Jenny Hval - At its simplest, this debut novel by the Oslo-based musician Jenny Hval is about a libidinal awakening. But the book, drawing elements from pulpy romance novels, the Book of Genesis, and magical realism, is also the origin story of a world born of queer desire

Jenny Hval, Paradise Rot, Trans. by Marjam Idriss, Verso Books, 2018.


excerpt

A lyrical debut novel from a musician and artist renowned for her sharp sexual and political imagery

Jo is in a strange new country for university and having a more peculiar time than most. In a house with no walls, shared with a woman who has no boundaries, she finds her strange home coming to life in unimaginable ways. Jo’s sensitivity and all her senses become increasingly heightened and fraught, as the lines between bodies and plants, dreaming and wakefulness, blur and mesh.
This debut novel from critically acclaimed artist and musician Jenny Hval presents a heady and hyper-sensual portrayal of sexual awakening and queer desire.

“In Paradise Rot, Jenny Hval creates a parallel world that’s familiar but subtly skewed. As intriguing and impressive a novelist as she is a musician, Hval is a master of quiet horror and wonder.”– Chris Kraus


Musician Hval weaves a strange and lyrical tale of a young woman trying to navigate a foreign world in her intriguing if uneven debut. Johanna is a Norwegian exchange student at Aybourne University in Britain in need of a flat. When she responds to an ad seeking a “QUIET” respondent, she finds herself embarking on a bizarre journey with her new flatmate Carral Johnston. Johanna’s new lodgings are strange indeed: in a renovated warehouse, with thin plaster walls that stretch only halfway to the high ceilings. Sounds echo oddly throughout, so that Carral speaking in the bathroom sounds as though she’s everywhere, smudging the boundaries between what is personal and what is shared. Johanna’s study of mycelium begins to take over her life in a literal fashion; mushrooms sprout from the walls of the flat and distinctions between life forms become blurred. Carral and Johanna, it turns out, might be two women, or one. Hval’s writing is surreal and rich with the grotesque banalities of human existence: urine, decay, mold. The prose is principally concerned with the varying feelings of grossness: from the mealy slime of a rotting apple to a man exposing himself on a train. Though the images can be striking, the reader begins to get the sense that there’s not much substance behind them, making for an visceral yet thin novel. - Publishers Weekly


It’s the textures of Paradise Rot, Jenny Hval’s debut novel, that stick with you. When Norwegian student Johanna arrives to study in a British seaside town, she’s struck by how foamy the food is compared to the wholegrain heft of Nordic cuisine—the only crunch is the sugar. She moves into a fetid converted warehouse with graduate Carral, where the damp partition walls and a glut of festering apples break down all physical and psychological boundaries. They consummate their strange attraction with Carral pissing on Johanna in bed and awaken with their “bodies dried up like a crystal fist.” Paradise Rot was originally published in 2009 and is newly translated into English, yet it feels ahead of its time. The themes of alienation, queerness, and the unsettling nature of desire align Hval with modern mainstays like Chris Kraus, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Maggie Nelson. Hopefully its critical acclaim will lead to the translation of Hval’s subsequent novels, Inn i ansiktet and this year’s Å hate Gud (I Hate God). –Laura Snapes

https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/the-best-music-books-of-2018/

“Hval is an artist of many questions—the ones she asks, and those she provokes in the listener. Apocalypse, Girl swerves from decipherable politics to recondite personal imagery. It’s not a paraphrasable album, but it is a listenable one, its avant-garde tendencies held in check by Hval’s beguiling voice.”– Anwen Crawford, New Yorker

“Contemporary pop culture teems with unfiltered first-person narratives and cathartic self-exposure, from search-engine-optimized ‘it happened to me’ essays to the highbrow family memoirs of authors like Maggie Nelson. At its worst, the form is trashy; at its best, it can convey ideas that extend far beyond the confessor, tapping into something both intensely intimate and universally political. The avant-garde Norwegian singer Jenny Hval pulls off this feat with a rare grace, layering prose poems, both spoken and sung, over synths, pulsing house rhythms, and noise-rock fuzz. Where Hval’s last studio album, Apocalypse, Girl, served as a withering feminist commentary on the sexual politics of American consumer culture (sample lines: “I beckon the cupcake/The huge capitalist clit”; “I grab my cunt with my hand that isn’t clean”), Blood Bitch, out September 30, deconstructs the menstrual cycle, the ageing body, and the symbiotic relationship between lovers, vampires, and prey.”

– Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, Village Voice

Norwegian musician and artist Jenny Hval’s debut novel, Paradise Rot, published by Verso Books, is a trip. It’s acid(ic), unsettling and luminescent—teetering the fine line that separates psychedelia and paranoia, often slipping into the latter (for me anyway).

There, not there, there, not there

I read the book very quickly but it consumed me more than I it. Very often it left me breathless. The writing rips apart reality—what we think we see, feel, smell, know—and places it under a microscope. Words come alive, they mingle and spark off one another, bubbling bubbling bubbling in my brain:

slippery silk slides with slime gets clogged—soggyis sucked in, then sucked outback in, becoming something else:
something moist, skinless and quiet.

My eyes widen. So grotesque yet I want more. The textured writing plays on the abject in a Kristeva-ean way, but also not quite—it’s more psychosis than psychoanalysis. Reading aloud, words stick to the roof of my mouth. sweet sap, Mycology, bulged, mushroom. My skin crawls with goosebumps. drops, seeds, beads, spores, burst. The air is claggy, My heart beats faster. porous, holes, burrowing, filling, flesh… Am I sweating? There’s an involuntary shiver. (Trigger warning for trypo and mysophobes: Paradise Rot is both a sensory/synesthetic dream and nightmare.)

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Jenny Hval is a pro at knowing how to get to you. She’s a good witch practising dark magic: performative, visual, aural and literary bewitchment. Her music is a spooky and surreal soundscape diving deep into female impulses, women’s bodies, sex and queer desire, belonging, nature, myth and monsters. It is intellectual and haunting. It leaves what Hval’s calls sense impressions.
The rhythmic breathing of her song In the Red sends my heart reeling into a pumping frenzy. The soft screeches of Mephisto In The Water and woeful moans of The Plague tap into something buried and seething under the surface: a swirl of longing, trauma, hysteria and psychic pain. How Gentle is still; Holy Land is slow, scary; This Is a Thirst is serene—and my body trembles, my eyes welling with tears. But it’s the breathy whispers:
bananas, thin,skin,subculturally lonely,soft dick rock,capitalist clit,flaccid fingers
And the echoing bangs and clangs of Kingsize that remind me the most of Paradise Rot and its creepy power of getting under the skin and staying there.
As a piece of writing, Paradise Rot is, possibly, brilliant. But that’s not what I’m interested in. To read this book, one must embrace the vastness and messiness of their thoughts and perceptions—they must experience with their whole body. Hval takes simple moments, like looking at a decaying apple, taking a piss, sipping tea or holding another human form, and magnifies them, opens them up, making the reader pay attention to what is easily left at the wayside. A peripheral reject.

An apple is never just an apple,

it is a body or bodies: the core, skin (peel), (forbidden) flesh, leaking black (blood) juice. An apple is the beginning and end of this (fairy)tale. And through the senses and skin, nerves and organs of narrator Djåoanna/Johanna/little Jo—a 20 year old from Norway who has moved to the English coastal town, or maybe city, of Aybourne to study biology at university—this tale is told. It is a story of isolation, identity and navigating a sense of belonging within a new landscape. To make a home in a strange place and ask is this normal? Or better yet, is this real? Jo likes the real, that’s why she chose the study of the living.

The biologist creates the world; The world of biology

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W.HOUSE,
Paradise Rot is Jo’s living and decaying world. One she can’t escape. On lone walks around the winter stricken seaside town Jo follows an orbital circuit (Aybourne was beneath me, closed off in all directions, like a chest with no lid.) The hostel—her first “home”— the train, the university, the warehouse: all these new locations feel paradoxically full and empty, like, there’s a sense of solidarity and synchronicity yet total loneliness. It is a familiar heartbreak. A story I can search for, make fit in some places, but cannot fully feel the weight of:

I suddenly knew nothing about myself, nothing seemed right in English, nothing was true(I could not align with the landscape. It reminded me, my body, of being newborn.—Holy Land)

The warehouse—the story’s nucleus—is the vast and uncertain home Jo ends up in after numerous viewings, interviews, rejections. This is how it begins. She sees it advertised:

“ROOM AVAILABLE IN LARGE W.HOUSE.
SHARE WITH 1 F.
.QUIET.”

There is a curiosity to find out the warehouse’s history: why construct a plasterboard apartment here? It was an old brewery that becomes a sinking ship. It’s also haunted, filled with ghosts of inhabitants new and old. Invisible life grows, moves and speaks of its own accord. I know this uneasy sense of space well. Visiting friend’s warehouses or attending a random party: the milky synthetic walls, a make-shift bathroom, old rugs thrown over walls for warmth, tripping over unexpected steps, a new treasure around every corner—lots of corners. So much space yet everyone is on top of one another. A place where even isolation is intimate.
The book shifts between inside/outside the warehouse and its occupant “1 F.” Carral Johnston. The warehouse, or factory, as it is often called, is raw and porous; the outside gets in but the inside can’t get out. Unable to purge, the warehouse becomes sick and everything turns yellow: apples, moss, Carral’s hair, sweater and skin—the yellow Carral Johnston. The book, in general, is very yellow: urine, wallpaper, yolk, a pie, a rejection note, dying grass, alcohol, a lamp, a beam of light. Supernatural yellow, toxic waste yellow, pallid yellow; fading and fading and rotting. Bitten apples turn yellow, infected with Carral’s spit; apple slits, punctured by nails, go brown like a small dark nipple in the golden skin.

 I stared at her yellow sweater, trying to see a hint of nipple under the tight-knit wool fabric. There was nothing.

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1 F. 
Yellow surrounds Carral but not like an aura, more like a lingering disease. Everything she touches stinks of yellow. She’s a slippery goldilocks with no sense of boundaries. Sticking her fingers in everything. Reading about Jo and Carral makes me itchy. Uh, it is nearly a love story. But more carnal than considerate. More affect than affection. Their intimacy makes my stomach dance and my toes curl: Jo strokes Carral, Carral pees on Jo’s leg; their shared silences that say so much; two siamese twins entangled as one four breasted creature. It is toxic yet delicious. Their bodies melting into one another. It is intense and cruel.

(I feel sick)

Carral tries to devour young and innocent Jo. She plays with her like a yo-yo: back and forth. Breathe! … Anxiety brews in my chest because I know Jo and I know Carral. I know what it is like to live off the sickness of another person, to be fascinated and repulsed by them, all the while allowing the infection to spread. They promise to make you better. But in the end, please, you gotta purge. Jo and Carral’s relationship embodies the ethical dilemmas of consumption. Consume so much that you become it (another person? thing?) and it erupts out of you leaving scattered remnants—a trail of trash. A tangled history of trauma and triggers—slowly, slowly decomposing.
But! Love or not, it is a lust story that seeks to devour heteronormative convention.
Everything she sees she understands;Everything can be made from her hands.His body so tight, his arms so strong,His hair as red as fire…

…To grow together is their pursuit,And his red flesh their forbidden fruit,He stumbles and gasps and finally dies;From his ashes will a four-breasted creature arise.

These are extracts from a novel written (in verse) presumably about Jo and Carral in a yellow notebook. The beginning, on the left, was written by a man (the neighbour, Pym) and the ending, on the right, was written by a woman (Carral). It transforms from a man’s paradise fantasy into a tale about the destruction of Eden and the demise of Adam—a feast of flesh. It gives Genesis’ Garden of Eden the kiss of death, although in this version the snake—what a trickster—is suspiciously missing. Storytelling is important in Paradise Rot and there are others, like Moon Lips, the fantasy fiction porno book that rarely leaves Carral’s hands, which begins “this isn’t just any romance in your hands, dear reader…”. And there’s the story of Emma, a girl from a memory Jo tells Carral who, when Jo was seven, asked her to get into her bed naked.

Emma said that we could get pregnant On the sofa cushions, a fidgety Carral in my arms,I wondered why I’d been so scared in Emma’s bed back in year one

(a queer epiphany)
A four-breasted creature, Moon Lips, Emma, Paradise Rot. The stories leak into one another. By the end I feel as though they’ve climbed inside me—as one.

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QUIET
Paradise Rot is loud. It continues to echo through me long after I’ve put it down. Jenny Hval’s sensory sensitivity is magnificent. She writes tunnels of sound, honing in on the subtle songs of everyday life. There are outside sounds: cars, trams, raindrops, a bee. And there are sounds that settle inside a person: skin against clothes or a toilet seat, apple juice between teeth, the distant swooshing inside someone’s ear, breath. The warehouse acts as an echo chamber, everything vibrates and everything has a rhythm.

I’m programing a new heartbeat for a new home.

Confession: I re-enact several sound scenes. By going deeper into Jo’s head—her body—I hope to fall into my own. In the shower I listen to water droplets bouncing off my body, noting their change or softer quality as I lather my skin with soap. Pausing, I push my ears to hear farther—what is there to be heard beyond the traffic, or wind, or tv? Vague sonic contours. I pay closer attention to the people around me and, after some time, learn the uniquely tuned rhythms of their breathing, chewing or fidgeting. But it always puts mine out of whack. One room of people becomes a fucked up symphony of fluids and skin. I wonder if that’s why I spend so much time alone.
I have to read some pages twice—slow down—as words seem to tumble and tumble and. Mania: I see and feel so much. This was on purpose, I think… Writing in rhythm, as rhythm, through rhythm. Sentence after sentence so well crafted that I sing them in my head as words bounce against one another.

warm white glob Pym…Pym…Pym…thick blood clotsdrips and dripsJo…Jo…Jo…Jo…

Jo sings too, but only in her head. And people sing to her: in dreams, at a party and at bars, through earphones. When Jo listens to music she wants to overpower and pause; volume high to push out unsettling thoughts, which, uh, doesn’t always work. Some music can only take you closer to the source of pain, like Bjork’s Vespertine album, so intimate. Music, sound and verse—poetry—form parts of this book’s soft skeleton. Paradise Rot is a re/mix of and for senses. Listen…

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The Snake
It’s Carral.

In the story the apple poisons the snake, and Eve packs her books and moves out of paradise.

Tears fall. It’s so simple: an apple.
A symbol of sin and desire to keep us in line, to keep the doctor away—(the in)sanity! Fruit of temptation, a lesson in shame and sex. Written as Golden in Greek mythology, the fruit of Discord, an embodiment of beauty, vanity, desire and dispute in the name of. The Norse Goddess Iðunn, the keeper of apples, a deity of youth and immortality with long golden hair and a promise of eternal beauty. And then there’s dear Snow White, an innocent soul and a foolish child. It’s a fairytale laced with envy and vanity, one bite of the poisoned apple and sleep beckons Snow into a glass casket: an eternal performance of Woman, Supine. Oh, of course, Alan Turing: gay, a genius. The myth of his poisonous apple is the saddest yet. Remember:

An apple is never just an apple

Paradise Rot has an abundance of abandoned apples, half-eaten and rotting. Yellow Honeygolds: Carral is the snake, the apple is the warehouse inside Carral. Pink Ladies: flesh. Bloody Ploughmans: forbidden. Each apple is a story of transformation and becoming, of desire and sex/uality. (A four-breasted creature, Moon Lips, Emma.) Hval weaves and re-forms stories, mutilating them with a deep commitment to the senses and subjectivity. Her stories grow around me and reach inside one tendril at a time, sometimes I feel her words behind my eyes or in my stomach: they wake something up; stirring something that has long laid stagnant. Paradise Rot is situated storytelling as a queer methodology for writing and rewriting (or breaking?) myth—the tales that seep throughout history—and for mapping lived experiences. It is writing against (hetero)sexed normative narrative and literary structures. Words run free, they feel from the inside. Paradise Rot is revolution through revulsion.
Jenny Hval has truly written something beautiful.

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Here, not here, here, not here
I still feel like I’m dreaming: expecting dirt between the tiles in my bathroom to start moving or waiting for an apple I’ve just bitten into to instantly rot, turn black and crumble. As I write I watch people move—in my house or at a cafe—and I see it: the sharing, touching and mingling of their bacteria and flesh and fluids. They take form in bright colours and grotesque textures, growing larger and larger and… stop! I have to look away. But it doesn’t leave me, I still feel it,

The apple has no end, just like this fairytale

growing under my skin, letters forming flesh bubbles. Spores, sex, stain, a snake, a mushroom, an apple. They want to be known.- Mollie Elizabeth Pyne
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-destruction-myth-jenny-hvals-paradise-rot/




In Paradise Rot, a young university student named Jo has her first queer sexual experience in an apartment slowly filling up with creeping moss and fungi. At its simplest, this debut novel by the Oslo-based musician Jenny Hval is about a libidinal awakening. But the book, drawing elements from pulpy romance novels, the Book of Genesis, and magical realism, is also the origin story of a world born of queer desire. As Jo and her roommate Carral grow closer and closer, their damp apartment becomes ever more fertile, slowly transforming into an ecosystem unto itself. Their home is a warm bubble inside the cold fictional English town of Aybourne, and within that bubble, Jo slowly loses all sense of distance and separation from the object of her desire.
The novel very much mirrors the world that Hval has created in her work as a recording artist. Best known for the playfully cerebral avant-garde pop albums she’s released over the last decade, Hval explores intimacy and desire while embracing the repulsive along with the banal. “In the doctor’s office / Speculum pulls me open,” she sings on her 2016 song “Period Piece.” “Some people find it painful / But all I feel is connected.” It’s no wonder, then, that in Hval’s literary vision, love is driven by a focus on the eroticism found in the quieter details of domestic life: the sounds of fabric against skin, water dripping, tea mixing with milk, urine streaming into a toilet bowl. In these everyday acts, she finds something wondrously carnal to marvel at: “When she dipped her tongue in the surface of the warm milk and licked up the skin,” Jo observes of Carral, “I felt the tip of my own tongue get warmer, and when she closed her mouth I could almost feel the milk skin against the roof of my mouth, like slimy cigarette paper.” Although it was written early in Hval’s musical career, Paradise Rot is a compendium of the imagery and themes that have long run through her discography: queerness and feminism, a stark focus on the human body and its fluids, and the continuum between innocence and corruption. Originally published in Norway in 2009—when Hval was releasing music under the stage name Rockettothesky—the novel is evidence of just how long she has been turning these concepts over in her mind. It also marked the transition to releasing music under her own name. Her first album as Jenny Hval, 2011’s Viscera, can be seen as an extension of Paradise Rot’s love story: “Golden locks / Dripping, melting out of me / Golden showers,” she sings on the song “Golden Locks,” over soft guitar arpeggios. The language clearly mirrors the fixations that Jo develops as she falls in love: “I dreamt of Carral’s golden hair locks twisting around me like a warm golden exoskeleton,” she remarks at one point as the two become inseparable. “When I woke up, our bodies were clammy and damp. The mattress stank of urine.”
Moisture is the vehicle by which the main characters find connection, as well as the reason their small home starts to become a mini-biome. In the same way that wetness dominates Jo and Carral’s lives, fluids permeate every part of Hval’s music. She has sprinkled past albums with recordings of breathing and sound effects like liquid trickling and spilling in a quiet space, creating the feeling of an isolation chamber submerged in still, murky waters. The cover of her 2013 album Innocence Is Kinky features a wet face pressed against wet glass, and her fourth solo album, Blood Bitch, is entirely devoted to its titular fluid. Hval celebrates liquid for its drawing and binding power—another way to communicate sensuality and queer romance. On Blood Bitch’s final song, “Lorna,” Hval declares: “No one ever asked me, how do I desire? I don’t think anyone ever talked to me using the word ‘desire’ at all. No one ever told me or taught me how to contain it. It kept existing, but there was no language. Does anyone have any language for it? Can we find it?” Paradise Rot is an endeavor to create that language and articulate that desire, and it remains as relevant to Hval’s artistic practice today as it was almost a decade ago.
That Hval is examining the same issues that moved her from the beginning is a rare feat at a time when artistic reinvention commands the most attention and examination. And with each musical or literary examination of a substance like blood or a concept like desire, she reveals a new aspect. Her work in its entirety, then, offers a multidimensional perspective on those images, building up to an entire world—her beautiful, monstrous, queer Eden.
Hval’s latest musical release, The Long Sleep, revolves around this theme of constant revisiting, with each song calling into question aspects of the tracks that came before it. The lyrics of the opener, “Spells,” begin “You are your own disco ball,” with Hval singing the words in an upbeat, crystal-clear voice; the next song, “The Dreamer Is Everyone in Her Dream,” starts out with her whispering dolefully, “Let’s say that you are your own disco ball / It sounds better, more promising / It doesn’t just sound like you’re broken.” The result is an album that winds around itself, never leaving any detail unexamined or taken for granted. In many ways, this kind of spiral structure is a fitting analogy for Hval’s career. Now, with the release of the newly translated Paradise Rot, we can experience her artistic evolution beyond the shape of a timeline, as a series of challenging examinations melting and bending in on themselves. Like Paradise Rot, Hval’s musical catalog begs constant revisiting and reexamination. Listening to—or now reading—her work feels like getting jettisoned into an underwater reality that fantastically mirrors our own. It would be entirely terrifying, if exploring it weren’t so much fun. - Ann-Derrick Gaillot
https://www.thenation.com/article/jenny-hval-paradise-rot-review/


As per the title's promise, Paradise Rot seeps with goo. There are "spit bubbles," "pearls of fat," "a pee soaked mattress," "warm white globs" and "sticky black crotches" frothing freely around; apple flesh "bubbles in between teeth," sweat forms "cold sweet sap," and velvety "honey funguses" sprout from space.
Such freaky finery fills only a petri dish's worth of secretions from the sticky bildungsroman of Djåoanna, or Jo – a mousy, twenty-year-old Norwegian on semester abroad in the fictional seaside town of Aybourne, Australia – poised on the cusp of a fantastic sexual awakening. Lonely, curt and unmoored, little Jo tumbles into an oozy erotic fantasia in the same way that one falls asleep and enters a dream: slowly, then suddenly. "Sometimes I'm not sure what's going on," she whispers partway through her psychedelic trip through Aybourne. "I don't know how to explain it."
Equally psychedelic (and Norwegian) is the author of Jo's life, Jenny Hval, a multi-disciplinary artist who has always loved investigating viscera in search of dampness and truth. Over the past 12 years, Hval has presented clammy wonderland after clammy wonderland, in albums and art installations that suggest her intense fascination with the lurid world of flesh, disentangling beauty from gore and vice versa.
Her music – rich, filmic, spectral and sinewy, as if Cronenberg's more operatic movies were for some reason re-scored by Björk — inveterately worships the body, in modes that can sound like prayer. In her songs, women appear in primal, exposed, surreal shapes: sometimes in moments of climax, sometimes pried open and into pieces, and very often in states of extraordinary rapture. ("I arrived in town... with an electric toothbrush... pressed... against... my... clitoris..." goes the first line of the first song off Hval's very first record under her own name.) As such, mucus, rot and pus; blood, spores, urine — all of it takes center stage in the ornate grotesquerie of her gluey debut novella.
"When I went to America I found myself to be not myself," Hval recalls on "Holy Land," the sprawling closing track of her fifth album, Apocalypse, Girl. "I could not align with the landscape. It reminded me, my body, of being newborn." Rot opens on a similarly natal scene: Jo lands not in America but Australia, loaded with too much luggage, staring out of her hostel window as fog smothers the grey coastal hamlet. "There. Not there. There, not there," she hums upon her arrival in a coolly lyric voice, imagining herself "a new heartbeat" for her new life.
After a fruitless, weeks-long apartment hunt, Jo makes a funny friend in the older, lissome, chronically sleepy Carral Johnston, moving in with Carral after a brisk interview in the converted beer brewery she's made her home. (The place is "raw and porous," nightmarish and noisily alive.) Their shared living space spans a rancid, massive cube, all plasterboard and mezzanines with a thin fur of moss lining the floors, but nothing is half as monstrous and weed-like as Jo's lilting narration, running wild as her home becomes a slimy wonderland of psychosexual discoveries. It is, as Jo puts it, a "rotten, reeking garden of Eden" — not hell and not heaven, but an honest limbo where Jo's reality lives in jelly-like suspension.
Like the first-person mode so often used throughout Hval's art, Jo's voice feels partly like autobiography and partly like a proxy for women fighting the drifty feelings of dissociation in response to a world of vague, unnavigable sensations, like sexual preference or anxiety. Braising in the juices of her home — the runoff slimes, the milky emissions, the putrefaction of decaying food — Jo spends much of her time trying to compartmentalize away the mounting bizarreness of the world around her as half-hallucinatory visions threaten what's real and what's not. Like funguses, strangeness springs forth sui generis. Things decay and fall apart; certainty curdles. Bodies change with the suddenness of jump scares, mimicking the sometimes-monstrous shifts that occur during puberty.
"There's something in me that makes me ... lose control sometimes," Carral reveals at one point where her body seemingly disintegrates, softens into mush, and joins the squalor of their little universe. Like a riff on Helen Chadwick's "Loop My Loop," it begins when her hair falls clean from her scalp in large fistfuls, mixing into their flat's fleshy sludge "like peelings from a golden apple."
Unlike the work of magical realists like Bulgakov or Borges, the thrill in Paradise Rot is not in the characters' lack of acknowledgement of the vile and surreal, but in feeling Jo's eyes, like our own, widen in response to the unstable world both within and around her. Sex amplifies the feeling tenfold. The novel's liquid language – decomposed and viscous, as if pooled from the home's floorboards – gleams during the dreams and motions of desire. "Transformation is for me a much more interesting way to look at narrative than a 'story,' " Hval told NPR in a 2015 interview. "The reward is desire, a desire that is not about inequality and dichotomy, but about liberation. It's a fairy tale, perhaps."
"I wanted to wear him like a coat, suck him out," says Jo, of a former partner. In fantasies, Jo has "paws and claws growing out of fists," and necks elongate "thin and long like swans." An unwanted kiss is a "Spanish slug, antennas tickling the roof of [her] mouth," while a wanted kiss is a "rush," where "stalks and fingers and veins spread through the body like a new soft skeleton."
Compared to Hval's "continuous echo of splitting hymens;" her appellation of "soft d*** rock" to her fourth album, her orgiastic "black vegetable soups of hair and teeth," Rot often feels like a parade of impressions mixed from her lyrics writ large. Hval has always seemed to admire the cursed image for the shorthand way it suggests the violence of emotional turmoil. But she is at her best and most successful in the novel, as in her music, when she allows herself to follow the twisty thread of a wild vision and spiral backward into more mystic places. Paradise Rot only does this at key moments, and not often enough to pull the novel out of its sometimes too-distant stupor, but the passages that do pursue this movement feel extraordinary, like translations from an ancient, kinky parable.
Here is Jo, for instance, midway through recounting a good dream:

"I'll tell you the fairy tale of the apple. Eve ate the apple, and then Adam came and did so too. Afterward, this apple was forgotten, and it was assumed that it rolled away in the grass while Adam and Eve were chased out of the garden. But that's not true, because secretly the apple rolled in between Eve's legs, scratched open her flesh, and burrowed into her crotch. It stayed there with the bite marks facing out, and after a while, the fruit-flesh started to shrivel, and mold threads grew from the edges of the peel."

Julia Kristeva, in her essay "Powers of Horror," might term the whole of Paradise Rot a work of pure abjection: "that which does not respect borders, positions, rules ... that which disturbs identity, system, order." In art, and in practice, the abject refers to the monstrous, horrific, literally repulsive stuff — corpses and blood and slurry — that one "thrusts aside in order to live." But abjection — to Carral, by proxy Jo and more broadly, to Jenny Hval — is life itself.
Cindy Sherman — a woman who has also spun together an artistic existence by inspecting the bonds among our bodies, our fluids, our flesh, and one another — may be Hval's closest analog in her study of the similarities between revulsion and desire. Sherman's photographic Sex Pictures series, one of her many projects that induce lightheadedness on sight, features sharp images of violated and hybrid mannequins posed like odalisques on damp forest floors.
Like the figures in Sex Pictures, Hval is calmly consumed by the grotesque and the relationship it has with women's bodies. Flesh is never immaculate in Hval's universes, but meant to be probed, biopsied, examined intently with a hand mirror in low light. Hval's curiosity is more than simple pleasure in perversity: It's meant to defile the idea of women's bodies as pristine and plush (recall Eve's primary role in Milton's Paradise Lost: "For softness she, and sweet attractive grace") and reshape it into something more dreadfully real. Maybe more revolutionary than that transfiguration is her disemboweling of desire itself, unraveling it to its fearsome, primal state, and exploring the strangeness of how sexuality can alienate one from oneself; how feelings of mistrust come about when desire is new, queer and unreliable. Or, too, the nasty, menacing, small instabilities of attraction — how brutally infiltrative it can feel when realizing, midway, the sensations of a crush — the freakishness of the way it grips.
The cover of Hval's sixth album, Blood B***, features two faces (one of them Hval's) unpeeling from one another from what looks to be a single sheet of skin. It's a photo of two Eves, shot in low-fidelity, and reminds me of one of Sherman's Sex Pictures — "Untitled (#305)" — in which a pair of almond-toned mannequins exhale in soft ecstasy.
"My breath was her breath," Jo intones, barely at a whisper, at the end of the novel.
Aren't all romances conceptual? Though what Carral and Jo had was as doomed as a dream, Hval's treatment of sexuality as grisly eros perhaps shouldn't be all that shocking. Desire, like viscera, is quotidian, part of us, as reliable and as fitful as sleep. When fantasies become reality, however, there's a calculus to be made. What can we live with? What fictions do we have to reject? What happens when we realize loneliness is the gory thing that unsettles?
Hval already wrote a song about this, two years ago, titled "Secret Touch." "It was both ravishing," she sings, her voice curling toward paradise, "destructive, and most of all, (and most of all), absolutely necessary." - Mina Tavakoli
www.npr.org/2018/10/25/660242476/in-paradise-rot-jenny-hval-traces-a-surrealistic-sexual-awakening


Paradise Rot, the newly translated debut novel from experimental Norwegian musician Jenny Hval, centers around a stranger come to stay. After biology student Jo arrives in an English university town, the only housing she can find is in a former brewery. There are no permanent walls, and every sound carries and amplifies itself. Before Jo even agrees to move in, she hears her future roommate, office temp Carral, urinating: “I thought it sounded a little thick, as if warm milk was trickling out of her.” But Jo is not bothered by this intimacy. She moves in with little hesitation, marking her first shift from the person she used to know and into this unknown new world. The narrative setup (newcomer, foreign town), combined with the tenuousness of the living situation, gives the novel a sense of shifting reality and temporariness from the start.
Hval is an expert at creating and sustaining atmospherics across genres, and Paradise Rot is no exception. Her descriptions of the odd, fervent life inside the place creep in slowly and then take over. Normal apartment things take place at first, with bugs, mildew, and some near-rotten apples that wind up in strange places. Eventually, though, every surface in the apartment is covered in moss and grass and condensation, with mushrooms growing on the ledge of the bath. Jo and Carral adjust themselves to the changing atmosphere, growing separately inside their habitat and closer together like a network of fungus. The novel becomes like a terrarium, the loft some kind of magical realist Eden. There may be severe hazards involved with the living situation, but nobody seems to mind (even though, in a panic, I found myself thinking “Buy a dehumidifier!”).
The strength of Paradise Rot is its peculiar narrator, whose headspace provides Hval with a showcase for her descriptive style. Jo is a watcher—reticent and imbued with the patience of a scientist. She accepts the oddities of her living situation as observable fact, but it’s clear that her inner monologue has an unusual quality to it. Every time Jo observes Carral, the latter takes on slightly alien aspects: “She was wearing that thin pale-yellow wool sweater again. The yellow was so close to her skin tone and hair that she seemed naked, a sexless, matted nakedness.” As Jo’s relationship to Carral grows closer and more idiosyncratic, their interactions become stranger and less human too: “Carral stared back at me and followed the juice sinking down my clear jellyfish throat.” By the time that Carral creeps unsettlingly into Jo’s bed, the two seem on the way to becoming mycological, a part of the mushroom network of the apartment itself.
In this novel, as in much of Hval’s work, identity and belonging are capable of morphing based on the narrator’s surroundings. In “Holy Land,” the closing track from 2015’s Apocalypse, girl, Hval says, “When I went to America, I found myself to be not myself/I could not align with the landscape.” This also rings true for Jo, whose identity is upended the second she lands in Ayborne, down to her name. “When I said, Hello, my name is, I couldn’t help but think of other names, from pop songs and films: My name is Luka, I sang to myself, My name is Jonas.” When she does manage to introduce herself, the sound is all wrong: in Norway, she is Johanna, with a soft, y-like J; in Aybourne, she is Jo, or as Carral calls her, “Little Jo.” All through the novel, her selfhood is context-dependent. She repeatedly visualizes herself disintegrating or absorbing outside elements. At one point, when talking with a male character, she remarks how she doesn’t enjoy the conversation or the way it “focused only on burrowing deeper inside of me. I felt translucent. Could you tell just by looking if someone is a virgin?” She repeatedly finds herself unable to explain the circumstances of her relationship with Carral to other students in her program. The borderlessness she feels by being dislocated from her context offers her no bolster against outside forces. It also renders her nearly incapable of decision-making until the novel’s end, when she has to choose a self and salvage it.
Other motifs running through Hval’s lyrics are also on display, including sex and gender, the curious grotesqueries of the body, its fructification and softening. When Jo gets her period, thoughts about fecundity come with it, and she sits in the toilet “as if [...] leaking into the room and dissolving, flowing from my own bloody crotch like black juice from a rotten apple core.” The detached yet unbearably intimate manner of this organic observation is common throughout the book, and reminds me of the track “Kingsize” (Apocalypse, girl), in which the singer holds four large bananas in her lap to rock them to sleep as they “rot slowly in my lap, silently, wildly, girly.” There is, obviously, a connection to Blood Bitch, Hval’s 2016 thematic investigation of menstrual blood, but the album takes cues from horror in a way Paradise Rot simply does not. Given that Paradise Rot was printed in Norway nearly a decade ago, it’s also possible the novel is an incubator of sorts for what seems to be a significant thematic interest for Hval.
Paradise Rot is an odd microcosm inside an ordinary world, something so enclosed that it might go unobserved if you didn’t know where to look. It is, in many ways, a novel about finding and then choosing a self; it also shows the pull of unexpected queer desire and the dismantling of boundaries that draw requires. But most of all, in the way that a microscope reveals an unsettling truth about the familiar (that it’s teeming with life you never expected), Paradise Rot is hard to forget. - Niina Pollari
https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/jenny-hvals-debut-novel-paradise-rot-review-stunning-slice-of-fermented-life/


The sound of urine hitting a porcelain bowl rings in your ear, bouncing off high ceilings to reverberate throughout the air. As you read Jenny Hval's Paradise Rot, it becomes clear that Hval is writing for the senses, conjuring with almost nauseating accuracy sensations both mundane and extraordinary. The motifs swirl across the pages: the uncannily soft texture of a slowly spreading fungus, the saturated stench and taste of overripe apples, the endlessly echoing plinks of streams of urine, the pale yellow-white of elderly skin and hair—a world that is completely saturated, about to burst. By the time you close the book, you practically expect the pages to be damp and stained from the juice of apples.
Paradise Rot is not necessarily a pleasurable read, blurring the lines of the coming-of-age genre with psychological horror and rendered in such lucid, impressionistically descriptive prose that merely reading it makes you feel fairly woozy. The skeleton of Paradise Rot—the ostensible plot—tells the story of Jo, a young Norwegian woman who moves to a small town in the United Kingdom to study biology, and moves in with Carral, a mysterious older girl, who lives in a renovated old brewery.
And that's where the sensations begin to pile up, both for Jo and for the reader, because their apartment in the brewery barely has any walls, and the walls that have been constructed are thin, shoddy affairs that don't reach the ceiling. Every sound carries, whether it's the rustle of hair swinging in a ponytail or, as we experience along with Jo multiple times, Carral using the toilet; every smell carries, like the nearly-rotten apples Carral brings home. There's simply no privacy; Jo and Carral therefore grow closer in ways both intentional and unintentional, until it's no longer clear to the reader whether Carral is another character or merely a manifestation of how Jo sees herself in her new life in a foreign country.
If Paradise Rot were to catch on and become popular (or if it took the form of a television miniseries), the inevitable water-cooler discussions would certainly center on whether Carral actually "exists". There are clever little hints dropped by Hval throughout the short novel (it's barely 150 pages) that indicate a growing convergence between the eccentric Carral and the rather passive Jo. It's seen as Jo becomes accustomed to taking tea with milk in the British way (rather than the Norwegian way) soon after moving in with Carral. One of Jo's classmates notices that she changes around Carral, speaking with a similar accent and acting oddly around her in public. Towards the end of the novel, it's seen when Carral discusses Jo's childhood memories as if they were Carral's own.
Indeed, Just as Jo's biology lecture about mycology seems to spill over into her life in the brewery as mushrooms appear in the bathtub, parts of Jo's own life become intertwined with Carral's. (There's also what could be a red herring alluded to later in the story, where one of Jo's classmates mentions that the brewery is supposedly haunted by a dead girl. But I prefer to think of Carral as less of a specter haunting their apartment, more a facet of Jo's personality.)
If we read the relationship between Jo and Carral as Carral being alter egos, of sorts, then Jo's later actions begin to make sense; it's as if Carral is giving her permission to explore her sexuality. Jo only picks up the trashy romantic novel Moon Lips after Carral has left it lying around the apartment. Clearly, Carral enjoyed its purple prose. Jo only hooks up with their neighbor Pym after Carral suggests they find someone for Jo to lose her virginity to.
As Jo bleeds into Carral, Carral bleeds back into Jo: Carral, in turn, has sex with Pym after Jo does, and Carral hijacks Pym's preposterous prose novel to add a short piece about two women feasting on a man, destroying him, then combining into one being. At this point the lack of privacy in the apartment begins to make sense, in a way: after all, there's no privacy from yourself, as much as you might try to hide parts of yourself from the other parts.
Of course, there's the opposite way to interpret this strange relationship: Carral and Jo are both real, and their merging is merely symbolic as they become closer and closer, a sort of quasi-literal rendering of how people's identities change when they form intimate bonds with one another. The heightened reality of Paradise Rot, then, could be read as highlighting Jo's unfamiliarity with being in a relationship, and her own fears of losing herself to this mysterious other girl.
As Jo grows more used to life in the former brewery, she and Carral become more intimate, going from what seems to begin with Carral crawling into Jo's bed to Carral's eventual… disintegration, as if she has been absorbed into Jo when Jo packs up and leaves the brewery for good. The disintegration of any narrative propulsion in Paradise Rot, as the story goes on, seems to mirror how unreal Carral feels to the reader. Where Paradise Rot starts off with the structure of Jo going to her university classes, it slowly begins to become less linear, as half-remembered dreams and surreal lines of thought blur into one another. Like Jo and Carral in bed together, the two becoming one in multiple ways. - Deborah Krieger
https://www.popmatters.com/paradise-rot-jenny-hval-2615210862.html

On her 2013 album Innocence is Kinky Norwegian artist Jenny Hval asks, “Is there anything on me that doesn’t speak?” The eponymous track, written while Hval toured the world with her 2011 release Viscera, features drum machines and soft guitar, forming a scant, panicky terrain where Hval details the lines and limits of her body in unfamiliar lands—Australia, Brisbane, even home base Oslo. The musician gained broad notoriety from arbiters of taste like Pitchfork’s Jenn Pelly, who contextualized Hval’s 2016 release Blood Bitch within a canon of leading female intellectuals including Judy Chicago, Julia Kristeva, and Chris Kraus. Indeed, Hval’s heady craftsmanship pulls from a vast array of capital-T theory—her master’s thesis was on Kate Bush’s The Sensual World, an album inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses—but it ultimately centers a deeply visceral feminine experience. Under Hval’s steady guidance, the body becomes “a thousand little mouths” and “a thousand baby birds,” both lines from the 2013 track. The words could have just as easily emerged from Jo, the main character in Hval’s English language debut novel Paradise Rot, out this month from Verso.

In Paradise Rot, the musician-novelist proves once again the breadth and depth of her intellectual and artistic range, articulating a young girl’s queer emergence into adult desire. Jo’s story is firmly situated in a reality just south of our own—fruit rots and expands, walls talk, and bodies taste as sound overlaps with smell and touch. We are led deep within the consciousness of Jo: a somewhat uncomfortable, awkward occupation that beckons the reader into a sensory exploration of the character’s emerging sexuality. Sensations permeate Hval’s writing as they do her music, where slippages from genre to genre and voice to voice create a polyphonic world for listener (and reader) to occupy for a minute, an hour, a day—if you have it in you. Hval’s writing, like her music, does not make for seamless reading. On her 2013 album’s title track, Hval says, “I watched people fucking on my computer… My skin starts breaking like LCD.” Hval (and Jo) lift the reader into a fantastical reality that is as contemporary—as millennial—as it is piercingly bizarre. The novel offers a unique window into girlhood from an experimental voice, marking new territory for both musician and reader.

Hval deftly avoids overwrought political arenas by focusing on Jo’s persistent, almost confessional narration. Sexuality is never explicitly discussed, and when it is referenced, the elliptical question roots itself deep within Jo’s body. One insistent fact swims through the sensorial topography of her prose: This is not a coming-out story; it is a coming-of-age story. The arc of Jo’s maturation, though, does not find itself lingering in Holden Caulfield’s duck pond. Jo March’s proposal rejection at the climax of Little Women may be more analogous—but Hval’s Jo resides in a different domain, deep within the gutters of girlhood. Jo does not “come of age” in one fell bat mitzvah swoop; instead, she journeys to and from disgust and pleasure, eventually finding, more or less, the love, passion, and understanding that hides in other people. In this way, Jo’s story does not follow a typical romantic queer plotline, which would move linearly from coming out, to marriage, and then maybe adoption. Instead, Jo’s vault into adulthood is composed of experiences, sexual and not, that center on the learning of an individual body to like what it likes—nothing more and nothing less.

Jo’s growth rests in her relationship to sex that, unsurprisingly for Hval, is also the narrator’s relationship to her own senses. In an interview with The Arts Desk in 2009, Hval said, “I want to see the body differently—as a space, a pioneer territory, something surprising and eye-opening.” For no one is this statement truer than for the teenage girl. With keen focus, Hval transmutes the facts and figures of late adolescence into a beautifully alien vista. The effect is both intimate and estranging. In an early episode, Jo gets cat-called on the street by a man who makes a lewd gesture, mistaking her for a prostitute. Jo’s description of the scene levitates away from the streets of Aybourne. As she says, “[Nothing] helps: Inside me the boy continues to put his index finger through his hand… as if he is poking it inside my body.” Trauma is not earth-shattering; in fact, it is worse—trauma is quotidian. The banality of Jo’s experience is dwarfed by her emotions about the event, manifesting in her imagination long after the “cat-call.” It is isolating—mostly. In one instance, a man exposing himself on a bus to every passenger allows Jo to feel a rare appreciation of acceptance and fellowship, a communal repulsion from sex that, for a moment, makes her less alone. Moments like these demonstrate Hval’s unique ability to gaze upon late adolescence with an unusual complexity, evoking the discomfort of growing up while allowing an intricate sense of belonging to begin to form.

Like Hval’s music, the novel defies genre, negotiating a space in between fantasy and reality, driven principally by the highly specific internal life of a young female narrator. As Jo settles into her life, her home in Aybourne quickly develops supernatural qualities. Jo’s roommate-crush, Carral, lets apples rot and insects invade the apartment, inciting unique permutations of objects and emotions. As Jo bites into a fried egg, she says, “The yolk burst under my tongue, and I imagined it was her skin I was tasting.” This rich description of highly specific sensorial overlap persists throughout the novel. Soon, the environment gives way to Jo’s blooming awareness of her own body, as she starts to grow more attuned to her own desire. The outside world originally invaded Jo’s thoughts, prodding her perceptions and dominating her daily life. However, in an apartment with a female love interest, emergent desire seems to create different, unfamiliar sensations. After discovering a newfound intimacy with Carral, Jo describes, “There’s a rush through me, her stalks and fingers and veins spread through my entire body like a new soft skeleton.” Her voice gives way to description of sweet fruit and long trees, things she can touch and smell. This may be the greatest gift from Hval in Paradise Rot: the idea that sex and love restructure the way our senses work. In a short 140-odd pages, Hval manages to suggest that queer, honest, desire births strange and wonderful relationships not only to other people, but also to all the tastes and textures of our landscape.  

Over sparse drumming, Hval’s voice echoes through her 2016 track, “Period Piece”: “I must find some kind of art form that calls my tongue from underground.” In her novel, Hval articulates on paper the aural and bodily entanglement she sets forth in her music. What Hval loses in books—the silent medium—she makes up for in a wildly imaginative portrait of a young woman colliding with the world for the first time. Intimacy and alienation create the very substance of Jo’s experience, where, under her eye, ordinary objects like apples (or urine) take on beautiful, dreamlike, and even horrific attributes. Sexuality is refreshingly subservient to Jo’s individual preferences and relationships, untethered from now-tired articulations of social pressure to be cis-het-whatever.

Is writing fiction Hval’s way of calling her tongue from the underground? Maybe, but somehow it seems that Hval’s answer is more complicated than any single medium. In her world—and, for a novel or two, ours as well—bodies sing and shudder before a universe of desire, of the possibilities of desire. Hval’s search for the art form is one we should be more than happy to accompany, waiting patiently while she leads us through the magnificent caverns between sight, smell, and sound.

- Claudia Ross
https://www.clereviewofbooks.com/home/paradiserot


Every page of Paradise Rot, the debut novel by Norwegian musician Jenny Hval, contains something in it that burrows deep inside you. Much like Hval’s musical output, the book is almost uncomfortably intimate, the kind of penetrating encounter that will make you uncontrollably shudder as your body is plunged into the sensory world that Hval has created. It’s an uncanny and yet deeply moving reading experience, one that Hval uses to explore the complexities of queer desire and human enmeshment in our physical surroundings.
The book, first published in Norwegian as Perlebryggeriet (Pearl Brewery) in 2009, follows the story of Jo, a young Norwegian woman, who has moved to the small fictional town of Aybourne to pursue a degree in biology. Jo quickly discovers a world in which all boundaries have collapsed, as she moves into a former factory building with few walls, every sound pulsating through her conscious awareness.
Her roommate Carral similarly erases all clear barriers between them, creating an unfamiliar form of intimacy that challenges Jo’s ability to make sense of the distinctions between her and the space around her. As mushrooms sprout from mold in their bathroom, bringing the outside world into their home, Jo and Carral find themselves uncertainly linked, with Hval writing: “Mostly I would stay still and feel the rhythm of her soft breath on my neck. Sometimes I was sure I could feel little sprouts appear under the skin where she’d breathed.”
Chatting with NYLON, Hval describes what it was like to see her work in translation, how her
music and writing relate to one another, and the challenges of creating political work that isn’t readily captured by platforms like Facebook. - Tanner Howard
 read the interview

Alex Cecchetti - the post-mortem investigation of the victim into his own assassination. The only clue—found in a secret pocket sewn inside his trousers—that detectives have recovered is a fragile piece of paper torn from the pages of a book with the words Tamam Shud, “this is the end,” written on it. Experts, antiquarians, and opium smokers have been consulted

Alex Cecchetti, Tamam Shud, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw + Sternberg Press, 2018.


http://www.alexcecchetti.com/tamam-shud/

http://www.alexcecchetti.com/texts-alex-cecchetti/official-website/
excerpts




“I am dead. Homicide, assassination, accident, suicide, the detectives have come up with nothing. The labels in my clothes, my fingerprints, my shoe size, everything has been unstitched, erased, wiped away, blanched, bleached, and consigned to oblivion. As the only clue, in a secret pocket sewn into my trousers, the detectives found a flimsy slip of paper torn from the pages of a book. On that folded bit of paper just two words, Tamam Shud, ‘this is the end.’ Experts, antiquarians, and opium smokers have been consulted, and all agree that these are the last two words in the Rubaiyat, an ancient collection of esoteric poems written by a Persian poet named Omar Khayyam. What the hell do I have to do with poetry, Persia, and hidden pockets? I can’t even sew on a button. My identity is still unknown and not even I remember much. This is why I have decided to investigate my own death.”
The Tamam Shud narrative emerged through a series of episodic performances and an exhibition by Alex Cecchetti at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw. For two years the writing process and the artistic process were interwoven, feeding each other as they evolved. The art project and the artist’s novel are linked together as much as the life of the victim is connected to the piece of paper found in his pocket.


I am dead. My body has been found somewhere between Los Angeles and Warsaw, dismembered. Murder, accident, suicide, detectives haven’t found anything relevant, my identity is still unknown and me also, I don’t remember much. This is why I have decided to investigate over my own death myself. Only clue, in a secret pocket sewn inside my trousers, I have recovered a fragile piece of paper torn from the pages of a book, written there, the words "Tamam Shud, this is the end".

"To die without memories, this is the horror. You know, life is short, but death never ends. And now I have no one to love and no one to hate for eternity. This is why I have decided to investigate my own death."

http://moussemagazine.it/alex-cecchetti-tamam-shud-la-ferme-du-buisson-centre-contemporary-art-noisiel-2017-2018/

http://www.zerodeux.fr/en/essays-en/alex-cecchetti-pierre-paulin-maxime-rossi/

Edward Dahlberg - An examination of the occidental mind in poetry and literature; the essays themselves are poems and fables, having nothing in common with modern criticism. The myths and names of this volume, all ancient, are employed solely to understand the present enigmas of the heart and the head."

Edward Dahlberg, Because I Was Flesh: The Autobiography of Edward Dahlberg, New Directions, 1963

Because I Was Flesh is the story of Edward Dahlberg’s life as a child and young man, and a portrait in depth of the remarkable woman, his mother Lizzie, who shaped it. It is an authentic record from the inferno of modern city life, and a testament of American experience. Lizzie Dahlberg, separated from a worthless husband, works as a lady barber to keep herself and her son in shabby respectability amid the vice and brutality of Kansas City in the early 1900’s. Her constant objective: to acquire a new husband who can give her security and help educate the child. She is attractive to men, but fate never brings her a good one. One suitor makes her put the boy in an orphanage––years of torment that are brilliantly described––and then betrays her. Another does marry her––and disappears with her savings. Lizzie is in despair, but soon begins to laugh at life again and arches her bosom for the next prospect. As he grows through a sensitive, painful adolescence, Edward is both fascinated and appalled by his mother. He adores her but is ashamed of her. He tries to escape, bumming his way to Los Angeles and later going to college in Berkeley, but is always drawn back. Even her death, with which the book ends, cannot release him. Seldom has there been so ruthless, and yes so tender a dissection of the mother-son relationship. And from it Lizzie Dahlberg emerges as one of the unforgettable characters of modern literature.

Dahlberg wed the kill-the-father imperative, the famous anxiety of influence, to the truism that a man is only as big as his enemies.—Jonathan Lethem


Because I Was Flesh is a work of extraordinary honesty, eloquence and power.—Alfred Kazin

Because I Was Flesh was the first book I owned by Edward Dahlberg.  I bought it in the fall of 1964 from Gordon Cairnie, at the Grolier Book Shop on Plympton Street, in Cambridge, shortly after it was published by New Directions.  Until then I had not read anything by Dahlberg, although I recognized his name from Charles Olson’s dedication of the “Christ” chapter in Call Me Ishmael to “Edward Dahlberg, my other genius of the Cross and the Windmill.” But when I caught sight of the book’s distinctive dust jacket photograph of a shoeprint in the sand, as I browsed among Gordon’s “new arrivals” on a small table near the front of his cluttered but welcoming shop; and when I opened the beautiful red, cloth-bound volume with its attractive type faces, laid paper, and letter press format to Dahlberg’s first sentence—“Kansas City is a vast inland city, and its marvelous river, the Missouri, heats the senses.”—I knew I had not only to read but to posses this book.
“Good choice,” the ever-attentive Cairnie commented when I brought the book up to his desk for payment. “Just don’t let Charlie know you bought it,” he added, referring to the well known rift between the two writers, who had been competitively close since they first met in an East Gloucester boarding house, on August 9, 1936, while Dahlberg was on vacation from New York and Olson was preparing to enter graduate school at Harvard. By the time I acquired Because I Was Flesh, it had been nearly nine years since the former friends last communicated, when Dahlberg, on November 24, 1955, had written a final letter to his former disciple, a letter which concluded “in a rebuke, in love and sorrow.”
Naturally I said nothing to Olson, who never once referred to Dahlberg during the many years of our friendship. But as soon as I returned home to Rocky Neck, I opened the book and began excitedly to read. Having spent the previous several years immersed in Beat and Black Mountain writing, I found Dahlberg’s richly biblical and classically allusive prose a bracing antidote to Kerouac, Ginsberg, and even Olson. As a young English teacher and graduate student, I immediately recognized Dahlberg’s absorption in the stately rhythms of Elizabethan prose, particularly that of Sir Thomas Browne, echoes of whose Hydriotaphia or Urne Buriall and Religio Medici I discovered on nearly every page, along with allusions to both the imagery and diction of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Webster, the Euphues of John Lyly, and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. But these allusions and occasional direct quotations were no mere borrowings or decorative effects in an otherwise highly original style. Dahlberg had internalized the major works of these canonical writers, along with Homer in Chapman’s translation, the pre-Socratics, and the Latin and Greek texts of Alexandrian philosophy, not to speak of the theology of Origen and Augustine.  And when he came to write, what resulted was not affectation, as one might assume, given the range and eclecticism of the texts I’ve referred to, but a prose that was entirely unique—direct, resonant, and breathtakingly beautiful:
Would to God that my mother had not been a leaf scattered every-where and as the wind listeth. Would to heaven that I could compose a different account of her flesh . . . Should I err against her dear relics or trouble her sleep, may no one imagine that she has not always been for me the three Marys of the New Testament. Moreover, whatever I imagine I know is taken from my mother’s body, and this is the memoir of her body.
It was this language, then, that held my attention, along with Dahlberg’s acute sense of place. Kansas City, where he grew up with his widowed mother Lizzie, a “Lady Barber,” emerges in his pages not only as a quintessential American mid-western, riverine town in all the specificity of its streets, drug stores, slaughter houses, tenements, and bordellos, but also as one of the generative places of the earth:
Kansas City was my Tarsus; the Kaw and the Missouri Rivers were the washpots of joyous Dianas from St. Joseph and Joplin. It was a young seminal town and the seed of its men was strong. Homer sang of many sacred towns in Hellas which were no better than Kansas City, as hilly as Eteonus and as stony as Aulis. The city wore a coat of rocks and grass. The bosom of this town nursed men, mules and horses as famous as the asses of Arcadia and the steeds of Diomedes . . . Kansas City was the city of my youth and the burial ground of my poor mother’s hopes; her blood, like Abel’s, cries out to me from every cobblestone, building, flat and street.
Although I was moved by Dahlberg’s account of his and his mother’s many misfortunes in this first reading—the eccentricities of her endless suitors, her struggle to retain what she felt was a necessary “respectability” as a woman who cut the hair of cowboys and traveling salesmen—and though I found the story of young Edward’s horrific incarceration in a Jewish orphanage in Cleveland nearly impossible to bear, what riveted me especially was the language I’ve spoken of. And its music remained for many years in my head.
But now, forty-four years later, when I revisit the book, which critics Alfred Kazin and Allen Tate both called “one of the great American autobiographies,” I’m once again taken by Dahlberg’s language, especially in a time when our own has become increasingly debased and trivialized. In this second reading, I’m even more fascinated and delighted by Dahlberg’s clear mastery of authors and texts once so central to our own self-definition. But what emerges in greater relief for me, though it was always resonant, is Dahlberg’s stunning sense of the social and the political. For when I first read Because I Was Flesh I was unaware of the author’s beginnings as one of our finest proletarian novelists; and it wasn’t until I had read Bottom Dogs, his first novel, published in 1930, with an introduction by D. H. Lawrence, who wrote that Dahlberg’s “directness, that unsentimental and non-dramatized thoroughness of setting down the under-dog mind, surpasses anything I know,” that I began to understand the political underpinnings of Because I Was Flesh in Dalhberg’s early radicalism.
What is Bottom Dogs but a first telling of the story of Edward and Lizzie in the most extraordinary plain American English, so reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson’s?  In 1964 I had read little Anderson, perhaps in college only the deeply affecting Winesburg, Ohio, and I was unaware of how important his novels and stories had been to the young Dahlberg, just as they were to the youthful Faulkner and Hemingway. But when you come upon the opening sentences of Bottom Dogs—“She moved from town to town, selling hair switches, giving osteopathic treatments, going on again when she felt the place had been played out. In this way she hoped to save a little money and establish herself in some thriving city. She had taken Lorry with her wherever she went.”—the echoes of Anderson’s diction and narrative mastery, especially in his masterpiece, Poor White, a stunning novel of small town failures and broken dreams narrated against the backdrop of emerging industrialization, are unmistakable, along with Dahlberg’s sharp sense of outrage over the kinds of oppression that he and his mother and so many others experienced as the country moved from a human-scale agrarian way of life to an alienating market economy.
So in revisiting Because I Was Flesh I find the echoes of Anderson along with Dahlberg’s ever-present social consciousness, though perhaps less stridently expressed than in his first book. It’s as if the two sensibilities, the lovely, direct Andersonian voice of the middle-American storyteller and the rueful, politically seasoned awareness of the mature Dahlberg, have interpenetrated in the context of Dahlberg’s exquisite late and more classical style, creating a new dimension of understanding and a greater, more tragic depth to his narrative. Yet the long-suffering figure of his mother Lizzie remains; and in dramatizing the story of their painfully conflicted life together, Dahlberg has given us one of the great accounts in literature of the relationship between a son and his mother:
When the image of her comes up on a sudden—just as my bad demons do—and I see her dyed henna hair, the eyes dwarfed by the electric lights in the Star Lady Barber Shop, and the dear, broken wing of her mouth, and when I regard her wild tatters, I know that not even Solomon in his lilied raiment was so glorious as my mother in her rags. Selah. - Peter Anastas
https://www.dalkeyarchive.com/revisiting-edward-dahlbergs-because-i-was-flesh/



Edward Dahlberg is one of the shrewdest, most rugged and interesting “failures” in American letters. One might almost say that in publishing his new autobiography, Because I was Flesh, at a vigorous sixty-four, Dahlberg had exhausted the possibilities of failure in our time, the rhetorical possibilities anyway. Nothing much left for him now but success. Notwithstanding the evidence of his sensible, clean-cut features on book-jackets, or the striking portrait by James Kearns in Can These Bones Live, he never tires of spooking us with intimations of his lacerated Lazarus-face, his pariahhood, his Ishmaelic solitude in a machine-made wilderness. How awful to meet Mr. Dahlberg! The man who knew and appreciated Randolph Bourne, belonged tangentially to the Stieglitz circle, befriended Tate, Josephine Herbst, Herbert Read, and Charles Olson; was befriended by Lawrence and Ford and warmly received by Eliot despite a warning from F. S. Flint that “Tom does not like Jews,” is clearly the victim of some demon of good sense that not only kept him working through three eras of changing tastes but guided him to the best compromise with those tastes. He anticipated Saul Bellow of Augie March in his serio-comic pilferings from the classics, he was way ahead of Fiedler in the love-and-homosexuality gambit about American literature, and he easily wins a prize as the loudest James-and-Eliot hater of them all, “I blame Eliot for nothing except the books that he has written.” (Thanks a million—TSE.) And lastly, he has made as big a personal thing out of Wisdom as John Kennedy made of not wearing a hat. I say it with respect and admiration.
The deceit in Dahlberg’s compromises is more apparent than real. When it isn’t the protective canniness of the self-educated love child of a lady barber from Kansas City, Missouri, it is probably reaction against an ever-threatening success as some kind of intellectual Barnum. He might well have become a distinguished editor of encyclopedias, anthologies, or textbooks. He is, indeed, a literary reactionary with a large, inclusive range. His quotations are often his own, original and amusing, and even at its lowest ebb his magpie classicizing (one envisions the Dahlberg Notebooks in 48 folio volumes) has a nonsensical charm, as when he tells us that Max Stedna’s horse in Kansas City had “more patience than Seneca.” Is patience the virtue for which we esteem Seneca?
But he chose to be a writer, and the alert impresario in his nature knew well how to invest and re-invest the modest capital of absorbed egotism without which no “creative” writer could hope to function. Which is one reason why Because I Was Flesh will probably be judged his best book and why it beautifully illustrates the principle of feedback in its reworking of Bottom Dogs, his first success of 1930; an Arcadian romance full of “gents,” “rounders,” “fellows,” “drummers,” where people “dance with pep” making “keen dips,” where the tenderly regarded hero is called Lorry and his fellow inmates at the Jewish orphanage are Shrimp, Spunk,… - R.W. Flint
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1964/03/19/dahlbergs-wisdom/




Edward Dahlberg, Can These Bones Live, New Directions, 1960
Revision of Do These Bones Live (1941)


This book is a work of criticism and exposition. Shakespeare, Dostoevski, Cervantes, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Rilke, Randolph Bourne (of whom we are so regrettably ignorant in England)--these are the prophets to be expounded, related, excoriated (stripped of accretions of platitude and misunderstanding). But behind them are the original prophets, the great Hebrew prophets, and the greatest prophet of them all, the Galilean.


“There is no contemporary prose work from which I have got so much pleasure and profit. The pleasure comes from the texture––a prose style which, in an age that has forsaken the art of prose, gleams with such expressive beauty… It is the crystalline vein of the English Bible, of Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Browne, running through the torpid substance of modern life… and is as relevant to our present condition as any book of wisdom… “It is a work of criticism and exposition. Shakespeare, Dostoevski, Cervantes, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Rilke, Randolph Bourne… these are the prophets to be expounded, related, excoriated (stripped of accretions of platitude and misunderstanding). But behind them are the original prophets, the great Hebrew prophets, and the greatest prophet of them all, the Galilean. Turning and returning to these Hebraic forebears, Dahlberg taps some source of collective energy, some fire-laden force of anger and denunciation, some heaven-lit clarity of vision.” - Sir Herbert Read

Edward Dahlberg is the literary phoenix of his generation. No greater proof exists that Fitzgerald's famous dictum about the absence of “second acts” in American life is susceptible to splendid contradiction. Once a much‐praised practitioner of that most mythical of American literary enterprises, the “proletarian novel,” Dahlberg repudiated not only his early fame but the books on which it was based, consigning himself to years in the wilderness where he virtually began his literary career all over again.

This second career dates from the publication, in his early forties, of “Do These Bones Live” (1941) —an extraordinary book of criticism clear ly inspired by D. H. Lawrence's “Studies in Classic American Liter ature” and William Carlos Williams's “In the American Grain” and emi nently worthy of taking its place beside them. (This book was revised and reissued in 1960 under the title of “Can These Bones Live.”) Next came “The Flea of Sodom” (1950) and “The Sorrows of Priapus” (1957), the “prophetic books” in which Dahl berg perfected his style and which began to win for him a new “under ground” reputation. But it is only in the last decade, since the publication of “Truth Is More Sacred” (1961), an exchange of letters with Sir Her bert Read on the value of modern literature, that Dahlberg has re emerged as something of a cult figure, recipient of the kind of hom age that is reserved, in our literary culture, for authors who are at once venerable, difficult, a little odd and very little read.

The rush to discover and redis cover Dahlberg—not to be confused with a readiness to understand him— has now reached the proportions of a minor stampede and is given per fect expression in the Festschrift which Charles Newman and Jonathan Williams have lately put together on the occasion of the author's 70th birthday (Tri‐Quarterly, fall 1970, $1.95). On the merits of what other living writer could one expect to find Allen Tate and the late Jack Kerouac in substantial agreement? Here, clearly, is a literary phenome non worth pondering, especially since the writer who is now said to please so many diverse critical tastes is not always entirely recognizable in the chorus of praise currently being lavished upon his every utterance.

Consider this latest volume, Dahl berg's ninth book (not counting “The Edward Dahlberg Reader”) in seven years. Though it contains fugitive elements of both genres, “The Con fessions” is neither a conventional memoir nor a standard autobiog raphy. Dahlberg himself calls it “a chant of shame.” “What else can a memoir be,” he asks on the last page, “but an enchiridion of cha grins” and the book is, above all, a threnody on the woes of existence —Dahlberg's in particular and man kind's generally.

Like all the books of his later years—with the important exception of “Because I Was Flesh” (1964), his masterpiece—”The Confessions” is a highly personal form of baroque sermonizing, a collage of sacred texts, lacerating aphorisms, dour prophecies and pitiless ruminations on the follies of the human species. There are, to be sure, some prickly and even malicious reminiscences of well‐known writers in this book; but to read “The Confessions” primarily for its small quotient of gossip or history—one of the pleasures, after all, in reading memoirs—would be about as rewarding as reading “The Ambassadors” as a book of etiquette. It can be done, I suppose, but it is bound to be disappointing.

“At nineteen I was a stranger to myself. At forty I asked: Who am I? At fifty I concluded I would never know.” In these opening sentences, the tone and much of the substance of “The Confessions” are laid before the reader, who quickly discovers that in these pages at least he is not going to suffer any surfeit of quo tidian detail. Chronologically, the book covers Dahlberg's life from the age of 19, when he arrived in Los Angeles down and out to make his way in the world, to the late thirties, when he broke with the Communist literary world in New York and thus brought his first career to a grinding halt in a clash of recriminations and lost friendships.

But the chronological framework of “The Confessions” is rarely al lowed to obtrude on Dahlberg's real concern in this book, which is not only to recount his sufferings but to transform them into the abstract revelations of a myth. Especially in “The Prentice Years,” the long open ing section that constitutes nearly two‐thirds of “The Confessions,” every painful memory—and in Dahl berg's case, every memory is painful —is pressed for whatever measure of dark wisdom it may yield about life itself. Every detail of his condi tion—the unabated poverty, the ter rible sexual suffering, the unrelieved loneliness, even the familiar frustra tions of the young aspiring writer— is generalized and allegorized into a fable of defeat.

There are oblique glimpses of life at the Los Angeles Y.M.C.A., of the author's university days at Berkeley (“Rabble University”) and Columbia (“St. Pragma”), of his fierce self initiation into the literary vocation, and, throughout, of that “muddy slime of concupiscence” in which he passed his loveless youth. But noth ing here is given in terms of realistic description or concrete events; every thing is raised to the level and lan guage of mythic revelation in which despised experience is redeemed by the dignity of exalted discourse and universal wisdom.

I doubt if the basic scenario of “The Prentice Years” will be entirely comprehensible to readers unfamiliar with “Be cause I Was Flesh,” the first volume of Dahlberg's autobiog raphy. In that great book—a masterpiece of Oedipal passion —Dahlberg returned to the ma terials of his first novel, “Bottom Dogs” (1930), now dismissed in “The Confessions” as “my dunghill fiction,” to retell the story of his mother Lizzie, a luckless lady barber in Kansas City, and of his own miserable childhood passed in orphanages in Kansas City and Cleveland. In what remains the best critical account of “Be cause I Was Flesh,” Josephine Herbst remarked that in writing this book Dahlberg had “taken the deadweight out of his teaching as a didactic writer, and … launched his basic theme on the confusing, chop ping and changing current of individual human life.”

“Because I Was Flesh” is the most compelling of Dahlberg's books because it is the most concrete and deeply felt. Here, as nowhere else in his writing, he confronts the only experi ence that is still entirely real to him and does so with a power of evocation that is at once eloquently physical and highly poetic. The paucity of credible women in American writing has often been re marked, but in the portrait of Lizzie Dahlberg we have one of the rare exceptions—one of those figures who lodge them selves in the imagination with the force of life. In “Because I Was Flesh,” as Josephine Herbst observed, “Dahlberg has given us a world of the kind we used to find in the great novels.”

There is nothing quite on this order in “The Confessions,” however, for there is no single personage in this book who exerts a comparable hold on the author's imagination. Dahl berg does not bring to the physical and moral circum stances of his adult life the kind of concrete observation and psychological penetration that make “Because I Was Flesh” so unforgettable. In “The Confessions,” observation gives way to maxims; portraiture gives way to anathemas, or, in the case of the few contempo raries for whom Dahlberg retains some remnant of affec tion, to a form of panegyric that somehow fails to persuade.

In the second and third sec tions of “The Confessions”— the one covering his expatriate period in Paris and London in the late twenties, the other on the thirties in New York— villainy abounds, but there is little credible shading. We are given, not history, but a moral ity play in which the author's tortured virtue is under con stant temptation from the rogues of the literary world. Even a stylist of Dahlberg's virtuosity cannot make of such insistent and unvarying self‐ justification a completely be‐ lievable chronicle.

There are some marvelous things in these later chapters of “The Confessions”—the story of how D. H. Lawrence was cajoled into writing an intro duction to “Bottom Dogs,” the account of the hunger march in Washington and some of the details about the role of status in the Communist literary world—but, for the most part, Dahlberg is too completely hos tage to his own rancor, too much in thrall to the vast store of grudges and grievances he has carefully nursed over the years to write a really illu‐ minating account of his con‐ temporaries.

His attempts to “gibbet” his enemies, real or imagined—the book contains appalling attacks on Edmund Wilson and Charles Olson, among others—are only slightly more repugnant than the affectionate condescension he lavishes (no doubt uncon sciously) on his friends. His profound hatred of modern lit erature, moreover, makes even his praise of certain writers a little suspect. For Dahlberg is not writing history or criticism in this book but a chronicle of his wounds. “I walk upon my hurts which readers entitle my books,” he writes at the end of “The Confessions.” “Forgive me, dear unknown readers, for I cannot pardon myself or life.”

Reading Dahlberg is a har rowing experience, not to be taken lightly and certainly not recommended for the faint of heart. He deals harshly, not only with the world at large, but — most vehemently —with himself and does so in a style which, in its elaborate artifice self‐conscious archaisms, ?? attention and inhibits almost equal measure. Nor ?? intelligent reader ever ?? to entertain the illusion Dahlberg thinks any better ?? This is an author expert ?? the reader's affec and exhausting his pati ?? The note of moral exhor on and recrimination mounts imes to a din.

?? then, constitutes the ?? of such a splenetic and ?? writer? The usual ?? is—what else?—style.

Dahlberg's prose style is, ?? question, a remarkable ary phenomenon. “Long I proposed to employ words gave joy to my ears, even ?? are archaic,” he writes “The Confessions.” “Never ?? the jeers; I don't care a about them.” With its ?? cadences and repeated ?? from the ancients, style is about as far re ?? from the rhythms and ulses of modern life as a temporary literary style ?? be. It is a style that not affronts history but tries dissolve it in favor of that hic realm of discourse in ?? the events of our own ?? even the events of our lives, can be recast in the of eternity.

?? it is precisely in this ance from history, this im ?? refusal to accommo the historical imperative, I think Dahlberg's style ?? its appeal. But do we really respond to a writer ?? on the grounds of his ?? I doubt it. Every style invokes an attitude toward ex perience, and Dahlberg's is no exception. What attracts so many writers of disparate per suasion to Dahlberg's writing is, I believe, the conviction and eloquence with which he ab solves us from the pressures of history and the necessity of having to negotiate our politi cal destiny. When, sometime in the 1930's, he repudiated “the fatal hellebore of political doctrines,” he took flight from history itself and from the uses of reason in divining its course. At the end of. “The Confes sions,” he denounces “the most depraved and cunning of all harlots, Reason” and earlier on, the worst epithet he can bring himself to hurl at Ed mund Wilson is to call him a “rationalist.”

Dahlberg is a powerful writer, but he represents, I think, the end of something, not a begin ning. Specifically, he repre sents the end of that modern literary tendency to evade the responsibilities of history in the interest of mythicizing all experience. In his essay on “The Myth and the Power house,” Philip Rahv Spoke of the way “myth, the appeal of which lies precisely in its ar chaism, promises above all to heal the wounds of time” and this is a fairly exact descrip tion of the central motive in Dahlberg's later writings. The irony is, of course, that in all his violent denunciations of modern writers, Dahlberg has steadfastly refused to recognize his essential affinity with the tradition of which he is one of the last heroic ornaments. - HILTON KRAMER

https://www.nytimes.com/1971/01/31/archives/the-confessions-of-edward-dahlberg-312-pp-new-york-george-braziller.html

Rabble articles and labor squandered in creating them hardens the heart. Nations that are rich in parasitic goods are poor in spirit. Thus Edward Dahlberg in one of these essays. Praised for developing a prose style that is, in Paul Carroll's words, "a weapon of rage and authority...monumental and astonishing," his work is unsettling as he confronts the American psyche and morality, its declevities and hollow ambitions. This book is an excellent introduction to Dahlberg's enduring vision and exemplifies the several modes in which he excelled: autobiography, literary sketch, principled diatribe, poetry of conscience.

His perceptions are generally brilliant, cogent and refreshingly original, and his use of the language as well as his mastery of English sentence structure make the book worth reading as an example of superlative style if nothing else.” - R. Baird Shuman

An examination of the occidental mind in poetry and literature; the essays themselves are poems and fables, having nothing in common with modern criticism. The myths and names of this volume, all ancient -- Deukalion, Theophrastus, Hesiod, Isaiah, Pindar, and Bellerophon -- are employed solely to understand the present enigmas of the heart and the head."

DAHLBERG, EDWARD (1900–1977), U.S. novelist and critic. Born in Boston, Dahlberg was the illegitimate son of a Kansas City barber and had a miserable childhood, being committed first to a Catholic, and later to a Jewish, orphanage, remaining in the latter from the age of 12 until he was 17. For the next two years he led a vagabond existence, supporting himself by work in a wide range of occupations, from truck driver and cattle drover to dishwasher and clerk. He then studied at Berkeley (California) and Columbia universities, became a teacher, and moved to Europe, where he first began writing in 1926. Dahlberg's early experiences inspired the semi-autobiographical novels Bottom Dogs (1929) and From Flushing to Calvary (1932). Those who Perish (1934) dealt with the impact of Nazism, the rise of which he had seen in Germany, on a small American-Jewish community. With his later works – mainly "prophetic" criticism – the writer gained a considerable reputation as spokesman for the avant-garde, although he soon abandoned his political commitment to Communism. Dahlberg's other books include Do These Bones Live (1941); Sing O Barren (1947); Flea of Sodom (1950), an attack on modern civilization; The Sorrows of Priapus (1957), a study of three world cultures (illustrated by Ben *Shahn); Truth Is More Sacred (1961), correspondence with the English writer, Sir Herbert Read; and The Carnal Myth (1968). Dahlberg was considered an outstanding prose stylist and later taught at universities in the U.S., receiving various literary awards. His autobiography, Because I Was Flesh, appeared in 1963, and his letters, Epitaphs of Our Times, in 1967. Steven Moore edited Samuel Beckett's Wake and Other Uncollected Prose (1989), an anthology of Dahlberg's uncollected writings. - https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/dahlberg-edward

Brad Phillips - 'Essays and Fictions' navigates the never-ending work of undoing oneself, whether that be through drugs, sex, art making, or finding a connection with someone worth living for.

Brad Phillips, Essays and Fictions, Tyrant Books, 2019.


excerpt


Brad Phillips' collection of short stories adeptly walks a very thin line between taboo and propriety, with rigorous self-awareness and generosity.
By confusing ideas around fiction and autobiography, Phillips writes with painful sincerity about shame, addiction, trauma, and the more troubling outreaches of sexual desire, with wit that is at odds with the subject matter.


"Essays and Fictions navigates the never-ending work of undoing oneself, whether that be through drugs, sex, art making, or finding a connection with someone worth living for. Amidst the ugliness of the human condition, this book’s beauty sneaks up on you." - Chelsea Hodson

"One sign of encountering a great writer for me is envy. I'm envious of the way Brad Phillips writes. I'm envious of his honesty as a writer. I'm envious of his bone-dry turns of phrase and his sarcastic observations. I'm envious of the slack alacrity with which he attacks such morbid subjects as suicide, addiction, pain, and death. I'm envious of the utter fearlessness he displays. Writing is dead, but Mr. Phillips, decidedly, isn’t.” –Bruce LaBruce

"Brad Phillips says, at the beginning of this incredible book, that honesty eludes him. Obviously, that’s a lie. When you read Brad Phillips, you understand why nice women write love letters to men on death row." –Sarah Nicole Prickett

"Last week, Giancarlo Di Trapano turned me on to Suicidal Realism, a short memoir by the Canadian painter Brad Phillips. It’s not exactly an edifying book. Phillips’s main themes are drugs and sex, in that order: “People who like to get fucked up with other people are not people I like to get fucked up with.” But Phillips has a watchful intelligence and self-knowledge, and an impatient sincerity, that sneak up on you (or at least, snuck up on me). He doesn’t ask to be liked, even by his groupies, but he does want to communicate: “I’m not interested in the ones who are drawn to the creator of the work, I’m interested in the ones who are drawn to the content.” ―Lorin Stein

"Searingly honest, brilliant and disturbing . Brad Phillips peels back the skin and bone and stares right into the human soul." - Anthony Bourdain




Wary readers might stumble into this book with one big worry: Is familiarity with Brad Phillips’ way of life and art—some awareness of his other output—necessary to make sense of this work?  If not, would ignorance breed misunderstanding? After all, Brad Phillips has spent most of his career as a photographer, visual artist, and provocateur. He’s primarily a graphics man, a bit of a Vancouverly con, a post-modern appropriation artist, and look at him now, writing guileless autobiographical hybrid fiction. What’s a reader holding his debut wildcard supposed to think?
Phillips has written critical essays on art history and art markets, but prior to this collection he is best known for his art and a sizeable Instagram following. Some of his paintings are photo-realist (a series of Patricia Highsmith novels reflected in mirrors, his wife in poses that are, uncannily, both alluring and asexual) and others that are word-based. For instance, a 60 x 48″ oil on canvas, Sad Story/True Story 1988/2002 (2016) which proclaims in black letters on a flat blue background: “Being kidnapped for ransom was incredible for my self-esteem.”
Upon examining the cover of Essays and Fictions, the first thing one notices is a bold sense of style : its stylized coptic lettering, that tell-tale “A,” its punctuating glyphs, the earthy red background a foundation for bright calligraphic flourishes. Perhaps you’ve seen this before. Consider the 1956 Benjamin Kopman edition of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.  Slipping on Dostoevsky’s jacket is quite the bold boost.  Recently, Eminem did something similar with his Kamikaze cover—a direct design lift from the Beastie Boys notorious License to Ill, art by David Gambale.  It might be wishful thinking to imagine that somehow Phillips will touch upon Dostoevsky’s themes of pride, nihilism, murder, and redemption, but given his known work as an artist, it may be more of a Kopman homage, recognizing great design. It’s a sweet cover in the best basic sense.
 Cracking the book open, what do we have? Phillips’ eleven stories provide plausible autobiography. He’s on trend with current indie lit mavericks who scumble lines between fiction and nonfiction.  Elizabeth Ellen drilled hard down in this genre in 2017’s Person/A.  A newish literary journal, Always Crashing, says in its submission guidelines that it accepts nonfiction, “though we prefer not to be told if it’s nonfiction.” Like Tim O’Brien, in his 1990 groundbreaking collection of linked stories, The Things They Carried, Phillips seems to ask: Can one reconcile past experience with today’s truth? Can fiction operate as a redeemer, a memory sculptor? Although Phillips is not a war veteran, his figurative “Viet Nam”—the place where he copes and masks the truth with this literary mark-making—is his inner-scape of pain management and addiction.
Phillips’ debut is ambitious. But how does it fare? It teeters on the cusp of greatness. He has taken time to think about life and the path he is navigating through it, and found solace, perhaps affirmation, in documentation and appropriation. It’s a memoirsy collection of stories and essays, recollected speeches, fragments, rants, letters-to-be-opened-in-the-case-of-death, and yet the best moments may well be the ones where he provides intentional story structure.
The king of this collection, “Ophelia,” arrives first. It’s fantastic.
In it, a man undertakes a monomythic journey to self-discovery (at least as far as scrip renewal), including an existential bus ride to some Lynchian intersection, where a mysterious BDSM club and  his shady psychiatrist’s den are both located. There are some dream elements, some nightmares, and some desire to undertake action harried by the desire for zero progress. It is, in essence, a story about an endless consumption of services powered by a penchant to waste time, underscored by the pleasure of being scammed while scamming.
Psychoanalyst Leslie Morris may be Phillips’ keenest creation. He has absolutely no intention to tell the truth. His office is papered with false documents, populated by prop women (patients? partners? grifters?) coming and going. The narrator, Brad Phillips, is his patient. With an acute sense of detail and an eye for all the major, minor, and disturbing objects in his doctor’s office, he is no more inclined to be honest. The reader is pulled into in Phillips’ trap as much as Phillips is caught in Morris’s. At one point, strangely alone in the office, Phillips sees a framed picture and is terrified:

The man in the middle was me. I was wearing a sweater I had worn the week between my first and second visit, an old sweatshirt from the Universidad de Salamanca. The women were both smiling, while I was staring somewhat apprehensively at something ahead of me. In the far distance of the photograph I saw a mirror. I picked the photo up and held it closer. Barely reflected but still legible I saw the word Ophelia in reverse, tinted neon red. I took the photo and my file and went and sat in the comfortable chair.
I took out a cigarette and lit it, staring at nothing, unsure of what I was thinking. I looked at the photograph and my file again. I ashed my cigarette on the carpet. Then I saw and reached for a very large ornate Africanesque clay pot—the staple of any therapist who wants you to know he’s cultured—and I pulled it off the shelf. I put it on the floor in front of me and continued to smoke, as I used my lighter to set my file on fire. First, I lit the edge of the cardboard, then I tilted the file so that the flames attached themselves to all of the paper within, and I deposited it in the bowl.
I took the photo of myself out of the frame and lay it on top of the burning file. I watched the image of myself curl and ripple then turn to smoke and begin to rise out of the bowl. Small black embers floated gracefully then vanished. When I finished my cigarette, I put it in the bowl and sat there until everything had burned away.

This story sets Phillips’ tone (toward the subject of himself) for the rest of the collection. There is fear, self-loathing, and humor (including a great Pen Collector running gag), and Phillips explores the real struggle between desiring notoriety vs maintaining privacy. Big themes swing at his head, like bike locks whipping dangerously close to his temples, but he is in charge. Or this world, and those weapons don’t make contact. Yet.
Another strong scene comes in “The Barista, the Rooster, and Me.” The title sounds like a joke with a set-up and punchline, but it’s about anger, about how when people put selfish demands on neighbors—to lower music, to tolerate intrusive pets—there are consequences. There are short fuses burning all around, working in and against our favor.
Finally, there’s a great nod to Patricia Highsmith, a girl who loved her con men if ever there was one, in the penultimate story of the collection, “Deep Water.” Here, the Brad Phillips character takes action to eliminate a person who has secret information on Phillips.  (Sidebar: a long time ago there was a Gary Indiana story called “Pillow Talk” in Bomb Magazine. It has a line in it I’ve never forgotten: “You’re brilliant and you’re handsome, but deep down where the icky fish of your mind really swim, you’re sick.”) So, now there’s this guy who knows something about Phillips, something Phillips can’t handle facing, and rather than avoid this threat, Phillips lures his mark into an olive grove (drolly, the grove is located in Sezze, Italy, the Italian headquarters of Tyrant Books) and deploys a Highsmith solution. “I lifted the rock far over my head, bringing it down with all my strength and the kindness of gravity….”
As a collection, there are remarkable moments.
Finally, three other random things arose in the reading of this book. I put the text down to look up “cold water extraction” techniques, something Phillips gives passing mention to, and discovered opioid addicts do this to avoid inevitable liver damage.  The word “scrutiny” also triggered a lot of thought, to the point of seeking its etymology and learning “Perhaps the original notion of the Latin word is ‘to search through trash,’ via scruta (plural) ‘trash, rags’ (‘shreds’).” Knowing that made me happy to continue reading, feeling somewhat vindicated for thinking there was a bit of trash-picking in the process. I also found myself thinking about another recent ode to narcing up, Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. But only because deploying the word argot is to Phillips as pilly is to Moshfegh.
As a project that stands somewhere between fiction and nonfiction, one might wonder if Phillips’ debut is more satisfying as a set of stories or as essays. I found it satisfying as both. As essays, each is focused on memories and meaning-making. These are all very personal, particular experiences that speak to the larger human experience. Yet Phillips is also freewheeling enough to follow where his mind wanders. There is, for instance, this scene in “Boo Hoo in Three Parts” where he encounters and parties with his junky father’s decaying corpse. Believe me, that story haunts. But these are essays that clearly evoke places and times, populated with characters who are inconsistent in the way good fiction should be. Phillips is a fiction writer, writing in a style so close to what we often expect from nonfiction, that a reader cannot tell what is true or not.
I had a chance to attend a reading from Essays and Fictions in Brooklyn this past November. In person, Phillips is slender and angular and friendly. Dressed in a simple gray tee, a gold chain, and workman’s pants, he delivers a quiet, almost tentative reading of his own words. His body language telegraphs discomfort, his tall frame cants back and leeward from the mic, his head and its shaggy shingle of bangs, salt-and-pepper, crick occasionally toward a shoulder. He is a soft reader, eyes down, and in a beautiful open space, the audience listened quietly in return. “My job is to make paintings,” he began from “The Dumb Tide.”  “I’ve been doing it for a long time.”
It’s easy to like Phillips’ honesty as an essayist, and a storyteller.  He doesn’t have to be one or the other. As a matter of fact, as he says in “Suicidal Realism,” he wants to live a life spent “scattering behind me paintings and writing and women’s underwear as I go.” - A. E. Weisgerber
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/coper-doper-kopman-spy/

Steve Anwyll - In wakeful, rhythmic prose, Anwyll writes a mirror for our double vision and the selves we don't want ourselves to see. There's no getting out of Welfare

Steve Anwyll, Welfare, Tyrant Books, 2019.
excerpt


Welfare is wholly made up of four-line paragraphs and has a cadence that is uniquely its own. A high school student leaves his parents’ home to live on his own with friends and with the help of government aid. The narrator becomes your best friend on the first page.
I walk down the slight slope of their driveway. A backpack full of t-shirts and socks and underwear and books on my back. I have $50 and 2 packs of cigarettes in the pocket of my army surplus jacket. But no lighter. You can’t have everything I tell myself.


“Steve Anwyll's entrancing novel about a 16-year-old on welfare surprised and moved me, made me smile and laugh a lot, and increased my appreciation for life. I recommend it and look forward to reading it again.” –Tao Lin

In wakeful, rhythmic prose, Anwyll writes a mirror for our double vision and the selves we don't want ourselves to see. There's no getting out of Welfare. The voice stays in your blood. - Mila Jaroniec


When Stan turns 16, he decides that he can no longer take the fighting with his indifferent dad’s new wife, and he hits the road in Anwyll’s solid debut. His sketchy plan involves moving in with free-spirited friend Greg, 20, whose life in his small Canadian fishing village on Lake Erie is not so idyllic up close. Greg’s all-night benders and Stan’s inability to pay his share of the rent spell an end to this arrangement. He ends up with another friend, sharing a beach house, applies for welfare, and gets a caseworker. From there, it’s slowly downhill: his welfare application fails; he finds another apartment with an explosive landlord; school becomes a struggle because Stan’s poverty means he rarely gets enough to eat. He develops a crush on his caseworker, who sends him to a tough counselor, who enrolls him in a resume writing workshop, and so on. A series of demeaning jobs, financial panics, and insecure living situations follow. Anwyll’s coming-of-age novel sometimes reads more like sociopolitical allegory, but the authenticity of its first-person voice, and of its plot, which moves in deliberate, subtle steps, immerses the reader in Stan’s struggles. Stan’s story resonates with relevance and heart. - Publishers Weekly


King of the Park (story)