Welcome to your new favourite genre: the fucking fantastic.
In these ten stories, everything is sex: walls, wax, the past, your
future, your neighbours, hankies, candles, circuit boards, petri
dishes, scrap metal – and language itself. Conjuring experiences
for which there are no words, our amazing queer authors generate new
tongues from the heat of their communing with a wild variety of
lifeforms.
From Diriye Osman’s spiritualised Peckham to Jem Nash’s
time-travelling trans multiverse, these stories transport you to new
ways of being and feeling. In a word, it’s
CruiserShimmeringLipophilicNeckingerCircuitGirlboss.
Whether you get horny from aliens, ghosts, robots, utopia,
possession, ritual, or the completely surreal, there’s a story here
for you. But why stop at one when you can taste pleasure in each and
every one?
A dark, unflinching
haunted house novel that takes readers from the well of the literary
gothic, up through Brighton’s queer scene, and out into the heart
of modern day trans experience in the UK.
The House spreads.
Its arteries run throughout the country. Its lifeblood flows into
Westminster, into Scotland Yard, into every village and every city.
It flows into you, and into your mother. It keeps you alive. It makes
you feel safe. Those same arteries tangle you up and night and make
it hard for you to breathe. But come morning, you thank it for what
it has done for you, and you sip from its golden cup, and kiss its
perfect feet, and you know that all will be right in this godforsaken
world as long as it is there to watch over you.
Three years ago,
Alice spent one night in an abandoned house with her friends Ila and
Hannah. Since then, things have not been going well. Alice is living
a haunted existence, selling videos of herself cleaning for money,
going to parties she hates, drinking herself to sleep. She hasn’t
spoken to Ila since they went into the House. She hasn’t seen
Hannah either.
Memories of that
night torment her mind and her flesh, but when Ila asks her to return
to the House, past the KEEP OUT sign, over the sick earth where
teenagers dare each other to venture, she knows she must go.
Together Alice and
Ila must face the horrifying occurrences that happened there, must
pull themselves apart from the inside out, put their differences
aside, and try to rescue Hannah, who the House has chosen to make its
own.
Cutting, disruptive,
and darkly funny, Tell Me I’m Worthless is a vital work of trans
fiction that confronts both supernatural and real-world horrors as it
examines the devastating effects of trauma and the way fascism makes
us destroy ourselves and each other.
"Punk in every sense of the word, this is a debut unlike
anything you’ve read before. Tell Me I’m Worthless builds a
thoroughly British haunted house, and terrorises its readers inside;
Rumfitt’s horrifying talent shrieks out from every page and rings
in your ears for days." - Eliza Clark, author of Boy Parts
“A sharp and
visceral novel which bends the horror genre to its will. Tell Me I’m
Worthless holds a gruesome mirror up to the way it feels to live now.
I absolutely tore through this book” – Julia Armfield, author of
Salt Slow and Our Wives Under the Sea
‘Ghosts are
born from trauma and violence.’
I relish the rare
moments when a book can completely annihilate you. Tell Me I’m
Worthless, the debut novel by promising young writer Alison Rumfitt,
is a horror novel that not only has teeth but an intelligence and
power to tear you to pieces and put you back together in a way that
leaves you forever haunted, and glad for it. Seriously, this book is
intense and while the content warning that precedes her grisly tale
lets you know what you are in for, nothing can truly prepare you for
how unsettling this is in the way it forces you to confront the
violent and pervasive ideologies of fascism as it slimes its way
through modern society. Drawing on a long history of horror and fairy
tale literature, Rumfitt delivers a razor-sharp and very political
haunted house narrative that explores issues of trauma and the trans
experience under creeping fascism. The novel rotates between
perspectives of Alice, a trans woman, and Ila (with an intentional
choice to mirror their names), her former girlfriend that is now a
public figure for trans exclusionary radical feminists, and the voice
of the House itself, as the two women deal with the aftermath of them
having entered the house years ago with their friend Hannah. Only the
two of them walked out, both with conflicting memories of abuse from
the other that occurred during their stay, and are forever
traumatized and haunted by both figurative and literal ghosts. Tell
Me I’m Worthless is an unrelenting horror festival that boldly
pulls the reader through the hell of modern discourse and violent
ideologies to explore the real-life horrors of queer life in the UK.
‘Where were you
when we lost the culture war?’
This book is a lot,
and I’m completely blown away by it. Alison Rumfitt, a trans woman,
has delivered a harrowing narrative on the trans experience that hits
with a truly astonishing force and is a perfect example why we need
inclusivity in publishing to tell a more encompassing range of
stories. While Tell Me I’m Worthless draws on horror and fairy tale
fiction influences complete with homages to Shirley Jackson, Angela
Carter, Helen Oyeyemi, books including Jamaica Inn or Jane Eyre, as
well as allusions to pioneers of literature on gender and race such
as Audre Lorde, there is still a thrilling uniqueness to the novel
that feels it couldn’t—and maybe shouldn’t—have been created
by anyone but Rumfitt herself. The inspirations and occasional
pastiche that occur are very welcomed, and Rumfitt has a reading list
that I simply adore (it helps that with each reference I caught I
thought, “I love that book too!”). The Haunting of Hill House is
a clear inspiration and model for much of the book, and lovingly so.
Look at one of Rumfitt’s descriptions of the House:
’ No live
organism can continue to exist compassionately under conditions of
absolute fascism, even the birds in Italy under Mussolini were
observed to take part in rallies and violence. Albion, not
compassionate, not sane, stood ringed by a tangled forest, holding
inside, however messily, its overpowering ideology; it had stood so
for a hundred years but would only stand for one more before it
entered into the long process of becoming something else, at the end
of which it was hoped it would seem to all the world that it had
always been that way. Within, floors crumbled, ceilings gaped open,
vines choked the chimneys and the windows. Silence lay steadily
against the wood and stone of the house, and whatever walked there
marched on Rome.’
It is a wonderful
reimagining of the imagery and ideas expressed by Jackson and her
notable opening paragraph to Hill House:
‘ No live
organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of
absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to
dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills,
holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might
stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met
neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay
steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever
walked there, walked alone.’
It feels less like a
clever remake and more like passing the torch, continuing the
tradition of psychological horror to battle the demons of the present
with the support of those who came before. The whole book reads as
very personal to Rumfitt and of-the-moment in a way that truly
shines, with Rumfitt admitting it is build from a space of being
‘quite tuned into discourse, in a way that can be bad for my own
health,’ and, written during the pandemic lockdowns, was constantly
informed and updated to address the ever changing arguments that
flood social media with each news cycle. It is effective and the
language of the novel crackles in the tongue of modern internet
discourse, twisted and imperfect as hot takes and viral twitter
threads and soiled with the rhetorical maggots that lay their eggs
and thrive in the damp and dark of 4chan anonymity. Tell Me I’m
Worthless feels destined to become a cult classic as it truly
captures uneasy existence as violent ideologies are given space and
taken seriously in the general public while violence against trans
people is so prevalent it has been declared an epidemic Or, perhaps,
in ten years we may look back on it as outdated and not in line with
a more inclusive present. This would be preferable, and the book
argues for a future such as this.
‘The fascists
are already here…’
As stated in the
content warning, Tell Me I’m Worthless focuses on ‘trauma and
fascism.’ This book is triggering in very many ways, dealing with
sexual assault, transphobia, antisemitism, and racism among others,
and it should be kept in mind they are used for more than mere
discomfort for the horror genre and to make a very loud statement
against them. Be warned though, this book is intensely graphic and
uses a lot of language and explanation of ideas that are extremely
uncomfortable (though very effective). Nothing is very subtle here
either, with the house being very obviously a metaphor for how
fascism can infect through entry points of fear, feelings of
inadequacy, thirsts for power and more. However, there is no need for
subtleties here, with bold choices such as the house being named
Albion (a word that is used to name the island of Great Britain) and
the directness of the book gives it a rather punk flair that works
particularly well with the horror aesthetics. While Rumfitt avoids
directly naming him, one of the ghosts that haunts Alice is the
musician Morrissey—who’s political statements of late have more
or less made him the older generation’s J.K. Rowling but for
music—who appears eyeless out of her torn The Smiths poster she
keeps up to cover a frightening looking stain on her wall. The effect
is both comical and utterly terrifying to read, with Rumfitt being
astonishingly good at creating very visual scenes full of terror, and
this combination of horror and dark humor really drives the enjoyment
of this book. This book is punk as fuck, as the saying goes.
This book is set in
our present, where LGBTQ+ issues have gained visibility but also
continue to have a frightening and often violent backlash. ‘Notable
reversals have appeared in nations overtaken by right-wing populism,’
Jules Joanne Gleeson writes in an introduction to a collection of
essays on the intersections of politics and trans culture, and in her
interview for the Guardian between her and gender-studies philosopher
Judith Butler, Butler (most notably in an answer that was removed
hours after initial publication despite pushback from Gleeson) notes
the large overlap between trans exclusionary radical feminists
(TERFs) and neo-fascism, claiming an anti-trans ‘ ideology is one
of the dominant strains of fascism in our times.’ The TERF ideology
is prevalent through the novel, as Ila is an active member of an
anti-trans organization and frequent contributor of essays and
interviews on the subject. These passages may be difficult to read
and much of the book makes the reader confront the rhetoric of
anti-trans arguments. In an interview with Pink News (highly
recommended read), Rumfitt explains that the narration from Ila was
written for ‘ getting into the headspace of someone who, if they
met me on the street, would probably hate me… it’s so much a part
of modern discourse in this country that it’s kind of strange that
it’s gone so unexplored.’ As she is someone who has undoubtedly
heard these arguments far too often and made to feel unsafe because
of them, Rumfitt delivers a very disturbing exploration.
‘ Now, if three
girls enter a house and only two leave, who is to blame? And if both
girls tell a different story, but you read online that you have to
BELIEVE WOMEN, what do you? Do you decide one is a woman and one
isn't, so you can believe one them but not the other? Do you take the
side of the woman who is most like you? Or the most intersectional
one? But one is rich, and white, and trans, and the other is rich,
and Asian and a lesbian, and cis (?), and fuck, who wins here? In the
end it's so hard to choose where your sympathies settle. So, you go
online and find an `intersectionality score calculator' on the
internet…Numbers have been known to lie. Numbers have been known to
show bias, statistics often have racist undertones, for example.
So, there's just
two girls leaving a house and maybe you don't have to take a side,
maybe you can empathize with them both and hope they get the therapy
and help they need and can learn to forgive one another. No. You
can't do that.'
What makes Tell Me
I’m Worthless so effective is how well it captures the nuance of
modern discourse that is often swept aside out of inconvenience to
get the best hot take. The nature of social media also positions
people against each other, where the best spicy quip is often more
valued than discourse. We exist in a world where access to
information and theory is right at our fingertips, but there is still
the difficulty in navigating and rationalizing it all. Activist Emma
Dabiri discusses the difference between information and knowledge in
this regard, and how the latter requires much more experience and
cerebral undertakings to effectively utilize. Which is also Rumfitt’s
point in presenting some of the more toxic ideologies and then
framing them in complex and intricate scenarios almost as a test to
see if you will succumb to the voice of the House as so many others
do. The book borrows language and imagery from fascist political
figures like Pinochet and Mussolini, or drawing from fear-mongering
speeches like the ”rivers of blood” speech by Enoch Powell to
demonstrate how persuasive they can be, particularly under extreme
circumstances or while bathed in fear. While the growing fascism
examined in the book is particularly framed as it occurs in the UK,
the darkness of it is universal to anyone who has encountered
far-right authoritarians in their many forms.
‘You, too, are
implicated in its presence. Don’t forget that. You, me. Those you
love.’
The House itself is
written as a root of these ideas, spreading them throughout the land
as well as claiming victims for itself in a way that feels like a
more subtle version of the monster that infects the citizens of New
York City with racism in The City We Became by the wonderful N.K.
Jemisin. The House reminds us of our complicity in the society we
exist within and that our systems and structures can be rotted at the
core, creating a systemic violence or oppression that thrives on our
denial of them. The effect here is that while people might not be
knowingly fascist, it shows how they become willing to accept fascist
rhetoric and arguments into their minds, which then festers and grows
within them like vines slowly strangling out their empathy and
humanity.
’The House
spreads. Its arteries run throughout the country. Its lifeblood flows
into Westminster, into Scotland Yard, into every village and every
city. It flows into you, and into your mother. It keeps you alive. It
makes you feel safe.’
Presenting this
topic through the genre of horror is brilliant, keeping fear and
safety a central topic in the novel. ‘For someone to feel safe,
another has to be safe,’ the House preaches, ‘for someone, the
majority, to prosper, another has to… well. I think you
understand…’ The book places the characters in that unsettled,
deflated feeling of being post-college and wallowing while waiting to
land somewhere, making them all the more susceptible in their unease,
and we watch as they are losing a battle of becoming a product of
their traumas rather than one they wish to be. Only by returning to
the House and confronting them can they ever move forward in life. In
the present, Hannah is absent, the friend who ‘always ended being
the odd one out, the third wheel,’ which made her the perfect
victim for the House where she may or may not be either trapped
inside or have fallen victim to the horrors she endured.
‘We were young and
idealistic,’ they think of when they braved the House the first
time, ‘ we wanted to make some political point of the whole thing.’
The political is always present in this book, but beyond topics of
gender Tell Me I’m Worthless also tackles social class head on.
Immigration, Brexit, crime, and more are all public conversation, one
political ideologues capitalize on for power and profit, and the
House is a well-constructed metaphor of these. ‘The most famous
haunted places in the world tend to be the big houses and castles,’
Rumfitt writes, ‘because rich people lived in them and the
collective blood on their hands, the collective violence that they
caused on everyone else in the world, manifests into ghosts.’
Albion, the House and the nation, are examined as the product of
years and years of bloodshed, colonialism, racial oppression,
patriarchy and more amalgamating into a dark force that transcends
the physical world. The reaches of the House occur in every corner of
society, even property ownership that leads to pushing out the
unhoused and anyone deemed an Other. An effective image occurs early
in the book of an abandoned church with ‘a sign outside reading
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. God’s body, decaying, has now been
cut off from society; do not touch him, for he is owned by a variety
of contractors, and they have legal power over the likes of you.’
Tell Me I’m
Worthless is an unflinching and brutally direct novel that
combines horror with political and social discourse to deliver a
fantastically unsettling story. Alison Rumfitt has taken the reigns
from her predecessors and driven the genre of horror and fairy tales
deep into the heart of our modern condition, constructing amazing
imagery that thrills as much as it chills. Rumfitt has crafted a
stunning debut here. This is certainly not for everyone, and I will
caution that this book can be quite triggering, but if you dare to
enter this book will have its ghosts following you forevermore.
‘Sometimes, at
the end of everything, the only option you have is to make it worse.’
- s. penkevich
Okay, wow. If you read Tell Me I’m Worthless, prepare to be
haunted: for days after finishing it I was infected with its story,
sick with it, couldn’t stop thinking about it. There are so many
moments, observations and images from this book that have crawled
inside and made themselves at home under my skin.
Three years ago, three girls – Alice, Ila and Hannah – entered
the House, a corrupted, haunted place. Hannah never came out, and in
the aftermath, Alice and Ila’s relationship is radically
transformed. Once best friends and lovers, they now barely speak and
have somehow come to occupy opposing ideological standpoints. A bit
later, we find out that each of them believe the other to be guilty
of violent and degrading assault, though it seems they can’t both
be right. The only way out of it all is for Alice and Ila to return
the House, and however horrifying that idea is, they are inexorably
drawn back.
Sometimes, at
the end of everything, the only option you have is to make it worse.
Tell Me I’m Worthless is something entirely new. It’s a haunted
house story unlike any other, and it’s also about fascism and
trauma and guilt and gender and what it’s like to try and perform
an acceptable impression of a functioning human being after bad shit
has happened to you. It’s electrifying. It’s disgusting. It’s
hot. It actually made me fucking THINK. It’s the best book about
what it is to be a woman (specifically in modern Britain) that I’ve
read in years, possibly ever. It’s the most radical horror novel of
the year and probably the decade.
People who spend a lot of time talking about books, including me, are
probably guilty of saying something is ~like nothing else I’ve ever
read~ far too often, but that truly applies here. The only thing I
can think of that I’d perhaps stand it next to is Gary Budden’s
London Incognita, which has a similar punk spirit flowing through its
veins, but the fact that Tell Me I’m Worthless is written
specifically from a queer/trans/female perspective makes it feel that
much more radical.
I might write more when I reread it – which I definitely will.
Honestly, I’ve struggled to find the language to describe how good
it is and how it made me feel; it’s an experience. Just know that
if you are at all interested in horror, this book is essential
reading. - Blair
Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt is, in many ways, a
straightforward horror novel: on the surface, it’s a gruesome
haunted house story about three friends whose lives are torn apart by
a mysterious presence.
But Tell Me I’m Worthless is so much more than that. Rumfitt’s
deeply unsettling story also explores the wave of transphobia that
has been engulfing Britain for years, delving into the rise of
fascism, Britain’s terrifying lurch to the right and the scourge of
racism.
At the centre of
the novel is the complicated relationship between Alice, a young
trans woman, and Ila, a “gender critical” feminist who has become
embroiled within the UK’s anti-trans movement.
“I’m interested in radicalisation and the effects of right wing
politics, so I think it made sense that something as obviously
conservative as a haunted house – a house that is maintaining the
past so much that it is literally breaking the foundations of life
and death – it made sense to me that that could be an effective
framework for exploring right-wing politics,” Rumfitt says.
PinkNews: Why is
the horror genre a suitable place to tackle issues like fascism and
transphobia?
Alison Rumfitt: The really basic answer is: these things are
horrible. It just makes sense to me – I don’t have to push things
too much further to make them into actual, all-out horror. I find it
scary so I wanted to write a novel where those things were scary to
the general reader.
This is a novel, certainly first and foremost, I was writing for
trans audiences. But I would hope that it’s also scary and
interesting and enlightening to people who aren’t trans. That’s
just the way I work – I try to prioritise our audience. There are
particular interests in specific corners of horror within trans
communities – we have particular interest in body horror. This is a
book where things happen to people’s bodies that they can’t
control that are quite upsetting.
I’ve always read into a lot of horrific things that I like, even if
they don’t have subtext. I’ve always read into The Shining film
and thought, that’s about racism, or I can look at The Exorcist and
think, this is about some TERF parents whose child is showing signs
of gender dysphoria and they’re freaking out and calling the
Catholic police or whatever. So I was just trying to do that and make
that stuff textual rather than me projecting subtext onto it.
The haunted house
in Tell Me I’m Worthless is almost like a character of its own.
What references did you look to in creating the house?
I’m a writer who writes a lot in references and intertextuality but
hopefully that still works if you don’t know the references. Hill
House is sort of, I think, the most perfect haunted house in
literature. It’s so vivid and the characters in that novel are so
vivid as well, so that was a big reference point. There’s a book
called White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi – that has wonderful
sections written from the perspective of this house. I had that in
mind but I also wanted to make sure I wasn’t just doing what Helen
did because I think she writes in a really unique way.
There are parts from the perspective of the house, but they’re not
first person narration. I’m not sure I would have liked to write it
that way because of what the house represents. I wanted to keep a
distance. There are obviously references to speeches by fascists,
there’s references to Oswald Mosley (the former leader of the
British Union of Fascists), and the “rivers of blood” speech by
Enoch Powell. So it does speak in those ways, but if there were
sections just from its point of view that would have been too much.
The house is
called Albion, which is an old name for Britain. What was the meaning
behind that?
This was in my head because one of the last big things I did before
lockdown was I went to a William Blake exhibition in London, and
Albion is such a recurring character and concept within William
Blake’s writing. I love William Blake, he’s a really interesting
artist and writer to use to think about England and the changing
perspectives of what England is. I think by using the name I was
trying to imply a lot of history, going as far back as it’s
possible to go into the roots of the country. The real horror is that
the rot goes all the way down to the roots.
That really hit
me reading it, the idea that this rot in Britain is by no means
something new.
Because of the nature of how messed up the UK is, things would just
be constantly developing as I was writing it, so I’d finish a draft
and then suddenly there were the horrible right-wing arguments about
Black Lives Matter protesters trying to censor statues, and then
there were prosecutions against people involved in that. So when I
did another draft I had to have that in mind, and once I finished
that, more stuff happened – it kept happening! So it developed
naturally because every time I would look online there would be
something else.
The novel deals
brilliantly with the idea of Britain today being a bit of a cesspit –
how did you weave themes transphobia through?
Originally I wasn’t going to write so explicitly about gender
criticals because I’d just put out this long poem about gender
criticals and gender essentialism, and honestly, I wasn’t sure if
me writing about it was doing any good. And then suddenly I realised
that one of the primary characters of the novel needed to be – for
want of a phrase that wouldn’t get me attacked – a TERF.
It was interesting to write a TERF character because I haven’t
really read any books that have TERF characters, especially not books
by trans people. And it’s so much a part of modern discourse in
this country that it’s kind of strange that it’s gone so
unexplored.
Ila is such an interesting, flawed character – the reader almost
roots for her at times. What was it like for you exploring her
psyche?
The thing I enjoyed was getting into the headspace of someone who, if
they met me on the street, would probably hate me. I was trying to
build a psyche of someone like that and work out if there was a way
that I could still empathise with them. It’s kind of telling that
Ila doesn’t ever quite feel like she is with the gender critical
movement all the way. I don’t know if I could have written an
unrepentant TERF with no point of origin of their bigotry. It was an
experiment but it was an experiment I really relished.
The book also
comes with a content warning, which was really refreshing. What was
the reasoning behind putting that in there?
My general opinion is that authors should certainly consider
including content warnings if they’re dealing with subjects that
might be upsetting. But I really don’t want them to be mandated in
any way – it should be up to the author. It’s a good idea if the
author writes it out if they want it, rather than it coming from the
publishing house.
I put it there honestly as much for me as for the reader. Work that
deals with complicated and triggering subjects by marginalised
creators is often the work that gets criticised more – I don’t
know why that is. But I wanted to avoid off the bat accusations of
writing trauma porn. I see a lot of queer writers get accusations of
that thrown at them. It might still happen, but this was a way I
could see to avoid that.
The book doesn’t
have a very optimistic outlook for the future of Britain. Where do
you think the country is headed?
My next novel is about that, so I can’t say too much. But I imagine
it’s sort of clear. I don’t have an optimistic outlook. I don’t
mean to be a doomer or anything like that, but the Overton window
[the window of current political possibilities] doesn’t at all
include left-wing ideas. I think it’s shifting even more and it’s
narrowing even more. A lot of people who are in positions of power
who could maybe do something about that are not doing it for whatever
reason – maybe they see financial gain from it, maybe they see
social gain from it, or maybe they just don’t really care about the
people affected.
I don’t have a great outlook but the sliver of hope, if there is
one, is seeing the renewed vigour around protest. We haven’t quite
gotten to the point where it lasts for an extended period of time,
but there certainly is still passion there.
Tell Me I’m
Worthless also explores issues around social media, particularly with
Twitter. Does it echo your own views of social media?
People have lots of different experiences of the internet. My
experience is very much informed by being a trans woman online, a
trans woman on Twitter especially. I don’t have a great view of
Twitter – I go in for it, too. It’s a very easy place to end up
in these death spirals of utterly pointless arguments.
Hopefully the tweets that are in the novel feel like real tweets and
you can imagine coming across them on your timeline. There’s a bit
where someone calls out a character for using the ’T’ slur on
them, but they write out the word or they put an asterisks in it, and
someone else tries to call them out for using that word as well, and
it was just a really fun Russian doll of discourse.
Twitter isn’t the only website in the book – there are also
sequences talking about 4Chan and Tumblr and Mumsnet. The Mumsnet
stuff was really fun to write. Obviously it’s horrible, but there’s
something about the twee, middle-class white woman phrasing they use
on there that’s just hilariously slimy. Different websites have
different languages so it’s fun to try and reproduce those
languages. - PATRICK KELLEHER
Alice, the protagonist of Alison Rumfitt’s debut novel Tell Me I’m
Worthless, is haunted by a curious phantom. Every night, the
disgraced frontman of a 1980s indie band (unnamed but unmistakable)
crawls out from the poster which confines him and stands over Alice’s
bed, his eyes blacked out with biro and radiating malevolent intent.
If the idea of someone being haunted by an evil Morrissey poster
sounds funny, that’s because it’s intended to be – but as the
novel progresses, it becomes genuinely creepy, too.
It’s a satire that’s actually funny and a horror novel that’s
actually scary. To blend genre without one aspect diminishing the
other is a difficult feat to pull off, and made more impressive by
the fact that, after beginning her career as a poet, this is
Rumfitt’s debut novel.
Tell Me I’m Worthless concerns the wreckage of a friendship between
two characters – Alice and Ila – both of whom are hateful at
times but ultimately redeemable. Alice is a trans woman who scrapes a
living through online sex work and drifts through Brighton’s house
party scene. As a first-person narrator, she is bitter and acerbic,
prone to erudite digressions on the nature of fascism and the
conventions of the ghost story genre. Ila, meanwhile, has become a
committed ‘gender critical’ activist: she attends meetings,
appears on Radio 4 to discuss the importance of single-sex spaces,
and boasts a number of anti-trans celebrities as followers on
Twitter. The sections of the book which concern Ila’s journey
through the world of anti-trans activism make for a lacerating,
sharply-observed satire.
But this is, above all, a horror novel, and a haunted house looms
large. Three years before the story begins, Alice and Illa (along
with their friend Hannah, now missing) spent an evening in a decrepit
mansion on the outskirts of the city, where they experienced a
brutally violent incident. The house functions as a metaphor for a
particularly English form of fascism, and exerts a Mephistophelian
influence on the characters; it whispers in their ears, appealing to
their worst impulses and most reactionary anxieties, doing everything
in its power to lure them to return. When it eventually succeeds, the
novel reaches an explosive climax.
There have been some excellent non-fiction books published about the
trans experience recently: for instance, The Transgender Issue by
Shon Faye and Transgender Marxism, edited by Jules Joanne Gleeson and
Elle O’Rourke. Tell Me I’m Worthless refracts similar themes, but
through the lens of horror and pitch-black comedy. It’s an at times
transgressive, hallucinatory, and frenetic novel, but one which is
nonetheless lucid in its treatment of its themes: the resurgent
threat of fascism, the absurdities inherent to contemporary
transphobia, and the way that trauma, rather than being a learning
opportunity, can make people twisted and cruel. I caught up with
Rumfitt to find out more about the novel.
Why did you
decide to have Morrissey as one of the spectral presences in the
book?
It honestly just started as a joke. I had a friend a couple years ago
who had a Smiths poster on the wall of his room, and it always
weirded me out that it was there, but I never really brought it up.
When it came to writing the book, I was trying to think of something
that could tell you a lot about the blind spots in someone’s
politics, and ways to signal, fairly early on, that Alice isn’t
someone that the audience should be trusting. It’s less that she’s
clueless about what the poster says about her and more that she
doesn’t care, and hopefully, that signals to the reader that while
they might sympathise with this person, they shouldn’t go with her
all the way.
There’s a
tendency today for people to interpret characters in novels as direct
stand-ins for the author (take the transphobic backlash to
Detransition, Baby, for example, where lines of dialogue from Reese,
the fictional character, were frequently attributed to Torrey Peters,
the author). Are you concerned about being misinterpreted in that
way?
There are bits in the novel where, if you took them out of context,
would make me look bad. There’s one section where that is a very
real danger. But I think that the formatting hopefully means that it
can’t be taken out of context. I would hope that it’s pretty
clear, if you read the novel, that my perspective is that Alice is
wrong and has some abhorrent views.
It seemed to me
that the book is partly about why fascism is seductive to some
people. If fascism does have an appeal, what do you think the nature
of that appeal is?
There’s one example I actually included in the book: I was at some
university event with a group of left-people and there was a
Trotskyist guy there arguing that the 2011 London riots were innately
bad. It made me angry because it was such an annoying view for a
left-wing person to have, and such a specifically white view – not
understanding why that unrest was happening at all and purely
foregrounding community order over understandable retaliation.
I think that’s a good example of how someone who would never think
of themselves as right-wing could end up falling into right-wing
viewpoints. You have to be vigilant of your own politics and where
they’re being pulled from and what are the logical conclusions of
your own ideology. I think white people, in particular, have a real
potential for falling into right-wing thought without even thinking
about it. - James Greig read more here: https://www.huckmag.com/art-and-culture/alison-rumfitt-on-her-darkly-comic-tale-about-transphobia/
Tuesday or September
or The End by Hannah Black is an incisive and playful work of
speculative fiction that explores the rupture year of 2020, when
aliens finally invaded.
Tuesday or September
or the End puts calendar time back into messianic time, and also the
reverse. An account of the last two disorienting years in history, in
our lives, this intimate and funny and abstract fiction uses fable,
and unreality, to flood a reader with the real, to remind her what is
at stake. — Rachel Kushner
Allegory and satire,
alert and conscious, Hannah Black’s Tuesday or September or the
End, is an existential novel. Narrative innocence is not the engine
of this work; knowledge of life in the modern is. Bird and Dog,
Black’s wide awake and dreaming characters, are electric and wise.
This novel is fluent in our dystopia and utopia. — Dionne Brand
An acid calendar of
planetary rot and revolt, Hannah Black’s new novel listens for that
alien language of the future: total social transformation. Staging
debates on communism and social democracy, or unraveling the double
helix of race and capitalism, Black’s calendar is one that breathes
and breaks, figuring the temporal hiccups of revolution. Suddenly
it’s no longer endless winter and our narrator Bird, much like
chirping in early spring, brings us to witness the reanimation of the
world. — Greg Nissan
In Tuesday or
September or the End, we see ourselves battered by time, which isn’t
real, and chance, which is. But just as “the world resists its
reduction to winter,” Hannah Black’s writing, in its passionate
grasp of possibility, resists spiritual suicide. The book is deeply
felt because the pain of attachment is close to its center and funny
because life is currently absurd. But what I love most about it,
reading its compact brilliant sentences in this sunless covid
afternoon, is the way it makes an argument for clarity, which really
can—partially, briefly, and when it matters most—sometimes be
achieved. — Benjamin Krusling
Hannah Black is an
artist and writer at work in New York City. Black’s latest book,
Tuesday or September or the End (Capricious), is a novella written in
the aftermath of the early months of the pandemic and the uprisings
of summer 2020. If we experience daily life as “simulation or
psychosis,” Black shows us throughout this book that it is
“probably something much more drab, like the slow death of a form
of society.” Black offers a chronicle centered on two characters,
Bird and Dog, as they contend with rapidly changing political
possibility and foreclosure during the pandemic while the run of
Moley Salamanders (i.e., Bernie Sanders) concludes and aliens—who
are real—come to earth. The book narrates what it is to let these
beginnings and endings “scroll through you” and to participate in
their coming about, both in the sense of the normal rhythms of
capital and of riots.
The recent past was
and is “a time of signs and wonders” in the most horrific sense,
but Black tethers it to mundane continuity, an account of life in
late-stage capital as time breaks down and goes “queasy and wrong”
and all dates are “in retrospect, a monument.” Via a propulsive
consideration of how the riots of 2020 might have turned
revolutionary, Black offers a meditation on collective life. This
crucial novella is about how we might know who we are when our normal
referents are muted, deleted, upended.—Hannah Zeavin
Hannah Zeavin
Congratulations on
this latest book. In Tuesday or September or the End, you give us a
chronicle that shows the impossibility of chronicling “The Event”
as separate from a four- or four hundred- or thousand-year history.
Hannah Black
I had a fantasy that
I could write a book in a couple of months. I was on a residency on
Fire Island and decided to spend the time writing a book really fast,
the novel of 2020. I kept saying, “It’s a fictionalized version
of the first six months of 2020,” as if you can fictionalize time
itself. The temporality of writing was supposed to relate to the
temporality of the book. Of course, that didn’t happen; in the end
it took over a year to write it. The form of the novel itself
disciplined me.
Uprisings are the
only time you ever learn anything new. Then you have months, or
years, or decades of aftermath during which you have to keep drawing
on the moment of rupture. Intellectual, social, and cultural leaps
forward happen at these moments of maximum collectivity; and then
we’re just putting together the pieces, or singing praise songs, or
wondering what exactly went down for a while after. I really wanted
to be part of the attempt to try and understand what happened in
2020. The book is a contribution to that general effort.
HZ
Yet, for a few
reasons, it is not only a faithful chronicle of that time. First
there are aliens; and in the world of the book, aliens seem to be
deeply real. But so much like the real virus, or the uprisings, the
aliens are an object of watching and witnessing at a distance.
HB
It came to my
attention at some point while I was working on the book that many
people didn’t want to watch or read works of fiction that in any
way referenced the pandemic. People felt strongly that it was best
that contemporary storytelling unfolded in a vague, parallel present
where there were no masks, no social restrictions. So the aliens were
partly a technique to try and inject some totally different therefore
protective substance into a painful retelling.
Everyone knows what
an alien invasion narrative is, in the same way that everyone knows
what a love story is. They are sort of similar: you are new to each
other and have something huge to learn. The aliens were also a pun on
alienation. In the book they are alienation’s opposite; they “erode
the social base of fascism” and are “even further away from
politics than love.”
When I first read
from the book in public, at a Segue reading that Kay Gabriel
organized, I was so relieved by the alien parts. Whenever I started
to worry that I was being pointlessly hurtful to my audience, there
were the aliens. And that’s what they do in the book too: they
guarantee the possibility of something other than pain. But I’m
still not sure if anyone actually wants to read a book about the
first six months of 2020.
Dark Pool Party is a
wide-ranging collection of artist Hannah Black’s essays, personal
texts, and video/performance scripts. Black’s work reassembles
autobiographical fragments to think about the relationship between
bodies, labor, and affect. Drawing on feminist, communist, and black
radical theory she explores sex, ambivalence, departures, history,
and violence with characteristic wit and precision.
I am eating at a
vegetarian restaurant called Vegetarian Restaurant. The food is not
good, but my hands are dirty, and I am alive, reading Dark Pool Party
by Hannah Black at a muted red picnic table yet unwarmed by early
sun. “O girl or boy,” she writes, “life force in you, if you
think you can take something from me I am flattered, and you can have
it.”
Dark Pool Party
features seven texts that blur the lines of fiction, nonfiction,
cultural criticism, critique, and poetry. Many of the pieces enact a
reedy line of space between the author and the character/s,
noticeable immediately in “Celebrity Death Match,” about an
unloving/unloved person searching for connection. The distinguisher
is that the quote unquote real names of characters (friends, lovers)
have been replaced with celebrity names like Rihanna, Justin Bieber,
and Usher.
We know from context
clues that the characters do not signify actual celebrities but
distance the author from autobiography, a productive and constant
manifestation in Dark Pool Party. Sitting there in that mostly sunny
day, propelled by the force of Black’s work, I was splayed by the
isolation and separation, from both the speaker and the speaker from
the characters, this speaker who enacts the wall between her and the
characters by denying the reader a chance to completely penetrate
that Otherness through narrative:
I tried to be in
love with Usher and so far it didn’t work out and now I am trying
maybe to fall in love with Rihanna but I already know it won’t work
out. I composed several sentences of an email to Usher in my head: We
are not good for each other. I wanted to fall in love with you. You
activate my tenderness. I want to look after you. I was moved by your
strange combination of strength and weakness until I saw you were
only a man.
I think of a book
called Heroines by Kate Zambreno, a text I adore, and suddenly also
of its total whiteness and its mostly-straightness. Heroines: a
writer’s guide on how to be part woman (part girl) with an affinity
for melancholy, living in the shadow-stain of man. Zambreno and Black
share the anxiety that a woman writing narrative means readers assume
it’s pure experience, unadorned with craft or artistic license.
Zambreno explores ripping what really happened from the writing, and
she thinks of that strategy as a gendered, male act. She believes
what really happened is the feminine of the poem, a drama that men
like Eliot and Pound wanted to stifle, delete. The male act: to posit
that what really happened is bad writing.
Clipped of the
superfluous what really happened, an image or concept resonates. It’s
stark. It enacts. The question, confusion: is the hand that deletes
what’s true from the text invisible, male? In conversation with
Heroines, Dark Pool Party recognizes race, not just gender, as a
factor in the author-genre anxiety: “God is not an autobiography,
but nor is race or gender, though they threaten at all times to
become the full extent of one,” Black writes. Riffing off the
notion that a marginalized identity is only capable of
autobiographical narrative, Black’s answer to Zambreno’s
supposition is that it’s not the writer or the writing that’s the
problem, but rather how the text is read.
In Dark Pool Party’s
“Atlantis,” we understand that Atlantis is a cover for a specific
place or generalized experience based on the “absolute truth” of
the author’s experience. Black gives us that sticky, delicious
window into “her life,” but also throws it in our face. She uses
the tool of the canon to exploit the tool of the canon and to
critique it, legitimizing a large body of work by people who struggle
to write work that looks in some way like their life. In this way,
Black’s book teaches us how to read narrative written with an
intersectional lens, and her aesthetic of dealing with the slippery
space between truth and fabrication is one of the pleasures of this
book.
The narrator,
speaker, consumable woman, moves through the book, acting and
repulsed by her own actions: “We ate trash for breakfast, squeezing
ketchup sachets onto strips of American bacon, the perfectly round
egg, both of which signified: the unimaginable suffering of animals.”
Dark Pool Party conflates woman and meat, men and farm animals,
hamburger meat and the suffering of marginalized bodies. Humans eat
for survival but also to fill the vacuous hole of past experience
that manifests in the physical as shudder. Humans are imperfect
animals, rooting around in modernity, looking sometimes to be
ethical, intelligent, or mindful, in a time and place where no
perfect action, art, or critique exists. “Perhaps critique is over
and this is unexpectedly the era of joy, but I am still luxuriating
in the interesting feeling of shame,” Black writes. Dark Pool Party
is part critique, part shame, all sentence richness, a poetry of
force, a book thick with ideas and essential cringes of yore. - Ally
Harris
Hannah Black and Juliana Huxtable, Life, Walther König, 2017
The book presents Black's ideas in collaboration with artist and
musician Huxtable and is designed by artist and DJ Soraya Lutangu
(aka Bonaventure). The science-fiction narrative is described as
a "scenario of impending apocalypse [about] two risk analysts
returning from retirement to attempt to avert the end of the world" and the title refers to a Wikipedia entry on Life/Leben. Black's
exhibition revolves around the question of 'collective being', 'life' as
an abstraction, and the uses of ancestry and lineage.
Hannah Black cowrote this science-fiction narrative with New
York-based artist/musician Juliana Huxtable; in its pages each author
plays the character of a risk analyst ‘returning from the dead’,
somehow to accompany or prevent the apocalypse. ‘I have retired
from risk, and now nothing can happen to me. I’m a single-celled
organism carved out of the white bone of the world. Mind is a
miracle,’ writes Huxtable. ‘You don’t have to tell me what you
were by virtue of still being,’ answers Black.
THE WORTHWHILE FLUX
collects Frost's dynamic performance pieces, including the texts from
some of his beautifully designed chapbooks self-published over the
last decade. "Tonight you'll have a filthy dream" was a
collection of stories first performed in Montreal from 1994 to 1999,
accompanied by the images used in performance. It included the
surreal pedagogy of "5 minutes with the Communist Manifesto"
(the digitally remastered version) and "5 minutes with/without
the ground," a story about airplanes and war that proved to be
creepily prescient in September 2001. "I feel perfectly fine"
was the third volume in the Backwards Versions trilogy of chapbooks.
THE WORTHWHILE FLUX collects the best of the author's chapbooks along
with newer performance pieces and some never-before-seen writing.
And, although the stories and photographs will now be forever fixed
on the page, the experience is still definitely worthwhile. Corey
Frost has received wide acclaim for his self-published chapbooks and
his multi-media performances that reverberate with surrealist wit and
proletarian pop. He has travelled extensively, including two tours of
duty on the unique Perpetual Motion Roadshow in Canada and the US,
and performance tours of Europe and Australia. Currently he is
pursuing a PhD and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Corey Frost, a veteran of Montreal’s spoken word scene, spent a
decade writing, performing, and collecting the bits and pieces that
make up The Worthwhile Flux, his second book. The book encompasses
prose, photos, and poetry, but most of its 15 pieces lie halfway
between story and poem, and all resist definition.
These are stories
for the altered attention spans of the modern world: experimental
meditations on everything from the way North Americans vacillate
between happiness and unhappiness in “A Few Advanced Yo-Yo Tricks”
to underused letters of the alphabet in “A Farewell to Q.” The
book is also highly visually oriented, with graphics on almost every
page.
Dreamy and erudite,
silly and profound, The Worthwhile Flux is an exercise in
contradictions that lingers in the memory. Frost cites Louis
Althusser and Karl Marx as influences alongside Xena, Warrior
Princess. Occasionally, the postmodern juxtapositions can leave the
reader wondering whether Frost is merely serving up a selection of
literary gimmicks, but he consistently pulls the most delicate
nuances of meaning out of the familiar or mundane. Such show-stopping
lines as “Every quotation must be taken out of context, or it’s
not a quotation” make every moment of ambiguity worth savouring.
In “Summer Plum
(Winter Version),” an exploration of the implications of eating a
plum months past the growing season, he asks, “Am I living in some
fantastical 21st-century golden age, when I can just buy a plum that
is nearly as big as my fist and as purple as heck?” The answer that
naturally follows is, “Yes, I am.” Though some readers may lose
patience with The Worthwhile Flux’s non-linear ways, the more
adventurous are sure to dig it. - Cheryl Taylor
This is in no way a
review of Corey Frost’s second book of fiction, The Worthwhile
Flux. I was sitting in my local pub last night, a Sunday, reading his
remarkable book of stories. I was in the mood for a drink, and in the
mood for some reading, so grabbed it off my shelf. You have to admire
any book of stories that includes the line, “Does the name Pavlov
ring a bell?” Or what about the line, “I broke my leg in two
places so the doctor told me to stop going to those places.” There
are parts of this book that make me laugh out loud, and other parts
that make me wish there was more, so I could continue reading. Here
is a section from the story “Summer Plum (Winter Version)” that
begins:
I was about seven
years old, and it was summer. Our rabbits had miraculously survived
another winter. I gave them some carrots to munch on, and then I went
back inside. My mother was making squares for fellowship group at the
church. On the table there was an open bag of shredded coconut, which
I had never seen before. What’s this? I asked. It’s coconut, she
said. Can I have some? Yes, she said, but it won’t make you fly.
Apparently when she was a kid her older sister had convinced her that
if you ate enough coconut you would be able to fly, but it hadn’t
worked. She had eaten so much she got sick, and then she got her head
stuck in a milkcan. Her skepticism didn’t deter me from trying,
though, so I took the bag out on the front steps and started eating
it. I can’t believe how lucky I am, I thought to myself. Soon I’ll
be flying.
Corey Frost used to
live in Montreal but then he moved to New York, but he claims he goes
back and forth. For a while, he was touring, but you probably didn’t
see him. Do you remember when he used to be a creative writing
student at Concordia University? Do you remember when he and Colin
Christie used to publish items as Ga Press? Do you remember when he
and Anne Stone used to take turns doing the layout for Matrix?
Right after they
called last call and gave me another drink, being the only one left
in the pub, they shut everything down. They turned lights off, and
locked the doors. I was still reading the book. I don’t know why
they even gave me the other drink. I couldn’t stop reading. I don’t
know why I had to pay for that other drink, if I couldn’t sit there
and enjoy it, reading Frost’s remarkable stories. The last time I
saw Corey Frost he bought me the drink he owed me from the time
before, when he forgot to pay for that other one. Is there a
connection? - Rob McLennan
My Own Devices is a
concept book: a series of stories in which the main character, Corey
Frost, is left to his own devices in Japan, St. Petersburg, Sumatra,
Macau, Montreal, and other locations. His devices include various
telephones, cameras, tiny Japanese cars and mini-disc recorders, as
well as a backpack full of witty, occasionally satirical literary
gimmicks. It's a fun, irreverent take on the first-collection cliché,
full of post-colonial unpredictability and tinged with
début-de-siècle angst.
"If this book
disappoints, it's 'cause you're just not trying hard enough." --
Broken Pencil
"Irony,
metanarrative, and levels upon levels of meaning. The feeling I get
is oddly life-affirming." -- McGill Daily
Rats survive and
adapt; they run together in the lower parts where nobody wants to go,
eat what nobody else wants to eat. Like the poor and lower classes,
like Edison and the other characters in the book. Since that's the
way things are, I say rats are nice.
"Your first
book, "Wigger, "was about co-opting someone else's culture,
but the characters in "Ratz" seem more directed toward
their own. "
"Ratz"
starts the way "Wigger" did. But this time Edison is
deciding on stuff about his life with the "Dumbdumz." He
realizes you can be a part of something without it stealing parts of
yourself to be there. So it's about kids deciding to make this
decision in life. They want to make that adult decision, right or
wrong, and deal with the consequences.
"Tell us about
the world your characters inhabit. "
We are in another
failed "Reconstruction Period." There was the Civil War and
the exploitation and lost hope of civility and equality. Then we had
the overhyped civil rights movement followed by the big '80s Pomo
divisive cultural revolution. The people in "Ratz" are the
bastard children of all this. The have-nots are the only ones who've
never gotten a voice, and everyone keeps saying they're speaking for
them. What else could we get from the kids who grew up during this
period, but them running a power move on things?
"Some of them
are pretty evil in a lot of ways. "
I do think there is
evil out there. They say that Victoria is the occult capital of North
America, that it's the center of the pentagram and that there are
places here which are right on the crossroads. You can call up evil
or goodness in the middle of a crossroads. I think people have called
up some wickedness. It's the underlying theme in the novel. The
"Dumbdumz" reflect that. How distorted and twisted they
have become. Edison knows that we don't have a "Buffy" to
slay baddies nor do we have "Hellboy" or a John
Constantine. Todd McFarlane is from around here. He created Spawn to
fight that stuff but really it's up to an in
In Vancouver’s
street punk culture, West Coast writer and performer Lawrence
Braithwaite has found both the subject and the esthetic with which to
further exploit the stylistic territory he began exploring in his
1994 novella Wigger. Ratz Are Nice speaks with the unmistakable
rhythms of reggae, ska, and punk; the backslashes and other
typographical symbols that Braithwaite used in Wigger to disrupt the
text here become visual signs for the slash of hardcore guitars, the
tumbling loop of reggae bass, the pumping of fists in the air. Ratz
is rhythmic rather than lyrical, but undeniably musical – call it
performance fiction, sound fiction – and difficult to read sitting
down. Its closest literary relative is not the conventional novel,
but the dub poem.
The book’s plot is
negligible; what matters here are the repeated patterns of language
and behaviour. They are not, it must be said, particularly lovely
patterns. White supremacists, gang-rapists, drug dealers, and junkies
– Braithwaite’s characters aren’t exactly endearing, or even
really interesting in their own right. What makes them interesting –
riveting, in fact – is the voice that describes them. It is often
incoherent, occasionally tender, and frequently desperate as it tries
to make sense through a fog of drugs, alcohol, exhaustion, and fear.
Braithwaite’s
narrator, a black skinhead named Edison, is trying to retain his
humanity in a clockwork orange world where straight society’s rules
don’t apply. Like the world it is part of, Edison’s narrative is
chaotic and improvisational, both highly creative and highly
self-destructive. But Ratz Are Nice is also self-consciously
literary. Substantial endnotes emphasize the research and theory
behind the apparent chaos of the text. The language feels grittily
real precisely because, like the language of Anthony Burgess’s A
Clockwork Orange, it suits the purposes of a specific fiction. Don’t
let the disorderly appearance of Ratz fool you; Braithwaite is a fine
craftsman, and Ratz Are Nice is punk in the tradition of Tristan
Tzara, Johnny Rotten, and Heiner Müller. - Hugh Hodges
Spotlight on … Lawrence Yitzhak Braithwaite Ratz Are Nice ...
Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite, Wigger,
Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995
I'll stick with Burroughs. It seems that the author (who obviously a
fan of Burroughs) tried to write his own version of 'Queer' just
after he stayed up all night reading 'Naked Lunch' and 'Nova
Express'. The mood of the book is self deprecating, pretentious, and
hatefully hip. It is a short read and can easily be finished in a day
which is good because if I had put the book down I would never have
picked it back up. The only good thing I will say is that Braithwaite
definitely doesnt deviate and is true to his character and self
deprecation. Reading about his life from Wikipedia or wherever will
give you a better idea of what I'm saying. supposedly he wasn't the
best of people. He ultimately committed suicide which is sad but
didn't surprise me. I can see this book best in the hands of a post
adolescent or high school suburban rebel who has just started to cut
his teeth on anarchy and nihilism and 6 months into his new pot
binge. I see it sitting beside their unfinished copy of notes from
the underground and the obligatory Nietzsche. - Jeremy Southern
Quick read, doesn't
overstay its welcome. Very unusual but creative and effective
metaphors ("he had the face of a repeatedly defeated boxer and
walk of a lazy metronome", "[a drag queen] pulls her purse
open like Tarzan breaking the jaws of a crocodile").
Experimental-ish, but not distractingly so. Nonchalantly
transgressive in parts, but without the in-your-face obviousness that
makes it seem contrived. Drugged out prose, almost spacey language.
Very ambiguously voiced-- it is often difficult. - Vampire Who Baked
“There was
something gorgeous about Andrew. He had the face of a repeatedly
defeated boxer and the walk of a lazy metronome. Andrew was tall and
always wore a flight jacket, his head bobbing this way and the other.
He let Jerry photograph him on two occasions, but still paid little
mind to him in public…. Andrew would allow him, after having a hand
placed on his shoulder and something whispered in his ear, to take
photos of him and touch him naked.”
That’s the opening
of Lawrence Braithwaite’s debut 1995 novel, Wigger, which is really
a collection of connected short stories. It soon hots up.
“I should turn you
over and f-ck fifty bucks up your ass.”
Wigger (a term for a
white guy who acts black) is a fractured chronicle of 24 hours in the
lives of a disparate (and desperate) bunch of violent, sexual,
drug-taking urban youths. The book’s apparently scatter-gun
approach combines a keen eye and a fresh way with metaphor: a drag
queen opening her purse is “like Tarzan breaking the jaws of a
crocodile.”
“Anti-romantic,”
says Arsenal Pulp Press’s cover blurb, which is putting it mildly.
Novelist Kevin Killian said he hadn’t been so excited about — or
frightened by — a new writer in many years.
The author of this
unprecedented foray into narrative mayhem was Lawrence Ytzhak
Braithwaite, a 32-year-old queer, black, ex-army guy on permanent
disability, living in, of all places, Victoria, BC. He broke into
print in Dennis Denisoff’s anthology Queeries: An Anthology of Gay
Male Prose, seeming to come out of nowhere to create some of the most
daring experimental writing in Canada, a mixture of profanity, street
slang, song lyrics, dub poetry, porn (gay and straight) and
typographical tricks that masked a ferocious intellect.
Braithwaite was by
all accounts a difficult customer. A little guy with a patch over one
eye (“Lord Patch” was one of his nicknames), he could be
disruptive, abusive and annoying, all the while quoting Joyce and
Kafka and speaking in “complete paragraphs — with footnotes.”
Unfortunately, his drug-fuelled paranoia got in the way of his life.
One friend said he had “problems with just about everybody.” This
included literary contacts, a violent ex-boyfriend and various drug
dealers.
In spite of the
difficulties of both Braithwaite and his prose style, he published in
several anthologies and gained the respect and friendship of various
writers, particularly those associated with the San Francisco-based
New Narrative school. Poet Dennis Cooper described his writing as
“gorgeous, propulsive,” seeming to “reinvent fiction before
your eyes.”
Two later books,
Speed, Thrash, Death: Alamo, BC (1998) and Ratz Are Nice (PSP)
(2000), show no falling-off of abilities. Some of the dialogue in
Ratz Are Nice (PSP) gives the effect of being shouted over loud music
— not an easy trick to pull off. The cover photo shows the author
in a combative stance, holding a walking stick and accompanied by a
skinhead and some other tough-looking characters.
For all his talent
and originality, Braithwaite was obviously a troubled soul. His life
on the margins (one acquaintance called him a “fringe-dweller”)
came to an abrupt end in July 2008 when he was found hanged in his
Victoria apartment — a murder victim or a suicide.
Canada has produced
too few wholly original talents and certainly none remotely like
Lawrence Braithwaite. I found my copy of Wigger at a lawn sale for 25
cents. If you come across one, don’t let it get away. -Ian
Young
Lawrence Christopher
Patrick (aka Ytzhak) Braithwaite (March 17, 1963 – July 14, 2008)
was a Canadian novelist, spoken-word artist, dub poet, essayist,
digital drummer and short fiction writer.
Born in Montreal,
Quebec, he has been called "one of the outstanding Canadian
prose writers alive" (Gail Scott) and linked to the "New
Narrative" movement, a term coined by Steve Abbott. He was the
author of the legendary cult novel Wigger.
Braithwaite's work
has been praised by Dodie Bellamy for its "sublime
impenetrability".[5] and is fueled by a modernist and Fredric
Jameson-influenced late modernist approach to writing and recording.
His work is influenced by the musical and social realism of punk
rock, opera, musique concrète, noise, hip hop, rap, industrial,
black metal, country music and dub.
Braithwaite utilized
the intensity of the New York City No Wave scene and the Los Angeles
and Montreal hardcore punk music subcultures to compose his
narrative. His family has laid him to rest in Notre-Dames-des-Neiges
Cemetery, Montreal, Quebec.
Braithwaite was
openly gay. He was a vocal critic of the LGBT community's sometimes
inadequate response to issues of racism. - wikipedia
Carla Harryman’s W—/M— is a sociosexual swirl which surprises and deepens at every turn. It is a diptych with the aura of personal history and portraiture, but its principal gift is its capacity to conjure a world—a kind of no-place that runs asymptotically to our own. Harryman marbles her language with noirish liasons, childhood landscapes, sublunar detritus, and unruly narrative gestures. This is a driven, shrewd book full of mystery, invention, play, and pleasure. – Maggie Nelson
Part memoir, part autobiography, and part paean to the late Detroit playwright and poet Ron Allen, W—/M— pits Mnemosyne against Minerva, stringing and unstringing the clothesline of childhood, the lunch lines of adolescence, and the assembly lines of southeastern Michigan. Harryman traces and retraces the line per se as nomadic consciousnesses multiplying beyond the doubles that mark, and thus engender, the self-patrolled borders of identities. At each turn Harryman burrows into the interstices between, among, the grammars that partition normative life from its estranged twin(s). Think of W—/M— as an ode to a thinking that outflanks the actual—and so, makes the actual the center from which all thinking radiates. – Tyrone Williams
In this pair of wry, dark, brilliant books, we hear tell of domestic partnerships with a shifting array of W and M. Women and Men? Names multiply, genders reverse, and those initials, flipped, transform into one another. I suspect M could refer to the Market, which hovers everywhere, funneling itself through characters and settling at any opportunity into Mine. At one point the narrator declares that an artwork "supplements being while framing the subject as a caged thing." Characters are magic, says one narrator, because they are "mine," and control feels good. These speculatively anecdotal meditations on identity, agency, and artifice are witty, cagy, and provocative--Harryman at her best. – Catherine Wagner
Carla Harryman
describes GARDENER OF STARS as "an experimental novel that
explores the paradise and wastelands of utopian desire." The
book offers a mythic history of a post-historical city situated in a
garden landscape whose inhabitants are engaged in perpetual tending,
limitless generation. Their generatings and tendings take place in
speculation and dream, practical and impractical invention, desire
and copious sex - all facets of a politicized eros and an erotic
politics. The utopia in question ("the unruly utopia of the
senses that is not in conflict with the world's current") must
be understood first not in terms of place but in terms of personage.
M, Serena, Gardener (the eponymous heroine of the novel) are
themselves utopias (as distinct from utopians) surviving in a
painfully fraught (though sometimes beautiful) milieu. Negotiating
this milieu, the various characters come into contact (or, more
precisely, throw themselves into contact) with events that are in a
ceaseless process
In the world of this
putative novel, far more fantasmagoric poem than fictional narrative,
the first thoughts of a child and the dying thoughts of a
post-nuclear race blithely coexist; it is a land where erotic
impulses, social hierarchies, alternative cultivation and "a
death god's radar" mix with a moral ambivalence that recalls
Lewis Carroll and a violence and artistry that recalls Lautre amont
and Samuel R. Delany. Purporting to track "the paradise and
wasteland of utopian desire," two characters, Gardner and M,
coax us into their mental adventures with a slipstream of avatars and
misfit angels, and with each other. Both are gendered female and live
in a city where women normally "do not sleep piled up on
themselves as male captives in sloughs of despond," but who do
engage in a variety of bodily trials and tribulations designed to
gauge the limits of their world (i.e., of our ruined dreams of the
ideal). M comes upon a man who gets separated from a group of dirt
bikers mindlessly jumping a ditch; Gardner, "on the shore of her
own giganticness," gives birth to Caesar and leaves him to M and
a variety of others. A lot of the action is bleak in its
characterological affect, uncompromising in its brutality (and
ecstasy) and difficult to figure out. "Frankly, women want to
own men for the sake of revenge." This book will convince
readers of all sexes to surrender as many as possible. (Dec.)
Forecast: Harryman was an integral part of the 1970s Bay Area
Language poetry scene, and now teaches at creative writing at Wayne
State University in Detroit. There Never Was a Rose Without a Thorn,
published by City Lights, is her best known and most assigned book,
but her many smaller press publications are ripe for selection. Fans
of Mac Wellman or Sam Shepherd's experimental theater, or of Alice
Notley's recent work, will find this book similarly accomplished and
engaging. - Publishers Weekly
Carla
Harryman, The Words: after Carl
Sandburg’s
Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul
Sartre, O Books, 1999
In THE WORDS,
Harryman playfully examines the family, the suburbs, daily life, the
position of woman, while boldly undermining notions about character
and plot. There's a ferocity to her wit, a cunning to her
deconstructions -- and always a devotion to language, its elasticity
and limits. I admire Harryman's rare mind, its gleeful feminism,
broad intelligence and anarchic inventiveness! -- Lynne Tillman
At last, children's
literature has been liberated, liberated into fiction! Carla
Harryman's WORDS is a fiction in which the mischief is perpetually
unnaming names in an ongoing discursive cross-wind beneficial to
hybridizing texts. Bold and subversive! -- Marjorie Welish
The Words is not one
novel, but many. Its economics are libidinal, luxuriant, and layered:
part roman fleuve, in which the first generation born in the
“artificial jungles” of the Cold War comes of age “on the
border that separates the absurd from the socially constructed
reality,” part roman à clef, in which every word will instantly
recognize itself and every fly allusion find its author in eternity,
and part philosophical romance in the mode of the later Wittgenstein,
who proposed that “the double cross and the duck-rabbit might be
among the spots [on] a wall covered with spots.” And, because
“shadows dream in their niches,” this is finally a utopian novel,
everywhere transforming “defeat into rapture.” In (and with) The
Words, Carla Harryman has written a postmodern classic. It’s the
book to take along to that proverbially deserted island.— Ted
Pearson
Winesburg, Ohio
through a convex eye. Dismissing romanticization and exposé,
Harryman opts for the multidimensional properties…— Sarah
Schulman
Appreciative readers
will call Harryman's book a prose poem or an feminist anti-novel, a
experiment in life-writing or an abstract autobiography. Harsher
perusers will say it falls between two stools. Indebted to Gertrude
Stein, to French feminist theory, and to the French nouveau roman,
and written (as Harryman says) "after" Sartre's Les Mots
and Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories, the book is a radically
scrambled fictive memoir: narrator Woemess moves through a place
named Watch Out, encountering entities or characters called the
Stranded, All Done, the Keeper of the Spool Babies and
Interpretation. Moments of lucidity are interspersed with
wrench-in-the-machinery doggerel that makes reading the book
sometimes fun, sometimes challenging, and occasionally
disheartening-especially as Harryman's brands of disjunction adhere
to modernist models (like Mina Loy's) nearly a century old. Sometimes
Harryman (Memory Play) limns a provocatively aggressive feminine
consciousness, at once her own and a model for others: "After
childhood, for many days running I studied people's asses with the
slowness of one who has discovered the crucial element in a universal
tragedy." Woemess (whose name conflates womanhood and
menstruation) fades in and out of the narratives, "as unreal as
a discovery made elsewhere," then erupts in oracular outbursts:
"If I wanted to, right now, I could paint the picture of the
picture, show you the cryptic world, the song, and the wampum. Or a
dreary series of irregular rectangles, a repetitious dirge, and
money. But if I take you there, we will be gone." If Harryman's
book fails to deliver the ideological or formal innovations it
promises, it remains an inspiring take on gender politics-not to
mention a pretty good read. - Publishers Weekly
Carla
Harryman, Baby, Zephyr Press, 2005
Carla Harryman is
the author of 11 books of poetry, prose plays and essays. Her two
experimental novels, Gardener of Stars (2001) and The Words: after
Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul Sartre (1999) are
“explorations of the paradise and wastelands of utopian desire.”
Baby continues this exploration through the convolutions of Baby, who
enters the book as “fire in the womb with a skirt.” Harryman, a
native Californian, now lives in Detroit where she teaches women’s
studies, creative writing and literature at Wayne State University.
She has also written a number of essays on innovative writing by
women. Her most recent essay, “Residues or Revolutions of the
Language of Acker and Artaud,” is forthcoming Devouring
Institutions (SDSU Press).
Carla
Harryman, Adorno's Noise, Essay Press,
2008
ADORNO'S NOISE is a
collection of experimental, poetic, and conceptual essays that "once
again proves how necessary an encounter with [Harryman's] writing has
become for us today" (Avital Ronell). ADORNO'S NOISE takes a
stunning plunge into a kaleidoscopic world of globalization, female
sexuality, the place of art and artist, and the looming power of the
state. Phrases from Theodor Adorno's aphoristic philosophical text,
Minima Moralia, serve as catalysts for an explosion of thought and
language that quickly breaks Adorno's orbit. As Rob Halpern puts it:
"ADORNO'S NOISE reinvents the 'essay as form,' but it doesn't
stop short of reinventing thinking." Other Carla Harryman titles
available from SPD include OPEN BOX (IMPROVISATIONS), BABY, and
ANIMAL INSTINCTS.
This work by Carla
Harryman, startlingly astute, once again proves how necessary an
encounter with her writing has become for us today. Her grasp of
theoretical and poetic exigencies is unbypassable, and she moves
lightly, lifting the prose poem into the amplitude of a new
articulation. --Avital Ronell
Adornos noise may be
nothing more than the consonance of late modern capital talking to
itself, but Carla Harryman listens to Adorno listening, and what she
hears is a very different sort of dissonance, something Adorno
himself may have been deaf to. Listening for a noise that can t be
heard, Harryman attends to the disruption of signal the aesthetic
artifact called a corpse at the limit of Adorno s magisterial
eloquence, where thought steps over the body. Atonally faithful to
his negativity the afterglow of torment passing through figures of
speech while refusing the authority of a masterful dialectic,
Harryman makes our unthought horizon normality is death audible,
presencing a body that cant be redeemed by aesthetics the body wants
to be art and fails at it. From Gender The Status of Dogs to works by
Sun Ra, Anais Nin, Robert Smithson, and Kenzaburo Oe, This radically
asynthetic writing moves thru polyphonic configuration of word, image
and concept. Synthesia? Emotional truth? The intersection between
abstraction and narration? Practicing a militant ethic of non-mastery
as every one of its sentences sounds like a sensory organ in the
process of becoming its own theoretician. Adornos Noise reinvents the
essay as form but it doesnt stop short of reinventing thinking. --Rob
Halpern
Delicate sinews of
thought and revelation manage to hold together Carla Harryman’s
stargazing, mind-teasing, and genre-defying essays in her latest
collection, Adorno’s Noise. Taking phrases from Theodor Adorno’s
aphoristic text, Minima Moralia, as starting points for searching
investigations inward and outward, Harryman presses language and
dialectics into her service as she probes, explores, and lobs sticks
of philosophical dynamite across the imaginative borders of art, sex,
self, memory, politics, poetry, and, ultimately, Adorno. As the title
essay declares: “Even as languages disappear the headspace made in
the damage converts to tongue.” Likewise, in the clamor of Adorno’s
Noise, new meanings come to life and resonate. Take, for example, the
essay “Just Noise,” appearing under the heading “imagination is
inflamed by women who lack imagination.” Lucky for “imagination,”
Harryman is the woman wielding the torch as she assembles,
disassembles, and reworks sexually freighted quotations from authors
like Elizabeth Grosz, Anais Nin, Jocelyn Saidenberg, and Kathy Acker.
Harryman quickly takes apart her first assemblage of footnoted
quotes, and the explications she included in the footnotes become
detached from, and ultimately blend into, the quotations to which
they initially adhered. The result is a literary fugue that both toys
with and brings to the fore the pleasure inherent in appropriating
and manipulating others thoughts and language. In other essays,
Harryman covers the surface and structure of the Institute for
Advanced Strategic and Political Studies’s notorious document
titled “A Clean Break” or explores and analyzes reflections that
have arisen from her fertile readings of texts by writers like
Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe and conceptual artist Robert Smithson,
among others. Moments of exceeding clarity erupt in the midst of
imagined dreamscapes, such as when she describes her near
decapitation while sticking her head out of an open casement window.
Like many moments in this collection, the experience “never
happened although it does correspond to a perception, if not a
feeling, that [she] could not communicate in any other way.” For
those not familiar with Harryman’s oeuvre, her essays are often
difficult, dense, or phantasmagorical—or, to quote from one of the
essays, “reminiscent of Ovid and acid trips.” But from these
challenging passages emerge sumptuous turns of phrase and images that
bring light to the darkest recesses of thought. As Harryman notes, “A
blank and therefore barely existing feature of the world, once
illuminated, fills out and extends the world.” Her essays will take
you to many of those newly extended territories. - Jonathan Wegner
I first read Carla
Harryman’s new book, Adorno’s Noise, on a plane. Flying home from
Detroit, aided by the laser focus of jet travel discomfort, I turned
page after page in rapt attention. Along with five other poets, Carla
and I had just presented a live performance from a serial work in
progress, The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography,
1976-1980 (Mode A/This Press), the product of a longstanding
community of writers whose manifold relationships span critical
dialog, collaboration, rivalry, and friendship. The individual
accounts of times past are strikingly various and say as much about
now as they do about back in the day. Despite our long familiarity,
as authors we remain in many ways mutually mysterious. In fact, the
appeal of the unknown, a different way of perceiving and responding
to the world, was what first attracted us to one another in the first
place.
Energized by my
in-flight encounter with Adorno’s Noise, I resolved to write about
it. Back on land, however, I found that to be easier said than done,
and not only due to the capaciousness of Harryman’s rapidly
shifting frames of reference. I also discovered that to understand
the place of this book in contemporary praxis as thoroughly as I’d
hoped, I’d need to tackle another work: Theodor Adorno’s Minima
Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (Verso Books, 2005).
An attractive and
difficult work, Adorno’s Noise doesn’t fit neatly into any
preconceived categories; it straddles the boundaries of essay,
journal, performance, poem, and play. Even the book itself is a
curious object. For example, there is something strange about the
chapter titles. On the Contents page they appear at first glance in
two distinctly gendered fonts, an archaic feminine script and a
modern sans serif in all caps. On further inspection, one realizes
that one font represents section headers, the other, chapter titles.
Yet some sections lack chapters. Then there is the disconcerting
appearance of the section dividers, white drop-out type on dark pages
with dim images like blurry x-rays, sometimes beginning on the
right-hand page with words cut off at the edge, only to repeat in
full when you turn the page. These tricks of the eye are the work of
designer Jeff Clark, whose contribution to the book is that of a
collaborator fully engaged with the author’s thinking.
Harryman’s thought
stretches out in so many directions it hard to know where to start.
Indeed, Adorno’s Noise seems to perform a kind of essayistic yoga,
creating new spaces inside the body that knows. Since the known is
always bordered by the unknown, the work has a kind of erotic charge,
as desire vies with security for the attention of the mortal. New
spaces are continuously opened up then occupied, leading to a series
of encounters. Hence, the exercise of thought leads inevitably to
play, but it is an unrelentingly and often hilariously thoughtful
play, peopled by incongruous characters with wills of their own. The
play, Harryman seems to say, trumps thought, because it realizes the
interplay of the known and the unknown. As Adorno put it in Minima
Moralia:
Only at a remove
from life can the mental life exist, and truly engage the empirical.
While thought relates to facts and moves by criticizing them, its
movement depends no less on the maintenance of distance. Essential to
it is an element of exaggeration, of over-shooting the object, of
self-detachment from the weight of the factual, so that instead of
merely reproducing being it can, at once rigorous and free, determine
it. Thus every thought resembles play, with which Hegel and Nietzsche
compared the work of the mind. The unbarbaric side of philosophy is
its tacit awareness of the element of irresponsibility, of blitheness
springing from the volatility of thought, which forever escapes what
it judges.
We read Adorno today
with mixed emotions; he was a Cassandra who, in addition to assessing
the implications of the Holocaust for art in his time, also foresaw
what our world was to become and recoiled in horror. Our admiration
of his prescience is unqualified by the fact of his enclosure in
history. Still, scandalized as he rightly was by the commodification
of everything, his trepidations fall short of the relentless
replication of empty signs that has become our global environment.
“Relax,” we want to tell him, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
Against Adorno’s
grumpy old man, Harryman proposes an altogether lighter yet still
obdurate figure: the radical sylph. Unlike the spleen and vanity
displayed by the sylphs of Pope’s satiric Rape of the Lock,
Harryman’s figure injects lightness and air into every argument,
causing bones of contention to slip their moorings and float free
into the medium of creative action.
She walks to the
window and flings it wide remembering a similar gesture made by
Elizabeth Taylor and Alice B. Toklas… Air intoxicates better than a
drink after a day’s work. [13]
The injection of air
into closed spaces containing multiple objects is reflected
everywhere in Harryman’s prose. This notion of injected space may
offer a clue to how Harryman’s insouciance may emerge from the
caustic irritability of Adorno, who noted “Beauty of the American
landscape: that even the smallest of its segments is inscribed, as
its expression, with the immensity of the whole country.”
Harryman’s sense of space is rooted in her childhood in Southern
California, the apotheosis of American landscape, a coastal paradise
peopled by settlers from the vast continental interior. Perhaps her
sense of light and open space is derived from the physical
environment in which she grew up; in the chapter “The End of
Nationalism,” she give us an intimate portrait of her family life
in 1960.
Subject matter in
Adorno’s Noise is a moving target; themes of sexuality, death,
normality, repression, power, desire, and art flow freely and
intermingle throughout. A passage on Anais Nin reflects on the action
of the essay itself, proposing publication as a mechanical harnessing
of sexuality. After love, “Anais thrusts ink back and forth…
across sheets of paper until the record of every maneuver, including
the forceful thrusts, is consigned to the immortal life of
circulation.” [14]
The politics of
Adorno’s Noise offers a visceral response to the policies of the
recent Bush administration. In a wittily violent scenario, Harryman’s
sylph is physically pinned to the floor by “the president,” a
sadistic tyrant, and abjectly offers to work in his library. “A
Privitization Document” is an abstract description of a found
document that exposes the actual machinations of a Bush
administration think tank that included Iraq-war architect Richard
Perle and other inside-the-beltway, right-wing career intellectuals.
The document is described clinically in terms of its form—headers,
bulleted sentences, paragraphs, etc. – with only occasional
snippets of content that gradually reveal its subject, concluding
with “Israel will not only contain its foes; it will transcend
them.” Thus is performed an unmasking of brutal authority.
In “Just Noise,”
we are presented with several paragraphs of sentences quoted from
philosopher Hannah Arendt, critic Elizabeth Grosz, novelist Kenzaburo
Oe, poet Jocelyn Saidenberg, anthropologist Michael Taussig,
performance artist Karen Finley, poet Etel Adnan, novelist Kathy
Acker, and poet/performance artist Jackson Mac Low. These sources are
cited in a thicket of footnotes, which are then reprised as the next
page of text. As with the mercurial headers and titles that cue the
book’s action, the push-pull of interchangeable foreground and
background stands in metonymically for larger questions of language
and truth.
“Beware of Seeking
Out the Mighty” begins, “in writing a poem she is not writing a
novel in writing a novel she is not writing an essay in writing an
essay she is not writing a diatribe…” and continues for 23 pages,
a tour de force. It’s worth noting that a less engaged, more
conceptual approach might seek to automate the process, replicating
the formula ad nauseum, but that is not the case here. Harryman rings
small changes on the variations, keeping the interplay of thought and
gesture alive all the way through.
In the final
chapter, “Orgasms,” Harryman writes:
With the flick of
the switch aggression exposes erotic drives to blindness. On the
other side of this blindness is an orgasm in the public void.
An orgasm is an
elegy in which there is no consolation. Machines, like orgasms, are
inconsolable things.
Adorno
metamorphosed from an instrument to a machine to the unnameable, a
figure in the Beckett he had admired. Text is the electricity that
moves the body from one thing to the next even as it cannot break out
of its instrumental rationality. [180]
Harryman’s essay,
an argument overheard, starts at A. The first sentence reads: “A
might be an abbreviation for something inside itself, inside A.” Is
A a letter? Or a person? Is the essay about persons? Or is it about
the means by which persons understand one another to be persons—that
is, the symbolic? Does A stand for Adorno? Or is it only the first
letter in a sequence of textuality through whose generative
unfoldings we might yet realize our liberation? “People thinking in
the forms of free, detached, disinterested appraisal were unable to
accommodate within those forms the experience of violence in which
reality annuls such thinking,” Adorno wrote. “The almost
insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own
powerlessness, stupefy us.” - Kit Robinson
Carla Harryman’s
work always seems to reward repeated readings and her 2008 collection
of essays, Adorno’s Noise, is no exception. Her book is remarkable
not only for the many threads it ties together but also for the ends
that are left loose. It shuttles across generations and cultures:
from Theodor Adorno and Anais Nin to Kenzaburo Oe and Robert
Smithson, from William Blake to contemporary noise artists. Each
essay is effective on its own, but when read together the reader is
able to appreciate the intricacy of Harryman’s arguments.
Theodor
Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951)
serves as both the springboard and organizing framework for
Harryman’s book. Adorno’s book of short essays attempted, in his
words, “the teaching of the good life” in as much as that was
possible in an era of increasing dehumanization. As he states, one
“who wishes to know the truth about life in its immediacy must
scrutinize its estranged form.” But for Harryman’s purposes,
Adorno is both an inspiration and a foil. While each section heading
is clipped directly from Minima Moralia, she chose the phrases that
sounded the least like Adorno--her attempt to liberate his project
from its linguistic heaviness and fatalism.
Harryman uses
a variety of strategies to prod and confront Adorno’s framework.
Perhaps the most overtly philosophical section is titled “Regard
for the Object Rather than Communication is Suspect.” After
considering the types of world in which this statement can be
considered correct, Harryman proceeds to show that suspicion of “the
Object” is not nearly as important as suspicion of the process of
Objectification. This objectification is personified by a young
Robert Creeley, whose introduction to The Gold Diggers (1954) she
cites in the book. “The story has no time finally. Its shape, if
form can be so thought of, is a sphere, an egg of obdurate kind.”
This conception of story represents for Harryman how enclosed and
static structures become suffocating: “Once I dreamed of an
obdurate egg. It was strangled in twine.”(167). - Pat Clifford
But the idea of the
vengeful dedication fascinates me.
We stay where we are
in order to get where we’re going.
We stay where we are
in order to be where we’re going.
In a way this
writing is a spin-off from spin / a sort-of-outside to spin’s
frenetic interior – it’s the mould that makes the void possible
that makes the next object (of thought) possible. In this way copy
after copy of each spin can be produced / and (don’t you kid
yourself) each copy redefines the mould (a lot) – each copy is the
effect of this mould that surrounds it and in that way it might come
to not be.
The sentence in
whole or part remarks on this from a long way off while it
concurrently pours out of the frame. The sentence imitates bodily
fluids pouring out of inflicted wounds before it becomes an abstract
line.
Carla controls the
pulse of the moment with words / so that its even flow (rarely
(really) interrupted) tells the mind of the reader where to go.
Prose is (always) about things that probably (probably) happened
(that probably happened). Prose paces our way through life / making
it happen / as if (as if) anything could happen (that way).
In a way though
prose is a bodily thing. It can sing.
If normality is
death then regard for the object rather than communication is
suspect.
…
I wonder if it would
be the case that if normality were not death, regard for the object
would be purely an entailment of belief and communication would in
turn become the object of thought.
Carla displays more
wonderment in the face of the word (in the face of the actual word)
and what happens to it when another is added to it / than anyone I
can think of (and this goes even more so for sentences). This
wonderment is grace / this wonderment is a (the) form of grace. What
she says about Anaïs Nin could be said about her own work –
She has set about
the task of explaining women to men using a language men can
understand, one that is persuasive but not frightening.
But the writing does
not define itself in relation to (only) that project / or to any
project other than itself. But again / that doesn’t mean that it
is at all solipsistic – that simply means that it is here (here
(that it is here)).
We know that Carla
is telling us stuff about living / about how to go on living / about
what living is like / about what living-together is like / about what
to expect from living / about the problems and pit-falls of living /
and so on – but she tells us this stuff kind-of-obliquely (or
perhaps it’s more accurate to say that she does so
directly-but-from-one-vantage-at-a-time-and-then-very-quickly-from-another-vantage).
Very often this kind of oblique-rendition-of-ideas has been brought
to us via the novel (eg H G Wells / J G Ballard) – but here it is
the essay form (replete with plenty of narrative elements) that is
called into service. The obliqueness comes not from a general or
all-over obscurantism or vagueness – (quite the contrary) / each
sentence is remarkably simple in a declarative-sort-of-way. But the
sentences exist in relation to one-another as equals / normal (or
common) progressions are pretty-much-eschewed in favor of the
building-up block-by-block (sentence-by-sentence) in such a way that
the overall effect is somewhat more like music (linear and additive
but with significant resonances and recalls) than prose usually is –
so in this way it is wonderful prose and it instructs us by its
mean(s) as well as by its meaning(s).
For a moment it is
unclear whether this is a piece of music or something else, then for
a little while things seem to proceed in a narrative fashion.
And another thing
that keeps the language kind-of-floating (and not too much
too-much-to-the-point) is that (here) everything (everything) is
under consideration / nothing is fixed (decided-upon) / everything is
still being worked into the fabric of possibility (such that
everything is (is) possible (everything is possible)).
In Carla’s world
there is really no difference between the lived-daily and the
politically-imposed world(s). This is brought home by the way the
language examines itself-as-language / and by the way it examines
other-languages(-as-not-other-languages). It’s frightening – I
mean the impact is frightening / clarifying and frightening.
in writing a poem
she is not writing a novel in writing a novel she is not writing an
essay in writing an essay she is not writing a diatribe in writing a
diatribe she is not putting her body on the line in putting her body
on the line she is not going to jail in going to jail she is not
getting a job she is not protesting in protesting she is not
elucidating her point of view in elucidating her point of view she is
not writing a poem
Everywhere she is
writing thought. Everywhere she is thinking writing.
What does it mean to
describe anything? – how do words bring a thing into space in a way
that a painting of it does not? / a photograph of it does not? / that
it itself does not? This question begins to get a lot of exercise in
the text called HEADLESS HEADS – I don’t say that the question is
answered (it is not) but that it is taken out and put through
multitudes of its possible paces. What does it mean to analyze? –
what does it mean to analyze such an image? / or a text (of whatever
sort)? / or a text with such an image in it? These questions (too)
are given the space-of-pages in which to roam. - Alan Davies
Carla Harryman’s
Adorno’s Noise is a self structured work which reaches out towards
worlds of language, dialectics, art, sexuality, memory, politics,
poetry, writing, the self, the object, space and Adorno. Carla
Harryman plunges us into her minds eye- into her world which is a
complex object fighting for its place in the world. Adorno’s Noise
is a complex work, which aims to challenge. Like the Harryman work
which has gone before it, this new example of her writing does not
shy away from complexity of thought or process. This complexity makes
this work initially daunting to engage with; this feeling of daunting
is not a negative one, but one which spurs the reader on to uncover
the meaning of the text. The text is a noise; a hybrid of hisses and
spits from across genres. Harryman plunges us directly into this
noise; a noise we are unfamiliar with, a noise which is forcing us to
listen, a noise which is asking for change.
There is a need to
uncover what this noise means; you must be willing to translate it.
Carla Harryman demands that you listen and listen with intent. This
text demands that you listen and listen throughout. Yet what are the
implications of this intent listening and is it possible? Has
Harryman constructed a dense enough text to be physically
deconstructing itself?
I must firstly turn
our attention to the title: “Adorno’s Noise”. There are instant
connotations of thought here and from the beginning Harryman has set
up a very open dialogue with Adorno’s work. Yet will this book be
just that; noise from Adorno? I must admit that this text is noise,
but it is certainly not purely Adorno, it is very much saturated with
the voice of Harryman. - Becky Cremin
These hybrid
writings, staged as they are between fiction and theory, the domestic
and history, abstractions and androgeny, the rational and the
nonrational, the creator and her artifact, organize themselves
against normative ideas while using whatever tolls of novelistic,
philosophic, autobiographical, or poetic discourse present themselves
to advance their tellings. Concepts such as narrative, character, and
binary thinking are manipulated and scrutinized but not adhered to
methodically. The writing is also a response to literature and the
things of the world: it does not separate one off from the other.
Marquis de Sade, rocks, Balzac, war, Lautremont, amazons, Jane
Austen, news, Jan Bowles, utopias, Ludwig Wittgenstein, child's play,
Saint Augustine, censorship are probable points on its strange map.
in the world of this work, words themselves may become characters and
instincts are regarded as if they were books. Complex ideas and
simple rheetorics mingle, yielding impure theories, precarious
stories, and fabulist games. —Carla Harryman, 1995, Preface
"Carla Harryman
is a great wide-awake visionary–reading her is like playing Olympic
ping-ping in eight dimensions! In her work we encounter the libido's
fierce games: the willful sense and non-sense, the endless
reversibility. Rampant story and rhetoric (our culture's
self-descriptions) are raised up, then promptly guillotined for
crimes against honesty. Through this florescence of creation and
destruction, Harryman wages one of contemporary writing's most
radical critiques." —Robert Glück
"There Never
Was a Rose Without a Thorn is a work of magical intelligence and wit,
opening up words and ideas in ways that are both startling and
moving. Carla Harryman folds out ideas revealing more meanings and
connections than seem possible, yet each new image settles
irrevocably inside us, no experience, either literary or personal,
remains the same once you've traveled through the worlds she creates.
Her newest work is an alchemical gem that sparkles." —Jewell
Gomez
Carla Harryman's SUE
IN BERLIN is a collection of six genre blending pieces of poetry and
performance that are informed in varying degree by musical, verbal,
and physical improvisation. Composed between 2001 and 2015, each of
the works are written for both the page and for live performance and
are, what Harryman calls "recalcitrant texts," meant to
perform their own object status "as both linked to and separate
from the live performance of its language." Deeply
collaborative, the pieces in SUE IN BERLIN are born from Harryman's
improvisational work with both performers and musicians, while they
touch on topics that span from childhood and gender, to race and the
social construction of space, to Detroit Techno and noise music.
Works in the collection have been performed nationally and
internationally: in San Francisco, Detroit, New York, Chicago,
Austria, Germany, France, and the Czech Republic. Never settling
between poetry and theater, Sue In Berlin resists genre to create a
material sense of constant motion and morphing identities,
heightening our attentions and sensitivities as readers to that of
listeners: to the chorus that emerges -- ruptures, rather -- as text,
as process, as narrative insistently folding back into itself.
"The realism of
Harryman's work lies not in a normative reenactment of past events
but rather in its existence as a thought experiment through which the
past and its connection to the present moment are reconfigured. It is
characterized by the ability to hold contradictions in interplay and
by a willingness to see the overlay of conflicting realities."--Heidi
Bean, Associate Professor in performance studies, Bridgewater State
University
It is an absolute
delight to read SUE IN BERLIN, the text hovers magically between the
poetic line and narrative continuation, opening all sorts of doors in
the process. If there is an in-between in new writing by women--this
is it!"--Gail Scott
"What SUE IN
BERLIN puts to the fore: The paramount importance of theater or some
aspects of theater within poetry--Within any poem. Harryman's poetry
is theater, at once."--Chrisophe Lamiot Enos, Editor, "To
Series," PURH
Carla
Harryman, Open Box, Belladonna Books,
2007
OPEN BOX
(IMPROVISATIONS) is the newest book from prolific poet Carla
Harryman. "GRNN alert just in--Joseph Cornell is doing the
can-can over the delicious debris organization in Harryman's OPEN
BOX. This dance of demi-characters--half half, semiquaver, three
hooks quarter--places (a State) under an obligation not to maintain
armed forces. Next up: removing oneself to another place;
migration"--Tina Darragh. Carla Harryman's recent books include
BABY and THE WORDS AFTER CARL SANDBURG'S ROOTABAGA STORIES AND
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, both currently available from SPD.
Carla
Harryman, A Voice to Perform: One Opera
/ Two Plays,
SplitLevel Texts, 2020
HANNAH CUT IN:
Assembled in time-bound segments, each derived from the idea of
interruption in the writings of Hannah Arendt, this play was created
for a Poets Theater event at the University Art Museum, Berkeley,
2017.
MEMORY PLAY: A
two-act, multifaceted conceptualization of memory-as-performance
proffered by personified creature and instructions, a child, and a
Miltonic Humiliator toy.
GARDENER OF STARS,
AN OPERA: A duo, a trio, a quartet, an ensemble, this work adapts
Harryman's experimental novel, GARDENER OF STARS "paradise and
wastelands of utopian desire."
