Ben Segal - From an oceanic bedroom to a restaurant overrun by hedgehogs, a man who stumbles across strewn—about human—limbed planters to four people in an enclosed room where their every action is prescribed by cards drawn from a slot, Pool Party Trap Loop perambulates space and potential and in so doing plots a humanizing intersection

Ben Segal, Pool Party Trap Loop,  Queen's Ferry Press, 2015.

bensegal.blogspot.hr/


If space determines the contours of possibility, Ben Segal’s domain delineates limitlessness. From an oceanic bedroom to a restaurant overrun by hedgehogs, a man who stumbles across strewn—about human—limbed planters to four people in an enclosed room where their every action is prescribed by cards drawn from a slot, Pool Party Trap Loop perambulates space and potential and in so doing plots a humanizing intersection. For the human condition—as revealed in these short yet shapely fictions—is dislocated, and dangerously so; repositioning requires the daring elasticity in language and form that pushes against the surreal sides of this boundless collection.

Ben Segal’s Pool Party Trap Loop is a collection of captivating stories sheathed in grammatical glitz. In each of these narrative nuggets Segal exploits form and conceit while simultaneously tightrope walking the excitingly dangerous arena of the artful sentence. A recent graduate of the prestigious cross-genre UCSD MFA program, Segal came of literary age editing his fiction with input from poets (and vice versa) and it shows in his prose in ways that should convince everyone that there is no better method. Admitted to the program by National Book Award finalist Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, and mentored by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Rae Armantrout, it is no wonder that Segal’s collection debut is such a dazzler. One could find traces of both Armantrout and Bynum in his stories, but Segal’s work stands alone in its strange, winding, sudden candor.
Perhaps the most distinctive experience that Pool Party Trap Loop elicits is the feeling of being exposed to a compendium of transposed photographs. Reading sentence by sentence, story to story, one gains the repeated feeling that there are other narratives stuck in between the pages, other narratives overlaying the stories on the page one can readily see. This transposed story sensation is most present in “I Would Kiss Him Back All Over Too,” which has an extremely innovative form, with the image of a tiger placed over that of a male lover whose female counterpart has mysteriously disappeared. The story is structured in dualities, alternating between tiger phylum reportage and this couple’s existence or (horrifically) possible lack thereof. Through describing the tiger and then the couple and then the tiger and then the couple again the descriptions begin to creep in on each other and overlay in the reader’s mind. We start the story thinking the tiger and the couple are separate entities, but as we read on they become closer and closer together, each separate description bolstering and implying the other until the two stories collide and the reader is forced to conclude that these two separate images the story started with are, in fact, inseparably intertwined. The way Segal deliberately delivers a glut of information (both about the tiger and the lovers) to get at his subjects’ separate, and, later, synonymous reality is reminiscent of Anne Carson’s “Short Talks” and Lydia Davis’ Almost No Memory.
In addition to his formally innovative structures Segal also, in many of his stories, takes on the tool of the fantastical conceit. In “A Room That Is and Or Is Not Past Tense” a group of prisoners exist contained in a felt chamber that has a “soft spot” in the center that shoots out daily tasks and instructions. For a moment, while reading, I thought I was in another wing of George Saunders’ Spiderhead, but the room of Segal’s imagination was far too surreal and pliable, too other world, other mind to be a Saunder’s story, and thus much more like how I would imagine a George Saunders fever dream, some conceit pushed through at high heat till it melts over the edges and burns at the fringe. Similarly, in “Bright Paper/Blood Sand” Segal builds a pyramid of corpses atop which people play volleyball and keep score by slashing tallies on their hands. And again, in “Childpainter,” Segal reveals his vast imagination through Arnold, a failed landscape painter, who found fame by painting portraits of children. Segal explains:
[Arnold] had a way of pulling out the perfection of children that faded in his pictures of teenagers and was gone entirely for any subjects beyond their early twenties. The adult portraits didn’t lack for competence, but they lacked for something else, something more important and less easy to define.
In this story Segal takes his conceit and walks it all the way to the end of the diving board. By the middle of the story Arnold has evolved from painting portraits of children to painting directly on children, and by the end Arnold has taken to “[painting] lost childhoods back on adults.”
But beyond the innovative conceits and the transposed narrative trickery, Segal makes the most immaculate sentences. Gary Lutz, literary leader of the cult of the beautiful sentence, says of Pool Party Trap Loop, “The fresh, previously unheard notes of Ben Segal’s brain-feverish surrealism arrive in the reader’s mind with an audaciously hyper-compact lyricism.”
And there are ample examples to support Lutz’s “hyper-compact lyric” claim. Take the below sentence from “Mrs. Van Pelt’s Class Is Not Coming to the Assembly”:
Allison’s all covered already in those black and purple welts that make you fear her father.
And then this sentence from “Halfingers”:
She took a hold of his little wet hand (a thick and difficult wet, slicked out of her), and she took him by it towards the room that was all light and fuzz.
One of the effects of these lyric sentences is the blurring of the borders between the stories. Although each story is presented as its own world, the consistent sentence-level style in which Segal writes all his stories links them to each other and causes the reader to question exactly where one world ends and another begins. Thus Segal’s narrative gifts don’t only give us ear candy, but, through their lyricism, also lead us to a questioning of our own mind’s compartmentalization. Why did I view these two stories as separate when they may be connected? Why have I separated this world into rooms when it may be an anti-gravity sphere? Although Segal attacks boundaries throughout his collection, the blurring of body and borders and story is most overt in “The Reason I Get So Many Parking Tickets,” when the narrator is stuck in a jail cell and a cop’s little sister says the below to the narrator who is behind bars:
She was saying to someone that she didn’t really know what virginity meant because as far as she could tell, it was impossible to determine where the interior ended and the exterior began and so then how do you ever know if and when penetration has occurred?
This idea is so startling it might be considered violent. It raises the stakes of the story and takes you outside the story. It makes the reader question their own borders, what they are and why they need them to exist.
In this way, Pool Party Trap Loop is a collection for the intellectually adventurous and the unafraid. The sentence level beauty and large-scale conceit ingenuity make it a serious read that requires, between stories, even more serious pause. Reading Pool Party Trap Loop is wounding to the memory — it’s a collection that will pull you in, swirl you around, and spit you out mangled and changed. - Rita Bullwinkel







Ben Segal, 78 Stories, No Record Press, 2008.


As the price of oil skyrockets to heaven, NASA flights plummet back to earth, contemporary philosophy runs on dualistic fumes and the National Football League all but forbids end zone dance fiestas, you decided that humanity was officially out of good ideas. But you were thinking in terms of "left" and "right." 78 Stories, unlike the vast majority of the Western hemisphere's chirographic offerings, conceived of the world in terms of "across" and "down." Challenging our core assumptions of textual linearity while tickling our funny bones, Ben Segal's astonishingly original debut pirouettes from the Mayan Long Count, ghost/human romances, seedy Native American hotels, pie-creamed art critics, bears transfixed by cellular phone ringers, and much more. As in an American crossword puzzle, the text is readable in two directions. 


This book is a giant fold-out with multiple puzzles and blocks of text, an experimental text in the form of a crossword puzzle: 










Ben Segal's 78 stories are the interleaved answers to non-existent crossword clues, stories composed a paragraph at a time in the successive boxes of a giant crossword puzzle printed on one side of a large sheet paper, folded accordion style like a road map. Read the paragraphs in the five squares that might ordinarily contain the letters to be an answer to the clue "DIAGRAM Reviews Editor," and you've read a story. The same paragraphs, of course, are part of stories that must be read vertically as well, to answer a hypothetical "down" clue.
     The space at the bottom of the sheet of paper typically reserved for clues is taken up with interesting but inessential material about the development of the crossword puzzle and its European cousins—but there are so many we don't miss the clues, ones that feature a homicidal mouse crossed in love, a pet psychic named Sandra's experiences during the end of the Mayan long-count, and an overweight bear with a taste for human flesh. It's a broad panoply of possible experiences, and while the range of experience required to finish the Sunday Times crossword might be broader (I wouldn't know; it's beyond my experience), a wide ranging and not-too-serious cross sample of contemporary narrative possibilities jostle for space on the page.
     Segal doesn't play entirely fair with his structural conceit: in a traditional crossword puzzle, you are limited to one letter per square, yet Segal doesn't limit himself to a single sentence, or even a set number of sentences or words per square. Instead, the rule seems something like "include enough information to move the two stories, across and down, forward one measure." So one square, selected at random, captures a character investigating his relationship with his father, and acting to understand it by writing a letter. The adjacent squares, then, follow the letter or the reflection, depending. And as far as that goes, Segal's process works—the stories have an almost serial effect, as if each chapter is a frozen moment (if not a cliffhanger) like the panel in a comic strip, recording a significant exchange, something to advance the stories.
     With very few exceptions, Segal succeeds; there's one part of the collection where I found myself a little bit confused, unsure if the Carl I was reading about is a mouse who is in love with a man named Paul, or else the ghost of Paul's father. And in another section, the resolution of certain stories is conclusively unsatisfying: what exactly is going on with the invisible pit Paul is knocked into by some errant elk? A collection that stakes so much on structural ingenuity invites structural scrutiny, and on occasion, I felt as if I'd opened the wrong door in the funhouse and found myself in a custodian's closet, or some narrative engine room where a belt had slipped. But in almost all the stories, the experiment with branching narratives works to show Segal in control of whole swathes of experience, human and animal.
            Of course, it's worth asking about the value of a project like this. What passes for back matter positions 78 Stories alongside Cortazar's Hopscotch, Abish's Alphabetical Africa, and George Perec's Life: A User's Manual (I had to look that last one up). The idea that the form guides content isn't a new one, really, but the mechanical experiments of writers like Perec and his OULIPO peers gave them the means to investigate the workings of arbitrary state power. Stripped of a similar context, Segal's project will be read differently. 78 Stories reveals the writer, his quirks and particularities in a way that A Void or Exercises in Style maybe doesn't. Segal is a witty observer of people's awkward foibles, as the following sentence shows: "Paul and Sandra had only brought a small amount of food with them for their honeymoon because they had planned to eat out for the most part." It's funny because the situation is recognizable to me and most of Segal's likely readers—erudite, cosmopolitan people who enjoy the challenge of a crossword as much as we enjoy finishing one. Segal's stories build downward and rightward toward an apocalypse in the puzzle's final squares, and humans play a smaller and smaller role as history winds down. What is perhaps less immediately noticeable is that the collection starts with a death, too, that of Dennis Winston, a fifty-three year old architect, husband and father. Maybe it's just a desire to conclusively end so many stories, but Segal's presence shadows the collection; instead of obscuring the author, Segal's scrupulous arrangement becomes the clue that needs to be solved for: who is Ben Segal? I suspect he is like his readers, worldly enough to recognize when a coincidence is nothing more than that, but ultimately drawn up short by the way lives–ours and those of others–end so suddenly, whether we did them justice or not. - Matt Dube

Ben Segal: Wearing Thin

So much is made of Simone Weil having starved herself to death. The Nazis, you know. I could starve myself to death for a thousand good reasons and none of them would be good reasons after all. I would still lack the saintliness for righteous starvation. I would only be bodily dysmorphic.
Or maybe saintliness has been pathologized.
Maybe what was good about the Nazis was that they wore those stupid signs that read EVIL with such semiotic boldness. You could starve against them without question.
*
Some of my friends are photoshopping a hunger strike. You can watch them turn to wraiths. Limp skinned, bonesome. It’s too much competition for the real. I stare and feel obese. That dysmorphic thing again.
What I don’t mean to say is that hunger is always saintly.
Knut Hamsun, of course.
But still.
*
Simone Weil wrote a book called Gravity and Grace. Can we set grace apart from weight? Can we place it only in the image-body, in the body at a remove? My friends are fasting electronically.
When a person doesn’t eat, the body eats itself. Starvation is the activation of different kind of eating, a total eating. A phone call, concerned: Are you eating? An honest answer: Of course I am.
Simone Weil tried to be an anarchist freedom fighter in the Spanish Civil War but her comrades would not let her into battle because she was so clumsy and such a terrible shot.
She had to get picked up from the war by her parents.
She failed also, several times, to become a spy.
That is to say, she was trying to disappear into her self. She succeeded by way of starvation. To spy, though, is a dissociation of the self from the body, to starve a dissociation of the body from the self.
*
I am on a train right now. I did not say that before. I am draped in baggy clothing on a train.
If you starve to death, quietly, on a train, that will cause quite the to-do. But you have to time it right. It’s important not to only almost starve. God forbid some rough Samaritan snatches you up and deposits you in an ambulance. Those I.V. fluids, those feeding tubes.
There are so many ways to eat besides by mouth!
*
If I were a saint, my miracle would be some new kind of eating. A pure eating, through the eyes or the air. Nothing to get stuck in the depths of my teeth, the mounded valleys of my throat. Nothing to coat my tongue in untonguely color.
*
On their website, my friends are so devastatingly skinny. They’re getting attention too. The news. Such tiny bodies eclipsing whatever cause they’ve claimed.
And those bodies of course, not even theirs. But theirs indisputably. So I’m wondering who’s pulling off miracles now? My stomach is growling its mouthless language, my body is eating my body. Then there are my friends, saintly, on the internet.
*
I do like the trees that are passing my window. I am always happy for my friends and acquaintances. It is pleasant, these days, to ride on American trains.


OnlineJelly Bodies- Lamination Colony (forthcoming)

Halfingers- Elimae, June/July 2009
Over Dinner, The Life Story of the Wandering Jew- 3AM Magazine, 2009
Youth and Beauty (Short Version)- Abjective, February 2009
Mrs. Van Pelt's Class is Not Coming to the Assembly- Corduroy Mtn, 2009
The Pork Shunter's Fingers- Eyeshot, May 2009
Switzerland, 1471- For Every Year, 2009
Tender is a Nice Way of Describing Meat- Willows Wept Review, Spring 2009
Underground, in a Cave, in a Shallow Bed of Freezing Water- Pequin, 2009
The Wrestling Bear- Wigleaf, 2009
Reunion- Why Vandalism?, December 2008
Underwater- Hotel St. George, Fall 2008
Shaving- Lamination Colony, 2008
Glue- Elimae, 2008
The Thing about Elephants- Johnny America, 2008
Sometimes Girls- Dogmatika, 2008
Mr. Pibb, etc.- Dogzplot, 2008
Perfection- Flatman Crooked, 2008
Henry- Holy Cuspidor, March 2008
June Bug- 55 Words, 2007
Donny- Monkey Bicycle, 2007
The Old Man- Zygote in my Coffee, 2007
Towards A Dead Father- Word Riot, 2006
Non-Fiction/Other
Tell It (Again From Your Mouth)- Text installed on site as part of the exhibition 'In The Light Cone' at the Department of Saferty art space on Anacortes, Washington, July 2009. Painted in black and glow-in-the-dark paint on on the gallery wall. See the website.

Frequent contributor at Ghost Island- www.ghostisland.wordpress.com
Dear Wigleaf- Wigleaf, 2009
From Batailles to Christ in 4 Moves- Diet Soap, 2007 (Print Journal)

Houses/Bodies
Worm Organ Transit
Childpainter
Hair Land Instructional
Eight Paragraphs Involving an Ouroboros
Flash Fiction by Ben Segal
The Happy-Enough Family on the Day of the Sorrows-Weighing
The Beards and Chair Legs are Not in the Frame
Loved Ones
You are Today a Man
Dear Confessor

Feliz Lucia Molina and Ben Segal: from THE MIDDLE

"The Darkest Inevitable Logical Conclusion": An Interview with Ben Segal


Ben Segal is the author of 78 Stories (No Record Press), co-author of The Wes Letters (Outpost 19), and co-editor of The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature. His short fiction has been published by Tin House (Online), The Collagist, Gigantic, Puerto del Sol, and many other magazines and journals. He holds an MFA from UCSD, an MA from the European Graduate School and a BA from Hampshire College, and has been a visiting scholar or writer at the University of Pennsylvania, the Haisyakkei residency in Toride, Japan, and Mustarinda House in eastern Finland. He currently lives in Los Angeles.

Feliz Lucia Molina, Ben Segal and Brett Zehner - an epistolary novel written from three friends to the elusive Wes Anderson. It's about personal memory, it's about gossip and philosophy, and it's about pop culture and late capitalism. It's (not) about Wes Anderson. It's a generational vacuum full of hope and embarrassment

 
 
Feliz Lucia Molina, Ben Segal and Brett Zehner, The Wes Letters, Outpost 19, 2014.

excerpts

THE WES LETTERS is an epistolary novel written from three friends to the elusive Wes Anderson. The story begins on a train and multiplies, composes, and fragments itself across the United States to Finland. It's about personal memory, it's about gossip and philosophy, and it's about pop culture and late capitalism. It's (not) about Wes Anderson. It's a generational vacuum full of hope and embarrassment.

Dear Wes, . . .Details aside, memory's a dodgy thing and if you don't remember me, well, I don't blame you. I imagine you meet billions of people every year and they're all impeccably dressed. One of my mottos - not that I am a motto kind of a guy - is to be memorable. At least, that's one of the secret performances I have in the works. I want to be ridiculously present, crystal clear without daydreams. So present I infect people's minds and all of the sudden everyone is performing outside-Brett. In this way, I can slip off and assume other identities, tricksterlike. . .

Dear Wes, I'm sitting on our living room futon while Brett explains the situation of meeting you on the train. Apparently, the person you were with writes children books. I hear words like aristocracy and kings. Our friend asks him questions like "did you tell him it's 'HUN-day'?" Apparently you and your girlfriend asked Brett what he reads and what he thinks about trains. Obviously you and Brett have a lot in common. How rustic chic, Wes, especially on a train while sipping chardonnay, poking at your duck, staring out onto the plains that speed past into a blur while talking about literature. . .

Dear Wes Anderson, I was thinking about you again because we all got together to celebrate Brett's birthday. There were a whole bunch of us and we made a fire at the beach and drank wine from the bottle. We bought two bags of Doritos and several pounds of grocery store fried chicken. Strangers also had fires going. Their fires were bigger, but ours lasted the longest. When the strangers left, we found a hooked metal implement and stole the burning wood from their abandoned fires. We walked the burning logs along the beach and fed them to our fire, and we caroused and, at times, we spoke of you. . .

"Writing into the sand hole that is 'Wes Anderson,' three friends write their way almost to the limit of their engagingly ambivalent and indisputably brilliant personalities, thereby calling into question the certainty of anything. Follow their quest to the Fin/n/ish line! A gripping read." - Chris Kraus

"THE WES LETTERS seems destined to find its place among other recent classics of the epistolary novel narrated by smart, anxious, and questing narrators. . . but its triangular structure is all its own, as are its particular obsessions: transference, celebrity, friendship, changing technologies of writing, and the various relations - be they pained, productive, or pleasurable - between performativity and 'something like honesty,' if not honesty itself." - Maggie Nelson

"Dear Wes Anderson - Each film you make is a secret letter to the viewer, and each letter in THE WES LETTERS is a secret view into you. These letters are innovations of you, the authors' lives chronicled through apostrophe, radiant stylistic gymnastics, philosophies in flight - these letters are relentless and resplendent. You won't regret reading this book, Wes Anderson, it's hardly about you at all." - Lily Hoang

Dear Wes Anderson,
A few days ago I was sitting in a bar across the street from my house, listening to one of my former professors read poetry. Right before I graduated a few months ago he’d been diagnosed with cancer and had to pull a fast fade on the day of our final reading, which sort of stung us, to be honest, but cancer>complaints.
The point was I think we were all pretty curious what he’d read this past Sunday, what he’d been doing, what he’d been writing. He’d grown a fucking giant beard, but that was all we knew.
Alongside reading a lot about the food he’d been eating and the dogs he’d been walking and cancer and the desert, he read a lot about this book — this book that’s not about you, Wes, but it is about the people that wrote it, who I know, and who my professor knows. My professor read writing he’d written about what it was like being friends with these people, being writing peers, being envious and overwhelmed by their success.
I mean, something like that. It’s what it sounded like to me.
The point I’m getting at Wes, is that there’s always someone outside-looking-in. At the start of this book, it feels like Feliz, Ben, and Brett are outside, trying to access you; by the end, they are assuredly inside, accessing each other and themselves.
It’s impossible for me to write this like a real review, Wes. I knew Ben and Feliz and Brett the whole time they wrote this book, and probably the main thoughts I had about it in that time was that it sounded kind of more gimmicky than I thought they would have ever let themselves be, and also that I wished I’d been invited to write it with them. But I also wished, years later, that my professor would write a poem about me being his peer, or that he’d have come to my final reading. Comme ci, comme ça, Wes. There’s always an outside/inside.
I’ll tell you this, though. Of the three authors, I know Feliz the least. I think for most of our acquaintance we’ve mainly tried not to argue with each other too loudly at parties. Feliz’s is the preeminent voice here — I won’t hazard guesses about who did what kinds of work in the production of the book entire, but in terms of pure words-on-page it’s Feliz that’s guiding us, finding the book’s balance, performing the outsideness of writing to you and the insideness of divulging things about herself, of reaching out to Ben and to Brett in her letters.
To be honest, Wes, I’m going to guess it’s more likely that Feliz reads these notes about her than it is you read her notes about you. To be more honest, I actually have a feeling this book will eventually find its way to you, so to edit my prior statement, I’ll say that while I think everyone is going to eventually read everyone else’s everything with regard to The Wes Letters, I think it’s more likely that what I write here will get read first.
With that in mind, I’m going to pause in my letter to you and write to Feliz for a minute.
Dear Feliz,
I think the story/letters/section of book you’ve crafted here is really very beautiful. I don’t feel like I know you very well, but getting to know you here was a lovely thing. 
Ben and Brett, who I do think I know pretty well, chime in less on-the-page: Ben and Feliz begin with two distinct voices and eventually seem to merge, so that I’d often skip ahead to figure out whose voice I should be assigning to each letter. Perhaps that’s destroying some element of intent, but everything is so meta at this stage, with me and with this book, that Wes I really think you should just kind of back off with the directionality here. Just let me do this my own way.
As I was saying — Ben’s voice, often dismissive and anecdotal but still centered and warm, stands in opposition to Feliz’s more personal and emotionally wrought letters. Feliz’s letters seem to use every rhetorical trick to evoke an actual response, or failing that, a gut reaction. Ben seems more amused by the idea of writing to you as a constraint, which is in keeping with what I know of him “for reals.” Eventually, Feliz’s urgency wears off, as she deciphers what it means to write to you, before seeming to lose herself again in the book’s final pages, which take place somewhere between Helsinki and the Swiss Alps.
Brett’s inclusions are more like interjections; it may be that his main function in this text was to meet you, Wes — to be the Kevin Bacon holding the theoretical framework of the book together. In practice, his written contributions are sporadic, and seem less like letters and more like what he happened to be writing in the time the book was written. If you meet Brett (again) Wes, I’ll posit that you will be least surprised by the difference between Brett OTP and Brett IRL. It’s an apt transference.
I’m writing all this like you don’t know it already, Wes — but the truth is that if you ever find this book review, you’ll probably have already read this book, and met these people (for the first or second time). Feliz’s suggestions for what you might eventually say to them seem believable and accurate, although I know you even less than they do.
But the funny thing is that you really are a guy who it seems like I/we/they already know — I honestly hadn’t even thought of it until this paragraph, but this whole writing-to-you thing comes pretty easy. I know what your movies look like, and you helped me appreciate The Who. What else is there, right?
I’m sorry, Wes. It’s just the cult of American celebrity that makes me flippant with you. I liked this book more than I’ve liked most of your movies, except for Rushmore, which I saw a few years after I’d ended a short affair with one of my high school teachers. I never thanked you for that — for making a film that spoke to me on such a specific level, at a time when I really needed it.
So thank you for that, Wes. I mean it. She was my first love, and that ain’t easy gettin’ over.
K - Keith McCleary

The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature - Imagine that you’ve just read the most amazing book you’ve ever encountered

The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature, Ben Segal, Erinrose Mager, eds. Cow Heavy Books, 2011.

„This book is a catalog of textual desire, of wished-for and ideal books as described by a diverse collection of writers, critics, and text-makers. The maligned blurb form herein becomes, time and again, the entryway into unreadable books and the anticipation that comes before opening them.
"A tour de force of dust-jacket discourse! A torrid farce of rocking back-cover back-patting! . . . Or so I imagine, not yet having ventured into this flurry of blurbs for non-existent masterpieces, a fierce tear through conceptual imagination, an idea vibrating with enviable potential energy." -Troy Patterson

„Consider this: at various points during the last 150 years, painting has been said to be on its deathbed. The nineteenth century emergence of photography required that painting justify itself. Other forms, like collage, sculpture, video, and installation art cut into painting’s share of the visual arts marketplace. Yet painting persists, much re-defined and evolved since its crisis began.
Consider this: the book—and, by extension, writing—is now said to be on its deathbed.
I thought of these things last night when reading The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature. The anthology, edited by Ben Segal and Erinrose Mager, consists of blurbs, dusk jacket copy, and descriptions for unwritten and, perhaps, unwritable books. In their call for submissions, the editors made clear that they both wanted to writers “to imagine that they’ve just read the most amazing book they’ve ever encountered” and, in the broadest sense, “conceptualize forms and potential works: not necessarily to bring them into being.”
Sixty-two authors provided entries for this Catalog, most in fundamentally unique ways. Some satirized the hyperbolic language of the blurb form (Blake Butler: “this book lit down upon my house and ate my children and my mind”). Others used the occasion for socio-political barbs: (Vanessa Place: “Capital—the most important epic poem of the twentieth century”).
Where the Catalog succeeds most, in my opinion, is in the entries where the book form itself is brought into question. Rather than be just a bound collection of text printed on paper, Catalog writers point to other possibilities.
Michael Martone, writing about Nabokov’s lost book about butterfly collecting in the “central Indiana hardwood swamps,” envisions the book as a kind of Joseph Cornell wonder cabinet, complete with “… scale reproductions of the wing scales taken from the Karner Blue… a coupon redeemable for a podcast recording of the Luna moth calls....”
Assemblage also features in the book that Lance Olsen imagines, Paradise Blind, which is “contained in a text packed with typed over passages, torn postcards, poems that can be deciphered only when held up to a mirror, pages ornamented with trompe-lœil paperclips and coffee stains and buzzing houseflies…”
Craig Dworkin proposes The Cube: “Set in a grid, the book’s words can be read conventionally, across the page, as well as down each column… But they can also be read as stacked strata…By opening up the z-axis to reading in this way, The Cube recognizes the book as a three-dimensional sculptural space.”
Shelley Jackson’s The Slow Book is hammered out and “encoded into a series of punctures on a strip of copper… at a rate of one word per century (local time).”
Ben Mirov’s Inadequate Pillow is “seems to be about nothing in particular.” Yes, it contains “orthographic symbols,” but its primary function is as a physical object: “It might be used as a pedestal for a vial of dust. In certain cases, the book may be used for sexual intercourse…”
The book’s physicality is further explored in Sean Higgins’s The Paper Archivist entry, while, most tantalizingly, Adam Robinson writes that he “opened the third drawer of Barbara D’Albi’s wooden novel.”
Can all the modifications in book technology suggested by these many writers be implemented given present book industry operations? Perhaps not. Yet like the Oulipo movement that inspired this collection, the works show that even this late in the game, we still have not fully explored what “book” might mean.“ – Nick Kocz

“I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues. —Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel
Stephen King once quoted an unnamed “fairly cynical writer acquaintance” who had a strict rule when it came to writing blurbs: “Never blurb a book you’ve read and never read a book you’ve blurbed.” Cynicism aside, this notion highlights the interchangeable aspect of most book blurbs. There are the clichés (“unputdownable”) but it’s more fun to look for over-the-top praise and imagine the blurber never read the book in question.
Thomas Pynchon’s trippingly hyperbolic blurb for Rudolph Wurlitzer’s 1970 novel, Nog comes to mind:
“Wow, this is some book, I mean it’s more than a beautiful and heavy trip, it’s also very important in an evolutionary way, showing us directions we could be moving in—hopefully another sign that the Novel of Bullshit is dead and some kind of re-enlightenment is beginning to arrive, to take hold.”
I don’t really need to read Nog. I’m happy enough to imagine the book Pynchon describes. Soon enough, a Derek Smalls-esque voice pipes up: “Can I raise a practical question at this point?” What if the book being blurbed doesn’t exist?
Literature abounds with collections of imaginary books. In the story “The Library of Babel”, Jorge Louis Borges describes an infinite library, containing every possible variation of a 410-page book. Italo Calvino’s 1979 novel If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller describes a bookstore with stacks that “extend for acres and acres” which contain “the Books You Needn’t Read”, “the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered”, and “the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified”, among others.
Neil Gaiman’s classic comic book series The Sandman introduces the memorable Lucien, the librarian of the strange realm known as “The Dreaming”, In August 1993’s Vertigo Jam #1, Lucien tells us, “The library of dreams is the largest library there never was. I’m sure all your books are here….Here’s one. It’s called ‘The Bestselling Romantic Spy Thriller I used to think about on the bus that would sell a billion copies and mean I’d never have to work again.’”
In Sandman’s issue #57 (Feb. 1994), he describes his library as containing: “Every book that’s ever been dreamed. Every book that’s ever been imagined. Every book that’s ever been lost.”
The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature offers a selection of blurbs for books that could line a shelf or two in Lucien’s or Borges’s libraries. It’s publisher, Cow Heavy Books, specializes in “limited-edition, perfect-bound minibooks” with limited print runs, and they describe this wonderful collection as “a catalog of textual desire, of wished-for and ideal books as described by a diverse collection of writers, critics, and text-makers. The maligned blurb form herein becomes, time and again, the entryway into unreadable books and the anticipation that comes before opening them.”
Edited by Ben Segal and Erinrose Mager, over 60 writers contribute blurbs, and the collection begins immediately, without an introduction or table of contents. The first entry, “All these violent children”, by J.A. Tyler could also apply to the entire The Official Catalog: “The way this book manipulates the world, tears it up into tiny pieces and then re-structures it, recreates it, makes of it a new state of being, this is something to behold.”
Most of the blurbs take no more than a page, and this gives the collection the feel of a book of prose poems. The reference to “potential literature” connects this book directly to the Oulipo writers such as Raymond Queneau and George Perec, and their constrained writing technique. Like the best examples from the Oulipians, The Official Catalog uses its self-imposed rules to create something intellectually and aesthetically exciting and limitless.
There are blurbs for imaginary books by famous authors, such as Michael Martone’s entry for Vladimir Nabokov’s “The Blues of the Limberlost” (“part collection of prose poetry, part entomological treatise”). There are blurbs for imaginary books whose authors are unattributed, such as Peter Markus’s entry for “The Book of Sounds” (“A book meant to be read out loud.”).
Some entries take the form of short stories about books, such as Matt Bell’s piece about “The Big Book of Infinitely Possible Timetables,” which tells a Calvino-like story about the “reader”:
“Following the Big Book’s charts, he finds another almost similar conveyance in his train’s place, one that makes him late or early to arrive at some barely other destination, one that he did not know to desire and is at first mostly familiar. Here is some new home where his wife’s face is only slightly paler, only barely broader, where his children speak more or less likably than before, and where his roast beef tastes not quite exactly unlike any other roast beef he has ever tasted.”
Bell’s curious and circular style also brings to mind Jorge Luis Borges’s tale of an infinite book, “The Book of Sand”, as well as Umberto Eco’s 2009 study The Infinity of Lists, which differentiates between two methods of representing infinity. One depicts it in a closed form, “a potential infinity”.
“There is, however, another mode of artistic representation, one where we do not know the boundaries of what we wish to portray, where we do not know how many things we are talking about and presume their number to be, if not infinite, then at least astronomically large,” Eco writes. Into that mode falls the The Official Catalog. This is not to say that the book is highfalutin and academic. Some pieces work as twitter-length literary jokes, such as Teresa Carmody’s “Literal: A novel,” for which the entire blurb is, “Surprisingly true to life!”
Two standouts are the contributions from well-known writers Aimee Bender and Shelley Jackson. Jackson expands the concept of a blurb into an epic fantasy comparable to Pynchon’s write-up for Nog:
“The Slow Book, written by an anonymous author at the dawn of literacy, on a minor planet (otherwise notable only as the source of that exceptionally hardy, not very tasty grain called ‘shef’ sowed on hostile planets as an early step to colonization), and encoded into a series of punctures on a strip of copper coiled inside a clever device, something between a player piano and an old-fashioned film projector, is being released into print, as was the author’s intention, at a rate of one word per century (local time).”
Where Jackson condenses all of time and space into a blurb, Bender turns the blurb inside-out. Her piece (for a book whose title we never discover), describes a surreal feeling that could also apply to the entire The Official Catalog.
“When I read, I generally feel transported, but when I read this book, I did actually seem to be transported,” she writes. “When I finished it, I looked up and some of the furniture in my living room had been rearranged.” – Oliver Ho

„Potential is a dreamer’s word, an ideal state that may never be. Perhaps that’s what makes it a writer’s word. One searches for a potential mate, discerns potential careers and paths–the word implies an active state of searching and becoming. However, there’s also the disappointment of not meeting one’s potential, as in dating, there’s the oft-heard dismissal, “(s)he had such potential.” In literature, the word is usually associated with Oulipo (ouvroir de litterature potentielle, or “workshop of potential literature”) where constraints (often mathematical) were (and are) used to create new exceptions, deviations, derivations, or rather, new forms of literature.
Potential has such possibility when untouched by the heavy hands of reality. In attempt to reify the energy of such fleeting states, Ben Segal and Erinrose Mager compiled The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature, “a catalog of textual desire, of wished-for and ideal books,” that were dreamt of and desired by sixty-two writers, critics, and text makers. The homage to Oulipo is evident from the title, but also its aesthetic, with a spare white cover that resembles a French paperback, and its execution, which prizes the potential form. The entries are supposed book blurbs, but more frequently resemble narrative distillations from book jackets (only better), or stories unto themselves. If anything, this enhances the book but also reveals the liberties taken. In this catalog, the only constraint is the author’s imagination. The ideas are set out like seeds germinating on a windowsill before the final winter’s frost. They are unruly, ambitious, ready to unfurl.
The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature is a book of books, and in some cases a catalog of catalogs, such as Matt Bell’s Big Book of Infinitely Impossible Timetables or Peter Markus’s Book of Sounds. Some titles are very literal (and amusing) like Teresa Carmody’s Literal: A Novel, which she describes as “Surprisingly true to life!” while others are intentionally misleading–How to Paint (imagined by Derrick Pell) was written by a lewd photographer who provides no such instruction.
Vanessa Place (also one of the contributors/wishers) commented during the Belladonna prose event at AWP that as an author she acts as a mirror for the reader, and that a reader’s response to a book only reveals the reader to her- or himself to a greater degree. In this sense, there are books that illuminate inner lives, that heal, that undo past harm, and offer guidance–including one for Diane Williams (suggested by Diane Williams), What Diane Williams Did and What She’ll Probably Do, With Useful Suggestions for Her. There are even more that injure. Bhanu Kapil warns, “Don’t read this book. Is it a bruise?” Robert Lopez imagines poems that assault like slipping on ice and cracking your skull.
It’s interesting to note the ways the wished-for books converge into categories. Many of the books transport the reader, but Aimee Bender’s literally changes her perspective, by rearranging her living room. There are adventure tales, stories packed with stock characters, including zombies, vampires, super models, cannibals, and race car drivers. Some books transform into poultices and contain elixirs, others are objets d’art and masterpieces of design, like Adam Robinson’s book within a wooden sculpture.
Add to the list political, fantasy, self-help, and practical books too, if you’re wondering which drugs to pair with certain video games. Surprisingly, there is no comedy, as a category. One author is trapped within the book and another is undone by the text, consumed. And, as a reader would expect from a catalog of potential literature, there are nods to the Oulipians. Laird Hunt conjures a tale about the French boxing league formed by Georges Perec after he fakes his death, while Craig Dworkin imagines Oulipian-like constraints for Cube, which can can be read both horizontally and vertically, as well as in strata, by way of lexical core sampling.
More than a few ideas, now born, beg to become. Shelley Jackson’s Slow Book is a story unto itself. Far more complex than a Kindle, The Slow Book is a book of the future, stored on a strip of coiled copper, that reveals one word per century, the word that defines the age. Lance Olsen imagines a manuscript that reads like David Lynch’s Lost Highway, it contains a poem that ignites with breath and others that dissolve upon exposure to light (and so much more). Artist and author Tom Phillips was so inspired by his idea he’s decided to make his book. I wouldn’t be surprised if others do too.
The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature is a trove of ideas, ready for looting by writers, as well as a garden of delights for the reader. Jac Jemc describes a longed-for childhood fairy tale: “At the beginning, the author ties the finest narrative threads around your belly, and pulls you gently, but certainly, to the end.” Which is something so many of us have longed for in a book. If only wishing and imagination were readily transformed into the desired object, many of these books would already exist. But, as this book shows, there’s magic in the dream.“ – Anne K. Yoder

„The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature, edited by Ben Segal and Erinrose Mager, is more than just a collection of short blurbs describing would-be books; it is a droll and scalding glimpse into the witches cauldron of the postmodern literary imagination.
No, really.
The contributors to this collection, from well-known writers like Aimee Bender and Matt Bell to newer voices like Mallory Rice and Sean Higgins, do more than satirize the tired language of book reviews, dust jackets, and literary theory–they take our preconceived ideas about what is literature and turn them upside down and inside out. Posited here are books by authors both real (Vladimir Nabokov, Georges Perec) and imaginary; books by the dead, and yes, the undead; books in the form of cubes, wooden drawers, sounds; books that can only be deciphered when held up to a mirror.
In some cases the prose is as irritatingly self-conscious and convoluted as its object of ridicule, but more often the language, although hyperbolic, is to be savored. For example, this from Lance Olsen:
“Pages ornamented with trompe-l’oeil, paperclips and coffee stains and buzzing houseflies, some busy with illegible runes that dissolve when exposed to light, three that smell like roses or lemons (depending on whether a man or woman is reading), two that stain with the bloody fingerprints of the those who handle them, one that ignites when brushed with breath, thirteen sewn from baby skin, one that moans when touched, and one that screams—yet all without mass, unimaginable, and invisible.”
But my favorite has to be the blurb by Lucas Astor, PhD (courtesy of Samuel Ligon) which contains the embedded narrative of the reviewer’s affair with the would-be book’s author, who taught him, “over and over, first in my office, then in her apartment, also in the woods behind Barrett Hall and in so many other places, at AWP in the New York Hilton for example,” that their thirty-five-year age difference was inconsequential and that he should not under any circumstances introduce her to his agent.
Not surprisingly, this collection is packed with enough obscure references to scare away the lay-reader, and to have the AWP crowd snorting our lattes through our noses. But it also has zombies, so check it out.“ - Anna Laird Barto


The Official Catalog of Potential Literature—Selections

In early 2011, Cow Heavy Books published The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature, a compendium of catalog 'blurbs' for non-existent desired or ideal texts. Along with Erinrose Mager, I edited the project, in a process that was more like curation as it mainly entailed asking a range of contemporary writers, theorists, and text-makers to send us an entry. What resulted was a creative/critical hybrid anthology, a small book in which each page opens to a new iteration of textual desire.
These texts explore the material possibilities of the book. Somewhat parallel to the call of N. Katherine Hayles who, in her book Writing Machines, urges literary theorists to take up the practice of Medium Specific Analysis (to account for the way the medium in which it is presented conditions or at least bears on a literary text). I see in the imagined works of The Official Catalog a call for the innovative writers of today to become Medium-Responsive. This would mean thinking through the specific (materially constrained) possibilities offered by the media in which texts are presented, and in thinking of the literary text as a kind of art in the greater context of other arts and the book as a medium situated within the context of many other media. In doing so, the contemporary writer refutes the chorus of critics who lament the death of the book by consistently reinvigorating literary innovation.
The following are selections from The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature that show possible paths for (thinking about) new writing that engages with its medium. —Ben Segal, Editor

THE CUBE
Even the most radical non-linear texts have tended to exploit or subvert only the sequential possibilities of print—from the continuous loop of Joyce's Finnegans Wake to the shuffled cards of Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1—but The Cube takes such multiplicities to an entirely new level. Set in a grid, the book's words can be read conventionally, across the page, as well as down each column—with either route making complete grammatical sense. But they can also be read as stacked strata and mined like lexical core samples through the layered pages of the book. Each path tells the same story from a different perspective (the narrative, naturally, hinges on the potential outcomes of a throw of cubed dice). By opening up the z-axis to reading in this way, The Cube recognizes the book as a three-dimensional sculptural space. Taking its lead from Armand Schwerner's (If Personal) and Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes, The Cube reads like a experiment by Christian Bök precision printed by Emily McVarish. - Craig Dworkin

HE GOES
In He Goes, we read notes, letters and e-mails from a scholar father to his novelist daughter. We read of the father's musings on Beckett, on Pinter, on Anne Frank; his description of a woman hanging laundry from a line. We read about his journey toward dying, followed by a brief, third person account of his death, and his obituary. Then a long series of blank pages that demand to be read in real time, non-sentence by non-sentence, blank page by blank page. Finally—and it is here that this peculiar little book begins to soar—the dead father writes to his as-of-yet-still-living daughter. He does not write from death. He does not write from life. The words unprint, unstamp, unkindle. Still, they require no translation. The father "writes" (for lack of a better word) about the serendipitous, the commonplace; he recommends another book. He jokes. He asks his daughter how her stomach is. He says forget about presence in absence, darling; screw words as memorial and the guys in garbage cans and loss as redemption and I can't go on I must go on. He goes, "Love, Fodder." He goes, "incidentally." He goes, "I thought you might like to know."- Elizabeth Graver

THE PAPER ARCHIVIST
A stunning package and a triumph of imagination, The Paper Archivist at times looks to be less a book than an abstract expressionist painting. Softly bound, its contents unfold to a single sheet of uneven thickness and texture—a canvas splattered with colored lines, stickers, broken sentences, and nonsense pictographs. But by following the directions to fold, dip, smell, rub, scratch, and tear the sheet according to the contingencies of the weather and using only the objects at hand, the reader slowly brings the forces hidden in the noise into a glorious sculptural convergence, processing a different story and shape each time. This is the rare book that continues to stir, whirl, and pop on every new reading. - Sean Higgins

THE SLOW BOOK
The Slow Book, written by an anonymous author at the dawn of literacy, on a minor planet (otherwise notable only as the source of that exceptionally hardy, not very tasty grain called “shef” sowed on hostile planets as an early step to colonization), and encoded into a series of punctures on a strip of copper coiled inside a clever device, something between a player piano and an old-fashioned film projector, is being released into print, as was the author’s intention, at a rate of one word per century (local time). Each word is, across the Forty Galaxies, agreed to be uncannily apt for the century in which it appears—even “of,” in a century during which the highest value was attached to fidelity, whether to ideals, worlds, or romantic love; even “the,” which governed two centuries, one extraordinarily materialistic, during which advances in propulsion and navigation accelerated the exchange of exceptional objects between the remotest planets of the Forty, and one in which the central concern, both of philosophers and the common man, was whether, in an age of rapidly proliferating hypothetical worlds, anyone or anything concretely existed at all. Even those words published long before interstellar contact can be seen in retrospect to have transgalactic pertinence. As a result, attempts to abstract the machine from its publishers, Hobson & Hui, in order to “predict the future” for insight or gain by “fast- forwarding” the copper strip have been many and ingenious. While, in centuries of skepticism (“maybe”), or of unrest (“go”) the book has been nearly forgotten, in others it seems to haunt every thought, every deed, despite the fact that the subject of The Slow Book is still unclear. So far only a few sentences exist in print; everyone knows them, can quote them, offer the standard exegeses and assorted heresies; yet certainties are the stuff of adolescence; mature readers are forced to acknowledge that these sentences are probably only a preamble to the main argument. They contain no proper nouns, nor can we identify any definite theme. There is even disagreement about their tone, whether coolly ironic, as some insist, or ardent. The appearance of an unusual grammatical case, sometimes called the future pluperfect continuous, used to describe events that at some future point will have always been true (but are not yet)—hitherto known to appear only in the synthetic dogmas of the Thanatographical Society, and in certain highly circumscribed religious contexts—has suggested to some scholars that the Slow Book was originally intended for ritual use, but the proximity of the usage to a term designating a small hand plow that, as Pott and Mielcke have convincingly shown, would have borne a distinctly obscene double meaning in its culture of origin in the author’s time, argues otherwise. It is likewise unclear whether the situation that seems to be—with teasing incompleteness—sketched out in these few lines is intended as an illustration of general principles, a case study, a dramatic scene, or an extended metaphor. In short, we have no idea what The Slow Book is about. In our own time, we believe that it is almost certainly a work of fiction, but that may be because we live in the century of “if”. In each age, perhaps, we see the book we most need to read. Some have dared to suggest that the metal strip is blank until, with millennial fanfare, it advances into its new position, that no ur-text exists, that the book itself is brought into being—written—by our need. But that is exactly the sort of thing we would believe, in 7645. - Shelley Jackson

THE BOOK OF SOUNDS
The Book of Sounds is just that: a book of sounds made when letters are construed in new ways to bring forth out of the alphabet new forms of speech. A book meant to be read out loud, The Book of Sounds is not unlike Laurie Anderson's O Superman or Brian Eno's Music for Airports in its attempt to make music out of the most primary and simplest of methods. It breaks language down to its barest bones and makes out of the page a drum that has never before been beaten upon.
- Peter Markus

PARADISE OF THE BLIND by Celan Solen
Although the reclusive Celan Solen published his first and only book in 1963—paying out-of-pocket for a limited edition of the slim collection No One May Have the Same Knowledge Again—he remained in American obscurity for almost three decades. In 1992 a micro-press in Istanbul brought out No One in Turkish. A German translation followed in 1995. Soon it became clear in literary circles Solen was a world-class (if highly unclassifiable) artist—lyrical, dense, enigmatic—who could undo the conventional short story in 397 words by inventing impossible worlds housed in impossible whirls (in “Small Sadnesses,” a single chartreuse tree frog in Borneo unknowingly holds time together by its very presence in the universe, while each letter of its tale refers, not to itself, but to the one preceding it in the alphabet). By his disappearance last year, Solen was considered master by a generation of writers and critics (except, alas, for those gentlemen in the Swedish Academy). Imagine, then, that generation’s delight at the discovery, locked away in the author’s safe-deposit box, of his second and final composition. Had Lynch’s Lost Highway been book instead of film, and had it been penned by Beckett at his least certain, revised by Barthelme at his most formally deranged, and typeset by Derrida at his most semiotically catastrophic, the result might have been something like Paradise of the Blind: interlacing narratives of a man composed of borrowed organs (whose most cheerless and difficult to locate, god, could only have been invented by an empty heart), a nonexistent medieval painting blamed for the ruin of future hope, and the spread of a philosophy that holds earth a mistake constantly recurring in the dream of a fish lying on the floor of the Atlantic (if the fish wakes, our world winks off)—all contained in a text packed with typed-over passages, torn postcards, poems that can be deciphered only when held up to a mirror, pages ornamented with trompe-l'œil paperclips and coffee stains and buzzing houseflies, some busy with illegible runes that dissolve when exposed to light, three that smell like roses or lemons (depending on whether a man or woman is reading), two that stain with the bloody fingerprints of the those who handle them, one that ignites when brushed with breath, thirteen sewn from baby skin, one that moans when touched, and one that screams—yet all without mass, unimaginable, and invisible.- Lance Olsen

SUPERSTRUCTURE! by Barbara D'Albi
As soon as I opened the third drawer of Barbara D'Albi's wooden novel, everything became hopeless. Now in Ithaca, there was no going back. And it wasn't just the intricate series of shelves, hinged doors and locked drawers which D'Albi layered into the book, no, lo, I was constructed anew by the story. Who else but D'Albi to imagine a God who becomes a carpenter and gets killed?! And makes it good! You want stories? D'Albi is a skyscraper, built with planes and levers. Momentarily I wondered where I could shelve this book, and then I thought: no matter; I couldn't put it down. -Adam Robinson