9/26/22

Lucie Paye - the story of a painter fixated with a ghostly female figure becomes entwined with the story of a woman seeking to connect with a long-lost son. A delicate tale of artistic obsession and creation

 

Lucie Paye, Absence, Trans. by Natasha Lehrer,

Les Fugitives, 2022


A mysterious female figure keeps on appearing under a landscape painter’s brush. A woman addresses letters to an absent loved one. Directing her reader and characters with the deftness of the Master of Suspense, Lucie Paye dramatises the power of unconditional love and the role of the unconscious in artistic creation.


‘In this remarkable debut, the story of a painter fixated with a ghostly female figure becomes entwined with the story of a woman seeking to connect with a long-lost son. A delicate tale of artistic obsession and creation, and a moving meditation on longing and loss.’ — Ángel Gurría-Quintana

9/23/22

Jessica Baer - Here the linear lives within the subliminal sequencing of itself, breaking out a kind of disco of sorrow, hypervigilant texts that hope to dance into bijections by abandoning itself to lexical chance. Here the abyss of Baer’s prosaic, cryogenic world does not thaw, but hyperventilates from insularity and significant enigma.

 


Ulrich Jesse K Baer/ Jessica Baer, Midwestern

Infinity Doctrine, Apocalypse Party, 2021


http://ulrich-baer.space/


Midwestern Infinity Doctrine is about the diabolical pact with analogies within language as an endlessly proliferating series of artificially derived re-semblances, halving & splitting and re-joining themselves. The affective currency of disastered bodies where the brain’s automatic hyper-completions run crunching errant timelines together into singularities that transgress homogenized social time in the neurodivergent cptsd text embodied. It’s about the (im)possibility of intimacy after violence and its fulfillment within my relationship to my 2005 maroon Ford Taurus. In a Super Walmart parking lot where I met myself in an identical car; the sinuous-duplicitous doubling that powers drives through the immaterial of language textures. A paean to Ivan Ooze, it’s about my decision to reunify my abusers out of the world of my life and into the cosmic everything-nothing faraway. It’s about the specters that stay behind anyway. It’s about the paranoia-machine of alienated desire; the perpetual inauguration of the uncanny-familiar in time as indexicality. It’s about the line in The Who’s “teenage waste/land” where he sings “I don’t need / to be forgiven.”


"Jessica Baer’s philosophical and entropic Midwestern Infinity Doctrine is more of a backward sermon than a doctrine, a sermon that sits on the edge of science and time, giving quenched counsels on existence, on survival, on livelihood, on the search within the JessicaBaerself: where the birth of the protagonist meets the birth of the author. Here language battlecrawls as a paranormal dual citizen of reality and lexical electrostatics. Everything in Baer’s penultimate world is comodulated for depth of chaos and for depth of furtive estrangements between logic and beauty. A place where language could experience post-traumatic disorder in science with some order and some chaos. Here the linear lives within the subliminal sequencing of itself, breaking out a kind of disco of sorrow, hypervigilant texts that hope to dance into bijections by abandoning itself to lexical chance. Here the abyss of Baer’s prosaic, cryogenic world does not thaw, but hyperventilate from insularity and significant enigma. The speaker is a surgeon of the nascent. A machine or an aperture that ejects snowclouds of lucid ambivalence. Of course, in the rhetorical exploration of the self, there is the reader, the cyborg, the villain, Ivan Ooze, then Paul Newman, and then Clarice Inspector who show up for Baer’s inexact mathematical party dressed like bullets out of an experimental pistol, all hoping to miss us softly, a few inches, from our true literary artery. Be colossal and enter with cosmic form." — Vi Khi Nao



The haunted speaker of Midwestern Infinity Doctrine, self-reflexively invoked on the page as “Jessica Baer,” offers a philosophical-poetical treatise on the liminality of life, death, and memory—where the in-betweenness of living becomes rupture from which other, alternate timelines emerge. Like science fiction/fantasy author Gene Wolfe’s seminal Peace (1975), a highly poetic and unsettling novel which recalls scenes from the life of the possibly deceased Alden Dennis Weer, Midwestern Infinity Doctrine enigmatically traces how “[s]pace is haunted” in the post-pastoral Midwest. Here, lost dreams of a peaceful landscape belie a reality wherein “[t]he difference between living and dying is fuzzy logic” (Baer). Consciousness spreads across pages, spilling forth maladies, quandaries, and contradictions—such that life is—and it is within the life of the imagination that the reader finds themselves on a journey into and beyond the self in ways that breach the unknown.

Baer’s world is the world of the “wobbling putrescent,” where the flesh has gone immaterial and is revived again, shocked out of the grave in an endless circuitry. It is the body trying to make sense of the world through a kind of private language that often eludes sense: “I go backwards in time and find myself in bed with you, suddenly, we’re floating inside the open air, begin to drop Contemporary Me throws their arms around the pastmyself as we’re falling and I murmur, in a steady voice, into my own hair, ‘it made sense. It made sense it made sense.’” The “you,” that threshold between selves, is an alluring space that can also be painful. At times the speaker is pained by the intimacies of being surrounded by other bodies in the wherewithal, this whelm world. As Baer writes, “you try to tell me what you’ve done, gone & died again, in your head . . . I hesitate to speak, a threshold where your heart should be / learning to cross itself.” The heart crosses itself with the knowledge that we are here, right now, and now is kind of like forever when one lives in a moment for so long they never leave—(“He leaves the room and I do not move. I have always been here). We remain in multiple places and memories at once.

Baer’s world also conscripts the reader into its building, performing the page as a portal and simultaneous a zone of revelation where sharp and brilliant insights come to surface—“Time is in a sense only affective investment which serves as the delineating force (cosmic law) between the bios and the dead/undead of object-matter, where we live at this ledge of spilling cascade-time.” Timelines are broken apart and reconstituted through intuitive logic, and intuition leads the reader toward an infinity as much illusory as real—if we could only reach beyond ourselves so far to see it, we might have some knowledge to share. Baer’s speaker is filled with wisdom emptying from pockets of time, the hard-won wisdom of a speaker contemplating living and dying alongside joyrides through intersecting texts and philosophies, what it means to live out our words and the worlds they spin. This threaded text bears significance in relation to stars and sky and cosmos which continually loop back to remind us of the point of puncture/rupture. What pains one is the prick of time. But it is also revelation. It helps us “carve back to the core, if you can find it,” as when the speaker says, “Jessica Baer, the pain is as bad as it is recalibrating.” Baer is not only interested in scar tissue but goes deep into bone to realize the why and what for.


There are other why’s and what for’s that concern me in this text, for instance when Baer writes, “[w]hen you crossover thresholds to pass between universes, rounding the arch of the portal to the midwestern heart, a bell rings—its an apex.” I find myself taken back to a fantastical, almost supernatural Midwest, where I come to know the landscape as a universe once spoken and so twice lived by myself and the speaker—it is a Midwest embedded at the heart of a vortex, and I ask why I am here and if “I” even exist. The Midwest becomes a pause, a “caesura of sense” where we ask ourselves “did what you find what you were a searching for and/or are you actually not there, at all?” Baer writes, “[y]r mouth collapse into a tractor beam as tachyons filterback from the future past through the voices, singing in the dusky bar, smoke crags, and the melody repeats because the needle is broken can’t find its groove.” These fleeting impressions provide solace amidst, amongst, and against the troubling vortex of experience.

Midwestern Infinity Doctrine will make one want to transgress the boundaries of themselves, staying up late on a journey past the edge of day and into something more beyond than beyond. - Julia Madsen

https://annuletpoeticsjournal.com/Julia-Madsen-Time-Transgression-and-the-Vortex-of-Experience



Jesse Baer’s Midwestern Infinity Doctrine is a novel undoing the genre by unstitching time in both its form and content. Structurally, the book begins with “Final New Jersey Transcript” and “The Cosmic Dirge: Finale,” which sound more like titles for endings, and ends with “*Addendum: Subducted Time” and “Epilogue: Reversing Time,” seemingly flipping conventional order around. The reader enters the text as a detective embarks on a case, starting from sparse and ex post facto evidence and culminating in a fuller, though still incomplete, backstory. Suggesting a narrative reluctance to accept an(y) ending as conclusive due to time’s actual slippery dimensions, the chapter titles buck linearity. Within these nonlinear units, dominant concepts emerge around time, violence, and definition of the self. Baer’s approach to form ruffles those concepts, pets their fur backward, and recreates the experience of losing time, which can be one manifestation of trauma.

The Midwest gets a bad reputation sometimes, and I am from a part of it in between recognizable places. I can attest to the landscape’s potential for an outside-of-timeness, to how driving its highways feels a bit apocalyptic, particularly in the winter, particularly when it seems you’re the only one who sees anything out of the ordinary. Walk into a rest area and observe the families eating fast food or whatever and squabbling as if the landscape outside isn’t devoid of even rudimentary signs of life, lacking a color palette beyond shades of gray. The twilight zone. It is alien and alienating, a plausible setting for a novel imbued with UFO sightings and abduction reports.

On the road, Baer invokes the seasonally omnipresent deer in the woods and alongside highways, which brings with it a sense of unease. Baer writes, “A deer skins itself, because you were the math, inside velocity.” Hitting a deer, or any animal, with a car is unpleasant and dangerous. Deer are large and innocent. We empathize with them when we see them killed, perhaps because as roadkill they can look a little bit human. If a deer skins itself, that suggests you’re not at fault. Outside of hunting you really can’t control deer, which is itself a humbling reminder of individual frailty.

In the chapter “The Cesarean Scar,” time seems to run backward through two threads alternating in short sections. First, in a dreamlike scene a cesarean scar is untaped and the wound opened up. The last line: “Then, I break into my car.” And in between, a variety of quick scenes of confrontation take place, some with the narrator speaking from inside their car, contributing to the sense of reversed time. Amid the same chapter, the deer reappears in a new form. Baer writes: “My mother is weeping on the floor, a deer collapsed into its soft hind legs, an accordion cataracting within its mythological song, it won’t play, now.” Like the first scene of the chapter, this follows dream-like logic in which disparate common elements mash together. But it’s also true that trauma can cause fracturing of narrative, as we see frequently in film storytelling. When the accordion of your mother’s body no longer plays, breaking into your own car might be the most reasonable decision you can make.

The narrator tries on many different roles, often signaled by formal changes from one chapter to another, as they attempt to break time with language to access hidden truths from their own experience. Formal variations include radio transmission, abduction report, transcript. Most chapters bear titles or subtitles with familiar language that belies complex unexplained phenomena; just now, entering “time halos” into an online search engine, I find some video game instructions that tell me to “jump through the wall.” Irrelevant but apt. Like light halos that people with low vision see when driving at night, time halos would be experienced as pinches or radials of time. Variations in speed of time are impossible to prove since felt time is relative anyway.

These attempts succeed in breaking time. Baer writes: “this gesture expulsed what we were, waves attenuated. Slower than that. Carve back to the core, if you can find it.” Here we are, subject to time fluctuations. “In the spaceship, we just kinda float around.” No one knows how long it’s been and we are powerless. Further, in the chapter “Interlude: Time Mirages,” the narrator shapeshifts and “become[s] a paranormal investigator to save you from the human parameters.” In this role they perform competence amidst chaos and disrupt otherwise-inevitable harmful events. Human parameters might be self-destructive instincts, like the horror film lead who runs to the basement to hide. Suggesting that time manipulation is not uncommon, Baer writes: “Beneath the surface of the midwestern plains, thousands of women are burrowing wormholes in time. Their bodies crush through geological history.”

There’s a laundromat in my neighborhood with floodlights as bright as the World Trade Center memorial. I imagine mischief took place in this parking lot and the owners increased the wattage until it was no longer a fun place to be. How would you explain the vibe of a laundromat to an alien? “After solemnity enmeshed you within the liminal space of empty laundromats,” Baer writes: “you pursue yr precision in its opposite.” The laundromat is a difficult, even vulnerable, place, a place to get caught up in grim emotions. The scene quietly depicts a breakthrough: to “pursue yr precision” is a liberatory venture, and if one can turn toward it from a rock-bottom moment, then perhaps the laundromat is a site of great potential.

Midwestern Infinity Doctrine requires deep engagement as an intellectual exercise; it is a challenging read and an interdimensional adventure. To read a book like this one, the reader must slow down, stop reading for information and read instead for mood, atmosphere. Baer has crafted an homage to science fiction literature and media through this novel’s amalgamation of forms. The X-Files mantra “the truth is out there” is not just a TV catchphrase, but a resonant touchstone for the narrator, for abductees, and for anyone estranged from their own past. The same can be said of this novel. - Krystal Languell

https://bigother.com/2022/03/14/review-of-jesse-baers-midwestern-infinity-doctrine/


Excerpts:

My abilities were bleeding


This gearshift linguistics as Blanche Dubois spins her web and Telemachus eyes the suitors all things come to suspension. I reside here with my ambivalence as the propulsive force of the sumptuary absence which animates my line, dangled to catch what? Until we catch the light, her haunted music, and I want magic—to be revisited by the language of the sphere’s harmonies. The felt revolution which unties the thread to perforate my speaking throughout-time.


I will myself forwards into the slipstream rendering a chasm between my feeling self and the desire to say it is texture. This antinomy does not resolve it does provide decoys in the form of internal tensions perceived as absolute ends I refuse my own promises. Once one was to love to love dearly and truly and absolutely, my own polestar and to guide be guided by light I lay down my instrument having woven the tune from which I can imagine no escape. This lingering marrow leaks out fulfilling my absence in the root of my being, to be weeded interminably struck out and erased radically from the ledger of all botany. I dismember myself because forgetting is a caesura. The mythics of an endless sentence and its intervals deployed ludically, without remorse. If it was an imposture to supersede myself in secession to the chase itself, then I am a counterfeit symbol, lay it to rest.


He hides in the orchard, removing his face from my vision like sloughing a mask. I find the porcelain artifice of his betrayal strung against the tree bark, where all masks cast down light and I castigated beneath its unseeing vision. It replicates interminably.


Eye holes.

Here is the architecture for the artifice you were sewing and molding, kneaded with hands, the pressure lingers in the material: a dull heat throbs. As necromantics refrain from the living we cascade like water simply dazzling and without recourse to scission I carry my wound at my side, its hemorrhage makes the stakes made of our passing through each other, relinquished its autumn which dawn wound began. Dehiscence splinters the parcels where you packaged your fruiting, effloresce, its nimble occupation to fulfill the destiny of all plant’s nature, raggedly divulging the seeds of its wreckage to the impartial observer who held heaven with his shoulder. Staggering dust stirred throughout the vista. Did I summon him here? To look down.


All masks are their own desideratum to look out, and this contracts with infinity whose hilt I applied to your sign and the contours forgiven with my fingers parsing silences that rounded the gate, to chase quixotically from the crushed music of pastures. Its wreckage surmounted me where I watched the passing of light upon the ruins of a world that forgot me before I began to molder.


I came here to rust, I tell you with my gesture. It’s slower than patina, slower than the creeps of our own gardened delirium. How do I honor the dead who speak through my hearing them.


It was never yours? This injunction to compose it is music.


& we were dawn’s last word.


The radiation turns inwards toward the core dragged bed sky tug your claws out from me. Ousted in time’s jostling tracks. Shunted with Triassic chronology between us, escapes. Granular knowing your exit exit reason. Strategic deployments of mythology to luster through time. Scoured in the interior surfaces without losing reception. The cloud buzzed with cloud thoughts, overdrawn at the memory banks.


I wake up in the stall between times, in another ether body. On the table looking up eyes could not escape from mine. My mother says no, fractals. You were untethered when you spread your legs beneath space. The thermal pressure encodes when the crust reveals your secret weather. Its secret brain


You drag your memory out of me like an enclosed space for time capsules buried in the ground. We built a genital monstrosity out of earth. Shaft of dark antimatter and the revolving's soundless.


It’s so hard to keep going once you’ve left the continental shelves behind you must speak from the top of your head, cortices scramble for it, and click your heels once not again. You’re trying to freeze time and this doesn’t make you prehistoric, molasses, the screamcrushed insect means what? Your segments—busted.


Cleave to god cleave to rage cleave to rhythms in yr body Kristeva says I wreck ostracized death by turning. Swerves inside the body, dendrites bang to. The living around persona, in absentia, in a cigarette. You mashed your hand trying to.


I know you love me you sonofabitch just look at all these circles on your arm terminate in mud you burned holes through to dig your way out back in dirt. I ask you another question.


How long have I been waiting. To hear it ricochets echoes disclose nothingofthemselves. I have to creak, floor boards be reburied in earth, the tremors were subsiding mountains between you.


You came once if you ever came, come again and we all fall away.


The ladder stretches into in visibility, octaves lapse in the root, of what you were when vanishing.

http://www.americanmicroreviews.com/jessica-baer-interview

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Purple hinges the sky together. When electrical towers volt, we park our cars beside the end the end of time.


I.

In the midwest, bodies are guided by a preternatural internal magnet. At the center of the vanishing point of the horizon we converge: the Super Walmart. In the dream, you disclothed beneath the fluorescent lights, on the talkshow yr culpabilities were revealing.

“Do you have an individual reading light like, uh, a clip? For a book.”

I frame the employee’s face between thumb and index finger, at the crux of an alright angle. See, a square. Where’s its edges

Lately I’ve noticed myself making theatrical gestures that borrowed motifs from the movies. I like to wiggle my fingers into the itch after triggers, raising my hand towards You. You can lift mostlyanything.

Behind the supercenter, its immortal gloaming a refinery pumps slowmagma against the purple-contour ripped sky. Outloud, colors I cry My God, My God.

No one has the one product I need. So flatten space, you try again and mists strangle the possibility of depth the light contained. I hesitate before the solid blooming blocks of Indiana industrialnight. My Ford Taurus is parked across from another ford taurus they both smell like a fire hazard. When you have to magnify everything to get to the truth, shifting scales, I turn my head back, lower my body into its center, rocked away and carried forward, running at that improbable night

II. Indiana Abandoned

My weeds my weeds my weeds my weeds, my weeds rapture the air and hunk the concrete.

Pacing nurseshoewhite, and terminal. The abandoned hospital ahead of us finds the wedge in yr heart and finality dislodges it. What did you need this for

A red brick facade.

We enter through an improbable door.   https://tskymag.com/2019/06/jessica-k-baer/



VKN: I have never interviewed someone semi-rum(my)? before so thank you for giving me an opportunity to be a little bit buzzed. Speaking of buzzness (is that even a word?), your prose reads to me like a motorcycle swerving in and out of European cities indeterminately. How do you describe how words exit your consciousness onto the page? Do they move like a motorbike? Or something else entirely?

JB: Haha. Thank you so much for that beautiful image. Sometimes when I feel dislocated in spacetime, I find myself running up alley stairways in the Balkans but I never realized I was on a motorcycle until now. When I write I think of fluid dynamics, so like the eddies and suspensions of silt in a river and the breathless vertigo of the grace of being able to speak with myself fluently. I also definitely try to remain in proximity to death, like a stunt worker driving a motor bike.

VKN: Should your readers wear protective helmets or latex gloves when they read your work? What clothes should they wear when they open your prose?

JB: A hazmat suit would be sufficient, but better yet, an antique cosmonaut suit with an old diving helmet. Sometimes the air gets sucked out of the room of my body, is given to the movement of the piece and I want my reader and me to have a cosmic tether while we submerse and cyclically resurface. I wonder if the cosmonaut tether is tied to anything at all.

VKN: Cyclically resurface? Cyclically resurface makes me think of bicycle wheels drowning in ice, thawing out by spring, and then resurfacing for the summer seasons. Partly deflated, but ready to spin again if someone has the courage to re-pump.

JB: I like the quirkiness of this indomitable bicycle. If consciousness spins like a wheel then sometimes when you're moving fast, skids must be inevitable. I wonder if the bicycle ever changes positions or if it’s spinning in place, posthumous and subject to the mediation of the seasons. By cyclical resurfacing I think I’m describing sublimation, like the spaces where everything coheres and cocontaminates together so that it can be transformed. I think this piece passes through turbulence but is wrought into something that exceeds it.

VKN: How long did it take you to write the experimental piece “Mother Issues”? And where did you write it? Was it in sea-induced Providence or pre-slushy Chicago?

JB: That piece was written in feverish bursts of painful energy across about eight months in Chicago. I was intermittently soft homeless, so falling through space, so perpetually redefining and then losing the possibility of domesticity. For much of the time I was living in a diy space in Chicago converted from a gutted grocery store into a sort of curioso type open floor plan filled with Hammond organs, skeletons, and music equipment. It was also written in the vacillating sometimes painful interference zones of interpersonal intimacy.

VKN: I am sorry to hear the pain you endured. Livelihood hardship is one of the most terrifying conditions to exist in psychologically and physically. It’s a kind of unspoken torture and it seems endless. It warps our relationship to humanity and makes survival a perversity and not an adversity worthy of conquering. I understand and know what you mean. How were you able to shift out of it? What changed? What is your recent residence like now? Are you happy with your roof?

JB: Thank you for your very kind response; this is why I have so much difficulty with Bachelard’s poetics of space—it posits, like, a universalized unconsciousness of space defined without dispossession. I’ve spent my entire life rapidly transitioning between locations and I think this informs my work. Dislocation is a major issue for so many people and it’s important not to stigmatize the person who experiences its effects. I have privilege still in the spaces I’ve been given that might be wrested from others. I’m certainly still tempering my resultantly engrained wanderlust but for the next few months, am settled in a brick house in north Chicago. I think that my sense of temporality in my writing is reciprocally shaped by the velocity of my personal movements.

VKN: Would you like to accelerate the force of your velocity? What kind of temporality would you most desire for your work? What is the perfect piece of writing that doesn’t hope to take the shape of a tornado? Your thesis adviser, Carole Maso, talks about vortices in her classes a lot. Do you share her vision of vortices? And, what is your relationship to them, if any?

JB: I’m actually trying to paradoxically dilate and crystallize time because I am afraid of it, so I want to collect it in the ground and slow it down like amber. I think of pain as magnetic remanence that might shape a durable pattern in the materials we have. Often I feel a piece is finished only once I’ve reached the resonant frequency of my own body. If I set a vortex into motion, I would sound its eye.

VKN: What are you working on now, Jessica? Can you describe your project to us a little? Are you working on a novel? A poetry collection?

JB: I’m working on a piece called “Midwestern Infinity Doctrine” which is a psychogeographical study of the relationship between the flatness of the Midwest and different articulations of infinity, shifting between macro and microcosmic infinities. It’s about time and UFOs and conspiracy theories, sanctioned and unsanctioned knowledge, rhetorical paradigms, interpersonal violence, and what constitutes a “plausible” self. It shifts between numbers station broadcasts, manifestos, and auto fiction. I want it to be like a haunted radio for the drowning.

VKN: Your MID sounds majestic and scientifically enigmatic. We are in different geographical radio stations, transmitting rhetorical materials that look like an interview. Speaking of the Midwest—I am in Brooklyn right now and you are in the Windy City. I hope by conversing with a soul sitting in a red-curtained bedroom in Brooklyn doesn’t deform or skew your infinity doctrine. What was your experience in Providence like? Did you love it? I love its easy access to the ocean.

JB: What’s it like in Brooklyn right now? How does the weather feel inside you? When we met, we all talked about visiting the coastline. I like to pause before impossibly large elements. I constantly drove to Beavertail beach to find an immensity capable of more-than holding my feelings. I thought pvd was like the movie The Fog and I was Adrienne Barbeau in the lighthouse watching out for the flash of an ice pick through the mist. So, complicated impressions, haha.

I love this interview because right now I get to interact with you like a phantom typewriter. Infinity is definitely lurking behind the red curtain; you can find it mostly anywhere, I like to think.

VKN: Brooklyn is chilly, and so un-rumlike. I took three train stops and the weather inside me is tropical. I am a pineapple that has been roasting too long on a space heater, so to speak, though there is no space heater in this room. There is St. Germain inside me too, not the sofa but the elderflowers. What is inside you? I hope a bookcase or two and a fancy, silver wastebasket. I love wastebaskets. I am addicted to them the way one gets addicted to lollipops.

JB: My wastebasket is certainly unlined and small objects pass easily through. Thank you so much for transmitting your rich vitamin c to Chicago! In Mississippi, as a child, I would receive lollipops through what I called a spacetube at the bank, that peristaltic plastic tube that sucks up ur personal checks and delivers candy. How do you feel about banks with tubes? Did you ever go to the dive bar on Jewel Street in Providence with the juke boxes?

VKN: I love taking large and small bills to outer space. I think money is a better time and space traveler than Doritos. I think I may have given the bank tellers some by accident. I think so, yes. I didn’t dive very much and I didn’t bring any gold bars to the bar. I am not very good at listening to American music, Jessica. You must miss Providence very much? Did you ever walk on Wickenden? I used to live on that street.

JB: I used to chainsmoke in an alley off Wickenden and read Bataille a lot. I am so self-similar despite (because of) my viscousness. Oh wait! Also I was obsessed with the neon sign for the aquarium supply store on Wickendon which perfectly evokes slushiness. I took pictures of it everyeveryday. Have you ever taken a photograph of the same object repetitively and systematically over the course of time?

You really have to keep multiple denominations with you when you’re performing space travel. I miss everywhere; I’m a nostalgia machine, woof. Let me know if you need me to go get those Doritos back for you.

VKN: How many umbrellas do you own?

JB: 0. I have to borrow them. My car possesses two but it’s practically its own autonomous entity now, maybe my most enduring relationship. How many do you own and what color?

VKN: I own 1 beautiful armpit-held canopy, gifted to me by fiction writer Ali Raz. It is yellow and egg-colored and slightly psychedelic. Like most umbrellas, it’s inefficient—like it was designed for humans to frighten the rain or entertain the clouds or something and not to clothe our clothes from the rain, but I love it because it was gifted with thoughtfulness. This leads me to ask: what is your favorite piece of writing you’ve written? What do you love about it? And, has your writing ever clothed you from snow? From slushiness? From infrared light? From solar radiation? From indeterminate discourse with Foucault?

JB: That sounds like a beautiful gift and I hope that you have spooked the rain consummately. I want the record to show that I lol’d at being clothed from indeterminate Foucault discourses—what force could possibly protect us from him. Can I ask if you have a favorite book you’ve written? My favorite thing I’ve ever written is a poem called “Foreclosure Rodeo” which features many repressions which are done and undone by volcanic lava horses. Do you think writing can be protective or that it’s a conceit like an umbrella, or that the answer is both/and? I work through antiphasis a lot now so it’s hard to see writing as a stabilizing structure because I think as soon as I build something I unbuild it again? However I want as much infrared light to come in as possible.

VKN: My favorite is the one on its way to being born. I don’t think writing can protect anyone from anything. I used to think it could—that its gravitational center leaps outward and places you inside of a period, for X amount of time, and when the paragraphs walk away to take a shower or use the bathroom to leak, it sneaks back out to end a run-on sentence or two. I think writing, in this sense, is really lame. But practical. How do I stop my students from being writers, Jessica? What did you love about “Foreclosure rodeo?”—love those two words as a couple that shouldn’t ever get divorced. Please don’t divorce them even if you find excellent lawyers for them. All of those “e’s” and “o’s” in such tight vowel-inducing space and the “r’s” to disrupt them. Where did you write it? And, when? Were you young?

JB: I just saw Kim Hyesoon read in Chicago, which was a devastating eviscerating ecstasy, and I asked her about the sort of impossible geometries I think she animates in her work, where infinity hides in the corners (Derrida is digging it out) and the contamination between inside and outside, and she mentioned the eye as I think an interface that problematizes the in/out determination in a beautiful way, as well as her hope that the field of vision women are trapped in by reciprocating eyes will open and expand through her poetry. Like Alice in Wonderland style but much better than Carroll, I hope that writing will cause us to fall through portals that never cease opening out, which is not safe but unsafe and trans-safe. I want all bb students to be writers because I am gauche and sentimental. I want the erotics of confused diary entries and excessive revelation. I wrote it when I was a dreamy 20-something swimming in a pool of soupy infatuation. I like the idea of writing inserting pauses where you can rest from the world—a caesura to end time.

VKN: Your description of Hyesoon makes me want to read her—“eviscerating ecstasy.” How gauche are you?

JB: I know you’re not finished writing this question but omg South Bend. Gauche enough that I spend a lot of time in Hammond IN. (You can even dock your boat at the Hammond Horseshoe Casino on the lake). - Vi Khi Nao

http://www.americanmicroreviews.com/jessica-baer-interview



Jessica Baer’s new book Midwestern Infinity Doctrine, out from Apocalypse Party, might fuck you up. A revelatory cosmic kick from punk Chicago, with breakneck quantum leaps and time collapses. Dense, grief-ridden, but also loving: maybe you didn’t think a book could hold this much, but turns out MID is a portal.

Writes Vi Khi Nao, “Here the linear lives within the subliminal sequencing of itself, breaking out a kind of disco of sorrow, hypervigilant texts that hope to dance into bijections by abandoning itself to lexical chance. Here the abyss of Baer’s prosaic, cryogenic world does not thaw, but hyperventilates from insularity and significant enigma.”

I chatted through the virtual ether with Baer about the midwest, aliens, dreams, and time.~ ~ ~

Noah Fields: How did Midwestern Infinity Doctrine begin as a project?

Jessica Baer: It began because I emailed a friend of mine and asked them if they had ever had the experience of being in multiple places in time simultaneously, and they asked me to elaborate on that sensation. And then they said that I should write a project about it.

NF: If you had to summarize it, how would you describe your “midwestern infinity doctrine” as a thesis?

JB: I have been continually trying to summarize Midwestern Infinity Doctrine. The work lives on in my own attempts to understand what that work is for me personally as it’s continuously redefined. But if I had to give a doctrine for what it’s about, there’s like two dimensions that are interlocked.

On one dimension is what we could conceive of as the political real. So in that dimension I am trying to talk about conspiracy theories, social paranoia, alienation from desire, toxic masculinity and how that relates to those things. So like, depictions of violence in masculinity and violence perpetuated through toxic masculinity — where does it come from? how does it relate to alienated desire? and how do we disrupt what is perceived as the linear flow of time? It’s partially to make a new space, like an anomalous or autonomous space for — thinking about [Michel] Foucault too, some sort of like heterotopic space — for time to exist in a different way, so that people who don’t relate to time in the way that it’s presented to us by capitalism have a space to perceive time how they experience it.

So that’s the top dimension. The bottom dimension, underlying that is a comment on literature and feeling trapped by literature, and wanting to create some kind of writing that does something else or that escapes the expectations of literature and trying to figure out if the literary project itself can be a transgressive act or is more like a trap.

NF: I’m curious about where the Midwest specifically enters into that. Or maybe more broadly, what the Midwest means for you?

JB: One of the important aspects of this work is thinking about infinity. I am not a mathematician or physicist, and so I probably have a poor mathematical conception of infinity, but I do know that there are multiple infinities. And there’s different proofs for that, but there are uncountable sets that show that there’s more than one infinity.

When I think about the Midwest, I think of this optical illusion of endlessness — because the Midwest is so flat, that you can see for miles in any direction. Like Lake Michigan: Lake Michigan seems like a massive ocean-like presence, because it’s so flattened and endless looking. That sort of horizon of perspective draws you to the idea of infinity as something that I think you experience in the Midwest because of the landscape.

But I also have a lot of nostalgia about Chicago because it’s a place that I love. Because I feel like it’s an incubation chamber for weirdness, in a very warm way. But also post-industrial America? That is the Midwest — like these decaying, rusting cities, super Walmarts, just stereotypical American culture that is sold to you in terms of ideologies and American narratives.

NF: Sure, a place becomes more than a place. It’s like a vacuum sucking in all these ideological underpinnings. Let’s talk about those dreams! How do dreams play out in MID?

JB: I mean, the Midwest is sort of a dreamy space. Chicago, for example, has a veneer of nostalgia and sentimentality. Have you felt that? Like the personality of Chicago, how it’s spread all over the architecture and the neighborhoods, and this idea of what it means for a place to be Midwestern in the United States. So it’s sort of like a dream space of this nation that we partake in producing and reproducing together, because of course Chicago doesn’t exist — it’s occupied land. The United States doesn’t exist. The Midwest kind of exists, it’s kind of in the Midwest of the country, but relative to what?

NF: In your book, you write about becoming a “paranormal investigator to save you from the human parameters.” Can you tell me about what it means to be a paranormal investigator?

JB: Paranormal investigator for me is a useful way of conceptualizing the fact of being a poet. So it’s this sense of investigating the zones that exceed the normal or the accepted as empirically or ontologically given. So, existing in and putting a stethoscope to these fringe realms outside of what is accepted social reality.

For me personally, I feel that writing poetry is like being a person on the beach with a metal detector. Paranormal investigation is a similar thing — like if you imagine someone investigating a haunted house and moving through the rooms, knocking on walls listening for ghosts. It’s not that different from the way Jack Spicer conceives of it, I think when he talks about his poetry as coming from martian voices on the radio. It doesn’t matter if he believes in the martians or not, it’s that he believes in the idea of receptivity to something that exceeds what he knows.

NF: Hm. I’m interested in what you said about the writer’s receptive role, and in particular, I’m curious about the way your writing is maybe receptive to time’s multiplicities? How do you receive time in your writing practice?

JB: I’m glad you asked that question because I would love to assert right now that Midwestern Infinity Doctrine is a failed project because I failed to understand how to discursively reproduce nonlinear time. It’s built so thoroughly into the trappings of prose fiction especially to experience things in accordance to a linear conception of time that I still don’t even understand how to break that.

In terms of how I would ideally ideologically conceive of time? In this work I’m resistant to positivism. Any conception of linear time seems to depend upon a positivism like that things are building upon each other, and usually that is premised in a Christian conception of time or a capitalist conception of time, where everything is working towards some good end. In this book I wanted to disrupt that idea and argue that things aren’t moving towards some good end. And in many ways, things are just trapped in like an ongoingness where they’re not progressing at all.

NF: IDK, when I was reading your book, I didn’t get a sense of linear time. I guess I’m pushing back a little bit on this idea of your book being a failed project. I mean, I acknowledge failure can be a goal, like in Bhanu Kapil’s project [Ban en Banlieue]. I totally respect if failure is part of how you want to frame your project, but I also think that there is something that you are articulating that feels anti-positivist and offers a different way of orienting to time and poetry that feels vastly original and mind-boggling.

JB: That is the most flattering thing you could say that you felt that my book did reproduce a nonlinear time. Yeah, that is exactly what I wanted to do. Bhanu Kapil is so exemplary in terms of thinking about this beautiful carving of fragmentarity not really coalescing into some monumental project or a project of like a “major language” (in the Deleuzian sense) but like creating the minor works that are the actually significant works because they transgress those expectations.

NF: Who are your interlocutors that you bring your discursive universe?

JB: So maybe the most important interlocutor that I bring into it is Alvin Lucier because of his album I Am Sitting In A Room, which is an album where, because he has a stutter, he is trying to perfect the tone of his voice by recording himself saying this whole speech, and then playing it in the room and then recording it again, until his voice is lost in the resonant frequency of the room. For me, I think of that as a sort of creative praxis of the zone of art existing in this almost impossible space between the idiosyncratic stutter of the individual voice, and the universal — or supposedly universal — space of the overall artistic practice and its given expectations. And so it’s that interference zone when you’re moving between being Alvin Lucier’s unique stuttering voice to being just the resonant frequency of the room, and in my opinion that’s like a really good allegory for their process of making art.

And then there’s [Julia] Kristeva, the “Queen of Space” — so one thing that’s happening in the book is that it’s also a space opera. [Laughter] I’m like a cosmonaut, and I’m continually addressing this figure of Kristeva who’s like this matriarchal, but then this matrixial space, like a generative space — thinking about literature thinking about building universes. As a cosmonaut, I’m constantly refining her and trying to deliver some sort of message to her, which continuously fails.

NF: Among these semiotics and messages, perhaps: “alien hand prints.” You write,

“There’s a parenthesis for what’s inside me. if you fillspace, it’s an infinity

symbol.” I’m glowing with the alien hand prints fanning across my chest, patteddown from a fire. Who sets it, renews?

Can you tell me about these alien hand prints?

JB: Oh, yeah, alien hand prints. This is about interpersonal violence. And it is about the experience of having a UFO visitation. This is something that I’ve researched a lot and that I’m working on a project right now about and planning to do more with in the future.

To conduct the research for this book, I visited the Center for UFO Studies in Chicago: one of the most important UFO research organizations, which was run by this ultimately disgraced astrophysicist Dr. Hynek, who because of his relationship to UFOs became a persona non grata in his field. And so now, all of their records — which are first person accounts from people who have seen or have been visited by aliens etc. — are just housed in this person’s basement. And when I interviewed the person who’s responsible for the archive now, he said that the vast majority of the people that he was interviewing or who wanted to make a report wanted to remain anonymous, because they had so much shame about this experience of seeing something that exceeds the space of the socially given real.

That is one of the major themes of the book. Because we live in an incredibly gaslit society where the real is very much calibrated by authoritative forces. Like gender violence or even just the experience of alternative genders. These are things that we are gaslit about individually and locally, as well as more globally. So I was using this idea of “alien hand prints” — people who’ve been visited by aliens, people who experienced that or feel that they’ve experienced that — to think about the hand prints that are left on people who experienced violence. That violence leaves a hand print that may be visible to you or that may be pertinent to your life that may stay with you until you die, that other people may attempt to convince you does not exist, could not exist.

NF: For me the violence of gender as this orienting (or disorienting?) force or bottomless gravity field hooks up with your description of how “space is haunted.” And it makes me wonder, where in the hauntology of violent space-time can you sort of just be in a non-threatening way?

JB: Yeah, and I think that’s one of the primary tensions of the work, that inter-relationality is what prevents that being, and also accommodates or creates the possibility for that being. And so it’s so difficult to find those interrelational or interpersonal spaces where one can just be themselves, or become themselves, as a changing singular selfhood in relationship with the selves around you.

In this work I mostly focus on relationships that fail to accommodate that space or, like, are incredibly antagonistic to that space, but I have a few moments where I bring in those holding spaces, like people in your life who radiate that sense of safety that allows one to finally come to a sort of resting place, briefly.

NF: Absolutely. Do you think that Midwest Infinity Doctrine in some ways a love poem?

JB: Yeah, I mean this book is in many ways inspired by the aftermath of an abusive relationship in which I was in love with the antagonist! And that is a space that I also wanted to create in my literary work, because that space is so fucking stereotyped and codified in all of these very ridiculous and reductive ways that says you’re a bad subject if you fall in love with someone who hurts you; you become a good subject, if you leave them. And so this book is all about how you can leave and your life is still fucked up; you can stay and experience real meaningful happiness with them, even if it’s ephemeral. It’s just so much more complex than that. But what I think is a shared experience is the way that I felt frustrated by the fact that I wanted to love this person and their orientation was so anti-relational and destructive and violent and underscored by things like toxic masculinity and paranoia that I couldn’t, even though I desperately wanted to. And, as a result, they were able to inflict an incredible amount of damage onto me which I still live with.

But it’s definitely a love poem to the Midwest. It’s a love poem to friendships, relationships, queer friendships. It’s a love poem to science, which I think is also ambivalent.

But also, for me personally, this work was really terrifying, because in this book, I accidentally predicted my mother’s death a few months before it happened. Which, I don’t want to sound ridiculous but I think that when you write, you’re open to intuition and perception, like you’re especially open and receptive. And so it makes sense to me actually that in this book, I was able to pick that up. But I guess I’m grateful for that because it also means that in some ways this work allowed me to start processing my mother’s death before it occurred, you know? And if we’re thinking about mobius strip time, my mother is like alive and dead simultaneously; she’s gonna die again, she’s already died in the past, and she’s alive in the future and dead in the past; and the same thing will happen to all of us. And yeah, I like the idea of being able to experience that relationship in this less linear way. - Noa/h Fields

https://medium.com/anomalyblog/paranormal-investigations-with-jessica-baer-d5a454c61466



Jessica K. Baer, At One End, Essay Press, 2020


AT ONE END collects excerpts from a longer science fiction epic composed in a hybrid autofiction style, a mediation or recuperation of traumatic memory: the trans body, here, my trans body represents an attempted topography, mouthing around shape-hood, which fails to resolve into any ideal epistemological dimensions but, instead, like the syntax, mutates within your looking at me.



At One End and Midwestern Infinity Doctrine are two stunning new works by Jessica Baer that explore mergings and transformations of yous and Is, pasts and futures, trauma and its aftermaths. In the interstices of sound, where words merge, the living world in Baer’s writing bursts outward — an island ascending as foiled tectonic shift. This linguistic merging is also a thaw evoking an apparition of identity, haunted luminescence of self-in-mutation.

The writer characterizes At One End as “excerpts from a long science fiction epic.” In this collection of five titled segments, an unnamed time traveler is the only narrative constant as they move through time, affective spaces, and alternative endings. Through the sporing of time, in the metamorphoses of living, the present has been rewound, “No singularity, but repetition.” Assemblages of sense are made and unmade; narrative arches drawn then demurred; and references to characters (a mother, a lover) renewed across geographic signposts — New Jersey, Providence, the Moon.

Baer’s genre-bending text is an extended exploration of metaphors, such as of overheated and melting bodies standing for psychic instability, that survey the experience of being alive at a point in time inhabiting a body-in-formation. It explores these metaphors to convey the dissociative experience of the trans-body or the liquifying logic of recombining embodiment. In the introduction, Baer writes “The trans-body here, my trans body represents an attempted topography, mouthing around shapehood, which fails to resolve into any ideal epistemological dimensions but, instead, like the syntax, mutates within your looking at me.”

Selfhood in Baer’s universe does not parallel self-awareness or the ability to name one’s affective states. It is rather a relational tension between the speaking subject (which is multiple, engrained in oceanic resilience) and what lurks adjacent to breath. The “I” is ever dissolving itself so as to reemerge. And the “you” is an “I” looking at itself, but never fully distinct from it. Baer’s writing rips through the “you,” a redacted self, a grounded observational fissure. It remakes the “you” in myriad guises: the fecund image of a lover, a mother. The desiring and regretful “I” moves in the shadow of interrupted speech and averted gaze, a disappearing and estranged observer of one’s observing, whose “gendersmelt” holds the slippery wave of its escaping.

Images of self keep transforming and replicating. In the folds of time, phases ellipse into phases, so “you phase transitioned, shifting between states of solidity and fluency, slagging your neon green across the red sheets.” The body melting into steel or elsewhere built “from spare parts” beams with affective vibrations and object-knowledge. It absorbs and emits a history of sensations. It has been inducted by the implications of unilateral desire. At times, the body becomes heat, a tungsten connectivity turned telepathic hotspot: “see my body is burning all the time but no one else can see it so they can’t avoid the flickering halo of flames and I never wanted to hurt anybody.” Temperature unleashes the body’s travels thru misunderstood connections between body and brain. The burning sways in general invisibility.

At the end of this text, an exchange occurs between two entities, a reconciliation between the “I” and “NJMother.” Yet, the undergirding conflict is not specified. The NJMother assuages the “I” of an unspecified guilt: “It’s not your fault.” In this reconciliation, things of the past are exchanged and shed — a transaction that decides a future: “I just wanted to pick my things and leave theirs in exchange.” Many questions remain. Do the things of “theirs” belong to the lover in the first section? Or is the “theirs” referring to an abandoned iteration of the self? Why does NJMother appear here forming a kind of triangulation? The indeterminacy here is perhaps the point. Which object or being is so singular as to detach itself from its own mirror image? What is so distant as to have no parallel or precedent? This hyperbolic quest to fully inhabit one’s singularity lies at the heart of At One End. The title itself indicates that the one is only one. Nothing exists besides what is manifest in this iteration. Yet, the world repeats. Repetition is everywhere and the alienation pleating Baer’s writing dwells within a paradoxical tension. The pain (and forgiveness) the you/I needs emits from the one end, one exit, one premise jutting awkwardly against the “yet again.” Baer says it all distinctively:

Back on the moon, I remember my anti-quark, and wonder where it’s waiting for me. Maybe it’s stuck in the charged vistoelasticity of the lunar dust. Perhaps I was brought here to disturb the dust so that it plumes in dense flurries of soft white. If I could loosen my disremembered anti-quark from the lunar surface soil, which disintegrates to itself, I could break this chirality. I would disengender the spin that drives me away from you.

“To break this chirality” is to create a new equation, to reestablish novel relations of mass and perhaps also to recalibrate the psyche toward a fresh order, but also to “disengender” the motions that frame dialogical understandings within consciousness. Let me state the obvious: there are many possible readings of the above passage. This hermeneutical richness and density epitomizes the experience of reading Baer’s work — the very reason it requires an almost Weilian attention to unfurl its vibrant signifying range.

Midwestern Infinity Doctrine is a cosmological interpretation of the posttraumatic condition.

Here, Baer continues to blend autofiction and science fiction to explore a repository of personal history. Vampirism and alien abduction exist alongside the distillation of quotidian life and memory. In this longer manuscript, time travel becomes a state of consciousness, which represents the experience of trauma and abuse; the narrative unravels in fractured chrono-nuggets, from the future into an uncovered past back to some uncategorizable time-spindle. The world moves backward into the sight of grief and loss, into the autobiographical pressure of meta-commentary:

The auditory hallucination I’ve been experiencing since I left an

abusive person in 2016 is my brain’s attempt at a

hypercompletion of ambient sounds it’s a PTSD-related

phenomenon in the complicatedly intertwining zone between the

body and the mind where my dysregulated autonomic nervous

system and my hypervigilance device eachother together to

gather me away from

what is ruptured-time

and you’re not here in the pause but the wreck in my body

keeps gathering

Time is a socio-political relationship that permits the funnel tension of desire — which in Baer’s text is the driving force of time travel. Desire propels the time traveler who seeks to escape traumatic pasts but yearns for different endings, for the elusive variation of life. The past endures in the entanglement through which mechanisms of surveillance turn biological life into a late capitalist laboratory of institutional experimentation. So, Baer writes, “To situate ourselves within the polis is to situate our dreamful proximity to the idealism of linear time and it is in this sense that time becomes the privileged site where bare life is transformed into politicized life, reflexive with the coefficients of slowness and speed accounted for in a normativizing gesture towards homogenized time.” If norms spur forces of compliance and categorization, Baer’s text instills a total disruption of expectation through virtuosic linguistic and narrative inventiveness. Notice, for example, how the analytic mode of the previous passage shifts elsewhere toward an incomparable lyric register, one that recreates the negative space between words to rephrase their conceptual meanings:

We were cryogenically frozen into the hillside, for a trilliontrillion years, devoured by plantmatter. Here, We lose four hands making the shape of what is only between them. The earth ruptures its belt and the mountain buckled, drawing everything into the void pause before matter evolves, a chemically evoked litany. Yr body is the wet shell of a naked fetus this life feeds there, vibratile plasma. And the stars run hyperchromatic scales furling the night further away, a helix magnetizes: two ends that never meet. Repulsed because they were the self-identical.

What destroys us is also what releases an expansive perception of the pulsating chains of connection between events, people, and the tiny links driving the unimaginable. Yet, an inability to break with the re-experiencing of traumatic memory undergirds the notion of infinity that grips the attention of the subject. In the fold of an eye, the refracted light revels in endlessness. Looking itself mimics the experience of infinitude, and the multiple ruptures in the act of seeing mold the possible iterations of becoming. In the chapter “Earth In Memoriam,” we learn that “Jessica Baer,” the persona through which we experience the text, has been admitted into a hospital ward. The details of Baer’s life unfold under a scene of institutional surveillance:

Your patient file mentions that you’re from the south.”

Why don’t you spend more time in the recreational hall? The nurses mentioned that they never see you socializing with the other patients.”

We need you to provide an emergency contact. If we could just contact your family, we could make arrangements to keep you here. Without insurance, you’re likely to be transferred to the state hospital. I think you will find our facilities significantly more comfortable.”

Under such institutional scrutiny, Baer introduces the idea of infinity, here inspired by Emmanuel Levinas. For Levinas, we encounter the idea of infinity through our finite thought and the overwhelming sense of an infinite content that can fill it. In looking at another, one finds the plural singularity that each gaze returns — the Other is a face looking at our unseen face. The “I” is a face shielded from itself, that approaches itself only through what it mirrors for the eyes of another: “He jots a few notes, in a jerky authoritative hand. One last look through glass lenses, the light slips across, blotting out his eyes: infinity. Levinas annotated this division holding me closed.” The posttraumatic condition holds the subject captive in a loop that the awareness of infinity alone may interrupt. Infinity recognizes the irreplaceable singularity of each finite being, a relation that precludes the possibility of repetition. - Isabel Sobral Campos

https://www.full-stop.net/2021/05/13/reviews/isabel-sobral-campos/at-one-end-midwestern-infinity-doctrine-jessica-baer/



Jessica Baer, Holodeck OneMagic Helicopter,

2017


“Jessica Baer’s devastatingly imaginative poems feel closer than any other contemporary poetry written in English to neo-Baroque writing from more southern regions of the hemisphere. IMHO at least. The norms limiting the sayable are as pulverized in Baer’s hands as in the poetry of Perlongher, Sarduy, Lezama Lima, Haroldo de Campos.

Witness language acquiring a propulsive force shattering the time and space divide: “we wind up / in two timezones of experiential / holodeck, I’m ignition / here?” None of these cosmo-terrestrial phenomenologists are part of the North American canon and yet it’d seem Baer has absorbed them all.


Horses and holographs. Identity as orbit. A bricolage of psychocartography, a prism in love, poems for when the aliens finally come but only want to talk to the rocks. Holodeck One is Jessica Baer's debut chapbook, and it's a mysterious new technology. One that deweaponizes the language of self-constriction, one for all the noises that noise leaves out.


“Aleatory alterity” or astral projection? “Reentranced echolalia”? Sheer verbal articulations at the limits of desire and expression, “full of trans / verse wavenoise.”. - Mónica de la Torre


 POEMS BY JESSICA BAER 

"Earth Wedging Light" in Pinwheel
"Deer Black Out" in Prelude
Two poems in Fruita Pulpa
Three poems in Horse Less Review (with audio!)


JOURNALS

• Gazing for yr heart, if we blew, Go by stars, and very august [The Tiny Mag]
• Harbor Lines [Baest Journal]
• Perception's Toxic [BathHouse Journal]
• Griefmouth and The Powers of Horror ​[Black Sun Lit] (Print)
• ​Kill/Switch and "Working Title" [The Boiler Journal]
• ​Mask Generators / Weather Machines [Bone Bouquet] (Print)
• Kintsugi Variations and After Mareshiver [Deluge Journal]
• Crystalmine [Dream Pop Journal]
• In Pilsen and We Crammed [Fog Machine]
• Deleuze Fucked My Mother and The Church of Cattle Entrails [Fruita Pulp]
• Pegasus My Mother and 'Mareshiver' and Foreclosure Rodeo [Horse Less Review]
• Mineral Mnemonics [Leveler]
• Earth Wedging Light and Mineralremitting::radioact [Pinwheel Journal]
• a lovely chord / it ends [Potluck Mag]
• Deer Black Out [Prelude Mag]
• The Cretaceous Periods [Pulpmouth]
• I was never more and misconstructed you and The angels the angels and & Don't You Miss the Dancehall [Reality Beach]
• My Quora and Desynch [Queen Mob's Teahouse]
• Antler Axile [Sugar Mule]
• Excerpt from shortlisted finalist manuscript Midwestern Infinity Doctrine ​[Tarpaulin Sky Magazine]
• We Begin To Tessellate [Voicemail Poems]

ART CRITICISM

• Time filling a room like water [The Collaborative Center for Storm, Space, & Seismic Research]

Jessica Baer received their MFA from Brown University in 2017. They have published a chapbook, Holodeck One (Magic Helicopter Press, 2017), and their work has been featured in journals such as Pinwheel, Prelude Mag, Horse Less Press, and Bone Bouquet. They live anywhere and they love horses.

9/22/22

Yuri Felsen - Once considered the "Russian Proust", Felsen tells of an obsessive love affair set in interwar Paris in Deceit, an experimental novel in the form of a diary.

Yuri Felsen, Deceit, Trans. by Bryan Karetnyk, Prototype, 2022 [1930]


"This is ... real literature, pure and honest." - Vladimir Nabokov


Appearing for the first time in English, Deceit is the debut novel by Yuri Felsen, a leading modernist writer of the interwar Russian diaspora. Known by his contemporaries as ‘the Russian Proust’, Felsen died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, his life and legacy destroyed by the Nazis.

Written in the form of diary, Deceit is a psychological self-portrait of an unnamed narrator, a neurasthenic and aspiring author, whose often-thwarted pursuits of his love interest and muse provide the grounds for his beautifully wrought extemporizations on love, art and human nature. Modulating between the paroxysms of his tormented romance and his quest for an aesthetic mode befitting of the novel he intends to write, Deceit is a remarkable work of introspective depth and psychoanalytic inquiry.

Like voyeurs, party to his most intimate thoughts, we accompany the diarist as he goes about Paris, making enraptured preparations for the materialisation of his fantasy, observing not only his eagerness, dreaminess and poetic inclinations, but also his compulsive desire to analyse his surroundings and self. Yet amid these ravishing flights of scrutiny we discern hints of his monomaniacal tendencies, which blind him from the true nature of his circumstances. Thus begins an exquisite game arranged by the author, wherein it falls to the reader to second-guess the essence of what really lies behind his narrative.


Once considered the "Russian Proust", Yuri Felsen tells of an obsessive love affair set in interwar Paris in Deceit, an experimental novel in the form of a diary.

Following the arrival of Bolshevism in his home country, our narrator finds himself living in exile, in Paris. When a Berlin-based friend and fellow Russian expat asks him to look out for her niece, the beautiful and clever socialite Lyolya Heard, he is initially hesitant, but intrigued by Lyolya and her well-established reputation. Over the course of the novel, this curiosity devolves into a lustful obsession, as the hot-and-cold Lyolya sends mixed signals while pursuing the many objects of her own affection, none of which seem to be our narrator. In rich and introspective prose, this novel in diary form speaks as truthfully about the timeless problem of unrequited love as it does about the fragile reality of daily life in interwar Europe.

Subtle and profound in its exploration of love, deceit and betrayal, Felsen's novel is a daring and highly original work of psychological fiction. Originally published in 1930, Deceit was recently rediscovered in Russia after much of Yuri Felsen's archive was destroyed by the Nazis.

Referred to by some contemporaries as “the Russian Proust”, Felsen’s work has recently been rediscovered in Russia. His modernist debut novel Deceit was originally published in Russian in 1930 by Paris-based publisher J Povolozky & Co, and the upcoming edition by Prototype will be the first time that any of Felsen’s books have been published in English. This new translation and publication of Felsen’s work has been supported by the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation.

Prototype explained: “Set in interwar Paris and taking the form of a diary, the novel relates the complex and fraught relationship between an unnamed narrator and his love interest and sometime muse, the beguiling Lyolya Heard. Subtle and profound in its exploration of love, deceit and betrayal, Felsen’s novel is a daring and highly original work of psychological fiction.”

Karetnyk said: “Felsen is one of the great undiscovered Russian writers of the 20th century, so the opportunity to bring his debut novel into English is both an honour and a career highlight. It’s especially pleasing that the novel’s exceptional merit has been recognised by the Prokhorov Fund through its generous support of the publication.”

During his lifetime Felsen, the pseudonym of Nikolai Freudenstein published three novels as well as over a dozen short stories, and extensive essays and criticism for the émigré literary magazines Zveno and Chisla. Following the German occupation of France at the height of his career, Felsen tried to escape to Switzerland. However, he was caught, arrested and interned in Drancy concentration camp. He was deported in 1943 and killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.



‘The miracle of Yuri Felsen is how his apparently Nabokovian rhythms lull you into a false sense of security, before a sudden and chilling exposure to the weather of a walk where the whole elegantly interwoven conceit of the narrator is ripped apart. And the pain of someone like Walser glints through a decadent surface of exiled life in Paris, to hint at darker shadows to come.’ – Iain Sinclair


‘Towards the end of this strange novel in the form of a strange diary the narrator declares that “it is impossible to live without deceit”. What has preceded this bald statement is the work of a connoisseur of deceit in its multitudinous forms, the most potent being a subset of self deceptions described in painful raw detail. It’s a work steeped in absolutely joyous misery.’ – Jonathan Meades


‘Dark thickets of language part to reveal a pearl of psychological prose and a highly actual account of the psychic impermanence of migration.’ – Sasha Dugdale


‘Deceit is a strange and beautiful dream, an intimate and tragic love letter from a lost world.’ – Camilla Grudova


‘He [Felsen] has rightly been compared to Proust in his determination to make language capture every atom of the mind’s workings… This translation is a formidable achievement.’ – Literary Review


‘Felsen’s name deserves to be conjured with, just as it was before Paris fell.’ – The Sunday Telegraph


‘Yuri Felsen’s Deceit offers the reader that rarest of gifts: a glimpse into consciousness as it was constructed nearly a hundred years ago; a portrait not only of how one Russian émigré lived in Paris in the first half of the Twentieth Century but of what and how he thought. This is an improbably modern novel in which, to my own surprise, I seemed, again and again, to encounter and recognize myself.’ – Miranda Popkey


‘As astute as it is disturbed, as callow as it is wise, and as brilliant as it is idiosyncratic, Deceit reads like the twisted love child of Proust and Dostoevsky, but with a genius all its own.’ – Antoine Wilson


The debut novel by Yuri Felsen, an author once regarded as the “Russian Proust” whose work has been forgotten since he died in Auschwitz in 1943, is set to be published in English for the first time.

Felsen, the pseudonym of the Russian émigré author Nikolai Freudenstein, was born in St Petersburg in 1894, emigrating after the Russian revolution and settling in Paris in 1923. He was seen as one of the leading Russian writers of his time, ranked alongside Vladimir Nabokov, but when France was occupied in the second world war his escape to Switzerland failed, and he was killed in Auschwitz’s gas chambers in February 1943. His manuscripts and letters were lost – possibly destroyed – after his arrest, and his work is almost unknown today.

Academic and translator Bryan Karetnyk discovered Felsen’s name while reading literary criticism from the 1930s, finding that he was widely praised, and going on to track down Felsen’s own writings.

“In the so-called ‘Russia Abroad’, Felsen was unanimously held up by his contemporaries … to be one of the most original and significant writers of his generation, next to Nabokov,” said Karetnyk. “Felsen’s plunge into obscurity came about for a variety of reasons. Not content with having sent him to the gas chambers, the Nazis did everything in their power to destroy his legacy, and his archive disappeared without trace following his arrest.”

Karetnyk has now translated Felsen’s first novel Deceit, which was originally published in Russian in 1930, into English, with the book due out next May from independent press Prototype Publishing. Written in the form of a diary, and set in Paris between the wars, it sees the unnamed narrator tell of his fraught relationship with his love interest and muse, Lyolya.

“It really made Felsen’s reputation as one of the leading writers of the so-called ‘younger generation’, although of course it was banned in Russia,” said Karetnyk. “The fine psychological portraiture of the protagonist and his love interest, as well as the beautifully wrought philosophical meditations on love, art and human nature, bear parallels not only with Proust, but also with other greats of modernism including Nabokov, Woolf and Joyce.”

Jess Chandler, who founded Prototype in 2019, said that she acquired Deceit because she saw it as “an extremely rare opportunity to introduce a highly significant, undiscovered modernist work to an English readership.

“Felsen’s writing would undoubtedly have been hugely influential had his legacy not been destroyed, and Deceit will still feel contemporary and groundbreaking to readers today,” said Chandler. “As a publisher interested in freeform literary art, this novel from 1930 feels as exciting as anything I have read in recent years.”

Only brief extracts of Felsen’s writings have previously been translated, although his collected works were republished in Russia in 2012. His writing, said Karetnyk, remains resonant today.

“He consciously positioned himself as an anti-totalitarian writer (in that he was both anti-fascist and anti-Bolshevik), championing love, artistic freedom and individual identity, and seeking to give them heightened expression at a time of mounting political pressures that would rather deny them, at a time when writers were desperately seeking out new ways in which art could provide adequate response to political tyranny. Without exaggeration, I believe we’re living in a time when these ideas have renewed political, cultural and artistic significance,” said the translator.

“On a more literary note, given today’s obsessions with autofiction, his profoundly psychological prose, which marries private experience with artistic expression, is also a timely reminder that this genre in fact has a long and distinguished European history.” - Alison Flood

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/01/debut-novel-russian-proust-published-in-english-yuri-felsen-deceit



Deceit, published in 1930 and Felsen’s first major novel, takes the form of a diary in which the narrator recounts his fraught, on-off relationship with Lyolya (whose real-life counterpart perished in Riga during the Holocaust.) In what amounts to an exploration of the age-old Madonna-whore complex, Lyolya represents Felsen’s Platonic ideal but is unfaithful both to her husband and the novel’s protagonist (and narrator), who in turn betrays Lyolya with two other women, leading the reader to conclude that self-deception is the mother of all deceit.

Yet for Felsen, deceit contains existential properties. There is a “curious mental exertion that can be produced only by deception, and from which alone derives that most intriguing, most inexplicable activity of ours — shaking off the desolate human darkness, extracting more and more fragments of indisputable knowledge.”

Equal in importance to deceit is the act of writing: “I find writing to be not only a useful and distracting enterprise but also a means, perhaps the only means, of speaking freely about what matters most to me.”

Felsen, a modernist, has been described as “the Russian Proust”. His three novels, of which Deceit was the first, were indeed meant to form part of a large scale literary project entitled, at one time, Recurrence of Things Past. Felsen, like Proust, is preoccupied by “involuntary memory” and its relationship to fiction.

But readers expecting a Russian version of Remembrance of Things Past will be disappointed. Proust, as capable of looking outward as inside, draws his readers in with what Nabokov termed “the transmutation of sensation into sentiment”, whereas Felsen’s preoccupations with the inner workings of his psyche can be more alienating than inviting and his characters often little more than vehicles for philosophising.

Yet his tortuous style paradoxically beguiles, and, in the detailing of his inner world Felsen frequently elicits profound truths about human nature and its motivations. His self-regarding prose stands as a riposte to that unchallenged dictum of contemporary writing: “Don’t tell, show.” Given social media’s solipsism and public self-examination, Felsen’s writing captures the zeitgeist well.

And at a time when Eastern Europe has once again descended into nihilistic hostilities, this autobiographical fragment sadly resonates: “I should like to belong to the school that… for me represents a kind of neo-romanticism, the exultation of the individual and love set in opposition to Soviet barbarism and dissolution in the collective.”

Felsen’s narrator wishes: “I cannot escape the persistent vain hope that one day these notes of mine (despite myself and, as it were, as a reward for my pains) will be read carefully by somebody.” Prototype Publishing has performed a useful service in introducing a neglected but intriguing Russian writer to an English-speaking readership. - Mark Glanville

https://www.thejc.com/life-and-culture/all/deceit-book-review-intriguing-introduction-to-the-work-of-largely-forgotten-russian-emigre-yuri-felsen-78dGoJ6giCQewNU22bAYdI



In the aesthetic and ideological turf wars waged in the 1930s among the writers of the Russian diaspora, virtually everyone had a good word to say about Yuri Felsen (1894-1943). As the memoirist Vasily Yanovsky (1906-89) observed, Felsen “was miraculously aided by various influential people, many of them hostile towards one another; each of them made sure to praise him, even inordinately, at least once a year”. For this reason, Felsen’s work is easy to blurb. However, as Yanovsky pointed out, it was indecent how quickly those who praised Felsen proceeded to forget him. And, alongside just about every affirmation of Felsen’s writerly quality, one finds, as part of the same utterance, a deprecation of his “difficult”, “sticky” style.

Vladislav Khodasevich (1886-1939), a pre-eminent poet and critic of the Russian exile, liked Felsen for his “microscopic investigation of feelings”, but observed that his painstaking psychological analysis lost much through his “laborious stylistic complexity”, which rendered much of the effort demanded of his readers “unproductive”. (For private consumption, he later wrote a humorous poem in which a maharajah with insomnia learns Russian just so he can read Felsen as a soporific.) The critic Pyotr Pilsky (1879-1941) appreciated the experimental, relentlessly self-analytical quality of Felsen’s prose, even though he found it “dark, cloying, dry and exhausting”, of interest to critics, not readers. “Who can listen to an entire concert for just one flute?” asked the poet Boris Poplavsky (1903-35). Well, surely some people can and do. But something else is apparent in all this praise: this “writer for the few” was seen as a profoundly unthreatening competitor. Leonid Livak, in his authoritative How It Was Done in Paris: Russian émigré literature and French modernism (2003), describes the situation more charitably: for many émigré writers, “no notion was more prestigious … than the artistic failure of a writer in search of ‘truthfulness’ and sincerity”.

Born in St Petersburg as Nikolai Freudenstein, Felsen trained as a lawyer and fled to Paris after the Revolution. He wrote three novels – Deceit (1930), Happiness (1932) and Letters About Lermontov (1935) – as well as short stories, essays and reviews. Deceit is the first translation of Felsen’s work into English, other than a short story, “Extras”, published in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2020. All of his fiction is in the first person, and most of it concerns the unrequited romantic obsession of a…- Eric Naiman

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/deceit-yuri-felsen-book-review-eric-naiman/



ON SATURDAY, February 13, 1943, a crowd of 998 men, women, and children clambered out of the dilapidated boxcars and down onto the Judenrampe, the unloading platform for new arrivals at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. The transport had been organized by Adolf Eichmann’s department of the Reich Main Security Office, which at the time was busily overseeing the deportations of foreign-national Jews from occupied France. This was the 47th such group to endure the two-day journey from Drancy, a transit camp situated in one of Paris’s northeastern suburbs; en route three people — two men and one woman — had tried to escape, but failed.

It is the Sabbath, and among the crowd, a tall, elegant, slightly stooping figure, noted for his “Aryan” good looks and fair hair, joins the men’s line, awaiting selection. For those sent to the right, what lies in store is the dehumanizing process of registration, tattooing, disinfecting, and, ultimately, hard labor in the typhus-ridden camp. For those sent to the left: oblivion. Though the figure, whose documentation lists his profession as “homme de lettres,” is only 48, the SS doctor examining him notices his stooping back — the result of an affliction affecting the ligaments of the vertebrae — and duly directs him to the left. Unfit for work, and so for life. That night, a little after the Sabbath ends, the figure, along with 801 others, is led off to one of two bunkers that lie to the north of the ramp, converted farmhouses hidden from view by woodland. We cannot be certain whether it was in “the little red house” or “the little white house” that he met his end (although it was probably in the latter), but we can be sure that late that same night his murdered body would be borne out and disposed of in a nearby mass grave. Thus ended the life of one of the most unique figures in 20th-century Russian literature.

In all likelihood, you have never heard of Yuri Felsen. He plied his art in emigration in Europe, and so was already marginalized and at a significant disadvantage. Writing “difficult” prose and being labeled “a writer’s writer” sunk his chances for fame still lower. Moreover, his terrible end was followed by the mysterious disappearance of his archive, so in addition to what he published, only a handful of his letters survive, and not a single clear photograph of him remains. And yet, for all that fate seemingly tried to efface this man and plunge him into obscurity, he nevertheless left an utterly distinct, if now faint, mark.

I first encountered his curiously un-Russian surname several years ago, as I was reading Gaito Gazdanov’s “Literary Professions” (1934), one of his notorious polemics on the state of Russian literature in exile. Feeling by then the strains of deracination, Gazdanov was in a characteristically mordant humor, and in the article he provocatively claimed that the emigration, for all its freedom from Soviet tyranny, had produced only one writer of genuine artistic merit: Vladimir Nabokov. He immediately qualified this assertion, however, adding an ominous comment that was later revealed to be sinisterly accurate:

I wrote “only one talented writer,” but that of course was an oversight […] It is impossible really to talk of Felsen, whose fate seems almost foredoomed. He is an honorable fatality, a battle of one against the many, lost before it is begun.

My curiosity was piqued further as I observed, one by one, the major names of Russian émigré literary criticism, even the most inveterate rivals — Vladislav Khodasevich, Georgy Adamovich, Zinaida Gippius, Wladimir Weidlé, to name but a few — sing Felsen’s praise. Even Nabokov, who so importunately lampooned and travestied the self-styled “Paris note” (one of the emigration’s major literary movements, which sought to combine the despair of exile with the cynicism and anxiety of the modern age), singled out the now-forgotten author as the school’s only true artist.

A blueprint of Felsen’s life emerges from a handful of scholarly works and memoirs — most vividly in Elysian Fields, an outspoken, remarkable account of émigré Paris written by Felsen’s close friend Vasily Yanovsky. The author, critic, and essayist’s real name was in fact Nikolai Freudenstein, and he was born on October 24, 1894, in St. Petersburg, not long after his parents moved to the Russian capital from Riga. The eldest son of a distinguished Jewish family (his father was a doctor and his extended family had influential connections at Court), Felsen read law at Petrograd Imperial University, graduating in 1916 “without the slightest vocation for it.” In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, he and his family relocated to Riga, in newly independent Latvia, where he began writing sketches and publishing in the local press. In the summer of 1923, he made his way to Weimar Berlin, and then, toward the end of the year, on to Paris, the capital of “Russia abroad.” Conversant in French, German, and English, Felsen set himself up in business there, engaging in what he himself termed “independent ventures” — which is to say he played the stock market and pursued various commercial enterprises, among other things, as a means of supporting himself as a writer.

He debuted under his literary pseudonym in 1926, and by the time of his death 17 years later he had published three novels — Deceit (1930), Happiness (1932), and Letters on Lermontov (1935) — as well as over a dozen short stories and scores of feuilletons, essays, and criticism. The publication of his first novels secured for him a serious reputation; it also marked the beginning of a great literary project, variously titled The Recurrence of Things Past and A Romance with an Author, which would span the rest of his days and encompass each of his subsequent novels and the lion’s share of his later short stories. The scale of Felsen’s literary ambition, combined with his thematic interests and baroque, stream-of-consciousness prose style, earned him the moniker “the Russian Proust.” His chef d’œuvre presents a fine, sustained psychological portrait of a neurasthenic would-be author, Volodya, and his eternal object of desire, Lyolya, while at the same time elaborating beautifully wrought philosophical meditations on love, art, and human frailty.

For me, the real revelation in reading Felsen was his beguiling use of language and the sheer depth of his psychological introspection. His long, tortuous periods take the reader on a journey into the human psyche. To paraphrase Adamovich, the emigration’s foremost critic (as well as Felsen’s friend and early mentor), reading him is by no means an easy undertaking, but for those willing to engage with his work, the rewards are exquisite. His style is unlike that of any other writer in the Russian canon, and with this rich, idiosyncratic, poetic prose he evokes not only the existential angst of his milieu, but moreover the innate psychologies of his characters, which are drawn with a lightly cynical, wry humor. Time and again I find myself reading and rereading passages, marveling at Felsen’s ability to give expression to the counterpoint of thoughts and emotions, profound and trivial, that we can experience in a single moment. Take, for instance, Volodya’s at once comic, perceptive, and ultimately touching attempt to justify a shopping spree intended to impress his beloved:

Without stopping at home, I set out post-haste for all the shops I required — earlier, before the money’s arrival, in order not to tantalize myself needlessly, not for anything would I have lingered by shop windows (much too enticing and beyond my reach) — today, however, as soon as I left the bureau, where the debonair old boy had paternally slipped me a primed envelope containing a check, I immediately began totting up how much I would spend on what, adjusting the figures, swapping one decision for another and proving to myself once again that I was quite able to make spontaneous decisions — indeed, I drew up a half-mock (though quite serious) budget, carefully adhered to it, and then hastily bore off my purchases, so as to lay them out together all the quicker. At home each purchase seemed to me a miracle of good taste (as we find everything that bears the hallmark of our selection, our accidental favor, our slightest efforts, and to which we immediately cede both our sense and our serene equanimity), and each of these tastefully chosen items, gifted to myself, unexpectedly drew me closer to Lyolya — for her sake alone had I chosen them, and so in every respect, even in this act (not only mentally and emotionally), did I prove myself worthy of her.

Or his crystalline description of the indignity and dread that follows a night of inebriated over-indulgence:

Now this “tomorrow” has dawned, one of those maddening days that are spoilt from the very outset, when, having awoken, you do not know what went wrong the previous evening, when you look for something to find fault with and then recall some heated, unnecessary words, a careless act that might seem frivolous, deceitful, irrevocably binding, and the sense of having made an irreversible mistake now permeates everything, irrespective of what happens before sleep comes again, and there remains (because of the impossibility of undoing what has been done or taking back what has been said) but one sole desire — to hide, to sleep, and never to wake up.

While many writers have successfully conjured up the atmosphere of the Parisian cafe, with its Russian waiters, “gypsy” music, and romantic anticipation, few, I think, have captured, with such nuanced, expressive clarity, the internalization of that atmosphere. In Deceit, Volodya diarizes an evening spent there, as he waits for his beloved Lyolya to arrive the next day:

Now the gypsy woman urgently sings out my favorite “everyone remembers their beloved” — and, one after another, muddled thoughts race through my mind: that without fail “everyone” will remember (there is a touching grandeur to the enormity of the generalization); that I too shall remember is, for me, the most important thing, but this alludes not to the past (though the music might easily have stirred that up), but to tomorrow’s Lyolya, in sudden proximity, alive and almost palpably in love with me. Then comes a new, dancelike, lulling meter and new, peculiar words — “the heart is spent on caresses” — they have the charm of a humble, uncomplaining, eternal readiness to sacrifice, but my objection is unwavering: no, the heart is not “spent,” but enriched — one need only crack open the heart’s riches, and they shall prove inexhaustible.

In Felsen’s world, it is precisely these inner riches that are able to engender poetic vision and raise the quotidian and prosaic to an apotheosis of artistic beauty. For all her cruelty, the mercurial, beautiful, and enigmatic Lyolya forever remains the center of Volodya’s psychological and emotional world, and his love for her the impetus for his writing. How sobering and poignant, then, to learn that the original of Lyolya — Felsen’s “Beatrice of Riga,” as Adamovich dubbed her — would ultimately share in his woeful fate, also perishing in the Shoah.

In the Talmud it is written, “Blessed be the one who resurrects the dead.” I cannot resurrect Felsen, but perhaps in trying to raise him from obscurity I can do the next best thing. And what better place to begin than his art, which, for all that has been lost and destroyed, shall forever remain the truest testament to Yuri Felsen’s life.

Will Felsen finally find his audience? Perhaps Gazdanov again holds the answer. The off-the-cuff remark that began my acquaintance with Felsen, despite its grim foreboding, went on to elicit from me a wry smile. To illustrate the author’s predicament, Gazdanov thought it prudent to draw a parallel with a little-known German poet, who had died some eight years prior. “How many readers have heard of Rilke,” he asked, “one of the most remarkable poets and writers of Germany? You read him and are amazed: how and why is this name not famous the whole world over?” Gazdanov was ahead of the curve. And it thrills me to think that there may be hope for Felsen yet. - Bryan Karetnyk

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-truest-testament-on-the-life-and-art-of-yuri-felsen/



DEEP DOWN nothing has changed: by no means have I chosen my present identity (buried as it is under layers of women, books and cafes).”

Displacement and the search for identity form the heart of Deceit, a novel by the Russian Jewish émigré author Yuri Felsen, which was published in Paris in 1930 and now appears in English for the first time. Meticulously translated by Bryan Karetnyk, and with a thoughtful, informative introduction by Peter Pomerantsev, the novel takes the form of a diary written by an anonymous Russian émigré in 1920s Paris. Each of the entries is a deep psychological exploration of the nature of love, heartbreak, and deceit, and collectively they chart the diarist’s obsession with a fellow émigré, the alluring but ultimately unattainable Lyolya Heard.

Lyolya, perhaps in her imagined rather than her real form, offers our bachelor salvation, as well as a link with his Russian self. Identity is essential to survival for those forced to quit their homeland, a fact repeatedly if obliquely emphasized by our diarist, who laments that “everything in Russia feels taken from us forever.” This desire to retain a Russian identity is one of the novel’s main threads. The diarist only speaks to fellow Russians and seems permanently ready to criticize others for their un-Russianness. Meanwhile, the French language, always untranslated, encroaches just at the very edges of the text and reminds the reader of these Russians’ status as foreigners in a foreign land.

If the diarist’s relentless quest to win Lyolya’s affection could be seen as an attempt to find a safe harbor while he is adrift from Russia, then he is fated to remain at sea. Lyolya, he finally concludes, “embodies deceit.” Hidden beneath his allegedly candid diary entries, however, is the core paradox that Lyolya has a closer relationship with the truth than he does. As the story unfurls, the diarist’s unwillingness, or inability, to admit to what both his friends and his readers can see as the truth, is highlighted by his own observations. ​Our bachelor describes each of Lyolya’s slights against him in excruciating detail, and yet he continues his pursuit. Take, for example, this beautifully timed description of his first few days with Lyolya who, we soon learn, is adept at shutting down her potential lover’s amorous advances. The pair have just spent the evening with a friend, the enigmatic Monsieur De Waal, and are finally on their own:

I began to kiss her hands (which until then had been so singularly alluring and out of reach, unforgettable even for a moment), but I did not kiss them boorishly, as I might have wanted, but with that usual disingenuous tenderness that every one of us can muster if only we ape infatuation, which was necessary here, lest I repulse and offend Lyolya. I was clumsy — I know this to be true – but Lyolya seemed touched, commending me amicably and freeing herself:

Thank you, my dear, for the evening — you engineered it all admirably. Till tomorrow, then.”

Lyolya’s standoffishness does not stop him from pursuing her. Later, when he suspects (while the reader is certain) that Lyolya is having an affair with his friend, the diarist is still resolved to be with her. He refuses to leave the pair on their own and sits in their bedroom like a petulant toddler in an effort to prevent any intimate relations. He then sequesters himself in the adjacent room, straining to hear proof of any intimacy. While he listens, he reads, without a trace of irony, André Gide’s Les nourritures terrestres.

Our bachelor’s self-deception is not the only example of deceit explored here. Despite his professed love for the uncooperative Lyolya, the diarist pursues intimate relationships with two other women, Ida and Zina, and drops them upon Lyolya’s return without any regrets. He is only annoyed that he has to go through the breakup process at all. Would a letter be too cruel, he ponders. He ​claims he sleeps with Ida because he is drunk and starts a relationship with Zina ​in order to make Lyolya jealous. He would much prefer to be able to meet with his women for “immediate gratification” without performing all the “tedious and insincere overtures” he feels obligated to make.

The reader may not approve of our bachelor’s attitude to women, or his penchant for watching them in cafés, but we can readily sympathize with his anguish when he does not hear from Lyolya, and the torment he experiences as he sits and waits for her alone in a café on a Friday night. Recognizable too are the heartbroken diarist’s actions. When Lyolya returns to her former lover Sergei N., our bachelor revisits old arguments, going over what he should have said. Eventually he writes Lyolya a letter listing all of his grievances, though he never mentions whether he actually sends it. He tests their relationship constantly, searching for proof of Lyolya’s feelings for him, and even when he is with Ida, his description of physical pleasure quickly spills over into recollections of Lyolya.

Throughout the diary, Karetnyk’s seemingly effortless translation captures Felsen’s wit and comic timing perfectly. The diarist considers spending the night with a prostitute just before he meets Lyolya for the first time, but he decides against “gifting [himself] a night of unencumbered generosity.” Likewise, the description of his quest for oblivion after Lyolya’s rejection is wonderfully paced:​ “I began to intoxicate myself with an array of various liqueurs in turn, trying to avoid that ambiguous, transitional state […] Intoxication came quickly.” When he decides to visit Ida in the hope of a night of passion, and realizes that success is near, he admits that “in such cases I know I wear an obnoxious, triumphant smile, one that I cannot suppress.”

Karetnyk’s careful handling of Felsen’s intricate sentences is to be not only commended but relished. Midway through Deceit, the diarist hopes against all odds that Lyolya will return to him and performs a mental trick to convince himself that he can still salvage their relationship. He describes his thoughts as he rescues himself from despair, layering clause upon clause to create a vivid account of his mental process:

Without love we fall into a stupor or despair, it covers our naked animal essence; with the fear of death, with deliberate attempts to grab hold of some kind of eternity, one that is at once a mystery to us and yet devised by us, even the remains of love, even its very echo in music, imbues us with a semblance of fearlessness, dignity and the spiritual range to disregard death. Only by loving, by knowing about love, hoping for love, are we inspired and meaningfully engaged in life, able to banish the sovereign of petty day-to-day cares, to stop waiting for the end to come; hence my conclusion, my hope — despite doubt, despite experience, despite my perennial, easily pacified patience: Lyolya must love — for my sake (thankfully I have mellowed, and it startles me to think for the first time — for her own sake, too); she cannot leave me, else she will know how feeble, how inadequate and elusive are the remains of love, and how, before we realise it, it will be too late. Because of the enormous triple strain — Lyolya’s almost tangible presence all day, somebody else’s dying, desperate music, my own foolish fever — I have ceased to doubt and now begin to believe, with rejoicing, with relief, that Lyolya has already staged her intervention.

One wonders what Felsen, who was killed in Auschwitz in 1943, would make of his long-delayed transportation from Russian into English. Had Karetnyk not stumbled across Felsen ​during his research, this author, who was heralded as an heir to Proust by his peers, might have remained unknown to the Anglophone world. The fact that Deceit has come into English almost a hundred years after its debut speaks not only to the power of translators to rescue authors from obscurity, but also to the importance of independent presses such as Prototype in commissioning new and relevant voices, no matter where or when they are writing from. Timely, relatable, and thoroughly absorbing, if Deceit proves anything, it is how little both our interior and exterior lives have changed over the span of a tumultuous century. - Sarah Gaer

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/almost-tangible-presence-on-yuri-felsens-deceit/



Yuri Felsen, a leading émigré writer in Paris between the wars, died in Auschwitz in 1943 — Bryan Karetnyk’s fine translation of Deceit is Felsen’s long-overdue debut in English. Deceit takes the form of a confessional diary, charting the highs and lows of his relationship with his muse Lyolya. Felsen has been described as the Russian Proust, and his intensely layered psychological self-scrutiny is comparable to the French great, although without Proust’s rich imagery. We are trapped in the narrator’s head as we’re trapped in our own consciousness; this is Felsen’s power.


Women’s bodies do come under the microscope — size of hands, length of leg, texture of skin are examined objectively. This dates Felsen but if his rejected lovers are made to suffer humiliations, “Zina ... came over to me ... (I was sitting by the little table adorned with fruit) and, resting her hand on my shoulder, slightly crouching on her long legs, reached over me to the apples ... ” — his psychological insight compensates. Unable to respond to Zina because his other lover, Ida, is present, “I thought how distressing it is to recognise in everything the inequality that we have wrought (even when it is in my favour) ... ” — the humiliations suffered by the narrator are boundless. Proust’s wicked humour comes to mind. Felsen is a master of human expectations and the subsequent accommodations of those expectations. When he does focus on an object, he works it beautifully. In the first flush of their relationship, Lyolya insists on mending his glove. Later on “I asked Lyolya to mend an old, soiled glove of mine. Just as I had anticipated, she marvelled at this request and replied, half-incensed: ‘Your concierge will do it far better than I’ ... it was not difficult to discern ... an accompanying renunciation of any sweet concern ... for me ... a note of squeamish disgust directed specifically at the glove ... I had poisoned that delight forever”.


His insight is so sharp yet he cannot help himself. The relationship descends into hell — a cardigan sheltering Lyolya’s infidelity with another lover provides some wicked hilarity. Yet despite all his cynicism — he asserts that “It is impossible to love without deceit” — he continues to offer up his “dwindling strength to the cruel ... whims of love’s divinity.” Human beings just can’t help themselves.

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/review/2022/06/25/deceit-by-yuri-felsen-translated-by-bryan-karetnyk/



Our narrator is not a writer but a businessman, though he is writing this diary we are reading. We are not sure what sort of businessman he is but we do know that he struggles. (Felsen himself apparently lost a large sum of money on the stock market in Paris.)

He starts off as he means to go on – miserable: Everything I have is superficial—appointments, acquaintances, time-keeping—dull and dry, and it hopelessly anaesthetises what little in me remains alive, my final frail impulses: I cannot achieve even a melancholy clarity with regard to myself, a sense of remorse, however inert, or the simple warmth of human kindness. Only more persistently than before, more shamefully, do I sense that I am the same as others, that, like everybody, I swill down idle days in trivial anguish, and that one day I must, as must everyone else, rightly disappear.

Then an old acquaintance from Berlin, Yekaterina Viktorovna N., writes to him to let him know that her niece, Lyolya Heard, was coming to Paris. Lyolya was divorced. She had been living in Belgrade, was now in Berlin and was coming to Paris. He knew of her from when he lived in Berlin as Yekaterina Viktorovna N. had mentioned her and even implied that the pair would make a fine couple .Before she arrives, before he has even met her, he has decided that she is the woman for him. Though he has a negative view of life (I am often made to feel out of sorts as a result of the fairly commonplace notion that every expectation will be frustrated, that the joy proclaimed to us will be robbed), he is very optimistic about Lyolya.

He has made a good business deal and for once has some money. He books a room for her. When she arrives she is not too keen on the room but finally accepts and the pair seem to get on well. She had had a relationship with an actor, Sergei, who is now famous in Moscow but that had ended. Or had it? The relationship between out narrator and Lyolya, at least from his perspective, does not continue well. Never have I, with any woman but for Lyolya, been able to talk without that ghastly, deprecating other voice that appears the moment I catch a woman out and, for my own sake, expose her frailty or deceit . - The Modern Novel            read more here: https://www.themodernnovel.org/europe/europe/russia/yuri-felsen/deceit/