C. D. Rose - In these 19 dreamlike tales, ghosts of the past mingle with the quiddities of modernity in a bewitching stew where lost masterpieces surface with translations in an invisible language, where image and photograph become mystically entwined, and where the very nature of reality takes on a shimmering sense of possibility and illusion

 

C. D. Rose, Walter Benjamin Stares at the

Sea, Melville House, 2024

Excerpt

Excerpt

Welcome to the fictional universe of C. D. Rose, whose stories seem to be set in some unidentifiable but vaguely Mitteleuropean nation, and likewise have an uncanny sense of timelessness — the time could be some cobblestoned Victorian past era, or the present, or even the future.

A journalist’s interview with an artist turns into a dizzying roundelay of memory and image.

Two Russian brothers, one blind and one deaf, build an intricate model town during an interminable train ride across the steppe.

An annotated discography for the works of a long-lost silent film star turns into a mysterious document of obsession.

Three Russian sailors must find ways to pass the time on a freighter orphaned in a foreign port.

A forgotten composer enters a nostalgic dream-world while marking time in a decaying Romanian seaport.

In these 19 dreamlike tales, ghosts of the past mingle with the quiddities of modernity in a bewitching stew where lost masterpieces surface with translations in an invisible language, where image and photograph become mystically entwined, and where the very nature of reality takes on a shimmering sense of possibility and illusion.

“A book that belongs on the same shelf as Italo Calvino’s “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler,” Nabokov’s “Pale Fire”, and several works by Zoran Zivkovic, Stanislaw Lem and David Markson.” — Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

“Every madness is logical to its owner,” one of Rose’s characters says. And it is that line — between logic and madness — that Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea walks with such assuredness and imagination.

C. D. Rose’s Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea is a collection of short stories about how storytelling can help to face the terrors of the passage of time.

Scenes of creative inspiration mingle with violence, tension, and grief: “The Disappearer” compares the mysterious vanishing of an inventor to a revolutionary film, “Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man” explores the morbid last piece a photographer leaves behind, and “Everything Is Subject to Motion, and Everything Is Motion’s Subject” features a camera shaped like a gun. Even characters who do not make art use it to orient themselves, as with the narrator of “I’m in Love with a German Film Star” tracking a relationship through a lifetime’s worth of songs.

The writing is dark and dreamlike, filled with philosophical tangents, evocative metaphors, black comedy, and sly metatextual references (in “A Brief History of the Short Story,” characters from different literary traditions read about and react to each other). Locations and time periods are seldom established; there is a surrealism reminiscent of fairy tales (“The Neva Star” features three marooned sailors all named Sergei).

Ambiguity and anxiety abound as characters experience existential dread, suffer grave lapses in communication, and are alienated by sudden, senseless loss. Experimental forms heighten the uncanniness, emphasizing disorientation and ineffability: “Ognosia” whips through different points of view midparagraph, “To Athens” alternates between a series of eclectic anecdotes and a run-on sentence, and “What Remains of Claire Blanck” is told through annotations of an unseen text. But there are glimpses of hopefulness amid the bleakness too: emboldened by the works they create or consume, characters yearn for more fulfilling futures.

The stories in Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea position art as an antidote to the ravages of time, with a subtle sense of imagination suggesting that, even through the grimmest moods, nothing is impossible. - Jenna Lefkowitz

https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/walter-benjamin-stares-at-the-sea/

Reading C. D. Rose’s new collection of stories made me think of Walter Benjamin’s dream of composing a book solely out of citations of other writing. This is hardly surprising, and it’s quite likely something Rose expected me to think of—it’s that sort of book. But while there are citations galore to be had in Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea, Rose’s Benjamin, in the title story, sits on a bench on a Los Angeles beach in an imagined continuation seven years after the man himself took his life at the edge of a different body of water in Portbou, Spain.

Given an extension of his time on Earth, Rose’s Benjamin imagines writing a different book about Los Angeles. Instead, he decides to go to the cinema, where he contemplates reporting himself missing and starting a new life as Ben Walter, a private detective. There is a lot of wishing and hoping, but no one else gets much writing done in these stories either, not Augustine, improbably stuck on Twitter, or Henri Bergson, improbably unstuck in time, or the unnamed MFA writer in Tucson, Arizona, very predictably writing about not being able to write.

An awful lot of stories in Benjamin Stares at the Sea are told out of this familiar stasis, floating somewhere between the postmodernist vacuity of Rose’s earlier years and the decidedly unplayful autofiction of today’s literary landscape. These stories should not work as well as they do, but the wit, range, and sheer absurdity of Rose’s story world somehow pull together just enough to not get locked into the cul-de-sac of either form. They resist adding up to anything, but the sum stubbornly remains greater than the disparate parts.

Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea is Rose’s fourth collection in ten years and the first since completing what his online biography terms “a loose parafictional trilogy about lost books and forgotten writers, about who is forgotten and who remembered, and how, and why.” These stories, too, are populated by the lost and forgotten, intertwined with many who are neither. Readers will (sometimes quite explicitly) be reminded of usual suspects like the Oulipian constructs of Italo Calvino, the “games with time and infinity” characteristic of Jorge Luis Borges, and Vladimir Nabokov’s 1962 ur-paratextual fiction Pale Fire.

They will also encounter a loosely connected sequence devoted to the stories of obscure figures in the history of photography and motion pictures, the filmography of a (presumably) imagined German starlet named Magda, a recurring retelling of Guy de Maupassant’s hoary 1884 classic “The Necklace”, and a respectively blind and deaf pair of brothers constructing and deconstructing a memory palace out of matchsticks on a train somewhere that really should be but is never actually named as the Transiberian Express. Despite the unrelenting self-referentiality, it’s better than it sounds, partly because Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea‘s stories or fables or whatever they are are often extremely funny and partly because every once in a while, they’re also quite affecting.

Like many collections and novels where the formal conceits dominate the storytelling, the sum total can be tiring or enervating, and all the more so because Rose both carefully controls meaning and connection and also because he refuses either to settle into them or to constrain the resulting ambiguities satisfactorily. So, yes—Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea remains postmodernist in its emotional withholding.

At the same time, unlike, say, 1980s Paul Auster, who is everywhere and nowhere in these pages, Rose ranges more globally and, at key moments, touches on the rich formal lode that makes contemporaries such as Benjamin Labatut, Valeria Luiselli, and Teju Cole so powerfully exceed the limited stakes of so much of today’s autofiction and fictionalized nonfiction. At these moments, staring at the sea evokes not only coldly rolling waves of nearly identical lives passing and ungraspable temporality but something warmer, more finely grained, and more relevant to the lives we live, without losing sight of the absurdity of that desire or the impossibility of maintaining or even attaining it.

It’s not as if Rose is unaware of the pitfalls of his approach; indeed, the collection is both compelling and exhausting in its ceaseless circumnavigation of those pitfalls. The opening story is a lively round-robin of indirect free style set in a hotel bar. Its myriad of characters both exemplifies and questions the portentous title. “Ognosia”, the Acknowledgments inform us, is Jennifer Croft’s translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s coining.

The Internet tells us agnosia is the ability to perceive the world as meaningful and connected; a footnote to the story “What Remains of Claire Blanck” implies that it’s quite similar to “apophenia … the mental condition in which the sufferer sees everything as being connected.” That is, if you’re the kind of reader that either seeks “agnosia” or suffers from a surfeit of “apophany”, you’ll find abundant grist for your mill in Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea. And if you have perspective on your condition, you’ll probably decide like I did that the gap, or perhaps the overlap, between an ability and a mental condition seems a reasonable description of what Rose seems to be getting at.

I certainly enjoyed the Borgesian biographies of dimly remembered French inventors and the refusal to take Bergson, Augustine, or Benjamin as seriously as they are usually taken without thereby losing sight of an iota of the complexity of their ideas. “St. Augustine Checks His Twitter Feed” is as laugh-out-loud funny and as effortlessly erudite as a classic Monty Python sketch. I was less persuaded by the more Austerian paradoxes of stories like “One Art”, in which one man’s world progressively vanishes only to accumulate in a woman’s drawers, or “Sisters”, in which one of a non-identical pair of identical twins similarly fades into nothingness. I was irritated by the intentionally emptied story “What Remains of Claire Blanck”, not because I didn’t enjoy the cleverness of taking Pale Fire one step further into notes without a text (get the name?), but because it’s in those notes that Rose unfolds with one hand and deauthorizes with the other the closest the collection gets to a raison d’être. When postmodernism doesn’t have the courage of its own convictions, I, like Benjamin, lose interest.

On the other hand, the two stories that precede “What Remains” are good enough not to be so easily undermined by their complex armature of form. “A Brief History of the Short Story” is a virtuoso variation on Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style, in conversation with numerous threads elsewhere in the collection, and with each variation on the short story formula spiraling around the previous one. It’s followed by “Proud Woman, Pearl Necklace, Twenty Years”, which appears intended as Rose’s own contribution to the prior French, Russian, and American models, and which echoes the multiple opening voices of “Agnosia”, except that here it’s an ESL classroom somewhere in Europe and a teacher is retelling the tale of “The Necklace” as a teaching device seamed with the varied experiences of a multilingual and multi-everything-else classroom. And not even my awareness that Rose writes it as a honeyed sop to the gatekeepers of today’s literary tastes keeps me from falling for its charms.

It’s moments like this, which escape knowing winks, ironic nods, and formal pyrotechnics, that make reading Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea feel like more than just another of those unremarkable afternoons that so many of its characters spend their days living through and trying to write about. - David Pike

https://www.popmatters.com/walter-benjamin-stares-cd-rose

The title of the story "St. Augustine Checks His Twitter Feed" tells readers a good deal of what they need to know about the English writer C.D. Rose's collection Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea. The 19 concise stories in this volume feature surrealist, metafictional and fabulist elements, and although not all succeed, there's much here that will appeal to readers who prefer short fiction of a less traditional variety.

Rose (The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure; Who's Who When Everyone Is Someone Else) gives a foretaste of much of what is to come in "Ognosia," the book's opener, which defies the short story convention of unity in point of view as it moves effortlessly among the perspectives of a group of characters in a hotel in an unnamed city. In "To Athens," Rose threads a lengthy sentence through a story whose paragraphs all begin with the phrase, "I have a friend" to fashion an entrancing counterpoint, while "A Brief History of the Short Story" engagingly examines the form in its French, Russian, and American iterations through a smartly linked narrative.

The St. Augustine story is a wry commentary on the allure of social media, as the cleric muses about writing what will become his Confessions and "oh, you know, the nature of suffering, evil, free will, time, the apocalypse, eternity, that kind of thing," while thinking about "changing his handle to @StAugustine_original," or wondering "why he hadn't gotten a blue checkmark."

In the titular story, the famed European intellectual Walter Benjamin has escaped to Los Angeles, where he "stares peacefully at the Pacific Ocean," acknowledging his boredom while unable to "settle for the time needed to concentrate on even the idea of a book and thinks he should try instead to finish the many things he has started." But in a story like "Henri Bergson Writes About Time," depicting the French philosopher at his desk reflecting on how "the past gets bigger, the future, like the dwindling spool, worryingly smaller" as he recalls an encounter with Albert Einstein, Rose shows he can write with emotional resonance.

He's heir to the tradition of short story writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, and shares some of the sensibility of their contemporary counterparts like Steven Millhauser, Jim Shepard, and Aimee Bender. Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea isn't necessarily tailored to appeal to a wide audience, but appreciative readers will find ample enjoyment here. --Harvey Freedenberg

https://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=4610#m61961

C. D. Rose, The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure. Melville House, 2014

A darkly comic, satirical reference book about writers who never made it into the literary canon

A signal event of literary scholarship, The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure compiles the biographies of history’s most notable cases of a complete lack of literary success. As such, it is the world’s leading authority on the subject.

Compiled in one volume by C. D. Rose, a well-educated person universally acknowledged in parts of England as the world’s pre-eminent expert on inexpert writers, the book culls its information from lost or otherwise ignored archives scattered around the globe, as well as the occasional dustbin.

The dictionary amounts to a monumental accomplishment: the definitive appreciation of history’s least accomplished writers. Thus immortalized beyond deserving and rescued from hard-earned obscurity, the authors presented in this historic volume comprise a who’s who of the talentless and deluded, their stories timeless litanies of abject psychosis, misapplication, and delinquency.

It is, in short, a treasure.

“Rose writes with wit, playfulness and an impressive knowledge... An author to reckon with, one whom Borges and Max Beerbohm would have admired... We haven’t heard the last of C.D. Rose.”—Washington Post

“Nuanced... Though the vignettes are fictional, most are entertaining and all could serve as warnings to anyone thinking of taking up the literary life."—Wall Street Journal

“An anthology that cleverly calls out the ways in which we dramatize—and idolize—the lives of authors, successful and not."—Huffington Post

“This selection may appear to break the rules, but this hilarious 'dictionary' of literary may not be as non-fictional as you think. It helped inspire my new favorite life-negating maxim: fail worse and go out on bottom."—Flavorwire, 50 Best Independent Fiction and Poetry Books of 2014

“Spend an hour with it...for a bracing, mordant reminder of why almost nothing is really worth bothering with."—Paris Review, Staff Picks

“A mesmerizing and hilarious little book." —Flavorwire

“Wonderful... A must read." —PopMatters

“This gloriously delicious testament to efforts of the wordy kind that seem to have gone off the rails offers the literary shenanigans of some rather suspect authors."—BookTrib

“[A] delightful compendium... The BDLF is a clever put-on, a brisk stroll...guided by Rose’s fastidious prose and copious literary references, but it is also a clarion for the infinite possibilities of literature."—Failure Magazine

“A delightful account... Genius."—Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg, VA)

“This lovely brown book presents insights into 52 literary failures…collected by C D Rose and retold with both care and wit. Every single one made me laugh, and I don’t just mean with schadenfreude or a dry resigned croak at the common fate of so many writers. As unlikely as it sounds, I found this book immensely cheering.”—Mind and Language

“A glorious alphabetical compendium of those who never achieved greatness.”—Stuart Kelly, Books of the Year, The Scotsman (UK)

“More a short story collection than a dictionary, this book is an homage to the many ways writers can fail... Failure. Of the most spectacular kind."—LitReactor

“Offers us a shadow history of literature... Whether the subject is Icarus-like or more of a Walter Mitty, Rose’s writing is unfailingly sympathetic and inventive."—Workshy Fop

“A series of clever (and occasionally hilarious) literary vignettes… Rose makes highly literate and arcane references to a vast number of authors and literary theoreticians, and it’s great fun for the reader to become part of the game.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Taking long-form comedy to brave new heights… Rose well utilizes that trick good writers have of including readers and making them feel smart."—Library Journal

“Tongue is definitely in cheek here… Each [writer] fail[s] better than the one before.”—Booklist

"A page turner of the best sort of slow motion, train wreck sort of way... Give this petite compendium a read!"—Susan Mulder, Rejection Chronicles

"A wonderful book. At long last someone has invented these failures and given them their due. We owe C. D. Rose an incalculable debt."—Steve Hely, author of How I Became A Famous Novelist

"A funny look at literary legends who, for one reason or another, managed to fall into oblivion (or fail to get noticed in the first place). From authors leaving masterpieces on trains, to those who compulsively--and literally--eat their words, this book will get you thinking about losses to literature that we'll never get to hear about. Just don't eat this book, please. Or, if you must, buy another copy afterwards... and restrain yourself from eating that one, too."—Jen Campbell

C. D. Rose, The Blind Accordionist. Melville

House, 2021

A supposedly long lost collection of fable-like stories supposedly written by the little-known middle European writer Maxim Guyavitch ... with a helpful intro and afterword making it hilariously clear that the keyword is "supposedly."

In the novel WHO'S WHO WHEN EVERYONE IS SOMEONE ELSE, the character "C.D. Rose" (not to be confused with the author C.D. Rose) searches an unnamed middle-European city for the long-lost manuscript of a little-known writer named Maxim Guyavitch. That search was fruitless, but in THE BLIND ACCORDIONIST, "C.D. Rose" has found the manuscript--nine sparkling, fable-like short stories--and he presents them here with an (hilarious) introduction explaining the discovery, and an afterword providing (hilarious) critical commentary on the stories, and what they might reveal about the mysterious Guyavitch.

THE BLIND ACCORDIONIST is another masterful book of world-making by the real C.D. Rose, absorbing in its mix of intelligence and light-heartedness, and its ultimate celebration of literature itself. It is the third novel in the series about "C.D. Rose," although the reader does not need to have read the previous two books. (The first in the series was THE BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF LITERARY FAILURE, containing portraits of dunsuccessful writers; the second was WHO'S WHO WHEN EVERYONE IS SOMEONE ELSE, in which the author of the DICTIONARY, "C.D. Rose," searches for the manuscript of his favorite dead writer, Maxim Guyavitch, while on a book tour for the DICTIONARY.)

Like those books, THE BLIND ACCORDIONIST can be read both as a simple but wonderful collection of quirky stories, and as comedy--or as a beautiful and moving elegy on the nobility of writers wanting to be read.

”The Blind Accordionist is a collection full of mischief and artistry. It is playful and serious in all the right places, though not necessarily the places the reader might expect. C.D. Rose is a storyteller of real brio and originality.” — Ronan Hession, author of Leonard and Hungry Paul

"In The Blind Accordionist, C.D. Rose shows once more what readers of the previous books in this unique series will already know: that here is one of the most talented writers of his generation, doing what he does best. Playful, wry, witty, understated but packing a real emotional punch, The Blind Accordionist is also great fun. Frankly, about as much fun as it is possible to have with the imagined long-lost manuscript of the equally long-lost Maxim Guyavitch." - Rodge Glass, author of Bring Me the Head of Ryan Giggs

“Rose writes with wit, playfulness and an impressive knowledge… Rose himself is an author to reckon with, one whom Borges and Max Beerbohm would have admired… We haven’t heard the last of C.D. Rose.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

“Mr. Rose is an appealing crank.”—The Wall Street Journal

C. D. Rose, Who's Who When Everyone is

Someone Else. Melville House, 2018

A hilariously charming novel about a heartbroken man trying to redeem himself by championing forgotten books

Fleeing heartbreak, an unnamed author goes to an unnamed city to give a series of lectures at an unnamed university about forgotten books ... only to find himself involved in a mystery when the professor who invited him is no where to be found, and no one seems quite sure why he's there....

So begins this Wes Anderson-like novel hilariously spoofing modernist literature even as it tells a stirring -- and eerily suspenseful -- story about someone desperate to prove the redeeming power of reading -- and writing -- books.

And as the narrator gives his lectures, attends vague functions where no one speaks English, never quite meets his host professor and wonders the city looking for the grave of his literary hero, the reader begins to suspect this man's relentless faith in literature may be the only thing getting him through the mystery enveloping him.

"This ingenious, uproarious novel deserves to sit on any bibliophile's shelf."—Times Literary Supplement

"A riotous, triumphant rattlebag of a novel. C.D.Rose has created an intricate exploration of literary intrigue, suspense and levity — lose yourself in this book at once, and savour every moment"—Eley Williams, author of Attrib. & Other Stories

“Anyone who’s been looking for the same hit to the cerebral cortex produced when they first encountered Calvino and Borges will read this extraordinary novel, as I did, with a grateful sense of urgency. It quenches a thirst you almost forgot you had: endlessly inventive, wickedly intelligent, funny and melancholic. I don’t remember the last time I read something this clever, puzzling and intricate which simultaneously packs so much soul. Who’s Who When Everyone is Someone Else is so much more than a sequence of bravura exercises in style; the passages between the lectures have the tone and elegance of a forgotten masterpiece themselves. It puts us outside ourselves, beside ourselves, as readers, as critics, as writers: a total perspective vortex which reminds us, even as it upends our expectations, why we fell in love with reading in the first place.” —Luke Kennard, author of The Transition

excerpt:

Who’s Who When Everyone is Someone Else

IT WAS A burning morning in late summer when I took my leave of Clara, the sky distant and receding as if in sympathy, the few wisps of cloud that had graced the dawn and reminded me of her hair now scorched away by the sun, already so hot at this hour, at this time of the year. I stood outside the Café Terminus and watched her pass, knowing I would never see her again, knowing our worlds had finally, definitively, utterly separated, and all that would be left of us were improbable names scratched in hotel registers, a bundle of letters bound by a ribbon hidden in the drawer to the left of her bed, and a few bitter tears, long evaporated, leaving only their salty trace on a handkerchief that may, for all I knew, have gone with her. Memories, I should say, memories would last, but I knew she no longer had any, and the few I possessed were treacherous, deceitful, liars to themselves as well as to me.

I sipped the last of my coffee, now little more than a sad black meniscus lining the bottom of the cup as her handsome wooden box passed by, pulled, as her father had insisted, by four fine black horses along the corso then out of town onto the cart track as far as the cemetery which lay a good few kilometres from any living habitation, its own walled and silent kingdom. As she slowly faded from view, I knew I was now, finally, free. Free to take the opposite direction, to turn away from her, from this town, from their whole world.

It was time to take the train.

The station was a tawdry, flyblown little place, scarcely worthy of the name, one platform and a bucket in a shed claiming to be a restroom. Yet it mattered little, as the locomotive appeared on time, entering the town just as Clara would have been leaving it to the other side. While I have to admit that there was a certain grace and pomp in the manner of her departure, train travel, too, has its own romance. The hiss of steam, the burn of coal and grit, the immense breath of the engine as it heaves itself into motion, slowly building to the mighty speed that even such an old chugger as this one could muster. As we passed into open country I listened to the sound of the iron wheels on the steel rails, felt the slow rock of the carriages, watched the land speed by as if I were watching a film. The history of all this, I thought, the knowledge that the rails I travelled on had been forged by honest steelworkers and laid by burly immigrants, that the rock gorge I was now passing through had been hewn by brave engineers laying dynamite with their bare hands. How many had died in the construction of this marvel? The land fell away beneath me, the sound suddenly expanding as we passed over a bridge fashioned from a Roman aqueduct.

But finest of all was the anonymity. Here, I could be anyone I liked. Stepping aboard a train is stepping into a new world. The random strangers. The potential for chance encounter. Once the door is locked and the whistle blown, the departure is total. No one knew me; I knew no one. I could begin again.

I LET THE book drop onto my lap and felt its pages slap shut. I closed my eyes and wished for sleep, but none came. I’d hoped Enrico Cavaletti’s Train to the End of the Night would be the perfect thing to accompany me on a long rail journey and at first the rhythms of the prose dutifully matched the rocking of the train I was on, but soon the long sentences merely bored me and I had to go over them time and again, unable to focus, not for the first time disappointed by the gaping juncture between a book and reality.

I’d turned to Cavaletti on the advice of a friend whose name I was now trying to recall so that I could ignore any future advice from him. “It’s a fine example of train literature,” I remember an indistinct voice telling me, and scribbled Cavaletti’s name in my notebook for future reference only to forget it again until I was embarking on a long rail journey myself. I’d thought of including it on the reading list I was drawing up, too, but on the evidence of its opening passage it seemed little more than a piece of early-twentieth-century schlock, its fancy prose giving away far too much right from the first page. It could go on the reserve list, I supposed.

Sadly, I had nothing else to hand, my only other books stuffed into one of the suitcases now stashed on a dangerously narrow overhead luggage rack. To get it down and open it up would have meant disturbing my fellow passengers, none of whom seemed the types to be disturbed without annoyance. I stared out of the window instead, and thought about how it wasn’t the gap between the book and reality that had disappointed me, but rather my failure to allow what I had been reading to change the world I was in.

The world I was in at that point was a packed train now three hours late due to an unexplained and interminable stop in the middle of flat empty fields somewhere just over the border between two countries, neither of which I knew the first thing about. I was squashed into a back-aching seat next to a man who had the air of a distracted philosophy professor, and seemed to be sleeping off a heavy lunch. Across from me, another man was attempting to engage the other members of our compartment in conversation, but the two young women were content to whisper to each other and ignore him, while the final occupant, a nun of some order unknown to me, only nodded whenever he spoke to her and said not a word. Fortunately, as long as I read or pretended to read, I maintained the force field of the book-absorbed foreigner, one which no one attempted to break.

After what felt like several hours—but I concede may have been fewer—the train began again, slowly enough to let a few grey storage hangars emerge from the fog but rising to a steady trundle through a cluster of unimpressive tower blocks, which in turn gave way to spreading leafy suburbs before sinking into a tunnel of near-Stygian gloom, its brick and cement walls seeming remarkably free of graffiti. The tunnel then opened out into a glass-domed space, all light and iron tracery, pigeons swooping around the crosswork beams. A platform hove up alongside us as the train slowed, the film finishing. An ornate fin-de-siècle sign announced the name of our city, and the word “Terminus.” The end.

AND SO I had arrived, a man in a battered hat with a bulky suitcase in each hand, suffering under an overcoat too heavy for the weather. I could have been that eternal migrant, the one slowly fleeing from some domestic turmoil, the man who’d shifted from city to city for years, ever seeking a point or purpose in each one. I could have been an autodidact peasant, now come to the city to show off his learning, pronounce a great theory of everything or a new path to spiritual enlightenment to rapt crowds in packed halls. Had I been younger, I could have been the eager naïf at the beginning of a cheap musical, ready to put his cases on the pavement, stand up, stretch his back, whistle through his teeth and sigh, So, big city—whaddya got in store for me?

I was, in truth, none of these things, yet also a little part of each of them.

But perhaps I should explain.

João Ubaldo Ribeiro - an anti-history of the author's homeland, Brazil. Whaling, war, macumba, slavery, murder, cannibalism and Brazil's struggle for independence add momentum to Ribeiro's lyrical, effusive, sonorous, serpentine prose laced with a touch of magic realism something of a cross between Melville and Garcia Marquez

João Ubaldo Ribeiro, An Invincible Memory, Trans. by the author. HarperCollins, 1989

https://thecollidescope.wordpress.com/2019/07/07/an-invincible-memory/


This epic historical novel is an anti-history of the author's homeland, Brazil. The narrative follows two families - one of aristocrats, the other slaves - through many generations and vicissitudes.

A family saga spanning nearly 400 years, this absorbing epic novel lays bare the soul of the Brazilian nation. Whaling, war, macumba, slavery, murder, cannibalism and Brazil's struggle for independence add momentum to Ribeiro's lyrical, effusive, sonorous, serpentine prose laced with a touch of magic realism something of a cross between Melville and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. (The author himself has rendered the fluent translation.) At the center is Amleto Ferreira, a 19th century paterfamilias and conniving bookkeeper who defrauds a baron of his wealth; Amleto's ladylike, long-suffering wife Teolina; and their children, among them a priest, a romantic poet and a soldier. A bestseller in Brazil, the novel graphically portrays the terrible cruelty inflicted by whites on blacks, mulattos and Indians; the lives of these native peoples unfold in dozens of intertwined stories. The relationship between Merinha, patient, Penelope-like servant girl, and runaway slave Budiao is moving. Also memorable are 100-year-old Great Mother Dadinha and Maria da Fe, a bandit warrior who converses with birds and seeks special power from a sorcerer's charms. Catapulting his tale into the 1970s, journalist Ribeiro ( Sergeant Getulio ) creates a stunning portrait of a people who, though outwardly mirthful, are still not free.


An impressive fictional re-creation of Brazilian history, this work moves from the colonial to the modern era in an attempt to decipher the psyche of contemporary Brazilians. The result is an exhaustive work that leads the reader through time in this fascinating Latin American country. The swarm of characters function to uncover the development of a Creole society based on the mixing of ethnic groups--Indian, European, and black--whose clash at different times produced a national awareness of belonging to native clans. In criollismo literary style, the novel offers varied aspects of native color, such as the Indian ceremony of making mate and the black macumba and spiritualist practices. Essential for the reader interested in a yet unexplored world. - Rafael Ocasio


Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro's novel ''An Invincible Memory'' is about the forging of the Brazilian national identity - the incongruous merging of the various elements of its indigenous, Dutch, Portuguese colonialist and African slave populations into one unified spirit that calls itself Brazilian. As such, the novel attempts to trace the history of Brazil from the arrival of the early Dutch settlers in the 17th century (with some fairly hilarious Rabelaisian passages regarding their cannibalism) to the country's recent struggles with right-wing dictatorship and state-sponsored terrorism. It is an often miserable history, as Brazil endeavors to become itself during its colonial periods, its fight for independence in 1822, the freeing of its slaves and its critical war with Paraguay, which began in 1864. In this panoramic, epic sweep, ''An Invincible Memory'' - fluently translated from the Portuguese by the author himself - tries to give its readers not merely a story, but the history of a people.

The second novel of a former journalist and teacher, the book is written in a nonlinear, episodic style. Mr. Ubaldo Ribeiro plays a kind of historic hopscotch; there is a general forward movement that ultimately carries us toward present-day reality. (For example, consecutive episodes are dated June 10, 1821; June 9, 1827; Feb. 26, 1809; June 11, 1827.) The complex plot is generational and virtually universal in its scope, with characters who represent the members of the Brazilian class system, such as the patron-colonial ruler, the slave, the mulatto. Its patchwork skips from date to date, character to character. If this sounds confusing, it is, unless one is well versed in Brazilian history. (Given the complex format and cast of characters, a simple genealogical or chronological chart would certainly have helped the North American reader, as it does in such works as, say, the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation of ''War and Peace'' or the Gregory Rabassa translation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's ''One Hundred Years of Solitude.'') The novel's many subplots spin off like the spokes of a wheel. To take one example, a baron of the empire lives in the coastal town of Bahia, where he is in charge of the fishing industry. He has tremendous wealth, many slaves and so forth. The way he became a baron and a hero in the battle for independence is an important element of the book. He secretly killed one of his slaves, smeared himself with the slave's blood and declared himself to have been wounded in combat. Another slave happened to witness this killing, and the baron ordered his tongue cut out at the root so that he could never reveal what he saw.

The baron prospers and grows powerful, and one day he rapes a young slave who is actually an African princess named Veve. He believes the slave girl has been killed or sent away after the rape, but she remains and delivers his child nine months later, a beautiful, green-eyed girl who will become known as Maria da Fe. Concurrent with the birth of this child, some of the baron's slaves begin a revolutionary faction called the Brotherhood of the Flour House. After Maria, as a young girl, witnesses the brutal murder of her mother (who was trying to protect her daughter from rape by eight white men), she joins the brotherhood and becomes a major revolutionary force herself.

What Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro handles very well, and in a moving fashion, is the episodes about slavery and its remarkable cruelty. The severing of the slave's tongue, the rape of Veve, the terrible life that the slaves lived - all are effectively rendered in this novel. The book persuasively portrays a country in collision, deeply troubled by its class struggles. The mulatto Amleto, for example, passes for white and denies his own mother (who is black) and will not even permit her to attend the baptism of her grandchild, even though she offers to pose as a house servant.    

While the novel does have these poignant moments, their impact doesn't carry through the whole. In part, the structure - its splices in time, its mosaic of small incidents and subplots - never lets the reader sink very deeply into any one story. But the real problem is the characters themselves. Rather than being fleshed-out, organic outgrowths of the story, they are stereotypes, inventions in the service of an idea: the horrid baron, the rebelling slaves, the conflicted mulatto, the monsignor who makes endless speeches espousing the church's viewpoint, never really come to life on the page.

For instance, when Patricio Macario - a rather mediocre military man whose destiny it is to fall permanently and impossibly in love with the great revolutionary Maria da Fe - finds himself face to face with the son he never knew existed, the offspring of his star-crossed love, he says, ''What do you do, my son?'' And the son responds: ''I'm a revolution maker, my father. Ever since my mother's time, even before that, we've been looking for a conscience of what we are. And before that we didn't even know we were looking for something, we just rebelled. But as time passed we accumulated wisdom through practice and thought, and today we know we are searching for this conscience and are finding this conscience.''

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While admirable for its ambitious scope and its vision of history, the microcosmic world of the novel topples under the weight of its heavy language and stereotypical characters. There is no Buendia family, as there is in ''One Hundred Years of Solitude,'' whose quirks and foibles carry us along. No Alba, as in Isabel Allende's ''House of the Spirits,'' who narrates her story in such a way that our hearts break in the final pages. Instead, we have a novel of ideas told by a student of history, rather than a story told by a real storyteller.

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Mary Morris is the author of ''Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone,'' an account of a trip through Latin America. Her novel, ''The Wait

Jeffrey T. Nealon - If "fragmentation" was the preferred watchword of postmodern America, "intensification" is the dominant cultural logic of our contemporary era

Jeffrey T. Nealon, Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life, Stanford University Press, 2015

“In our age of ecological disaster, this book joins the growing philosophical literature on vegetable life to ask how our present debates about biopower and animal studies change if we take plants as a linchpin for thinking about biopolitics. Logically enough, the book uses animal studies as a way into the subject, but it does so in unexpected ways. Upending critical approaches of biopolitical regimes, it argues that it is plants rather than animals that are the forgotten and abjected forms of life under humanist biopower. Indeed, biopolitical theory has consistently sidestepped the issue of vegetable life, and more recently, has been outright hostile to it. Provocatively, Jeffrey T. Nealon wonders whether animal studies, which has taken the “inventor” of biopower himself to task for speciesism, has not misread Foucault, thereby managing to extend humanist biopower rather than to curb its reach. Nealon is interested in how and why this confusion predominates. Plant Theory turns to several other thinkers of the high theory generation in an effort to imagine new futures for the ongoing biopolitical debate.”


Jeffrey T. Nealon, Post-Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism, Stanford University Press, 2012

Post-Postmodernism begins with a simple premise: we no longer live in the world of "postmodernism," famously dubbed "the cultural logic of late capitalism" by Fredric Jameson in 1984. Far from charting any simple move "beyond" postmodernism since the 1980s, though, this book argues that we've experienced an intensification of postmodern capitalism over the past decades, an increasing saturation of the economic sphere into formerly independent segments of everyday cultural life. If "fragmentation" was the preferred watchword of postmodern America, "intensification" is the dominant cultural logic of our contemporary era.
Post-Postmodernism surveys a wide variety of cultural texts in pursuing its analyses—everything from the classic rock of Black Sabbath to the post-Marxism of Antonio Negri, from considerations of the corporate university to the fare at the cineplex, from reading experimental literature to gambling in Las Vegas, from Badiou to the undergraduate classroom. Insofar as cultural realms of all kinds have increasingly been overcoded by the languages and practices of economics, Nealon aims to construct a genealogy of the American present, and to build a vocabulary for understanding the relations between economic production and cultural production today—when American-style capitalism, despite its recent battering, seems nowhere near the point of obsolescence. Post-postmodern capitalism is seldom late but always just in time. As such, it requires an updated conceptual vocabulary for diagnosing and responding to our changed situation.

"Nealon's periodizing work certainly contributes to the field of postwar literary and cultural studies . . . The book's eclectic style and turn to the liberal arts is somehow both unexpected and well-suited to the conversations in which it intervenes, and Nealon's sharp-witted, cogent assessment at this pivotal moment in cultural/economic history is just in time."—Matthew Mullins

"This is a work of very considerable importance. Now perhaps more than at any other time, culture and the economy constitute a seamless whole: everything can be given its price. Nealon poses the question: if postmodernism was the cultural logic of late capitalism, what is the cultural logic that has accompanied our current regime of accumulation? His answer is novel and ingenious."—Kenneth Surin

"Post-Postmodernism is Jeffrey Nealon in full flow: biting, smart, funny, and demonstrating his rare ability to combine philosophical insights with the most irreverent aspects of the popular. He propels us into thought through capital, through the popular, through the philosophical, through the political. Nealon has much to teach us, and he does so in splendid fashion."—Grant Farred

The world of things has become a world of signs – a universe that both brings into being and is brought into being by symbolic codes. Perhaps it is for this reason alone that that most symbolic of all codes, the literary text, can foreshadow a future world while the contemporary world suggests the future of poetics. - Steve Tomasula

Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Post-Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism restages and reactivates Fredric Jameson’s call, over twenty years prior, for a new situation and new mode of criticism adequate to late capitalism. While reduplicating Jameson’s title, terminology, methods and modes of address quite directly at several points, Nealon’s text, in fact, reflexively redirects Jameson’s methods and concerns. It contraposes Jameson’s “style” of reading postmodernism, to what it describes as the “changed cultural and economic situation” of “just-in-time capitalism,” which Post-Postmodernism identifies as a distinct mode of production emerging around 2001 (xi, xii). Suggesting that we are stuck in the economic narratives and theoretical practices of the 80’s, Post-Postmodernism returns to Jameson’s methods to provide a “genealogy of the recent economic past” against which we can more adeptly read the post-postmodernist period (14). Its comparative genealogy explores those still pivotal concepts from postmodernism: “intensity,” “commodity,” “interpretation,” “literature,” “deconstruction,” “university” and “liberal arts,” using these to register mutations in today’s post-postmodernist tendencies and, in this way, to retrace and recalibrate our understanding of these ongoing, unfolding concerns.
Post-Postmodernism joins other recent attempts to reflect back on Jameson’s Marxist project and historical materialisms, more broadly, as a means to look forward and more effectively unfold new kinds of reading more responsive to the present, somewhat altered historical situation and its forceful, biopolitical modes of power. It introjects and creatively recombines Jameson’s reading practices with those that Christopher Nealon, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Jane Tompkins, Alain Badiou, Catherine Malabou, Theodor Adorno, and Friedrich Nietzsche, respectively, recommend and/or practice. Its analyses selectively draw upon a remarkably eclectic, broad-ranging grouping of leftist theorists, including those featured in the collection rethinking A Leftist Ontology: Beyond Relativism and Identity Politics (in which an earlier version of the first chapter of the book appeared).
Importantly, its diagnosis of an emergent post-postmodernism, which it adeptly locates in and across cultural and economic practices as varied as “classic rock,” literary studies, Las Vegas, Don DeLillo novels, the corporate university, and conceptual poetry, serves as a productive, open-ended provocation to rethink literature, literary studies, and poetics—in their current relationships to capitalism, their abilities to re-engage the present terrain, and what that might do for the left. Post-Postmodernism tracks the “material links between literary works and their institutional and commercial context,” pursuing “the networks within which writing is located,” the places, purposes, and operations of literature and literary and cultural studies in their complex relations to emergent media, social, and economic systems, a preoccupation Daniel Punday suggests is a “condition of this post-postmodern moment” (“Looking for Writing After Postmodernism”). With this emphasis in mind, I recommend engaging Post-Postmodernism as a much-needed provocation, taking up, even taking liberties with Nealon’s invitation to participate in “periodizing the present, a collective molecular project that we might call post-postmodernism” (15).
Post-Postmodernism is distinctly intensive in several interrelated senses of particular relevance to its aims here, as well as to its diagnosis of “just-in-time capitalism.” Its mode of inquiry is intensive in the sense of a reflexive turning back or inwards to reflect on the very category of postmodernism and the expansion of the cultural sphere Jameson initially theorized, though now from the vantage of our unfolding, post-postmodern present. By recursively replaying key methods and claims from Jameson’s 1984 essay and subsequent book, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, among other work, Post-Postmodernism, amplifies and, thus, transformatively intensifies them in light of shifts in the historical situation and in theoretical efforts to grapple with these shifts since then. Nealon’s recursive turning back and reflexive redoubling of the prior text and several of its notable theoretical methods intend (excuse the pun) to register the difference of the present—in other words, to diagnose the qualitative phase change that has taken place within the systems of late capitalism and to develop more adequate reading practices to address those shifts. Paradoxical as it may seem, it is by overlaying these historical moments and respective reading practices that Nealon attempts to more fully register their distinctness, a positively (i.e., productive, transformative) intensifying reading practice that informs the text and project at multiple—historical, stylistic, methodological, and theoretical—levels.
Rather than moving us clearly beyond postmodernism and postmodern theory of the 80’s and ‘90’s, as many contemporary calls for a new mode of reading, certainly aspire to, the redundant, admittedly “stammering post-post” (viiii) in Nealon’s account, through this accentuation, intensifies underappreciated dimensions to Jameson’s reading practices that, Nealon argues, we may be in a better position to register and more effectively repurpose now that postmodernism has become a thing of the recent, not immediate past. Similarly to other “posts” that remain as cognitive goalposts to mark the tangible contradictions that persist amidst categories such as posthumanism, postcolonialism, or the postdigital, Nealon’s title and methods enthusiastically activate these very complexities, stressing how they exceed, as well as extend, those with which postmodernism already contends. If efforts to understand, let alone differentiate PoPomo and the present situation in the most casual of conversations always lead back to Pomo and its discontents, then, Post-Postmodernism seems to wager, perhaps a more concerted return to Pomo theory from the vantage of the present might, instead, lead to a better grasp on the present and a more positive appreciation of its distinctly PoPomo potentialities and perils.
Readers will likely find the “style of Jamesonian critique” (xi) in Post-Postmodernism familiarly unfamiliar precisely because Nealon’s project is not to fetishistically review or extend Jameson’s framework, as if that remains an autonomous, self-contained theoretical practice unaffected by shifts in capitalism’s operations and historical time. Instead, by reflexively reopening Jameson’s ongoing theoretical methods to the present situation, Post-Postmodernism expands upon Jameson’s prior aspirations to a “dialectical thinking that is both situated and reflexive” as a means to more productively open onto modes of reading the present that are quite distinct from Jameson’s (Valences of the Dialectic 322). In “Ideological Analysis: A Handbook” in Valences of the Dialectic, Jameson states
the dialectic may be said to be thinking that is both situational (situation-specific) and reflexive (or conscious of its own thought-process). Also implied here is the idea that the very nature and strategies of the dialectic will change according to the historical situation and according to the objects or ideologies it seeks to understand or combat. (322)
Following through on Jameson’s retheorization of the dialectic, his endorsement of a historical materialism equally invested in historical periodization and autocritique, Post-Postmodernism reconceives its dialectical methods to better understand and counter the distinct economic and cultural practices of “just-in-time capitalism.”1
The methods of intensification Post-Postmodernism devises are explicitly designed to diagnose (in Nietzsche’s sense), and enhance apprehension of, a historical situation in which late capitalism’s own tendencies have intensified, requiring compatible modes of reading and engagement. Post-Postmodernism draws upon and extends prominent work on finance capital and the “new economies” by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri and others to anatomize and flesh out their accounts with remarkably detailed and engaging analyses of interrelated emergent economic and cultural practices in chapters such as “Intensity: Empire of the Intensities: A Random Walk Down Las Vegas Boulevard.” This chapter opens on the Vegas strip with Hardt and Negri’s claim in Empire that “Capitalism no longer looks outside but rather inside its domain, and its expansion is thus intensive rather than extensive,” and it proceeds to consider its consequence to understanding American empire today as it filters through this contemporary cultural and economic mecca and through films such as Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (25).
In this way, Post-Postmodernism identifies what it conceives as a qualitative intensification of postmodernism in the present. Following up on Hardt and Negri’s accounts of the intensive “new economies,” while further crossfertilizing these with his neo-Deleuzian understanding of “intensities,” Nealon argues that post-postmodernism has amplified the “speed and penetration” of postmodernist tendencies we first became familiar with during the 1980’s, and have been re-experiencing, since 2001, to a qualitatively distinct pitch or key due to their heightened pace and reach (150). Intensification, in Nealon’s account, flags the qualitative shift involved in that “just-in-time capitalism” is increasingly reliant on economic practices that self-referentially turn inwards, circling back on themselves to create value through symbolic manipulation rather than through the production of material objects alone. Finance capital, which produces money by manipulating money is the most obvious example of this kind of “intension” characteristic of the “new economies” as opposed to the “extension” to new physical markets or frontiers more typical of industrial capitalism. These intensive, self-referential, symbolic tendencies have catalyzed capitalism’s growing preoccupation with service industries and the creation of experiences, in distinction from tangible cultural objects. Post-Postmodernism uses the Las Vegas strip as one of its primary examples of the elaborate creation and pursuit of commodified experiential events in contemporary life, yet there is really no need to leave home to realize that even a Red Lobster commercial on t.v. is now proclaiming it’s the “experience” that will bring you back to their “annual shrimp event,” offering experiences one used to expect from conceptual art, not a seafood chain—until now.
Intensification, in both cases, evidences what Post-Postmodernism considers as a pervasive “culturalization of the economic” (41) as the symbolic and service-oriented, informational economies first identified in the 80’s gain unprecedented prominence. Post-Postmodernism explores the consequences of this shift now that economic logics are increasingly intermeshed with the symbolic dimensions and performative logics one is more likely to associate with language, cultural work, and poetics. As evidence, Nealon points to the massive fluctuations of economic value within the “new economies’ ” and finance markets’ dynamic, computation-based, symbolic flows. When the housing bubble burst, for instance, he argues that we began to realize that the value of one’s home is much more a “bardic ‘performative’ than an objective, ‘constative’ entity,” more symbolic than one might have hoped, yet not at all poetic in our usual sense of the term (154). “[T]he world of things has become a world of signs—a universe that both brings into being and is brought into being by symbolic codes,” to apply Steve Tomasula’s eloquent figuration of these altered relays between material and symbolic, and economic and cultural practices, to Post-Postmodernism’s observations here.
Post-Postmodernism’s diagnosis of “just-in-time capitalism” connects the economic intensifications accompanying the expansion of cultural practices and products to a shifting, similarly intensified “paradigmatic ethos” informing subjectivity and affectively intensified modes of consumption in which, Nealon darkly underscores, “[t]he final product, in the end, is you and me” (150, 31). Just-in-time capitalism’s intensive, flexible, computation-based exchanges of information have tightened these relays between subjectivity and consumption, turning us into “prosumers,” as Alvin Toffler presciently termed them (285). On this point, Nealon’s account of post-postmodernism coincides with other recent attempts, such as Nigel Thrift’s Non-Representational Theory, to think through the striking affective and experiential terrain twenty-first century capitalism works to quantify and rerealize. Through this concept of intensification as a “paradigmatic ethos” (150), Post-Postmodernism draws important attention to the growing economic and biopolitical interest in creating, administering, manipulating, and documenting emotional experiences. Most readers are aware of these tendencies, which are quite apparent in the consolidation of Google, Facebook, Zynga, and other social media pioneers as some of capitalism’s most newly intensified frontiers and as remarkably innovative sites for its cultivation of what Andrew Ross terms “free labor” (16). Perhaps less noticeably, they are also fueling the noticeable explosion of fields of affective computing, computational linguistics, and elaborate research and development now surrounding biometric sensing and tracking that enables better quantification, tailoring, and management of a wide range of affective, biologically attuned experiences well beyond social media. Though computer scientists’ and entrepreneurs’ thorough investment in daily emotional experience and in tracking language practices online today is not without its precedents in the history of biopower, it also seems clear that, as Post-Postmodernism suggests, the dynamic interrelations between economic and cultural practices have changed significantly of late. Further, while these intensive tendencies of late capitalism initially provoked surprise, as is evident in Jameson’s and other early analyses of postmodernism, Nealon’s text convincingly reveals how today an awareness of the imbrication of economic and cultural spheres is more often taken as a starting point and given for subsequent analysis and behavior, in spite of lively disagreement about the particular contours to, and consequences of, these entanglements. As a result, suggests Post-Postmodernism, it might now be possible to register and differentiate between distinctly postmodern and post-postmodern modes of embedding economic and cultural production rather than simply bemoaning their seeming conflation.
At this point, you may be wondering what in the world is positive about Post-Postmodernism’s intensification of Jameson and/or the disturbing cultural and economic practices this text energetically anatomizes. Rightly so. Well, a dialectical intensification is also the basis of the immanent, provocational reading practices that Post-Postmodernism recommends (and practices) as a way to better engage and transform the topographies of post-postmodernism, its multileveled call to: “read this way [!]” (168). Reexamining Jameson’s “schizoid,” “style of engagement” in his essay, “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Nealon excavates a more positive, “neo-Deleuzian (though he’d undoubtedly prefer the adjective “utopian”)” side to Jameson’s dialectical methods. Scrutinizing Jameson’s style—i.e., his holding together of disparate elements in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms—in his reading of Nam June Paik’s video installations, for instance, Nealon focuses in on Jameson’s identification there of “a new mutation in what can perhaps no longer be called consciousness” (7). Reminding readers of Jameson’s own “mishmashing” style in the essay, Nealon superbly suggests that Jameson, in this way, attempts to perform and to “limn” the new mode of apprehending relationship this historical situation seems to elicit and/or call for. Repeating Jameson’s suggestion that our negative inability to map the present, “can also provoke ‘a more positive conception of relationship’ ” (7), Nealon convincingly illustrates how Jameson goes on to perform this emergent mode of perceiving and thinking the relationships between economic and cultural practices, one more adequate to postmodernism and its flows.
Nealon differentiates this positive side to Jameson’s methods from the “negative, stony, finger-wagging” (6) Jameson we think we know and readings of his work amongst other symptomatic “hermeneutics of suspicion,” arguing in the terms provided by fellow literary scholar Christopher Nealon that Jameson’s dialectical methods are, instead, practiced as a “hermeneutics of situation,” as “a kind of reading that proposes texts for our attention because they seem useful for historicizing the present” (25). Nealon insightfully differentiates this incipient “hermeneutics of situation” within Jameson’s work from the symptomatic, postmodernist “hermeneutics of suspicion” with which we are more familiar. The problem Post-Postmodernism finds with the kinds of symptomatic reading practices preoccupied with finding hidden meaning and symptomatically searching for what the text cannot say or its hidden cause (which were made famous by Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, leading Paul Ricoeur to coin the “hermeneutics of suspicion” as a laudatory term and later became standards for ‘80’s post-structuralist theory) is that they remain wholly unresponsive to the topographies of late capitalism. In particular, they overlook its tendencies to operate on a “flat plane,” as Nealon insists after Jameson, not according to the surface-depth model underlying symptomatic readings, which still locate the economic and the cultural on separate planes (22).
Post-Postmodernism proposes its own augmentative reading practices, creatively elaborating on Jameson’s dialectical method of transcoding or overcoding (Nealon’s preferred term), as a “hermeneutics of situation” that might move us beyond the “hermeneutics of suspicion” and its oppositional politics to allow more adept engagements with the fact that “[d]ifference in the postmodern world isn’t there to be overcome; it’s there to be intensified” (41). Here, the text references late capitalism’s signature embrace of fluidity, hybridity, and an ongoing, dynamic, anti-essentialist production of difference, noting that in the context of capitalism’s own embrace of multiplicity, hyper-differentiation, and its aversion to stasis and binary oppositions, 1980’s style post-structuralist theory’s critical pursuit of open-endedness, dynamism and non-binary accounts of difference no longer deliver the same force. Modes of ideology critique designed to combat an oppositional, normative politics of exclusion are, for this reason it suggests, significantly missing the mark today.
While Post-Postmodernism’s attention to the centrality of dynamic differentiation to capitalism’s operations of late, not stable binary oppositions, is quite important and in keeping with other accounts of late capitalism and the “new economies,” at this point the text, itself, risks reinforcing an equally limiting distinction between their open-ended, deterritorializing fluidity and dynamism in contrast to the static, exclusionary, normative territorializing logics of industrial capitalism. In demarcating current limits to symptomatic deconstructive and multicultural methods of reading focused on dismantling and hybridizing oppositions at the level of signification, Post-Postmodernism seems to overstate its case for the obsolescence of oppositional political and economic practices. Recognizing and sharing Nealon’s concern here with capitalism’s own remarkable (now computationally enabled) aptitude for de- and re-constructing the very oppositions on which it seemed previously to rely, and for emergent biopolitical strategies that seem to circumvent language altogether by acting directly on bodies in ever more minute, forceful ways, I expected more thoroughgoing engagement with how the political economies of “just-in-time capitalism,” as well as late capitalism and industrial capitalism, have actively rerealized distinct modes and logics of closure and openness, at once, not fully abandoned oppositional or significational methods for intensifying, productive, material ones, for instance. To borrow the language of social systems theory, all of these economic practices can be understood to create “openness out of closure,” to use differentiating logics to facilitate certain kinds of circulation and flows and not others, yet ones which are always premised on certain kinds of constraints, stasis, exclusions, or closure, as I think Nealon would agree. Otherwise, it is quite easy to forget that capitalism’s current open-ended fluidity is premised on an increasingly nuanced and elaborate differentiation of markets, subjects, and experiences, on its “hyper-differentiation,” as Nealon elsewhere acknowledges. In developing this argument against oppositional politics and significational practices and their current discontents, Post-Postmodernism glosses over the untimely persistence of prior economic and cultural practices, in the face of their more striking recalibration. At times, Post-Postmodernism claims that the “postmodern world” as a whole embraces difference and hybridity, as in the passage quoted above, yet elsewhere the text is more careful to acknowledge that well-established oppositional political modes remain key to nation-states, for instance, in spite of their somewhat contradictory relation to economic practices and policies. For example, while an embrace of “difference” appears to be shared by late capitalism and nationalist discourses of multiculturalism today, as Sara Ahmed has argued, nation-states often paradoxically establish the tolerance of difference as a new exclusionary norm that discourages ethnic or race based identifications on that normalizing, now multicultural basis of “loving difference.” Late capitalism’s increasingly differentiated, as well as dynamic, modes of circulation, in other words, frequently refine and extend, rather than wholly contravene the exclusionary, oppositional practices made familiar during the prior period. This complicates any straightforward distinction between old and new economies according to their relative dynamic, difference and fluidity or normalizing stasis, and raises questions about the reach of reading practices not attuned to these complexities. These are insights, I’d stress, that postcolonialism, critical race studies, feminism and gender studies, and science and technology studies contribute, offering additional conceptual resources and reading practices to further expand the affirmative toolkit Post-Postmodernism recommends here.
Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “powers of the false,” Nealon further differentiates his intensifying approach from earlier postmodernist theories and historical materialisms, even Jameson’s, that remain more or less invested in the “weak” or mediating, interruptive force of the false and its limiting modes of challenging hegemonic truth by interrupting or suspending it. His own “post-postmodern” reading practices opt, instead, to pursue the “strong” powers of the false, which affirmatively intensify the “powers of the false as the engine for the emergence of another, different mode of speaking the truth” to “produce effects of truth in an alternate fashion,” and, in this way, “posit different ways of separating out the true and the false” (162).
In his chapter on “Literature,” Nealon realigns literature and literary studies with these productive, affirmative, “strong powers of the false,” in contrast to previous, predominant understandings of literature in terms of the “weak powers of the false,” as a “dialectical other” that subverts the true. Creatively extending Jameson’s practices of “overcoding” in relation to this neo-Deleuzian understanding of power as a production of truth effects in and on bodies, Nealon devises his aggregative method of “overcoding,” of “working out the connections, the sites of homology and difference” between seemingly unrelated economic and cultural practices “and the difference they make” (24). As Nealon explains the basic recipe for this methodology of “overcoding”:
Take one set of cultural claims…and overcode those cultural claims with another set of economic imperatives or explanations. When one then returns to the cultural claims, this intensifies or modifies the claims, and one can no longer dialectically return to the initial, seemingly commonsense claims and see them in quite the same way. (69) 
The notably intensifying, aggregative process of overcoding Nealon recommends, which brings modes and discourses of cultural and/or economic production to bear on each other, paradoxically opens onto new possibilities for perceiving the relationships between the cultural and the economic in terms attentive to their complex interweaving today. While Nealon’s recommended post-postmodern reading practices and their “strong powers of the weak” initially seem to give up significant ground in that they actively conflate and confront increasingly overlapping economic and cultural practices rather than, as one might hope, attempting to clarify the precise kinds of relationship between economic and cultural production “just-in-time capitalism” currently co-realizes, these intensifying, affirmative methods are designed to bring their unregistered differences to the fore, and, in this way, to open up alternate modes of producing truth, of differentiating truth and falsity.
Based on Nealon’s own demonstration of such overcoding practices in Post-Postmodernism, these methods generate much-needed perspectives on the literary, the liberal arts, and the infamous corporate university. They encourage us to ask, as Nealon’s text does, what “poetics tell us about the workings of economics and culture rather than vice versa, what roles can literature play other than the ‘other’?” (153). Taking these overcoding operations in the other direction, from economic discourses to cultural ones, facilitates Nealon’s counterintuitive consideration of how the economic logics of corporatization might, in fact, serve academics, if tactically engaged as a rationale for improving the corporate university’s efficiency by downsizing administrative bulk (as opposed to the current predilection to eliminate tenure lines and student financial aid first). Demonstrating this immanent poetics of overcoding at the level of the book’s methodology, Nealon’s text illustrates how socioeconomic and literary questions and their essential, yet vexing interrelations today are quite usefully co-explored through such a poetics of overcoding. Instead of myopically focusing on the interpretation of textual meaning, Post-Postmodernism insists that the “force of literature” as equipment for living (pace Kenneth Burke)
at this historical juncture may precisely lie in intensifying and expanding our sense of ‘the poetic’ as a robust form of cultural engagement or analysis, whose force is enabled not by its distance from dominant culture, but its imbrication with contemporary socioeconomic forces. Within such a rethinking, even literature’s seeming uselessness could be recoded from a stoic, prophylactic avoidance to a positive (maybe even joyful) form of critical engagement with contemporary biopolitical and economic life. (154) 
Reading this way, among others, encourages a greater, much-needed appreciation of the work that poetics and the literary can do in engaging with the modes and logics of contemporary capital by attending to the ways that literary and cultural texts work (at once textually, poetically, materially, institutionally, and economically), especially in light of the bioinformatic networks and modes of circulation now defining capitalist circulation.
Post-Postmodernism inventively initiates such lines of inquiry into these entangled relays linking literary and cultural and economic practices in contemporary life through a variety of overcoding practices. It responds to the increasing elaboration and variety of sites and modes of literary and cultural production and their complex relations to the workings of contemporary capitalism and provides a compelling alternative to current efforts to sidestep these shifts and resolutely maintain a conception of the literary and cultural as a minor or peripheral (presumably resistant) “weak,” subversive outside to these operations. Not everyone will want to model their reading practices off the conceptual art of Kenny Goldsmith, one of the examples Post-Postmodernism uses to illustrate how poetics can overcode and document the productive operations and work of the literary and to demonstrate the transformative, material force of language, though most readers who have encountered Goldsmith’s compilation of all of the text from one New York Times newspaper in the book, Day, will agree that it is impossible to read The New York Times in the same way after this. Day’s poetics undertake a unique kind of work we might want to be able to register, even if this doesn’t quite live up to Nealon’s proposition of a “joyful” form of critical engagement.
This example underscores, to me, that such aggregative, productive poetics and their distinct material force are already part of literary and cultural practices today as are a wider range of comparative media practices whose operations are, in my view, equally attuned to the differential, coordinated workings of the literary in complex relation to other spheres of production in the present. Post-postmodernism’s provocation stresses that such literary and poetic practices have yet to be fully recognized for the work they do or for what they have to teach us about the literary as it responds and acclimates to economic and social systems and their emergent modes of power and it suggests one way we might begin to read the topographies of capitalism again. - Laura Shackelford

Dow Mossman - This epic "great American novel" draws from Salinger, Heller, and Faulkner in its stream-of-consciousness style and remarkable characters. Light on plot but heavy on metaphysical insight

 

Dow Mossman, Stones of Summer, 1972

Originally published to glowing reviews in 1972, Dow Mossman's extraordinary debut is a sweeping coming-of-age tale that developed a passionate cult following. It recently inspired the award-winning documentary film "Stone Reader," described by Peter Rainer of "New York" magazine as 'a marvelous literary thriller that gets at the way books can stay with people forever.' Rendered with breathtaking artistry and emotional depth, "The Stones of Summer" captures the beauty and pain of postwar America. Its vivid evocation of culture-void Iowa in the '50s and '60s reveals in layer after layer of richly observed detail the maturation 'the very soul' of an artist. Its rediscovery was the catalyst for one filmmaker to confront his faith in the power of great literature to endure, and it can now be embraced by readers everywhere.

The Stones of Summer, first printed in 1972, quickly went out of print after its publisher Bobbs Merrill filed for bankruptcy. Because of this (and, it is speculated, a subsequent lack of marketing), this "marvelous book" (reviewer John Seelye in The New York Times Book Review, saw minor sales. According to Moskowitz’s documentary, Mossman was also briefly hospitalized for a nervous breakdown while completing the novel, which may have also impeded its commercial success.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stones_of_Summer

First published in 1972 to glowing reviews, Dow Mossman's coming-of-age story in America's great midwest tracks the maturation of aspiring novelist Dawes Williams. This epic "great American novel" draws from Salinger, Heller, and Faulkner in its stream-of-consciousness style and remarkable characters. Chronicling 1949 through 1968, Dawes reflects upon America's evolution from the end of WWII to the hippie revolution. Narrator Scott Shina portrays dozens of characters with dexterity and talent. Light on plot but heavy on metaphysical insight, THE STONES OF SUMMER transports readers with true emotion.

The great "lost" novel is available again-after more than 20 years--And now there's a movie tie-in! Originally published to glowing reviews in 1972, Dow Mossman's first and only novel is a sweeping coming-of-age tale that spans three decades in the life of irrepressible 1950s teen Dawes Williams. Earning its author comparisons to no less than James Joyce, J. D. Salinger, and Mark Twain, this great American novel developed a passionate cult following-even as it went out of print for more than 20 years. But Mark Moskowitz's recent award-winning film Stone Reader, a passionate and deeply personal tribute to the book and its author, revived interest in Mossman's magnificent achievement.

After its 1972 publication, this sprawling, modernist Great American Novel–style epic garnered its author critical comparison to Faulkner, for its saga of rural dynastic decline; Salinger, for its mood of youthful alienation; and Joyce, for its labyrinthine, cryptically allusive, stream-of-consciousness renditions of the private psyche. The episodic coming-of-age narrative follows budding writer Dawes Williams from boyhood on his grandfather's greyhound ranch, through a feckless Iowa adolescence of drinking and joyriding, to a mentally unstable adulthood in which, through rants against propriety, positivism and the establishment and a terminal bout of countercultural dissoluteness in Mexico, he becomes the voice of the 1960s' lost generation. The real action, though, is the development of Dawes's writerly sensibility, his—i.e., the author's—knack for transmuting the dross of reality into the gold of literary metaphor. But Mossman's own lyrical, metaphorical sensibility tends toward pseudo-profundities ("[h]er body was an inward fall, a deep spiral of musky sea lying easily within itself"), abstractions ("[s]he had a metaphysical eye, as blue as perfect nightmares"), and a synesthetic scrambling of sensory categories ("[h]e felt he could not listen to the light anymore, that it stood off in the distance, wordless with impossible opinion"). Long out of print before this reissue, the novel has generated a cult following among those who find in its inchoate but intense imagery the very portrait of the young artist's soul. But many readers may find the book's hallucinatory prose—"In the beginning there was me, green smoke and oatmeal, conscious light, all looking for a shoe to rise from"—interesting but self-indulgent, and the plot insufficiently gripping. - Publishers Weekly

Dow Mossman wrote one great novel in 1972 and vanished - until a documentary-maker tracked him down. Now literary lions Nick Hornby and Dave Eggers are putting their weight behind the resulting film.

Do you remember that novel you bought years back and never got around to reading? You tried the first few pages but, as the saying goes, you couldn't get into it. Sometimes you'd catch a glimpse of it on your bookshelves, sitting there in silent reproach. Shouldn't you have another go at it? Yet each time you looked for the next book to read, that particular novel was never the right one, you were never in the appropriate mood to face it, never had the necessary energy to take it on. Life was always too short and that book - just look at the size of the thing - was simply too long.

There is probably no reader of novels to whom that experience would seem unfamiliar. I myself endure such a relationship with a small library of big books that, over the decades, I have bought and not finished or, more often, not started. Sometimes I can even persuade myself that the special majesty of these tomes relies on my not reading them, that to do so would spoil their virgin perfection (the same logic applies, as it happens, to the various novels I have also not written).

I don't think the filmmaker Mark Moskowitz is or was prone to this particular line of warped reasoning. A middle-aged American bibliophile, he avoided the unread novel on his bookshelf for three decades, purely because he had found it close to impenetrable when he last attempted to read it in 1972. Then, one day a few years ago, in a rush to make a plane, and with no other suitable book at hand, he took it with him on his journey. As he read, he was enveloped by an overwhelming recognition of the exceptional, as if he had discovered a lost masterpiece and could not understand how or why it had come to be lost or, indeed, if it really was lost.

The book was The Stones of Summer, by Dow Mossman, and Moskowitz was so enthralled by its rich, lyrical prose that he became convinced that the fact he had never heard of the author could only be due to an oversight on his part. He checked the internet to see what other works Mossman had written. Nothing. What's more The Stones of Summer was out of print and only a handful of secondhand copies were in circulation. Moskowitz bought them all.

He could find no information about Mossman or his book other than the New York Times review that had originally sent him to his local bookshop as a young student in 1972. Presciently, the review suggested in its opening paragraph that the extraordinary accomplishment of this debut novel was 'a frightening thing, for the author may remain forever awed by the force and witness of his first production'.

Intrigued to the point of obsession, Moskowitz decided to make a film about tracking down Mossman. It took him more than two years and a great deal of his own money but the outcome is a documentary called Stone Reader that has become a cult classic in the States and will be shown over here this month.

Not the least of the film's achievements is that it has led to the republishing of The Stones of Summer, the re-emergence of Mossman from three decades of obscurity, and refocused attention on the magical and redemptive power of fiction. It also explores how that power, while inspirational for the reader, can destroy the writer.

In America, literary figures have lined up to pay tribute, and screenings, such as one organised by author Dave Eggers, have become open celebrations of the secret pleasures of reading. One unanticipated side-effect of all the hoop-la is that original copies of the novel have become collectors' items, trading for $12,000 a go in internet auctions.

It was on a trip to the States that Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity and How to be Good, read about the film in an LA freesheet. He, too, was enraptured and earlier this month he arranged a screening in London.

'The film,' he says, 'is a very tender and engaged piece of work. It's not without its crudities and contrivances, but it's compelling, and anyone who loves books - especially American books, as I do - can't help but respond warmly. It mentions [Frederick] Exley [author of A Fan's Notes] and [Kurt] Vonnegut, and there are interviews with Leslie Fiedler and Frank Conroy, who wrote the brilliant Stop-Time and isn't terribly well-known, and that would have been enough for me. But there's the mystery element to it, too - you can't wait to meet the guy.'

But wait you have to. As one false lead follows another dead end, the audience becomes involved in a search that is not just for a disappeared writer, nor simply lost books in general, but the elusive reader in all of us who cries out to be embraced by the voice and thoughts and insights of a kindred soul.

'Mark has been very clever about not making any specific claims for this book,' Hornby says. 'He seems to acknowledge that he could be wrong about it and, by doing so, the film becomes more about the personal passions we all have. What's great about books - and films and music - is that once they're out there, they have a good chance of connecting with someone who identifies completely with every single creative decision, who believes the artist is speaking for and to them.'

Nick Fraser, the series producer for Storyville who bought Stone Reader for the BBC, says that what impressed him about both Moskowitz and the film is the belief they share in the importance of fiction. 'As I get older,' says Fraser, 'I read fewer and fewer novels but Mark's appetite is unsated.' He wonders if Moskowitz's usual business, making commercials for politicians, might have something to do with this. 'If you spent all day around those people, you'd need to turn to fiction at night.'

Added to which, some novels are best read by an older audience. In one scene, Moskowitz interviews Robert Gottlieb, the fiction editor who bought Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Moskowitz recalls how he devoured the book when he first read it, then waited impatiently for its successor, Something Happened. It proved a disappointment to Moskowitz, who found himself lacking the necessary experience of life.

'It's not a book that should be read by anyone under 30,' he tells Gottlieb.

Gottlieb dryly agrees, then adds: 'But it should be read by everyone over 30.'

This, I think, is a telling insight into the changing relationship between reader and novel. Like us, books mature. As a teenager, I had almost precisely the same experience with Catch 22 and Something Happened, although now I think the latter is the superior novel. Our passions evolve and all a writer can hope is that his passions so happen to chime with those of his potential readership at the right time - which is usually, but not always, around the time the book is published.

That did not happen with Mossman. Perhaps he was a victim of passing fashion. The 500-plus page coming-of-age, stream-of-consciousness, Vietnam-era novel may have enjoyed its finest day already by 1972. He was certainly unfortunate with his publishers, who were bought out by a large corporation with a crudely economic agenda.

Whatever the explanation for The Stones of Summer's failure, the experience of writing it had left the 25-year-old Mossman in a vulnerable state. His tutor on Iowa University's creative writer's programme was Irish-American novelist William Cotter Murray. An entertaining old cove, he directs Moskowitz to Mossman with mischievous merriment. Murray told me he had enormous trouble getting Mossman to finish the novel. 'I thought the damn thing would go on for ever,' he says. 'Either it would kill him or he'd kill it.'

In the event, Mossman suffered a breakdown and spent a period in a psychiatric hospital. The book marched swiftly into oblivion, which Mossman says 'flattened my tyre', and he followed not far behind, scuffing around the country as a manual labourer, before taking up a trade as a welder. Moskowitz eventually traces his quarry to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and finds him divorced, living alone in his childhood home with a job bundling newspapers.

'I thought if I did find him,' Moskowitz tells me, 'he would be crushed and disenchanted.' Neither of those words apply. In fact, he turns out to be such an individual character that it's not easy to think what words do apply to him.

When I asked Murray what his impression was of Mossman when they met more than 30 years ago, he said that he was a 'country boy'. Insofar as it's possible to describe Mossman, that will probably do. But perhaps it's also worth remembering that The Stones of Summer was semi-autobiography and ran to a couple of hundred thousand words.

If he used to write in a stream of consciousness, he continues to talk in a torrent. On screen, with his walrus moustache and manic enthusiasms, he makes a wild, welcome contrast to the eloquent concision of the talking heads that go before him, and on the phone he retains the same disarming ability to improvise with jackknife digressions. You don't follow his conversation so much as get washed along in its serpentine wake.

He seems to be enjoying his new found celebrity on the film festival network. He tells me about meeting Bertrand Tavernier at one screening and how the director insisted his novel should be translated into French. He recalls how he used to stay up all night as a boy reading books on his porch, and tells me his great-grandparents came from Lancashire.

He thinks films and books should never be compared - 'they're not apples and oranges, they're apples and lawnmowers' - and that the camera 'is the coldest thing in the universe'. In among all this, he refers to Cervantes, Casanova, Shakespeare, Joyce, Woolf, James M. Cain, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor and probably another half-dozen writers I don't pick up on.

He thought it was a 'junk call' when Moskowitz first phoned him. Now, he says: 'I consider him a brother, one of the very few I've ever had.' They remain in close contact, and Moskowitz has managed to protect the author, while also reintroducing him to the world at large. The filmmaker helped negotiate with Barnes and Noble to get the book republished. 'Most of the offers were pretty small but Mark got a good deal,' says Mossman.

The contract does not involve a second book. Although Mossman has compiled extensive notes on two novels down the years, he would not savour the pressure of expectation. Moskowitz was also worried about how he would handle the pressure of public attention.

'I said to him,' Moskowitz remembers, "You need to think about what you want to say to people. You might have 15 minutes of fame." He said, "I have no problem. I know exactly what I'd do. I just want to tell people how important books are to me in my life."'

I can't imagine that Mossman put it as briefly as that. Not that you doubt that it is the belief of the novelist, just as it is the message of Moskowitz's film. In the end, it's an uplifting story about a man who got lost by trying to write the perfect book and and was finally found by the perfect reader.

- Andrew Anthony

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/aug/03/fiction.features2

GS: Oh, I was just asking if you feel overall that The Stones of Summer has said everything you wanted to say in fiction.

DM: Oh, yeah! So anyway, I did all of that and it was nine years later. It was an absurd box, it was 900 pages. I don’t even know where I got the box, I can still kind of picture that. This editor and the guy Carl Brandt. They came through and I had no idea what was even going on. [William] Murray came up to me one day and said, “I gave your manuscript to these two people who got interested in it and they took it back to New York,” and I talked to that editor briefly and she said, “If you come to New York, come and see me.” So that was my last semester, and I graduated mid-year, it was January. So I headed for New York and I went through Indianapolis for a reason, and I stopped because the guy Dunker was in his first year playing for the ABA. He was playing for the Indiana Pacers. So I wound up staying there till the playoffs. They always made it to the playoffs. They were the best team in the ABA. I was friendly with him and I was sleeping on his couch. He had this three-level apartment. So that became a habit. I went through 10 years of his career and every time I’d always wind up over there. But anyway, by the time I went to New York, it was ‘69. I missed Woodstock only because I had this sense that I hated mobs but I had a chance to go up in a sound truck. It’s a long story I’m not gonna get into. But I messed around there and I loved New York. I used to walk up to the library every day, and on a good day, I’d walk up to about 90th Street, you know from down in the Village there? Tenth Street and 9th Avenue down there, which I got lucked out, I got a free apartment there. A guy I knew in Cedar Rapids was in Africa and this thing was empty and he wanted me to watch the stuff he had in his apartment. Anyway, I had a free place to flop for about all summer. God, it was great. I finally made my way up there and talked myself into going up the elevator and I opened the doors and it was just a huge typing pool that was right out of that early, what the hell’s the name of that, the film with all of the New York office pools, you know, it’s just infinity. King Vidor’s The Big Parade or The Crowd, maybe. I walked in there and she had me coming from one thing to the other in the back and she looked at the elevator which just opened up into the whole complex, and she said, “Dow where have you been?” (laughs) Just like that, “Come on in here!” We walked into her office and I talked to her for a few hours and I guess I talked her into, I got an advance. Brandt got involved and, anyway, then I went to Montreal and I knew I had to rewrite the whole thing. Richard Wright [Dow’s friend who took his author photo for the novel] went up there, he’s in that movie. It started snowing and I went home and did an 11-month rewrite and I never left my room and I finally cracked toward the end of it. It was like an hour per page. It was all I did. My mother would bring me stuff on a tray and I’d eat lunch and I had my typewriter and my window was kind of like, I could see the winking light of the Roseville Hotel about 15 blocks down. That was all I could see outside my window pretty much. I’d sleep and I’d work on that. Every three months I’d go down to Iowa City for a couple of days and I finally really, I talked to her on the phone and this was the age where they had great phone lines that were free and I’d mail her 100 pages here and 100 pages there, and I guess they were re-editing it. And IT&T told her she could have 550 pages and that’s what they were going for. They didn’t change anything but they put a lot of blue pencils here and there. I don’t even remember now what all was in it, or how valuable it was but [Betty Kelly Sargent] cut quite a bit out of it. She kept it in order, then later I found out that there were three assistant apprentices helping her. They were working on it.

Dow Mossman’s author photo, taken by his late friend Richard Wright

GS: She had three assistant editors?

DM: Yeah, I don’t know if they were even hired. I know the name of one of them. Mary Judd. She wound up in The Metropolitan. I met her briefly about 30 years later.

GS: I remember in the documentary you said you felt the publisher basically stole the manuscript from you because you were still trying to work on it.

DM: I was conscious at the time that they took it away from me and I probably would’ve worked on it for the next 20 years probably, but, I mean, you can’t do that. I also wanted to get out of town and I was tired of being a student. If that thing would’ve made the money even comparatively to what it made the second time, I would’ve gone to Europe. If worst came to worst, I would’ve bummed around England and played some snooker. (laughs) That was my only interest. That game was alive in England and I just noticed that last night on my iPad. I sat and watched two hours of snooker matches. God, those guys could play. That’s what I would’ve done. I know that for a fact. The other thing, I drifted back to Indianapolis. In a way it was good and in a way it wasn’t. For off and on those 10 years I worked in my buddy’s…I’ve known him since 7th grade, that’s the only person I’ve known that long in my life, actually, but he had a saloon. - George Salis

https://thecollidescope.com/2023/08/13/the-shivering-hearts-of-other-summers-a-rare-conversation-with-dow-mossman/

 Fifteen years ago, Errol Morris’s documentary The Thin Blue Line famously resulted in freeing an innocent man from prison. Last year, in what is arguably a comparable turn of events, Mark Moskowitz’s documentary Stone Reader rescued a forgotten American writer from obscurity. Moskowitz’s scruffy and warmly personal film recounts his obsessive search for Dow Mossman, the author of a long out-of-print 1972 novel, The Stones of Summer. For the last three decades, it turns out, Mossman has been living where he was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and working the kinds of blue collar jobs—welding, bundling newspapers—that writers are supposed to have before they publish their big novel, not after. And make no mistake, at nearly six hundred pages The Stones of Summer is a big novel. Its ambition and scale are matched only by the monumental mystery of why no one seems to have ever heard of it.

Hermetically sealed for thirty years, Mossman’s weird lyricism ("the lawn was a wet bowl stirred and thickened, a lilac’s throat") is startlingly fresh and pungent. If not a lost masterpiece, it’s clearly the work of an enormously talented writer. The novel’s three sections follow a classic coming-of-age trajectory from idealized youth, to troubled adolescence, to an adulthood blindsided by drugs and instability. Virtually without plot, the narrative is constructed of richly textured anecdotes and set pieces, many of which Mossman has said are autobiographical. The protagonist is named Dawes Williams, the state is Iowa, and the hometown is coyly rechristened Rapid Cedar.

The early chapters are chockablock with vivid characters. Dawes’s profane grade-school chum Ronnie Crown is expelled for assailing their teacher, Miss Wilma Spent, with crude sexual epithets. The eight-year-old Crown later confesses that he has no idea what the f-word means. "I still can’t figure out," says Dawes, sounding not unlike a wry Peanuts character, "how they could expel you for a word if you didn’t know what it meant." Mossman’s novel is a flurry of words, a logorrheic avalanche. His intoxicating voice is ideal for conveying the enchantment and sensuality of a recollected childhood: "The thick, white moon ran like a round, naked rain through the dry spines of the trees." Languid Augusts are whiled away on a farm where Dawes’s quick-to-rage uncle Arthur raises greyhounds. The finest writing in the novel is a rollicking ten-page depiction of an epic croquet match between Dawes and his uncle that turns deadly earnest.

But as the pages pile up with precious little momentum or suspense propelling them forward, the law of diminishing returns settles in somewhere around the middle of the book. The scenes of teenage pranks feel protracted and repetitive. There’s an interminably unpleasant chapter in which Dawes and his pals set about humiliating one of "the doggy girls of Waterloo" living in a nearby town. Mossman’s galvanic prose struggles mightily but fails to elevate the predictability that overtakes the material: Dawes’s growing rebelliousness, his lost weekends with a beer-guzzling carload of boastful buddies, and his fumbling toward romance with the aptly but improbably named Summer Letch ("her hair was thick and rich as heaven"). The spectacular automobile crash that closes section two doesn’t touch as deeply as it might because the occupants of the car have been too thinly developed and differentiated as characters.

The final third of the novel, chronicling Dawes’s dissipation in Mexico, is both a tour-de-force and something of a slog. Instead of the timeless quality of the novel’s opening section, the concluding pages reflect the nadir of 1970s literary pretentiousness. There are poems and epigrammatic excerpts from Dawes’s notebooks ("family understanding, indeed all of the great middle-class virtues, are not what they are cracked up to be"), and long passages from a novel-in-progress, and letters from a buddy in Vietnam. Much marijuana and Mexican beer are consumed. Dawes intimates that he’s suffering from schizophrenia, but it’s presented less as an illness than the sort of oracular "divine madness" espoused by R. D. Laing during the era. According to Moskowitz’s documentary, Mossman was briefly hospitalized for a nervous breakdown while completing The Stones of Summer. Ten years in the writing, the book may have in the end depleted the author’s psychic reserves. Despite its flaws, it’s an impressive debut novel. The significant achievement is Mossman’s voice. And the good news is that he is writing once again. – Bob Wake

https://culturevulture.net/books-cds/the-stones-of-summer-dow-mossman/