Diamela Eltit - Radical projects that dispute the public space, the national interpretation and the role of genres under authoritarian conditions

 

Diamela Eltit, Soul's Infarct, Ronald Christ, Helen Lane Books, 2009.

“Another splendid book by Diamela Eltit, Chile’s most celebrated experimental writer. In collaboration with renowned photographer Paz Errázuriz, Eltit questions the lovers’ discourse—how this magic is born, how it is sustained and nourished—and roots her perspective in those outcasts whom society has condemned to the margins. These abject figures, locked for life in a psychiatric institution for the poor and insane, are the protagonists of this beautiful book about love; they are the guardians of what Eltit describes as ‘that mysterious symbolic disorder’ which nothing in medical science can ever come close to explaining. Soul’s Infarct is certain to embrace the reader who in turn will recall the power of love as a moment in which the senses override the intellect, an instant when we surrender ourselves to the tremulous body of desire, to hunger for the other to reach a transgressive bliss. Award-winning translator Ronald Christ is unique in his ability to tease out the subtle rhythms of Eltit’s text and bring to English-language readers the sublime poetic prose of Soul’s Infarct.”—Francine Masiello, University of California at Berkeley


“Binocular: visual and verbal lenses, individual but parallel in focus, Soul’s Infarct brings up close—brings us up close—to the distanced, the unmentionable, the unsightly: crazy people, who yet are people in love, witnessing their immense emotion before Paz Errázuriz’s welcoming camera, conveying their unknown and unknowable selves and histories through Diamela Eltit’s transformative, recording word. Soul’s Infarct is doubly unique.”—Catalina Parra


While it´s generally accepted that love is a form of madness, are we as ready to admit that the mad can fall in love? In Soul´s Infarct, translated by Ronald Christ for Helene Lane Books in 2009, Diamela Eltit (Santiago, 1949), Chile´s foremost experimental writer, has opened the doors of a provincial psychiatric institution not far from Santiago where poor men and women live, walk through the corridors, stare up to the sky, and indeed, fall in love. Triggered by the photographic images of Chilean artist Paz Errázuriz—which depict inmates in a dignified manner—Eltit crosses literary genres to question the relationship between love and madness, and their connection with marginality and power. Eltit has famously embraced writing as a political practice—and this is political writing at its intimate best. - Cristina Rivera Garza

Diamela Eltit, E. Luminata, Trans. by Ronald Christ and Catalina Parra, Lumen Books, 2008.


"Chile's prize-winning novel of rebellious defiance in revolutionary prose—a feminist triumph of Joycean stature."

"In the preface of this, her first book (published in 1983), Chilean writer Eltit confesses that her works are difficult to read, which must have made translating E. Luminata a daunting task. Christ rises to the challenge, deservedly winning the 1997 Kayden National Translation Award for rendering this work into English. Eltit's experimental novel consists of a series of scenes that include interrogation sessions and events occurring in a public park after dark that one would more likely expect to find in a modern dance performance than in a novel. Eltit interrupts these scenes with analyses that shatter any thoughts that the reader may have been forming regarding what was just read. For its innovative form, remarkable craftsmanship, and the issues raised in its content?the personal and societal effects of dictatorship?this important work is highly recommended for public and academic libraries.?" - Carolyn Ellis Gonzalez
"E. Luminata is an active unworking, a vigorous defying of psychological characterization, chronological story, unequivocal occurrences, and limiting or limited signification. It immediately brings to mind Blanchot's The Madness of the Day and Beckett's The Lost Ones, but refuses the coherence and presence of these equally tenebrous texts. This active unworking makes any sort of metatextual comment, let alone interpretation, difficult: to summarize what "happens" in the novel's ten chapters (just over two hundred pages) - a woman in a gray dress stands looking at a neon sign in the middle of a deserted plaza one night in Santiago - is to say next to nothing. The text agrees to, indeed requires, interrogation and interpretation, while simultaneously refusing and escaping such inquiry.
It is this very act of resisting that the text both "is about" and "is." Eltit sees complicity between critical interpretation and political totalitarianism. She writes, "I am interested in... cracking the monolith of completed stories," and is attracted by "the rebellious circulation of strategic fragments oppressed by official cultures." To Eltit, writing is an "act of liberating meanings and of protecting against the ideologizing of literature." In other words, it is literature's resistance to unequivocal meaning, its refusal to be allegorized, its detachment from significance, that gives it its truly revolutionary power.
I did have some trouble with the novel: Eltit's insistence on the substantiality of the book in her introduction - "An experiment may turn out or not; what I make is a work" - as well as Christ's placing it within a tradition of great (instead of minor) literature in his afterword, belies the novel's fugitive quality. I also had some problems making the connections the text requires: I must confess that I left the novel feeling it just eluded my grasp. Still, it is important to realize that E. Luminata is a text - in the most extreme sense of the word - and as such is profoundly contentious, discomforting, and unstable." - Jeffrey DeShell
"E. Luminata is truly exquisite, preternaturally so. A symbol of existing under vexing duress, this defiant minefield dance ("from my own poor, particular trenches" - Eltit) is a promenade of linguistic efficacy and daring imaginative prowess. The protagonist crosses a public square, as the women protestors once did - dancing as the only allowable form of (silent) protest for the holocaust of the invisible/tortured Chilean men - during the cesspool of Pinochet's dictatorship. From this embankment, E. Luminata apprehends her anguished sphere of existence through the gaze of those who encircle her; those who bear witness as she bewails, bodily, the treacherous, swirling rapids of the city she inhabits. It is textual performance art and embodies the troughs of the infernal prance, with rollicking glimpses of salvific crests, towards a techno-baptismal. The experience of reading E. Luminata is, at once, a starling/refuge and the throwing down of a linguistic gauntlet (as in, la fleur of "a city reconstituted/out of some operetta") - by true wit-mongering maestro(s):
As Diamela Eltit wrote in the Author's Forward, "Writing in that space was something passional and personal. My secret political resistance. When one lives in a world that is collapsing, constructing a book perhaps may be one of the few survival tactics...The part of me that writes is neither comfortable nor resigned and does not want readers who are not partners in dialogue, accomplices in a certain disconformity. The (ideal) reader to whom I aspire is more problematic, with gaps, doubts - a reader crossed by uncertainties...pleasure and happiness, but disturbance and crisis as well."
My acquaintance with E. Luminata brought such unexpected depth to a song that I've always loved by Sting, "They Dance Alone (Cuerca Solo)" -- but never fully appreciated, multi-dimensionally, as I now do (as a teenager in the 80s, the preoccupation was more about Madonna's latest re-incarnation, rather than grasping the political surrealities and nightmares that loomed on distant shores). To read Diamela Eltit, we must travel "...as Portia's suitors come 'as o'er a brook' to see her..." (Shakespeare's Imagery by Caroline Spurgeon), checking our vanity or arrogance at the door and, instead, apprehending - with our hearts - her pencil's portraiture. In the wake of reading this novel, I witnessed our former Great Communicator & President's elaborate state funeral, and had to consider what Chilean women (devoid of the remains of their husbands/fathers/sons) must have thought -- witnessing a shining city upon a hill: the resplendent homage, the bereaved widow -- when they endured silently those inexplicable disappearances, still without a trace, the result of our evil empires clash. A Belmont versus Venice debate (in contrast to our binary wonts for black & white contrasts - or white-washing portrayals; the cry for a more nuanced perspective, a ying/yang distinction)...
Reading Diamela Eltit's novel thrusts us into the very experience of these women and their anguished dances in ways both unsettling and liberating. It also calls us forth, challenges us in our own literary dances with the taboo, our tendency to look askance when faced with linguistic beckonings, pleading that we bear witness to the suffering of others. This literati and her eroticized veterinary/venatorial allusions to mounting for 'top-dog' dominance contextualize Sting's opening lyrics: "Why are these women dancing on their own?/Why is there this sadness in their eyes?/Why are the soldiers here/Their faces fixed like stone?/I can't see what it is they despise/They're dancing with the missing/They're dancing with the dead/They dance with the invisible ones/Their anguish is unsaid." (from: Nothing Like the Sun) E. Luminata, by its stark contrast and avalanche of unfamiliar/ities, displays true bravery amidst great risk and the very real threat of torture and censorship. It's a visceral reading of another time and place, with its profound fragility of consciousness - a Trojan Horse fingerpointing to a ravaged Troy (where the sudden disappearance of innocent/civilian/loved ones can occur before one's very eyes) - something, perhaps, unfathomable to us, collectively, before 9/11.
This reading might mirror back to us - by its bald contrast with our pulp fiction - the dynamics of our often more Pirandellian world: for the most part less tragedy, more problematic comedy, or the tragi-comedy of which we partake, which blurs the real/unreal (think, 'reality tv') of our society and its convention/alities.
This recalls the work of another Latin American writer, Manuel Puig, and his ingenious depiction in the play "Under a Mantle of Stars" - as when we provoke another until at their wit's end, and compelled to scrawl names within yellow wallpaper's mirror, signifying 'how' we occur, if not who we are (as in one case, mine very own - the coinage 'pamelodrama' in fury's hallway scribbled - by an exasperated yet, still collegial/kellner housemate, for my viewing edification each morn, a woefully/truly true tale). After pouring over E. Luminata's text, trying to envision the experience from which it's drawn - the source of Chile's societal madness under dictatorship - I was reminded of the opening quote of Shoshana Felman's book Writing and Madness: "But the gift a man makes of his madness to his fellow creatures, can it be accepted and then returned without interest? And if that interest is not the insanity of the one who receives the other's madness as a royal gift, what might its recompense be?" - Georges Bataille
Certainly Diamela Eltit, within this translation's chrysalis, has made a royal gift - edifying us/U.S. - about the conditions of our military coup, as in my/America's spurious overthrow of their/Latin American democracy, and its anguishing results. Consider that without the artistry of such writers (as Eltit or Isabelle Allende), our collective conscience might have willingly/fully lost its memories. As Ronald Christ writes, in the Translator's Afterword, "Authors, Eltit herself, are different dictators, sayers, governors of words. Her governance resisted still another - deadly - outside as well as inside her book."
In spite of my grandiloquent dances within Zagazig towns, cryptic & baroque (to the utter, grammatical dismay of Wily Sirs), this rare and ground-breaking literary narrative is quite deserving of a broadly attentive English-speaking audience (hearty bards w/ bardic hearts unite): "That light we see is burning in my hall.../How far that little candle throws his beams!/So shines a good deed in a naughty world." - Amazon.com review Diamela Eltit, The Fourth World, Trans. by Dick Gerdes, University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
"No one can be closer to another than a mother to her unborn child. No one, that is, except unborn twins jostling for space in the womb. In this concise and inventive novel, a twin brother and sister vie for attention from the reader much as they competed for room before their birth. Their prenatal intimacy and jealousy interlace until they can hardly recognize who is who.
The chaos originating at the very moment of the twins’ conception gains dramatic proportions when they enter the world male and female. From the moment of their births, everything changes. The lives of the family members begin to unwind as they are each consumed by illness, obsession, and insanity. The inevitable and violent dissolution of the family becomes a metaphor in which Diamela Eltit explores the social crises in Chile during the military dictatorship of General Cesare Augusto Pinochet.
Born in Santiago, Chile, in 1949, Diamela Eltit now makes her home in Mexico as Chile’s cultural attaché. The Fourth World, first published in 1988, is her third novel. While other Chilean writers fled the military dictatorship that began in 1973, Eltit found no alternative but to join resistance groups and actively protest the government until democracy was restored in 1989. In the intervening years she learned the dual importance of concealment and discovery in language and the vital connections among story, politics, and personal survival."

"A brief introduction from the translator places this bizarre, often difficult, yet compelling novel in the company of the Chilean Eltit's other work about marginalization. Twins, a nameless sister and a brother named Mara Chipia, narrate their lives. He begins the story, going back to their conception when their brutish father forced himself on their ill mother. In utero, the two compete for space and the competition continues after birth with the twins often hiding their development from each other. She is the first to speak, so he learns to walk first. But from the first pleasurable sloshings in the womb, the two also share a highly erotic relationship. Adolescence brings envy, as she begins to menstruate and ``embarked on a separate journey of uneasiness that I would never experience.'' With its heavy-handed symbolism, the second half of the novelnarrated by the twin sister, now pregnant with her brother's childis much less satisfying. ``We are fiercely prepared for extinction,'' insists the twin sister. The family's obsession is with the ``sudaca'' child and the act the engendered it. Although Gerdes explains that ``sudaca'' is ``used by Spaniards to denigrate Latin Americans,'' the decision to leave this word in the original Spanish makes it hard for English-speaking readers to feel its full sting. Despite some rocky translation problems and a loss of energy in its latter section, this demands attention." - Publishers Weekly
"A younger compatriot of Chileans Donoso, Skrmeta, Allende, and Dorfman, whose narrative device of intrauterine history in Last Song of Manuel Sendero (LJ 1/87) this novella employs, Eltit camouflages the defense of the marginal and disenfranchised (the "Fourth World" of the title) behind a dialectic political metaphor. The first half, narrated in winding discourse by a male twin, chronicles his life from birth through adolescence. The second half, told by his twin sister in shorter phrases but with more personal expression, focuses on the forthcoming incestuous birth of a deformed girl. This third novel by Eltit, first published in 1988, is her first to be translated into English. A disturbing and challenging new voice in Latin American women's literature; recommended for women's studies collections and for larger literary collections." - Lawrence Olszewski
Diamela Eltit, Custody of the Eyes, Trans. by Ronald Christ and Helen Lane, Lumen Books, 2005.
"A victimized woman victimizes by identical means: alienating surveillance, of her son and herself."

“Custody of the Eyes is Helen Lane and Ronald Christ’s brilliant translation of Diamela Eltit’s Los vigilantes (1994). In the novel, Eltit dramatizes voice, gender, and power in the relationship among mother, son, and father. As translators, Lane and Christ capture the intensity of expression that evokes, calls upon, even preys upon the figure of the mother as the lightning rod of power and repression in an oppressive society. Custody of the Eyes explores the climate of vigilance related not only to gender and familial relations but also to the social fabric torn by the Chilean experience of Pinochet’s dictatorship. Earlier translations of Eltit’s novels, such as Fourth World, Sacred Cow, and Ronald Christ’s E. Luminata, introduced English-language readers to Eltit’s radically experimental prose. Custody of the Eyes brings into English the challenging and questioning linguistic performance that sustains Eltit’s approach to the novelistic genre.” —Danny J. Anderson

Diamela Eltit has “forged what is considered as one of the most risk-taking and consistent narrative projects to emerge in Chile in the last decades.”—Mary Green
Jean Franco describes the goals of Eltit’s fiction: “to act against the authoritarian state, to take literature symbolically into the most marginal of spaces, to work against the easy readability of the commercial text, to foreground the woman’s body as a site of contention, to increase or exaggerate the marginality of art, and juxtapose literature’s marginality to that of prostitutes, vagabonds, and the homeless.”

"The mother of a troubled pre-teen boy gradually reveals her "state of collapse" in anonymous letters that she writes to an unnamed "you" in this 1994 novella from Chilean experimentalist Eltit (E. Luminata). The woman, too fearful to sign her letters, writes from the midst of a horrific Santiago winter during the Pinochet dictatorship. Her addressee emerges, over the course of several missives, as the father of her son; she believes the man to be collaborating with authorities and neighbors in Stasi-like spying and denunciations. When she takes in homeless families who would otherwise perish, the narrator is gripped with the thought that "you" thinks she is taking in lovers, thus sealing her "case" before the shadowy court that, it seems, will judge her. Eltit creates a voice trapped, hysterically, in paranoia and desperation. Framed by several pages of the son's even creepier monologue, this is an elliptical, Kafkaesque cry of utter terror. It is one the last books worked on by late translator Lane, and the first of Lumen's Helen Lane editions." - Publishers Weekly
Diamela Eltit, Sacred Cow, Trans. By Amanda Hopkinson, Serpent's Tail, 1995.


"As the forces of political repression encircle Santiago, the capital of Chile, the narrator raises the question of the relationship between her sexual cravings and fantasies and the domination of women in Chilean society. Sacred Cow is an intense, erotic unveiling of the human psyche."

"The Chilean Eltit (The Fourth World) has a fierce dark side that becomes oppressive in this novel set in Santiago about a woman's obsession with a lover. The narrator is in love with Manuel, a man who has migrated from ``the South'' with his wife. The worse he treats her the more she loves him, and most of this brief novel consists of her eloquent ranting about him. The truth is ephemeral here; the narrator is constantly contradicting herself and others: first she says that Manuel misses the South terribly and talks about it all the time in reverent tones (``City-dweller that I was, his obsession felt foreign to me''); but she then explains that he had really hated the South and had run away from it. When the two are separated, the narrator imagines quite calmly that she is communicating with Manuel by telepathy, making her blind to the oppressive changes taking place in Chile in the '70s because ``With my head thus jammed, it refused to take in the countless changes that were taking place in the city.'' Eventually, she finds herself poverty-stricken and miserable, roaming around ``in pursuit of non-existent jobs.'' The writing here is startling, and often startlingly bloody, and the translation does it justice. As the allegory it clearly is of the position of women in this troubled country, it works well, although on the narrative level it occasionally become repetitive." - Publishers Weekly
"During the Augusto Pinochet years, Diamela Eltit was the leading Chilean writer working in her country, and one that kept exploring new margins of resistance and creativity.
Her novels are radical projects that dispute the public space, the national interpretation and the role of genres under authoritarian conditions. Her most recent books are El lnfarto del alma (heart attack of the soul), a narrative on love in a madhouse, with pictures by Paz Errázuriz, and Los trabajadores de la muerte (death workers), a novel about impoverished peddlers in neoliberal Santiago. Her writing has an avant-gardist’s freedom of forms, a political reaffirmation of margins, and an exploratory and rebellious edge. After working as a cultural attaché for the democratic government in Mexico City, Diamela Eltit now divides her time between Buenos Aires and Santiago, and is a frequent participant in forums and workshops at American universities.
In your 1994 book El infarto del alma, which includes photos by Paz Errázuriz, you show that it is possible for love and eroticism to exist in an insane asylum, and that the desocialized, placeless character of these institutions can provide an added vulnerability and freedom to the discourse of love. If love is in fact an eloquent form of madness, what artistry of love does the asylum promise?- El infarto del alma was a literary experience, a book to which I am still indebted, in the sense that I feel a tinge of regret for not having pushed the writing further. This particular asylum is one of the most extreme in the country—with the understanding that all asylums are extreme places; it is a public hospital that takes in terminal and indigent patients. These are people who carry all of their belongings with them around the hospital; you can imagine the immense daily effort that this entails, and its disproportion to the minimalism of their belongings. It is incredible that these lives, which transpire with such slowness and such effort, should evolve into love affairs. Love in a place like this is a poetic and political act. It laughs in the face of a bourgeois system that turns couples into economic alliances, or commercial enterprises. In the asylum, these social constructs do not exist; they are replaced by the terrible burden of survival and by an unexpected notion of the other. This notion is at the heart of the crisis of these patients, who do not even have a reliable self that they can count on. The art of love is what this space bequeaths to us. The wonderful thing was to be able to reveal the existence of such a subversive union.
In your novels, marginal and decentralized spaces are clearly a privileged position, of speech, of the subject, and for the embodiment of a new order. What do you find and what are you seeking in society’s internal margins?- I find it aesthetically and politically stimulating to work, think, and exist mentally in spaces that are, in a manner of speaking, not “officialized” by the dominant culture. Of course I am thinking of movable places that shift, mutate, and revert back to themselves. In general, official culture softens artistic production and creates a domesticated subject, a sensible literature, and a well-mannered intellectual who functions successfully and comfortably—but whose success is necessarily anodyne—within the dominant system of the moment. In my case, there is a kind of “un-positioning” that is not really part of a deliberate program but which comes about little by little; it is a torsion or distortion that impedes the literature that I frequent from becoming normalized or centralized.
In your novel El cuarto mundo (1988 in Chile; 1995 in the U.S. as The Fourth World) twins converse in their mother’s belly. In Vaca sagrada (1991 in Chile; 1995 in the U.S. as Sacred Cow), a woman bleeds, intermittently and lucidly, throughout the book. In Los vigilantes (1999; The Policemen) a mother and her son are pursued by the ubiquitous police. These narrators speak from the experience of asphyxiation; they are against the wall, on the edge. Is this a reflection of the position of the feminine voice in our society today, or of writing itself?- It’s true, and I’m not exactly sure why, but these characters that appear to me are marked by a sense of being hunted down, and of hunting themselves down. I believe that I function better in a certain dramatic register, though in truth I have a great tendency and vocation for irony. I imagine that the feminine condition is at the origin of this tendency, but I am not really interested in the ideology of the feminine that the system has so cleverly created: a direct, “light,” consumable, and, most importantly, bourgeois femininity. This construction has nullified the possibility of debate, of a space for discussion, and, paradoxically, has promoted silence. I am more interested in the violence that can come out of working within a femininity that transgresses and questions itself. I am not talking about literary militancy. With few exceptions, I am not a fan of literature that is actively and consciously referential. I still think of literature as a thing that can defend itself, of signs as things that can alter the logic of utilitarian language. I think that literature is capable of presenting, through the literary sign, a “feminine” that is more jagged than this and less functional. So I think in literary, rather than in simply sociological terms: if this, then that; if the other, then something else; and if woman is this and the other thing, this is what we owe, or that is our obligation.
One could say that you have composed a significant part of your work “under your breath” during the Chilean military dictatorship, and thereafter in dialogues, forums, and debates. What expectations have been fulfilled in the long transition to democracy? Is present-day Chile capable of recalling all of its recent past?- It has been a truly staggering passage from democracy to dictatorship, and then from dictatorship to democracy. I published under the dictatorship, during those dark, wounding years. And the transition back to democracy has been traumatic. Memory is altered by political interests and by the forces exerted by savage capitalism. Memory is the thing that is most battered by the neoliberal system, which requires an unsatisfactory present in order to oblige the subject to obtain fulfillment through consumption. The only epic dimension within the neoliberalist notion of desire is in purchasing, and the potential for indebtedness. Of course, on the fringes there are solid realities, voices that conserve their memories, mental or social zones that prove irreducible in the process of the globalization of the neoliberal project. Part of me continues to struggle because of the inability to achieve complete justice in the face of the excesses of the past. Pinochet’s imprisonment is a milestone, but the images of the ex-dictator’s captivity pale in comparison to the conditions of captivity of his victims, so the consolation can only be partial. But perhaps we must be satisfied with this minimum. I haven’t yet been able to do so. I don’t believe I ever will.
When you began writing, Latin American art was living its heroic period, through workshops, comunidades de base, discussion groups, and practices of aesthetic renewal. Today, one could say that these writers have stepped forward into the public space of media culture, into the ebb and flow of the market. How do you see these processes, and what place have you found in which to continue to explore freely?- It’s true, when I wrote my first books I was immersed in an antidictatorial epic and ethic. It was a generalized feeling, and in Chile it was called the “alternative” world. Even so, from the beginning my books provoked a certain resistance within the system. My first novel Lumpérica (1983; E. Luminata, 1997) was not what one would call a transparent work. And, later on, if we are going to discuss the difficulties of inclusion, we would have to talk about the central role of the market—by which I mean the overvaluation of commercial literature, and the way that publishers favor this type of writing. But of course this is a result of the neoliberal hegemony. Beyond the costs, the question in this new media-filled reality is, clearly, how to keep desire alive. It may be that there have always been stumbling blocks in literary creation and that today we are experiencing a change in the technology that drives those stumbling blocks. I don’t know, but it’s possible. I try to think in less functional terms, in terms of desire and of the imagined. The truth is that personally I am horrified—as I would be by a horror movie—by the idea of an official writer. I’m partly king when I say this, and I’m caricaturing a bit, but I find the writers who go around proclaiming a series of clichés and banalities to be terribly tragic. They aspire to become portable, recyclable oracles, and in the end they fit perfectly into a market that asks them to furnish more and more truths for their readers. What I’m talking about, beyond the changes that are taking place in the social landscape, are the tensions that exist in the system, the repressions, everything that the system excludes. This is the heart of my work and the marionette string that moves my hand to write.
Tell me about the play that you are currently writing.
- I’m finishing a play that I’m not sure could ever be performed on stage. What matters to me, what interests me, is the writing of a dramatic work as a literary experience. I am still thinking about the body and power, the body and the obligations that are imposed upon it, the body and its desolation. And also the cruel way in which different systems attack the body through refined, painful, and sustained processes, like debt in the case of the neoliberal system. There exists a residue of fascism that I am trying to dramatize. I am working in these genres, and at the same time writing several screenplays about the fascist component of power. These screenplays are non- or anticommercial. I find it interesting to propose an alternative economy, one that is more wild and unexpected, a literary place that is, in appearance, more poor, less populated. I’m not talking about Romanticism or literary essentialism, but rather trying to point out the deliberate and conscious construction of a space that is troubled, ill-conceived, poorly realized.
What are you reading with interest these days?- I’ve been interested in the Portuguese writer Antonio Lobo Antunes because of his aesthetic of emotions; it is an obsessive kind of writing, very extreme in its syntax. In fact—and I find this fascinating—his novels closely resemble one another; only the subject changes, but the construction is the same from one work to the next. This amazes and captivates me. And I’m reading a book that just came out called Cartas de petición, Chile 1973–1989 by the professor and critic Leonidas Morales. He has selected a series of letters written by victims of the dictatorship and their relatives, requests to be set free or inquiries about the whereabouts of family members. It is an extremely moving book, essential for understanding the dimensions what happened in Chile, and especially interesting because the letters are written by common people. Leonidas Morales finds connections between these letters and the petition letters written by the original inhabitants of Chile to the authorities of the Spanish Crown. It is an essential book, though of course painful to read.
You have lived for several years in Mexico City, and now you have moved to Buenos Aires. Is one lifetime enough for those use two cities?- Well, we are talking about a privileged situation. Really, I have lived my whole life in Chile; I only left in 1990. I’ve done things backwards. Mexico City has been very important to me, and I still miss its energy, its mestizo way of life, its vibrant folk art. I have maintained some wonderful friendships which in some measure make up for the daily loss of place. Then I arrived in Buenos Aires and soon found myself caught up in the literary density I sense here. But the tragic reality for me is a kind of provincialism that I feel and cannot leave behind. I’m not talking about patriotism; there are aspects of Chilean society that I consider deplorable: the arrivism, the classism, what amounts to a kind of deliberate ignorance. But beyond that I miss my neighborhood, my block, my friends’ faces, and the political destiny of those in need. But, going back to your question, I counter with my own: what lifetime could be enough to encompass the two fundamental poles of this continent, Buenos Aires and Mexico City?" - Interview by Julio Ortega

"Marginalities: Diamela Eltit and the Subversion of Mainstream Literature in Chile. By GISELA NORAT. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2002.This collection of essays is the first book-length study of the novelistic and nonfictional body of work of the contemporary Chilean author Diamela Eltit. Consisting of an introduction followed by six essays, this study offers a critical analysis of the five novels and two non-fictional texts published by Eltit between 1983 and 1995, a period that spans the latter half of the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-90) and the return of a democratically elected government in Chile. Norat states that the aim of her study is to offer 'a practical tool for first-time or hesitant Eltit readers who seek discussion of a particular book or books' (p. 16). The essays approach her first five novels individually, rather than thematically, and a brief reading of her sixthnovel, Los trabajadores de la muerte (1998), is included in the form of an epilogue. In her second essay Norat offers a joint analysis of Eltit's two non-fictional texts: the transcription of the testimony of a vagrant in El padre m[sections]o (1989), and a photo-essay that chronicles the residents of a psychiatric hospital in Chile, El infarto del alma (1994), co-authored with the Chilean photographer Paz Errazuriz. English translations of the titles of Eltit's texts, and of quotations from her work, are included throughout.
This study takes as its starting point the theme of 'marginalities', in terms both of Eltit's marginal position as a woman writer in Latin America and of the intersection of social, political, sexual, ethnic, and gendered categories of marginality that are critically examined in her work. The introduction opens by addressing the labels of 'difficult' and 'cryptic' that have been associated with Eltit's texts since the publication of her first, and radically experimental, novel, Lumperica, in 1983. Norat acknowledges that the fragmentation of language and plot, and the character marginality found in Eltit's texts, may have distanced some readers and critics, but she seeks to redress this by locating Eltit within the postmodernist tendency to interrogate genre boundaries and models of identity. Noting that the female body is central to Eltit's narrative, Norat simultaneously draws on feminist theory in order to construct a general theoretical framework that she describes as a feminist/postmodernist one. The introductory chapter outlines the debates surrounding postmodernism in Latin America, while also exploring the differences and points of intersection that exist between postmodernism and feminism.
Norat uses Eltit's fourth novel, Vaca Sagrada (1993), to exemplify her argument that Eltit's writing is 'undeniably female-centred while at the same time wholly postmodern' (p. 23). This essay examines the textual instability and ambiguity of Vaca Sagrada in terms of postmodernist theories, while exploring the narrative inscription of female experience through the menstrual blood that emanates from the body of the protagonist/narrator, Francisca. While this study examines categories of marginality throughout, other essays veer away from the postmodernist/ feminist slant in order to employ a range of theoretical approaches that emphasize what Norat describes as 'the interpretative richness which Eltit's texts offer the literary critic' (p. 17). Each essay is written to stand alone, but when collated into a book-length study of this kind, the disparate theoretical explorations at times result in a sense of disjointedness.
Throughout the study, Norat aims to initiate a dialogue between Eltit's novels and other Latin American narrative, most notably in the essay on El cuarto mundo (1989), a substantial part of which offers a comparative reading of this novel with Cristobal Nonato, by Carlos Fuentes. A sense of historical moment is given, as the texts are placed within the socio-political and cultural context of the Pinochet dictatorship. Further reference could have been made to the post-dictatorship period in Chile (since 1990), a point that would help to locate Eltit's later texts. Biographical information regarding the author and Eltit's own comments in published interviews regarding her work are supplied, and the bibliography is comprehensive, although Eugenia Brito's Campos minados (literatura post-golpe en Chile) (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 1990) is notably absent. However, the clear and detailed analysis of key passages of Eltit's texts and the numerous interpretative possibilities that this study opens up make it a useful and timely introduction for students who are approaching Eltit's work for the first time." - Mary Green
Diamela Eltit: Lumperica
Mary Green: Diamela Eltit: A Gendered Politics of Writing (pdf)
Mary Green, Diamela Eltit: Reading the Mother, Boydell & Brewer, Limited, 2007.


"The Chilean author, Diamela Eltit, whose work spans the periods of the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) and the Transition to Democracy (1990-), is one of the most innovative and challenging writers in contemporary Latin America. This book focuses on the representation of motherhood in Eltit's first six novels and, through a chronological series of close readings, argues that the maternal body and mother-child relations are crucial for an understanding of the critical challenge posed by Eltit's narrative oeuvre, too frequently dismissed as 'hermetic'. An analysis of the novels' structure and language reveals how Eltit seeks to reconfigure the foundations of symbolic structures and so incorporate the mother as a subject. Although the study draws on a feminist psychoanalytic framework to explore Eltit's continuous disarticulation of key concepts that emanate from the West, specifically in relation to the formation of gender and sexuality, the work of the major Chilean cultural theorist, Nelly Richard, is also used to situate Eltit's work within the political and cultural context of Chile. MARY GREEN lectures in Hispanic Studies at the University of Wales, Swansea."

Dion McGregor – Recordings of the world most famous sleeptalker: otherworldly, deeply fascinating and sexually disturbing

Dion McGregor, The Dream World of Dion McGregor, Bernard Geis 1964.

„Dion McGregor was a sleeptalker like no other. It’s always entertaining to listen on occasion to the REM ramblings of a loved one, family member or roommate, as long as it doesn’t disrupt one’s own sleep — but these recordings are otherworldly, deeply fascinating and sexually disturbing, to list but a few descriptions. The Guardian sez:
There is a delicious irony to the story of musician Dion McGregor. A bohemian chancer who struggled for years to produce a hit record, he finally released an album on Decca in 1964, except it didn’t feature songs, but dreams. For McGregor is probably the world’s most famous sleep-talker. He was a man who could speak in complete, comprehensible sentences while asleep, painstakingly describing the events of his hallucinations as they unfolded, before, more often than not, his nightmares would conclude with a howl. Whether he was a conman or the genuine article, it’s certainly an unusual take on the American Dream.
After hearing these records quite a few times, I’m unconvinced that anyone could make this stuff up out of any conscious desire. My absolute favorite parts are the dreams’ finales, when Dion inevitably lets forth a truly terrifying, bloodcurdling shrieky blurts.
The first album, “The Dream World of Dion McGregor”, was released in the ’60s, and is rather tame, compared to the freaky uncensored realms of the two later compilations.“

"Somewhere between Jonathan Winters and Brother Theodore on the one hand, and William Burroughs and Terry Southern on the other, there existed a totally un-famous yet incredibly imaginative failed songwriter who happened to “sleeptalk” very odd material in the early morning hours. Dion McGregor was the gent’s name, and he is about as forgotten in pop culture circles as Murray Roman.
However, those who have listened to his amazing spoken-word 1964 LP The Dream World of Dion McGregor know that McGregor was a seminally weird performer — who just happened to never have once performed on a stage (he acted in several films in his early years, but gave up the craft by the 1950s). The mythology on McGregor was that he “sleeptalked” these bizarrely surreal vignettes, which run the gamut from laidback moments of oddball discussion, to vague and hazy trips through queerly-inhabited landscapes, to incidents rife with melodramatic and cartoonish peril. The Dream Life album contained 10 of these dreams, which were taped on reel-to-reel by his songwriting collaborator Mike Barr in their apartment at First Avenue and 53rd St. in NYC, from 1961-1967.
I had heard the album for the first time more than a decade ago, but wasn’t aware until about two weeks back that two CD sequels existed, culled from the same material. All three albums are available online for free (although, of course, I recommend you buy the CDs if you like the material) — but more about that below. First, let me consider the obvious question: what is this stuff? It definitely qualifies as humor of a sort, but it’s not a standard comedy LP. At times one can be convinced that McGregor is insane but, as with Brother Theodore and Jonathan Winters, this is actually a creative person *playing the role* of a crazy person — or, more appropriately, given the mythology, a creative person’s subconscious running wild, on tape.
The question of whether McGregor was for real is addressed in the best biographical article on the man ever published, which can be found here. Author Phil Milstein maintains that he interviewed several people who knew McGregor and saw him actually sleeptalk. He swears that it’s for real. As you listen to the original LP and its CD sequels, however, it’s sorta hard to believe that contention, since McGregor’s pieces, while scattershot (like the best Winters improv sessions), are developed vignettes that have specific characterizations, take their bizarre premises as far as they can possibly go, and have a weird internal rhythm that suggests they weren’t just (ahem) dreamed up out of the blue. The dreams were in fact also converted into print — Dream Life of Dion McGregor book was published in 1964 by Bernard Geis, with illustrations by a very appropriate artist, Edward Gorey.
The most interesting aspect of McGregor’s life to me, is the revelation in Milstein’s article that McGregor was part of the NYC “private film society” scene in the 1950s and ’60s — the folks who where the American equivalent of the Cinematheque/Cahiers crowd, who gathered at various apartments to watch 16mm prints of old movies and attended Manhattan’s many repertory houses together to check out Golden Age classics. McGregor, in fact, had an encyclopedic knowledge of old movies, and had a very large still collection which he supplied to the Citadel Films of… series (he gets co-author credit on The Films of Greta Garbo), which at that time was supervised by Mark Ricci of the Memory Shop (where McGregor worked when he needed dough – and which he mentions in one of his “trips” represented on YouTube [see below]).
I urge you to listen to all of McGregor’s work linked to below, and yes, check the vids and the MySpace if you want a quick fix. Also, read Milstein’s article, which gives you the full story behind the recordings. The long and the short of it was that McGregor was an aspiring songwriter who wanted his work to appear on Broadway, but the closest he got was to have a few songs included in various performers’ nightclub acts and have a few shows mounted off-Broadway (one, co-written by Robert Cobert of Dark Shadows fame, actually made its bow as an “original cast album” of a show that was never actually produced!). His single biggest moment of fame was having Barbra Streisand include one of his and Barr’s tunes (“Where is the Wonder”) on her My Name is Barbra LP and TV special. Dion (his parents named him for Dionysus — little more needs be added) lived from 1922-94, was a New Yorker by birth and disposition, but lived on the West Coast in his latter years with his last partner, whom he met (surprise) at an old movie screening.
The three McGregor albums are truly unlike anything you’ve ever heard. Which is not to say they’re hysterically, laugh-out loud funny. They’re more strange than anything, and in fact, do neatly fit with both the “sick humor” of Lenny Bruce and co., as well as the “black humor” of Southern, Bruce Jay Friedman, Joseph Heller, and friends. While re-listening to the albums today, I was struck by how the stuff could easily be described as the kind of thing that drug-taking artistes would come up with, but to all accounts McGregor was a straight arrow (well, maybe not straight, but…). I wondered if maybe the gent imbibed, because at times he does sound like the later Truman Capote (who was always as sharp as a tack while he was stewed to the gills). Apparently, though, McGregor didn’t indulge in that fashion either. Milstein notes that a few tapes of his real speaking voice exist — among them, an appearance promoting the LP and the hardback book on the Long John Nebel show. On those tapes he speaks differently, so perhaps the somewhat liquored-up effect or slow speech pattern was indeed what he sounded like when he was sleeptalking. Or, of course, the last option: that the voice was just another aspect of his performing and he, along with his friends (and publisher and record producer "witnesses"), made the whole sleeptalking thing up. In any case, whatever the truth may be, the albums are worth hearing, and so we move to the audio portion of the program.
The three albums have been uploaded by Bret B. at Egg City Radio (those who are familiar with the TV scripts of Stanley Ralph Ross will notice that I didn’t go for “eggs-cellent”). I heavily recommend Bret’s blog, which also has links to Lester Bangs’ Jook Savages on the Brazos LP, as well as several National Lampoon Radio Hours. The latter are as fresh and vibrant as when they were recorded in 1973-74, with any single hour as funny as the cumulative Saturday Night Live output for the last 24 years. Lorne Michaels should thank his lucky stars that Mr. Mike existed (as should we).
But back to McGregor. The first album, as noted, is the 1964 Decca LP The Dream Life of Dion McGregor. The dreams are all joined in media res, with McGregor just launching into his character, whether he be a guy reminiscing about a magical girl he knew years before, or a man lamenting “Terrible Town” and wanting to visit “Lovely-ville,” or the greedy relative who wants to write a letter to his uncle using the word “perspicacity,” which he can’t spell. Since there are no samples of this available for fast perusal, I put up the most grisly vision, “The Swimming Pool” on YouTube (“well, that lady died rather uselessly, didn’t she?”). It ends with his stock in trade, a frenzied scream:
The second album was released in 1999.It contained additional “dreams” from the original reel-to-reel tapes, which were apparently kept by Mike Barr all those many years. It is called Dion McGregor Dreams Again, and features dreams that are surreally dirty (I’m thinking Dion was well-aware of not only Lenny but Mr. Burroughs’ mid-day repast). The album is well worth your time, and has its own little website here. The album’s stranger tracks include: “Vulvina,” a visit to see a stripper/psychic who demands that Dion’s character (a frustrated husband) put his head in her vagina; a collector of mythological creatures who finally finds a gryphon (yeah sure, this stuff was all improv-ed from the subconscious); and Dion working as a tattoo artist who has to put “LOVE” and “HATE” on either side of a fat woman’s tongue.
I would recommend that you check out the page put up on MySpace for McGregor which contains a few choice cuts. Also, you can immediately hear the weirdest tracks on Youtube. This is one of the filthier flights of fancy, “The Wagon”:
This one, which mentions TONS of now-long-gone Manhattan movie theaters (and the Memory Shop), is a MUST-LISTEN for New Yorkers who remember what used to be in the way of movie palaces around this burg (“Do you want to go to the Thalia — do you want to go to the Thalia?”):
And a little “thought for the day”:
The third and final album (so far) is from 2004. It’s called The Further Somniloquies of Dion McGregor. My personal fave bit is a loooong routine called "Midget City," but he also has a wonderful trip through a mansion being offered for sale — with different implements of murder in every room. There’s no better way to end this survey of McGregor’s insane fancies than his account of a battle to avoid “the poison éclair,” the exceedingly nutsy “Food Roulette.” And one final question: how come those loud car horns never woke our sleeptalker up?" -
mediafunhouse.blogspot.com


"DION McGREGOR IS the greatest sleeptalker in recorded history. In another age, the brilliance of his slumbered monologues would have seen him branded a spirit medium or a sorcerer, subjected him to persecution for demonic possession, or led to his being declared insane. But in this slightly more enlightened era, sleeptalking as sparkling as Dion McGregor's can only be celebrated. His dream-stories are so unique that a special word had to be coined just to describe them. And so, what you're about to hear are the somniloquies of DION McGREGOR.
Unlike your average garden-variety sleeptalker, whose utterings rarely go beyond a few indistinct words here and there or perhaps the occasional semi-coherent mumbled sentence, Dion McGregor actually dreams out loud, verbalizing fully-realized miniature dramas of the subconscious. His clear articulation is underscored by the noises of the New York City street traffic outside his open second-storey window. The somniloquies of Dion McGregor are among the damnedest sounds you'll ever hear.
In one sense, Dion McGregor's dreams are not really all that different from those of us mortals. Like ours, the premises of his dreams are unearthly takes on real-life events and thoughts, their plots prone to labyrinthine twists and broad leaps of logic. The premise is always resolved (although, alas, in his case almost never happily so). But this is where the similarity to the dreams of ordinary people the dreams of Dion McGregor end. Quite unlike the rest of us, Dion McGregor narrated his dreams, in a fey, slightly distracted and sometimes insolent voice, the irregularity of his cadences only amplifying the hypnotic effect. Only Dion McGregor's dreams were incessantly tape recorded. And only Dion McGregor's dreams were the end-products of such an unbridled subvoluntary imagination.
McGregor's special brand of nocturnal emissions includes puns, rhymes, internal dialogues, made-up songs, sound effects, brogues and dialects, spelling games, existential dilemmas, chase scenes, violent arguments, and even nonsensical "tongues." The characters that inhabit his somniloquies include an ugly woman who'd been married 28 times, a woman with an orifice large enough to house a sideshow tip, an array of post-endangered animal species, various faded screen stars, and the perspicacious old Uncle Horace. His sleeptalking sessions conjure such fantastical scenarios as a cemetery for midgets, a martini eyewash, the Candy of Knowledge, a contest for cunnilinguists, a balloon ride to the moon, the Thumb Your Nose club (founded by Lenny Bruce), and a pastry table that starts its own food fight.
W E GO BACK. Picture New York, New York in its great grey Cold War period -- the city of Automats and Polo Grounds and Flatiron Buildings. The year is 1953, the address 255 E. 50th Street at 2nd Avenue, on the east side of midtown Manhattan. Our protagonist, an indigent wit, lyricist and movie buff named Dion McGregor, has just set himself up as the uninvited houseguest of yet another friend, this one a multitalented, semi-famous entertainer named Carleton Carpenter, who has just been granted his release from an MGM acting contract. McGregor and Carpenter have recently begun writing songs together, McGregor handling the words and Carpenter the music. McGregor, known to his friends as an "inveterate freeloader," an "international freebie," and "the man who came to dinner," has made a temporary home for himself on a slide-out ottoman in Carpenter's living room.
Despite the extravagant street noises intruding into their apartment, and despite the fact that the living room was a long hallway away from Carpenter's bedroom, midnight mutterings were heard. But McGregor's utterances were not yet the clear, spoken-aloud dreams of the sort that comprise this album - the true epiphany was yet to come. McGregor himself would later tell a radio audience (appropriately, in the middle of the night) that he'd been talking in his sleep since he was five years old, but we can presume that back then, too, his talent was not a very well-defined one.
In the late summer or early autumn of 1955, Carpenter's actual roommate returned to New York and McGregor was forced to find another couch to call home. He hiked the few blocks to 961 1st AVENUE (photo courtesy Ellery Eskelin), a nondescript five-storey walkup near the corner of 53rd Street, where another new songwriting partner of his named MICHAEL BARR had an apartment on the second floor. McGregor's sleeptalking was still a very occasional and unremarkable thing, and during this period Barr never even got to hear any of it. McGregor eventually moved (or was moved) up three flights to the apartment of yet another friend, Peter de Rome, a British writer and filmmaker (and later a prominent director of gay erotic films), where he lasted for a year or so as a resident of de Rome's couch.
It was during this year -- 1960, give or take a few months -- that McGregor's sleeptalking finally blossomed, and was ready to be recognized as the rare and marvelous beast that it was. Not having to hear his somniloquies himself, McGregor wasn't especially moved one way or another by them, but de Rome was intrigued. According to the introductory notes McGregor wrote to the book version of The Dream World Of Dion McGregor, de Rome "tried taking the dreams down in longhand, but the words came faster than he could write. I had a good laugh about it and then forgot it." But when de Rome told Barr about the sleeptalking, Barr immediately recognized that he had stumbled onto something special. Barr, a budding composer whose hobby was tape-recording the audio portions of movie musicals off late-night TV, was eager to turn his microphone on McGregor's dreams. McGregor, on the other hand, was not quite so eager to have his dreams turned upon, but for the historical record -- as well as for a more-or-less permanent address -- he would endure. All that he hoped to directly gain from having his dreams recorded were ideas for potential song lyrics. McGregor moved back to the spare twin bed in Barr's living room, where his exceptional talent would be voluminously documented over the course of the next seven years.
Barr's fascination with making these tapes quickly grew to an obsession. The somniloquies would typically arrive just prior to McGregor's awakening, not every morning like clockwork but rather, as if to keep Barr on his toes, four or five days per week. To compensate for their inconstancy, he would sometimes emit more than one dream in a day, amounting to as many as seven separate somniloquies in a single session.
By the time McGregor began speaking each morning, Barr would already be up and waiting for him, the microphone of his second-hand Pentron reel-to-reel recorder (soon upgraded to an Ampex) resting on a pink table behind and slightly above the sleeper's head, his own breath at half-speed in anticipation of the weirdness that was about to arise. The phone would be taken off the hook so its ring -- you never know when someone might need to call you at 6 a.m. -- would not interfere with the dream, nor with the taping of it. The tape deck itself rested in the hallway near Barr's bedroom, the better to smother his face in his pillow to stifle waves of laughter from leaking onto the tape.
By Barr's estimate, he eventually recorded over 500 of his roommate's somniloquies. McGregor complained (lightheartedly, one assumes) in the book's introduction about "the miles of tape that have taken over the apartment." In reality, the 7" reels were stored neatly in their boxes, the boxes stacked in bookshelves along the walls of the living room -- but there were a lot of boxes.
As the collection of tape reels grew, Barr began playing them for some of their friends in New York's theatrical whirl. They eventually reached the ears of producer and talent agent Jules Green, a co-creator of The Tonight Show and manager of Steve Allen, still a hot property at the time. At that point, things quickly moved into high gear. Green was struck by the alien notion of a man who dreams out loud, and by the compounded strangeness of being able to eavesdrop on those dreams. He approached Milt Gabler, A&R director of Decca Records, to suggest that Decca release an audio verité album of the best of the somniloquy tapes.
Gabler was a savvy industry insider with an ear for unique material. He had been the founder of Commodore Records, the world's first independent jazz label, which in 1939 released Billie Holiday singing "Strange Fruit," a song that directly and chillingly addressed the topic of racial lynchings in the South. "Strange Fruit" was so withering that Billie's contracted label, Columbia, had shied away from releasing it. Gabler jumped at the opportunity, and his release of "Strange Fruit" put Commodore on the map. The song's impact remains powerful enough that it merited a full-length article in the September 1998 issue of Vanity Fair, a rare achievement for a single song.
In 1954, by then a member of Decca's A&R staff, Gabler produced a New Jersey-based hillbilly combo doing their best imitation of a rhythm and blues number. The band was Bill Haley & The Comets, the song was "Rock Around The Clock," and alongside a few of Elvis Presley's early RCA releases it ignited the rocknroll era.
To finally make the point, Milt Gabler was a truly wild cat, who decided to release THE DREAM WORLD OF DION McGREGOR (HE TALKS IN HIS SLEEP) (left: album cover), "because I was a nut!" Gabler had no expectation nor even reasonable hope that such a strange album might do any significant business. "I knew it wouldn't be a gigantic seller," he says today, "but I thought I should do it just to show that some people talk in their sleep. This guy told complete stories and that's what I wanted to prove." Gabler adds, as if the point weren't inherently clear, "I did it because it was different." The album of ten dream-tapes was released in January of 1964.
Green also played the tapes for Bernard Geis, a respected book publisher whose imprint was distributed by Random House. Unlike Gabler, Geis was looking for sales. "I thought it might catch on as a novelty," he remembers. "I thought it was quite an unusual book and took a flyer on it." On May 27, 1964, Bernard Geis Associates published THE DREAM WORLD OF DION McGREGOR (right: book cover), a collection of transcriptions of 70 of McGregor's somniloquies.
To render the gorgeous three-color (red, black and a near-golden yellow) cover illustration and the 30 black-and-white line drawings inside, Geis hired Edward Gorey, a high school classmate of his wife's who was just beginning his rise to fame as an illustrator of the whimsical and the macabre. The album jacket used virtually the same cover art as the book, but because of its different shape had to be redrawn from scratch. Gorey lettered both covers by hand, but the album bore a subtitle, (He Talks In His Sleep), that was not conferred to the book. The reason for this difference is uncertain, but it was probably just a matter of space. At a glance, however, it's hard to tell the two covers apart.
The releases were given sparse promotion. On the same day Bernard Geis Associates published The Dream World Of Dion McGregor, they also released a biography of Jean Harlow that was a tie-in to a big-budget movie starring the bombshell Carroll Baker. The Harlow book (which, by perverse irony, included several stills supplied by McGregor) got the lion's share of the company's publicity muscle, but a wee bit still managed to spill over onto their quirky little sleeptalking volume. A bookstore devoted an entire Fifth Avenue window to a display of both the album and the book. The New York Times ran a small ad. In a clever endorsement concept, McGregor was scheduled to appear at a trade show booth sponsored by the Simmons Mattress company, but that fell through. Some television appearances were planned, but they too never came to pass. The few press reviews that trickled in were mixed -- one particularly glowing one in a Tampa newspaper, of all unexpected places, seemed to get it.
The one thing that does remain is a tape of an overnight radio program which aired on July 8, 1964, hosted by bizarro New York talkmaster LONG JOHN NEBEL. Over the course of a midnight-to-5 a.m. roundtable discussion, Nebel subjected McGregor to the taunts of his gang of smug know-it-alls, who alternately play along with and patronize our sleeptalker. But McGregor emerged imperturbed. His wall of defense was erected automatically by the fact that he was never "into" the sleeptalking nearly as much as Barr was, and so he wryly agreed with Nebel's goons that these releases were indeed fairly ridiculous. His bemused detachment allowed him to maintain dignity in the face of a barrage of misdirected spitballs. In typical fashion, Nebel even produced a hypnotist, who brought McGregor under for a while. He elicited snatches of two dreams, one a repeat of a portion of "Peony" (a dream about "a Chinese-Austrian dwarf" which appears both in the book and on the first album), the other a recreation of McGregor's failed attempt to levitate two tables and a roomful of friends. It was the levitation portion that finally impressed the panel, although it's hard to tell whether they were responding more to the dream they heard or to McGregor's telling them, after coming out of the state and hearing a playback of it, that the events he dreamt of actually happened. [transcript]
The album and the book both stiffed. Geis recalls, "I don't think we sold more than six, seven thousand copies," out of an initial press run of ten thousand. The remains were remaindered. Gabler (who really does speak in exclamation points) doesn't recall any numbers on the record, but it still stands out in his memory as "one of the biggest flops I ever put out!" He seemed more proud of the fact than distressed by it.
W ITH McGREGOR'S COOPERATION and Green's supervision, Barr had pulled off a most subversive stunt: he had taken a set of utterly anti-commercial tape recordings and had snookered two major publishing firms into releasing versions of them. Although still as fascinated as ever by their haunting occurrence, there was little more to be accomplished by his taping of further dreams. In 1967 McGregor finally got a place of his own, on E. 3rd Street in a building directly across from the Hell's Angels' stomping ground. He referred to the place as Fear Village, and so naturally didn't spend a whole lot of time there, but he wasn't spending many nights at Barr's apartment anymore, either. Mike Barr was finally forced to hit the Stop button on his tapings of the somniloquies of Dion McGregor.
To this day, though, Michael Barr refers to those tapes as "the paramount thing in my life." Early on, Barr and McGregor started thinking of them as the basis for a musical they would write. They even had a serious nibble towards getting a show produced, but, in a fashion that would repeat itself over and over again in McGregor's professional life, nothing came of it. But it is an idea which Barr has continued to develop over the years. He has finally completed a musical version of The Dream World Of Dion McGregor, which will interweave the original dream-tapes with his own songs and those he and McGregor wrote together. He is currently shopping around a demo tape in the hopes of finding a producer." - Phil Milstein


Download his three albums

Frank Hinton - He is made. In the chapbook he is made when a father dies. He is a kind of child idea, a child born into fiction

Frank Hinton, I Don’t Respect Female Expression, Safety Third Enterprises, 2011.

"Who is Frank Hinton? The author of the newest chapbook from Safety Third Enterprises? Why yes, but more so Frank, a manifested male character, is the voice of a woman searching out for masculinity while on an island of femininity.
“He is made. In the chapbook he is made when a father dies. He is a kind of child idea, a child born into fiction,” Hinton says of her own creation within the narrative walls of I Don’t Respect Female Expression.
Can men and women ever truly understand each other? At our best social moments we come to claim victory by only grasping at the patterns of our sexual opposites. In the grand scheme we stumble clueless. Hinton seeks to get past that, all the while enjoying the juxtaposition of female power and female powerlessness as they stand as a cage and weapon mixed together, a modern cocktail."

“I’s a way and I’s a way to know. I’s not forty thousand dead crabs on a beach. I’s not the dog Will Smith kills in the movie or the photo of your dad’s old paddle boat. But sometimes I is soft and lonely, and sometimes I makes the hole that makes more holes. Frank Hinton makes the I that knows what it holds. Knows without affect, affected by tenderness. When this chapbook asks you to dance, you’ll shake your head no and dance anyway. There’s a lot to be kissed on our trip to the shore.”- Mike Young

"I have focused on Steve Roggenbuck’s latest endeavor, Internet Poetry on this blog before. While the whole site offers a plethora of material yanked from the internet’s general indifference, one piece got stuck in my head. That was Frank Hinton’s piece, which apparently is called “unrequested livejasmin.com pop-up”. I thought about it a lot and decided to find out a little more about this person.
Frank Hinton keeps busy. Halifax, Nova Scotia doesn’t really offer a great deal of activities, excluding an airline (Air Canada Jazz) which elicits some of the angriest emotions I can muster out of my near-uniform polite attitude. I reckon Frank Hinton is the chief exporter of poetry and literature for the general Halifax metropolitan area. Besides writing her own poetry, she’s also an editor and founder of the online literary journal Metazen. Metazen is probably one of the best places to publish literature online, since they tend to curate the work and apply such abnormal things like standards. Originally it started as a place to post her drunken writing. As someone who created a Facebook group for this sole purpose, it is reassuring to know some drunken thoughts transform themselves into full-bodied literary journals.
Obviously she is a female and writes under a male pseudonym Frank who she refers to as “A sad man, a pathetic man”. How she explains it is her enjoyment of ambiguity. Living on a gender pendulum, it allows a greater amount of freedom than simply being thought of as a ‘male’ or ‘female’ writer. There are countless articles explaining how this kind of perception (either as a male or female writer) can create a certain expectation. By using an obvious pseudonym, it makes things more interesting. Her online persona is extremely shadowy, mysterious. We don’t really know much about her besides her writing. Keeping mysterious yet accessible makes the work more interesting, as I find it can be easier to write something when I know I’m anonymous. The pain of writing something with your actual name attached probably contributes to a great deal of dishonesty within literature, as if the writer is trying to impress you in some small way. Frank Hinton’s writing is direct painfully so at times.
She has a few poems lying around in odds and ends. Apparently she also has a chapbook called “I don’t respect female expression” coming out around the end of April from Safety Third Enterprises. But I haven’t read it. So I won’t go over it. Instead, I’ll go over her poems she’s had lying around, whatever I could find basically. Most of these I found on her Spartan-style Tumblr which you can access here. Though I won’t review every one of these, I do recommend reading all of them.
Her piece for Lamination Colony, called “How to be Me, an Instructional Video narrated by Frank Hinton” shows a certain playfulness. In here you learn how to hate people on a bus, chew off your fingernail in public (which is an actual skill) and how to avoid negative thinking upon waking up. Since she does have this on the internet, she explains how to post online in order to flame or remain anonymous (both good choices). Along with these apparent instructions is the final sentence which states “You were once a child and you had it all”. That’s probably one of my favorite lines of hers. Children get lucky with the amount of happiness they get. Then come teenage years they grow overly angst-ridden and depressed. Finally, in their twenties they begin trying to improve themselves through questionable practices of self-help, self-improvement and other endeavors of dubious merit.
Relationships get a lot of attention in her poetry. Every word she uses has a distinct meaning or conveys a particular meaning. In “I’d be a Barbie without him” she takes on a female persona. Frank becomes one of the antagonists in this story/poem. Jumping between ages, you see the evolving attitude and increasing knowledge of sexuality. Some of it is humorous, like at age 17 when she tried to return the rock to Glenn but Glenn didn’t live there anymore. Other instances show Frank as a 12 year old, then what I’d think was a first-time at 18, I could be wrong. Everything is in shadows here. Nothing really is fully explained, but as time progresses; certain numbness sets in followed by a plea at the end.
Part of my joy reading these are how well she describes various feelings about love. Love is a difficult thing to write about without falling into the extremes of anger, sadness, despair, happiness, coy, and so on. Frank Hinton avoids these. She writes things with an honesty that’s hard to find. Being honest could be funny or tragic, it depends on the circumstances and often her work can be both. Her chapbook will explore these themes even further." - Beach Sloth

"If you are at all involved in the online lit community you have most likely heard (or read, as it might be) the name Frank Hinton. Hinton is the mastermind behind Metazen, but she is also one of the community’s most vibrant voices. Now, with her first chapbook, I Don’t Respect Female Expression Hinton is poised to take an even larger share of the community into the folds of her words, her vision.
Coming from Safety Third Enterprises, the folks behind the wildly successful He Is Talking to the Fat Lady by xTx, Hinton’s chapbook feels like a natural follow-up direction to xTx’s collection. What the two share as writers is stark honesty, the inability to pussyfoot around, and a fearlessness when it comes to the words they choose to put to paper. For instance in “Father/Daughter” Hinton writes from the perspective of a girl who is remembering seeing her father’s penis.
Hinton writes with a poet’s sensibility. Her stories are fragments of realism wrapped in dream sequences. “I want to create a machine with our tongues revolving around one another,” she writes in “Something Pure and Good.” And you will find yourself nodding, hoping along with Hinton’s narrator that such a thing could be possible.
Like any good chapbook, I Don’t Respect Female Expression will make you ache for more of Hinton’s work. It will make you feel Hinton’s loneliness, uncertainty, and yes, bravery. It will tell you of the promise in Hinton’s words, and it will make you believe that she will continue to deliver."- Ryan W. Bradley

"The collection is comprised of eleven fiction pieces of varying shapes and sizes, and Hinton writes with a somber, meditative ease.
From A Starting Place:
“In the curl of the banister I rest my head. I put two slugs of clementine into my mouth and wish they’d melt. Of course, I need to chew. This is my favorite place in the house. My back fits well on the wood. My head feels good on the curl.”
It’s the simple observations of this piece that make it so damn endearing despite its brevity. That’s not to say that short work can’t be good; it’s just not always easy, and some of the shorter works in this collection don’t always break off cleanly.
I felt the struggles for depth in the short form were most apparent in Father/Daughter and Make a Man. In the former, a young daughter sees her father’s penis, and, years later, reflects on the incident and the overall bond the two of them shared. It’s a good idea and it strives to be a touching story, but in this instance I felt the brevity worked against it, as did the emotional, telling catch-all, “I loved my father very much.” I enjoyed this story, I simply wanted more.
The concise pieces in this collection challenge us to accept them, oftentimes earning their way with addictive architectures like the one found in A Material That Doesn’t Exist,
“I put in a cherry tomato and took it out. I put a baby carrot up there and took it out. I put an egg up there and pushed it out and the eggshell didn’t break.”
or with expertly executed verse fiction like the kind found in Fake Kiss,
“You took me to a beach. You put me on a blanket where I shivered in the wind. You pointed at the playing children and laughed. You kicked a castle back to sand.”
My favorite piece in this collection is the lengthier All Of The People In These Pictures Are Dead Now, a wonderfully crafted study of tragedy and loss. Hinton gave herself some room to move here, and it served the work well:
“Here’s a picture of Janice Baker sitting on a wooden bench at the park holding her exposed left breast. This might be my favorite picture. I’ve looked at it so many times. Janice won’t care that I’m showing you this, at least not in this realm because she’s dead.”
Overall, this is a solid collection that employs themes of love, loss, and impermanence, and it’s at its best when stretching its legs, rolling in the poetry of second person, or simply relaxing. Frank Hinton and Safety Third Enterprises have done it again, and I can’t wait to see what both of them have in store for us down the road." - Mel Bosworth

A Conversation with Frank Hinton By Brad Green

Emotionally dissonant but solvable: An interview with Frank Hinton

Metazen

Frank Hinton's blog

Richard Froude - At first seem like high-stakes non-sequiturs, then a study in perfect, surprising aphorism, then a deftly woven web of profundity

Richard Froude, Fabric, Horse Less Press, 2011.

"The complexities of alienation hybridize the mouth, double the tongue. The logic of Froude’s syntax gives us, mercifully, the poetics of the divided tongue: in the space between multiple possibilities, we are invited to trespass our own borders . . . that we might – finally – hear (and learn to speak) radical change and transformation. FABRIC is a remarkable and necessary book, a wonderful achievement." - Selah Saterstrom

"Of FABRIC: Accepting whatever its elegant sentences say, in their not conventional logic, I’m convinced it contains whatever I need to understand it. It says it’s about memory, numbers (sequence), consciousness. . . And I guess it is, I really like reading it (a big compliment). Being in the fabric of it, though it is so mysterious – an amazing book." - Alice Notley

"I love Richard Froude’s declarative, incandescently plain sentences, which at first seem like high-stakes non-sequiturs, then a study in perfect, surprising aphorism, then a deftly woven web of profundity. The formal distillation and intellectual range of this book are impressive enough; even more so is Froude’s gentle but insistent touching on questions of God, mortality, war, memory, family, intimacy, and history. Froude sets up poetic shop in the fraught space between ‘terror and fertility,’ and wrests from it this exceptionally beautiful, intelligent book." - Maggie Nelson

"This is a British blurb, because we were both born in England. Richard Froude is sort of brilliant. To translate: he is a complete and utter bloody genius. I am thrilled to stand behind this gorgeous, fused book. I remember when I met Richard, and we sat on some stairs at Naropa. I tried to explain to him that he was doing something strange and beautiful in his writing, that was different to other kinds of writing. I said: 'Have you ever considered the possibility that you're actually a novelist?' He looked at me blankly, but now I think the prediction has come true. What is a novel? That's separate. Ask Richard. Ask the person who mutates the given form." - Bhanu Kapil

“The United States contains at least ten cities of Bristol. Each is in a different state: Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Virginia, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Michigan, Maine.
We flew home from Orlando International on July 17th, 1992. I took everything: pamphlets, menus, cups, even a toilet roll wrapped in Mickey Mouse paper. I believed that if I carried these things with me, then they would stay with me, become part of me. I mention this in relation to Frank Sinatra, Howard Carter and the realization that in these rooms inside apartments we are collecting the items that will grant us passage.
This is how Bristol, Indiana exists as the dream of Bristol, England. And America, as it is known, as the waking dream of all who have arrived. What is known as the American Dream is a reduction. The common and singular dream of these dreams simplified into linear narrative. I am trying to write the perfect American story: the book whose name is God.
It becomes difficult to explain just what is happening in American poet Richard Froude’s first trade collection Fabric without wanting to quote from large swaths of this extended narrative, this extended essay-poem.
Subtitled “Preludes to the Last American Book,” Froude’s Fabric is even difficult to describe in terms of straight lyric poetry, despite the many qualities they share, existing somewhere between prose and poetry, but something other than the straight “prose poem.”
There is a sharp and deepening wisdom here, writing out a series of narrative threads that begin to reveal themselves, later on in the book, and wrap around each other, swirling across breathless pages. How do his poems manage to know so much? As he writes:
I have tried to understand death as related to the idea of waking. I am not certain of the name for this relation. It may be more appropriate to ask somebody better acquainted with mathematics.
We drove to a beach where the rock was said to be rich with fossils. I knew about ammonites and trilobites and harbored dreams of owning a metal detector.
Fossils, like windows, are moments of discourse. Music is distinct from the measurement and transcription of sound. It is a form of recurrence.
I have tried to understand waking as the moment when the world ceases to make sense. Maybe one day everything with be collected in sequence and bound with leather.” - Rob McLennan

„I just got a copy two days ago and read it in two sittings: the first in the downstairs handicapped bathroom at my college’s student center, and the second while wrangling my youngest daughter. In both sessions, it seemed like time well spent, with essayistic entries–prose poems, poetic prose, linked and lovely and learned–dancing from page to page. It’s more lean and perhaps less ambitious than other poetic prose meditations, and yet it is that small scale, that personal cabaret performance, that makes this a cut above for me.
“Every book is an account of its own failure,” Froude writes.
But what a failure! I haven’t looked up who Froude is, other that he is on the young side (gleaned from the bio) and has blurbs from the right people to get this book in the right hands (Alice Notley, Maggie Nelson, others). Here’s hoping you’ll pick it up.“ - Daniel Nester

„Prediction:
Richard Froude’s FABRIC: Preludes to the Last American Book is a sentence you will be hearing.
Wolf in a Field heard it from Seth Landman, and we hear it here (or you heard it from ____ _______ or from Selah Saterstrom, Alice Notley, Maggie Nelson, or Bhanu Khapil, who gets it just right in her “British blurb”:
I tried to explain to [the author] that he was doing something strange and beautiful in his writing, that was different to other kinds of writing. I said: “Have you ever considered the possibility that you’re actually a novelist?” He looked at me blankly, but now I think the prediction has come true. What is a novel? That’s separate. Ask Richard. Ask the person who mutates the given form.
Yesterday I tore FABRIC–its subtitle calls to mind, as does, at first crack, the blocks of poem and days inside, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric; its title, in turn, reminds one of another Richard (Rick Myersº) and the other Mayer, Rosemary, whose 41 Fabric Swatches I recently cataloged: does anyone know if there were ever swatches?–from an envelope, in which it was buffered by Thuggery and Grace (ed. Froude, Anne Waldman, & Erik Anderson), which is mailed to you, while it lasts, if you ask for it. Ask for it. Thing starts with Renee Gladman’s “Syntax and the Event of Reading”, which starts “I want to talk to you today about two possibilities of the sentence”: when Renee Gladman–who was reading, when I first read FABRIC, in the City where Lutz will be reading, as I read it again, with Lisa Robertson at SpaceSpace in the Poetry Time between; damn “I do not live in New York” (meaning: move) is a lonely sentence: at least there’s now a Poetry Time audio archive and there’s always when Gladman–wants to talk to you about the possibilities of the sentence, you listen. (Gladman: “It is usually from this perspective that the sentence begins to align itself with the city.” Froude in FABRIC: “I tried but could not write the city.”)
Also inside are two hearted Ohio poems by Sasha Steensen, Ohio’s own Merrill Gilfillan, goodgraphs from Noah Eli Gordon‘s Dysgraphia, Laura Elrick, and more, including two poems by Susan Scarlata, whose It Might Turn Out We Are Real is the other first full-length offering from Horse Less Press, of chapbook fame: Tobin, Cohen, Schapira, Schomburg, Starkweather, Browning, Rexilius, Becker, and so many more, including forthcomers Brian Foley, and Jennifer Denrow (four poems in T&G, and more at Brave Men Press), who took just the right photograph on the cover of FABRIC, which does everything I like to see a book do. Hear it go:
FABRIC: A Prelude to the Last American Book. A preliminary catalog.
• Memorable epigraphs from Jabes, WCW, Woolf, Dock Ellis (…”I was zeroed in on the glove, but I didn’t hit the glove too much.”…), Jabes, etc.
• It has four sections (the fourth, anti-first, has three parts, the fifth section is a Preface), begins alphabetically (“At Bristol Zoo”) enough and ends equally. The sixth section is a blank canvas dashes everything forever
• St. George, New Year’s Day, all the days of the week, all the days/months/years, Deleuze/Cortazar/Darwin/Lincoln, The Great Fire of London and Portland stone, Wittgenstein’s (sister/perfection/design) “genius”/”failure,” Emerson/Sappho, Giotto, Caravaggio, Sartre, Satie:
From the first section, TYPE:
What is 1982?
A silent movie.
What is silence?
Simultaneously a window and a bird. Like similar movies, it would have often been accompanied by piano. When Erik Satie claimed to be a phonometrician rather than a musician, he meant that he measured and wrote down sounds. The word ‘poet’ makes me uncomfortable.
Like Satie (like Cage after, like Duchamp and Dickinson and Coolidge during), like Gladman, like Lutz, like Robertson, like Jabes, like Rosmarie Waldrop, like WC(like Diane)W, like Woolf (before Borges before Homer before Joyce), like Dock Ellis (like Eliot Weinberger), like Genya Turovskaya‘s DEAR JENNY (like Jenny Boully, like Jennifer Martenson’s UNSOUND), like Jean Day, like Stephen Rodefer, like Steve Benson, like Michelle Taransky, like Blake Butler & Dana Ward (Happyesterday), like Gertrude Stein, like Donald Sutherland (tho I guess Gallop said: “Pigeons on the granite, damn it.”), like Judy Garland (Wizard of Oz is all over FABRIC and vice versa), Richard Froude is a writer who makes lines (“straight and jagged”: between blanks, between other lines, between poetry and prose) uncomfortable.
{Placeholder: perhaps this post is a prelude to a new breed of Hybrid, measured with due louditude to New Wave/York/School(s) and (Big Other’s) New Sentence, & on the analogy of Vila-Matas’ Writers of the No, Writers of the Third Word? Probably not, tho I just read in Lewis Freedman’s notebook from when he was writing The Third Word: “measure / meant”}
When Satie enters, early in the book, I put on his furniture music, and was rewarded four pages later:
What is night?
It is best understood as rhythm. We gave most of our furniture away.
On the back of FABRIC, Khapil asks, What is a novel? In the first section alone, the book answers: What is 1982? What is silence? What is night? Another answer:
What is transition?
A movement between states. I am trying to remember the various ways I’ve understood the afterlife. For example, my uncle [...]
In Sartre’s No Exit, it takes the form of what the Eagles sing about in Hotel Californi–a strange boarding house from which departure is deceptively impossible. [...]
Similarly, I believed that when I died my mind would freeze. Whatever I was thinking at that moment I would think forever. At times when I suspected mortal danger (before a rollercoaster, on a plane) I would think only the best thoughts I could. This still seems reasonable. What troubles me is that I can’t remember what any of those thoughts were.
What follows are four more answers to “What is 1982?” (A Dorothy, Atari, Apocalpyse, and Augustine are not the answers, but close.)
In the second section, CONTEXTURE, another type of answer:
So, it is a work of becoming?
It is a work of straight and jagged lines onto which language is superimposed. The chamber does not exist in the original pattern but in the curvature that language affords. Such was the response of the patent office. Such is the story of the drugstore.
Midway through A Confederate General from Big Sur, Richard Brautigan refers to the ‘rivets in Ecclesiastes.’ Specifically, this is a reference to his lead character Jesse’s method of reading by punctuation. When I started writing this I understood its relation to the preceding although now it isn’t as clear. I think I am remembering Erik Satie: reading (as well as writing) can exist as a practice of measurement.
And another:
On a website where users post questions for others to answer, between ‘What does your birthday mean?’ and ‘How do Volcanoes work?’ I found ‘Have you ever seen a dead body?’
The third section, THE DASHES (A SILENT MOVIE, A DREAM) has answers by the name of Alfred:
Insistence on decisive battle will be retained into the twenty first century. I can offer no illustration but this mirror. Am I to play Alfred? I think so, for now.
In place of logic, may I offer you these trinkets?
Here are my medals. Here is my gun. Her silence is white. / Cut with a dah or needle. / Dear Marjorie: These are my wishes of the season.
I want to type everything that plays out between Alfred and Marjorie and THE DASHES, but I will stop short. I will type only three more pieces of many:
This disrupts the logic of prayer. The text becomes deranged, split into its constituent parts (though these parts are themselves deranged: one molecule strontium, one molecule zinc).
These are weak bonds, the likes of:
DASH#1 Sticks
DASH #2 Straw
DASH#3 An old brick shithouse

After he was born it took Yuri Gagarin 34 years to die. It took Alfred only 40.
In the corresponding illustration, a garden. Alfred leads me down a path lined with pink rhododendron. he has led me this way before. Beneath a yew tree we stop at the bust of a gorilla. Its name is Alfred. We stare at it for days.
Such a prayer is conceived without discernible truth value.
I chew these terms until they turn to powder.
_ _ _
There was a rumor that ‘all’ meant ‘everything.’
There was a rumor that to breathe was forbidden.
Don’t you have a machine that puts food in the mouth and pushes it down?
In that excerpt, the three (actual) dashes (which actually top every page in every section) represent a page break. The next page looks (partly) like this:
What is a novel? The third section, like the whole book, begins with a book (a “prayer book”: but turning the page we learn that “The first eighty consist of three short plays”) and ends (after eleven wildly entertaining pages) almost as it began (“By January”). In between, it asks “Is this the argument?” (The third dash is offstage, but answers anyway.)
The fourth section, OCEANOGRAPHY (ANTI-TYPE) has two enviable epigraphs (Jabes, again–What, in fact, haunts me, is the last book: the one we will never write and which all our books try to look like, just as the universe in its becoming each day resembles a little more the pre-existing universe.–and Hejinian: Sway is built into skyscrapers, since it is natural to trees.) and three numbered parts (dashes?). One paragraph, respectively, from each:

1. Typically, recollections such as these are misconstrued. I first caught sight of her through stained glass windows. Her arms colored orange, her neck a deep blue and the twelve apostles danced sadly upon her saffron forehead. She drew my attention away from the vestry. Led it out onto the lawn. I followed her through the dusky streets as the last operational lighthouse, suspected of barbituate manufacture, quietly roused the trawlers.
2. Dear Gretl: I know that an American book is a book of movement. I know that movement is only seldom accompanied by silence. On her first night in the hospital, Marjorie heard a heart monitor flatline. It was the heart monitor of a woman two beds down on the opposite side of the ward. This is the ward to which I always return.
3. The last book is the unwritable book. The book that by its absence enables aperture, the means by which we touch the world. Jackie says that dying is like waking then realizing the life you thought you’d lived was a dream. And from this, instead of a new day, all that begins is your own absence. I have been calling him Jackie but his name is also Alfred. I can carry him no further.
Finally, a paragraph from 5. APOLOGIES FOR THE TIN MAN (A PREFACE), the last section of the book (at least the last with words) and the first with blanks:



What is a novel? What it’s not is not new.
Whatever else it is, FABRIC is a BOOK.
GO, etc.
ºI don’t know if Rick Myers is actually named Richard, but I’ve been wanting to remind myself to write about his work as well and why not now. After all, it fits this post that the work currently at the top of his page is called (in part) “(Afterimage Prologue)”- Nathaniel Otting

„ How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
- In a way my first book was Tarnished Mirrors, my translation of Baudelaire. Then followed two chapbooks. Although the second of these—The History of Zero—was a book length manuscript, it always felt like stuff I had to work through before I wrote a “first book.” So I’m going to talk about FABRIC in this question. That’s what I think of as my first book.
It stopped the anxious feeling that nobody would ever deem a book I wrote publishable. Other than that, if anything changed my life it was the circumstances in which I wrote the book forcing me to face things I had avoided for a long time. This was not because of the book, but the book was because of these circumstances. In the time I was writing most of FABRIC I often found myself overcome with sadness and anxiety. I was meeting with a counsellor who encouraged me to address the things I was feeling by writing: chiefly, absence from my home country, issues with my health and ultimately my own mortality. These were not things I wanted to think about. It’s not like I’m “over that” now, but you could say that being present with those thoughts has changed my life, that is, my interior and imaginary life. Day to day things are pretty much the same.
I think the biggest difference I feel in my recent work comes from allowing myself to stop consciously trying to be a poet because it was something I felt I should do. I have divorced that title. I don’t need it and, of course, it doesn’t need me. If people say I am a poet that’s fine. I just don’t need them to. Now I can write whatever I want.
How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
- Well, I don’t think I really did come to poetry first. I don’t necessarily consider FABRIC to be a book of poetry. I’ve been more comfortable thinking about it as nonfiction. I have been to school twice for writing and only applied to those two schools. The first time I had to decide what genre I was writing in was when I applied to the MFA at Naropa. I applied to poetry because you only needed 15 pages of writing rather than 30 for fiction. I was only confident in 15 of my pages. Then when I applied to the DU PhD, although I had not written what I considered to be a poem for two or three years, I applied in poetry because I generally prefer the conversations that happen around poetry over those around fiction or nonfiction. I think the conversation around nonfiction is changing for the better and is now more interesting to me than poetry. But things change all the time.
How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
- I make lots of notes. I love notes. I don’t know about how long things take to get started, it really varies from piece to piece. But when it happens, it happens very quickly, then nothing for weeks, then an amazing three hours.
Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
- I nearly always write with the larger work in mind. I think perhaps I write more like a novelist in that way. Am I a novelist? A nonfiction novelist? Maybe I am. I very rarely write shorter pieces that are not part of my larger work. When I do, they often find their way into the project.
Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
- That’s interesting to think of readings as part of the creative process. I hadn’t thought of that but yes, absolutely, they are part of my creative process. They press me to make my work as good as it can be. It’s one thing to have it on my computer or even published in a book or magazine. It’s another to stand up in the flesh and deliver it to people. I do enjoy giving readings. I think I’m quite good at them and I love doing things I think I’m good at. Shooting pool, Gameboy Tetris, Facebook Scrabble.
Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
- I don’t know what the current questions are. More important to me is that I know what some of my questions are. I do not anticipate satisfactory answers. I think there are also questions I am addressing that I don’t even know I am addressing, or am unable to articulate. I don’t mean to suggest these questions originate with me. They are just the things I come back to:

What does it mean to be alive? What happens when we die? Why do we die? What does “God” mean? Where have I come from? Why do I think I am the person I think I am? Why does this feel like that which also feels like the other? Why do I miss everyone so much? How will all this information around me help? How can I express any of this in language?
I think of these questions less as theoretical concerns and more as just concerns. I mean, qualifying them as theoretical (even if it’s correct) feels unnecessary. I do not come to writing with a theory of how any of these questions might be answered. I want to think of writing as begetting theory in its own becoming. I want to, so I do.
What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
- Yes, writers have a role in larger culture. Everyone has a role in culture.
I think the writer’s role should be to discern and express things that matter, undertaken with brutal and disarming honesty about these things and themselves. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done in fiction. I think the core of fiction is honesty.
What matters? Well, do you feel something deeply and powerfully? Does it frighten or overwhelm you? Does it fill you with joy, dread, love, compassion etc.? Does it feel like premonition? Does it not leave you alone? If the answer to any of these questions is yes then it probably matters. When Pound famously said that literature is news that stays news he was pretty much on it.
But, all this said, whatever role you want, that’s your role. You decide. Who am I to tell any writer—or anyone—what they should be doing?
Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
- I’ve only had to do it twice and both times I found it difficult, although I must say that the two people I worked with were very intelligent, talented, generous people. It didn’t matter. It was still very difficult for me. Both of these occasions were journal publications. I’m still open to the process. I think I can see how it could be amazing.
What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
- “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’”
That’s what came to mind. My own literary pretensions aside, it certainly bears remembering, especially if, like me, you happen to be a straight, white male.
How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?
- The notion of genre has very little appeal to me as a writer. As such, movement between genres appeals as an act of quiet subversion, especially when that movement can occur without moving at all. That is, to stay still and let other’s ideas of genres move around you. This may seem passive. I’m fine with that because I don’t think it is. Imagine there’s no country. It isn’t hard to do. I love how John Lennon described that song as the Communist Manifesto set to music. I also love how in this interview (http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?fa=customcontent&GCOI=15647100621780&extrasfile=A09F76BE-B0D0-B086-B653FFBC137719A6.html) Kathy Acker talks about Pasolini’s refusal of separation as an approach to genre. It turns the passive into active: an intentional act of refusal.
Excerpts from the project I’ve been working on have been published as fiction, nonfiction and poetry. I see no generic distinction between these excerpts, now or as I was writing them. I mentioned my strained relation to the title of “poet.” My major trouble was thinking of it as something I could call myself. I prefer to think of it as a destination, something others can attribute to you.
I was talking to a writer in New York about this and he said that by choosing to publish writing as a particular genre you are giving instructions on how it should be read. I respect this but I do not feel the need to give that particular instruction. It feels more like a limit. I don’t want limits. Open the doors! Go crazy!
I think moving between translation and my own work is a different question. To me, translation is the greatest apprenticeship I could possibly take on. It feels very different to my own writing. In translation, I am much more concerned with the text beginning at the level of the word rather than the sentence. I love how the intimacy with a text I have translated leaks into my own work. For example, I translated the “Song of Songs” last year. I have found that syntax possessing my current writing in the strangest ways.
What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
- I wake up, use the bathroom, feed the cats, read the internet (email, Facebook, ESPN, BBC, Wikipedia), eat toast and Marmite. Most days I don’t physically write. I mean, I write emails and lists and all that, but I don’t generate writing that is part of my creative practice. I make this physical distinction because every day I think about it and this thinking constitutes the largest part of my creative practice.
When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
- I tend to just let it stall. It has taken me a lot of time and anxiety to get to a place where I am OK to do that. I think I’m there now. The writing always comes back. If I notice that I’m not writing a lot then I make a conscious effort to read more.
What fragrance reminds you of home?
- I have no real answer so I will tell you this: the year after college I moved back to live with my mum. I drove to work every morning at 6am past the docks and the industrial estates. On one side of the highway was a huge bakery (more like a bread factory), on the other side a chemical works. The smell was amazing but something wasn’t right. I’d always get a whiff of chemical scent mixed with the fresh bread. I couldn’t tell where one smell ended and the other began. That was in Bristol in 2001. I’ve lived in Colorado now on and off for 6 years. Whenever it’s about to snow, Denver smells like dogshit.
David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
- The books I am interested in reading and writing come from everything. I wrote out a huge long list of things I am influenced by then deleted it because I realized I was trying to write down everything that I can remember. I tried to answered this question in depth in conversation with Selah Saterstrom (www.zeroducats.com/resources/Conversation.pdf). But, to address the idea that books come from books: books have to originate in engagement, engagement doesn’t have to originate in a book.
What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
- I’m going to make this list that will surely leave off many I should have included. The most important writers to me have been: Allen Ginsberg, Alice Notley, James Joyce, William Blake, Marie Redonnet, Kathy Acker, Kenneth Patchen (especially The Journal of Albion Moonlight), Neil Young, Bob Dylan, William Carlos Williams, Richard Brautigan, Roland Barthes, Edmond Jabès, Jack Kerouac, Virginia Woolf, Whitman, Emerson, JD Salinger, Donald Barthelme, The Bible. Then the other hundred I didn’t mention.
Thinking of contemporary writers, I am energized by the writing of (among others) Renee Gladman, Erik Anderson, Bhanu Kapil, Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine and Selah Saterstrom. Anne Waldman is a writer who has made my world a lot better by her very existence in it.
What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
- See England win the World Cup. I’d also like to go to a posh restaurant and order a porterhouse with a lobster tail. One day I’d like to drive to Alaska. Maybe for a year I could live in Tokyo?
If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
- If all goes to plan, I finish my PhD on April 22nd this year. This summer I am teaching at Naropa’s Summer Writing Program and starting pre-med classes at UC Denver. This, in earnest, will mark the beginning of my attempt to be a physician.
I don’t think of being a writer as an occupation. Not that it doesn’t involve a lot of work, it does. And yes, there are people who earn their living just by writing, so I suppose I don’t consider my writing as my occupation. It’s in one of Salinger’s books (I think Seymour, I throw this around a lot so I should probably check) where the narrator, Buddy, gives his occupation as “writer” and Seymour tells him that writer isn’t something you do, it’s something you are.
Why did I get a PhD in English/Creative Writing if I wanted to be a physician? Well, I didn’t know I was actually going to follow through with medicine when I started the PhD. And they paid me to read and write for 4 years. After all, they don’t teach you about Blanchot in medical school.
If I wasn’t going to do this I would like to be a carpenter, a professional cricketer or a spaceman. Or maybe all three. Imagine watching the earth rise from a wooden rocket ship you had built with your own two hands after playing a crisp cover drive off the bowling of Glenn McGrath. Doesn’t get much better than that.
What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
- I like this question a lot but I don’t think I know how answer it. I write rather than draw, paint, play music etc. because I am better at writing than any of those other things. Creativity is a function of consciousness and as such I don’t think it is in opposition to doing something else but just a part of it. What is that other thing? Being a college professor, being a librarian, an attorney, a physician, a schoolteacher, a secretary, a mother, a father, an insurance salesman, a bartender etc. I do not mean for these to be exclusive. That is, I am interested in people who embrace the overlaps.
What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
- I read The Sound and The Fury in December. A little late to that party but holy shit! Last week I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey again. I cannot get over that movie. The last recently published book I read that I thought was really great was Bluets by Maggie Nelson. I really liked There Will Be Blood.
What are you currently working on?
- I just finished CAST, a book that orbits Carlo Collodi’s wooden boy Pinocchio. It’s the second in a series of three thematically connected books. FABRIC was the first. I’m about to start the third one which I think will be called RISE. It’s not really a trilogy. Maybe a triptych in the way Redonnet uses the term. The three definitely go together.“ – Interview by Rob McLennan

Excerpt

and here

Richard Froude: Apocrypha #9a

From The History of Zero