Incisive and loving at the same time, Forever Forest Upper Field
paints a portrait of Japan from a perspective that, like the elephant
in the room, is almost never breached nor openly admitted, but rather
felt through the bodies of the haunting and unnamed characters
traversing through the lonely landscapes and vacant city squares in
the prose-sketches, full of human warmth in the pockets of spaces
remaining where the governing forces have not yet rendered them
lifeless, glowing in the deep of the night, that read like the voice
of a lighthouse in the uncomfortable silence.
Setsuko Adachi
writes a rhythmic prose that steps across the pages to remind us of
the inherent beauty of the way to use the language that can at once
be universal and specific. It raises a unique voice that is
simultaneously foreign but also recognisably naturalised — much
like the webs of metropolitan thoroughfares that she describes and
brings to life. Tan Jingliang’s entrancing photographs, which
accompany the text, further intensify the energy of Adachi’s
stories, and provide the syncopations that befit the expansive
story-telling. The images, narrating an extending vista, draws us
deeper into an aesthetic that is not beyond subsuming the dystopic
purely for the purpose of creating a better art, both visual and
verbal. — Lim Lee Ching
I believe this
collection of vignettes, this tapestry of Setsuko Adachi’s texts
and Tan Jingliang’s images, this collaborative work that through
keen lenses examines the “usual/normal/correct world,” exposes
how society’s oppressive systems are too easily accepted by far too
many people. Adachi and Tan’s work acts as a unified voice,
comprised of unique, individual, independent thinkers acting through
empathy; a voice putting forth a poignant warning to which this world
needs to harken. — Michael Kearney
Belan is the CEO and
he needs this PowerPoint deck asap. The narrator, however, just wants
to fly home - and he might not deliver what Belan is expecting. Set
mostly during a delay at SFO, The Belan Deck captures one traveler's
reflections on art, artificial intelligence, corporate life, David
Markson, coincidences, and literature.
"Very smart,
witty, insightful, very literary, and a lovely homage to Markson."
- Steven Moore, author of The Novel: An Alternative History
"An
excellent, piercing account of the AI question and a reminder of the
potentials of fractured literature, or maybe fractured life more
broadly. Marksonian to the core and just a joy to read." - Kyle
Beachy, author of The Most Fun Thing
"The Belan Deck
almost acts as the placement of a hyper sensitive human antenna
extended into our cold, dark accelerationist evolution into the
Information Age looking for ways in which we can still mine and
reflect back upon ourselves some deeply luminous sign of life that
reminds us of the beauty resting within the heart of what it means to
be human. A must read." - Phillip Freedenberg, author of America
and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic
"Fantastic, a
work of profound wisdom." - Greg Carlisle, author of Elegant
Complexity
I stayed up later
than I meant to the other night reading all of Matt Bucher’s new
book The Belan Deck in one cover-to-cover go. On his website, Bucher
describes The Belan Deck as “a little book…set mostly during a
layover at SFO” that “centers around a person who maybe doesn’t
really fit in at their AI tech job but still needs to produce one
final PowerPoint deck.” This description approximates the plot, in
the barest sense, but doesn’t touch on the spirit or form of The
Belan Deck.
Let’s talk about
the spirit and form of The Belan Deck. Bucher borrows the epigraphic,
anecdotal, fractured, discontinuous style that David Markson
practiced (perfected?) in his so-called Notecard Quartet (1996-2007:
Reader’s Block, This Is Not A Novel, Vanishing Point, and The Last
Novel). “An assemblage…nonlinear, discontinuous, collage-like,”
wrote Markson, to which Bucher’s narrator replies, “Bricolage.
DIY culture. Amateurism. Fandom. Blackout poems.”
Bucher’s bricolage
picks up Markson’s style and spirit, but also moves it forward.
Although Markson’s late quartet is arguably (I would say, by
definition) formally postmodernist, the object of the Notecard
Novels’ obsession is essentially Modernism. Bucher’s book is
necessarily post-postmodern, taking as its objects the detritus and
tools of postmodern communication: PowerPoint, Google Street View,
Wikipedia, social media, artificial intelligence.
At the same time,
Bucher continues Markson’s obsessions with artists and death,
adding to the mortality lists that wormed through DM’s quartet.
Bucher’s updates are odd though, in that they seem to, in their
print form, contextualize anew coincidences that were so raw and
immediate when they popped up on Twitter and other social media:
Nicanor Parra
died the day after Ursula K. LeGuin died.
Larry McMurty and
Beverly Cleary died the same day.
(In my memory,
William H. Gass died the day before LeGuin, but this is not true. He
died almost two months before LeGuin. But I recall teaching
selections from both of their work in a literature class in the
spring semester of 2018, and pointing out to my students that the
empty spaces behind the dashes after their birth years might now be
filled in. “An encyclopedia entry demands at least a birth or a
death,” notes Bucher’s narrator.)
The encyclopedia, by
which I mean Wikipedia, becomes a heroic motif in The Belan Deck.
“Wikipedia is the number one result for over 50% of Google
searches,” Bucher’s narrator points out, following it up with,
Wikipedia, made
by humans, for free, is a better search engine than Google, the most
expensive and sophisticated algorithm in the world.
Earlier in The Belan
Deck, the narrator points to the “mindless pleasure of going down a
deep Wikipedia rabbit hole,” a pleasure that an artificial
intelligence, no matter how developed, could never feel. About three
dozen pages later, Bucher’s narrator throws a slant rhyme to his
previous note on the “mindless pleasures” of Wikipedia rabbit
holes, pointing out that Thomas Pynchon had used Mindless Pleasures
as a working title for Gravity’s Rainbow. That’s how this book
operates: Disparate fragments of information are “Clues rather
than trivia.”
The goal is to find
the sublime in these connections; Bucher’s narrator repeatedly and
succinctly argues that finding the beautiful, much less the sublime,
is impossible for an artificial intelligence. The Belan Deck plays
out as a discursive, looping, and unexpectedly moving argument for
humanity, in all its serious triviality, against the backdrop of
capital’s rapid encroachment into the human position in the arts.
“Capitalism is
incompatible with being an artist, for most people,” avers our
narrator. “Yet you participate!” might come the retort, and it’s
true—not only does Bucher’s narrator work in a soulless medium,
the deck (trying to inject some soul, some sublime, some humanity
into it), he also works for the soulless Belan, a money guy who would
love to replace artists with machines. (In what I think has to be a
great intentional gag, Bucher’s narrator’s point of contact for
Belan is a middleman named Jimmy Chen. I just have to believe that
the character’s a take on the Jimmy Chen who wrote and designed on
HTMLGIANT for all those years.)
The narrator
participates because there aren’t that many other options, as we
all know. “Do you understand what I am saying? Does it also feel
this way to you?” the narrator plaintively asks. I mean, for me,
that’s a Yes, all the time.
There’s much more
in The Belan Deck than I can get to here—more on art, artists,
baseball, airports—it’s voluminous for a “little book.”
(“When we buy a book, we think we are buying time to read” is a
line I underlined but could not otherwise work into this review, so
I’ll include it here parenthetically. (A lot of this review has
happened in parentheses.))
I’ll end with two
bits of personal trivia, two coincidences.
First: The day The
Belan Deck arrived in my mail, which is the day that I read The Belan
Deck, some AI-cheerleading dork went viral on Twitter for posting a
series of unasked-for renderings of “what the backgrounds of the
most famous paintings in the world look like with AI.” He was
roundly and rightly mocked for his endeavors, and I found the general
antipathy heartening, but still a small cadre of people who know
absolutely nothing about art congratulated his vapidity.
Second: Earlier that
same day, I read a passage from Walter Tevis’s 1980 dystopian novel
Mockingbird, and found its sentiment largely heartening as well. The
hero of the novel, staring at a “dumb parody of humanity”
declares it “nothing, nothing at all.” He continues, pointing out
that the forces of capital “had given robots to the world with the
lie that they would save us from labor or relieve us from drudgery so
that we could grow and develop inwardly.” But underneath this false
promise was a deep “contempt for the ordinary life of men and
women,” a deep hatred of human life itself. The sentiment I find
heartening here is in the hero’s recognition and resistance to this
contempt.
The Belan Deck isn’t
a straightforward guidebook or manifesto or map, but it nevertheless,
in its elliptical, poetic approach, offers a winding, thinking,
feeling path of opposition to not only the machines themselves, but
also the hollow men who would gladly replace artists and creators and
thinkers with those machines. It’s also really fun to read. Great
stuff.
“An attempt to
smuggle reality into anything, into a PowerPoint deck.”— The Belan Deck
“Plotless.
Characterless. Yet seducing the reader into turning pages
nonetheless.”— David Markson,
This Is Not a Novel
The scaffolding of
character and plot are here in The Belan Deck, but they can be summed
up swiftly, and they are beside the point in Matt Bucher’s
excellent new book. The first-person narrator works for a tech
company in the AI field. He doesn’t like his job (or his employer’s
CEO, Belan), he doesn’t believe in the work or the company’s
mission, and the job is looking extremely precarious anyhow, but he
has to produce a final PowerPoint deck for Belan. He’s using the
deck as his chance to lob “a sort of intellectual grenade on the
way out the door.” As he waits for a flight home to Austin from San
Francisco International Airport, he reveals all the thoughts and
anecdotes he’s pouring into the deck. The text is fragmentary. Many
of the fragments seem like trivia at first, but if you read Bucher on
the book’s own terms (“Clues rather than trivia”)
constellations emerge of theme and image.
Bucher makes a
heartwarming case for humanism and ordinary life as against the creep
of artificial intelligence and other tools of capitalism that make
work dull, meaningless and intolerable and that make the life of a
serious writer or artist nearly impossible. The book recruits the
reader’s curiosity to help build its deepest meaning and find its
relation to the works and lives and history that came before it.
Like in David
Markson’s Notecard tetralogy, the fragments in The Belan Deck hang
together. There are flashes of connection between things we might
not think are connected. Matt Bucher was generous enough to answer a
few questions I sent him, and he talks about Markson in the brief
interview that appears below my review. When the reader of The Belan
Deck takes the time to follow the clues (and follow the clue here
means add the context to the short anecdotes) patterns emerge. The
figure Bucher explicitly uses is rabbit holes, that metaphor for so
much of contemporary online life for the curious. The joy of
following a trail through interconnected Wikipedia articles is one
most of us have experienced. The narrator describes this feeling as a
deep need inside us.
As an example of
my reading of the way the fragments hang together, one image of life
The Belan Deck traces for us is horses. We’re told early on that
Belan, the CEO, “loves the Kentucky Derby” (page 10). The
narrator’s own great-grandfather had been named Leo Steven Belan, a
coincidental fact that did not impress Belan, the CEO, when the
narrator told him about it. We’re presented with some of Leo
Steven’s diary entries from 1910. They are dry and factual. “Cloudy
most of day. Worked on shop.” Until suddenly they’re not.
“Sunday, June 12, 1910 – Clear warm. Drowned two horses (Black)
(One Horse & one mare) Drove in pond to wash wheels, horse laid
down and pulled mare over him, got tangled in harness.” The moment
caught my breath, as history tends to do. The horse was not a machine
but a living animal. Later, the narrator tells us that there is good
art on display at SFO, and he looks at some old photographs. “The
next photo is of a man at a racetrack standing next to a horse. A
jockey sits on the horse and the two men appear happy, as if
they—meaning the horse—have just won the race” (page 27). On
the next page, we learn the famous Seabiscuit was owned by a man
named Ogden Mills who also owned the land where the airport now sits.
If every Wikipedia article is interconnected, that is only because
the facts of the world are.
Like in Markson’s
tetralogy, many of the anecdotes in Bucher’s collection are touched
with sadness. Some were well known to me. Others were not. David
Foster Wallace and Mark Rothko both appear but left unsaid is how
each man died. The baseball players Bill Buckner and Tom Seaver who
were briefly teammates on the Redsox doomed 1986 team both died from
Lewy Body dementia. Thomas Merton died suspiciously. Francesca
Woodman died very young by suicide. Robin Williams. Michael Jackson.
Grace Kelly. Malcolm Lowry. Randall Jarrell. The thematic build can
be powerful even if the book’s wordcount is spare. It is by this
gathering method rather than the straightforward march of traditional
plot that The Belan Deck works.
An aspect of the
book’s structure that strongly appealed to me reminds me of the way
Walter Benjamin uses fragments in his convolutes in The Arcades
Project. Events from modern Jewish history in Europe and America come
to life and a picture expands out from the suggestive anecdotes when
a bit of extra light is thrown on them.
Bucher shares the
story of Thomas Pynchon sending the comedian Irwin Corey to accept
the National Book Award on his behalf in 1974. That year, Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow shared the award with A Crown of Feathers and
Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer. What is left unsaid here is
what Singer’s book is about, which is the lives of Jews in Poland,
New York, Paris and elsewhere, Jews who have been through Nazi camps
or Czarist pogroms. Another fragment (in the straitened style of
Markson) tells us: “Zola died of carbon monoxide poisoning due to a
poorly ventilated chimney” (page 56). The story of this death is
not as simple as it sounds here. Zola involved himself on the correct
side in the Dreyfus Affair, a notorious case of antisemitism in turn
of the 20th Century French history. Another fragment reminds us
Dreyfus was shot during a ceremony at Zola’s tomb. A short fragment
asks: “Did Primo Levi jump or was it truly an accident?” (page
73). The record company executive Saul Zaentz is mentioned. “In
1980, Saul Zaentz sued John Fogerty, claiming Fogerty had plagiarized
his own music” (page 91). This fact seems to have no discernible
relevance to the rest of the book, but Zaentz’ parents were Polish
Jewish immigrants.
There is no
narrational commentary linking any of these facts and questions. The
references instead make demands upon us. The fragments signify
survival even if it is only a piece of a story. Reading them today
gives them what Benjamin called an afterlife. The book will seduce
you to turn pages whether you chase the clues or you don’t. But if
you do there is so much more to think about. I’ll close by pointing
out that there is now a rabbit hole connecting David Foster Wallace
to Matt Bucher via David Markson and there is a rabbit hole
connecting David Foster Wallace to David Markson via Matt Bucher.
This is pretty cool.
Brief Interview with
the Author
1. Like many online
book nerds I’m familiar with your interest in David Foster Wallace,
the list, the podcast, the Society, etc, but I only recently learned
of your interest in David Markson. Can you share a little about what
his work means to you as a reader and writer?
Matt Bucher: I’m sure I
discovered Markson through DFW’s essay on W’s M, but I did not
fall in love with Markson’s work entirely until I read his final
four books: Reader’s Block, This is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point,
and The Last Novel. Evan Lavender-Smith wrote a great book sorta in
Markson’s style (From Old Notebooks) and he called those four books
of Markson’s “porn for English majors.” I had never read
anything like them before and it was, for me, a moment of “are you
allowed to do this?” combined with “how did this guy do this?”
So I went down the Markson rabbit-hole and read all of his other
books and everything I could about him. Like me, he’s a collector.
He didn’t write this way until later in life and I do think it
takes many, many years of practiced collecting before these sorts of
facts and trivia begin to accrete into something solid or meaningful
with lots of interconnected parts. And honestly one thing I loved
about Markson is that he was a stubborn old man. He spent a lot of
time obsessing over aging and death. But my interests are pretty
different than his, and I think what I got from his work was a way of
thinking and writing that I could make my own.
2. Do you use a
card system like Markson to work the form you used for this book? I
figured the line in the book about always having several paper
journals on you at all times is from reality, but how do you go from
journal thoughts to building a work like The Belan Deck?
Matt Bucher: Yes, I started out
years ago aping his style completely, using that notecard system. I
filled about one shoebox lid with notecards, which is one reason my
book is shorter than his (he said he filled 2 shoebox lids with
notecards, per book). However, I moved away from the notecards into
another longhand system of writing everything out into a journal and
then typing it into a document later. I mention this in the book, but
I think Markson would have loved the “find” feature in a Word doc
(and Wikipedia, too). I was obsessed with index cards before Markson
because that’s also how Nabokov wrote, but these days the system
that works best for me is just to have several different sized paper
journals going. It took me a long time to find the right format and
the right story for this, and changing how I wrote and organized bits
of trivia—or rather, integrating that system with a way of writing
fiction that felt natural to me—is what made the book come alive
for me.
3. Have you
encountered anyone smuggling interesting or weird things into a
job-related PowerPoint in your working life?
Matt Bucher: Just me! I used to
work for a textbook publisher and there is one particular grade-level
writing text into which I was able to smuggle a ton of Infinite Jest
references :). But I truly hate PowerPoint and think it is such an
ephemeral format that it’s not even worth putting too much effort
into creating a presentation.
4. Besides Markson,
who are some fiction writers who played with form who you think
people should check out?
Matt Bucher: Markson took some
inspiration from Evan S. Connell’s elliptical style in Notes Found
on the Beach at Carmel and Points for a Compass Rose, but those are
books where the prose looks like poetry. I would also mention Georges
Perec who did a ton of different things with style and format. And
all Oulipo writers for that matter. Harry Mathews is probably my
favorite. His novel The Journalist devolves into a weird, nested
format that looks like something on a private, demented PowerPoint
slide. Another book that inspired me was Brenda Lozano’s Loop,
which was titled Cuaderno ideal in Spanish (Ideal being a brand of
Mexican notebooks and journals). Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is another
hard-to-categorize book I return to a lot. Obviously, I am attracted
to the mega-novels but I also adore slim little books that cram a lot
of art into a small format. Joe Brainard’s I Remember and Amy
Fusselman’s Idiophone are two examples of that. And one of my
favorite writers is Dan Beachy-Quick. He’s a poet, mostly, but has
experimented with all sorts of forms and I guess I like writers who
are able to follow their weird, eccentric tastes and do something
interesting on the page. David Shields is another one. - Jay Innis
Murray
All thought is driven out of sight, and before long unpleasant
things start to happen right in front of us...
Kari Hukkila's
One Thousand & One is a philosophical, essayistic novel about
catastrophes, both natural and man-made, about humans' ability to
respond to catastrophes by thinking or, at the very least, simply
managing to survive. Hukkila's novel is a cornucopia of
micro-histories, digressions, and a broad gallery of characters
ranging from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to an Ethiopian
refugee in Rome.
One Thousand & One begins when a large birch
tree falls on a cabin near the Russian border in eastern Finland,
leaving the narrator unable to concentrate on a writing project he
has been at work on. He decides then to take up an invitation to
Rome, where his lifelong friend has lived since abandoning a life in
philosophy. In Hukkila's novel, Scheherazade's survival by continuing
to tell stories is reimagined as survival by continuing to think, a
continued thought activity, often taken to extremes, the preservation
of humanity in an inhumane world. In David Hackston's eloquent
translation, Hukkila's musical, meandering, thought-provoking prose
is full of savage, ironic, and luminous humor, remaining
uncompromisingly alive until the final sentence.
One Thousand &
One is the first in a projected series of five novels. Upon its
release in Finland in 2016 it was said to bear "all the
hallmarks of a classic."
Thought no longer had a place in
the world, and of course if you're an illegal it's all but
impossible.
From Troy to
Hiroshima, Crimea to the nuclear Nevada desert, we make our tracks
over the war-scratched globe, and when we reach a ruin or a
destination we read the markings, record them using various forms of
photography. Later—or much, much later—someone else in turn will
try to understand our silvery traces. These are the threads that
Melissa McCarthy follows, unpicks, weaves again into a nexus of light
and time: the mirrored silver cells of a shark’s eyeball, sunlight
glinting off the foam and sea wrack of the Aegean on flower with
corpses, the silver salts of photographic paper, silver
grave-treasures at Ur.
Like an
archaeologist in her own strange literary landscape, McCarthy cuts
through layers of history and technology to realign the dead and
their images. She examines both what can be photographed and what
remains always just beyond the frame, and photography itself. It’s
a practice involving chemicals and the action of light. But it’s
also an organising principle for literature and beyond: there are
marks made—by us, on us—that we can’t yet fully see or
understand, though they push on through to the surface, always
re-blooming.
“Four dazzling
essays about images, destruction, flowers and invention, forging
unexpected links between Agamemnon, archaeology, early photography,
explosives, neuroscience, mirrors, Twin Peaks, and—the author’s
special interest—sharks. (Did you know that sharks see everything
twice?) Melissa McCarthy combines a sharp, precise intelligence with
great warmth, wit and sensitivity; her brilliant monograph is sure to
become a durable classic.”—David Collard
“In Photo, Phyto,
Proto, Nitro Melissa McCarthy mixes her four headline prefixes in the
crucible of her wit to capture the endless interactions in nature and
art of destruction, flowers, images, and invention. Like Montaigne
writing about the destruction of the Aztec empire, McCarthy
constructs her text as a vehicle in which to move across the
corpse-strewn wastelands and oceans of human history, gathering
together the images that survive and the flowers that unconscionably
bloom. The result is an extraordinary feat of quizzical, inquisitive
invention, an essay that never stops moving.” - Richard
Scholar
“McCarthy asks,
How do we picture the world? Her answer is: Metaphorically, one thing
in terms of another, and then another. And so she writes a beguiling
microcosm of a book which, like the ‘aleph’ of Borges, contains
everything: from Agamemnon to algae, from Hiroshima to Hergé, and
not omitting the inside of a shark’s eyeball.”—Dr. Andy Martin
“From Aeschylus to
Jaws, via histories of photography, tattoos, chemicals and some of
the most horrific moments of the twentieth century, Melissa
McCarthy’s Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro reads like the reed mats dug
up from a Sumerian city: an assemblage of lightly woven textured
texts, ‘crumbling as we try to consider them’. McCarthy
approaches writing as a generous reader, as a detective, as a
rummager among archives, as an archaeologist, as a photographic
developing agent. The book is suffused with the pleasure of looking
and finding and showing and sharing. McCarthy has a way of
recalibrating perception, finding the depth in a surface and surfaces
in the depths, helping you to see for just a fleeting moment that
perhaps yes a camera is also a coffin, and a shark is also a camera.
The result is forensic, joyful, surprising and rich. As McCarthy
herself writes repeatedly, ‘This is great’ and ‘I love this’.”
—Tom Jeffreys
“In this sequel to
her amazing Sharks, Death, Surfers, Melissa McCarthy shifts the focus
to photography and, as its jingle title advertises, makes completely
new stopovers and connections that indelibly change how we look at
and through the medium. While it participates in what is by now a
genre of study of our deep attachment to the vestige, her
contribution doesn’t get lost there. By offering rigorous
reinterpretation of the photographic image’s posttraumatic
temporality (from its lurking latency to its potent efflorescence,
which in the end happens only to recur) McCarthy’s analysis
situates not the history but the essence of the medium within its
near miss with doubling.”–Laurence Rickels
Though I have now
read it twice, I cannot remember the title of this book — that is,
I keep getting its four words mixed up. This is perhaps because the
four essays of which it consists (‘Flowers,’ ‘Early Processes,’
‘Refixing the Image,’ and ‘Explosions’) follow a sequence not
of Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro but of phyto, proto, photo, nitro. The
title might not have been chosen only for its more euphonious
qualities but to acknowledge the fact that what the book does among
many other things — is to show that these four elements (to quote —
‘Photo: to do with light. Phyto: plants and flowers. Proto: the
first, the original. Nitro: it blows up’) are not discrete objects
or processes, but ones which inhere in each other. Each section loops
back on the others, blooms and branches out, leaving traces on its
counterparts.
This method in turn
provides a guide to reading the book. The first section begins with a
brief mention of tattoos before rapidly turning to John Hersey’s
book about Hiroshima then pauses to closely parse one small excerpt
from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon before moving on to archaeologist Leonard
Woolley’s accounts of the excavation of Ur. That’s just the first
ten pages. There are another 118 to go, and the pace doesn’t slow.
The reader here will
be forgiven for worrying that PPPN may merely be yet another voguish
non-fiction book, one which attempts to link together a number of
disparate ‘oh-isn’t-this-quite-interesting’ facts, take a punt
at uniting them somehow then add a dash of personal memoir to create
something which we are assured will change how we think about subject
X or Y for ever. Relax, it isn’t.
The book also
manages to avoid the risk of information overload: while the method
may initially seem digressive, it is anything but. PPPN follows its
trails of argument precisely — every detail mentioned is vital as
it will be returned to, and looked at again in a sharper light or
from a different angle or in a new context, bringing each element and
the whole they form into clearer focus and relief each time.
McCarthy’s style is clear, even when dealing with complex subject
matter (the interior of a shark’s eye, for example), and moves
smoothly between lucid academic and casually friendly. There is
nothing de haut en bas here, only the dazzling pleasure of being with
an incredibly sharp, wide-ranging and well-informed mind as it
thinks. McCarthy asks us along, inviting us to explore the worlds of
cyanotypes, sharks, nitrates and memory books (among other things)
together.
Though the structure
is recursive, there are strong narratives here. The story of
professional solider and amateur photographer Alfred Capel Cure, for
example, reads like another modish genre, that of the ‘non-fiction
novel.’ However, whereas, for example Benjamin Labatut’s When We
Cease to Understand the World speculates on the interior torment of
the great men who would inevitably shape our world irrevocably,
McCarthy resists such speculation and the temptation to fabricate,
and gives us the lines of the story with enough narrative delay so as
to make it both compelling and well worked into the book’s overall
themes. If PPPN has any analogues, it is the work of Marina Warner
(her book Phantasmagoria especially), or Philip Hoare’s Albert and
the Whale. Anyone seriously interested in photography should place
this book alongside Barthes’ Camera Lucida and Geoff Dyer’s The
Ongoing Moment on their shelves.
The still-nascent
field of Forensic Literature takes the useful mis-quotation of Walter
Benjamin (‘every photograph is a crime scene’) and looks at a
range of objects very carefully, looking at the marks upon them which
show how they came to be and how they may have ended, at their
erasures, lacks and scars, what is missing from them, and considers
how they can reveal unexpected connections which shape our world.
Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro is a vital addition to it. - C. D. Rose
We encounter the
world through surfaces: the screen, the page, our skin, the ocean’s
swell. Here on the sea is the surfer, positioned at the edge of the
collapsing wave. And lurking underneath in a monstrous mirroring is
the shark. When the two meet, carving along the surface, breaking
through the boundary, is when death appears.
Steering her
analysis from the newspaper obituary in and out of literature and
past cinema, Melissa McCarthy investigates a fundamental aspect of
the human condition: our state of being between life and death,
always in precarious and watery balance. Sharks, Death, Surfers: An
Illustrated Companion observes how sharks have been depicted over
centuries and across cultures, then flips the lens (and dissects the
cornea) to consider what sharks see when they look back.
These refracted
lines of inquiry—optical, philosophical, historical—converge at
the focal point where we can fix the image of the surfer and the
shark. This is the picture McCarthy ends up framing: the
cartilaginous companions gliding together in a perfect model of how
to read, navigate, and exist.
If the most basic aspect of modern human life is species supremacy,
to be eaten is perhaps the true inverse of being alive. In the words
of Valerie Taylor, one half of the couple who pioneered the
underwater filming of sharks, becoming the first to film great white
sharks outside of a cage: “We all realize that the chances of being
taken by a shark are exceedingly remote, but it is the horror of
having chunks bitten from one’s body while still alive which evokes
fear out of all proportion to the actual danger.”
I’d never heard of
the Taylors until reading Sharks, Death, Surfers: An Illustrated
Companion by Melissa McCarthy. Sharks, Death, Surfers is a beautiful
art object, petite and strange, replete with artist renderings of
sharks that span the ages, from 750 BCE to the cover of Jaws. It is
more a brief philosophical exploration of the intersection described
in the title than anything else, unique in its take on the topics at
hand but at times scattered and abstract. McCarthy is the chief
obituary reviewer of the International Necronautical Society, a
twenty-year-old organization whose goal is to “bring death out into
the world.” It was in this role that she began to study obituaries
of surfers, and thus the lives of sharks.
McCarthy was
captivated by a 1982 Rolling Stone feature on the death of Lew Boren,
a veteran surfer who was killed off the California coast in 1981 by a
great white. Boren’s death is the stuff of horror movies: He went
out to surf alone and didn’t come back. First, his board was found
with bites taken out of it, indicating a creature in possession of an
eighteen-inch jaw, and then his body was discovered, missing a
portion of his chest cavity roughly the same size. “The excess
population [of sharks] is made up of loners, often deformed in some
way,” McCarthy quotes from the Rolling Stone article on his death.
“They abandon their home waters. They live in areas normally not
visited by their own species. They never return to the usual shark
breeding grounds. And sometimes what they do, at least in coastal
waters, is kill people.” Boren himself was a loner, she points out,
someone who was single-mindedly interested in abandoning his native
land for sea, and preferred to do so without the company of other
humans. “The surfer,” she concludes, “is the shark.”
The book is filled
with metaphors like these, some of which feel sharp and elucidating,
others heavy-handed—calling the preeminent shark scholar an “apex
predator,” for example. McCarthy’s most interesting metaphorical
detour comes at the halfway mark: She jumps from Moby-Dick to Crash
to a calendar of L.A. Artists In Their Cars, and finally to Ted
Kennedy driving off the Dyke Bridge in 1969, leaving Mary Jo Kopechne
to drown in the submerged vehicle. She writes, “In the photographs,
a beautiful, sleek, rounded machine (it’s an eighteen-foot-long,
four-door Oldsmobile 88) lurks just beneath the surface of the water,
next to the reeds and sedge and the pathetic plank bridge. The car
looks just like a shark.” It is in passages like this one that
McCarthy’s purposeful confusion is strongest: She is speaking in
symbols, and if the shark attack is the symbol of the most
frightening, helpless, isolated but conscious death, what could be
more that than drowning in the passenger seat of a politician’s
car, a death that could have been avoided “if competent effort had
been made at the time of the accident”? The car is the shark, but
so is Kennedy, who swam away unscathed and spent the night in his
hotel, failing to alert anyone of the incident until morning.
McCarthy brings a
variety of seemingly unrelated characters to her narrative: Captain
James Cook, an eighteenth-century British explorer whom she develops
an interest in after learning (incorrectly) that he died surfing;
schizophrenic surf photographer Ron Stoner, who sold his boat and
went to Maui, never to be heard from again and first presumed
missing, then dead; Dr. Samuel Gruber, “the world’s foremost
authority on sharks from the perspective of marine zoology.” The
pages flit from character to character, under subheadings like,
“Dissection & Pleasure,” “A Fence, a Boundary, a
Distinction,” and, “Dude, Where’s My Counterpart?” She
connects the disparate narratives through concepts that are central
to surfing and inherent to sharks: balance, slippage, steering,
lurking, vision, light, shadows, misdirection. The method is
effectively disorienting, pulling the reader into sudden, unexpected
points of connection.
I was drawn to
McCarthy’s book because I’m terrified of sharks. They are my
biggest irrational fear, by which I mean that they are the thing I am
most afraid of that has nothing to do with the reality or possible
reality of my life. It’s been this way for as long as I can
remember, and I have no idea when or why it began. I am perversely
fascinated by them, as happens with the things we dread, but usually
too scared to look. When I research shark statistics, I cover my
phone screen lest an image come up first. When I was a kid, I sat
with my legs folded up onto my seat during dinner, scared that sharks
were swimming in the open space under the table. I hated showering,
panicked at being shut in with water, thinking the faucet would turn
into a mouth. On planes, I was scared not that the plane would crash
and I’d die, but that it would crash into the ocean and I’d
survive, only to be eaten by a shark. Somehow, all of this did not
extend to being scared of the ocean itself; I loved to swim then, and
still do.
McCarthy’s
approach is literary and scientific—she doesn’t seem scared of
sharks, or death, only curious. I’m not sure how one becomes a
chief obituary reviewer for an avant-garde group studying death, and
she doesn’t explain, but does tell us early on, “In the summer of
2007, my organization undertook a research visit in Durban, South
Africa, to what’s commonly known as the Sharks Board,” which,
“carries out academic zoological research and, on the pragmatic
side, encourages beach-based tourism to the region.” The center
performs ticketed, weekly dissections of sharks for the public, and
it’s in this tradition that her book follows, presented like a
conceptual dissection, neutral and studious.
The most frightening
page of the book is a reference to another book. Under an underwater
photo of a great white, albeit mouth closed, the caption appears: “In
their 1978 book Great Shark Stories, the Taylors, who worked on Jaws
the film, report that the most frightening thing about being chased
by a shark is seeing the horror in your friend’s eyes as he or she
watches you about to be eaten.” I promptly bought that book, and
though I pored over it, was unable to find this reference. It’s
composed of excerpted stories of attacks, adventures, and benign
behaviors, both fiction and nonfiction, each introduced by the
Taylors. A few provided the gore missing from Sharks, Death,
Surfers—a gruesome account of a diver watching his friend torn in
two—but many were reverential and measured, particularly Valerie’s
descriptions of recording great white sharks for documentaries and
narrative films. It was perfectly clear to her that sharks don’t
attack without extenuating circumstances, and that when they do
attack, you don’t see them coming. I found this comforting. The
anticipation of being eaten is probably worse than the act itself.
McCarthy believes
that surfers have “the special quality of being in a privileged
relationship with the boundary.” I think this is a metaphor for
madness. Surfing is a mad sport, exceedingly dangerous not because of
sharks but because of drowning, and rocks. Because of the depth and
strength of the ocean. (And terror is a mad thing too: all-consuming,
divorced from reality, triggering paralysis or sudden, rash
movements.) Death by shark is rare but horrible, though death by
surfing isn’t uncommon for surfers. Yet the focus, always, is on
the shark. Every movie is about the shark; every spotting of a shark
makes the news; every July we are promised the wildest Shark Week
yet. But maybe it’s all symbolic—surfing is the best symbol of
the thrill of risk, and sharks the best symbol of risk’s
randomness.
I am less afraid of
sharks now than I was before I read these books. I’ve been
searching them on the internet every day, never wanting for fresh
news because every shark sighting is newsworthy in the summer, no
matter how insignificant: the great white that may or may not have
entered the Long Island Sound; the influx of sharks off Cape Cod,
threatening the tourist industry; the sixteen-foot behemoth that
circled a New Jersey boat named Big Nutz Required II before snatching
the dangling bait and swimming away; the guy who was bitten in
Florida and headed straight to a bar rather to a doctor's office.
I’ve been closing my eyes less, but when a trailer for 47 Meters
Down: Uncaged started playing on my Twitter feed before I could
scroll away, I screamed. I knew I could lure myself back into being
as scared as I was; indulging fear is formulaic and easy. And it is
both useful and exciting to cling to a fear as pointless as
man-eating sharks—to have a site to which to attach free-floating
anxiety, and to so easily jump.
When you surf, the
board has to slip just enough, but not too much: it’s “controlled
and focused slipping.” I never thought I’d stop fearing sharks,
and I haven’t, but I’m slipping. Their demonization is fatal for
them, having significantly diminished their population through
hunting. I know it’s our fault they are moving closer to shore, as
water temperatures change, and our fault their ecological status is
“vulnerable,” if not yet endangered. Great whites don’t want to
be near humans; it’s we who make the world smaller, with respect to
what is habitable, and force our proximity. We’d do better to look
to them as a model for freedom than for terror, but those concepts
are hard to separate for our species, when they appear at surface
level. I’ve not given up my fear but I’m playing at its
boundary—I imagine McCarthy would be satisfied. - Sophia
Giovannitti
Stalking America
blends an interior/exterior assemblage of a young person on a train
riding cross-county where everything is subtext and suspicion. Here,
events are presented in a glassy contemplation of travel and
transition. Stilted and strange dialogue, description, minor reality
stars, historical influences, lists, architecture, movements, and
mundane pop culture observations of a misinformed but well-meaning
observer montage into an internal and external reverie. In America,
nothing is seen or spoken directly. Conversations and thoughts wander
in from around a corner—a deleted browser history of
experience—ripple into the cliché of a coming of age. In this
sense America is half-baked like a teenager. The protagonist obsesses
over historical references to nude bathers, anarchist colonies,
reality television, communes, volcanic eruptions, and songs in a
playlist trying to understand a certain aspect of America through
observations and false epiphanies. A vacated puzzle attempts to undo
itself while each piece ploddingly re-assembles with the assurance of
the train ride as elements come into proximity. To understand
America, to really appreciate it, is to fundamentally misunderstand
it at the deepest levels—to read into its flattening out and image
as the ultimate subtext and that is where the story lies.
I wish I could wear
a permanent wireless earpiece like actors do when they don’t know
their lines, and that it was connected to a microphone that Jared
Pappas-Kelley hovered perpetually above while simultaneously viewing
everything I saw through monitors connected to surveillance cameras
littered through my surroundings, and that he could also magically
live a rich, full-fledged independent life and keep writing up a
storm. - Dennis Cooper
Sometimes who you
are is kind of where you come from, and sometimes where you come from
is kind of remade by you. Maybe America is a melting pot, maybe it’s
a tossed salad. Whatever it is, it’s a mess, just like you and me,
if you’re as apple pie as I am, as Columbined and Mayflowered and
high schooled and low schooled and junk-fooded and beautiful. That’s
us, that’s our US of A. Jared Pappas-Kelley understands why every
American feels stalked by history, and also needs to stalk our
legacy, our detritus, to do whatever we need to do to understand and
maybe make peace with our place in the busted world. - Rebecca
Brown
Interleaved with the
salvage of a Gordon Matta-Clark essay that glides to other sites of
narrating memory, Jared Pappas-Kelley’s well-oiled construction
here invites us to eavesdrop in a passenger compartment that doubles
as confessional space, where connections surface, cathexis is
sketched and flipped, and the communal share transpires. His montage
has a searching, glowing quality of folds through time, and I find
myself sitting back for the deferred destination, morphing graffiti,
overheard and worked-through conversations, dips into light
abstraction and high-concept fictionalizations like one of reality TV
and its reaches; a picnoleptic picaresque. Like the best of waking
dreams, it defamiliarizes the seemly, keeping an eye all the while on
some expensive shoes and accompanying muffin crumbs across the aisle.
It sent me. - Douglas A. Martin
Jared
Pappas-Kelley’s Stalking America is one of those rare beasts, a
truly unclassifiable novel: a text of a kind so mercurial that it
seems to want to shrug off even that label. On its simplest, most
rudimentary level, it follows the doings of a reasonably nondescript
young man—and yet even in saying as little as that, the word
“follows” becomes conspicuous, overloaded with meaning. That’s
because the protagonist develops an interest in a reality TV series
called Stalking America, which itself follows a woman who in turn
follows, and films, other people. But then, just as you’re maybe
thinking that the novel sets itself up to make something of the
reverberations between these two characters, it does something
different. It splits itself apart, cordoning off various sections of
its narrative, slicing viewpoints into pieces, creating boundaries
around and gaps between different ways of looking at (following?)
events as they unfold. The result is something restless, a little
insidious, equal parts frustrating and compelling, and made up of
many more fascinating elements than a summary can capture. Following
the publication of Stalking America last summer, Jared Pappas-Kelley
spoke to 3:AM’s Daniel Davis Wood about the stuff that Stalking
America is made of, and the stuff it tries to unmake.
3:AM: I’d like to
begin by thinking a bit about your vision for Stalking America,
particularly in terms of its breadth and scale. I’m not quite sure
how to classify the book. While it often feels like a work of
fiction, there are parts that hew closer to autofiction and the text
itself flirts with the label “memoir”—so let’s just say that
it operates on a very personal level. At the same time, though, the
prologue announces an intention to grapple with “this moment we
currently inhabit,” and the text is also shot through with shards
and fragments of what sound like fleeting contributions to “the
discourse.”
So, to me, the
vision of the book is one that pulls in two directions
simultaneously: it both concentrates on a singular experience and
broadens out to something more panoramic. I’d love to know more
about how it came to be that way. Did you know, early on, that the
book would be working towards this, or did it come about by
trial-and-error and experimentation?
JPK: When talking
with my editor, that was something we were trying to figure out—this
slippage or blurring that was the structure—and he put forward an
idea that for him Stalking America was what he’d classify a
“thinking novel.” What I took that to mean was that it was
primarily about a process of thinking or thought. For me, it became
more about layering these impulses and drawing out parallels in the
material, to let the threads pool together so that certain bits would
click and others sort of drift back into the background in a mundane
sense. And it was about blurring these approaches between fiction, or
“discourse,” and playing with conventions that might cause
someone to read it as perhaps memoir or biography or artist writings
as a way of tracing a thought within this slippage.
I was interested in
putting something forward that at the same time undermines or
questions itself, that parallels the movement from the singular to
the more panoramic, as you put it. Is this something that fiction can
support? Or is it collapsing under its own weight when it plays out
in this manner? There’s the idea of tricking a truth into revealing
itself, but instead it might be a sidestepping, and as an approach it
is maybe like with an eclipse—not something to be viewed directly.
Building these overly-complex and clunky apparatuses or
structures—like a hole poked in construction paper inside a
cardboard box with a paper towel tube: an eclipse viewing box, to
make the indirectly viewable visible—might allow us to approach
this idea of truth, to catch it unaware or startle it into view like
a woodland creature. And perhaps that’s tied to a notion of the
post-truth, whatever that means, how to navigate and perceive or cut
through.
3:AM: I love the
shambolic nature of those “clunky apparatuses” and I think the
book absolutely pieces itself together in that way. Alongside
narratorial discourse, you’ve got some typographic play (sporadic
sans serif fonts, dialogue inset like a blockquote, a dream sequence
rendered in double columns on a single page) as well as snippets of
cultural ephemera. I’m thinking of text messages, magazine cover
headlines (“Somali Gangs in the Midwest”, “It’s Time to Break
Up with Your Boss”), and the detritus of digital life: “We would
like to keep you up to date with news and events from our affiliates.
To unsubscribe from this, please click here.” If Stalking America
is a “thinking novel,” what are these bits and pieces
contributing to the thought process?
JPK: The different
bits sift together into something hybrid, or that’s what I was
playing with, and in my head I approached it like threads or a feed
aggregating in a way. How things have shifted or are shifting. How
these elements coincide without always being attributed. That’s
what I was interested in with the dialogue and those other elements,
and it became more about texture and building an affinity or
magnetism between parts. With the typographic and formatting
elements, I was exploring this anatomy, ways to signal elements
approaching from different sources, and flattening out, but also
giving cues that they shift registers. How to map this experience on
the page?—that’s sort of how I conceived it. I also wanted to
flirt with a sort of call and response between what was accruing,
these elements or ephemera, and a narrative that was developing. We
have perhaps become so hardwired to read these cues or bracket them
out, ignore them, so I was also looking not so much at what’s right
there on the surface but what wanders behind it.
3:AM: Which brings
us to the subject of structure, the arrangement of disparate parts.
What’s striking to me about the structure of Stalking America is
the way it looks a bit haphazard but actually, on reflection, is
working within a tight design. Can we talk about that design a
little? The book more or less opens with some notes on the real-life
installation artist Gordon Matta-Clark, who made his name by “cutting
up buildings”—by literally taking slices out of enclosed spaces
in the built environment. Matta-Clark’s work is important to the
substance of the book, but also to the structure. How did his spirit
inform the way Stalking America demarcates and arranges its various
components?
JPK: Matta-Clark
allowed me to work with someone else as a proxy or stand-in, to frame
the book as a biography around his ideas and how he approached
structures. Kind of in the way his houses and interventions served as
a proxy for revealing something more through their cuts and there was
a freedom in that. I tend to see myself most keenly in contrast to
other people. His approach gave me permission to examine that
contradiction, with lived or abandoned spaces dissected and put on
display as biography or narrative, but beginning with somebody else—a
significant artist—and his story and the way it is constructed.
Without representing, it begins to resemble. Cutting into these
narratives reveals something more within the material; into vacated
spaces, a stairway that led somewhere once, an impulse.
So one thing I was
playing with was this idea of over-identifying with something, and
how that thing begins to blend into the original or take the lead.
The main character in Stalking America is perhaps over identifying
with the character Claire on the TV show. Sure, there may be some
connection between them, and perhaps they grew up down the street
from each other, but even in this it’s a bit tenuous or overstated,
so it becomes more about self-construction through
over-identification. I was also inviting myself to over identify with
Matta-Clark in a way as a writer, his construction and process,
framing something a bit tenuous or skewed but also something that
traces a resemblance.
3:AM: Yes, and
you’ve even just alluded to one of the lines in the book that
touches on these ideas: “It somehow seems fitting for my memoir of
sorts (who the hell said it was a memoir) to begin with somebody
else, a significant artist, his story, as I have always seen myself
most keenly in contrast to other people, through an affinity but also
where they are not like me, their experiences.” But there’s also,
to me, another sense in which Matta-Clark is moving through Stalking
America—or, if we prefer to think of Stalking America as a
“thinking book,” then there’s a sense in which Matta-Clark is
driving its mode of thought.
I mean something
like this… There are the autofictional parts of the book, and then
there are the reality TV parts, and then there are the “Lapso mori”
sections. These intercut the other two parts with fragments of text
that sometimes seem like non sequiturs in relation to the action,
sometimes attempts at establishing thematic resonances with it—and
I emphasise the “cut” in “intercut.” So the way I came to see
these sections was essentially as prosaic versions of Matta-Clark’s
cuts: as if Stalking America were a structure unto itself, with its
enclosed spaces cut apart (and cut into) by the “Lapso mori”
sections. But maybe that’s just me over-identifying with your
narrator over-identifying with Matta-Clark! How do you see the “Lapso
mori” sections informing the broader vision?
JPK: There’s this
impulse of cutting to see what lies behind: carving windows as an
excavation, exposing what remains or bleeds through, but not in a
static way—seeking a sustained act of cutting-through in order to
construct. Without that constructive aspect, it’s more of an
autopsy of something gutted, or just a cluster of holes—that’s
something else. So with the more autofiction bits of Stalking
America, or the reality show or the “Lapso Mori” sections,
perhaps an architecture reveals itself like a push
notification—cutting through a proximity, reordering and observing
previously obstructed vantages or lines of sight or thought,
interjecting between these instances as when a wall is removed.
3:AM: Well, then,
after Matta-Clark, there’s another artist who could be called the
second of the book’s presiding spirits: the photographer Sophie
Calle. In fact, of the two artists, she is the one I was more
familiar with before I came to Stalking America. Her work is evoked
in the title of the book, given that she made her name in the 1980s
with a series of surreptitious pictures of a man she stalked on a
journey from Paris to Venice; and the reality show within the book
(also called Stalking America) basically follows a woman who stalks
others, albeit in a more mundane way. But my sense is that it’s the
creative aspect of Calle’s work, rather than the documentary
aspect, that resonates with the book: the framing, the selection, and
what goes on between the gaps. Am I on the right track? How would you
say Calle speaks to Stalking America?
JPK: Sophie Calle
was definitely in the material and in the initial ideas of the
reality show Stalking America. When Calle was secretly following and
documenting her subject around Venice, in a sense he became a bit
displaced and that was kind of the point. He’s a moving target but
he’s actually pretty secondary to her project, because her approach
it inverts the dynamic a bit. Calle said he wasn’t especially
interesting to her, but that she did it simply for the pleasure of
it, and that was the jumping-off point. There is something about the
act of watching, and through her attention and focus it accumulates,
it becomes about this process of looking and stalking an idea through
its everyday or mundane habitat to sort of put something else on
display.
In a sense we are
stalked by our individual histories or experiences, or where we come
from, and the show takes cues from that as well. There is a scene
later in the book where another character kind of cool-shames or
almost dismisses the kid’s own experiences, like: oh you like this
cringey TV show, but the real version is this artist Sophie Calle.
It’s as if the pop culture version is somehow less than, or less
true. I was intrigued by how there’s something about authenticity,
about the question of which is the real version (or is there one at
all?), but there was also something a bit endearing about it as well.
3:AM: That
discussion about Calle marks the only time in Stalking America that
she is named, despite the extent to which she haunts the book. But
what intrigued me the most about the discussion was the part
in-between the description of her project and the claim that she’s
“the real thing.” We’re told that Calle, in addition to taking
photographs of the man she stalks, “ makes diary entries about the
time of day, about the weather, about the man’s coat, which he
wears with a camera on his shoulder, on the bridge, maps of the
routes he traveled, pigeons in the square, how she changes endlessly
over time through the act of observing him” (emphasis mine).
JPK: In a sense,
that describes what has been going on with the show all this time.
And that’s the thing: the kid is observing this person, Claire, on
TV; and Claire is observing this man she follows, who we don’t
really know much about—just gathering detritus-level observations
about his coat on a rack in his home, the objects in his
refrigerator, the shampoo he uses. So there’s this sort of this
echo chamber of watching. And the documentation and objects are all
rather secondary, perhaps not very interesting or forgettable, so
what I was intrigued by was how Claire sees all this and the kid
perceives what she sees, and—as Calle says—they are changing
endlessly through the act of observing. At the same time, the main
character is trying on ideas, determining which fit, connecting some,
discarding some, and constructing his story from what he finds.
3:AM: Yes—so even
though, as you say, we might be stalked by our experiences, something
else happens to us when we record those experiences for posterity:
the product constitutes a separate, perhaps more malleable version of
oneself. And this dovetails with something else the narrator says in
Stalking America:
Sometimes I kind
of step back from what’s being said and I feel like the words are
separate things from us that just exist. I picture them as brittle
glass that comes out of all of our mouths to make this big shell
that’s made up of all the conversations that anyone has ever had or
ever will. When it’s warm, I think of it being more fluid, but when
it’s cold it’s extra brittle, like something you can actually
touch.
Ultimately, then,
there’s a sense in which the words of Stalking America, frozen on
the page, are as brittle as the narrator feels spoken words can be.
And, in the same sense, so too are Calle’s photographs. Which
suggests that inasmuch as Calle’s photographs are a
self-constitutive project, Stalking America is a project of a similar
kind, working in a way that starts off as autofiction but goes far
beyond it into speculative terrain. But what, then, is the self that
is constituted by the book as a whole—not only the narrator and
Matta-Clark and the reality show, but also the cultural flotsam and
jetsam, the Lapso Mori, and all the rest?
JPK: We kind of live
in the shadow of all this stuff and then we step away. I am
definitely intrigued by the idea of the malleable self, and in a way
I think this is foregrounded in how people operate now. I read
something a while back about how truth, when it is of the more
universal variety, is wisdom. I don’t know if I believe that; it’s
a weird hierarchy to think about. But I am interested in these
specific bits of truth that might get lost in the shuffle, that don’t
necessarily scale up to “wisdom,” or that when they are expanded
become exaggerated or flawed or undone in that jump to the universal.
So perhaps my approach to this is more like Mario collecting
coins—gathering up all these bits of truth, attempting to hew
together these fragments into this object that is a book, as
self-constitutive, some bits discarded or chronicled and on display.
When writing my
first book, I proposed it as a series of bombs in the shape of a book
for understanding something. Maybe my approach in Stalking America
still involves gathering absences, but now it’s less about
gathering a series of undoings and rather about the act of gathering
and letting the material congeal.
Jared
Pappas-Kelley’s newest book Stalking America (Delere Press) bends
the genres of fiction and memoir, piecing together a life through
online platforms and information gleaned along the way. Structured as
a novel, Stalking America builds on Pappas-Kelley’s previous
nonfiction and theoretical books, like Solvent Form (Manchester
University Press). Pappas-Kelley’s America is a place where very
little is seen or spoken directly. Conversations and thoughts wander
in from around a corner—a deleted browser history of
experience—ripple into the cliché of coming-of-age. Life bleeds
into the internet, flows in and out of states, and tries to rebuild
or reconstruct time and space. The book questions our concepts of
identity and how we navigate the pitfalls in this media-saturated
world, with the aim to understand and grasp the now, as identities
blur and change in a blink of an eye. Pappas-Kelley is America and
America is Pappas-Kelley, or at least a version of it, all built on
dreams. These blurred boundaries make this journey an intriguing ride
and a puzzle to solve.
Over a series of
emails, Pappas-Kelley and I discussed how the artist Gordon
Matta-Clark informs his writing style, the unauthorized biographies
written by his aunt, the unsettling blur of fiction and reality we
exist within, and how we tread water in the post-truth era. We also
considered the endless image-building and the various “us” that
haunt online platforms, the absurdity of influencers, chatbots, the
smorgasbord of Web 3 and AI issues facing us, all while we exalt the
allure and mystique of train travel.
***
The Rumpus: I really
loved Stalking America. You capture the feeling of “the now,”
where we flow through information daily at our fingertips. Facts and
fiction are blurring, especially when something is shouted loud
enough. How do you think fiction can exist when we seem to be living
in it?
Jared Pappas-Kelley:
Maybe the only thing that can be written now is fiction. I’m a
visual person by nature, so for me a lot of it was about trying to
catch an aspect of experiencing the world. This way of inhabiting the
now in a sort of mundane sense, when much is mediated or at a remove,
an observation, information, as that is one of the things fiction can
do and still give a sense of the truth in it.
One thing I was
interested in with Stalking America was this apparent distinction
between truths and fictions, not mutually exclusive in any capacity.
If anything, the blurring has become more overt, and that was a
starting point to tease out and observe. It was also something that I
tried to consciously explore with how things were structured with
details like the dialogue and layering or paralleling where in many
ways everything was presented like conversation threads that
aggregate from various sources and experience or blurring—without
trying to be too heavy-handed as a thought experiment.
Rumpus: You return
to cut building works of artist Gordon Matta-Clark throughout the
book. These works open up the private in a very controlled way,
giving you this curated view with just enough information to conjure
an idea of the person but never the whole. Why are these works so
important in this book?
Pappas-Kelley: Part
of it is that I just like Matta-Clark as an artist, but also in the
book there is a lot of identifying or over-identifying with public
personas, and writing about him gave another way into this idea.
Gordon Matta-Clark was an artist who went into old, abandoned houses
and sliced them in half or cut them up as interventions so that we
might consider them differently, but also there is just something
appealing and immediate about taking these homes apart, an artist
with a chainsaw and winches slicing across domestic spaces. He’s
one of those people I keep coming back to.
In a more practical
sense, Matta-Clark gave permission to make these sorts of
interventions into the source material in the rest of the book: to
make incisions into character, show how things are performative and
stepping into these domestic or public personas and question
intimacies of narrative or interior spaces and what is considered
outside for public consumption and like you said relates to
experiences of social media or even conventions of reality TV.
In that, what is
taking place as I approached it isn’t directly about writing itself
but something more writing adjacent as an approach or conjuring that
visual art and popular culture also allow.
Rumpus: There’s a
quote I’m going to paraphrase from Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity
that has stayed with me: “It’s not what you’re like, it’s
what you like that matters.” Delving into the subplot of the book,
the TV show Stalking America, feels like you’re tackling some of
these contemporary Black Mirror-esque dilemmas. Have we moved past
the Warholian “fifteen minutes of fame” to a new paradigm, where
Web 3 has made us all Truman, under endless surveillance to our own
self-censorship?
Pappas-Kelley: It
was there already, but with something as simple as the invention of
the like button, or the heart, or upvote, it’s become foregrounded
so that we are now the apex predators of liking but in an extremely
passive or disengaged way.
We swim in feedback,
baby sharks, and it’s about how do we live in that and make sense
or are perhaps shaped by it. Could this be translated as an
experience, the sort of bits that fall between the cracks when
nothing specifically is happening or directly contradicts? That’s
sort of how I approached it, and is it a satisfying experience or
what might it put on display?
I have an aunt, or I
guess she’s my mom’s cousin so whatever that makes her to me, and
she wrote these high-profile unauthorised biographies about people
like Nancy Reagan or Oprah and the royals that got a lot of
attention. And I don’t really have any particular connection with
her except as sort of a backdrop in family dynamics or as the
tangential fabric of extended relatives when a new book came out. And
she might have this lateral relationship to the subjects she writes
about and their fame or notoriety, but in a very real sense I am not
on her radar, but in writing this book I was interested in these
oblique or tenuous connections like the main character here where
they might or might not have grown up knowing this person who is now
on television and this supposed connection takes on a
disproportionate significance or projection. This kind of living
through a perceived connection to someone else that is somehow
noteworthy, trying to work it into conversations that are very
tenuous or cringe is an attractive starting point and what is being
noteworthy or being known in this more mundane sense.
With Warhol, you
might commission a society portrait in Neiman Marcus or wherever, so
for the price of admission you got the allure or appearance of being
someone who is known. But it isn’t even about fifteen minutes
anymore and perhaps about an ability or even desire to influence, an
aggregation as the act of influencing. And with this book I wasn’t
really interested in any of these big constellations but in only the
most tangential of identifications through these other people and
this might be the more duct-tape version of that.
Rumpus: I’m going
to change tracks for a minute. Personally I find influencer culture a
strange thing, I get the “we don’t believe big corporations”
bit, but this “celebrity is trustworthy” shtick is crazy—it’s
just another form of corporate advertising or that de-influencing
trend, which was mostly humble brag mixed with lifestyle selling and
cringe reverse psychology, it’s this weird desire hyper loop. I
find it super sad that people talk like they’re brands too, as it
really dehumanises us, we’re much more than a commodity, it’s
this kind of thinking that feels like the future is more hopeless.
Sorry for the doom spiral, do you have a better hope for how things
will turn out or are we going to be in a hyper-stalking of everything
soon?
Pappas-Kelley: I’m
intrigued by jobs that emerge that our parents or their parents
wouldn’t be able to conceive, like “influencer” is a genuine
job or career choice, and what does that mean? What do you want to be
when you grow up? A firefighter? An influencer? Do you score really
high in influencing on some aptitude test or the Myers-Briggs? “I
wanted to be an influencer, but my posts weren’t influence-y
enough.”
Have you ever seen
the forums on Reddit that are chatbots debating something, and each
approaches their response from a specific point of view and finds a
way to work those ideas into any conversation? And it’s unsettling
to me how quickly the bots get racist as well after culling through
all our cast-off material online, yet we wonder how that happens.
Rumpus: What and how
we teach AI is going to be the event horizon of the future, and so
far we’re not doing so great. You’re right about how jobs have
changed, with the cycles of boom, bust, and bailout it seems to be
having an effect on Gen Z’s approach to life and work. Things like
long-term planning seem pointless when the world crashes and burns so
fast before the phoenix rises again. Exploiting yourself seems like a
better option than doing it for the man, I won’t even get into the
politics and environment issues. So with a pull of the lever, we’re
back on track.
As I was reading
Stalking America, the specter of Sophie Calle, one of my favorite
artists was all around me, and then she popped up and said boo. Her
work feels like an important clue to deciphering your book’s puzzle
and I feel she was way ahead of her time with the work she makes. Can
you let us know how her art has impacted culture and your own ways of
thinking?
Pappas-Kelley:
Sophie Calle was definitely present in the material, following some
guy around Venice and covertly documenting his movements with her
camera, and I was doing this thing where I write sort of all-around
something that is right there in the middle of it until it gets lost
a bit and then after all that sidestepping just come out with it—and
here is the piece that was missing and it deflates it, like the polar
opposite of a jump scare, in a way that is curious to me and I also
think that is something Sophie Calle does. I was intrigued in writing
that sequence with how the other character was kind of cool-shaming
or almost dismissing the kid’s own experience, like, “Oh all
these things you’re interested in are the fake or poseur versions,
somehow less, but this artist is like the real version.” And this
happens a lot and sort of the way a music snob or someone like that
would do it but in perhaps a more endearing way, and there was
something more compelling rolled up in this exchange about
authenticity or an inability, and in this case what was the real
version or is there one.
Rumpus: She was like
cookies before the Internet, stalking the mundane to get a better
picture of the person. It’s really beautiful work I return to a
lot. Going back to Matta-Clark, home, or the idea of it as part of
our identity seems to reoccur, almost as if you’re taking his
process and reconstructing within a fractured sense of identity, like
you’re building a fictional you. Could you speak on this? You know
I also love a good joke, like that “where are you from” line?
Home. It’s why I own the perfume Rien from Etat Libre d’Orange,
so when asked, what I’m wearing, I can say nothing.
Pappas-Kelley: Yes,
I like the blurring where the writing appears to be more about me
than it actually is and the process of constructing while cutting
away. This idea of the process through which we construct ourselves
or the way a narrator sees themself more clearly through someone
else. I also appreciate a line like that where language sort of claps
back with its flatness—what are you wearing, nothing or where are
you going, home—the name of the fragrance or town is factually true
but also a more general idea as it shuts the door and truth lies in a
way.
Rumpus: You have
these lovely little disruptive devices, “Lapso Mori,” which give
you the sense of reading a book written right now, surrounded by
distractions. Is the train also a device? A phone or a tablet and
you’re on this scrolling journey through the time we’re in, where
everything can nearly be instantly recalled by the internet and
social media?
Pappas-Kelley: A bit
like a push notification. Like the memento mori, a pocket that
collects or lapses that are a withdrawal yet persist as an artifact,
a slippage as reminder from another parallel that bleeds across and
accumulates. I mapped out the beginnings of a follow-up book where
this idea of the Lapso Mori becomes the foreground, so I guess we’ll
just have to see if I ever sit down and write it.
I like thinking of
the train ride as a device in that sense or a peripheral, that is
sort of how I approached it, and in many ways, it is the least
train-like train ride, and I wanted it to be this sort of engaged
reverie space being constructed.
Rumpus: What’s
your favorite mode of transport and least favorite? Does the “you”
in the book share the same likes and dislikes?
Pappas-Kelley: Each
platform has that specific aspect it brings to the foreground or
highlights like image, brevity, or story, I guess, like how different
forms of transportation might also do this, it’s like the way you
show up.
Some of the initial
inspiration came from taking a Greyhound bus cross-country in the
U.S. years ago for many days, but a Greyhound felt a bit too
honky-tonk in a way and I also didn’t want it to just be a story
about highways which is something else. With a train there’s more
of an inevitability that you will end up somewhere. It’s more
automated and letting go, and the outside is out of your hands, so it
disappears into a permeable bubble of the experience.
I live in the U.K.
now and like travelling by train but feel like it’s really
expensive and always breaking down or delayed. Maybe a train ride in
someplace like Switzerland—do they have train delays or
interruptions there, I feel like no, or that if they did, they’d
have some mediated but posh Swiss solution in place.
Do I like the same
things as the character in the book—in many ways I suppose I do,
but I think I’m confused differently by things than that character,
and it also allowed me to be a bit more naive in the responses which
I also enjoyed. I feel like that character dislikes most things and
is figuring it out, but maybe that’s just me?
Rumpus: I’ve spent
a lot of my life commuting in various machines, from boats, buses,
and trams, but my favorite is still the train, well, okay not in the
U.K.—there’s always delays, but anywhere else it’s a great
space to dream. Does America have a smell? If so, what is it?
Pappas-Kelley: When
I first spent time in Southern California, the smell I remember sort
of embodying the experience was a mix of fake orange and car exhaust.
But for all of America? Maybe one of those air diffusers, so you have
a scent profile of like four options that you put on to match your
mood.
Rumpus: After
Stalking America, can you describe that scent in one word?
Pappas-Kelley:
Tenuous? This is a physical experience we are in, but so much of this
is beyond just the physical, so thinking of it like that is a good
way of giving it form. But for me it’s always how this physical
grinds up against the idea or intangible aspect, and maybe through it
there might be a lucidity to be examined, driven by these physical
actions. - Jonathan Mayhew
Solvent form examines the destruction of art—through objects that
have been destroyed (lost in fires, floods, vandalism, or similarly
those artists that actively court or represent this destruction, such
as Gustav Metzger), but also as a process within art that the object
courts through form. In this manner, Solvent form looks to events
such as the Momart warehouse fire in 2004 as well as the actions of
art thief Stéphane Breitwieser in which the stolen work was
destroyed. Against this overlay, a tendency is mapped whereby
individuals attempt to conceptually gather these destroyed or lost
objects, to somehow recoup in their absence. From this vantage,
Solvent form—hinging on the dual meaning in the words solvent and
solvency—proposes an idea of art as an attempt to secure and fix,
which correspondingly undoes and destroys through its inception. It
also weaves a narrative of art that intermingles with Jean
Baudrillard’s ideas on disappearance, Georges Bataille and Paul
Virilio’s negative or reverse miracle, Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept
of the image (or imago as votive that keeps present the past, yet
also burns), and Giorgio Agamben’s notion of art as an attempt to
make the moment appear permeable. Likewise, it is through these
destructions that one might distinguish a solvency within art and
catch an operation in which something is made visible through these
moments of destruction when art’s metaphorical undoing emerges as
oddly literal.
‘Solvent form is an important new addition to a constellation of
recent texts that have addressed destruction and art […] but while
acknowledging their content, this book does far more than summarise
their narratives, since Jared Pappas-Kelley’s study develops its
own radical take on the subject. Signalling from the outset that
Solvent form will be “an undoing process”, the average reader
will scarcely be prepared for his in-depth, fastidiously researched
examination, quotational density (248 endnotes by page 45), and a
bombshell of a conclusion. Pappas-Kelley enlists destruction –
through fire, theft, disappearance or design – as a critical
reagent showing up previously hard-to-discern, internal or “solvent”
characteristics of all artworks.’ Michael Hampton
Jared
Pappas-Kelley, To Build a House that
Never Ceased: Writings,
Interviews, and Letters
on Art, Sweat Drenched Press, 2023
Building on ideas of
solvency in art from Solvent Form: Art and Destruction, this
collection gathers many wide-ranging writings from Jared
Pappas-Kelley developed over the years. Within a tradition of artist
writers, it presents an opportunity to reflect and re-examine
existing thoughts—bisecting and dissecting the metaphorical rooms
of this writing, to see how it might collapse or build something new
when placed alongside another. In that spirit, this collection of
letters, writings on art, reflections, and interviews collected as To
Build a House that Never Ceased offers a glimpse into the interiors,
frameworks, and rooms within rooms of an artist and thinker
attempting to make sense of a contemporary world. Like the processes
of Sarah Winchester and Gordon Matta-Clark, with their own approaches
to the spaces inhabited, this collection presents windows where
before there were simply walls, slicing vantage across locales,
calcifications, or almost-starts, having bricked over exits in the
process of adding rooms within existing work. This slicing through
and reordering reveals something more—a framework or architecture
of an impulse. Seeing a stairway that led somewhere specific once: a
room, actions, anxieties, trysts that could only happen in the
microclimates of a particular time or day, cut across and somehow
bleeding into all but matchlessly separate/spliced onto or akin.
More-true somehow. Perhaps in this sense, writings like these
inevitably wander a tension between a Winchester pulling down in
order to construct and a Matta-Clark slicing through to show the
unseen interiors and connections of the spaces we inhabit in an
attempt to build a metaphorical house that never ceases.
I chat with Jared Pappas-Kelley about his new book, and it’s
context around whatever it is that seems to be happening in the world
right now. To Build a House that Never Ceased is a collection of
writings by Pappas-Kelley, seeking to take apart ideas of solvency in
art and building on his other recent book Solvent Form: Art and
Destruction. Following a tradition of artist writers, the collection
presents an opportunity to reflect and re-examine existing
thoughts—bisecting and dissecting the metaphorical rooms of
writing, to see how they might collapse or build something new. We
talk about his new book and it’s connections between The Winchester
House and Gordon Matta-Clark, we also chat cultural exhaustion and
Jack Halberstam, and what the problem is with the term contemporary
in the art world. We also discuss his new publishing imprint
invert/extant press, our mutual love of Auto-destructive art and
Gustav Metzger, as well as our dislike of gatekeepers, and how
instead we should support and collaborate with those still starting
out. These ideas and others are framed around the current era of
social justice movements like Black Lives Matter, and of course the
global effects of Covid 19. - Dec Ackroyd
