Matt Pine - a thoroughly Chicago tale concerning what survives and what fades away. Chicago is a character in this novel. A machine whose workings are dangerously hypnotic. A lake has “the same texture and tone as ink spilled onto silver.” A black dress has “the same cling and quality as plastic wrap on American cheese”

Matt Pine, City Water Light & Power, Cairn Press, 2013.

mattpine.com/

Matt Pine's City Water Light & Power follows the entwined stories of Jake and Michelle as they negotiate a changing external and internal landscape in the city of Chicago. Jake unwillingly emerges from a lost state, while Michelle must become lost before finding a sense of self. Themes of identity and renewal build in subtle crescendos of tension that rise again and again until the culminating image that transfixes these themes into a remarkable unity.


1. I’m in awe of Matt Pine’s prose style. A lake has “the same texture and tone as ink spilled onto silver.” A black dress has “the same cling and quality as plastic wrap on American cheese.” These similes give me goosebumps.
2. The frisson of encountering high style in a world that no longer much values it.
3. City Water Light & Power explores the angst of being young in the city and not knowing the score. It’s about twentysomething Chicagoans figuring out how to survive in body and soul — the alternatives, in this novel, are selling out or breaking down, in bars where salaries are “revealed like flashed genitalia” or in alleys where it’s “spiritually dangerous walking there dispirited after dark.” Your choice is to be one of the manipulators, or someone who walks without a destination — both flavors of desperation.
4. Chicago is a character in this novel. A machine whose workings are dangerously hypnotic.
5. A study of corruption and alienation that gives me that sense of a ruthless and inscrutable society I get from Fitzgerald, say, or Salinger. Matt Pine writes of venality in a tone of innocent fascination — he is sensual, aggrieved, and mystified by ordinary life, in a classic American tradition harking back to the Puritans.
6. The demolition of a dive bar stands for what’s being lost. The bar is called Lewis & Carol’s… perhaps to suggest a world down the rabbit hole or through the looking glass?
7. I like it that this bar seems to be the only thing keeping Jake from becoming an alcoholic – after its destruction, Jake takes to drinking outdoors. Somewhat illogically since the novel acknowledges there are other bars in Chicago – one might even say too much of this novel takes place in bars… But these bars are full of phonies, not like Lewis & Carol’s, which stands for community.
8. Many first novels by men include a dazed and confused main character. In this case, Jake. His job involves talking to imaginary customers. His free time is spent with an imaginary friend, a woman visible just to him, who communicates only through mime and gymnastics and might work better in a movie, a mute hallucinated character being tricky to pull off in a novel…
9. Adrian is a character who success brutalizes. He is seeking the wrong nourishment, acquiring what David Mamet has called “the canting language of the real-estate crowd.” There’s beauty in the process of making ugliness happen, Pine suggests, but it’s a lonely beauty.
10. Jake is a half-hearted preserver, Adrian a developer. Jake on Chicago – “But I wonder what it is we’re wanting after. If it’s really the city, I mean. Do we want more of it, or do we want what it was? I’m sorry. I’m not articulate today. I guess I wonder why we have to fight the city for it to stay itself? Because isn’t that stopping it from being itself? And yet it’s so glorious.” Adrian on Chicago – “What would lure a boutique? How many patios were necessary to make an enclave of patios? Did condos come before cuisine? But then who would move into this wasteland? But why would you open a business where no one lived? It all seemed to leap out all at once, all the parts dependent on all the parts, like a stone archway. But also like an archway, there must be a way to build one.”
11. The tendency in fiction for the only non-alienating jobs to be borderline criminal…
12. A book whose title shares two of the same words as this book is The Motion of Light in Water. This gets me thinking that Matt Pine shares with Samuel R. Delany an obsession with physical textures and an obsession with how power structures itself, which starts me wondering how these obsessions might be neurologically or metaphorically related…
13. City Water, Light & Power is the largest municipally owned utility in the state of Illinois.
14. Michelle is the point of connection between Jake and Adrian. My favorite line about Michelle – “A chorus of her future selves sang that this was not what they wanted.”
15. After his job gets outsourced, Jake moves through the alleys “as carefree as a bead through a pachinko machine.” A homeless guy is described as “not riffing, but reciting, perhaps a poem or an elaborate and damning contract, its words learned by humiliated, horrified re-readings once the offer and stipulations, the intents and considerations were binding and his mistake entirely manifest.” Most of the characters in this novel feel trapped.
16. Jake and Michelle spend much of the novel playing phone tag with each other, but it’s set up so they’re the implied judges of each other’s conduct.
17. Chicago as a crowd coming out of a sports bar to watch a demolition. Democracy as a rigged spectator sport.
18. A career as the trajectory of a projectile. Everything is deceptively packaged.
19. The novel as dive bar.
20. Krysminski, a perfect incarnation of “the man,” is a business guy whose HQ is a kind of labyrinth. “Feeling terrible gets things done, Adrian,” he says. I was kind of hoping for another scene with him in, but maybe it’s appropriate that the last we see of him is his business logo on some scaffolding. He’s the only character in the book whose actions have the effect he intends.
21. Matt Pine asks – what should we be loyal to?
22. Taking someone high up in an uncompleted building to demonstrate your power over them… there’s a scene where this happens that alludes to a comparable scene in Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift. I guess Chicagoans do this kind of thing a lot…
23. Matt Pine seems to spend a lot of time gazing at the light, e.g. noting how light quality can deceive you as to texture… this comes across even in his author photo. Is there something about the light in Chicago or something? Bellow has “the light was neat,” but I don’t know if that’s neat like whiskey or neat like ideas — maybe if I ever go to Chicago, somebody will take me high up in an uncompleted building and clarify this for me…
24. Bowling trophies are compared to polytheistic shrines.
25. My father, who towards the end only read Mafia novels, would have thought Jake was a putz, and would have wanted more about Krysminski’s connections. I asked my father once if there were any Mafia novels he recommended, and he found the question odd – by then he didn’t care if the novels he devoured were good or not, only that they were about the Mafia. This seemed strange to me, but I’ve come to learn his attitude is more typical than mine — a hunger for well-written books is rare compared to a taste for books about the Mafia/unicorns/whatever somebody happens to be into. Which makes me wonder — is liking good prose some kind of psychological defense mechanism against something? Life’s sheer destructiveness? The prevalence of Krysminskis? Do we enjoy similes because they imply an order the world actually lacks? - James Warner

1. City Water Light & Power is the first novel by writer Matt Pine. Peripherally, it’s a coming-of-age novel, and, yes, ‘coming-of-age novel,’ in most cases, can bring to mind the image of an hours-long navel gaze. City Water Light & Power is not that. It’s sympathetic without being pandering. It’s nostalgic without being contrived. It’s attractive in a broken-nosed kind of way.

2. To explain, Nelson Algren once said of Chicago, “Once you’ve become a part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies, but never a lovely so real.” Along with Jake (the book’s main character, a 20-something college graduate/regular drinker/working a meaningless, unrewarding job/heartsick dude), Michelle (Jake’s life-long friend and confidant and conspicuous person-of-interest), Adrian (a young dude who gets into the real estate biz fast), and the other names that weave in and out of the characters lives, it’s the place—Chicago—that makes City Water Light & Power stand out from its genre companions. It’s not because the place is Chicago (that would be kind of pandering, right?), but it’s because Pine is so conscious of the role ‘place’ plays in framing the story—that’s what makes everything in the story seem so familiar. It’s what makes the nostalgia so potent.

3. Full disclosure: Matt Pine has written for Anobium before, and participated in at least one Anobium reading, so this ‘review’ is not totally unbiased. But what review is, really? Stop kidding yourselves.

4. City Water Light & Power is strongest when you can see the story move. The characters literally come of age in the novel. Some find reward, others find questions, other forget the answers they’re seeking. This is Pine’s first novel, and it’s not always perfect (it can indulge in its physical descriptions, at times), but it’s honest. It’s the honesty of the writer, and of the characters, that makes the story move.

5. What City Water Light & Power does have in common with coming-of-age stories is that, in short, coming of age sucks shit. It’s not hard to say this, but it’s hard to say it well. Pine pulls it off.

6. As a Chicagoan myself, I enjoyed ‘seeing’ the places Pine was describing. Some of the places he mentions, I’ve seen myself. Others are figments, composed of various city fragments and put in place like a straw man. Here, Pine creates a place called Sammler Park. If you’re familiar with Chicago, it seems to share the same DNA as the old-school, working-class communities of Jefferson Park or Edison Park or Norwood Park, or any of the other ‘parks’ on Chicago’s northwest side. At the center of the narrative, perhaps analogically (deciding what is and is not an analogy in City Water Light & Power will (and should) ultimately be your responsibility, because I think you should read this book), is a bar called Lewis & Carol’s, a Sammler Park fixture being threatened by condo development (aka: suburban homogeny, and the depression associated with that). In City Water Light & Power, the developers eventually win in their own way, which begs the question: is the new always better? I believe Pine is asking the same thing: change is indeed constant, but is it always good? Can it be made good?

7. City Water Light & Power opens with an epigraph from the great Saul Bellow: “To count on stability here is madness.” Again, a reference to ‘change.’ And, also, a reification of the role Chicago takes in this story. (If you didn’t already know, Bellow is one of Chicago’s greatest writers, and one of the greatest writers of Chicago. And, yes, there is a difference.) Pine is no Bellow, of course, but that’s what an epigraph is for: giving honor where honor is due. Also, Bellow was a master solipsist, and solipsism is way out of style. Pine’s on point with this one.

Also also, speaking of Sammler Park, consider Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet.

8. There are moments in Pine’s prose that he lets slip a dry comment, like when he talks about the ‘Metaphysics of Cubicle Being.’ It’s just a brief comment, but it’s funny, in a wry way. If Pine writes another novel, and I hope he does, I’d like to see more of that.

9. The title, City Water Light & Power, is also the name of the largest municipal-owned utility in Illinois. If nothing I’m saying about the precedence of place in this novel is sticking, the title should. It describes something monolithic, in a sense. Even in the face of change, Chicago is still Chicago. A lovely so real. Pine gets it, and so does City Water Light & Power. -  Benjamin van Loon

SHORT FICTION
"Get This" - Sparkle and Blink
"Winter Vacation" - Bluestem Magazine
"Dry Cleaning" - Monkeybicycle
"No One Takes Lunch on Their Lunch Hour" - THE2NDHAND
"Wine Bar" - Red Lightbulbs
"Summer Barbecue" - Pif Magazine
"The Detective Drives Home" -THE2NDHAND
BLOGJOBS
"TITLE FIGHT: Paris Review vs. Paris Review" - Anobium
"Get Into It" interview series at Anobium. #s 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

 

Simon Morgan Wortham argues that sleep itself might constitute a limit for the philosophical imagination, and his vast, comprehensive, and wide-ranging study attempts to demonstrate this claim with reference to a range of philosophers

Simon Morgan Wortham, The Poetics of Sleep: From Aristotle to Nancy, Bloomsbury, 2013. 

To what extent does sleep constitute a limit for the philosophical imagination? Why does it recur throughout philosophy? What is at issue in the repeated relegation of sleep to the realm of physiological study (as in Kant, Freud and Bergson), in favour of promoting the critical investigation of dreams and dreaming as a key indicator of modernity? Does philosophy entail a certain repression of the poetics of sleep in all its conceptual impossibility?
Through a series of engagements with key thinkers in modern European philosophy, this book rearticulates a poetics of sleep at the heart of some of its seminal texts. From the problematic yet instructive status of a Kantian discourse on sleep to the conceptual contradictions inherent in psychoanalytic thought and the rich possibilities of thinking 'sleep' in the writings of Bergson, Blanchot and Nancy, the book's aim is to dredge the remains of sleep - not to bring its secrets to the surface of waking life, but instead to draw closer to what falls under or away in thinking and writing 'sleep'.

“Sleep is 'beloved', as that great insomniac the Ancient Mariner says, 'from pole to pole'. But what is this love about? What do science and philosophy have to tell us, and how can we know whether they are right? The Poetics of Sleep confronts the reader with something akin to the paradox of Bach's Goldberg Variations: a project of this nature inevitably dallies with the pleasures of the soporific. Maintaining an admirable critical vigilance and intellectual restlessness, Wortham provides a rich and thought-provoking survey of sleep theory, from Plato to Jean-Luc Nancy.” – Nicholas Royle

 

“THE ENTIRE MENTAL LIFE minus the effort of concentration”: This is the notorious definition of dreaming as rendered by the 20th-century French philosopher Henri Bergson in his 1914 book Dreams. Dreams have always presented a challenge to the systematizing pretensions of philosophy, not to mention positive science. This challenge arises in the form of a number of questions that would seem to strike at the heart of systematicity itself: questions of consciousness and the unconscious, of the permeability of the border that separates them, and of the very arbitrary nature of categorization, definition and division; indeed, the very divisibility of life and reality (seen as concentration) over and against death and unreality.
In The Poetics of Sleep, Simon Morgan Wortham claims that it is not merely dreaming that is at stake in prompting these interrogative crises, but rather “the repeated relegation of sleep to the realm of physiological study.” He argues that sleep itself might constitute a limit for the philosophical imagination, and his vast, comprehensive, and wide-ranging study attempts to demonstrate this claim with reference to a range of philosophers (Aristotle and Nancy, but also Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Freud, Bergson, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Foucault) as well as a number of literary figures (including Paul Celan, Maurice Blanchot, and Samuel Beckett).
These sleep-deprived (and sleep-derived) questions are questions of borders and limits: where and when do we draw the distinction between wakefulness and sleep, reality and dream, literature and philosophy? What authority permits such distinctions? Any recuperative attempt to simplify these questions in the name of physiological science, or philosophy, would divorce them from this problematic location of the border, and would do irreparable and unjustifiable damage. It is precisely Morgan Wortham’s attentiveness to the question of the border between sleep and wakefulness, however, that signals an exemplary methodology that works with ease both within and without the tradition of philosophy, neither exhausting sleep as a philosophical theme nor as simply a position to espouse an attack on philosophical discourse.
The Poetics of Sleep opens with an account of the psychologist Ray Meddis’s The Sleep Instinct (1977), and his inflammatory hypothesis that “sleep serves no important function in modern man and that, in principle at least, man is capable of living happily without it.” Meddis argues that sleep evolved not as a means to gain rest after physical or mental exertion, but instead as a way to maximize the chance of survival “when animals really have nothing else to do.” Sleep keeps animals still, inconspicuous, and usually in a safe place. Thus, as a survival technique, sleeps seems redundant in modern man. That great mistress of the night, Margaret Thatcher — famous for needing, purportedly, only four hours of sleep — would seem to corroborate Meddis’s observation that “sleep expands and contracts in keeping with the available spare time” accessible to different species. (Thatcher isn’t alone; according to a popular online tabloid, “the Thatcher gene” — ABCC9, apparently — is also shared by Madonna.)
As Morgan Wortham notes, the dismissive assumptions that underpin Meddis’s theory of sleep — a theory that mirrors Plato’s hypothesis that prolonged slumber should be minimized for the sake of the maintenance of the state, and that when asleep “a man is useless, he may as well be dead” — have been replayed throughout the philosophical tradition as a sort of “classical fascism,” rallied against what is seen as the “fatuousness and unseemliness of prolonged slumber in ‘civilised’ man.” Indeed, the pervasiveness of this ideological preference or trope would seem just as evident in contemporary neoliberal policies, most notably the cult of “work” that coincides with the European obsession for austerity, as explored recently in Carl Cederstrom’s Dead Man Working (2012).
Morgan Wortham sets out to do far more than ridicule decades-old trends in sleep science: it is his contention that Western philosophy has also missed something important in the phenomenon of sleep. As Freud and many others have emphasized, the brain is as active, dynamic, and functional as ever during sleep. The only reason that the activity associated with the waking mind is set at a different level of priority over its dormant counterpart, Morgan Wortham argues, is because of the “particular conception of consciousness” we have inherited from philosophy. He delineates Aristotle’s contention that sleep arises as a condition of the organ of sense-perception, and points out that the historical reception of Aristotle’s thought has played an important role in the history of metaphysics by linking sense-perception to consciousness, since the inability to do so marks an absence of sense-perception itself (in plant life, for Aristotle).
The crux arises when two competing readings of Aristotle become entangled: one, which would seem to suggest that sleep is a physiological response to the needs of the body; and another that suggests that sleep is a condition of sense-perception, which is itself a “sign of the soul moving through the body.” Thus, sleep is at once a movement or enactment of the organ of sense-perception, and a seizure of that very organ. “Thus, by way of a certain [...] reading,” Morgan Wortham writes:

“[S]ense-perception” would be imagined as having the ability to appropriate the “other” of itself; an “other” which the very process or necessity of philosophical thought suggests may nevertheless be a dangerous supplement.

Indeed, as Morgan Wortham argues, the “idea that bodily movement of any kind may be associated with the persistence of ‘sense’ continues to haunt the [...] popular imagination.” Our interests in dreams, then (as delusions or distortions of the perceptual mind), can be unequivocally derived from their position in “relation to waking sense.”
Kant, too, is associated with a certain implicit metaphysical preference for wakefulness over slumber, life over sleep. The figure of the somnambulist is disturbing for Kant as that which disturbs the assertion that sleep is in support of life, whereby the role of dreams prevents this sleep from becoming total, i.e. death. Similarly, for Hegel the “utter abandonment of the ‘soul’ to itself militates against being-for-self.” Through the sacrificial uncoupling of the objective and sensible relation to the actual world, the self risks “not only its reason but its unity and cohesiveness as such.” Philosophers, Morgan Wortham reveals, have often imagined sleep as if it were itself a recurring and troublesome dream, the very opacity of which seems to offer a range of possibilities. These include seeing sleep as a physiological condition (and therefore marginal to philosophy); seeing it at the core of the expression of the self; or seeing it as an instrument and effect of sense-perception and even consciousness itself. Thus, “across these examples, a strange legacy is bequeathed to thought,” he writes:

[W]hereby, in the very attempt to rationalise sleep in terms of its functional [...] relationship to both bodily and waking life, a certain supplement is unleashed — call it somnambulance, or some other name — which [...] cannot be excluded, contained or sidelined.

Morgan Wortham’s analyses of Bergson and, especially, Freud, are vastly rewarding, moving ever closer to the limits of sleep and its supplemental relationship to waking life. For Bergson, dreaming results from a specific interaction of sensation and memory, distinct from the unconscious, that during sleep is allowed free reign as a “form of perception that is unrestricted by the probabilistic interpretation of reality which typifies wakefulness.” Thus, the dream is neither a derivative form of consciousness, as was the commonly held scientific belief of the 19th century, nor a separate form of perception (governed, for instance, by the unconscious). Hence, dreams are “the entire mental life minus the effort of concentration.”
For Freud, on the other hand, dreams are univocally associated with the unconscious. However, as Morgan Wortham argues, the relationship between sleep — which Freud sees as predominantly physiological  — and dreams, and of both to the notion of the “day,” allows sleep to occupy a radically double-facing position in the Freudian text. For Freud, unresolved psychic tensions from the waking day are commonplace in our nightly dreams, yet they do not provide the basis for a primary explanation of dreaming itself. These leftovers, or residues of our daily life, remain secondary, although, as he admits in The Interpretation of Dreams, they might provide the material support for the dream. Contra Bergson, dreams for Freud are not to be understood as day-facing, in the simple sense that they accompany the process of awakening. Rather, the dream is intricately connected to both day and night as the product of long-held wishes that persist in the unconscious realm of sleep, but are forged during infantile waking life. So, for Freud, sleep serves the conscious wish to sleep and the workings of the unconscious at the same time, inducing the onset of repressed material through an unavoidable relaxation of energy.
For Morgan Wortham, the consequent difficulty in knowing in what or in whose interests one sleeps is at the forefront of severing the association of sleep with a purely physiological condition. In Freud’s 1914 essay “On Narcissism,” this condition of sleep is construed as a potentially malevolent force within psychic life. There, Freud tells us that the condition of sleep resembles illness to the extent that it involves a “narcissistic withdrawal of the position of the libido onto the subject’s own self.” This Hegelian move (withdrawal into the self) that Freud articulates reveals a complex narcissism that becomes shared by both the ego and libido. During sleep, a primitive narcissism is offered to the ego, while the libido can hope to indulge in the “hallucinatory satisfaction of wishes.”
However, the waters are muddied when Freud also asserts that, in Morgan Wortham’s summary, “dreams are also formed as a response to that which threatens pure indulgence in this same narcissism” (i.e., the residues of waking life). These outside disturbances acquire significance, for Freud, because they, too, are invested with a libidinal interest. Thus, Morgan Wortham argues, “the dream sees narcissism defending itself against what are basically its own interests. For Freud, in fact, this may be what a dream is.” Narcissism itself is then configured as potentially auto-immune, the condition of which is visible in Freud’s own text as sleep is depicted akin to Derrida’s pharmakon: as both illness and health, poison and cure.
The consequences of this Derridean interpretation of Freud are explored through a reading of Jacqueline Rose’s essay “On Not Being Able to Sleep: Rereading The Interpretation of Dreams.” Rose observes how Freud implies an underlying affinity between sleep or dreaming and madness. As Freud writes, alluding to Kant, “The lunatic is the one who dreams while awake.” However, Rose asserts that, when sleep itself is the focus of psychoanalytic study, it not only becomes a limit for psychoanalytic thought, but is also a fear for psychoanalysis itself. Rose argues that sleep “is entirely beyond that which can be willed,” and reads Freud’s injunction that one must sleep for the sake of the inner life as more of a “plea than a scientific proposition.” Morgan Wortham delineates an intriguing duality between “want” and “fear” that is involved in the seeming contradiction of the conscious pursuit of unconsciousness. Therefore, the transition into sleep can never be entirely programmed or predicted, despite its willed state, and inasmuch remains as threatening as a fear of the dark (as Rose states, “we never know what will happen –– or where exactly we are going –– when we go to sleep”). Indeed, this paradoxical relation to sleep and the mental life of sleep is encapsulated in the rather archaic German phrase “es träumte mir”: literally, “it dreamt me,” or “I have been dreamt” (rather than the conventional English equivalent, “I dreamed”). This Janus-faced relation to sleep also applies to psychoanalysis itself, as that which (in Freud’s terms) builds out “into the dark,” purportedly in order to awake the subject into reason through the paradoxical procedure of recalling and replaying childhood horrors, so that, as Rose argues, the subject “cannot be sure, whether it is itself awake.”
The Poetics of Sleep opens by suggesting that neurological or physiological science is heir to a certain philosophical heritage that, paradoxically, regards physiology itself as something that can be set to one side in the understanding of the formation of consciousness. In this tradition, “matter” (the body, the outside, materiality) can be distinguished clearly from rational waking mind. From this perspective, Morgan Wortham’s work opens the possibility of a certain non-anthropocentrism at the heart of sleep (but also potentially consciousness and “life” itself). Although these implications are not necessarily pursued in the volume, they might be said to arise in the very notion of poetics that makes up part of its title, which arguably addresses the seemingly unconscious question of the title itself, namely: why not The Politics of Sleep?
Morgan Wortham is certainly not proposing any form of aesthetic practice in his use of the term, but is rather hinting towards the possibility that something like the supplemental relation that sleep embodies might lie at the heart of aesthetic invention, inspiration, and creation. This is configured around the term “poièsis” (which literally means “making” or “production”), and is set in distinction to “praxis” (“doing” or “action”). Thus poesis, as a form of making, happens “beyond and below the level of the will.” Much as Derek Attridge, in The Singularity of Literature, defines artistic “invention” as that which encapsulates the duality of both active creation and “the event of coming upon” — since for something to be entirely new there can be no recipe for its coming about, and therefore it cannot be solely willed — poièsis, for Morgan Wortham, signals an excess “of thinking or reflection, never reducible to a tangible object.”
The implications and entanglements of sleep and poièsis are masterfully elaborated through the literary chapters that constitute the latter half of the book. This is evident in the discussion of Blanchot and Celan in reference to singularity, and the condition of literature as both totally unique yet fundamentally repeatable (as language): “to say that the poetic text in its singular repeatability [...] crosses from one time (and [...] one place) to another, is to suggest that such a traversal of borders is imperative for acts of poetry to take place.” Although Morgan Wortham’s position does not formulate an alternative or new understanding of sleep itself in either a neurological or philosophical sense, The Poetics of Sleep undoubtedly opens the possibilities of the future study of sleep as it appears thematically and formally in the texts of literature, philosophy and science. Such a study might incorporate an analysis of the language or ideology of sleep in a more explicitly political manner (including the history and politics of sleep deprivation), a framework that exceeds Morgan Wortham’s more subtle deconstructive approach. Nevertheless, whatever interest you find satisfied by The Poetics of Sleep, I promise you won’t be reaching for the No Doz. - Marc Farrant

Iosi Havilio - The novel itself mirrors a dream sequence: neither its locations nor its characters feel entirely there, and little justification is given for some of the narrator’s actions. Even by the end of the novel, we barely know anything about the speaker

Iosi Havilio, Open Door, Trans. by Beth Fowler, And Other Stories, 2011.

When her partner disappears, a young woman drifts towards Open Door, a small town in the Argentinean Pampas named after its psychiatric hospital. She finds herself living with an aging ranch-hand, although a local girl also proves irresistible . . . Iosi Havilio bursts onto the Argentine literary scene after Open Door was highly praised by some of the country's most influential critics and writer, including Beatriz Sarlo and Rodolfo Fogwill. 

With minimalist beauty and exquisite strangeness, Iosi Havilio offers a mesmerising addition to the literature of solitude. - Chloe Aridjis 

Look out for Open Door by the much-praised Iosi Havilio.’ Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

‘Iosi Havilio’s remarkable first novel brings news of an intriguing world’ Martin Schifino, The Independent

‘With minimalist beauty and exquisite strangeness, Iosi Havilio offers a mesmerising addition to the literature of solitude.’ - Chloe Aridjis 

‘Deliberately unshowy, so that plot twists can unfold in the quietest ways.’ Fatema Ahmed, Prospect

‘There is a lot of sex and violence in Open Door, but it is never gratuitous. … You have in your hands a masterpiece.’ Oscar Guardiola-Rivera

‘A moving and highly original novel. A good translation is one that convinces as a work in its own right. That is what we get here.’ Margaret Jull Costa, In Other Words (journal of the British Centre for Literary Translation)

‘Havilio handles the narrator’s listlessness with remarkable dexterity and maintains the reader’s attention throughout … a novel which will flourish under many re-readings.’ Annabella Massey, Cadaverine

‘Open Door really surprised me, it doesn’t obey any of the laws of reading, it feels like it sprang out of nowhere.’ Beatriz Sarlo, Perfil

‘Open Door is not a choral novel but a series of solitary songs sung in intimate keys. It contains a tale to mull over, a story not easy to forget.’ El País

‘Open Door is a confusing, bewildering, riveting book; a paen, of sorts, to both the pursuit of solitude and the futility of that pursuit.’ Eleutherophobia

The unnamed narrator of Open Door, a veterinary assistant, seems from the first quite adrift -- willing to go with almost any flow. She lives with a girlfriend, Aída, having moved into her flat soon after getting to know her and "without giving it too much thought". Her account opens with her travelling to relatively distant Open Door -- a mental institution --, to examine a horse, and she reports, for example, that:

     The return journey seems quick, drifting in and out of a sleep that mingles with flashing images of the motorway

       The novel proceeds similarly, lullingly smooth while also flashing a variety of striking scenes and images by, the reader very conscious of being a once-removed observer. Aída disappears, but the narrator barely reacts -- unlike one of Aída's aunts, Beba, who shows much more concern. The narrator continues to drift, finding other places to stay, losing her job (which she in any case more or less forgets about), eventually winding up with the man with the horse (both named Jaime) at Open Door, but also there not finding any real purpose or ambition (and not seeming to mind).
       Typically, eventually:

     Boca and Jaime are always playing truco, they never tire of it. Nor does it incite any great passion, they just play. They shuffle, deal, and speak only when necessary for the game to continue. [...] And me too, on the outside, although I'm not taking part in the game, I'm there, with them, half horny, half lonely, circling around them, and I'm part of it, breathing in time, or in syncopation, accepting that this is how it is, that things have to happen this way, first one, then the other, each one in turn, devising a unique, singular present, which immediately escapes the three of us forever.

       The narrator admits: "I make mistakes: I act too hastily, on impulse, like a child", but she can't help herself. She seems unable to move forward with much -- or almost any -- sense of purpose. Yet it's not just her, it's a reflection of the larger society.
       Open Door, the mental institution, casts a large shadow here too. Established in 1898, the institution began with 25 lunatics; by 2000, she notes, there were 1964 internees, with an average of 65 new ones added each year. Yet the divide between sanity and insanity seems porous here: few act truly nutty, yet all seem damaged and isolated; if society itself has not completely broken down, these characters certainly can not get much of a fix on how it should function properly.
       The narrator's account is an odd mix of confidence and uncertainty: there's little she can pin down, yet her narrative moves steadily, firmly along, and she seems largely untroubled by all the uncertainty in her life; she accepts it as an almost natural condition. Typically, when Aída becomes an issue of sorts again, she notes:

Every time I bring her to mind, she escapes me. After everything that happened, it's an old and faded story. And more than anything, it's very complicated. Why am I going ?

       But there's little introspection here -- the occasional why about as far as it goes, without any attempt to answer the question.
       Early on, after witnessing what appears to be a suicide attempt, the narrator catches an otherwise empty bus and sits near the driver:

     Intrigued by what he saw reflected in the rear-view mirror, that confusion of lights and shapes, shrinking into the distance, the guy asked me: Did something happen ?

       That's exactly the feel of the entire novel, which always seems to be moving away from what happened, but offers oblique, distorting glimpses of it. Havilio pulls this off remarkably well through the narrator's surprisingly even-keeled tone; though arguably the story is very murky, all this vagueness and the lack of any traditionally presented story-arc isn't irritating. It is a decidedly odd work -- literally off-beat -- but in Havilio's capable hands is nevertheless surprisingly appealing. - M.A.Orthofer

The first open-door institution for the mentally ill in Argentina was established at the end of the 19th century in an area of countryside some 50 miles north of Buenos Aires. A village grew around it, named after that comparatively novel medical practice: Open Door. Iosi Havilio's remarkable first novel takes its title from the village, though it is only indirectly concerned with its development or the history of psychiatry. Relying on the area for its symbolic associations, he touches on key aspects of the social history of Argentina, exploring themes such as absence, identity and the awkward relationship between town and country.

Set in a hazy version of the present, the tale is a succession of unresolved mysteries and pointed ellipses. For a start, we know little about the teller, an unnamed woman presumably in her late twenties, who works for a vet and is sent to Open Door to examine an ailing horse. There, she meets its owner, a taciturn older man named Jaime, and learns that "the horse is called Jaime, like him" – which may be the first indication that they do things differently in the country.
But she feels oddly attracted to the area, and a whole day goes by before she can explain how. Back in Buenos Aires, the woman meets up with her girlfriend, Aída, with whom she is clearly having problems. The following day starts on a promising note, but during an outing Aída unaccountably "disappears", and the protagonist sees someone commit suicide by jumping off a bridge. It is not, as she initially fears, Aída, but the possibility of a similar fate will remain open. The novel refuses both reader and character the comfort of an explanation: the more inexplicable the world appears, the more unfathomable the protagonist's actions becomes. This is a tale of disaffection, in the long tradition that goes back to Camus's The Stranger.
As she awaits Aída's reappearance, the protagonist calls Jaime about his horse, goes back to Open Door, and eventually moves in with him, leaving the city for the countryside. Yet the tone never drifts into the pastoral. What we get is a disquieting depiction of the surroundings ("The night, moonless, was a dark cell"), and a dazed tale of romantic obsession with a local teenager, Eloísa, described as an "uncouth little brat, beautiful and elemental".
News of the city keeps coming in the form of requests from a lawyer to identify dead women fitting Aida's description. Jaime "doesn't understand how it can be so difficult to find a body". The sentence has special resonance in a country where thousands disappeared during the last military dictatorship, but Havilio does not labour the connection. Similarly, the idea that the country life resembles life in a lunatic asylum only hovers above the story.
The novel is a success in large part thanks to its powers of suggestion. Writing in a crisp brand of minimalism – frictionlessly translated by Beth Fowler – Havilio remains both impassive and evocative throughout a book sprinkled with gently pregnant observations: "I flop onto my back in the grass and the sky renders me speechless." At times, he courts the erotic with equal assurance: "Eloísa holds the figs by the base and with her tongue licks the sweet, sticky milk, before opening and devouring them." Now and then, his novel may fall into romanticised strangeness, but it brings news of an intriguing world. - Martín Schifino 

Iosi Havilio's Open Door is a strange and impressive little novel, and one with the potential to creep up on an unsuspecting reader. The narrator, a veterinarian, attempts to restructure her life after the mysterious disappearance of her girlfriend. A recent house call led her to a sick horse in the rural town of Open Door and, in the absence of her partner Aida, she finds herself inexplicably drawn back to the village. Quietly coping with the nuances of her loss, she senses she belongs with Jaime and his ailing horse in Open Door; she moves from Buenos Aires into Jaime's house, and, eventually, his bed.
As the novel progresses, Havilio stacks a slew of odd scenes and details atop his narrator's story. Periodically, the narrator returns to the city at the request of a bashful coroner to identify corpses that might be Aida. The narrator sees a number of dead bodies, all of which further weigh on her conscience. This, and many other moments in Open Door feel like they're pulled from David Lynch's playbook: early in the novel, it's apparent that something isn't quite right with the village: "Just in time, I heard a rasping hum, somewhere nearby, but out of sight, as if someone had cleared their throat to begin talking. Like a purr." Later, it's revealed that Open Door was built around one of the nation's first "open door" mental institutions, where patients are free to come and go as they please (the idea is that patients will feel less like inmates with some independence and control over their stay). With this in mind, it becomes tricky to read Open Door without growing suspicious of the mental stability of its players. Jaime and his associates, or the sex-crazed teenager who works at the general store: could they actually be patients on some kind of extended leave?
And what about the stability of the narrator? Many of her scenes in Open Door are frustratingly insane, but written with the perfect amount of first-person confidence to further build her character's complexity. For instance, in an early scene, she decides she'd rather sleep in an examination room at the veterinary office than further face her girlfriend's absence:

"At closing time, I repeated the usual routine: I switched off the surgery lights, lowered the blind, put the chain on the door, but I didn't leave…I undressed and lay down on the consulting table. It was a bit narrower and a good ten centimetres shorter than me, but still quite comfortable. I fell asleep immediately."
Later, she's drawn to Eloisa (the promiscuous girl from the general store) with the same inexplicable conviction that brought her to Open Door. Through Eloisa, the novel takes an erotic turn, but Havilio maintains the same sense of drifting detachment through their relationship that their encounters hardly seem surprising.
Yet, through all the weirdness of Open Door emerges something much more serious: a tone of crippling loneliness that overpowers the novel's surreality. The narrator's inability to connect with or grow close to people is only masked by the peculiarity of her situation in Open Door. Her relationship with Jaime and Eloisa are sexual but emotionless, and function only to bring her further from the truth that someone she loved was pulled inexplicably from her life.
It's easy and quite enjoyable to get caught up in all the unsettled scenes of Open Door but it's the narrator's detachment that carries the story into Havilio's finely crafted melancholia. Tonally, this shift is one of the bigger surprises in Open Door. Havilio spends much of the novel signaling portentous ideas, but as the story floats on these themes become too detached to mean anything. This is a difficult, but intentional reversal: Havilio deftly builds a captivating mystery, only to rub of its eerie sheen and reveal the emptiness underneath. - Jeff Alford 

 

I read Argentinian Iosi Havilio’s Open Door  last week for Spanish Literature Month.  The start of the novel was as hypnotic as anything I have ever read.  After losing her girlfriend in the city, the female protagonist witnesses a suicide jumping from a bridge over a river. It turns out that she was witnessing her girlfriend jumping to her death. Or was she?
Thereafter, traumatised protagonist retreats to the countryside village of Open Door and takes up with an older man, …. and a younger woman.  The rest of the novel consists mainly of  their liaisons – and a number of visits to the city to identify a series of corpses.   You can tell from my prosaic language that the second two-thirds didn’t live up to the promise of the first, despite some wonderful flowing prose and the tantilising fact that the village and the novel are named after a psychiatric asylum.  In fact, I found myself wondering as to its point.
Then I read the afterword writen by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera which claims that Open Door lives up to Borges’ challenge.

Borges contended you couldn’t approach truth,  ultimate meaning or ideal beauty directly because doing so, and being able to experience such things as the face of God, the meaning of the universe, or truth, would turn out to be a nightmare. The experience would be blinding and destructive. …
It is best to proceed by revealing one layer of appearance after another in the same way as one peels an onion, but without expecting to get to the hard kernel.  Warning: onions do not have a hard kernel. …
… Havilio proceeds as Borges recommended: he describes effects rather than their causes and works through narrative rather than by naming.

Except it seems there is a clue on the back of one of the Spanish editions where Havilio names the causes, his monsters …. capitalism and every man for himself.
Well, knock me sideways.  There I was thinking this was just a sordid little tale in which those with no limits or sense of decency eventually grow up and become responsible adults. Well, put like that I suppose I can see the allegorical application to Havilio’s named monsters.
Perhaps I should reread this book, because nothing in this novel is quite what it seems as Guardiolo-Rivera, convinced of its masterpiece status , exhorts.  Then again, perhaps I should just acquaint myself with Borges.   I don’t think he’ll be anywhere near as grubby. - lizzysiddal.wordpress.com/

An undefinable illness permeates the unreal landscape of Iosi Havilio’s debut novel. Named after the small Argentine town just fifty miles outside Buenos Aires, Open Door touches upon a wide variety of subjects and themes, toying with them in a vague and unreliable manner that  quickly becomes a defining characteristic of the unnamed narrator. One of these themes is place, or rather, our mental perception of place. In both real life and in the novel, the town Open Door is based around a psychiatric institution with an open-door policy: inmates are free to come and go as they please. We hear how  

‘Instead of being on top of each other, getting worked up, over-excited, here they are free to come and go, to be alone, to work, to walk about; they don’t think about escaping (we only have one breakout per hundred patients), nor rebelling, nor shouting, nor fighting: they are free!’  

The institution is always lurking in the periphery of the narrator’s mind as she goes about her business between countryside and city; though she comes close, she never seems to fully confront its nature head on.  

The novel itself mirrors a dream sequence: neither its locations nor its characters feel entirely there, and little justification is given for some of the narrator’s actions. Even by the end of the novel, we barely know anything about the speaker – she starts out as a vet based in Buenos Aires, but seems to willfully surrender her identity as the plot goes on. The opening passage of the novel sets the scene: ‘When the owner of the veterinary surgery told me to go to Open Door to examine a horse, I didn’t argue with her. The idea appealed to me. Open Door. It sounded strange.’ There she meets Jaime, the sick horse, and Jaime, the horse’s unhappy owner (names double up in this novel). Back in Buenos Aires, the narrator’s girlfriend, Aida, inexplicably goes missing and is presumed to have committed suicide. The narrator comes back to Open Door, settles down with Jaime and becomes infatuated with the teenage Eloisa, an ‘uncouth little brat, beautiful and elemental’. Throughout the novel, the narrator remains passive – seemingly bored and apathetic – and almost obstinately provides anticlimax after anticlimax as we are presented with cadavers, love and rediscovered historical memoir. The narrator’s inability to sustain her own interests becomes a subject and a style of the novel itself: Havilio handles this listlessness with remarkable dexterity and maintains the reader’s attention throughout.

Everyone we meet in Open Door is ill on some level, even the animals. Both Jaimes seem to suffer from the same malady: ‘Equine scans are very expensive and I don’t feel it’s worth it, I think to myself without saying anything. Jaime’s eyes melt into those of the animal, becoming straw-coloured and sickly.’ As Oscar Guardiola-Rivera states in his afterword, sacrifice and substitution resonate throughout this novel: who is giving up what for whom, and what will be exchanged in return? Eloisa is a character who rails against her sickness: she is in no way stable, but she has a vibrancy and an energy which feel unique in this town. Instead of waiting for the inevitable flat cycle of self-sacrifice and exchange, she heads out of Open Door and into Buenos Aires where she finds boyfriends who haven’t grown up breathing the same diseased air as herself – though of course, she can’t ever shake off her childhood environment completely.   

The narrator never fully reveals what is wrong with her – the reader sees that even she is unable to pin this down. At times, we are given moments loaded with understated emotion:

‘It was my birthday yesterday and Jaime gave me a Walkman. I wasn’t going to tell him, but later it occurred to me that perhaps it would improve the relationship [...] We ate our picnic by the lake and I told myself again that, despite everything, he was a good man and if I wanted to I could still fall in love with him.’

Birthday presents feel almost ridiculously real in unreal Open Door and this scene is all the more affecting for it, as are the sad and sarcastic moments of muted humour: ‘My face is squashed up against his solid, hairy chest. It’s no use, I end up having to make way with my own hand. I guide him. He’s a terrible lover, with no technique.’ 

This is a novel which will flourish under many re-readings: the ambiguity of the author, the strange relevance of the setting and the loose-ended plot mean that this story can exist in different ways on many different levels. In fact, as Guardiola-Rivera says, you begin to wonder if the entire narrative could just be ‘[the fantasy] of a patient interned in Open Door.’ This is a skillfully crafted novel which, without the intervention of Beth Fowler’s masterful translation, would easily be overlooked by the English-speaking community. Havilio plays with psychological readjustment throughout – ‘I had forgotten that sensation of cosmic plenitude that you get when you walk to your own music’ – and the effect is both melancholy and striking. - Annabella Massey

The bereaved mother in “An Open Secret” appears mad, though the madness is all around her. In “Open Door” by Iosi Havilio, who was born only in 1974, Argentina resembles an asylum. A young veterinary assistant relates how her female lover went missing. She fears that she may have seen her commit suicide off a bridge in Buenos Aires's old port. Between trips to the morgue to identify corpses, she visits a pampas village named Open Door, after the psychiatric hospital that was founded there in 1898 as an “agricultural work colony”. In the countryside she moves between two partners: an ageing gaucho—whose name is the same as his ailing horse, Jaime—and an amoral, druggie country girl with plaits.
As sexual encounters unfold in the woman's alienated voice, the characters merge with the village “loonies”. Events, like interchangeable lovers, have equal weight, from a stable fire to the brewing of maté tea, in an ambiguous tale that verges on dark comedy. A suspected UFO turns out to be the spotlit film set for a commercial. In an asylum without walls, there is “nothing to limit the illusion of absolute liberty”; ultimate control is when people no longer feel they are being coerced. With skill and subtlety, the novel hints that a whole society might labour under an illusion of liberty, manipulated by forces outside the frame. - www.economist.com/



Interview with Iosi Havilio   by  Lucy Popescu                                                      

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

                                                      

Iosi Havilio was born in Buenos Aires in 1974. Open Door is his first novel. His second novel is Estocolmo (Stockholm, 2010), and he is currently working on a sequel to Open Door. He has become a cult author in Argentina after Open Door was highly praised by the outspoken and influential writer Rodolfo Fogwill and by the most influential Argentine critic, Beatriz Sarlo.

When her partner disappears, a young veterinary assistant drifts from the city towards Open Door, a small town in the Pampas named after its psychiatric hospital. Embarking on a new life in the country, she finds herself living with an ageing ranch-hand and courted by an official investigating her partner’s disappearance. She might settle down, although a local girl is also irresistible . . .

Lucy Popescu: What was the inspiration for Open Door?

Iosi Havilio: There is an anecdote which I like to think of as the starting point of the story. When I was eight years old my father took me on vacation and we went through a small town called Open Door. He told me that nearby was a hospital for the mentally ill where the inmates were free to go about the place. I was frustrated because we did not stop to visit it. Hence, I was prompted to imagine a place where crazy people could walk in and out without restrictions. For many years, I remembered this fantasy of a dark, gothic and miraculous village. In addition, my later readings, experiences and obsessions contributed to my writing of the story.   There was no plan or any clear purpose behind it. The novel is pure invention, much in the same way as the memory of my childhood voyage probably is.

LP: In his Afterword to the English edition of Open Door, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera writes “Borges contended you couldn’t approach truth, ultimate meaning or ideal beauty directly because doing so, and being able to experience such things as the face of God, the meaning of the universe, or truth, would turn out to be a nightmare. The experience would be blinding and destructive.” Guardiola-Rivera goes on to compare you to Borges – in your ability to subvert reality. There is a nightmare quality to Open Door. In what other ways do you think this statement relates to your novel?

I believe that mystery is everywhereIH: No, please not Borges.  Guardiola-Rivera is very imaginative as well as generous. Anyhow, I believe that mystery is everywhere. There is a misunderstanding which leads us to look for deep revelations of the soul when analysing important literature. As I see the world, it is a never ending spiral which I observe upwards, from the bottom. Such an experience serves as an entrance and exit to any story.

LP: There is a tension between city and country in Open Door. Can you say a little more about this?

IH: People talk a lot about such tensions. They sometimes draw a map of fictions where such differences are expressed, starting from classical literature to today. I believe these to be futile categories, resulting from considering a part instead of the entire text, thereby misinterpreting the real world. Tensions never occur in time nor space, but only in the eyes of the observer. Otherwise, we risk falling into over simplified antagonisms and arrive at faulty language and communication. The worlds exist and that’s it. In fact, for the narrator in Open Door, the city is not fully a city and the country is not fully a country.

LP: On the back cover of the Spanish edition of Open Door, you mention capitalismo + salvese quien pueda (capitalism + every man for himself). What relevance does this have to your novel?

IH:  It was my editor in Spain who made the remark. I have an inkling of why he wrote it, but since they are only inklings I prefer to keep them for myself.

LP: There is a lot of explicit sex in Open Door and scenes that some readers may find off-putting. What were you hoping to achieve in these passages?

IH: Absolutely nothing else then what they say. I don’t know of any other sex then the explicit one. Paraphrasing Bataille, I would ask: what is more scandalous in a scene of lesbianism under the sky, the pussies or the stars?

LP: When did you start writing and why?

IH: I could date it to my adolescence. But as I grow older I am inclined to believe that it was a long time before, even before I could read and write. Indeed, I am convinced that most of my writings need not be put into words.

LP:  Do you believe in Ricardo’s Piglia’s assertion that “All great literature is political”?
I believe that the best political literature is the one that doesn’t speak of politics

IH: Of course, either by action or by omission. In fact I believe that the best political literature is the one that doesn’t speak of politics. Just as the best love stories don’t need to speak about sentiments.

LP: Who inspires you and why?

IH: All living things, including books.

LP: Do you think you are difficult to translate and do you participate in the translating process?

IH: I had no part whatsoever in the translation and I believe that was a very good thing. I think that the difficulties lie not so much in translating meanings into words as in the task of uncovering the underlying universe. In this sense, I am grateful that Beth Fowler has done a wonderful job in making the novel her own.

LP: Describe your writing space and your writing routine.

IH:Impossible. Chaos is my only method.

LP: What are you reading now?

IH:  After many previous frustrating experiences, I finally read with great pleasure James Joyce’s Ulysses.  It was great fun. I still hear the music, the breathing and the dissonances.  Also, I went back to Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir and I am reading again Facundo by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. I tried Michel Houellebecq again after a while. The Map and the Territory is amusing and caustic but, in my opinion, it lacks the strength of his earlier books.

Extract from Open Door by Iosi Havilio, translated by Beth Fowler

Shortly before seven, I saw her for the last time. She was wearing faded jeans and a black T-shirt, she’d put her hair up in a kind of bun. She seemed happy, normal. Her breath was bitter, from an empty stomach.

We had gone to La Boca. We were bored, the walk had been a failure. Too many people around, too many noises all at once and nothing much to do.

At some point Aída went into a bar. She gestured with her hand, she barely moved her lips, she seemed to say I’ll be right back, or something like it. I lit a cigarette. With my back to the street, I caught my reflection in a long and narrow mirror with traditional painted designs around the edge. People passed to and fro and I disappeared and reappeared between them.

A blond boy stopped in front of me. He had a cigarette hanging from his mouth. He smiled at me and mimed lighting it with an imaginary lighter. I gave him mine. He couldn’t have been skinnier, or dirtier. He was that type of blond whose hair is the only blond thing about him. A tough street kid, tanned skin, full lips, theatrical stare, aged about fourteen or fifteen. He lit his cigarette with the tip of mine and lingered longer than necessary in handing it back. A tough street kid, tanned skin, full lips, theatrical stare He had a scar snaking between the knuckles of one hand. He didn’t take his eyes off me. He looked at me the way some brats do, unintentional and yet intense.

‘Fancy a smoke?’ he said bringing his face closer, all his teeth on show. I just looked at him, a bit lost.

Do you want to or not, the boy pressed me and, because it was Sunday, because I was bored and because Aída still hadn’t come out, I hunched my shoulders as if to say: Why not? The boy jerked his head for me to follow him.

First I glanced into the bar and amongst the crowd I saw Aída going into the toilets. What had she been doing all this time? It didn’t surprise me, Aída did that sort of thing, disappeared, played hide and seek. The blond boy was waiting for me at the corner.

We took a diagonal lane and came to a yard that doubled as a basketball court, a few parked cars around the edges. The blond boy guided me to an out-of-sight corner where there were two other boys, even rougher looking and much younger. One was rather chubby with the look of an obedient dog, his face camouflaged in the hood of the tracksuit he was wearing. The third boy was much taller than the other two, wearing denim from head to toe, a proper show-off. Did you get it? the blond boy asked the one in denim, who immediately took a long, fat joint out of his pocket, twice the size of a normal joint. The blond boy lit up, took two deep drags and passed it to me. We smoked, each taking our turn, in perfect harmony. They asked me my name and I asked theirs. They told me that they lived round here and that they played in a band. They wanted to know where I was from. From far away, I replied.

Drugs don’t always act the same way, it all depends on the person and the circumstances. The lad in denim, who had struck me as the most laid-back of the three, was retreating into himself. The fat one, on the other hand, had taken down his hood and was getting more and more excitable by the minute. The blond boy, like a good leader, didn’t seem to be affected.

‘We want you to suck us off,’ the little fatty said out of nowhere, projecting the not-yet-fully-formed voice of an overweight adolescent.

The blond boy released a smoke-filled laugh. The one in denim turned pale, then red. All the blood rushed to the fat boy’s head, enough for the three of them. And he laughed too, through clenched teeth. As I didn’t say anything, didn’t even move, their nerves finally got the better of them and they passed me the joint again. The round continued without comment. When the joint had finished, we said goodbye with a kiss on the cheek, like good friends.

Published in English translation by And Other Stories: www.andotherstories.org

 

 

Jerimee Bloemeke - Pyschotropic lyric poems: Stars are tonight, it is legal to fire white males under forty because they’re unprotected, they seek peaceful environments where they can replay the messages by pressing ‘1’

Jerimee Bloemeke, Cosmic Latte, Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2013. 

floatingwolfquarterly.com/14/jerimee-bloemeke/

Cosmic Latte is both the average color of the universe and the title of Jerimee Bloemeke's new chapbook of pyschotropic lyric poems. "The nothing / I could do to do nothing / anymore ridicules me," Bloemeke writes in one. "O to be on drugs / all the time / a little bit," he writes in another. These poems are filled with energy and verve, the lines echoing each other in the "kinetic periphery." Jerimee Bloemeke lives in Iowa City.

Harm's Way

(quiet with music)

Cicadas purr behind foliage.

The same things keep happening.

Tonight I’ve stolen a silver car

I am really good at driving

drinking clear West Indies rum,

clear music tropical moiré

surfacing the windshield

like a pattern untoward

trying to get out of me

platinum massacres of sorts.

Revving it, as if I hadn’t

already said I had, some  

passenger says, with the

strange cadence of a prayer,

I thought you stole this car.

Ferns in the rear views jump

pylons and we receive

undeserved glares in drive-thrus  

and looks from innocence  

at bus stop shelters where handles  

of grocery bags get grasped  

by hands and the nothing

I could do to do nothing  

anymore ridicules me,

but by the looks

of the car’s speedometer,

one can put their money in the bank

that these numbers mean something,

something is being done.

Delicate flame-scarred neck skin

shiny as a pin is reflected in the gimcrack

console plastic, a derby lap

accident too obvious put down

by a nepenthe and the current

nervousness met head on

by popular antacid without effect.  

To see where I stand, my passenger  

emerges from an open window

like a damned butterfly to walk the earth

prematurely, deformed by rushing,

then more grub than finished.

This should not be happening,

but I don’t know why.  

Promethazine Prometheus

(five-sided trains, the pentatrains)

People hate and do  

lovable lines of coke

minutes prior to when

they do another line  

of movie shoot fake coke.

  

Poem section

  

In the car, vapor trails and hats,

you are a benevolent king,

you put your fingers out  

the sunroof, scraping the sky,

you are a benevolent violet,

which sounds like benzedrine  

violence, but instead

you are a benzedrine lord,  

“xylophone music” (from the radio)

and “these cons” trying to con you

somehow like metanoia

or tripartite intercourse are  

defining moments.

  

Poem section

  

You say that capicola,

the traditional Italian cold cut

made from whole-pork shoulder or neck,  

makes you a tolerant

and understandable leader,

the stewardship, with honesty,

you place the meat upon a street seed bagel,

a “everything” bagel,

saying give me one with everything

you say make me one with everything  

and hahaha-ha-ha fuck  

(unwanted small talk),

the dreaded double tap.

  

Poem section

  

A bumper sticker reads

No One is Perfect,

a short but powerful quote

from an unknown author.

Put in perspective,

insight only matters if it’s salable,

if it’s alcohol soluble poison

or a solvable crime.  

In other words: waterproof jackets

versus water resistant coats.

In other words, talking over  

Italian lounge music  

(amore or erotica),

there’s salt.

  

Poem section

  

Stars are tonight, it is legal to fire

white males under forty

because they’re unprotected,

they seek peaceful environments

where they can replay the messages  

by pressing ‘1,’ where morale increases

with the sound of a Bic’s spark wheel

as it turns, and the little gas flame  

burns as the bowl is smoked,

coughing on the other line.

On the other hand, packed bowls

smile leafy green smiles.

Words seem to be happy, too.

  

Poem section

  

In a tent amongst cypress

we lick melted candy coating  

of Advil off our fingers; we do so much

with our fingers as humans, move the fingers

healthy and conscious, then look at them  

pick up the red, discarded head of the tulip,

viewing Earth through actress lenses,

over our shoulders, stooped, considering

if we are correct in saying  

that one who expresses displeasure

at receiving an unexpected gift

is not ungrateful.  

2c-e

(the universe slows since day one)

for Shulgin

No compassion enough to include

what are familiar details contained

unsatisfactorily (object irrelevancy),  

for those who possess more  

than they can love or hold

dear recognize the preface.

Bent knees and supine bodies

ground blot out the sky.

  

Poem section

  

Bothered alive, not yet dawn,

energized eyes see warm  

drinks (warmed) coat bones  

and the throats driven into coral

with regional design traffic lines

at the cabin’s chosen rooms,  

memory eaten with ease.  

  

Poem section

  

O to be on drugs  

all the time  

a little bit.

  

Poem section

  

The wall mirror from the wall,  

the Bank of America credit card,

spherical lumps of Wonder bread  

tasting like chewed pill medication,

calm and tenderness surrounding

plaid curtains –– interesting –– O stupid glory  

in young minds tripping down downslope  

runoff giddy up down the path to town  

flashing naïf expressions of clear, contained spirituality,  

that prescient sluice.

Palm Reading

(little batter stickers)

I, an organic, levelheaded adherent of a prescription,

feel nonexistence overriding my skin like an ant,

spider webbing shoot or a single of my own hair follicles

tickling the neck back, or my shoulder, behind a knee  

or at an ankle, I feel like whatever this feeling is  

is inexpressible circa twitching quick scratches  

of any of the aforementioned parts of me, kind of rubbing my nape  

with my left palm and finger padding, I do not feel too  

anxious or as a paranoiac, there is no withdrawal  

I cannot quell easily enough, and of an undiagnosed epidermal malady  

I know nothing, I don’t use topical applications such as Icy Hot,

I don’t have a flatland case of quivers of the anus, that vertigo,

for only at great heights am I afraid enough to play dead  

like some opossum in a jumpsuit, in a ’coon’s nest,

parachute placenta hindering the progress,  

I eat mac ‘n’ cheese from a box for Christ’s sake,

powder and rockhard pasta, must something be wrong,

some condition or conundrum, I’m turning up somewhere

unsavory, under some overpass, wedged up in the gutter  

at the casket clearance space at the top of an incline

to sleep inches below an interstate, feeling semis hauling  

colorful rusting containers of consumer goods rumble

to distribution centers in the relative middles of nowhere,

their suggestive Yosemite Sam mud flaps asway  

waving narcoleptically as the fluid’s wiped from my nostril.

  

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Even squirrels fuck

and scratch each other  

in bushes, even cars  

drive by slowly, and I  

have that look on my face  

and the demeanor unable

to express terrific things  

happening on tape  

and in photos detonated  

online which may  

or may not have  

anything to do with us.

  

Beater marble-sized

tiny tiny bird  

amongst boughs  

with red berry clusters,

people react to explosions,

bomb squads investigate

an item along the course

post-the terrifically archaic  

Twin Bombs of Boston,

and maybe I’m just sweaty,  

but I’m cracking me up. Please  

don’t crack down on me.

 

Blue M&M Mascot

There, a mound of seven or eight

crumpled debit receipts on the futon

within arm’s reach of hairy paunch.

  

Thunder’s heard as rain dies down.

Portions of routines like sad chords.

The paunch blue and shiny, mouth sighs.

  

Eyes like a stoner’s and the thumbs up

(I sware it makes me think) then the rain

matures enough for ponchos. White arms,

  

white cartoon gloves and sneakers,

that kick the box elder bug dead on

its wings, are counterfeit. Ach. Gloves removed

  

to wash hands and mouths with mouthwash

and hand soap, and the angle of the tall bay

window blinds evoke displacement, luxury

  

allowed only the situated. Deep breaths

of Crest peppermint, seeming sadder, employed,

what they will call this century one day.

  

The Copious

to know what it would be like
when I did not know better
than knowing what it was like
would be worse than knowing

Turned back to get the cdr I

  forgot and recognized the

blue and white fertiliser [pellets]

  under my boot tread, and in

  the night sky a cloud, its

cloudy [trim] haloed [white] by

the moon shine behind it. No

  less the tail lights [spanning]

  the back end of a

challenger blocks ahead in

the direction im headin.

Cuban in my pocket, bon

fire of the future awaits

  

Poem section

  

The copious, spider webs to

  the exposed skin of face

and wrists, copies imperfect

. Kind of lightly [trailing] like

cells  

[one can't remove]

  

Poem section

  

Twelve people here, but fun

  

Poem section

  

Theres a bit more people

here / getting more fun

  

Legalize It

(cigar cutter)

Beyond a certain point, movement itself changes…
…aim for the point of no return…

“shangrila”

Walked to the drugstore  

to buy sports drinks  

(swimming pool blue and red).

  

The knock-kneed girl stood  

on the overpass railing

stepping into the nook of the tree

overhanging the creek,

her face red that shed tears

over some rec center cruelty

(unknown).

  

On the opposite street-corner,  

two adults beamed on an infant  

sound asleep in a carriage

then gazed into their eyes  

silently, still, smiling, the cacophony  

of the parking garage,  

the street and the cars,  

as nonexistent for them as I.

  

The recounted familiarities

so there when passed by

on one’s way, in an OTIS vehicle,  

to install an elevator, escalator or moving walkway,

moved; we tilted our helmet.

  

Poem section

  

The jungle crosses the threshold.  

We contact our friends.  

“Jungle Boogie,” obsolete machetes.

You should choose your place in this  

bush adjacent to my screened-in porch,  

birds. Because only the strongest gusts  

jostle the wind chimes, there.

  

Poem section

  

The last time I was heard

I had coughed,

no one within 100 feet of me

(I was being polite).

  

I blew away a red spider  

hanging from an oasis

in the midst of the parrot man  

and the parrot man’s enthusiasts.  

  

The plumber repaired the jumping water jets

on the stone hill near the masonic lodge

as I lit a Parliament Menthol Light

because that is what I smoked then.

  

I was in a 3000GT  

with a decorative spoiler so slick

I was too hot (by which is meant sexy)

to be a terrorist.

  

I was too polite to discard my cigarette filter  

into any neighbor’s garden

because I believed litter belonged in the road

and I was alone.

  

Poem section

  

On sleeping pills, paint in the painting moves

when we focus on areas of the painting

the paint moves around

(kinetic periphery).

  

You cannot forget you are falling asleep

with your disagreeable hand on your face,

the fingers smelling of odd creams,  

soap, smoke or dough.

Un-to the Sepulcher

(slow of heart)

How did I awake? No boulder needed pushing aside

although it felt that way, tallying eight deaths, a little blue

in the sky (notice the compact size), dressing for mass

downtown where design imprisons, where the spires

quiver tentacular, and the sinners, their futility, trying

to erase the X marks on their hand backs. Mary, Mary,

quiet St. Mary fetishizes ideas of baby, of contracts,

punks put out on her cheeks, diving head first nude

into pool water drank and flicked onto sinners, those  

dehydrated Caucasians day drinking and hung over

indoor ponds, water pouring from golden decanters

onto infant crowns, mothers smiling ecstatic and wild,

fathers a blur the congregation cannot see, their tan lines

nothing but lines, but seen, giving the bends to fantasies

of inner tubes in lazy rivers of megamalls in late afternoon

light, waterfalls soothing me to sleep… How did I awake?

In a glass hexagon cell on cushions, glared at, my soul

mate’s nipples perked and I am feeling like I am falling

asleep to a thousand Newton’s cradles clicking, clacking

and sinners neighing holy holy holy holy holy holy holy

* and the scintillas tumble out of my soul mate’s purse

onto onyx tiles, my cirrhotic mania devolving into cackles

ringing off the porcelain toilet where my caca sinks like

macaws of smoke. It is said: It’s not what is done, but what thou call it.

Stunts, stick ups and lust. The outlined creases between her thighs.

The laughter thru her hair is hers, yes, as she takes down her panties,

looking close up at the third world details of my dark sneaker

with her weed eyes. At peace, I said unto her: My god, if only

I could put a little order to it. : Rab-bo’ni, which is to say, Master.