Steven Shaviro - When you open your mouth-or your ass, or your cunt-there's no way of knowing what `foreign particles' will enter

Steven Shaviro, Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about Postmodernism (Serpent's Tail, 1996)

"Doom Patrols is a rollercoaster ride through late-20th-century culture. Considering topics as diverse as Elvis worship, the erotics of cyberspace, fantasies of the millennium, multiple personality syndrome, and the molecular logic of insect DNA; ranging from William Burroughs to Dean Martin, from Michel Foucault to My Bloody Valentine, from Andy Warhol to Bill Gates, the essays in the collection take an idiosyncratic look at the forces and counter-forces currently transforming American and world culture."

"In Doom Patrols, Shaviro is out to prove that he is not just a nerdy literature-and-film professor, he is also a member of the hip-oisie who (gasp!) goes to rock concerts, reads comics and uses the word fuck. Through 17 loosely defined personal essays on subjects ranging from Bill Gates to Truddi Chase (of 92-personalities fame), Shaviro expounds on postmodernism. He applies the idea that essence is obsolete to examples from American culture (many already overanalyzed) including Kathy Acker and Cindy Sherman. Shaver's style is at times self-consciously smart ("This ability to deceive ourselves and to be sincere... is the defining characteristic of what it means to be American, or to be human") at other times embarrassingly confessional ("I needed your wound, but since that night you've withheld it from me"), always deliberately quotable ("war is menstruation envy"). Oddly, race has virtually no significance in his version of the postmodern universe. While Shaviro draws some interesting connections between the theory of natural selection and postmodernism, his book is still a party gathering the same tired, talked-out guests: Warhol, Burroughs, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Foucault. One gets the sense that Shaviro is trying way too hard to impress a readership of the converted-people who are easily wowed by ponderous statements such as: "When you open your mouth-or your ass, or your cunt-there's no way of knowing what `foreign particles' will enter." That may be true, but some of us have a pretty good idea." - Publishers Weekly

"Like those strange, fearsome fish that live in the ocean's deepest depths, Shaviro's prose and his ideas may thrive in their own confined milieu, but brought to the surface world where the rest of us live, they explode and die. Shaviro tries to conceal the basic unoriginality of his thought behind a dense patter of quotation, citation, and jargon. And so we are treated to the recycled thoughts of such postmodern sages as Baudrillard and Deleuze, as well as the usual, trite reflections on rock 'n' roll (it induces disorientation, the quintessential postmodern experience) and Disney World (where excess blurs the boundary between reality and unreality and the postmodern world's fetish of the object is fully realized). Shaviro also spends an inordinate amount of time analyzing the comic book series Doom Patrol, whose main virtue, apparently, is its deliberate engagement with postmodern themes. But the subject matter is really unimportant. With tautological criticism like this, subjects exist only to confirm a theory. Hence, postmodern critics adore such fabulistic novelists as Pynchon but almost never acknowledge the existence of such doughty realists as Mailer or Bellow. Shaviro jettisons such concepts as theme and coherence, rambling wherever whims and his borrowings take him, perhaps trying to demonstrate tautologically the confusions of a postmodern universe. In short, these essays aren't really about anything at all." - Kirkus Reviews

"This book is a theoretical fiction about postmodernism. Fiction because Shaviro exercises the novelist’s conceit of character and event in carving his preternatural discursions; Doom Patrols is not a declaration of narrative. Postmodern because: "Postmodernism is not a theoretical option or a stylistic choice; it is the very air we breathe."
Steven Shaviro’s gathering of dense, sometimes obtuse, occasionally electrifying essays should never have been published on paper. There is something awry (modernist; pre-modern even) about turning pages, submitting to the tyranny of left-to-right. We need a cerebral plug-in, intravenous disclosure; CD-ROM allows for Burroughsian cut-up (William Seward gets a chapter heading); or to at the very least restrict availability solely to the Internet. But chips like that are restricted to Jack Straw’s wet-dreams, and CD-ROM is never as good as (read Brian Eno - not a chapter heading, surprisingly). And besides, Serpent’s Tail have published it as a book, albeit after months of being available on Shaviro’s own web site.
Postmodernism: Let’s Go!
"To a postmodern sensibility, there’s no contradiction between cool and hot, irony and passion, playfulness and commitment, excitement and disgust, pleasure and anxiety, or camp distancing and involvement to the point of obsession." (from Chapter 1: Grant Morrison.)
"Sincerity is a postmodern malady." (from Chapter 2: Walt Disney.)
In his cover-shot, Shaviro - a teacher in literature and film - faces away but wrests his gaze for a brief glimpse of us. He recognises what he has written: Doom Patrols is a treatise that defies this very review. If there is no difference between cool or hot, camp and obsession, then how are we to accuse anything here of simple right or wrong, stupidity or perception to an nth degree? A mass of his dialogue is most likely bollocks; certainly much is almost impenetrable, compacted thought; mind-fucking inadequacy. And yet... and yet:
"It’s Bill Gates’s world; we just live in it... God, like Gates, has exactly the aggressiveness, the competitive drive, and the sense of entitlement you’d expect in a talented straight boy from a privileged WASP background."
If he builds it, we will come. Shaviro is good at that, lighthousing this ocean of punctuation, a beacon to pilot us through. And to the end is where we go, for no matter how annoying Doom Patrols gets ("detached from referential meaning; the mechanical piling up of fragments takes the place of organic completion or symbolic translation"), it remains compulsively readable. We have to find out who did it.
For every irritation (Chapter 7: Cindy Sherman, "all feminine coquetry and affectation"), there is real juice like the dissection of Twin Peaks in terms of child abuse (Chapter 14: Truddi Chase). Or the last and quite brilliant chapter on the enigma that was Dean Martin ("If Elvis ... is the triumphant product of processes of natural selection, then Dino is the anomalous, ephemeral, and sterile expression of an illicit counter-movement"). Tremendous stuff.
In the end the greatest trick Doom Patrols (the author’s world dissected in relation to the comic, not the celebrated POV-game) pulls is the very sobriquet postmodern itself; it is auto-reviewed. All Shaviro leaves with us are his own quotes. Pop will eat itself. We surrender." - Gerald Houghton

"...as a work on postmodernism, Doom Patrols can only approach its "subject" through performitivity. Or as Shaviro states in his preface: "Postmodernism isn't a theoretical option or a stylistic choice; it is the very air we breathe. We are postmodern whether we like it or not, and whether we are aware of it or not. For this very reason, the word postmodernism isn't explicitly defined anywhere in my text. Its meaning is its use: or better, its multiple and contradictory uses, as these emerge gradually in the course of the book." Thus, if one aspect of postmodernism is that we live in a highly technological society where words and images are constantly being recycled, being "borrowed" from television, the internet, books, magazines, films and CDs, being reproduced, scanned, downloaded, photocopied, recombined, distorted and redistributed privately and publicly, then Doom Patrols must make itself subject to these same "plagiaristic" forces if it is to discuss postmodernism accurately. Marshall McLuhan says that the medium is the message; if we take him seriously, then any work attempting to "study" the messages of contemporary culture must necessarily come to resemble the media which proliferate and perpetuate that culture.
Shaviro elaborates this idea further in "Grant Morrison," the first of the book's seventeen chapters, each named after a media personality or artist. Writer of the DC comic book DOOM PATROL from 1989 to 1992, Grant Morrison and his work actually become emblematic of Shaviro's whole enterprise. For like most graphic novels in the 1990s, DOOM PATROL is actually a reinterpretation of a comic book that originally appeared in the late 1960s. Indeed, the 1960 version written by Arnold Drake featured the same group of genetic and social misfits who put their strangeness to use by becoming superheroes. Yet Morrison appropriates from diverse and often idiosyncratic sources- ranging from chaos theory to literature, philosophy to alternative music-to infuse the 90s version with a mixture of cultural cynicism and camp utterly lacking in Drake's original.
"DOOM PATROL is just the fix I need," Shaviro writes, "It has exactly the right mix of ingredients. Everything is in pieces, everything is borrowed or stolen... Plagiarism, blank mimicry, parasitic borrowing, speaking in tongues: these are the tactics of exemplary postmodern works like DOOM PATROL." Just as traditional images of the superheros like Superman developed in the 1930s get subverted and transformed into "the world's most bizarre heroes" of the 1960s DOOM PATROL written by Arnold Drake, so Grant Morrison subverts and transforms the "naive earnestness" of this original into the "sly hipness" which characterizes the 1990s DOOM PATROL. Shaviro's subversion and transformation of the play on cultural and identity construction in Morrison's book into the "theoretical fiction" which makes up Doom Patrols, then, is merely one more rotation in an ongoing series. The writing and rewriting of DOOM PATROL as a text, thus serves not only to introduce many of the themes Shaviro wishes to discuss, but acts as a strategic statement of the methodology Doom Patrols will employ: "All we can do with words and images is appropriate them, distort them, turn them against themselves. All we can do is borrow and waste them: spend what we haven't earned, and what we don't even possess. That's my definition of postmodern culture, but it's also Citibank's definition of a healthy economy, Jacques Lacan's definition of love, and J.G. Ballard's definition of life in the postindustrial ruins."
With other chapters like "Andy Warhol," "William Burroughs," and "Bilinda Butcher," Doom Patrols appears initially like a series of meditations on the nature of celebrity culture. Yet as we can already begin to sense in a chapter like "Grant Morrison," Shaviro's goal is nothing less than to trouble our conceptions of "individual personhood," and "representation." Through what are both highly autobiographical and extremely theoretical discussions on topics ranging from Elvis Presley to the molecular logic of insect DNA, Shaviro calls attention to the essential fictiveness of "personality," and endeavors to trace out how notions of "reality" have been constructed. The chapter on "Walt Disney," then, is less concerned with our collective celluloid memories of good old uncle Walt than it is with trying to explicate American sincerity, with Shaviro claiming that, "a strange mutation arose in our hominid ancestors, probably less than two hundred thousand years ago. Call it the Reagan gene: the ability to deceive others by first of all deluding yourself."
For all the apparent glibness of this initial remark, Shaviro traces the idea of sincerity back to what Gerald Edelman calls 'higher order consciousness,' or the ability to know that one is merely playing a role, and doing so without this knowledge causing the performance to be any less heartfelt or 'authentic.' This category of 'realness,' Shaviro points out, is precisely what is most prized by drag queens and method actors: the triumph of simulating to perfection a gender or character whom one is not. It is precisely this same quality we admire in audioanimatrons (like the robotic Abe Lincoln in the Hall of Presidents at Disneyworld), creatures that cannot help but mean precisely what the say, and say exactly what they mean. Yet, Shaviro contends both Freud and Marx radically misunderstood the fetishism of the drag queen, and Americans in general, convinced as they were as Europeans that an obsession with surfaces and objects could only be a substitution for feelings of inadequacy, a means of concealing a lack. Yet, "if all you can say about a drag queen is that she's 'really' a man, or that her ostentation conceals a defect," Shaviro counters, "then you've missed the whole point of her performance... This ability to deceive ourselves and to be sincere-far more than language or sexuality-is the defining characteristic of what it means to be an American."
Yet Doom Patrols doesn't limit itself to what some might consider the "standard" postmodern concerns or positions. In "Michel Foucault," Shaviro begins with the wonderful anecdote about a woman who once wrote to Ann Landers asking her whether oral sex meant you 'just talk about it," and goes on to discuss how social constructions of human sexuality are actually much more rigid and intolerant of change than those in the biological world; he ends with an exploration into how electronic and information technologies invite us to imagine a different economy of bodies and pleasures not exclusively bound to reproduction. In "Truddi Chase," Shaviro locates in this case of Multiple Personality Disorder what is perhaps "the best paradigm... for postmodern consciousness," arguing against Freudian and Cartesian conceptions of a radically singular 'ego' in favor of demonology. He argues that we are continually and so powerfully transformed by visceral sensations and emotions as to make any philosophical claim to a fixed and stable 'I' entirely illusory. Shaviro explores in "Bill Gates" how the postmodern God might indeed resemble this brilliant and ferocious man-talented and competitive, an unreliable visionary not at all in control of the forces of liberation and mutation that drive the virulent evolution of cyberlife.
Much of the logic in Doom Patrols is admittedly tautological, and critics of postmodernism will undoubtedly claim that Shaviro's playful, meandering, meditative approach is indicative of an entire movement which is fundamentally anti-intellectual and lazy. I find it utterly impossible to counter such claims. If it seems difficult to weave discussions of the band My Bloody Valentine, tape-worms, Dean Martin, virtual reality, and language as a viral infection into a single, intellectually unified framework, the problem seems hardly to lie with these "objects" themselves as much as it does in the critical project. As Shaviro states in the preface, "I do not propose anything like a balanced and well grounded critique of postmodern culture. To do so would to assert my own separation from the phenomena under consideration." Instead we have a series of gestures, a frenzied dance through the fractured centers and along the dark peripheries of experience. Everything in this book is familiar. Every word is "autobiographical."
"Henry James" is not a chapter in Shaviro's book, but it very well could be. In it we might explore the fate of the printed page in the age of digital reproduction. Or better yet, we might trace out that all too human nostalgia certain humanist intellectuals feel for the peace and sanctity of old mausoleums. That melancholy of anxious critics, as Shaviro describes them, who find themselves unable to adapt to what McLuhan calls 'postliterate' culture. But no, Henry James is in need of no such chapter, for his work is alive and well. His image and excerpts from his books are available for downloading at numerous websites dedicated to his work on the net. His artistic visions and authorial intentions are discussed in electronic newsgroups at many of the major universities, and as soon as copyright expires on his printed works, they will undoubtedly be posted on the web beside those of Shakespeare and Milton. Indeed, Henry James as a virus will soon be free to replicate as never before." - Sheldon Robert Walcher

Willie Smith is deeply ashamed of being human, his work celebrates this horror

Willie Smith, Oedipus Cadet (Black Heron Press, 1990)

«Oedipus Cadet is a satire of the middle-American ideal of security and stability. In the 1950s everything only appears stable. But beneath appearances something sinister lurks. It arises from the depths, flirting with, even wholly engaging pure evil. It is a consuming fire, blazing from the furnaces of the libido to enflame your entire being. It is the violation of what you hold most dear. It is PUBESCENT FANTASY! Or is it? Willie Smith blends fantasy and - what? Other fantasy? Let's call it reality--until first you are not certain which is which, and then you know very well. Oedipus Cadet is very seductive. It is a book to be experienced rather than read with detachment. After reading this book, you will look at life, yours and others, different, perhaps with sympathy, perhaps with horror. Also, it is a fun book.»

"If James Joyce had wanted to write like Dashiell Hammett, and had a sense of humor, he would have written like Willie Smith." - K.O., Reflex Magazine

"Willie Smith has a reason for writing that goes hand in hand with my reason for reading: surviving under a crushing weight by proving daily that it is not a crushing weight. This writing is the only kind of argument that beats universal inertia. Heads roll here." - Jessie Bernstein

«A satirical first novel that nails the American lust for national security in the 1950's onto the myth of Oedipus. Young Cruikshank is only 11 as he begins his story and, although he masturbates night and day, has yet to have his first orgasm or ejaculation. Cruikshank is a kind of half-kid/half-airplane. His immense power of fantasy forever links him to the latest or most colorful aircraft: ""I ...
More was an American fighting under the joint command of Mom and Dad. My particular Hurricane, because it was Pentagon-designed, was every bit as good as any Spitfire the British could put up."" Then he sees his erotic ideal, Maureen, dressed as an SS Colonel, and swoops down, fires a burst, and as she dies riddled with wounds he sees that her wounds weep a sticky white fluid. None of which he understands yet. Stella, his long-suffering mom, thinks he should go to the doctor for his sticky bedsheets. Meanwhile, dad, who missed active service in WW II, works for the Pentagon, has built a bomb shelter in his backyard and fitted it with food and a phone. Where toweringly alcoholic Dad knows baseball backwards and forwards, and forever watches games on television while bombing out on beer, his son is spellbound only by war. The entire novel is a cartoon strip peopled by three one-dimensional main characters and a small handful of other one-dimensional family relatives and schoolmates. But an Oedipal drama is underway, and Cruikshank - who lusts for Mom and sees Mom's head on Maureen's body - must do in hated Dad to marry Mom. This is a quirkily original novel, told simply, that belabors a dead horse yet lusts for bigger fish than its surface satire can catch. The telegraphic, CÉlinesque style has its own energy but little lyrical force in Smith's hands.» - Kirkus Reviews

«Willie Smith is deeply ashamed of being human. His work celebrates this horror. His work can be viewed at corpse.org and he especially recommends, in the archives, ‘Spider Fuck’ and ‘Orestes In The Meat Department.’ Shorter pieces can be found at My Favorite Bullet, Zygote in my Coffee, Jack Magazine, Milk Magazine, Dream People, Thunder Sandwich, Monkey Bicycle, Fifth Street Review, Poetic Inhalation, et al. His novella, Oedipus Cadet is available from Black Heron Press. Novella Submachinegun Consciousness can be read at semantikon.com. He is a regular contributor to Andrei Codrescu's Exquisite Corpse and The American Drivel Review. He is reasonably clean, fairly sober and happily married without children. He enjoys stargazing, birdwatching, deep-breathing and hanging out at the public library with the rest of the bums. His chapbooks EXECUTION STYLE, STORIES FROM THE MICROWAVE, SOLID GAS and GO AHEAD SPIT ON ME are probably not available anywhere.»


Willie Smith: "How We X-ed Billy"

We crawled in through the sewer. Came up out of the toilet. Snuck into the parlor, where Billy sat in front of the tv puzzling over his Bible, the commercial selling a fast car to nobody. Lenny sneezed…
Billy slammed down the Bible. Jumped up. Saw us.
His spine iced.
I held a gin & tonic. Lenny kept him covered with a Hustler. Charlie shoved a chair backwards between the preacher’s legs. Sat with his chin on the chair’s wooden back, smiling big at Billy, who in shock mouthed JESUS!
Jack tore up floorboards. Put together a cross that he proceeded to lean against a glossy of Christ tacked to the knotty pine wall. Jack then leaned up against the wall himself; got out a jug.
Charlie had already wheedled the gin from my hand. Lenny was leafing through the Hustler. Billy saw his chance; grabbed for his Bible to quote us a few, when Jack lifted the wine – forced Billy to gulp. Fear froze the evangelist’s esophagus as tokay fired in his gut. He couldn’t even voice god’s name.
Then Bernstein, from somewhere out of the woodwork, crept in. He wielded a syringe capacious as a collection plate; inside lurked a bodacious taste of god’s good.
He motioned Billy into the bathroom. When they came out, five minutes and the rest of the gin and tokay later, Billy’s face was white; Bernstein zipped his pants.
Bernstein presently, in the presence of us all, knifed Billy in the back. Billy leaped forward into Lenny, who rolled up the Hustler; bunted him over to me, who fielded him with a javelin; forked him over to Charlie, who crooned in his ear, “This Jesus Jive Got To Go,” a song he had just written into the gin bottle.
Billy grinned watermelon. Danced over to Jack, who threw him up on the cross. We used bottlenecks for makeshift nails. Sank a garland of underground poetry into his head. Then Jack jumped up, drew a dirty picture and offed himself all over Billy’s face.
As a last gesture of redeeming cruelty, we left on the tv.


Willie Smith: "Acquired Taste"

I was sitting in my studio at the bottom of a five-hundred pound writer's block, when my critics surprised me. They knocked off the block. They grabbed me by the ankles. Dragged me into the john. Stuffed me headfirst down the toilet.
"Since you write about it," one began.
"Yeah!" another leaped in. "Let's give you a taste!"
A third critic flushed furiously, accusing me of fecal materialism. They snaked my body through the trap.
Feeling my feet submerge into the bowl, I realized these people were only trying to be constructive. They were intelligent, perceptive, sensitive. And they were right. I am scum. So I let go; shot through the plumbing, out under the frontyard and into the sewer.
Down there it was dark; reminiscent of rough drafts, false starts, abortions. But drink abounded, and it wasn't lonely. There were as many rats as humans in the city above. And many more roaches. Murder, rape, arson were unknown, although they happened. Above all, plagiarism didn't exist - who'd want to even read this shit? The critics are right.
So I loosened up, and let fly. Which felt so good, I passed out; then landed on a strange planet, where no scum had ever set foot.
I opened the door to my craft, and stepped outside.


Willie Smith: An excerpt from "Orestes in the Meat Department"

Big cow of a woman leaned over the pork chops. Mousy gramps with rimless peepers eyeing the rabbit, picking over the chicken. Packages squeaking like gristle in a knacking factory. Fingers depressing transparent plastic, prodding meat packed underneath on styrofoam tray. Yellow skin, pink meat, tan pork, scarlet flesh skirted in beige fat. Blue stamps, purple tags. Organ meat - heart, liver, gizzard, brain, intestine; hog maw, boar head, beef ball. Everything but stuffed rectum and pineal gland paste.
But no blood. Liquid leaked around muscle clumps is dye, packing ice and serous fluid.
Phone doesn't ring. Nothing happens. Who needs blood? Have a look at this pound of ground round. Bunch of red-white worms all pinked together - mashed on styrofoam, trapped under plastic. Nothing savage here.
The phone rings. It's Ellen again. She wants me to kill mother. Don't answer it.
Press down on plastic, feel worms squeeze. Dollar ninety-eight. Not bad this day and - hell! - age, damn phone rings a -damn!-gain.
Bovine woman tosses aside package of pork chops like they were hay in a disinterested needle hunt. She sidles her boxcar down to the chicken, the senile mouse having disappeared off into some corner of day-old bread.
I didn't ask for this. Father drove truck, yeah, sure: Akron to Chicago, Chic to Ak. Yeah. Frozen meat he hauled. Eighteen wheeler. Had a honey in Akron. Family in Chicago. Mom found out. Cut him in half pointblank with a sawed-off. Any business of mine? I'd left home by then. Just Ellen back there to clean up the mess. Just Ellen...
Looking down at the chicken, answer the phone. Ellen asks if it's me. I'm looking down at axed, bled, plucked, pre-frozen chicken - hell, I don't know...
She goes on anyway about why don't I come up to Winnetka tonight and plant a meat cleaver in Mom's skull. Let go the package of wings, close my eyes and concentrate on her voice sitting on my innermost face...
read more


Willie Smith: An excerpt from "Spider Fuck"

The horniest picture I ever saw was in National Geographics. It was a spider's asshole magnified fifty times. Resembled a soggy Cheerio on a slate background.
I haven't been the same since. Because I wanna do me one, and no live spider is big enough to accommodate. I've tried jacking off on arachnids. Wolf spiders and tarantulas the best. Daddy longlegs impossible. Scorpions a bitch. But I never come near the satisfaction gleaned that afternoon when I first drenched the National Geo full-color centerfold blown up to reveal a teensy parasite wriggling in some jungle spider's 0-ring.
You can't always get what you want. But, if you fixate, sometimes you get what you pay for. Visualize arachnoid roundeye.
One night I was jizzing a black widow -- ejaculating without orgasm, bored with the universe. I turned some jazz on the radio, while watching the spider struggle under the shroud of ejaculate.
Goodman Benny inhaled clarinet. Jack Webb sat in. Max Roach fogged the chamber. They were in mixolydian - I heard a vodka tonic. Willie "The Lion" Smith masturbated the 88.
I daydreamed anti-aircraft fire. Nazi flak redshifted into what I'd dine upon that night, Turkey Tetrachloride? Veal Hardon Blue? Fish Dicks? Spam Sushi? Only a wizard could decide which tv dinner, when all you got is a radio.
Imagine my lack of preparation, daydreaming as I was, when into the room clacked a spider big as a Buick. Eight pale legs supported a hispid, chartreuse body. She spun around. Hiked her crupper. Displayed a taut caterpillar-green starfish.
Like in a dream, I approached the miracle. The chiton of her legs buckled with anticipation. I ran a finger over the sphincter that was tinier than a dowager's purse. She stood nervous, shy, to all appearances a virgin. She was dry as calculus. I ran to the kitchen for butter.
Wow, I thought, yanking open the fridge, a cherry hallucination! I froze, staring at a bearded carrot, a cube of butter, a plastic liter of Rococo Coke and a stutter of roaches that had wormed in under the door.
The roaches didn't appreciate the light. Several rotated feelers. But none broke ranks. The fridge was too cold, despite crumbling insulation, for them to panic at such a stimulus. The insect at the head of the line lifted a leg at the grate of the middle shelf, whereon lay the carrot abandoned by Bugs Bunny about the time of Hiroshima.
I guess I didn't have any tv dinners afterall. In the back of my head a psychiatrist sniggered; neither was there any mammoth Miss Muffetbuddy out in the parlor.
I couldn't face that. Vision or not, she was real as anything else in America. Slammed the door. Sidled to the sink. Washed my hands. If she was from another planet, perhaps a victim of radiation, I didn't want to contaminate anything. Washed so good I scraped knuckles raw and broke two nails.
[read more - http://www.corpse.org/archives/issue_9/ficciones/smith_willie.htm]



"Why are you cunting?
- Is an email interview not good for you? Sorry, I'm just not good at the talking type interview, haven't done one in 20 years and I didn't like the experience or the result. So I'm not up for a phone-type interview. I think that's what you mean by podcast? Sorry I'm so ignorant about tech stuff. I'm not even sure what a podcast is... but I think it's done over the phone and then stored as an audio thing on a website? I'm really sorry for being so slow, man. But I am an old fuck and really not good at this new stuff. I prefer the old school written kind of an interview, although I'm not really much on interviews at all. I like to think mostly about the writing and the doing of it, which is hard enough for me. Talking I'm just not good at. It makes me nervous and I don't do a good job, so let's forget the talking approach; if the email approach doesn't interest you, that's fine, I'm OK with passing.
That was my first question.
Next question: did you read any contemporary novels in 2010 and, if so, what were they and what did you think of them?
- Gosh, I'm sorry. Let me take a deep glug of grog and wake up and not miss any more cues: In 2010 I worked fulltime five-days-a-week all 52 weeks that year as a financial worker in a Medicaid office in a big city in the Great Northwest I call Igdrasil. A financial worker is the guy who threatens to throw your grandmother out of the nursing home because she failed to send the fin wrkr a current bank statement the fin wrkr requested. It is the fw's job to track grandma's resources, to make sure she doesn't exceed the $2k limit. If she goes a penny over $2k in her bank accounts, cash values of her life insurance policies, stocks, trusts, etc. I promptly pitch her bony butt out on the pavement. I have 500 grandma's on my caseload. Actually a lot of them are grandpa's and some are just freeloading cocksuckers under the age of 65 who happen to be blind, disabled, crippled or otherwise living off the taxpayer. I sit at a computer in a cubicle with a headset staring into 6 different computer systems spread over two monitors. The phone rings constantly. Often it is you calling me up to threaten to kill me because I am threatening to pitch your grandmother's bony butt out onto the pavement. I explain to you that Amerika has consistently voted against socialized medicine. What you are thinking of, where snoops like me do not pry into grannies' financial doings, is socialized medicine. I hear-tell they have such a thing in savage countries like Japan, the European Union, Cuba, etc. But this here is Amerika and we aim to remain free and own all the guns we need and never pay any taxes at all. So what you get is your Uncle Willie: the Welfare boy. That's right, bub: Medicaid is just another name for Welfare. The last safety net in Amerika. And your grandma has fallen into it and there are some big fat holes in this here net. So you gonna get me that bank statement or do I push the series of 265 intricate keystrokes in my 6 computer programs that will deny Granny's benefits by 5PM today? You know it costs $6,698.15 to private pay one month for Gran in that nursing home where she is wallowing in her own piss while being raped nightly by excons masquerading as certified care providers? You sure you don't got a bank statement hanging around the house? By the way, how much is in Gran's purse right now -- that counts for resources too, ya know. And maybe if we kinda grab her ankles, turn her upsidedown and shake her good some pennies might fall out of her hospital gown pockets? They count, too. So when I come home at night I don't feel much like reading. Usually I just sit in the dark and swear quietly to myself. I think in all of 2010 I read about five books. Distinctly recall reading a translation by one Richard Holmes of Theophile Gautier's spooky short stories; Holmes rather blandly titles the anthology MY FANTOMS; the translation on the whole was rather mediocre, but it's hard to keep Gautier down; especially "The Opium Smoker" and "The Adolescent," both sexy chillers for the 1840s and they still can produce a tad of horripilation. The past four months Susan has been reading to me at night Trollope's THE WAY WE LIVE NOW, a surprisingly cogent and humorous social satire of the early 1870s London and environs. That's about as contemporary as I've gotten this year. I'm glad you asked that question.
You got me all wrong. My grandmother happens to leech off the communist State of Maine, which has this thing called MaineCare. My grandfather got a surgery in Massachussets using this MaineCare. It would have cost $650,000 out of pocket. During his life he only contributed a few million to the tax system, though very few of his contributions were on the employee side of the payroll tax. So clearly the bastard doesn't deserve any help! Good thing we're nice and soft up there in Maine, yeah?
Anyhoo, around the time that Trollope was writing, this idiot named Edward Bellamy wrote a book called Looking Backward: 2000-1887. Are you familiar with that? It's not incredibly good fiction, I wouldn't say, but it's interesting to read if only purely for the politics. Another good book I like from that period was definitely Moondyne.
I'm sorry to hear that you are a cog in the welfare machine. I myself will be collecting disability here in the near future. Don't ask me why, because I don't know. But I'm getting out of the army. I've started transcribing things. I'm good at it. Building a company around it. And going to school in the fall, hopefully.
Also, weren't you unemployed the last time I heard from you?
- Unemployed, yes. I was out of work for 14 months from September 2008 to October 26, 2009. For the last ten months of this otherwise unsalaried sabbatical Unemployment Compensation kept me in beans, rent and rags. Not such a bad scene at all. Everyday nothing to do but splat words on the page, lay around the house, look online for a job for maybe half an hour and go for long walks. One of heaven's sub-basements, but heaven nonetheless. Right when I was about to break the age-discrimination barrier and get hired on as a cog in the public library system, my old job took me back as a cog in the welfare system. Despite this meaning another descent into hell, it was a godsend. God often sends us to hell for our own good, you know. Godsend because I truly by then needed the bux. I had just turned my life savings insideout to pay off Susan's credit card debt of $37k and my Compensation had only another week to go. It was great to have those fat $1k checks arriving once again twice a month. Plus health insurance for only $94.00 monthly (plus copays, slowpays, blowpays, deductibles, refucktables, etc.) for both myself and Susan; Enzo the tomcat excluded. And after 15 months of consecutive feasting, I am, frankly, developing a real fondness for the taste of shit. The other day a supervisor in another unit asked me how long I'd been hired for this time. "Through Halloween," I responded, "but if it can be arranged I'd like to keep right on working till I'm 86." The soup reflected, frowned, said, "Sure, I think that can be arranged." Medicaid needs experienced workers these days. The whole system is collapsing like a house of phosphorus cards in sea water. Budget cuts make the legislature change the system at least once a month, in their usual shoot-yrslf-in-the-foot fashion of the latest bright idea on how to save money. I've been in and out of welfare offices since 1977, a perennial temporary hire, so I do have some idea of how things work; it takes a new hire, who has no knowledge of the system, at the very least one full year to be up to full production, that's how complicatedly complex welfare in general, and the Medicaid system in particular, is.
Thanks for filling me in on MaineCare, sounds significantly more merciful than Washington State Medicaid, although we have one of the more merciful setups in the country, less cold than MediCal (California's version of Medicaid) and certainly hotter than Texas Medicaid. Although by "you" I actually meant the third person singular general pronoun "one," which is so delightfully characteristic of British English. You with your French heritage probably speak better French than I do, and so are fully aware of the French version of this pronoun "on," which has such efficient usage in La Belle Langue. But I tend to rely on the vague American English "you" when I sometimes mean "one." Just another example of the ambiguity and lack of clarity in my prose. But I get a kick out of the obscure and the equivocal, so guess I'll just persist in this particular vagary.
No, I've never read Bellamy, though heard of the gent and his work, and I never even heard of MOONDYNE. I googled MOONDYNE briefly and looks like a great book. Thanks for the tip! I knew I'd learn something from this experience. Learning is where it's at. Even if you ("one") forget what you learned by suppertime. The very thrill of learning something interesting I didn't know before is what keeps me from dying of boredom on the spot.
What are your short and long-term goals as a writer? What was the last thing that pissed you off in a literary way? Non-literary? What do you think of Jonathan Franzen?
- Jonathan Franzen? My first reaction was: Who he? Then I googled the name and I see he wrote a book called THE CORRECTIONS, and I remember Susan read this book and told me something about it, I think she liked it OK, nothing special. Susan reads all the best sellers, brings home an armload of books from Costco once or twice a month. She also subscribes to the NEW YORKER and reads to me therefrom an article or two once or twice a year, whether she feels I need it or not. I guess this Franzen gent is on the rich and famous side. Bully for him! I'd like to be that way myself, except then I'd hafta endure the continual annoyance of potshots from punks like me.
My long-term goal as a writer is to die with a hot idea entering fresh into my mind. My short-term goal as a writer is pretty much the same.
Nothing much in literature pisses me off. I get a little bored sometimes. My entire lifetime teaching career amounts to one week. Out of the blue my phone rang one day in 1995. It was Naropa Institute. They wanted to fly me down to Boulder to teach fiction writing for one week as "guest faculty." I played right along with the game. It was a riot! My course consisted of dream writing. Assignment for each night was for each student to write down a real dream the student had actually experienced, could be from last night or from summer vacation age eight or whatever; then to write down a made-up dream. Next day the kids stand up one at a time and read first one, then the other, without disclosing which is the real dream. Then the rest of the class, myself included, vote on which is the real dream and which is the fake. It doesn't matter who wins and we don't keep track, but the voting, of course, is of vital importance. Everything is going fine and Uncle Willie and the kids are getting along great and everybody is doing his and/or her homework. For the last assignment I tell everybody instead just to write down a dream the writer would like to have. I have the kids the following day stand up and read his and/or her own personally desired dream. But one kid, we'll call him Jonathan, stands up without paper, hands empty as a cobweb on Beethoven's birthday. He starts talking. Jonathan has a way with words, good charisma, he's a born talker. He relates this dream he would like to have, pausing for the usual um's & uh's & backing up now & then to say something in a better or at least different way. It's a beautiful dream, good as any of the others, better than most. He sits down. I make him stand back up. "OK, Jonathan," I say in my best General Douglas MacArthur voice, "I'm going to pin a medal on you, because that was a grand dream, truly a wonderful imaginative creation. And then," I make the sign of the gun, bring the muzzle of my index finger to within an inch of his third eye, "I'm going to have you shot; because this is a writing class and writing is not talking and what you have done is talk. You, Jonathan, have not written a single word." But, of course, I spared the kid's life; after all, he was paying me for this; it hardly makes sense to hafta pay for your own executioner. I paroled him on his word of honor that he would go home that night and darken a page with words to capture the chat he had just given us. I guess I got a little bored that day, although not really; I had fun with it. If you ain't having fun, it's your own fault; always.
I get pissed off plenty in a non-literary way. And usually from the same phonomenon: people (this includes electronic people, machine people, people in print, people on the airwaves, etc.) who try to sell me shit. I get so fucking pissed off at phone solicitors let's not even talk about it. I don't watch TV and only listen to about an hour of radio a year, because I become apoplectic whenever a commercial erupts. Susan watches lots of TV, but she knows to turn the volume all the way down when I enter the room, and she moreover knows, if a commercial is on, to turn the entire set off immediately. Susan has no arms, no legs and only one eye, because exactly five times in our 31 year marriage she has left on the TV when a commercial was airing and I happened to saunter into the room. This is all arrant hypocrisy on my part, of course, because humans are the animals that sell. We all sell. I sell, you sell, he sells, she sells, but "it" does not sell. Unfortunately I must confess to being a human; argal I, too, sell. So I try not to take my anger seriously; it's all just hypocrisy. I also try to follow Yeshua of Nazareth (the most famous rabbi who ever lived) in his admonishment to "Love thine enemy." Such a beautiful and obviously sensible idea! But I hardly ever succeed in that endeavor either.
Franzen was last year billed as a Great American Novelist and featured on the cover of Time Magazine (only the fourth writer ever to do so) for his latest novel, Freedom. He was a friend of over-rated man-child David Foster Wallace. Etc.
I know your father was in the service, wasn't he? How does that make you feel right now? Have you gotten into real physical confrontations in the last ten years? Did you ever drink for more than two days straight? What is the most modern piece of technology, besides your computer, that you own and personally use?
- My dad wanted to be in the service. He was 26 when the Day of Infamy occured and tried to enlisted in the Navy, but was rejected because of his nearsightedness. Instead he became a career Federal Government Employee, ending up as a technical writer attached to the US Army Engineer Corps; mostly he worked on scripts for training films; how to build a bridge, how to blow up a bridge, etc. We lived on the base at Fort Belvoir once for about nine months, until the Corps decided civilians could no longer take advantage of such quarters (we shopped at the PX, as well as enjoying low rent, cockroaches and silverfish). My Uncle Mart was wounded at Anzio. My Uncle Gil was mustered out for TB before he was even shipped overseas. I was a peace queer during Viet Nam. Not really out of any deep political conviction; I don't have any such luxuries. I'm just a coward who cringes at the idea of hurting other people, even those I'm carefully instructed to hate; in fact, even people I DO hate, I still am terrified of hurting them; it's a kind of phobia: I just don't want to get my hands dirty. Come to think of it, I don't even really have the guts to hate anybody. I'm pretty much of a loser when it comes to being a man. I do enjoy pain, however. For pain in the late sixties I was a logger; a chokersetter for George Weyerhaeuser; I had a wonderful time and only wound up in the emergency room once when the mainline caught me in the shoulder and threw me thirty feet through the air like the piece of shit I am. I went back to work the next day. Setting chokers is very healthy for a young man; especially if you stay out of the bight of the mainline.
It's been maybe 30 years since my last physical confrontation, and that was because I was just standing around while a junkie was screaming at my fellow Welfare worker because said worker had denied said junkie said junkie's food stamps because said junkie was not cooperating with treatment. My friend stands six-foot-seven and I'm barely five-ten, so the junkie turned his frustration on me and shoved me to the pavement. I was surprised at how easily and professionally I fell. It was all those summers setting chokers: nothing like being a logger to teach you how to fall. The junkie ran off the moment he shoved me. I did nothing, of course, because I am a peace queer. Just got to my feet, dusted myself off and suggested to my buddy that we repair to the tavern for a couple pitchers and try to forget about Welfare. Before that... well... I remember throwing a brick at a friend when I was three... more like heaving a brick at him... and I remember the brick fell short and we both burst into tears and it was a thoroughly disgusting experience. I think that 's the last time I ever engaged in violence. Unless you call fucking the living shit out of three consenting women in one night violence. I have nothing against consensual sex. I think sex is very shiny and clean. It's violence makes me feel all dirty inside. Oh yeah, Susan and I were shot at in our own home back in the wild and woolly 90s; just a .38 or so, no big deal; I still keep the bullet hole in the ceiling of my study; I like to lie on my back sometimes and watch spiders crawl in and out of it. I didn't do anything about that either. Just call a cop, who showed up about an hour later and shrugged the whole thing off as just another unsolvable aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. At the time I was working as a medical records clerk in an African American mental health clinic. I told the gang about it the next day, but nobody was impressed. I just got looks like: "Hey white boy, welcome to the club!" That was a great job by the way. I was the token white boy and the gang really got to love me; they even bought copies of my novella; I tried to give the copies away, but they insisted on paying for them; and social worker in an African-American mental health clinic don't pay shit, bro; love to reminisce about those days... anyway, what was I babbling?
Did I ever drink for more than two days straight? Do you mean without sleeping? If you count days where I got my eight hours and my three squares, I drank for two days straight from about 1972 through 1996. I was a highly skilled beer drinker. In my prime I put away a gallon a day on the average; that means there were certain days when 18 cans of cheap brew were necessary to float my boat. But I never drank as much as a case a day. Alcoholics drink like that. I was not an alcoholic. Goddamnit, I LOVED drinking! I wasn't allergic to bourbon, brandy, vodka or gin, either; and would sometimes for a week or ten resort to a daily regimen of one to two quarts of cheap wine per diem. But I always ate plenty and ate well and always got in at least eight hours of sleep, plus an afternoon siesta. And I was careful to walk at least six miles a day. I very much enjoyed my booze. But one day when I was 46 or so I just decided I was too old for the shit. I've been a teetotaler ever since. It wasn't hard at all giving up. The first month was a little weird; but it was more like a free trip to outer space than a season in hell.
I don't completely own this computer. Susan bought it for herself. But when she got her laptop, she insisted on handing "Dottie" down to me. She was sick and tired of my lack of engagement with the internet, email, youtube, spacebook and various other fucksites. That was about seven years ago. I enjoy Dottie a lot. We have tons of fun together. I always wanted to live in a library, and now I do. The other piece of technology I own is... uh... well I do have a pair of binoculars my parents gave me about 35 years ago. As a kid I was an avid stargazer (still am!) and they wanted to be sure I could grok the Galilean satellites of Jupiter and the Andromeda Galaxy and the double cluster in Perseus and such whenever I needed to. I also own outright a gorgeous Smith-Corona portable -- one of the best manual typewriters on the planet. That's about it. Never owned a cell phone or a car or a TV... wait, I have some old-school cassette taperecorders gathering dust upstairs! That's right, bought those suckers with my hardearned library money back in the early seventies. I useta be a clerk in the Portland Public Library for a little over a year. Terrible job. Even though I love libraries. Working in a public library, for a bibliophile like me, is like being blindfolded while surrounded by a gaggle of gorgeous nekkid babes. I useta have loads of fun with those clunky old cassette recorders. I'd make tapes to friends and poets all over the country; walk around the neighborhood monologuing on the landscape, holding the condenser mike up close to fences when packs of maniacal watchdogs would exhibit fits of snarling and barking, sometimes catch the sound of a fender-bender, or some drunk screaming at his wife, etc. Yeh, I'm probably more into technology than I'm willing to admit. Never owned a watch, though. Damn things weigh down my wrist, ruin my typing.
How do you feel about the people of New York or New York itself? To me it's like totally over-rated and inflates itself like toxic commodity futures / mortgages. What was your first acquaintance with literary literature, ie, like Joyce Carol Oates etc?
- I blush to confess that I harbor a deep and abiding prejudice against NYC. Prejudice is never good. In the blind ignorance of my bigotry I consider NYC the bullshit capital of the universe. Except for a few hours once as a teenager screwing around on the subway, while on my way to somewhere else, I have never even been to NYC. What the hell would I know about the town? I need to get over this.
I think I read James Joyce in a previous life. The Joyce who wrote ULYSSES, that is. I first read ULYSSES carefully when I was 22, just out of college. I perused it at least another six times during the ensuing decade. I look on Joyce as being about half-a-dozen different authors. In my humble opinion: The Joyce who wrote DUBLINERS is a damn good writer, right in there with Stephen Crane, Hemingway and Raymond Carver; the Joyce who wrote EXILES should never have bothered to attempt a play; the Joyce who wrote POMES PENYEACH shows a lot of promise; the Joyce who wrote PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN is on to something really big; the Joyce who wrote FINNEGANS WAKE should see a shrink and stop annoying us with this nonsense; the Joyce who wrote ULYSSES is a god -- a fallible god, a sloppy god, a weird god, but an absolute fucking GOD. My taste in the works of Joyce probably tells you more about my limitations, interests and capabilities than anything else I might reveal in this or any other interview. But what do I know? I mean, really, what worse source on who someone truly is than the person him- and/or herself? Not that I'm not enjoying babbling; this is great fun! Thanks again for providing me with this opportunity. I love writing letters; I'm an epistolary freak; the letter is my soap box, my diary, my father confessor, my audience. Thanks for your patience in reading all this blather.
I was definitely referring to JOYCE CAROL OATES, author of Black Water? Pretty sure she's older than even you are. But anyways. In Oedipus Cadet, the narrator ends up "flying missions" (having sex, or at least masturbation) with his mother after (if I remember correctly) killing his father. Any reality there? Are there any plans to ever bring that novel to the digital age in some way?
- Holy Hannah - I just googled Joyce Carol Oates and I see she has eleven years on me; I had no idea people could even live that long. Whatever, yeah, sorry I got off topic with my answer to the last question; I majored in divagation and hold a masters in irrelevance. I read one of Joyce Carol's novels, but it was abridged. It was a book on tape (my eyes are failing me and about half of my "books" these days are books on tape) and only after I'd listened to it did I decipher the liner notes and realize the damn thing was an abridgement. I forget the title, but it was about a serial killer, told from the viewpoint of the perp. The killer stole off the corpse of one of his victims a pair of gloves lined with rabbit fur. Throughout the book he refers to this anonymous victim as "Bunny Gloves." I've always remembered that. I guess that's my abridged opinion of Joyce Carol: Bunny Gloves. I really should get out more.
There is a lot of reality in OEDIPUS CADET. All of the baseball players named in the book are real; even those with rather unlikely names, such as Enos Slaughter, Moose Skowron, Bullet Bob Turley, Clint "Scrap Iron" Courtney and Rabbit Maranville. However, my favorite line in the book, "Slaughter walks to load the bases," never happened; not in the 1958 World Series, at least.
I don't remember ever fucking my mother. I do recall exposing myself to her once, when I was about fourteen. As a child I was a chronic exhibitionist and masturbatory maniac (nothing much has really changed, I've just channeled my talents into less dangerous outlets). I was certainly one sick little "motherfucker." That's what's wrong with this country: we allow people like me to live on into adulthood. A little cyanide properly administered back there in 1962 or so and none of this embarrassment and inconvenience called my life would ever have occured. You could be interviewing a real writer instead of some twisted old douchebag with a handful of almosts to his credit. Well, I actually am fond of O. C. It does kind of work. Although what the Kirkus Reviews said about it is painfully accurate: "...lusts after bigger fish than it can catch." I think that's how it was worded; anyhow, that's probably true. But still and all, O.C. is the only novel I ever cranked out that is worth even a cursory read; I have maybe six other "novels" in manuscript. Oh yeah, I still have vague hopes for SUBMACHINEGUN CONSCIOUSNESS; but that's barely novella size, and I'm careful never to refer to it as a novel.
As a small child I feared my father would kill me. He was a functioning closet alcoholic who raged all night through the house naked screaming obscenities, slamming doors, kicking the dog and punching holes in the wall. I would lie awake in my bed perfectly still, eyes screwed shut, hardly breathing; I knew if I made the slightest noise he would storm in and pound me to a lifeless pulp. I learned a lot of things in those days, not the least useful of which is how to masturbate soundlessly. Then at about age 13 I stopped fearing for my life and instead grew afraid I was going to kill Dad. I left home at age 18 and never went back. As I boarded my Northwest Orient Airlines 727 from Dulles Airport in the Virginia countryside for Seatac Airport between Tacoma and Seattle, where I had never before in my life set foot, I breathed a deep sigh of relief: I had NOT killed the poor old drunken sonofabitch. Still, it took me another ten years to stop hating my progenitor. Bad scene hating your father, or either of your parents, for that matter; because in doing so you are also hating yourself, since Mom and Dad are both essential components of every human psyche. Today, seventeen years after his death, I realize I owe my dad TONS. He taught me how to do arithmetic in my head, he taught me my first words of French, he taught me how to throw a rock, he first read to me Edgar Allen Poe and he read aloud to me (over the course of about three months, when I was bedbound with rheumatic fever at the age of eight) A. E. Van Vogt's classic SLAN. But the greatest treasure Dad handed down to me was how to read poetry aloud. And I don't mean how he read to me at my bedside in the early evening. I mean how he screamed, howled and swore throughout the night, once he had a fifth of vodka under his belt. Ah, the passion he worked into those obscenities! SHIT! GODDAMNIT! SON... OF... A... BITCH!!!! That's how poetry should be read. I took those nightly lessons to heart. And I do LOVE to read my own stuff aloud. Thanks, Dad, you old dirty dying sonofabitch, you! I guess my father being a son of a bitch, that makes me a grandson of a bitch.
Actually, though, I think I am the grandson of a whore. My mother (she died last year at age 94) never knew who her mother was. Nobody now ever will. So 25% of my genetic makeup is utterly unknown. For reasons I don't have time to go into here, I strongly suspect Mom is the offspring of my maternal grandfather's union with a prostitute. So there you have it: OEDIPUS CADET, by Willie Smith, Grandson of a Whore.
I think Girls with Insurance might be happy to serialize one of these manuscripts you speak of. Feel free to send it along. Anyway, any closing words?
- Thanks again for providing me this opportunity to slap plastic. I had a bellyful of fun. I guess everybody's favorite topic is him- and/or herself, and I'm no exception. My only regret is that I misspelled POMES PENYEACH. Any chance that could be corrected? I so dislike in my own work typos and slips of orthography. The irony is that Joyce intentionally misspells both words in the title of his poetry collection, and I didn't have the balls, or the memory, to misspell them both. I will definitely consider your offer re GIRLS WITH INSURANCE. Unfortunately the only novel that today exists digitally, ZOMBIE INNA BASEMENT, is already up at THIEVES JARGON, where it received a deservedly cold reception. Nonetheless, it would be fun to have at least one of the others in digital form, even if I do chicken out at the last minute and decide it doesn't deserve to be seen on the web; like I say, these other "novels" are not capable of even one at-bat in the OEDIPUS CADET league; I really got lucky with O. C. Also, it's lots of typing for each novel, and time, energy and eye-strength are limited, at least till the State eliminates my job; so we're not talking near future, here; and I fully understand that by the time I manage to get one into digital form, the offer may no longer stand; like I say, I would not at all be the loser, as at least I would have one of these developmentally disabled novels in electronic form. Thanks again for your patience and all of your admirable energy and application.
Your humble and obedient servant, Willie." - Interview with P. H. Madore

Magdalena Tulli - Objects and buildings circulate randomly and mingle with one another, memory must constantly untangle them

Magdalena Tulli, Dreams and Stones, Trans. By Bill Johnston (Archipelago Books, 2004 )

"When Dreams and Stones (Sny i kamienie) first appeared in 1995, it was immediately hailed as one of the most brilliant contributions to the literature of Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of communism, winning the prestigious Koscielski Foundation Prize in Poland. The novel/prose poem's haunting lyricism truly breaks new literary ground, and comparisons have been made between her work and the stories of Bruno Schulz.
Tulli tells the story of the growth of a great city. Though never spelled out in the narrative, she is writing about Warsaw. The entire city was rebuilt after its complete destruction in World War Two; Tulli relates this history by entering the lives of the stones from which the buildings and monuments are constructed, as well as inhabiting the dreams of people and objects interwoven within the city's history. Tulli reveals the inner lives of edifices, mirrors, and newspaper photographs, while she explores the design of the city, its growth and its workings. Is it a living organism or is it a highly complex piece of machinery? Tulli dismantles the city piece by piece to reveal a very different metaphysical landscape lying, literally, beneath and around."

"Powerful imagery caught in a sinewy, architectural, elegiac prose. An inner-outer dance of cityscape with the taut emotion, terror & psyche of the 'human.' Where are we? What magical zone of dream and stone? We are inhabitants of the wild, brilliant imagination of Magdalena Tulli. This book is a great pleasure to read: deeply provocative, intuitive, haunting. 'I hunt among stones' was Charles Olson's probing line, a mission manifested here with full beauty & finesse." - Anne Waldman

"Dreams and Stones is a startling, beautiful, powerful achievement. It calls the conventional genres of literature into question as its central image and metaphor, 'the tree of the world,' grows, spreads and deepens. It does away with the persistent superstition of humanity's distinction from 'nature.' " - W. S. Merwin

"Dreams and Stones dexterously braids cords of memory, imagination, and elegiac intensity, as she give us the story of the founding and development of a major city and, by extension of all cities: a brilliant tale of “these interpenetrating spaces” that become “ever more confused, entangled, diffuse.” Tulli manages with apparent ease to parse the shifting urban amalgam she posits into complementary component parts that are rendered with great exactitude: “The city of yesterday and the city of today can seem like a pair of identical looking pictures from a puzzle in which on closer inspection one may find a flag missing from a rooftop, an additional flowerpot on a windowsill or one more sparrow upon a ledge.”
Like all cities, Tulli’ has a many coexisting, mutually coloring layers as mica. Zones of joy and sorrow overlap, rise out of each other. There are beautiful dreams evoked and, of course (not least, one supposes, because of the ravages of the 20th century) horrible ones. The generative and destructive nature of time is accordingly speculated upon: “Is it that which turns the cogs of clocks or that which the clocks crush in their cogs?” Part of great power of the writing derives from Tulli’s unusually limber, absolutely authoritative prose line. It never for a moment falters as her city of dreams and stones and steel, grows and contracts, turns inward, outward, rushes on." - Laird Hunt

"Dreams and Stones is a fantastical fiction, its subject a nameless city. It is mainly descriptive: there is no sequence of incidents of the sort that usually carry a novel forward. Other than the city itself there are no characters - just anonymous masses of inhabitants and workmen and the like, with no individuals standing out.
Dreams and Stones reads almost like a lyrical essay, but it drifts beyond that. It is fantastical, a work of the imagination that sees in the city much beyond the everyday and real: it's an interpretation that goes far beyond familiar urban realities.
The book is rich in fertile imagery, the city never static but rather in a state of constant, swelling metamorphosis. Growth and change are both organic and industrial, something Tulli conveys particularly well.
Many of her images and descriptions are striking, as is her ability to keep the reader from fixing on any single one. The world - this world, especially - is in constant flux, and the scenes can not be captured with photographic precision, blurring just at the moment when the scene seems to come into focus. Fans of naturalism will not be pleased, but it's an effective representation of urban (and historical) memory:
Objects and buildings circulate randomly and mingle with one another. Memory must constantly untangle them since permanent order is not possible there. The city can neither be described nor drawn; the reality of the city blocks is resistant to orthogonal projection.
The city is to some extent situated in contemporary European topography, connexions to Paris and St. Petersburg and elsewhere reflecting back and helping in defining it. Presumably, in fact, the city is Warsaw, but Tulli's cityscape is near-universal: particulars may differ, but what interests her about the living entities that cities are can be expressed more generally. Specifically, the constantly changing city - different from every perspective and every person's place within (and without) it - mirrors life and memory itself. It's one way of looking at the common conundrum:
In this city of changes, ruled by memory, there had to be room for everything that memory has retained, yet every day its contents are reduced to shreds a little more.
Tulli's wild vision sometimes goes too far, as when she describes dark stars in the sky, invisible because:
They were smashed to pieces by the helicopters of the municipal transit system which were roaming aimlessly beneath the vault of the sky without fuel, which they could not refill since there was nowhere to land: The landing pads on the rooftops had never been built and now they were overgrown with dense jungles of antennas.
But elsewhere she impresses greatly. There are many simple yet effective images:
With time the buildings took on the same shade of gray as the cloudy sky and in this manner disappeared.
And there are also more elaborate but similarly effective descriptions:
At dusk the city of dreams and the city extending in space become one and join in a murky whole crowned by the black silhouettes of office buildings against a reddish sky, giant edifices constructed not long ago yet already affected by corrosion and darkness. Nowhere is there any boundary marker, inscription or informational sign that would indicate the relative positions of dreams and waking life. Some take the ringing of alarm clocks in the morning as a signal indicating the crossing of the border. But alarm clocks which themselves belong to dreams cannot wake people from them.
Readers should be aware of what they are getting themselves into: Dreams and Stones is an almost plot-less novel of description. Romance, action, dramatic arc are absent. But for those who don't mind that, it's certainly worthwhile: Tulli does what she does very well, her meditation on memory and the cityscape an often fascinating, wildly-imagined, and well-conveyed one." - The Complete Review

"Architecture, dreams, life, lines and asphalt is where Magdalena Tulli takes the readers of Dreams and Stones. Along for the ride of a city, where the stones of reality will fall, but only the dreams survive. Life will always be imperfect, but dreams they can be what you make of them.
Magdalena Tulli could take the most hideously boring subject and write beautiful sentences. I adore her writing, it is deep, intense and ambiguous. She dares to go places that her readers may not be able to follow, yet she fear not as she takes them there. Dreams and Stones is a balance between the mystical dream world and the harsh reality of life. Life is too real, dreams are too far gone. I could drool over this book, there are certain key sentences which I will share, that might as well be screaming "I CAN'T BELIEVE NO ONE HAS WRITTEN ME YET!!!!", but she does, and does it with ease and a tenderness that willingly ushers the reader into a new place.
In saying all that, I can come clean and say that a lot of her writing was very deep for me, or just too hard for me to grasp. I love strange and weird and unsettling, however I am not fully able to comprehend what was hard for me about this book. Tulli's writing is incredible, yet many times I just had no idea where she had taken me and what she was writing about. I felt as though it were poetry in form of prose, which would make sense because so much of poetry is how it speaks to the individual, therefore making poetry on the hard-to-understand side sometimes. Throughout the book I was rocked out of my seat with her writing, others I was only holding on by a molecule. It could be that it was too philosophical for me, I am not sure.
The writing, it is heaven though, here are two quotes from the book:
Eventually the day came when the sofas were chopped up for firewood; a stray shell released the letters from their drawers. Paper turned to ashes, windowpanes shattered, door frames and tiled stoves were smashed to pieces. But this too failed to stop the pain. For pain does not belong to those who experience it but rather they belong to it.
But their brightness always arises from darkness and their beauty from horror. The tangle of dreams, untouched by pruning shears, fills the whole world; it can even be said that it is the world and that the inhabitants of the city - along with their houses, their beds, their blankets, their recollections and their unanswerable questions- are only necessary for the dreams to be dreamed.
Only for dreams to be dreamed? What about maintaining order in the world? What about polishing floors, making repairs? Surely the reason why people sleep at night is to gather strength for the labors of the day?
If you have read this book, leave a comment with the link to your review... I'd love to link to it!" - bethany (dreadlock girl)

"Magdalena Tulli’s book Dreams and Stones has been hailed as one of the most extraordinary books written after the fall of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe. It’s writing has been compared to that of her compatriot Bruno Schulz, and to that of Kafka, who himself had been a source of inspiration for Schulz. These kinds of comparisons are common when we encounter a new voice and feel the need to define it in some way, and since the only way we can pin it down is by encapsulating it into something we are familiar with, we always summon these familiar voices as a measure for the unknown. We think that because Tulli and Schulz share the same language and geographical space (Poland), one must have inspired the other; we think that because Kafka and Schulz were both Jews from Central Europe, they must have similar voices and world views. And we are not entirely wrong.
But for whoever takes the time to read these authors with an attention that goes beyond our comfortable assumptions, it becomes clear that they are also very different from each other. Kafka and Schulz were indeed almost contemporaries and the Jewish ethos streaming underneath their stories is recognizable as the same, but their style couldn’t be more different. While Kafka’s fight against idolatry, that is, the “lie” which any work of art is in its essence, is materialized in an austere style, Schulz’s style could be described as almost baroque. When we read Schulz, the influence of the surrealist writers who were his contemporaries is as undeniable as the presence of certain Kafkaesque themes: the authority of the father and the desire to overthrow it, the human metamorphosis into an insect, which in Schulz is taken to an extreme, for it is the father who is transformed into an insect. Shulz is a combination of surrealist aesthetics, Kafkaesque inner conflicts stripped of their religious anguish and Kafkaesque absurdness turned into grotesque humor. As for Kafka himself, one cannot recognize any influence in his writing; if there is any, it is not an influence; rather, it is distilled Judaism.
And what about Magdalena Tulli? As flattering as the comparison with these masters might be, I am not sure that it is entirely accurate. Like most comparisons, it too is based on something true: Tulli’s Dreams and Stones, a fictional prose poem or a poetic fiction, is reminiscent of Kafka’s parables in that the story seems to be telling much more than its surface lets appear; and it is reminiscent of Schulz in its unbound imagination and metaphoric associations. But its theme is remote from the concerns that the two Jewish writers had at the time when the lived and wrote. It is a theme that in today’s academic circles is described as nature versus culture or narrative versus technology, and which has been clothed in a jargon entirely absent from Tulli’s book - for, like any true creation, Dreams and Stones creates its own language as it re-creates the world. And because we often perceive things only in the shell we are accustomed to, we may fail to see what this book is about. Tulli’s countrymen say it is about a city, namely Warsaw, and they are probably right. But for those of us who do not know Warsaw, the book is no less vivid: the city it describes is not only Warsaw, but any city, a mythical city whose history replicates the history of civilization and the intricate relation between nature and artifact residing at the core of all societies. Knowing that Tulli has translate Calvino into Polish also reminds us that Calvino is the author of Invisible Cities, a collection of fable-like tales, whose narrator takes us through the labyrinth of the numerous cities he has passed through, all with names of women, all elusive and desirable as the women whose names they bear.
Dreams and Stones begins with the description of “the tree of the world,” which brings to mind the mythical image of the tree of life or of axis mundi. The tree, however, is not only he tree of life; it appears that it may also be the tree of death. The tree, which grows like all trees above the ground, has a “countertree,” which grows “into the depths of the earth,” dark and full of vermin. A rushed reading might conclude from here that we are dealing with the classical opposition between life and death, but Tulli’s story is much more complex than this. The opposition is between the visible and the invisible, between being and nonbeing, between that which is and that which could be, between the conscious and the unconscious, between the real and the imaginary. Moreover, each fruit of the tree contains in itself the possibility of the countertree. Which also means that the two sets of oppositions are rather sides of the same whole… From the image of the tree and its countertree, Tulli’s book slowly takes us to the universe of the city. Each fruit from the tree encloses a city. Each city and every single thing in it are “the embodiment of a singular possibility from the register of the possible.” For every thing that is, another thing has been “taken away.” In order for something to exist as a unique form, another possibility has been tossed away. Existence is built on the loss of its counterpart – imaginary existence. For example a river triggers in the imagination of the city’s inhabitants the desire to create another river, whose characteristics are opposite those of the first river. And so, the city “contains within itself all possibilities at once, and the entire plan of the world.” ...By the end of the story, the inhabitants realize that cleaning and repairing the city is not sufficient. Repairing only what can be touched does not take care of the invisible countercity, which influences the whole. The invisible is made of the flow of nouns, adjectives, verbs, and rules that link all ideas into a story. It may be, suggests Tulli, that the city and the world, i.e., the visible, exist only to make it possible for the inhabitants to dream their dreams." - Daniela Hurezanu

"Dreams and Stones is a postmodernist masterpiece of lyrical prose that defies generic definition and is rife with paradox and metaphor. Lacking characters and a clear narrative, it is non-linear and frequently non-rational. The world of Dreams and Stones is one in which nothing can be fully known, the past has left half-forgotten and distorted yet transformative traces on everything, and every word contains its opposite. Striving towards utopia inevitably flags and becomes weariness, sickness, and ultimately corruption and debauchery, as the enthusiasm of constructing a new order is transformed into sorrow. Continued disillusionment leads to cruelty and violence, which hasten the city’s demise. The disintegrating metropolis collapses, in the end, into an apocalyptic nightmare of miry swamps, torrid heat, ice, and floods.
Every city, for Tulli, is composed of dreams and stones. Dreams include thought, memory, and language, which are boundless, intangible, and invaluable. However, they are also impermanent. Thoughts and memories are like sunken coins in the cold black “groundwaters of oblivion”, which slowly wear them down, heedless of the principles of reason. The city of dreams is a city of death, but it alone has human value. The language of memory also dissolves as time passes, and Tulli gives this linguistic fragmentation imaginative physical form. The W and A—presumably of WARSAW—for instance, are broken letters of shattered words that have been dispersed far and wide in both time and space. They can be seen in the form of the roofs and steeples of the city destroyed by war; the spikes of rickety fences in the city of today; and the Arch of Triumph and Eiffel Tower in Paris. Just as language leaves its detritus on the cityscape, the city of yesterday is inseparable from the city of today. The many fractured layers of the city’s history overlap on its geography.
Countless memories were lost when the “city of furnishings” became the “city of excavations,” i.e., when “a vast bomb crater” appeared in the city’s heart and fires raged through it, destroying dreams, lives, and things. Yet many memories nonetheless survived into the ensuing period of optimistic reconstruction, when time seemed to be accelerated. People demonstrated faith, strength, and bravery as they dedicated themselves to labor to attain their beautiful dream of the future. Though faded and distorted, memories of this era and the subsequent failure of its ideal live on in the contemporary city of corruption, drugs, and American banks.
Whereas dreams, like nature, are ephemeral, yet living and unique, the stones of cities are permanent and tangible, but not alive. Though they possess neither language nor memory, they blindly and mutely observe the life of the city, as do the stone statues built in the early years of communism with their “protruding eyes without pupils”. Only the stones, which are outside time and language, will continue to exist, “a steadfast endurance free of any name”. Dreams and memories may disappear, but the city’s stones, for the most part, will remain. And even if they should fall or crumble to dust, they are always free of coercion and emotion, unlike the inhabitants of cities, who succumb to oppression and suffering.
Tulli’s vision of the world and the growth/construction of the ideal city are founded on two central metaphors: the city as a tree and the city as a machine. At first she criticizes the (Communist) builders for envisioning the city as a machine in which every part is replaceable. She then appropriates that metaphor, however, and describes the building of the utopian city as the construction of an intricate complex of machinery. The futuristic city’s mechanisms are so complicated that multiple breakdowns are inevitable, replacement parts cannot be found, no one is able to repair the damage, and eventually the city-machine begins to fall apart. It is the desire for utopia itself—the constant effort to dispel disorder from the world—that paradoxically creates more chaos, or what Tulli terms the influx of the “countercity.” Even the artificial stars n the sky go black, and sooty dust descends upon the dark metropolis. Not only the city, but the entire universe is nothing but junk.
For Tulli, however, those who compare the city to a tree are not only enemies, but also brothers of those who see it as a machine, for the manmade and the organic are always interconnected. As the world dies, each individual is alienated within a distinct city showering her not only with crumbling plaster, but also with dead leaves. The nature motif returns here, near the end of the book, echoing the first paragraph, which describes the tree of the world. Here too the natural and the inorganic mingle: when the tree of the world loses its leaves, they turn brown like “pieces of paper turned to ash or rusted-though tin cans”. The metaphors of “tree” and “machine” are inseparable; they are the obverse and reverse of a single coin, like good and evil, life and death, Tulli asserts.
Dreams and Stones is a difficult book, but it merits and rewards close readings and re-readings. Anyone interested in contemporary central European literature, or in post-Communism or postmodernism in general, will be deeply impressed by this brilliant elegiac work. But is it too complex for undergraduates? I taught it and found that about half my students didn’t like it because it was too difficult, while the remainder enjoyed it very much (though there was a lot that they didn’t understand). Some contextual background, close reading, analysis, and discussion helped them to appreciate the text, and at the end of the semester two students said it was their favorite reading of the course. I would, therefore, recommend it for undergraduates as well as advanced students, provided that the need for essential historical background and substantial guidance in interpretation is recognized." - Kirsten Lodge

Magdalena Tulli, Moving Parts, Trans.by Bill Johnston (Archipelago Books, 2005)
"The second of Tulli’s works published by Archipelago, Moving Parts is an invigorating puzzle of grammar and narrative that takes the reader on a fantastic journey through the last hundred years of European history without ever leaving the confines of a hotel. This curious building contains an impossible number of floors, trapdoors, and tunnels that seem to be the architecture of the story itself as well as the whole world. We follow here a nameless narrator who “would prefer not to tell about anything at all,” and who is not the book’s narrator but has been paid to narrate a certain plot, a banal tale involving a love triangle and an argument in a garden. This narrator gets bored, sidetracked, and ultimately lost as he struggles to maintain his hold on a story in which characters mutate or complain about their story line, other narrators of other stories get in the way, and a trapdoor in the hotel’s basement leads to the house in which the story he is supposed to tell is unfolding—which leads to a subterranean train, which leads to a bar, which leads to a tunnel, which leads to an apartment building during World War II, which leads to an elevator, which leads to something pretty close to hell on earth. Because he is not a reader or character, our narrator can move behind the scenes of the hotel—which stand in for the constructed realities of narrative and history—with a set of keys that open doors to other places and times; but he is finally as powerless as anyone to understand or affect the nightmare of the world he confronts. In its surprising movements through history, space, and language, Moving Parts is an incisive social commentary that suggests how crucial it is we pay attention to dominant structures of narrative in literature and life."

"In Moving Parts a feckless, comical narrator struggles against all odds to tell a story for which he is responsible, but which he neither controls nor understands. His characters multiply, repeat, and go astray; his employer is paying no attention, asleep in a drunken stupor. The increasingly desperate narrator clambers over rooftops and through underground passages, watching helplessly as his characters reappear in different times and settings and start rival stories against his will.
This thought-provoking, wryly humorous work tells of the sadness of the world and of the inadequate means that language and storytelling offer us for describing and understanding it. Yet it does so in Tulli's characteristically clear, concrete, gorgeous prose, and, as with Dreams and Stones, the book is a delight to read. Moving Parts was shortlisted for the 2004 Nike Prize, Poland's most prestigious literary award."

"This is a ghosted book: event and object haunt the pages as grammar pulls and rejects pieces if the plot like a confused magnet hovering over the mother lode. Language glides toward the inhospitable future as it stumbles over the cluttered past, but grammar’s structures cannot hold back the forces of personal loss, war, and whatever it is that is known as ‘the human condition.’ The moving parts of time/verb/image/story/character shift below our feet, endlessly rearrangeable in a terrifyingly prolific machine. As Tulli demonstrates with a quick swish of the knives, ‘story’ can keep peeling off from itself and regenerating, like a snake with ever renewable skin." - Eleni Sikelianos

"Masquerading as a novel, [it] is actually a brain-teasing meditation on the conventions of fiction and the strategies of grammar. In an unspecified, presumably Eastern European city, in an unspecified contemporaneous time, a handful of vaguely menacing, deliberately generic characters - a businessman, a red-haired woman, a "grinning hipster in a studded leather jacket" - behave like gnomic ciphers. Spinning the tale, such as it is, is a completely baffled narrator, straight out of a kind of Kafka-meets-Beckett spoof. A nose gets punched, a love affair probably occurs, cabs depart-as will any reader hoping for any kind of conventional story. Here, plot, character development, emotional catharsis and dialogue are sacrificed to Tulli's arcane musings about how her narrator can't rein in the words that threaten to erupt and seize control of the narrative: "All he can do, and that only to a certain degree, is to govern grammatical forms, especially as concerns the verbs, which are constantly striving to escape into open space." In the 1980s, when poststructuralism was the rage, this sort of metafiction at least was startling. Now, it's merely perplexing. After a while, however, once the thorny commentary about subordinate clauses is hurdled, Tulli's snapshot vignettes - of trains covered with "bright zigzags of graffiti," of "a fur that gives off the oppressive smell of mothballs," of a hobo who "rakes cigarettes out of his hair" - can be read as lapidary, Cubist poetry or a word collage that's amorphously if resonantly evocative. Evocative of exactly what, however, is the question. Erudite fans of postmodernist language gamesmay find this thrilling, but it's a decidedly acquired taste." - Kirkus Reviews

"One of the most gifted of contemporary European writers, Magdalena Tulli creates an intricate and, ultimately, inhospitable fictional world in her unsettling and fine novel Moving Parts. Tulli has been hailed as the “new Bruno Schulz,” but her literary heritage extends back to Franz Kafka, and her prose evokes the illusive and deceptive “reality” encountered in Nikolai Gogol’s later prose. Her nearest “relatives” among current authors include Cuban-born Italian writer Italo Calvino and American novelist Don de Lillo, the latter sharing Tulli’s strong sense of unease and impending disaster.
Tulli’s most distinctive contribution to modern letters may well be her hapless narrator, who loses all control over “his” text in the course of Moving Parts. Gogol’s narrator maintains ironic dominance over text and reader, while Schulz features a first-person narrator whose perceptions shape the readers’ reactions. But Tulli’s narrator can only observe helplessly as his world flies apart, a casualty of fictional centrifugal force with a “center that does not hold.” That her narrator is male, not female like the author herself, injects yet another disquieting note. The uncertain fictional world she creates in Moving Parts brings to mind the world of Eastern and Central Europe, or societies undergoing far-reaching changes. Tulli leaves the reader in a void, completely unlike the solid ground we encounter in the realist novel of the nineteenth century. Characters appear fleetingly and uncertainly, their fates unclear. They float in a nebulous space beyond the narrator’s control, perhaps even out of the reach of the author herself.
To underscore the insecurity of her fictional universe, Tulli typically depicts characters on the run. We encounter them in hotels—away from home—underscoring their vulnerability. When they are at home, their relationships unravel as the readers, uncomfortable witnesses to familial collapse, observe helplessly. Not even the narrator, the traditional locus of authority in fictional works, retains any sense of constancy or security.
Tulli combines homelessness with a universe gone awry in her images of displaced furniture that echo uprooted characters: “sofas, armchairs, and tables of that other world, deprived of solid ground, fall chaotically . . . into oblivion”. (Falling furniture foreshadows to a falling woman our “heroine”, who plunges into the void and dies “instantly”.) “The tale,” the narrator adds, “is like a hotel; characters appear and disappear”. A few pages later, furniture is piled up in a soggy heap out in the corner of the garden, where it will wait, forgotten, until clement weather. Tulli reminds us of the spatial and temporal fragility that lurks behind superficial solidity, and furniture, an everyday component of our lives vividly underscores this vulnerability. Our universe, she stresses, is built on sand, whirling through the blackness of the void.
How better to increase our sense of fear and helplessness than with a senseless crime? As in Dostoevsky’s later works, violence emphasizes the tenuousness of life. However, while in Dostoevsky murder is linked with larger religious issues, no such central theme emerges in Tulli. Thus we read that workmen are shot dead with an automatic pistol, a weapon divorced from a human perpetrator. The narrator—whose discomfort and powerlessness increase exponentially throughout—is “forced” to tell us about this pointless, bloody crime. He doesn’t act of his own free will, but the reader never finds out who has compelled him to recount this exceptionally unpleasant episode. Nor do we know why he recounts any of the incidents that he attempts to describe. His efforts are made increasingly difficult by his unruly and independent characters. But the characters themselves do not gain in strength, and the centrifugal forces that the author set in motion from the beginning pull characters and events out into empty space. At the end, the story has “slipped out of [the narrator’s] hands”.
By describing the narrator from the outside, Tulli effectively takes over his role and transforms him into yet another character. Midway through the novel, he has lost the privileged position we traditionally associate with a narrator. He is a most unwilling narrator, one who is “determined to do his job at the lowest possible cost” and who “sighs and sets to”. He gets his feet wet when attempting to keep pace with the novel. Unlike Herling’s narrator, always in control, Tulli’s is helpless and reluctant. We see him “calmly open[ing] and clos[ing] a double door and put[ting] a bunch of keys on a round side table”. As Chekhov’s readers recall from his play The Three Sisters, possession of keys denotes control, but Tulli’s narrator surrenders control when he deposits them on the furniture. Like peripatetic characters in the hotel and displaced furniture that hovers in space or gets shoved into a corner, forfeited keys underscore transience, loss of control.
Tulli elegantly distills the unease of a universe that has spun out of balance. She enlists details from everyday life, details that resonate with her readers’ own unpleasant experiences. We see a married woman (encountered earlier, in a relationship with her lover) sitting uncomfortably in a dentist chair. Dental problems compound personal problems, and we never know whether anesthetic was administered. But we know “it’s going to hurt” if she wasn’t medicated. Tulli forces us to imagine an unpleasant scenario, including the whirring drill. She expands fictional anxiety to include her readers, in effect forcing us into this unsettling world.
Finally, the void prevails, and we are deposited in a silent world, the aural equivalent of visual emptiness. In her masterful novel, Tulli strikingly and subtly captures the essence of a world in transition between tradition and modernity. This elusiveness, an apt symbol of contemporary uncertainty, may also be an echo of Poland’s complex history." - Janet Tucker

"Moving Parts is an invigorating puzzle of grammar and narrative that takes the reader on a fantastic journey through the last hundred years of European history without ever leaving the confines of a hotel. This curious building contains an impossible number of floors, trapdoors, and tunnels that seem to be the architecture of the story itself as well as the whole world. We follow here a nameless narrator who “would prefer not to tell about anything at all,” and who is not the book’s narrator but has been paid to narrate a certain plot, a banal tale involving a love triangle and an argument in a garden. This narrator gets bored, sidetracked, and ultimately lost as he struggles to maintain his hold on a story in which characters mutate or complain about their story line, other narrators of other stories get in the way, and a trapdoor in the hotel’s basement leads to a tunnel, which leads to an apartment building during World War II, which leads to an elevator, which leads to something pretty close to hell on earth. Because he is not a reader or character, our narrator can move behind the scenes of the hotel—which stand in for the constructed realities of narrative and history—with a set of keys that open doors to other places and times; but he is finally as powerless as anyone to understand or affect the nightmare of the world he confronts. In its surprising movements through history, space, and language, Moving Parts is an incisive social commentary that suggests how crucial it is we pay attention to dominant structures of narrative in literature and life." - Danielle Dutton

"Like all great works of art, Tulli’s books create something new, something that doesn’t respond to what the reader has been conditioned to expect. To begin with, they don’t tell a story in a straightforward way; rather, they tell the story of creation itself, of what it means to create, and this is particularly true of Moving Parts, a novel reminiscent of Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author or of the French nouveau roman.
Moving Parts mixes reflections on creation with the narrative fabric itself, and this gives it a mythical dimension, though it is hard to summarize. The historical time moves back and forth between German-occupied Poland during World War II, the Cold War, the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and the present. The space also is disconcertingly unidentifiable—the setting is Poland, but the characters’ names are not necessarily Polish: there’s an African-American trumpeter named John Maybe; the tight-rope walker Mozhe and his partner Yvonne Touseulement (who is also John Maybe’s lover); a Captain in the third Reich, Feuchtmeier, and his wife; and a Jewish publisher called Fojchtmajer.
Each time the story approaches some kind of resolution, Tulli makes sure we don’t settle comfortably in it, letting us know that it could branch off in many directions. The numerous possible stories that could develop are compared to the floors of a hotel where an elevator might stop: the names of the characters appear in the computerized list of guests, and the moving parts of the elevator are compared to the mechanisms of grammar governing the story. The focus shifts constantly from a vertical dimension—the stories that develop out of the elevator’s movement—to a horizontal dimension—the stories developing in a train that moves from one station to another.
This multi-dimensional storyline is unified by the presence of the narrator, who becomes a character in his own tale. When Fojchtmajer is forced by the Nazis to leave his house, the narrator moves in—the narrator who, like all characters, has a body, a wallet, and biological needs. The story ends with his grotesque humiliation in front of a big audience: he flips over, loses his glasses, injures his nose, his pants fall down, his butt is kicked, and a crumpled ball of paper hurled from the crowd hits him. Thus Tulli’s carefully constructed world succumbs to the inescapable chaos that precedes and follows all creation." - Daniela Hurezanu

"Moving Parts is an incredible, truly insightful novel in which the narrator looses control of his story. What? Yes! He becomes a character and cannot get out of the view of the reader. This is not a book to breeze though, it is jam packed full of brilliant quotes and stunning writing. The concept of this novel, and the storyline are completely unlike anything that I have read before. The depth in language use and parts of speech was over my head many times, but a lover of grammar would fall in love with the way words such as "predicate" and "parts of speech" are woven into regular everyday language, which the author does with ease.
While reading the word choice and use of certain phrases I could not help but to feel that I was missing out, that it was incredibly vast and I was only drinking from the surface. If you are a person who loves to think, who loves incredible well-thought deep quotes and an intense knowledge of language captivates you, this is your book. Read it and you will love it. It will speak to you and drive you to a deeper understanding about the other books that you love to read. It will guide you through the feelings characters suffer in being written about, and those that narrators must endure in order to tell their story (even if they don't want to), it will help you know more about the concept of a novel, in which all is created...but by whom? Who is in charge of these books that we read, who leads the reader? How would it be if things were not the way they should be in a novel, if the characters did not follow what the narrator asked of them, if past and future were slowly blurred and confusion was the key theme of the story? Read Moving Parts by Magdalena Tulli and you will surely be submersed in this fictional chaos of writing and will be taken to a deeper understanding of our current idea: a fictional novel, in which nothing really exists, except in our minds, our desires and on the paper.

Quotes from Moving Parts:

"All he can do, and that only to a certain degree, is to govern grammatical forms, an essential element, especially as open space, of their own accord taking on the forms of the future tense, without any obligations."
"The parts, always the same ones, wait like traps into which new characters will continue to fall, irrespective of their own wishes, promises, and misgivings."
"They even tried to joke about this process, but their jokes were not entirely successful; they were not funny enough for them to convince themselves that they were sagely beyond the reach of grammar. And so in the end, exhausted by the anticipation of leaving and by visions of an uncertain future, they changed the subject, returning to a certain betrayal, because betrayal was at least something they were capable of understanding."
" Hardly anything is possible any longer. And no truth will appear until the secure forms of the past tense impose order." - bethany (dreadlock girl)

Magdalena Tulli, Flaw, Trans. by Bill Johnston (Archipelago Books, 2007)

"Another arcane exercise from the Polish author of Moving Parts (2005). A tailor plies his needle. A maid bustles around her employers' kitchen. A radical student wakes up with a hangover. A lawyer and a newsboy both find their fortunes ruined. And a far-off catastrophe sets off a wave of discord as refugees pore into the tiny square of an unnamed town. But we should not suppose that this is a real town square, one connected to the real world. No, the far-from-omniscient narrator informs us, this is nothing but a flimsy set, a shabby facade constructed by a shiftless, unreliable crew-workers who submit multiple invoices for the same job and sell stolen materials to other stories. This idea that the author is not a creator-god but a hapless architect relying on dishonest contractors is funny at first, and it seems like it might even be interesting. But the more Tulli belabors the conceit, the less amusing and interesting it becomes. It's hard not to wonder if this sort of novel-one that isn't so much a novel as it is a critical dissection of the novel-has not also reached a similar point of diminishing returns. Aficionados of European metafiction may find this book exciting-or they may not-but it's hard to imagine it finding a receptive audience outside that rarefied circle. Not for the average reader-or even, maybe, for the above-average reader." - Kirkus Reviews

"Recently, I was chatting with a friend over IM about the virtues of Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of the 19th-century novel The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. After listening to me gush about how the film's slow, deliberate pacing mimicked the languorous sentences of the Victorian novels from that era, my friend admitted that he probably wouldn't like the picture. He sheepishly confessed that the on-demand quick fixes that define a large portion of the entertainment of our era had warped his ability to appreciate fare that was less forthright in its approach. Not being wholly immune to this phenomenon, I hastened to express my sympathies to my friend regarding his predicament.
I have recounted this anecdote as means to introduce the work of the brilliant Polish novelist Magdalena Tulli - whose books might be herded into the category of novels of ideas - to ensure that I don't make the same mistake twice: i.e., damning with praise. Thus, let me say up front that Tulli's work, while brimming with serious reflections, is far from dry and almost always immediately rewarding from the outset.
To grasp the context from which Tulli's oeuvre emerges one should be mindful that throughout the last century, the constricting belts of occupation and repression that wrapped around the lives of countless Poles shaped a culture of opposition. In this climate, underground lectures and publications proliferated. Little marvel, then, that the international, multidisciplinary aesthetic movement that has come to be identified as "modernism" was ported to Poland. For just as modernist artists labored against inherited regimentation of expression, likewise did many citizens in their everyday lives. Perhaps this is why an ethical, not just an aesthetic, mandate seems to inform the compositional innovations that were practiced by some of the most dashing exemplars of 20th-century Polish literature.
One finds evidence of this tradition in the fictional creations of Tulli, who has published four novels, three of which have been translated into English. As might be presumed of a writer who is acquainted with the modernist toolset (she has translated Proust into Polish), much of Tulli's writing flaunts its artificiality. Time and again in Flaw, as in her previous novel, Moving Parts (2005), a high-toned mockery is made of any pretense toward explaining the reasons behind every event. Fortunately, these narrative feints aren't superfluous. They're used as a podium from which to disperse philosophical comments in clear, direct language.
Tulli uses a behind-the-scenes approach to begin Flaw. An unnamed narrator commissions a tailor and an assortment of tradesmen to construct costumes for the novel's characters and sets for their actions. From a cursory viewpoint, considering the extent to which movies, alone, have made plentiful use of this meta-narrative device (one thinks, for example, of the opening scene of Godard's Contempt or Truffaut's Day for Night), such staginess does appear retrograde. In practice, however, Tulli immediately overcomes the familiar nature of this plot mechanic by milking it for a thoughtful effect.
As in Moving Parts, the unnamed narrator of Flaw is depicted as a sympathetic bungler who is incapable of conducting the story in an orderly fashion. This image of a beleaguered impresario allows Tulli to pack a judicious amount of buoyancy into her tale of displaced morality. It also emphasizes the writer's marginal status as a responder to - as opposed to an instigator of - events. For instance, on account of the narrator's monetary doldrums, the tailor becomes disgruntled with his work:
The more perfect the item that sprang from his needle in the first burst of inspired diligence, before the cash was used up to pay the rent, the greater the subsequent shame when things begin to descend into the mass production of poorly made garments. But shame decays; nothing turns to dust faster. It is wiped off with a clothes brush. Discarding his ambitions, the tailor will from now on cut the cloth sparingly and unimaginatively… Jackets will restrict freedom of movement by creaking at the seams.
Tulli coasts from an ominous allegory about thwarted potential and diminished freedom, toward a reckoning of how something, i.e., "shame," operates. It's her facility with saying what something is, rather than how it feels, that identifies her as an intellectual artist.
This attention to space is a theme revisited throughout Tulli's books - her 2004 novel Dreams and Stones ranks among the most accomplished meditations on urban planning in fiction. In Moving Parts, the narrator tracks the characters through a vertiginously interlocking spatial tissue comprised of a hotel, subway station, bar, house, and circus. Tulli's liquefaction of boundaries allows her to dream up some genuinely trippy moments - during one part, the narrator, traveling into the bowels of the hotel, encounters a makeshift medical facility for war victims, which must be cleared away to make room for a "German gunboat [that] slowly drops onto the floor." This incorporation of the surreal frees the narrator to experience and comment ironically on everything from the Soviet invasion of Poland to the redenomination of Polish currency in the 1990s.
In Flaw, by contrast, spatial parameters are more fixed. Even so, Tulli unmoors her story from specifics. Action takes place either on or behind a set built to "look like some quiet neighborhood of a large city." Beneath this universal canopy, a notary awakes one morning. Before ducking into his office - which the narrator's contractors have neglected to erect - the notary drops by a cafe inhabited by a hungover student. At length, the notary receives a phone call from his broker, who informs him that a stock market crash is underway.
News of the disaster spreads quickly, goods are swept off the shelves of stores and a black market comes into being. (Adding to this all-encompassing instability is the fact that the "contractors" helped to engineer the crash.)
Refugees emerge, fresh from who-knows-where. "Up till now they had lived where they belonged, uninitiated into the mysteries of the freight railroad, uninformed about…the economies made in the construction of walls, far away from the notary and his safe." Deposited by streetcar into the center of the neighborhood, their presence provokes predictable fear in the local residents.
As if all this weren't enough, an announcement is made on the radio that the government has been ousted in a coup. This brightens the student's day noticeably. Eager to avail himself of the shifting social climate, he stuffs his pants into his boots and buckles his belt around the outside of his jacket. In congruence with the novel's leitmotif that clothes can shape one's circumstances, this stab at military dress up works well enough that soon the student enjoys newfound respect as the organizer of a militia, which keeps an increasingly tight rein over the refuges.
With so much compacted allegory - what with the shady covert machinations, preyed-upon refugees, and hint of a totalitarian dawn - it's impressive that Flaw doesn't flounder, as the story's narrator does, in its attempt to express the dark opportunism that soiled much of 20th-century European history. But excluding a couple of sections where Tulli indulges in a truism here ("The pity of the majority is reluctant to make sacrifices: custom dictates that its noble impulses are paid for by those it overlooks") or an overblown description there ("Not a hair on anyone's head had been harmed and no one had suffered any wrong, aside from a few bruises and a certain amount of spilled blood"), Flaw is agile at exploring the ever fertile soil from which dehumanization can spring." - Christopher Byrd