
here. Zak Ferguson makes me want to write. TEXTURESs makes me want to
write. Makes me want to “fuck around” with text. Echo chambers.
Chambers without echoes. The anechoic chamber in Minneapolis is
purportedly the “quietest place on the planet.” TEXTURESs is
screaming. Zak Ferguson is screaming. Hear my tell-tale heart,
indeed.
Life is a rough draft. I still don’t know what the fuck Nietzsche
means by eternal return. What I do know: TEXTURESs by Zak Ferguson
makes me feel alive." -R.G. Vasicek, author of THE DEFECTORS
TEXTURESs
{Or}
{The Autistic Experience} didn't start out as a book, it started out
as a collage piece.
This is just the end result.
A book reflecting on Zak's ever evolving relationship with various
artistic mediums; and the artistry even the most minor of details.
This is both a collection of prose, fiction, poems, essays and a
novel length manifesto that relates to Zak's neurological condition
and the condition of the interiority of a book. It is also about
sweet fuck all.
Zak Ferguson,
Dimension Whores, Sweat
Drenched Press, 2019.
Dimension Whores is
a non-novel. A non-linear-experimental book. An ode to the works of
William S. Burroughs and all the great literary masters who gained
notoriety in death...rather than in life...a legacy Zak Ferguson
won't even have a chance at even following in his own demise. Praise
for Zak Ferguson, “Not often does new fiction come to this world so
fully formed and peculiar in its execution. Zak Ferguson’s work
confuses me on the deepest levels- and I would not have it any other
way- as it twists a thread of visceral narrative layers only to break
it and start anew. Ferguson dredges the most specific and proscribed
shapes and images to page, stilting and rendered through oblique and
haunting vantage, riddled through to the baser aspects of the
conscious and condensing as something more. Writers like this are
born to it, when one might suspect a heritage- Bataille, Lautréamont,
Bulgakov, or Burroughs- but also with a surprisingly delicate touch.
Manic images somehow increasingly specific, like intimate sea-divers
setting off a light-pulse from within a leviathan, merging with
genres like science fiction or metaphysics and rant. It is writing
that burns itself”. – Jared Pappas Kelley (Author of SOLVENT
FORM) "I don't get it, I truly do not understand how this is
even allowed to hit the presses...he didn't even pass English
Literature in his GCSE's"- Zak's English Teacher (year 9/10/11)
"Anyone know of Zak's whereabouts, please get hold of your local
Police"- Zak's Probation Officer
Zak Ferguson, Interiors for ?, Sweat
Drenched Press, 2020.
Interiors for ? is
an experiment. Nothing else.
Zak Ferguson,
Interiors for ? mark ii, Sweat
Drenched Press, 2020.
This book is about
experimental literature, and its
inter-inter-inter-inter--relationship with images, spaces, interiors
and the ontology of not just words but their relation to the physical
book and its form. pART 2 OF THE foUR-bOOK SERIES- iNTERIORS fOR ?
Praise for Interiors for ? mark ii: "Interiors for ? Mark ii is
a passionate experiment of form / structure / narrative. Navigating
the interiority of the text, investigating the semiotics of the
white-page and black-ink.Ferguson builds this machine with a steady
hand. He converts the interiors of the head into the interiors of the
text. Mapping this newly-formed space with the energy of a dadaist
manifesto--employing the techniques of collage and cut-up to create
simultaneously entrancing and enigmatic images. All of this revealing
the fragility of the book-object. The inclinations of language to
break down and distort / the limitations and potentialities of its
construction.Interiors for ? Mark ii is an exciting exploration of
what can be planted within text, what can be grown, seeded,
destroyed." - Mike Corrao, author of Gut Text and Man, Oh Man
Zak Ferguson,
Interiors for ? mark iii, Sweat
Drenched Press, 2020.
The third part in
the (Experimental, Pseudo-Non-Fiction, Innovative, Essay-Critique,
Fictionally-F*cked-Up-) INTERIORS FOR ?Quadrilogy, where Zak Ferguson
reaffirms, redesigns, alters, surveys, waffles on about the
relationship of text, interior design and formation of a book,
rediscovering the alternate dimensions of the book-space and all
those great avenues of thought, interpretation, philosophy of the
book and its overall dimensionality. It is full of
meta-critical-evaluation, meta-fiction, born from such a
construction- such as a place of de-con-struct-ion,
ION-/i/o/n-contained, offered, delivered, via the physical form of a
paperback novel. |Full| of| T/Y/P/O/S and error error errors-full of
mess and mess and mess and mess and mess and mess and mess and mess.
Zak Ferguson,
Interiors for ? mark IV, Sweat
Drenched Press, 2020.
The final book in
the Interiors book series. Where Metaphysics, Philosophy, the
inter-inter-inter-inter-interior-expansive-overt-expansive-cosmic-inter-I/N/T/E/Riorssssssssssssssssssss-inter-RIORs-Equations-56666888888=========-Satire-Non-Fiction-Essays-Cut-Up-Collage-Semiotics-Ontological-Phenomenological-Illogical-ill/i/L/l-are
offered-break down, mind, no mind, all mind. Art is the future.
Expression=Expansion of avenues of pathways of opening ups of a
variant and varietal osmosis of genetics where words make up known
connotations where. . .this book is all up for interpretation.
Zak Ferguson, One of Them Days, Sweat
Drenched Press, 2020.
One of them days we all have, whether young, old, racist,
all-inclusive, tolerant, intolerant, gay, straight, bi, human, alien,
we all have one of them days. So, here is a book of them, from many
different people, having one of them days.
Zak Ferguson, Soft Tissues, Sweat Drenched
Press, 2021.
Soft Tissues is for all the current generation of whom have had
issues and need a tissue.
"Exact— investigational retching— reminiscent of
Apollinaire— or Saint-John Perse. There is spiralling flight—
redolent imagery within Zak Ferguson’s writing— poetries
constructed in lifeblood—assembled fibres and entangled bear hair—
online apps and old static radios— social media and skid marks—
slang terminology inside high rise blocks— fashioned overall debris
and dormant wood rot— erected tequila slime within antisocial
attitudes— taken apart and pieced together by fag ash and slow
motion— structured infection combining— composed and created by
milky forms— put up and knocked down. Zak Ferguson has written
verses full of the shrill cries— the secret codes— and tricks of
spit spray and skeletal frames— material worth reading. Poetry as
pleasure buttons— the soft tissues— the synthesis of Alcools and
Anabasis— muscle." – Shane Jesse Christmass
Zak Ferguson, Volatile Voice's, Volatile
Universe,Sweat Drenched Press, 2019.
We live in a reality that is supposed to be our own. Voices break
through, in textural compositions. A reality crafted by our own hand.
Our own, their own, a sum of many, many parts of this slop of
material. We are existing on multiple plains of existence. Layered.
Tiered. Dormant. Existing. Birthing. Dying. Fizzling out. Our
decisions are not our own, it is dictated by a melange of our other
selves. Our parallel selves. Our truer selves. And if that isn’t
comfortable enough for you to accept, to compute, to define as a
narrative streak, there is a billion others in the wings to be hung
up for contemplation- {not entertainment}...then faith,
objectification and all great emotions are greater served and
rationalized, and made acceptable, by putting it to our greatest
deities; to make our most basic of decisions somebody else’s fault.
The Narrators? {who do you trust?} What if you got a TASTE of your
own reality? What if every minute thing has cause and effect,
rippling through the linearity of your(multiple-selves) LIFE-LINE(s)?
What if every possibility of all potentialities submerge into "your"
cohesive narrative life? What if you got a TASTE of a broader
Cosmos?What IF… those voices, those rippling, bending,
curvature-noise-made-material-ectoplasmic-events altered not one
singular variation of yourself, but all of your selves..these phantom
images, these intrusive thoughts, these Déjà vu-moments are our own
extremely tempered voices...ever so V O L A T I L E
Breaching...reaching out...Part of an even greater web-work and
mapping, making its own sub-pocket in space and time, where, out
there, in there {indicate to your own head, thus meaning your mind}
personified within itself as a multi-layered Universe, itself ever
so,V O L A T I L E...Meet a whole host of characters, whose singular,
epic, contained stories all interweave to culminate into a broader
far more {"pretentious} cosmic whole, where there is a sexually
perverse demented youth Dimension-hopping, searching for his sick
obsession, a young girl, of pig-tail innocence, a council-block
dwelling witch with a penchant for pushing carers to their
mushy-deaths, meet That Man who exists on the fringes of a young
girls reality, a girl, who in question is the focal point to all of
these characters, whose realities are splayed out, who is a key
component to this fractured,
Zak Ferguson, What Mr. Wants Mr. Gets, Sweat Drenched Press, 2019.
What Mr. Wants Mr. Gets. It's as simple as that....Or is it?He has a
method. He has no plan. He has a vision. He has no qualms with being
caught. He needs people. He has no friends. He has puppets. He has
pray. His thoughts run like a whippet...they strike like mercury to
flesh. He is damaged. He will damage. The art of killing has lost its
obliqueness and contrarily its definition. Killing isn't art. Art is
killing. Killing is enlightening. Not to sole perpetrator. But to
society as a whole.Kill. Manipulate. Games. Mind. Bodily. Eruptions
of instinctual possessiveness garnered by fear. Not of blade. Not of
death. But of the loss of one's legacy.Impromptu imprints impromptu
actions impromptu impromptu impromptu........pointlessness.The
greatest thing isn't the whys and the hows of a serial killer. It's
the internal coalescence of lust, greed, insecurities, control. It's
not the making of that's interesting...it's the subconscious splay
out played in real time that is the main and real focus one needs to
truly understand and experience to comprehend a killers actual pure
unadulterated motives and reasoning's.Experimental fiction hasn't
been this outright f*cking audacious.What Mr. Wants Mr. Gets is an
extremely experimental piece. Transgressive. Surreal. Disjointed.
This book is petulance personified. This novel is a harsh critique on
society, expectations, media-consumption, how expectations of self
border beyond deity levels of narcissism and modern humans want to
leave an imprint on this f*cked up Universe. Its a satire, a
meta-commentary on experimentalism used in modern day fiction. But,
be warned...
Zak Ferguson, A Taste of
Feeling, Sweat Drenched Press, 2018.
We live in a reality that is supposed to be our own. A reality
crafted by our own hand. We are existing on multiple plains of
existence. Our decisions are not our own by a melange of our other
selves.And if that isn’t comfortable enough for you to accept, then
faith, objectification and all great emotions are greater served and
rationalized, and made acceptable, by putting it to our greatest
deities; to make our most basic of decisions somebody else’s
fault.What if you got a TASTE of your own reality? What if every
minute thing has cause and effect, rippling through the linearity of
your LIFE-LINE? What if every possibility of all potentialities
submerge into your cohesive narrative life? What if you got a TASTE
of a broader Cosmos?What IF…
Zak Ferguson, Eat Your
Keyboard,Sweat Drenched Press, 2017.
Have you felt the lure of T H E P R O G R A M M E Has T H E S Y S T E
M worked its way through to your greatest most secreted depths? Or is
it still massaging, kneading, soaking into your subconscious, into
your extended being. Into your key-eat- boarD...Your.... THE BOOK YOU
HOLD IS SOMETHING ONE COULD MISCONSTRUE AS A LIE. IT IS THE TRUTH.
THIS IS LIVING PROOF OF A HIGHER CALLING, OF A BETTER WAY OF LIVING.
ONE COULD ANTICIPATE AN ANSWER TO THE ULTIMATE QUESTIONS. WE DON'T
ANSWER...WE HELP YOU GAIN A TRUTH. HERE, DEAR READER YOU'RE
GIVEN...snippets of experiences, one right after the next, all piling
in a heap. Slowly, as they all decompose together, they will begin to
form something. Again, not so much a story, but events that are all
related by something, united to "shine a light" on
something greater than the individual events. What are WE as a
species shining a light on by our actions? Like scattering bones and
the casting of entrails to seek some truth out of the random, through
its "chaos" , its telling YOU something, telling truths
about ourselves and what we, you, they, them- collectively create.
Writer Zak A. Ferguson takes his readers on a rip-roaring rampage
through the madness of one's mind. With this debut novella we, the
audience, are subjected to literary experiments that take us from one
existence to another, in flashes, explosions that tear the brain
apart, leaving each piece to grow into its own character - one after
another, they grow into agents of pure chaos. Their existence - a
manic slideshow shown at 100mph. Sit back, open your mind and EAT
YOUR KEYBOARD!
Zak Ferguson,Mr. Nick, Sweat Drenched Press,
2018.
Mr. Nick. He’s the Devil. Or just good ol’ Nicky-Boy. Any who,
Nick is suffering from a case of the mid-Millennium blues. What is
his life? To serve others, and more? At the end of the day, it’s
not like he’s got horns and breathes fire… …that, and he’s
not the actual epitome of Evil. He’s an old boy wanting to live out
the remainder of his (im)mortal life. After a few bevvies, and World
Record for MOST CIGARETTES SMOKED IN HALF AN HOUR, Nick comes to the
conclusion that it’s high-time to call it quits. To pass the baton.
Heavy lies the crown upon the head of he who is: RULER OF THE WORLD.
Of whom, you ask, would be the worthy heir to The Devil’s throne?
Well, none other than Nick’s son himself – a simpleton with a
devout passion for pushing papers, and sorting pencils. The REAL
question is: Can this desk-dweller do what is necessary to keep Earth
neat and tidy? That question is put to the test when Cupid is
bequeathed his utmost desires… …desires full of beautiful
benevolence – a fire too HOT for any level of Hell to contain, or
control. From one fiasco to another, Nick’s spur-of-the-moment
decision to quit his job couldn’t have come at a more hellacious
time. Mr. Nick offers laffs (laughs, for the spelling police),
gonzo-bonker characters (like a mallet to the head, and that soppy
cartoon laugh), and moments that’ll most likely have critics
throwing this book at their least favourite child.
THE RUMPUS
MINI-INTERVIEW PROJECT #219: ZAK FERGUSON
BY JARED
PAPPAS-KELLEY
Zak Ferguson’s work is mental in the best possible sense of the
word. His work is unsettling. He is a self-professed experimental
writer (I am an experimentalist!) and you can see how he approaches
each aleatory novel or book with its own rules, lucidity, and
structures as with this new series of “interiors” that are
underway. The logic of Ferguson’s work is one of expansion and
collapse, putting forward a thread only to subtlety fold in or snap
under, yet still felt in body and under skin.
I spoke with Zak about his new book, Interiors for ?, and the second
installment Interiors for ? Mark ii, which was published only two
weeks later. We also talked about wandering burnt-out buildings in
the UK, the legacy of underground or zine culture, vaporwave, his
autism, and his awakening as a writer.
***
The Rumpus: I stumbled across your newest writing project Interiors
for ?, and wasn’t really aware of the concept or idea of it. Can
you talk a bit about this project, and the thinking behind it?
Zak Ferguson: Interiors for ? began as a whole other endeavor. To
take images for a project. Maybe THE SYSTEM COMPENDIUM, or something
else. So after and during photographing, I had this image
percolating, not so much an image as an idea, that burned into that
idea, where I needed to name a folder, to create one, where to place
these images, to pick from—like a goodie box of images to use in
experiments and to apply to certain pieces I am working on. Then this
philosophy and appreciation for interiors, spaces, my relationship
with the metaphysics, meta-contextual-textural-integrated
notion—warped and took me over, wholly.
I needed a name, so I titled the folder Interiors for ? because that
had been percolating inside my mind as I was taking the photos, too,
and then this whole other plane of contemplation opened. Already
spurred and accessed by having initially started upon this path of
productivity, the images I had taken were taking on different
resonances. The husk of a recently burned-down hotel in Eastbourne
all of a sudden evolved, and was dislocated from this thing called
reality, and took on a new meaning, relating to my art, relating to
my procession of creativity.
The whole thing (the hotel) had fallen into itself, and only the
outside, the walls, the façade, the foundations, the sides were
remaining—it was wholly aesthetically and physically there in its
exterior standings, its own physically embodied thing, but there was
something supernal about it, too.
For me it was and still is about the spaces, the new being of this
fucking burnt down building, and in segments, framed by its falling
down, its eventual disintegration—the boring parts turned into
anarchy-parts, the beautiful parts turned into textural-parts.
Rumpus: So, what are your plans for this project, and what is it
about exactly?
Ferguson: I am planning on releasing four Interior books, from here
on at the end of every week; whether it may be later, may be sooner,
I have no clue, but I am enjoying myself because it is testing my
skills as an artist, metaphysically, with pathways of contemplation
and reflection and also my interrelationship with image-mockery,
image-manipulation, my need to explore, embrace, extend, engorge my
overall intentions, but in newer, for me, and far more innovative and
puzzle-piece-experimental ways. My intention is to build on this
work, because it has evolved, taken upon itself a whole new meaning.
It is the first official release from my press, and it is an itch
that needs to be scratched. To test. To push. To prove to myself.
What is it, exactly? I don’t fucking know, and I love that energy;
it’s almost a synergy and cyclical thing that is issued forth from
the ripples coming off my other works. Inside, outside of me, there
is something cosmic happening here…
Rumpus: I was talking the other day about all this and about how it
reminds me a bit of the glory days of zines and zine-making, but sort
of like the next evolution of that sort of process. I grew up in
places like Olympia and Seattle where a lot of that was going on and
sort of in the air. What do you think of this?
Ferguson: That is very fucking cool. I have never been part of any
zine, or publication that is circulated in a cool, underground, DIY
way. I think that this can be bettered, considering how things are
going, on a sadly commercial and capitalist level, by the
accessibility of POD (print-on-demand) platform, if used well. But
then as I think about this, I get agitated and the reality dawns, and
that is—that it takes something away from what makes zines, well,
zines… they’re printed, stapled, clustered, with art not approved
but shoved in, because they need as much content as they could scurry
together, collage, prose-poetry, rants, terrible advertisements for
local businesses, where the time is nearly running out on the
publication date they had set for themselves and told a fair few
mates (greasy-haired, mascara-clad, with a few terribly
ill-thought-out and self-applied tattoos)—who are willingly
standing on the street corner from the “press” contemplating the
jump from curb to road.
Rumpus: You mention this idea of underground, which makes me think of
Baudrillard, who says: “You must create your underground, because
now there’s no more underground, no more avant-garde, no more
marginality. You can create your personal underground, your own black
hole…”
What do you think of that?
Ferguson: Yes, we all must make our own underground, because there
really is no avant-garde, no more room or spaces allowed for the
people with the real rushing of blood keeping the actual heart of
these creative movements alive any longer. But people creating zines,
or chapbooks, or macro pamphlets, this reality, this place, that will
never die, oh I so fucking hope it doesn’t, and telling those whose
supposed positioning with these supposed wants to be DIY and so
underground is truly all faux and disingenuous. But if it can be
attenuated and captured in some minor way, that intent and
well-intended motion is more than what most presses try to express
and sell themselves off as.
Nothing will live up to the underground nature of pamphlets, and the
only person I know of successfully doing this, using the POD
platform, is Christopher Nosnibor at Clinicality Press. I love
Christopher as a publisher, reviewer, and writer himself. His
nonfiction really shaped my want to start writing, and is not as
veined into experimental fiction, but perhaps into spreading
experimental nonfiction.
Even though I may have been part of faux literary movements, all
online, and only in existence in words, in boasting, and on the
social media platforms these projects always live and ultimately die
by—that try to capture that punk-rock-underground aesthetic, and in
all honesty, in their failure, make it known that you just cannot
capture that type of thing without experiencing it. So, no, I have
never been part of it.
Rumpus: You talk about the idea of these small communities that exist
online or these faux literary movements. That makes me think of some
of the early intentions of vaporwave in music and its decentralized
locale (online), the first entirely online music genre. Scott
Beauchamp proposed that “vaporwave was the first musical genre to
live its entire life from birth to death completely online.” So
what is this shift?
Ferguson: Things are so gentrified, but it’s evolved beyond its
originally assigned and processed meaning, the process of renovating
and improving housing or district, yadder, yadder, yadder; its about
labels, about being this thing, in name, but not in execution. And
with this motion of application it is just a knock-off. Being this
thing, so people gravitate, towards it. To try adding to it, but if
it’s not truly the encapsulation to begin with, it’s just
assigning its own fizzle/burn out.
Rumpus: I sort of think, what would’ve happened back then if we’d
had access to this sort of immediacy with POD with zines or for
similar projects. But as you’ve said, there’s now this desire for
the physicality of the printed object as well or the sort of irony,
if we want to think about vaporwave as an example again—all of this
digital music that was produced and released online is now being
rereleased on vinyl, the sort of uber-analogue holy grail. But is
this POD also kind of brilliant in its potential?
Ferguson: Oh, it is brilliant. Really brilliant. For creative
endeavors, to circulate art that usually, in the past, needed to be
approved and were then made to wait. The POD platform has given
freedom to people of great intentions, to get other artists, other
experimentalists, innovators together and out there, to have their
work out in the open, without a committee board judging it, editing
it, breaking it down, and stating it is this, labelling it as that. I
do not know of what platforms they use, but publication houses like
Inside the Castle, headed by the genius John Trefrey, Dostoyevsky
Wannabe by Richard Brammer and Victoria Brown, are doing things in
literature that I wish to achieve. For the art. For the artist. For
the love of making and creating books and content.
Though POD encourages a lot of amateurism and bad books by some
people of whom shouldn’t write, there is no stopping that and nor
should those people be stopped. POD is a great place to create
careers, but also a great freedom to make presses, and through that
and the books, fuck yeah, POD is a masterful ingenious and necessary
platform and maybe a future scape where the best of artists end up
creating—because you can either learn, grow from it, or be stuck in
the same old rut from the beginning. You can put out there whatever
the fuck you want as an artist.
But, it needs to be learned, not taught; it needs to be felt out. It
needs to have a person with a mind to think outside the box, because
those who think inside the box are dictated by the rules of Amazon,
marketing on Facebook, which is an echo chamber, and so forth—those
people are lost.
Rumpus: You mentioned it in passing a bit, but maybe you could
mention your ideas about experimentalism or experimentalists briefly?
What is its significance or what might it entail?
Ferguson: Being me. I feel everything I have spoken about is the
encapsulation of what it means to be an experimentalist, such as my
methods, my attitudes, also when paired with the reality of having
autism. Autism allows one to be an experimentalist, whether they know
it or not, to be a discoverer, whether they want it to or not. It’s
a continual struggle—social niceties, social rules, and supposed
law-governed rules of how to behave or come across—that is an
experience born from an altered angle and perspective and a
consciousness. That is something one tries to attain with their art:
the experience, the mechanisms running the mind, the cerebral nature
of those with autism. Autistic people are born creators and born
experimentalists; it is how the “condition” dictates and such.
Just pair with it and become one. It then will be a benefit and not a
detriment.
Rumpus: Something else you’ve spoken a bit about in the past was
how your autism relates to your process and viewpoint in your work.
Does that relate to what you are doing with this new project?
Ferguson: It is my art. Autism is the product of my mind. My
emotions. My personality. These are wholly dictated, controlled,
steered, corrupted by my non-typical brain. Thus, it is heavily tied
to me. Everything you read, experience, process, read, enjoy, hate,
loathe, don’t quite get, appreciate, is part of my autism. Having
autism is now a piece of Art itself. It is a hurt, an ache, as it
affects my living situation societally, housing-wise, my processing
and survival.
My work is a total obliteration of those emotions, a capturing of
those odd moments, odd traits, odd-angled vistas from the way I look
at the world, that gets the creative mind and accompanying
imagination boiling over, and the autistic episodes and frustrations
to my existence with this alternate way of thinking and feeling and
living—sees me process, molecularly break it down, via
experimentation, of prose, prose-imagery, imagery, short films. It is
me. The full me.
Rumpus: I also know that you have been working on a new book, Art Is
Autism. can you speak a bit about that?
Ferguson: It is a manifesto. A pseudo-memoir. Talking about my life
with autism, and my coming into myself as both writer and reader. It
is almost an experimentalist autistic (passionate) meltdown, full of
rants, critiques, studies, emotional pleas. A wholly intimate
portrayal of what writing and experimental and innovative fiction
means to me.
Zak Ferguson’s work is mental in an unsettling and best possible
sense of the word. He is a self-professed experimental writer (I am
an experimentalist!) and you can see how he approaches each aleatory
novel or book with its own rules, lucidity, and structures as with
this new series of “interiors” that are underway. The logic of
Ferguson’s work is one of expansion and collapse, putting forward a
thread only to subtlety fold in or snap under, yet felt in body and
under skin. Some books are pulpy in their page turning and others are
a task, but one never doubts there is something at stake or a very
real risk, taking place in their execution.
I spoke with Zak about his new books Interiors for ? and the next
instalment Interiors for ? Mark ii, as well roaming through burnt or
torn down buildings in the UK, the legacy of underground or zine
culture, vaporwave, discussing both his autism and awakening as a
writer and an opening up of a literary world, as well as the launch
of his recent publishing venture Sweat Drenched Press.
Zak Ferguson is an Autistic, mental health-suffering much despised
entity, barely a person, just an irritable itch, on the ear- lobe, on
the fringes of your conscious-self; whose reality consists of words,
literature and the pretensions garnered from art.
If you like literature that tests your perceptions of literature,
that tests your patience, that entices, arouses, annoys, irritates,
breaks into you machinations of consuming literature, literature that
confounds, upsets, and semi-forms itself as entertainment and all
such and sundry as accepted and marketed in the full fledged market
place of book-building and publication… then Zak is probably
somebody you’d like to beat around the head with, said book, and
tell him what a waste of time it was…
If, and this is a BIG if, this is an experience you wish to partake
in, if only to get a chance to beat him publicly/privately…read his
stuff.
He exists online in some vague form. On INSTAGRAM under some name or
other…and TWITTER…under another name based around his issue with
sweating…
Three subtly
connected stories converge in this chimerical debut, each burrowing
into a turning point in a person’s life: a young woman gives a
melancholy account of her obsession with climbing Mount Everest; a
Peruvian-Brazilian vanishes into the forest after staying in a musty,
semi-abandoned inn in the haunted depths of the Brazilian
countryside; a young playwright embarks on the production of a play
about the city of Sevastopol and a Russian painter portraying Crimean
War soldiers.
Inspired by
Tolstoy’s The Sevastopol Sketches, Emilio Fraia masterfully weaves
together these stories of yearning and loss, obsession and madness,
failure and the desire to persist, in a restrained manner reminiscent
of Anton Chekhov, Roberto Bolaño, and Rachel Cusk.
A truly beautiful
book that is hard to describe without using words like precision,
subtlety and, mostly, wisdom.—Alejandro Zambra
Three stories track
the wanderings of contemporary Brazilians in Fraia’s subtle and
melancholy English-language debut, a collection inspired by Leo
Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches.
—Publishers Weekly
Like the writers I
most admire, Fraia sets for himself the hardest and most respectable
task a writer can face: unraveling the mystery without revealing the
secret. —Javier Montes
Three stories track the wanderings of contemporary Brazilians in
Fraia’s subtle and melancholy English-language debut, a collection
inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches. In “December,”
the 20-something Lena tries to avoid a life of stultifying office
work by becoming the first Brazilian woman to climb the tallest peak
on every continent, with her lover Gino, a photographer, accompanying
her on an ascent of Mount Everest. In “May,” a man goes missing
while staying at a run-down countryside inn. Before his
disappearance, he tells a meandering story of his life in Lima, Peru,
in the 1980s, a time when “the city’s air was poisonous.” And
in “August,” an aimless young woman teams up with Klaus, an older
theater director, to write a play about a 19th-century Russian
painter, though the lonely Klaus may really just be “seeking some
kind of accomplice in his sadness.” Situations and motifs recur
within and between the stories; for example, a ritual of mountaintop
sacrifice described in “May” echoes the ordeal undergone by Lena
and other climbers in “December.” These reflective, self-aware
tales eschew linear narration in favor of the characters’ somewhat
understated thematic musings. In the end, the reader is left to piece
together the sketches in this promising if somewhat underwhelming
triptych on the nature of storytelling. - Publishers Weekly
Three snapshots of lives spent striving but ultimately falling short.
On the surface,
these stories have little in common: Each is titled by a
month—December, May, August; each takes place in Brazil—the first
and last in São Paulo, the second in “the middle of nowhere.” In
the first, Lena writes to the creator of a short film playing on a
loop in an art gallery near her home. The piece seems to portray her
life, but in ways that make her question her lived experience,
especially her relationship with Gino, a photographer who accompanied
her on a fateful ascent of Everest. In the second, Adán and his
wife, Veronica, stop at a hotel that's defunct, but the owner, Nilo,
lets them stay anyway. Veronica leaves after one week; Adán seems
content on his own, then vanishes, leading Nilo to search for him. In
the third, Nadia, a young writer, quits her job to work on a play
with Klaus, a much older director who cruises for men to cast in his
work. The lone reference to the book’s titular city comes in a
gloss at the start of Nadia’s tale—“Sevastopol, a soulless
port...a generic scene, the kind with no story to tell.” It is
immaterial to what follows, almost an overt wink to the reader that
there is no hidden message in this slim volume. Similar metatextual
sentiments run throughout: “The stories ran in parallel, never
meeting”; “People always tell the same stories, even when they
try to tell new stories.” These are merely moments in time, lives
lived and—with the possible exception of Nadia’s—lives
mismanaged, leaving disappointment, regret, or, at minimum, probing
introspection. With deft precision, Fraia bares his characters just
enough to reveal only these stories—nothing is extraneous.
Somber, spare
stories that let the reader crawl inside, searching for insight, only
to be left greedily craving more. - Kirkus Reviews
Emilio Fraia’s
Sevastopol isn’t a debut but it is his first book to be translated
into English (by Zoë Perry). It’s a string of three stories that …
well, the lack of direct connection between them makes me reluctant
to invoke the word triptych, but there is a pattern at work. The book
was inspired by Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches, and each story is
titled after his (“December”, “May”, “August”); and sets
up a pair of characters in opposition, destined for disappointment.
Sevastopol by Emilio
Fraia [trans. by Zoë Perry] Lolli Editions, £12.99
In the first and
best story, a woman sets out to scale the “Seven Summits”, the
highest mountain on each of the seven continents. (I’m sure there
were only five when I was at school.) At the same time she has to
cope with the legacy of her lover Gino, the sort of filmmaker who
makes “a series of commercials for a car brand — commercials in
which cars never appear”.
It’s a smart,
knotty story, much fuller and more complex than its length should
permit, with plenty of space for the reader to think but also some
authorial sleight of hand to keep you curious. By comparison the
second story, “May”, seemed to me underweight, despite its
otherwise satisfying ambiguities in the narrative viewpoint and its
account of the two sides of hospitality.
Fraia is interested
not in the reality of things but its representation. That, after all,
is what writing is about
The final story,
“August”, was published in the New Yorker (as “Sevastopol”),
though this is not a traditional New Yorkery story, just as the
collection itself evokes less a South American literary sensibility
than a spare, elusive mitteleuropean one. This placelessness is apt
enough for a story which is — finally — actually about the
debatable land of Sevastopol, the largest city in the Crimean
peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.
It’s narrated by a
woman, Nadia, involved in a play about the siege of Sevastopol. Her
narrative is peppered with concise pen portraits (“he sports a
showy, swashbuckling moustache”) but really the message is all
about art, from Nadia’s advice to the playwright (research is like
a cherry in a cocktail, she tells him: “only there so that it can
be removed”) to the subject of the play: a war artist who never
witnessed the battles he depicted.
Fraia is interested
not in the reality of things but its representation. That, after all,
is what writing is about. “The chief thing,” we’re told via a
soldier in the Crimean war, “is not to think. If you don’t think,
it’s nothing much. It mostly all comes from thinking.” I’ll
drink — or think — to that. - John Self
This novel was
inspired by Tolstoy’s The Sevastopol Sketches, though there does
not seem to be a great deal of similarity between the two. Tolstoy’s
work was, as the title tells us, based on his visit to Sevastopol
during the Crimean War and describes, in three sketches what he saw.
This book consists of three stories, which have the same titles as
The Sevastopol Sketches – December, May and August – but there
the similarity ends. These stories are fictions. Each is set
partially in Brazil and partially in another country,- Nepal, Peru
and Russia respectively. The last one is called Sevastopol and is set
partially in Sevastopol during the Crimean War but mainly in
modern-day Brazil.
So what links these
stories, apart from all being set partially in Brazil and sharing
their titles with the Tolstoy work? On the surface, not a great deal
is the answer. However, there is one common theme. All deal with a
relationship (only one is romantic/sexual) which starts and ends
during the course of the story and in which some problematic event
occurs which hastens the end of the relationship.
Out first story is
called December and is narrated by Lena. She comes from a well-off
Brazilian family and is a keen mountain climber, so much so that she
plans to become the first Brazilian woman to climb the Seven Summits.
i.e. the highest mountain in each continent. She has trained hard,
got her sponsorship and got a team together.
We know from the
beginning of the story that she has a serious accident and we later
learn the full details. She had had an affair with Gino, an Italian
who had moved with his family to Brazil when a teenager. Gino was
also a climber but, above all, he he made videos. He makes a video of
her voice talking over shots of a mountain landscape which, she says,
gives the whole video a dreamlike feeling. - The Modrn Novel
Emilio Fraia's
Sevastopol clearly alludes to Leo Tolstoy's Sevastopol Sketches, not
just in its title but in its composition, with three pieces titled
(as in the Tolstoy) 'December', 'May', and August' -- even as
otherwise any connections are far less obvious; the stories in
Sevastopol are not scenes of war, and they are not set around the
Crimean locale; only in the final story does the place and time
Tolstoy described figure in any significant way.
Sevastopol is
very much about story-telling. The narrators of 'December' and 'May'
each recount significant experiences from their lives but in each a
separate story also figures prominently, stories within the stories:
in 'December' the narrator comes across a video that clearly is based
on her life yet in which: "Everything was inaccurate",
while in 'August' the narrator, Nina, describes a theater-project she
long worked on (featuring a painter, and set in nineteenth century
Sevastopol). So also 'May' -- written in the third person -- first
focuses on the mysterious disappearance of Adán but then repeatedly
turns to Adán's own story-telling.
In all three
pieces there are also other incidental examples of stories being
told; typically, in 'August', Nina describes being at an Alcoholics
Anonymous-type support group and listening to one woman, whose
testimony switches back and forth between her family situation and "a
story about the ocean, the waves"; the way: "The stories
ran in parallel, never meeting" is reflected in Sevastopol as
well, in both the whole and its parts.
'December' is
narrated by Lena, a woman who had been a mountain climber; her
project (as she called it) had been: "to reach the summit of the
highest mountains of each of the seven continents". When only in
her early twenties she had already had considerable success. Scaling
Everest, however, everything changed. Her story was then presented to
the public -- recorded by the photographer and documentary filmmaker
Gino, recounted in Reader's Digest and National Geographic, and also
by her:
I went out and told
my story. I gave interviews. I did more than one TED talk. I made
money. I became a successful speaker, someone who had beat the odds,
overcome adversity, and moved forward with her head held high.
When Lena
comes across Gino's video-version of her story, part of her sees it
as a betrayal: "How could someone have twisted my story so
horribly ?" Yet ultimately she's led to wonder:
(W)hat's the
difference between the story in this video of yours and the one I've
told myself for so long ? Is there even a difference, in the end ?
'May' is set
in an out-of-the-way failed countryside inn -- "an
all-but-abandoned-spot in the middle of nowhere, drowning in the
landscape, looking like it was about to get swallowed by the
surrounding wilderness". The owner, Nilo, clings on to it in its
final collapse. When a couple arrived, looking for a place to stay,
he offered them a room; the wife, Veronica, soon flees, but the man,
Adán, stays for two weeks -- before suddenly disappearing. The story
moves back and forth between the present-moment search for Adán, and
the story Adán has to tell, from his past.
In 'August' a
young woman, Nadia, describes getting involved with the work of
aging, theater-obsessed Klaus, helping him with a play-project. Set
in 1855:
It's about the life
of a painter, Bogdan Trunov, a man who reached his heyday during the
war years and then died young. He left behind many paintings, which
have only fairly recently been discovered. What's most fascinating,
Klaus said, is the way Trunov was always breathing the leaden air of
war -- he was up to his neck in it -- but the war, the war itself,
never appeared in his paintings.
The project
is an episode in her life. She quits her job to devote herself to it,
and sees it through, but Klaus -- and she -- then also move on. Even
so, the story -- in and of the play -- remain with her. As she notes,
reflecting on all this: "People always tell the same stories,
even when they try to tell new stories".
Fraia
suggests story-telling -- the stories we tell ourselves, and of
ourselves -- is both fundamental and very basic. We cling and return
to it, to try to impose some order and make some sense: as Lena put
it:
I did what people do
all the time. Tell stories, retell them, freeze them in time, try to
make sense of them. This is me, I exist, this is my story, this
happened to me
But
story-telling only gets us so far. As Adán suggests:
(P)eople have just
two or three stories in their lives. You won't learn anything from
it. No one learns anything from any story.
The three
pieces in Sevastopol are nicely presented, well-written and
atmospheric. Fraia manage to keep the common theme of story-telling
as under-current, not drowning his stories in it (even as it is
omnipresent), and the interweaving back-and-forth in each of the
tales is very effective. It makes for a solid little volume -- fine
reading. - M.A.Orthofer
