Brooks Sterritt - an employee of a “document storage and shredding facility” stumbles across “something that no one could turn away from,” namely a man with a pixelated face, an effect called “fogging” or “tiling” in television or film. This imposition of a “screen” image onto real life starts the protagonist’s byzantine journey to seek out this man, and later to seek out a mythical underground filmmaker who specializes in surveillance footage

Brooks Sterritt, The History of America in My Lifetime, Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2021

A shredding facility employee encounters a mysterious film and becomes obsessed with finding its director.

 "What follows is an account of events experienced by the above man. As a film subject, he was one of the best I've ever seen, despite a complete lack of dramatic ability. The sources I've used for the creation of this report are, in the main, video footage-both consensual interviews with the subject and footage generated without his knowledge. At the time of this writing, he is employed at a facility called Shred Authority Neighborhood Storage. In terms of familial relationships, he has two sisters (no contact), a mother (no contact), and a father (yearly contact). His sexual interests are best described as disappointingly vanilla with longtime urges for mild deviancy. Hobbies include cycling, occasional woodworking, and researching arcane topics on the Internet and internalizing them. He lacks a formal education, yet is adept at finding information, albeit in an unsystematic way. I chose this subject not because of the events he experienced-though they are thrilling and profound-but because he stumbled across something that no one could turn away from. Though a select few of you may be familiar with my film work, I've recently retired to pursue other forms, hence the at times novelistic appearance of the following narrative"--

Brooks Sterritt writes like a demented John McPhee. - Luis Alberto Urrea

If Nicholson Baker wrote The Crying of Lot 49 it might read something like The History of America in My Lifetime. Mind-bending, suspenseful, and extremely funny—I found this novel the perfect balance of intellectual challenge and pure pleasure. - Jac Jemc

The History of America in My Lifetime slips into the neural network of your brain and declines extraction—an amazing and unforgettable novel. - Michael Kimball

The History of America in My Lifetime is the first book by Brooks Sterritt, an assistant professor of English at the University of Houston-Victoria. A satire of our data-driven societies, of modern surveillance systems, and of the irrationality of the Western world, it is a novel about capitalist America and our struggle to understand it. It is a book, as Brooks Sterritt said on Twitter, “about the movies.” Movies, yes, but snuff movies in particular: while never getting too graphic, The History of America in My Lifetime is not a book for the faint-hearted.

A summary of it would go as follows: in an undefined year (around 2021), an unnamed shredding facility employee is about to board a plane to return home from a Supranational Association of Information Destruction (SAID)’s conference when he sees a man whose face “could only be called pixelated.” Our protagonist shows us that he wants to not believe in what he sees: after all, he is mentally sane, isn’t he? He knows what is real and what isn’t. The next day, he makes plans to “catch a matinee” with his friend Liam, with no intention of talking about the airport encounter. The two of them see a movie by director named Lucian Bevacqua. The movie, mainly a series of long-takes, features the same man with the same pixelated face. Here starts the narrator’s quest to find the truth. The book then proceeds to drag the reader into the mind of this unreliable narrator, while he discovers (or makes up?) a scheme around a mysterious movie director, a mysterious company, and a mysterious man. All the elements fit together, if you let the book take you where it wants to go: page by page, we see the narrator destroying his carefully curated life, while he goes on chasing a series of clues and symbols that do not exist. Or do they? By giving us glimpses into his protagonist’s thoughts, Sterritt manages to create a connection between him and us, intricately muddling true and false, fake and real. “It seemed unlikely, though not impossible, that Blanche met Liam through random channels, or had known him for some time. It seemed impossible.”

Filming and being filmed, CCTV, back and front webcams on computers, the lack of security and anonymity in the online world, and the knowledge that any online interaction leaves a trace are starting points for the narrator’s paranoia. It is no coincidence that Sterritt’s character works in a shredding facility: there is no shredding of documents in our online-driven world. “Looking at the image, I had the sensation of being watched, but also of watching myself; typing, searching, chasing leads in pursuit of — what?” he says. As readers, we also know that the main protagonist’s thinking is deeply rooted in a sense of unease that comes from the fact that he knows he lives in a micro-chipped, surveillance-systems filled, impersonal world. By following this particular narrator, the author teaches us about the history of America in our lifetime: Sterritt has written a critique of contemporary America.

Sterritt also plays with narration to capture the doubleness and doubt that such a world engenders. The narrator’s paranoia, and another unexplained mental disorder that becomes apparent as you read, give license to a narrative technique that produces two different modes of reading the novel: two different viewpoints. Every narrative detail could be a clue about an hidden conspiracy, laden with meaning. Or not. As the narrator performs this uncertainty towards the end of the book: “The individual I was meeting went by the username cuLtLeader, something I could have attributed meaning to but somehow didn’t.” One of my favorite aspects of the book was that readers have to use their own imaginations to resolve these uncertainties.

The narrator describes his life as a series of loops, an image the author uses several times in the book. At the end of the book, having set his car on autopilot, he drives it (or it drives him) in a series of rotations, each rotation getting him closer to the truth, with no idea when he will reach it, if he will reach it, and most importantly: if he wants to. A quest for the truth that encounters no satisfying ending, The History of America in My Lifetime’s last few lines encapsulates the satire of the entire novel: technology brings us both closer and further away from the answers we do not want, and the questions we cannot ask. The story ends where we would have expected it to begin again.

Because I felt like I had just read a contemporary version of The Crying of Lot 49, upon finishing I picked up my copy of Thomas Pynchon’s book, and re-read it. I then read Sterritt’s book a second time. The feeling remained: the unreliable narrator, the schematization of our political and historical issues, the use of irony, are all tied in together. Sterritt, by using the postmodernist conventions used by Pynchon in 1966, is echoing the author more than 50 years later. The paranoid characters live in a paranoid society, sick with new moral conventions denounced by the author as absurd. As with every postmodernist novel, unconventional methods of reading are also required, insofar as the narrative discloses the main problematics of the decade without talking directly of them. Like in Pynchon’s novel, Sterritt’s work requires effort, the unreliability of the narrator’s voice demanding constant attention. There is a discrepancy between what happens and what is relayed to the reader, between the story and the discourse. Both Oedipa and Sterritt’s narrator’s inconsistencies can be analysed side by side, with the main difference that Sterritt’s plot is easier to follow, but not less suffused with ideas and critiques. The narrative’s inconsistencies are the precise elements that allow the readers to use their imagination. But if Pynchon’s Oedipa is detached from the events happening to her and around her, Sterritt’s narrator often notices their absurdity but never questions it: part of the reason why the narrative voice is unreliable is because the question of whether our actions are pre-determined by a system just outside our perception is never answered. In the postmodernist’s vein, the novel is sceptical towards society: the new technoculture and our consumerist, hyper connected, almost cyber reality. And could the unreliable narrative voice echo an unreliable American government, in the same way Pynchon’s did? Like the news on your feed, The History of America in My Lifetime is worth reading cautiously, carefully. - Charlotte Lavin

https://www.full-stop.net/2022/03/18/reviews/charlotte-lavin/the-history-of-america-in-my-lifetime-brooks-sterritt/

THE UNNAMED PROTAGONIST of Brooks Sterritt’s debut novel, The History of America in My Lifetime — an employee of a “document storage and shredding facility” returning from “a conference organized by the Supranational Association for Information Destruction (SAID)” — stumbles across “something that no one could turn away from,” namely a man with a pixelated face, an effect called “fogging” or “tiling” in television or film. This imposition of a “screen” image onto real life starts the protagonist’s byzantine journey to seek out this man, and later to seek out a mythical underground filmmaker who specializes in surveillance footage.

The novel’s title is in reference to a quote by 20th-century British figure painter Francis Bacon who, Sterritt explains, “once quipped that a goal of his was to capture the history of Europe in his lifetime in a single image.” Like the painter, Sterritt’s desire to “capture the history of America in a lifetime in a single book” is a quixotic goal. What the novel does include — the compulsion to gather and process information (which is often ephemeral, unreliable, or qualified to the point perplexity); the fascination with watching (often mediated by screens) and the corollary fear (and desire) of being watched; the obsessive aestheticization of reality into a conspiratorial narrative — all point to the reality of living in a surveillance state, wherein we are being tracked by the very devices that we are enslaved to.

The History of America in My Lifetime, published in 2021 by longtime New York City indie publisher Spuyten Duyvil, draws clear comparisons to Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 in terms of narrative structure, as well as the laconic, satirical humor and dark worldview of Samuel Beckett’s prose fiction. The protagonist’s compulsion to mentally catalog information, outcomes, and origins as he tries to make meaning out of the proliferation of data and characters he encounters, coupled with his muted affect, also calls to mind Beckett.

The following conversation is an edited interview I conducted with Sterritt over Zoom in early August 2021. The conversation ranges from thematic concerns of the novel, connections between novels and film, and writing communities local and online that illuminate Sterritt’s development as a writer “without a hometown” — and The History of America in My Lifetime, a novel about a nameless protagonist living in a nameless city.

DANIEL MAGERS: One aspect I found particularly interesting running through your novel is the conventions of detective novels, or of noir or neo-noir in film. There’s an atmosphere of paranoia, distrust of others — even and especially friends, people close to you. Use of intrigue and double cross, women as femme fatales, a journey through settings and scenes that feel very filmic. What drew you to these conventions? How do you think you are using them?

Early on, I was fascinated by locked-room mysteries, whodunits, and all kinds of pulpy stuff. Agatha Christie, Conan Doyle, and even Isaac Asimov, who is mostly known for sci-fi but also wrote dozens of mystery stories and “puzzles.” Then there are books that kind of deconstruct the noir thing: Auster’s New York Trilogy and of course Beckett’s trilogy, especially Malone Dies.

I find film noir and film gris super interesting, the way the conventions have endured and changed. On the “neo” tip, I’ve watched Christopher Nolan’s Following (1998) at least 50 times. And this might sound funny, but working on the novel I watched probably hundreds of episodes of Forensic Files — not for research, per se, but because I became addicted. I was near a TV somewhere and an episode came on, and they’re 15 to 20 minutes long. And the narrative pull is like — they hook you in 15 seconds. You end an episode and the next one starts — they don’t even end on a commercial break, purposefully.

The thing about true crime is that it satisfies a hunger people have to read fiction, while also pretending to provide some utility in that they’re learning about real life or learning about a kind of history. Reading Tom Clancy or the literary equivalent because you’re getting all this submarine info on the side. Whether or not it is edifying you is totally beside the point. But along with Forensic Files, I was also fascinated with symbols and their decipherment. These symbols pop up throughout the book, and that’s probably enough of an answer. But it’s all connected for sure: the sleuthing, the missing pieces, the insoluble puzzle, the locked room.

Reading fiction for information is interesting. These detective or noirish conventions allow you to engage with deeper thematic issues: one of them is this sort of obsessive compulsion to gather information, often via the internet, to make meaning in the face of this impossibility of getting to the truth. The novel is incredibly interested in information as such — information, misinformation, cataloging information, unreliable information, ephemeral information, qualifications to the point of uncertainty.

Absolutely. I had all these ideas, and then at some point the Snowden revelations happened, which confirms what we always thought, that we’re being watched. More and more so through our devices and through our internet habits. On the other hand, one way my book is unlike the internet is its extreme linearity.

Going back to the information and data, sleuthing and collecting. We have so much at our fingertips, but we just collect bookmarks that we will never look at. Download and archive images that we will never sort through or ever return to. So, it’s this proliferation of data and information, and it goes right back to surveillance. We each produce so much data — valuable to corporations and to the government — too much data to look at it all without vast resources, which doesn’t happen unless you’re a terrorist or a journalist.

This idea of being monitored or watched has great bearing on all of us living in a surveillance state — I mean not just the government but corporations. Much of it is like, you know, not sinister, it’s to make money off us and how we use the internet, how we use our devices.

Well, you said it’s not sinister — it’s more that it’s not personal, I guess. I know to a certain degree it’s just part of the landscape or part of our environment, and would I prefer that to not be the case? Sure, but my interests in terms of the novel and surveillance were how and why to make a novel in this environment, and how the technology of the novel has responded to the emergence of surveillance tech.

You say that the novel takes place in a “world like the present,” which is a really interesting way of putting it. Do you see this as like a speculative novel? Is this literary realism? Do you think that there’s a spectrum between realism and the speculative?

I’d say it’s a realist book, depending on how you define realism. I think it was Fredric Jameson who said, if you examine the word “realism,” it begins to wobble. Is it realist, is it realistic, is it real — the question is, in what way? No book is a pure mirror, even if you sat down and attempted to write something photorealistic or a true depiction of a world that’s exactly like the present. It’s not a true mirror because it’s literature, it’s not real life.

I don’t know if I think in terms of the speculative, but several people brought up Black Mirror. And I think that’s a good example. Or take J. G. Ballard — it’s sort of a depiction of the world right now, but extrapolated and far shittier, which turns out to have pretty good odds of appearing prescient.

I just read Ling Ma’s Severance and last semester I taught Carmen Maria Machado’s short story “Inventory,” and both of those were published three and four years ago. They’re all about epidemics, in a sense — there is a clear speculative quality, an epidemic wipes out people and breaks down society, which has all become totally, totally true.

Those are great examples, and it’s interesting what takes on new resonance in light of current events. As far as the speculative goes, there are things that don’t exist whose depiction helps get at the truth of our world, whether they end up existing or not. It allows the freedom to tweak reality in order to get at something behind it, maybe. I think the gauge is less whether a book appears predictive, but whether a book speaks to our moment in advance or recognizes the unnoticed seeds of such a moment in the past.

While you were there writing the novel at University of Illinois at Chicago [where Sterritt received his PhD in English], you were studying the connection between novels and film. What connections do you see between the history of the novel and the history of film? What drew you to this?

What drew me to it was, I suppose, the pretty basic idea that novels have changed because of other available media, and vice versa. Early on, when people started creating short films and feature films, the models they had to go on were literary ones, often novels. It was fascinating to me to learn that D. W. Griffith gave the credit for his innovation of the close-up to Charles Dickens. Then you have Sergei Eisenstein writing that Griffith’s parallel montages were influenced by Flaubert! In a way this makes total sense, considering that novels were pretty much the dominant long-form narrative devices at the time, and what better for film to draw on?

But the kicker for me was when film editing “matured” and cuts and edits were becoming more obvious devices in film, that modernist literature in turn subsumes this, that a modernist novel like Ulysses has absorbed filmic techniques that arose in response to literary realism. And this evolution or this relation is still going, though in a faster and more splintered way, perhaps. - Dan Magers

read more here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-state-of-paranoia-an-interview-with-brooks-sterritt/

Roadside Picnic - With a combination of essays, memoirs, guided imagery, and speculative story-telling, this book reenacts Roadside Picnic, a sci-fi story addressing the problem of humanity’s contact with another intelligence through the environmental effects and wreckage left behind by the visitors

 

Roadside Picnics: Encounters with the Uncanny,

Ed. By Víctor Muñoz Sanz and Alkistis

Thomidou, dpr-barcelona, 2021

“A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see?” – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (1972), Roadside Picnic

As if humanity had woken up from a night-long party full of excesses, the sudden realization of being in the Anthropocene fills many in confusion and despair. Climate breakdown, environmental degradation, and mass extinction are tangible reminders that promises of human progress upheld by modernity have not really ended up in the landscapes of our dreams. What is more, the overwhelming complexity of their unintended consequences destabilizes our capacity to imagine ways to move forward. But, what if, simultaneously, such landscapes of unintended encounters, with the technologies, monuments, ruins, traces, and waste of seemingly supernatural forces, may also afford, and teach us, new designs and tools for survival?

With a combination of essays, memoirs, guided imagery, and speculative story-telling, this book reenacts Roadside Picnic, a sci-fi story addressing the problem of humanity’s contact with another intelligence through the environmental effects and wreckage left behind by the visitors. The bewildering nature of worldly Roadside Picnics pushes human and non-human beings across the planet to a similar situation. In the face of that shared condition, the book Roadside Picnics highlights the ways in which architecture and the built environment participate in and condition both our encounters with the unthinkable—How do we face trouble?—as well as the futures that are possible in the unintended landscapes of the Anthropocene—How do we stay with the trouble?

Contributions by: Céline Baumann, Ana María Durán Calisto, Julian Charrière, Dehlia Hannah, Víctor Muñoz Sanz, Alkistis Thomidou, and a foreword by Lucia Pietroiusti.

Jean Paul [Jean Paul Richter] constantly played with a multitude of witty and bizarre ideas; his works are characterized by wild metaphorics as well as digressive, sometimes labyrinthine actions. In them Jean Paul mixed reflections with poetic and philosophical commentaries; in addition to witty irony there are suddenly bitter satire and mild humour

 

Jean Paul [Jean Paul Friedrich Richter], A

Reader, Ed. by Timothy and Erika Casey, The

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991

Jean Paul occupies a special position in German literature and has always divided the reading public. Some of them were highly esteemed, others were shaken and disinterested. August Wilhelm Schlegel called his novels “self-talks”, in which he let the reader participate – in this respect an exaggeration of what Laurence Sterne had begun in the Tristram Shandy. Jean Paul constantly played with a multitude of witty and bizarre ideas; his works are characterized by wild metaphorics as well as digressive, sometimes labyrinthine actions. In them Jean Paul mixed reflections with poetic and philosophical commentaries; in addition to witty irony there are suddenly bitter satire and mild humour, beside sober realism there are transfiguring, often ironically broken idylls, also social criticism and political statements are included. - Harald Sack     Read more here

Siebenkäs is a German Romantic novel by Jean Paul, published in Berlin in three volumes between 1796 and 1797.

The novel's full title is Blumen-, Frucht- und Dornenstücke oder Ehestand, Tod und Hochzeit des Armenadvokaten F. St. Siebenkäs im Reichsmarktflecken Kuhschnappel — "Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces; or, the Married Life, Death, and Wedding of the Public Defender F. St. Siebenkäs in Reichsmarktflecken, Kuhschnappel [de]." However, the book is most commonly known simply as Siebenkäs.

As the title suggests, the story concerns the life of Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkäs and is told in a comedic style. Unhappily married, Siebenkäs goes to consult his friend, Leibgeber, who, in reality, is his alter ego, or Doppelgänger. Leibgeber convinces Siebenkäs to fake his own death, in order to begin a new life. Siebenkäs takes the advice of his alter ego, and soon meets the beautiful Natalie. The two fall in love; hence, the "wedding after death" noted in the title. - wikipedia

read it here 

or at Google Books

His novels were especially admired by women. This was due to the empathy with which Jean Paul created the female characters in his works: never before in German literature were women represented with such psychological depth. At the same time however, his work contains misogynistic quips. Jean Paul’s character may have been as diverse and as confusing as many of his novels: he was said to be very sociable and witty, while at the same time extremely sentimental: having an almost childlike nature, quickly moved to tears. It is obvious from his works that his interests encompassed not only literature but also astronomy and other sciences.

It is no surprise that the relationship of so capricious an author with the Weimar classicists Goethe and Schiller always remained ambivalent: Schiller once remarked that Jean Paul was as alien to him as someone who fell from the moon, and that he might have been worthy of admiration “if he had made as good use of his riches as other men made of their poverty.” Herder and Wieland on the other hand fully appreciated his work and supported him.

Although he always kept his distance from the classicists, who wanted to “absolutize” art, and although his theoretical approach (most notably in his Introduction to Aesthetics) was considerably influenced by Romanticism, it would be misleading to call him a Romantic without qualification. Here too he kept his distance: with all his subjectivism he didn’t absolutize the subject of the author as the Romantics often did. Jean Paul had what had become rare amidst classical severity and romantic irony: humour. He also was one of the first who approached humour from a theoretical standpoint.

He thought that both the Enlightenment and metaphysics had failed, though they still held importance for his worldview. He arrived at a philosophy without illusions, and a state of humorous resignation. Correspondingly he was one of the first defenders of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. He didn’t try to indoctrinate but to portray human happiness, even (and especially) in an increasingly alienated environment — the rococo castles and bleak villages of Upper Franconia.

Jean Paul was not only the first to use and name the literary motive of the Doppelgänger, he also utilised it in countless variations (e.g. Siebenkäs and Leibgeber, Liane and Idoine, Roquairol and Albano). In his novel Siebenkäs he defines the Doppelgänger as the “people who see themselves.”

read more here: https://mahlerfoundation.org/mahler/contemporaries/jean-paul/

Jean Paul Richter, Maria Wutz, 1792

We should avoid slotting works of literature too readily into preestablished critical schema. Still, it would be difficult to find a more “rhizomatic” work than Maria Wutz (1793) by Jean Paul Richter. Jean Paul’s texts propagate themselves vegetatively, sending out leading vines in every direction, without a central narrative or topic. Wutz was originally included as an addendum to another novel, The Invisible Lodge, about, ostensibly, a young man named Gustav who is raised experimentally in the “moral hothouse” of a cave inside a castle garden. Wutz concerns a minor character in the Lodge, a poor village schoolmaster, who writes his own versions of books based on the descriptions he reads in catalogs, including the Critique of Pure Reason by Kant. Are Wutz’s copies at all faithful to the originals? Jean Paul doesn’t even entertain the question, but it’s clear they represent an ideal for writing. — Matthew Spencer

Schiller said of Richter that he would have been worthy of admiration "if he had made as good use of his riches as other men made of their poverty." And it is true that in the form of his writings he never did full justice to his great powers. In working out his conceptions he found it impossible to restrain the expres-sion of any powerful feeling by which he might happen to be moved. He was equally unable to resist the temptation to bring in strange facts or notions which occurred to him ; and of such facts and notions he had a vast store, for he was an omnivorous reader, and forgot nothing that had ever touched his fancy or awakened his sympathies. Hence every one of his works is irregular in structure, and in some of them it is hard to detect the governing idea by which the relation of the parts to the whole is supposed to be controlled. His style, too, lacks directness, precision, and grace. With the main idea of a sentence he almost invariably associates a crowd of subordinate ideas ; and they are often grouped in an order so capricious and so fantastic that the meaning can be made out only by the closest study. The splendour of Richters genius, however, makes it easy for the class of readers to whom he appeals to forgive even these grave defects. His imagination was one of extraordinary fertility, and he had a surprising power of suggesting great thoughts by means of the simplest incidents and relations. No German prose writer has presented more fascinating pictures of childhood and youth, of friendship and love ; nor has any one shown more finely how' sordid circumstances may evoke the noblest qualities of loyal and generous minds. The love of nature was one of Richter's deepest pleasures, and he communicates his own delight in its beauty by many a description glowing with all the colour and the radiance of the real world. His expressions of religious feelings are also marked by a truly poetic spirit, for to Richter visible things were but the symbols of the invisible, and in the unseen realities alone he found elements which seemed to him to give significance and dignity to human life. His humour, the most distinctive of his qualities, cannot be dissociated from the other characteristics of his writings. It mingled with all his thoughts, and to some extent determined the form in which he embodied even his most serious reflections. That it is sometimes extravagant and grotesque cannot be disputed, but it is never harsh nor vulgar, and generally it springs naturally from the perception of the incongruity between ordinary facts and ideal laws. There are works of imaginative genius which we may read and enjoy without necessarily thinking of the author. The writer may reflect nature with so much fidelity that at first sight no element may seem to be imported into his conceptions from his personal peculiarities. But we appear always to see Richter's face and to hear his voice behind the printed page ; and his creations are true and suggestive only in so far as they are [manifestations of his own inward life. This means, of course, that his genius was not in any important sense dramatic, and that he was much more closely akin to the romantic than to the classic school; but it does not imply that his works produce a monotonous impression. Richter's personality was so deep and many-sided that in every new book he had some fresh secret to disclose. And the more he is known through his unconscious self-revelation the more he is loved and honoured; for we soon learn that with all his wilfulness and eccentricity he was a man of a pure and sensitive spirit, with a passionate scorn f«r pretence and an ardent enthusiasm for truth and goodness.

In 1826-38 a complete edition of Richter's works was published in sixty-five volumes, including several posthumous works. The second edition (1840-42) was in thirty-three volumes, the third (1860-63) in thirty-four. There are also a good many volumes of Richter's correspondence. See Döring, Leben und Charakteristik Richter's (1826); Kunz, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (1839); and Nerrlich, Jean Paul und seine Zeitgenossen (1876). There are two admirable articles on Richter in Cavlyle's Miscellanies.

read more here:  https://www.1902encyclopedia.com/R/RIC/johann-paul-friedrich-richter.html

Adrian Daub, Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism, 2012

Transcendental Masturbators: Jean Paul's Siebenkäs

This chapter illustrates how a critic of early Romanticism, Jean Paul, could precisely mobilize the problematic in exploding the Romantic metaphysics of marriage. Siebenkäs found Jean Paul leveling a more general critique at the Romantics and at Fichtean Idealism. This novel has been called “the first German marriage novel.” It appeared at a time in which the theory of marriage and the theory of self-consciousness were curiously intertwined. Jean Paul's critique of philosophical language threatened the self-understanding of German Idealism, construing it as a radicalization rather than a partial repudiation of the Enlightenment. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften showed that a married couple has sex while committing imaginary adultery. The erotics in the Wahlverwandtschafte imagined the four partners (real and imaginary) in four different sexual arrangements.

Vera Kotelevskaya: Jean Paul’s “Siebenkäs” as an explicit and implicit intertext in Thomas Bernhard’s fiction

“Siebenkäs” is considered to be one of the first German “family novels” (Eheroman). However, the description of “family” (Firmian and Lenettaliberating the writer's Self through rejection of family as an obstacle to creativity. While the book remains openended, the image of the new bride Natalie is significantly idealized and hardly could support development a traditional family fable. Jean Paul and Bernhard compensate familial estrangement with relationships with “others”. Friendship becomes an alternative to family.

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Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763-1825) adopted the pen-name 'Jean Paul' in honour of Jean Jaques Rousseau. His Levana or the doctrine of education (Levana oder Erziehlehre) was once a standard text and required reading in teacher education. Outside Germany the name of Jean Paul is now little known and the seminal educational text for which he was famous is rarely read. This neglect of Jean Paul is undeserved. What Jean Paul owed to Rousseau is apparent, but his work is rich in insight of his own. Three principles undergird Jean Paul's understanding of spiritual education (geistige Erziehung). Jean Paul insisted that spiritual education is essentially counter-cultural, that it is promoted by play and that it is grounded in love. Such education can never be at home in a curriculum which, however lofty are its stated objectives, is ultimately politically controlled. Jean Paul's insistence that play is constitutive of education needs to be heeded in an educational culture in which the playful is always at risk of displacement by what the government of the day deems to be of greater consequence. The heart of Jean Paul's understanding of education can be expressed succinctly, 'We love to teach and we teach to love'. - John Pridmore

Unreal Sex - everything is sex: walls, wax, the past, your future, your neighbours, hankies, candles, circuit boards, petri dishes, scrap metal – and language itself. Conjuring experiences for which there are no words, our amazing queer authors generate new tongues from the heat of their communing with a wild variety of lifeforms

 

Unreal Sex: An anthology of queer erotic sci-fi,

fantasy, and horror, Ed. by So Mayer & Adam

Zmith, Cipher Press, 2021

Welcome to your new favourite genre: the fucking fantastic.

In these ten stories, everything is sex: walls, wax, the past, your future, your neighbours, hankies, candles, circuit boards, petri dishes, scrap metal – and language itself. Conjuring experiences for which there are no words, our amazing queer authors generate new tongues from the heat of their communing with a wild variety of lifeforms.

From Diriye Osman’s spiritualised Peckham to Jem Nash’s time-travelling trans multiverse, these stories transport you to new ways of being and feeling. In a word, it’s CruiserShimmeringLipophilicNeckingerCircuitGirlboss.

Whether you get horny from aliens, ghosts, robots, utopia, possession, ritual, or the completely surreal, there’s a story here for you. But why stop at one when you can taste pleasure in each and every one?

Featuring stories from: Gracie Beswick, Swithun Cooper, Rachel Dawson, Rien Gray, Vivien Holmes, Jem Nash, Diriye Osman, Alison Rumfitt, Nicks Walker & Anna Walsh.

Alison Rumfitt - Cutting, disruptive, and darkly funny... a vital work of trans fiction that confronts both supernatural and real-world horrors as it examines the devastating effects of trauma and the way fascism makes us destroy ourselves and each other

 

Alison Rumfitt, Tell Me I’m Worthless, Cipher

Press, 2021

A dark, unflinching haunted house novel that takes readers from the well of the literary gothic, up through Brighton’s queer scene, and out into the heart of modern day trans experience in the UK.

The House spreads. Its arteries run throughout the country. Its lifeblood flows into Westminster, into Scotland Yard, into every village and every city. It flows into you, and into your mother. It keeps you alive. It makes you feel safe. Those same arteries tangle you up and night and make it hard for you to breathe. But come morning, you thank it for what it has done for you, and you sip from its golden cup, and kiss its perfect feet, and you know that all will be right in this godforsaken world as long as it is there to watch over you.

Three years ago, Alice spent one night in an abandoned house with her friends Ila and Hannah. Since then, things have not been going well. Alice is living a haunted existence, selling videos of herself cleaning for money, going to parties she hates, drinking herself to sleep. She hasn’t spoken to Ila since they went into the House. She hasn’t seen Hannah either.

Memories of that night torment her mind and her flesh, but when Ila asks her to return to the House, past the KEEP OUT sign, over the sick earth where teenagers dare each other to venture, she knows she must go.

Together Alice and Ila must face the horrifying occurrences that happened there, must pull themselves apart from the inside out, put their differences aside, and try to rescue Hannah, who the House has chosen to make its own.

Cutting, disruptive, and darkly funny, Tell Me I’m Worthless is a vital work of trans fiction that confronts both supernatural and real-world horrors as it examines the devastating effects of trauma and the way fascism makes us destroy ourselves and each other.

"Punk in every sense of the word, this is a debut unlike anything you’ve read before. Tell Me I’m Worthless builds a thoroughly British haunted house, and terrorises its readers inside; Rumfitt’s horrifying talent shrieks out from every page and rings in your ears for days." - Eliza Clark, author of Boy Parts

“A sharp and visceral novel which bends the horror genre to its will. Tell Me I’m Worthless holds a gruesome mirror up to the way it feels to live now. I absolutely tore through this book” – Julia Armfield, author of Salt Slow and Our Wives Under the Sea

‘Ghosts are born from trauma and violence.’

I relish the rare moments when a book can completely annihilate you. Tell Me I’m Worthless, the debut novel by promising young writer Alison Rumfitt, is a horror novel that not only has teeth but an intelligence and power to tear you to pieces and put you back together in a way that leaves you forever haunted, and glad for it. Seriously, this book is intense and while the content warning that precedes her grisly tale lets you know what you are in for, nothing can truly prepare you for how unsettling this is in the way it forces you to confront the violent and pervasive ideologies of fascism as it slimes its way through modern society. Drawing on a long history of horror and fairy tale literature, Rumfitt delivers a razor-sharp and very political haunted house narrative that explores issues of trauma and the trans experience under creeping fascism. The novel rotates between perspectives of Alice, a trans woman, and Ila (with an intentional choice to mirror their names), her former girlfriend that is now a public figure for trans exclusionary radical feminists, and the voice of the House itself, as the two women deal with the aftermath of them having entered the house years ago with their friend Hannah. Only the two of them walked out, both with conflicting memories of abuse from the other that occurred during their stay, and are forever traumatized and haunted by both figurative and literal ghosts. Tell Me I’m Worthless is an unrelenting horror festival that boldly pulls the reader through the hell of modern discourse and violent ideologies to explore the real-life horrors of queer life in the UK.

‘Where were you when we lost the culture war?’

This book is a lot, and I’m completely blown away by it. Alison Rumfitt, a trans woman, has delivered a harrowing narrative on the trans experience that hits with a truly astonishing force and is a perfect example why we need inclusivity in publishing to tell a more encompassing range of stories. While Tell Me I’m Worthless draws on horror and fairy tale fiction influences complete with homages to Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, Helen Oyeyemi, books including Jamaica Inn or Jane Eyre, as well as allusions to pioneers of literature on gender and race such as Audre Lorde, there is still a thrilling uniqueness to the novel that feels it couldn’t—and maybe shouldn’t—have been created by anyone but Rumfitt herself. The inspirations and occasional pastiche that occur are very welcomed, and Rumfitt has a reading list that I simply adore (it helps that with each reference I caught I thought, “I love that book too!”). The Haunting of Hill House is a clear inspiration and model for much of the book, and lovingly so. Look at one of Rumfitt’s descriptions of the House:

’ No live organism can continue to exist compassionately under conditions of absolute fascism, even the birds in Italy under Mussolini were observed to take part in rallies and violence. Albion, not compassionate, not sane, stood ringed by a tangled forest, holding inside, however messily, its overpowering ideology; it had stood so for a hundred years but would only stand for one more before it entered into the long process of becoming something else, at the end of which it was hoped it would seem to all the world that it had always been that way. Within, floors crumbled, ceilings gaped open, vines choked the chimneys and the windows. Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of the house, and whatever walked there marched on Rome.’

It is a wonderful reimagining of the imagery and ideas expressed by Jackson and her notable opening paragraph to Hill House:

‘ No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.’

It feels less like a clever remake and more like passing the torch, continuing the tradition of psychological horror to battle the demons of the present with the support of those who came before. The whole book reads as very personal to Rumfitt and of-the-moment in a way that truly shines, with Rumfitt admitting it is build from a space of being ‘quite tuned into discourse, in a way that can be bad for my own health,’ and, written during the pandemic lockdowns, was constantly informed and updated to address the ever changing arguments that flood social media with each news cycle. It is effective and the language of the novel crackles in the tongue of modern internet discourse, twisted and imperfect as hot takes and viral twitter threads and soiled with the rhetorical maggots that lay their eggs and thrive in the damp and dark of 4chan anonymity. Tell Me I’m Worthless feels destined to become a cult classic as it truly captures uneasy existence as violent ideologies are given space and taken seriously in the general public while violence against trans people is so prevalent it has been declared an epidemic Or, perhaps, in ten years we may look back on it as outdated and not in line with a more inclusive present. This would be preferable, and the book argues for a future such as this.

‘The fascists are already here…’

As stated in the content warning, Tell Me I’m Worthless focuses on ‘trauma and fascism.’ This book is triggering in very many ways, dealing with sexual assault, transphobia, antisemitism, and racism among others, and it should be kept in mind they are used for more than mere discomfort for the horror genre and to make a very loud statement against them. Be warned though, this book is intensely graphic and uses a lot of language and explanation of ideas that are extremely uncomfortable (though very effective). Nothing is very subtle here either, with the house being very obviously a metaphor for how fascism can infect through entry points of fear, feelings of inadequacy, thirsts for power and more. However, there is no need for subtleties here, with bold choices such as the house being named Albion (a word that is used to name the island of Great Britain) and the directness of the book gives it a rather punk flair that works particularly well with the horror aesthetics. While Rumfitt avoids directly naming him, one of the ghosts that haunts Alice is the musician Morrissey—who’s political statements of late have more or less made him the older generation’s J.K. Rowling but for music—who appears eyeless out of her torn The Smiths poster she keeps up to cover a frightening looking stain on her wall. The effect is both comical and utterly terrifying to read, with Rumfitt being astonishingly good at creating very visual scenes full of terror, and this combination of horror and dark humor really drives the enjoyment of this book. This book is punk as fuck, as the saying goes.

This book is set in our present, where LGBTQ+ issues have gained visibility but also continue to have a frightening and often violent backlash. ‘Notable reversals have appeared in nations overtaken by right-wing populism,’ Jules Joanne Gleeson writes in an introduction to a collection of essays on the intersections of politics and trans culture, and in her interview for the Guardian between her and gender-studies philosopher Judith Butler, Butler (most notably in an answer that was removed hours after initial publication despite pushback from Gleeson) notes the large overlap between trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) and neo-fascism, claiming an anti-trans ‘ ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times.’ The TERF ideology is prevalent through the novel, as Ila is an active member of an anti-trans organization and frequent contributor of essays and interviews on the subject. These passages may be difficult to read and much of the book makes the reader confront the rhetoric of anti-trans arguments. In an interview with Pink News (highly recommended read), Rumfitt explains that the narration from Ila was written for ‘ getting into the headspace of someone who, if they met me on the street, would probably hate me… it’s so much a part of modern discourse in this country that it’s kind of strange that it’s gone so unexplored.’ As she is someone who has undoubtedly heard these arguments far too often and made to feel unsafe because of them, Rumfitt delivers a very disturbing exploration.

‘ Now, if three girls enter a house and only two leave, who is to blame? And if both girls tell a different story, but you read online that you have to BELIEVE WOMEN, what do you? Do you decide one is a woman and one isn't, so you can believe one them but not the other? Do you take the side of the woman who is most like you? Or the most intersectional one? But one is rich, and white, and trans, and the other is rich, and Asian and a lesbian, and cis (?), and fuck, who wins here? In the end it's so hard to choose where your sympathies settle. So, you go online and find an `intersectionality score calculator' on the internet…Numbers have been known to lie. Numbers have been known to show bias, statistics often have racist undertones, for example.

So, there's just two girls leaving a house and maybe you don't have to take a side, maybe you can empathize with them both and hope they get the therapy and help they need and can learn to forgive one another. No. You can't do that.'

What makes Tell Me I’m Worthless so effective is how well it captures the nuance of modern discourse that is often swept aside out of inconvenience to get the best hot take. The nature of social media also positions people against each other, where the best spicy quip is often more valued than discourse. We exist in a world where access to information and theory is right at our fingertips, but there is still the difficulty in navigating and rationalizing it all. Activist Emma Dabiri discusses the difference between information and knowledge in this regard, and how the latter requires much more experience and cerebral undertakings to effectively utilize. Which is also Rumfitt’s point in presenting some of the more toxic ideologies and then framing them in complex and intricate scenarios almost as a test to see if you will succumb to the voice of the House as so many others do. The book borrows language and imagery from fascist political figures like Pinochet and Mussolini, or drawing from fear-mongering speeches like the ”rivers of blood” speech by Enoch Powell to demonstrate how persuasive they can be, particularly under extreme circumstances or while bathed in fear. While the growing fascism examined in the book is particularly framed as it occurs in the UK, the darkness of it is universal to anyone who has encountered far-right authoritarians in their many forms.

‘You, too, are implicated in its presence. Don’t forget that. You, me. Those you love.’

The House itself is written as a root of these ideas, spreading them throughout the land as well as claiming victims for itself in a way that feels like a more subtle version of the monster that infects the citizens of New York City with racism in The City We Became by the wonderful N.K. Jemisin. The House reminds us of our complicity in the society we exist within and that our systems and structures can be rotted at the core, creating a systemic violence or oppression that thrives on our denial of them. The effect here is that while people might not be knowingly fascist, it shows how they become willing to accept fascist rhetoric and arguments into their minds, which then festers and grows within them like vines slowly strangling out their empathy and humanity.

’The House spreads. Its arteries run throughout the country. Its lifeblood flows into Westminster, into Scotland Yard, into every village and every city. It flows into you, and into your mother. It keeps you alive. It makes you feel safe.’

Presenting this topic through the genre of horror is brilliant, keeping fear and safety a central topic in the novel. ‘For someone to feel safe, another has to be safe,’ the House preaches, ‘for someone, the majority, to prosper, another has to… well. I think you understand…’ The book places the characters in that unsettled, deflated feeling of being post-college and wallowing while waiting to land somewhere, making them all the more susceptible in their unease, and we watch as they are losing a battle of becoming a product of their traumas rather than one they wish to be. Only by returning to the House and confronting them can they ever move forward in life. In the present, Hannah is absent, the friend who ‘always ended being the odd one out, the third wheel,’ which made her the perfect victim for the House where she may or may not be either trapped inside or have fallen victim to the horrors she endured.

‘We were young and idealistic,’ they think of when they braved the House the first time, ‘ we wanted to make some political point of the whole thing.’ The political is always present in this book, but beyond topics of gender Tell Me I’m Worthless also tackles social class head on. Immigration, Brexit, crime, and more are all public conversation, one political ideologues capitalize on for power and profit, and the House is a well-constructed metaphor of these. ‘The most famous haunted places in the world tend to be the big houses and castles,’ Rumfitt writes, ‘because rich people lived in them and the collective blood on their hands, the collective violence that they caused on everyone else in the world, manifests into ghosts.’ Albion, the House and the nation, are examined as the product of years and years of bloodshed, colonialism, racial oppression, patriarchy and more amalgamating into a dark force that transcends the physical world. The reaches of the House occur in every corner of society, even property ownership that leads to pushing out the unhoused and anyone deemed an Other. An effective image occurs early in the book of an abandoned church with ‘a sign outside reading TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. God’s body, decaying, has now been cut off from society; do not touch him, for he is owned by a variety of contractors, and they have legal power over the likes of you.’

Tell Me I’m Worthless is an unflinching and brutally direct novel that combines horror with political and social discourse to deliver a fantastically unsettling story. Alison Rumfitt has taken the reigns from her predecessors and driven the genre of horror and fairy tales deep into the heart of our modern condition, constructing amazing imagery that thrills as much as it chills. Rumfitt has crafted a stunning debut here. This is certainly not for everyone, and I will caution that this book can be quite triggering, but if you dare to enter this book will have its ghosts following you forevermore.

‘Sometimes, at the end of everything, the only option you have is to make it worse.’ - s. penkevich

Okay, wow. If you read Tell Me I’m Worthless, prepare to be haunted: for days after finishing it I was infected with its story, sick with it, couldn’t stop thinking about it. There are so many moments, observations and images from this book that have crawled inside and made themselves at home under my skin.

Three years ago, three girls – Alice, Ila and Hannah – entered the House, a corrupted, haunted place. Hannah never came out, and in the aftermath, Alice and Ila’s relationship is radically transformed. Once best friends and lovers, they now barely speak and have somehow come to occupy opposing ideological standpoints. A bit later, we find out that each of them believe the other to be guilty of violent and degrading assault, though it seems they can’t both be right. The only way out of it all is for Alice and Ila to return the House, and however horrifying that idea is, they are inexorably drawn back.

Sometimes, at the end of everything, the only option you have is to make it worse.

Tell Me I’m Worthless is something entirely new. It’s a haunted house story unlike any other, and it’s also about fascism and trauma and guilt and gender and what it’s like to try and perform an acceptable impression of a functioning human being after bad shit has happened to you. It’s electrifying. It’s disgusting. It’s hot. It actually made me fucking THINK. It’s the best book about what it is to be a woman (specifically in modern Britain) that I’ve read in years, possibly ever. It’s the most radical horror novel of the year and probably the decade.

People who spend a lot of time talking about books, including me, are probably guilty of saying something is ~like nothing else I’ve ever read~ far too often, but that truly applies here. The only thing I can think of that I’d perhaps stand it next to is Gary Budden’s London Incognita, which has a similar punk spirit flowing through its veins, but the fact that Tell Me I’m Worthless is written specifically from a queer/trans/female perspective makes it feel that much more radical.

I might write more when I reread it – which I definitely will. Honestly, I’ve struggled to find the language to describe how good it is and how it made me feel; it’s an experience. Just know that if you are at all interested in horror, this book is essential reading. - Blair

more reviews at goodreads

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57307172-tell-me-i-m-worthless

Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt is, in many ways, a straightforward horror novel: on the surface, it’s a gruesome haunted house story about three friends whose lives are torn apart by a mysterious presence.

But Tell Me I’m Worthless is so much more than that. Rumfitt’s deeply unsettling story also explores the wave of transphobia that has been engulfing Britain for years, delving into the rise of fascism, Britain’s terrifying lurch to the right and the scourge of racism.

At the centre of the novel is the complicated relationship between Alice, a young trans woman, and Ila, a “gender critical” feminist who has become embroiled within the UK’s anti-trans movement.

“I’m interested in radicalisation and the effects of right wing politics, so I think it made sense that something as obviously conservative as a haunted house – a house that is maintaining the past so much that it is literally breaking the foundations of life and death – it made sense to me that that could be an effective framework for exploring right-wing politics,” Rumfitt says.

PinkNews: Why is the horror genre a suitable place to tackle issues like fascism and transphobia?

Alison Rumfitt: The really basic answer is: these things are horrible. It just makes sense to me – I don’t have to push things too much further to make them into actual, all-out horror. I find it scary so I wanted to write a novel where those things were scary to the general reader.

This is a novel, certainly first and foremost, I was writing for trans audiences. But I would hope that it’s also scary and interesting and enlightening to people who aren’t trans. That’s just the way I work – I try to prioritise our audience. There are particular interests in specific corners of horror within trans communities – we have particular interest in body horror. This is a book where things happen to people’s bodies that they can’t control that are quite upsetting.

I’ve always read into a lot of horrific things that I like, even if they don’t have subtext. I’ve always read into The Shining film and thought, that’s about racism, or I can look at The Exorcist and think, this is about some TERF parents whose child is showing signs of gender dysphoria and they’re freaking out and calling the Catholic police or whatever. So I was just trying to do that and make that stuff textual rather than me projecting subtext onto it.

The haunted house in Tell Me I’m Worthless is almost like a character of its own. What references did you look to in creating the house?

I’m a writer who writes a lot in references and intertextuality but hopefully that still works if you don’t know the references. Hill House is sort of, I think, the most perfect haunted house in literature. It’s so vivid and the characters in that novel are so vivid as well, so that was a big reference point. There’s a book called White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi – that has wonderful sections written from the perspective of this house. I had that in mind but I also wanted to make sure I wasn’t just doing what Helen did because I think she writes in a really unique way.

There are parts from the perspective of the house, but they’re not first person narration. I’m not sure I would have liked to write it that way because of what the house represents. I wanted to keep a distance. There are obviously references to speeches by fascists, there’s references to Oswald Mosley (the former leader of the British Union of Fascists), and the “rivers of blood” speech by Enoch Powell. So it does speak in those ways, but if there were sections just from its point of view that would have been too much.

The house is called Albion, which is an old name for Britain. What was the meaning behind that?

This was in my head because one of the last big things I did before lockdown was I went to a William Blake exhibition in London, and Albion is such a recurring character and concept within William Blake’s writing. I love William Blake, he’s a really interesting artist and writer to use to think about England and the changing perspectives of what England is. I think by using the name I was trying to imply a lot of history, going as far back as it’s possible to go into the roots of the country. The real horror is that the rot goes all the way down to the roots.

That really hit me reading it, the idea that this rot in Britain is by no means something new.

Because of the nature of how messed up the UK is, things would just be constantly developing as I was writing it, so I’d finish a draft and then suddenly there were the horrible right-wing arguments about Black Lives Matter protesters trying to censor statues, and then there were prosecutions against people involved in that. So when I did another draft I had to have that in mind, and once I finished that, more stuff happened – it kept happening! So it developed naturally because every time I would look online there would be something else.

The novel deals brilliantly with the idea of Britain today being a bit of a cesspit – how did you weave themes transphobia through?

Originally I wasn’t going to write so explicitly about gender criticals because I’d just put out this long poem about gender criticals and gender essentialism, and honestly, I wasn’t sure if me writing about it was doing any good. And then suddenly I realised that one of the primary characters of the novel needed to be – for want of a phrase that wouldn’t get me attacked – a TERF.

It was interesting to write a TERF character because I haven’t really read any books that have TERF characters, especially not books by trans people. And it’s so much a part of modern discourse in this country that it’s kind of strange that it’s gone so unexplored.

Ila is such an interesting, flawed character – the reader almost roots for her at times. What was it like for you exploring her psyche?

The thing I enjoyed was getting into the headspace of someone who, if they met me on the street, would probably hate me. I was trying to build a psyche of someone like that and work out if there was a way that I could still empathise with them. It’s kind of telling that Ila doesn’t ever quite feel like she is with the gender critical movement all the way. I don’t know if I could have written an unrepentant TERF with no point of origin of their bigotry. It was an experiment but it was an experiment I really relished.

The book also comes with a content warning, which was really refreshing. What was the reasoning behind putting that in there?

My general opinion is that authors should certainly consider including content warnings if they’re dealing with subjects that might be upsetting. But I really don’t want them to be mandated in any way – it should be up to the author. It’s a good idea if the author writes it out if they want it, rather than it coming from the publishing house.

I put it there honestly as much for me as for the reader. Work that deals with complicated and triggering subjects by marginalised creators is often the work that gets criticised more – I don’t know why that is. But I wanted to avoid off the bat accusations of writing trauma porn. I see a lot of queer writers get accusations of that thrown at them. It might still happen, but this was a way I could see to avoid that.

The book doesn’t have a very optimistic outlook for the future of Britain. Where do you think the country is headed?

My next novel is about that, so I can’t say too much. But I imagine it’s sort of clear. I don’t have an optimistic outlook. I don’t mean to be a doomer or anything like that, but the Overton window [the window of current political possibilities] doesn’t at all include left-wing ideas. I think it’s shifting even more and it’s narrowing even more. A lot of people who are in positions of power who could maybe do something about that are not doing it for whatever reason – maybe they see financial gain from it, maybe they see social gain from it, or maybe they just don’t really care about the people affected.

I don’t have a great outlook but the sliver of hope, if there is one, is seeing the renewed vigour around protest. We haven’t quite gotten to the point where it lasts for an extended period of time, but there certainly is still passion there.

Tell Me I’m Worthless also explores issues around social media, particularly with Twitter. Does it echo your own views of social media?

People have lots of different experiences of the internet. My experience is very much informed by being a trans woman online, a trans woman on Twitter especially. I don’t have a great view of Twitter – I go in for it, too. It’s a very easy place to end up in these death spirals of utterly pointless arguments.

Hopefully the tweets that are in the novel feel like real tweets and you can imagine coming across them on your timeline. There’s a bit where someone calls out a character for using the ’T’ slur on them, but they write out the word or they put an asterisks in it, and someone else tries to call them out for using that word as well, and it was just a really fun Russian doll of discourse.

Twitter isn’t the only website in the book – there are also sequences talking about 4Chan and Tumblr and Mumsnet. The Mumsnet stuff was really fun to write. Obviously it’s horrible, but there’s something about the twee, middle-class white woman phrasing they use on there that’s just hilariously slimy. Different websites have different languages so it’s fun to try and reproduce those languages. - PATRICK KELLEHER

https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/10/29/alison-rumfitt-tell-me-im-worthless/

Alice, the protagonist of Alison Rumfitt’s debut novel Tell Me I’m Worthless, is haunted by a curious phantom. Every night, the disgraced frontman of a 1980s indie band (unnamed but unmistakable) crawls out from the poster which confines him and stands over Alice’s bed, his eyes blacked out with biro and radiating malevolent intent. If the idea of someone being haunted by an evil Morrissey poster sounds funny, that’s because it’s intended to be – but as the novel progresses, it becomes genuinely creepy, too.

It’s a satire that’s actually funny and a horror novel that’s actually scary. To blend genre without one aspect diminishing the other is a difficult feat to pull off, and made more impressive by the fact that, after beginning her career as a poet, this is Rumfitt’s debut novel.

Tell Me I’m Worthless concerns the wreckage of a friendship between two characters – Alice and Ila – both of whom are hateful at times but ultimately redeemable. Alice is a trans woman who scrapes a living through online sex work and drifts through Brighton’s house party scene. As a first-person narrator, she is bitter and acerbic, prone to erudite digressions on the nature of fascism and the conventions of the ghost story genre. Ila, meanwhile, has become a committed ‘gender critical’ activist: she attends meetings, appears on Radio 4 to discuss the importance of single-sex spaces, and boasts a number of anti-trans celebrities as followers on Twitter. The sections of the book which concern Ila’s journey through the world of anti-trans activism make for a lacerating, sharply-observed satire.

But this is, above all, a horror novel, and a haunted house looms large. Three years before the story begins, Alice and Illa (along with their friend Hannah, now missing) spent an evening in a decrepit mansion on the outskirts of the city, where they experienced a brutally violent incident. The house functions as a metaphor for a particularly English form of fascism, and exerts a Mephistophelian influence on the characters; it whispers in their ears, appealing to their worst impulses and most reactionary anxieties, doing everything in its power to lure them to return. When it eventually succeeds, the novel reaches an explosive climax.

There have been some excellent non-fiction books published about the trans experience recently: for instance, The Transgender Issue by Shon Faye and Transgender Marxism, edited by Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke. Tell Me I’m Worthless refracts similar themes, but through the lens of horror and pitch-black comedy. It’s an at times transgressive, hallucinatory, and frenetic novel, but one which is nonetheless lucid in its treatment of its themes: the resurgent threat of fascism, the absurdities inherent to contemporary transphobia, and the way that trauma, rather than being a learning opportunity, can make people twisted and cruel. I caught up with Rumfitt to find out more about the novel.

Why did you decide to have Morrissey as one of the spectral presences in the book?

It honestly just started as a joke. I had a friend a couple years ago who had a Smiths poster on the wall of his room, and it always weirded me out that it was there, but I never really brought it up. When it came to writing the book, I was trying to think of something that could tell you a lot about the blind spots in someone’s politics, and ways to signal, fairly early on, that Alice isn’t someone that the audience should be trusting. It’s less that she’s clueless about what the poster says about her and more that she doesn’t care, and hopefully, that signals to the reader that while they might sympathise with this person, they shouldn’t go with her all the way.

There’s a tendency today for people to interpret characters in novels as direct stand-ins for the author (take the transphobic backlash to Detransition, Baby, for example, where lines of dialogue from Reese, the fictional character, were frequently attributed to Torrey Peters, the author). Are you concerned about being misinterpreted in that way?

There are bits in the novel where, if you took them out of context, would make me look bad. There’s one section where that is a very real danger. But I think that the formatting hopefully means that it can’t be taken out of context. I would hope that it’s pretty clear, if you read the novel, that my perspective is that Alice is wrong and has some abhorrent views.

It seemed to me that the book is partly about why fascism is seductive to some people. If fascism does have an appeal, what do you think the nature of that appeal is?

There’s one example I actually included in the book: I was at some university event with a group of left-people and there was a Trotskyist guy there arguing that the 2011 London riots were innately bad. It made me angry because it was such an annoying view for a left-wing person to have, and such a specifically white view – not understanding why that unrest was happening at all and purely foregrounding community order over understandable retaliation.

I think that’s a good example of how someone who would never think of themselves as right-wing could end up falling into right-wing viewpoints. You have to be vigilant of your own politics and where they’re being pulled from and what are the logical conclusions of your own ideology. I think white people, in particular, have a real potential for falling into right-wing thought without even thinking about it. - James Greig      read more here: https://www.huckmag.com/art-and-culture/alison-rumfitt-on-her-darkly-comic-tale-about-transphobia/

More reviews:

https://tornightfire.com/announcing-tell-me-im-worthless-a-new-novel-from-alison-rumfitt/

https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2021/10/29/the-call-is-coming-from-inside-the-house-review-of-tell-me-im-worthless-by-alison-rumfitt/

https://www.theskinny.co.uk/books/features/alison-rumfitt-interview-tell-me-im-worthless

Hannah Black puts calendar time back into messianic time, and also the reverse. An account of the last two disorienting years in history, in our lives, this intimate and funny and abstract fiction uses fable, and unreality, to flood a reader with the real, to remind her what is at stake

 

Hannah Black, Tuesday or September or The

End, Be Capricious, 2022.

Tuesday or September or The End by Hannah Black is an incisive and playful work of speculative fiction that explores the rupture year of 2020, when aliens finally invaded.

Tuesday or September or the End puts calendar time back into messianic time, and also the reverse. An account of the last two disorienting years in history, in our lives, this intimate and funny and abstract fiction uses fable, and unreality, to flood a reader with the real, to remind her what is at stake. — Rachel Kushner

Allegory and satire, alert and conscious, Hannah Black’s Tuesday or September or the End, is an existential novel. Narrative innocence is not the engine of this work; knowledge of life in the modern is. Bird and Dog, Black’s wide awake and dreaming characters, are electric and wise. This novel is fluent in our dystopia and utopia. — Dionne Brand

An acid calendar of planetary rot and revolt, Hannah Black’s new novel listens for that alien language of the future: total social transformation. Staging debates on communism and social democracy, or unraveling the double helix of race and capitalism, Black’s calendar is one that breathes and breaks, figuring the temporal hiccups of revolution. Suddenly it’s no longer endless winter and our narrator Bird, much like chirping in early spring, brings us to witness the reanimation of the world. — Greg Nissan

In Tuesday or September or the End, we see ourselves battered by time, which isn’t real, and chance, which is. But just as “the world resists its reduction to winter,” Hannah Black’s writing, in its passionate grasp of possibility, resists spiritual suicide. The book is deeply felt because the pain of attachment is close to its center and funny because life is currently absurd. But what I love most about it, reading its compact brilliant sentences in this sunless covid afternoon, is the way it makes an argument for clarity, which really can—partially, briefly, and when it matters most—sometimes be achieved. — Benjamin Krusling

Hannah Black is an artist and writer at work in New York City. Black’s latest book, Tuesday or September or the End (Capricious), is a novella written in the aftermath of the early months of the pandemic and the uprisings of summer 2020. If we experience daily life as “simulation or psychosis,” Black shows us throughout this book that it is “probably something much more drab, like the slow death of a form of society.” Black offers a chronicle centered on two characters, Bird and Dog, as they contend with rapidly changing political possibility and foreclosure during the pandemic while the run of Moley Salamanders (i.e., Bernie Sanders) concludes and aliens—who are real—come to earth. The book narrates what it is to let these beginnings and endings “scroll through you” and to participate in their coming about, both in the sense of the normal rhythms of capital and of riots.

The recent past was and is “a time of signs and wonders” in the most horrific sense, but Black tethers it to mundane continuity, an account of life in late-stage capital as time breaks down and goes “queasy and wrong” and all dates are “in retrospect, a monument.” Via a propulsive consideration of how the riots of 2020 might have turned revolutionary, Black offers a meditation on collective life. This crucial novella is about how we might know who we are when our normal referents are muted, deleted, upended.—Hannah Zeavin

Hannah Zeavin

Congratulations on this latest book. In Tuesday or September or the End, you give us a chronicle that shows the impossibility of chronicling “The Event” as separate from a four- or four hundred- or thousand-year history.

Hannah Black

I had a fantasy that I could write a book in a couple of months. I was on a residency on Fire Island and decided to spend the time writing a book really fast, the novel of 2020. I kept saying, “It’s a fictionalized version of the first six months of 2020,” as if you can fictionalize time itself. The temporality of writing was supposed to relate to the temporality of the book. Of course, that didn’t happen; in the end it took over a year to write it. The form of the novel itself disciplined me.

Uprisings are the only time you ever learn anything new. Then you have months, or years, or decades of aftermath during which you have to keep drawing on the moment of rupture. Intellectual, social, and cultural leaps forward happen at these moments of maximum collectivity; and then we’re just putting together the pieces, or singing praise songs, or wondering what exactly went down for a while after. I really wanted to be part of the attempt to try and understand what happened in 2020. The book is a contribution to that general effort.

HZ

Yet, for a few reasons, it is not only a faithful chronicle of that time. First there are aliens; and in the world of the book, aliens seem to be deeply real. But so much like the real virus, or the uprisings, the aliens are an object of watching and witnessing at a distance.

HB

It came to my attention at some point while I was working on the book that many people didn’t want to watch or read works of fiction that in any way referenced the pandemic. People felt strongly that it was best that contemporary storytelling unfolded in a vague, parallel present where there were no masks, no social restrictions. So the aliens were partly a technique to try and inject some totally different therefore protective substance into a painful retelling.

Everyone knows what an alien invasion narrative is, in the same way that everyone knows what a love story is. They are sort of similar: you are new to each other and have something huge to learn. The aliens were also a pun on alienation. In the book they are alienation’s opposite; they “erode the social base of fascism” and are “even further away from politics than love.”

When I first read from the book in public, at a Segue reading that Kay Gabriel organized, I was so relieved by the alien parts. Whenever I started to worry that I was being pointlessly hurtful to my audience, there were the aliens. And that’s what they do in the book too: they guarantee the possibility of something other than pain. But I’m still not sure if anyone actually wants to read a book about the first six months of 2020.

HZ

Well, I did—

HB

Okay, maybe a masochist. Or a sadomasochist.

Read more here:

Uprisings: Hannah Black Interviewed - BOMB Magazine

Hannah Black, Dark Pool Party, Dominica & Arcadia Missa, 2016.

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Dark Pool Party is a wide-ranging collection of artist Hannah Black’s essays, personal texts, and video/performance scripts. Black’s work reassembles autobiographical fragments to think about the relationship between bodies, labor, and affect. Drawing on feminist, communist, and black radical theory she explores sex, ambivalence, departures, history, and violence with characteristic wit and precision.

I am eating at a vegetarian restaurant called Vegetarian Restaurant. The food is not good, but my hands are dirty, and I am alive, reading Dark Pool Party by Hannah Black at a muted red picnic table yet unwarmed by early sun. “O girl or boy,” she writes, “life force in you, if you think you can take something from me I am flattered, and you can have it.”

Dark Pool Party features seven texts that blur the lines of fiction, nonfiction, cultural criticism, critique, and poetry. Many of the pieces enact a reedy line of space between the author and the character/s, noticeable immediately in “Celebrity Death Match,” about an unloving/unloved person searching for connection. The distinguisher is that the quote unquote real names of characters (friends, lovers) have been replaced with celebrity names like Rihanna, Justin Bieber, and Usher.

We know from context clues that the characters do not signify actual celebrities but distance the author from autobiography, a productive and constant manifestation in Dark Pool Party. Sitting there in that mostly sunny day, propelled by the force of Black’s work, I was splayed by the isolation and separation, from both the speaker and the speaker from the characters, this speaker who enacts the wall between her and the characters by denying the reader a chance to completely penetrate that Otherness through narrative:

I tried to be in love with Usher and so far it didn’t work out and now I am trying maybe to fall in love with Rihanna but I already know it won’t work out. I composed several sentences of an email to Usher in my head: We are not good for each other. I wanted to fall in love with you. You activate my tenderness. I want to look after you. I was moved by your strange combination of strength and weakness until I saw you were only a man.

I think of a book called Heroines by Kate Zambreno, a text I adore, and suddenly also of its total whiteness and its mostly-straightness. Heroines: a writer’s guide on how to be part woman (part girl) with an affinity for melancholy, living in the shadow-stain of man. Zambreno and Black share the anxiety that a woman writing narrative means readers assume it’s pure experience, unadorned with craft or artistic license. Zambreno explores ripping what really happened from the writing, and she thinks of that strategy as a gendered, male act. She believes what really happened is the feminine of the poem, a drama that men like Eliot and Pound wanted to stifle, delete. The male act: to posit that what really happened is bad writing.

Clipped of the superfluous what really happened, an image or concept resonates. It’s stark. It enacts. The question, confusion: is the hand that deletes what’s true from the text invisible, male? In conversation with Heroines, Dark Pool Party recognizes race, not just gender, as a factor in the author-genre anxiety: “God is not an autobiography, but nor is race or gender, though they threaten at all times to become the full extent of one,” Black writes. Riffing off the notion that a marginalized identity is only capable of autobiographical narrative, Black’s answer to Zambreno’s supposition is that it’s not the writer or the writing that’s the problem, but rather how the text is read.

In Dark Pool Party’s “Atlantis,” we understand that Atlantis is a cover for a specific place or generalized experience based on the “absolute truth” of the author’s experience. Black gives us that sticky, delicious window into “her life,” but also throws it in our face. She uses the tool of the canon to exploit the tool of the canon and to critique it, legitimizing a large body of work by people who struggle to write work that looks in some way like their life. In this way, Black’s book teaches us how to read narrative written with an intersectional lens, and her aesthetic of dealing with the slippery space between truth and fabrication is one of the pleasures of this book.

The narrator, speaker, consumable woman, moves through the book, acting and repulsed by her own actions: “We ate trash for breakfast, squeezing ketchup sachets onto strips of American bacon, the perfectly round egg, both of which signified: the unimaginable suffering of animals.” Dark Pool Party conflates woman and meat, men and farm animals, hamburger meat and the suffering of marginalized bodies. Humans eat for survival but also to fill the vacuous hole of past experience that manifests in the physical as shudder. Humans are imperfect animals, rooting around in modernity, looking sometimes to be ethical, intelligent, or mindful, in a time and place where no perfect action, art, or critique exists. “Perhaps critique is over and this is unexpectedly the era of joy, but I am still luxuriating in the interesting feeling of shame,” Black writes. Dark Pool Party is part critique, part shame, all sentence richness, a poetry of force, a book thick with ideas and essential cringes of yore. - Ally Harris

https://entropymag.org/dark-pool-party-by-hannah-black/

Hannah Black and Juliana Huxtable, Life, Walther König, 2017

The book presents Black's ideas in collaboration with artist and musician Huxtable and is designed by artist and DJ Soraya Lutangu (aka Bonaventure). The science-fiction narrative is described as a "scenario of impending apocalypse [about] two risk analysts returning from retirement to attempt to avert the end of the world" and the title refers to a Wikipedia entry on Life/Leben. Black's exhibition revolves around the question of 'collective being', 'life' as an abstraction, and the uses of ancestry and lineage.

Hannah Black cowrote this science-fiction narrative with New York-based artist/musician Juliana Huxtable; in its pages each author plays the character of a risk analyst ‘returning from the dead’, somehow to accompany or prevent the apocalypse. ‘I have retired from risk, and now nothing can happen to me. I’m a single-celled organism carved out of the white bone of the world. Mind is a miracle,’ writes Huxtable. ‘You don’t have to tell me what you were by virtue of still being,’ answers Black.