Ross Goodwin - first novel written by a car. Rooted in the traditions of American literature, gonzo journalism, and the latest research in artificial neural networks, 1 the Road imposes a new reflexion on the place and authority of the author in a new era of machines

Ross Goodwin, 1 the Road, Jean Boite, 2018.
https://rossgoodwin.com/


1 the Road is a book written using a car as a pen.
Ross Goodwin is not a poet. As a prominent Artificial Intelligence creator, he outfitted a Cadillac car with a surveillance camera, a GPS unit, a microphone and a clock, all connected to a portable AI writing machine that fed from these input data in real time.
Together, they traveled from New York to New Orleans, in an experimental automation of the American literary road trip. As they drove, a manuscript emerged line by line from the machine’s printer on long scrolls of receipt paper that filled the car’s rear seats over the course of their journey.

1 the Road offers the first real book written by an AI, which captures us from the first page, when the journey begins:
“It was seven minutes to ten o’clock in the morning, and it was the only good thing that had happened.”

Rooted in the traditions of American literature, gonzo journalism, and the latest research in artificial neural networks, 1 the Road imposes a new reflexion on the place and authority of the author in a new era of machines.

Last year, a novelist went on a road trip across the USA. The trip was an attempt to emulate Jack Kerouac—to go out on the road and find something essential to write about in the experience. There is, however, a key difference between this writer and anyone else talking your ear off in the bar. This writer is just a microphone, a GPS, and a camera hooked up to a laptop and a whole bunch of linear algebra.
People who are optimistic that artificial intelligence and machine learning won’t put us all out of a job say that human ingenuity and creativity will be difficult to imitate. The classic argument is that, just as machines freed us from repetitive manual tasks, machine learning will free us from repetitive intellectual tasks.
This leaves us free to spend more time on the rewarding aspects of our work, pursuing creative hobbies, spending time with loved ones, and generally being human.
In this worldview, creative works like a great novel or symphony, and the emotions they evoke, cannot be reduced to lines of code. Humans retain a dimension of superiority over algorithms.
But is creativity a fundamentally human phenomenon? Or can it be learned by machines?
And if they learn to understand us better than we understand ourselves, could the great AI novel—tailored, of course, to your own predispositions in fiction—be the best you’ll ever read?Maybe Not a Beach Read
This is the futurist’s view, of course. The reality, as the jury-rigged contraption in Ross Goodwin’s Cadillac for that road trip can attest, is some way off.
“This is very much an imperfect document, a rapid prototyping project. The output isn’t perfect. I don’t think it’s a human novel, or anywhere near it,” Goodwin said of the novel that his machine created. 1 The Road is currently marketed as the first novel written by AI.
Once the neural network has been trained, it can generate any length of text that the author desires, either at random or working from a specific seed word or phrase. Goodwin used the sights and sounds of the road trip to provide these seeds: the novel is written one sentence at a time, based on images, locations, dialogue from the microphone, and even the computer’s own internal clock.
The results are… mixed.
The novel begins suitably enough, quoting the time: “It was nine seventeen in the morning, and the house was heavy.” Descriptions of locations begin according to the Foursquare dataset fed into the algorithm, but rapidly veer off into the weeds, becoming surreal. While experimentation in literature is a wonderful thing, repeatedly quoting longitude and latitude coordinates verbatim is unlikely to win anyone the Booker Prize.
Data In, Art Out?
Neural networks as creative agents have some advantages. They excel at being trained on large datasets, identifying the patterns in those datasets, and producing output that follows those same rules. Music inspired by or written by AI has become a growing subgenre—there’s even a pop album by human-machine collaborators called the Songularity.
A neural network can “listen to” all of Bach and Mozart in hours, and train itself on the works of Shakespeare to produce passable pseudo-Bard. The idea of artificial creativity has become so widespread that there’s even a meme format about forcibly training neural network ‘bots’ on human writing samples, with hilarious consequences—although the best joke was undoubtedly human in origin.
The AI that roamed from New York to New Orleans was an LSTM (long short-term memory) neural net. By default, information contained in individual neurons is preserved, and only small parts can be “forgotten” or “learned” in an individual timestep, rather than neurons being entirely overwritten.
The LSTM architecture performs better than previous recurrent neural networks at tasks such as handwriting and speech recognition. The neural net—and its programmer—looked further in search of literary influences, ingesting 60 million words (360 MB) of raw literature according to Goodwin’s recipe: one third poetry, one third science fiction, and one third “bleak” literature.
In this way, Goodwin has some creative control over the project; the source material influences the machine’s vocabulary and sentence structuring, and hence the tone of the piece.
The Thoughts Beneath the Words
The problem with artificially intelligent novelists is the same problem with conversational artificial intelligence that computer scientists have been trying to solve from Turing’s day. The machines can understand and reproduce complex patterns increasingly better than humans can, but they have no understanding of what these patterns mean.
Goodwin’s neural network spits out sentences one letter at a time, on a tiny printer hooked up to the laptop. Statistical associations such as those tracked by neural nets can form words from letters, and sentences from words, but they know nothing of character or plot.
When talking to a chatbot, the code has no real understanding of what’s been said before, and there is no dataset large enough to train it through all of the billions of possible conversations.
Unless restricted to a predetermined set of options, it loses the thread of the conversation after a reply or two. In a similar way, the creative neural nets have no real grasp of what they’re writing, and no way to produce anything with any overarching coherence or narrative.
Goodwin’s experiment is an attempt to add some coherent backbone to the AI “novel” by repeatedly grounding it with stimuli from the cameras or microphones—the thematic links and narrative provided by the American landscape the neural network drives through.
Goodwin feels that this approach (the car itself moving through the landscape, as if a character) borrows some continuity and coherence from the journey itself. “Coherent prose is the holy grail of natural-language generation—feeling that I had somehow solved a small part of the problem was exhilarating. And I do think it makes a point about language in time that’s unexpected and interesting.”
AI Is Still No Kerouac
A coherent tone and semantic “style” might be enough to produce some vaguely-convincing teenage poetry, as Google did, and experimental fiction that uses neural networks can have intriguing results. But wading through the surreal AI prose of this era, searching for some meaning or motif beyond novelty value, can be a frustrating experience.
Maybe machines can learn the complexities of the human heart and brain, or how to write evocative or entertaining prose. But they’re a long way off, and somehow “more layers!” or a bigger corpus of data doesn’t feel like enough to bridge that gulf.
Real attempts by machines to write fiction have so far been broadly incoherent, but with flashes of poetry—dreamlike, hallucinatory ramblings.
Neural networks might not be capable of writing intricately-plotted works with charm and wit, like Dickens or Dostoevsky, but there’s still an eeriness to trying to decipher the surreal, Finnegans’ Wake mish-mash.
You might see, in the odd line, the flickering ghost of something like consciousness, a deeper understanding. Or you might just see fragments of meaning thrown into a neural network blender, full of hype and fury, obeying rules in an occasionally striking way, but ultimately signifying nothing. In that sense, at least, the RNN’s grappling with metaphor feels like a metaphor for the hype surrounding the latest AI summer as a whole.
Or, as the human author of On The Road put it: “You guys are going somewhere or just going?” - Thomas Hornigold

singularityhub.com/2018/10/25/ai-wrote-a-road-trip-novel-is-it-a-good-read/#sm.001fzw50n12ktddrums1aswklfdbm




In 2007, cars with cameras and tripods hitched on their roofs began roaming the streets of several American cities. Each tripod supported as many as fifteen cameras that captured footage of pedestrians, businesses, and street signs, stitching these images together into an immersive, panoramic image. This was the first fleet of Google Street View cars. They have since expanded throughout the world and to other means of transportation—from tricycles to snowmobiles. Ten years later, a Cadillac was outfitted similarly to a Google Street View car, but with the addition of an A.I. writing machine that converted images into words. It drove from Brooklyn, New York, to New Orleans, Louisiana, and produced 1 the Road (Jean Boîte Éditions), “the first novel written by a machine.” This gives new meaning to the concept of the road novel.
In many ways, the road novel could be considered the fullest expression of American freedom—cutting loose from the responsibilities and humdrum of daily life and escaping out into the vastness of America, so full of the unexpected. For much of the genre’s history, it has been a man in the driver’s seat. But as of late, its been imbued with fresh perspectives that are challenging the genre’s form and values, including The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling, which features a mother who has a “checklist” before she can take flight, and now, 1 the Road.
1 the Road, which won the IDFA DocLab Award for Storytelling, was created, not authored, by Ross Goodwin, a “gonzo data scientist” and former ghostwriter for Barack Obama, who, with the help of Google, rigged the Cadillac with a GPS unit, microphone, clock, and roof-top camera that fed information to the portable A.I. writing machine. As Goodwin drove from New York to New Orleans, the A.I. wrote “captions” to these images that were then printed on rolls of receipt paper 127-feet long, undoubtedly an homage to Jack Kerouac’s legendary first draft of On the Road, which he typed out on a single scroll 120-feet long.
The car itself is the pen. But, then, who is the author? Goodwin calls himself a “writer of writers” and “not a poet.” Others might call him a programmer or “creative technologist.” Though Goodwin has surrendered creative license to the writing machine, he nevertheless created the machine and the rules by which it operates. Not insignificantly, he selected the sources of input, including “nearly 200 hand-picked books” that, in composite, form the linguistic matrix that informs the A.I.’s literary sensibilities, from word choice to sentence structure.
This novel, which unfolds over the course of three days, reads more like a long poem than a narrative with a conventional arc. It begins, “It was nine seventeen in the morning, and the house was heavy,” a surprisingly apt beginning to a road novel, for a machine. Alongside the writing is a column of timestamps that log when each entry was written, as if it were an observational journal a scientist might keep when conducting an experiment. The entries are brief, no more than a few sentences long, and, unless it cites the same place, are rarely connected to the previous entry. The first day concludes with a brilliant coda, “It was seven minutes after ten o’clock in the evening. The station was deserted. The path was already in the sun.”
As evidenced by these two excerpts, the A.I. relies on certain formulas when constructing a sentence, one of which is citing the time. In the beginning, it relies on this construction with Homeric frequency to the point that this road novel seems more like a journey through time than space. In addition to the column of timestamps, the book’s sections are organized around the time of day rather than place or destination. However, as the novel progresses, other sentence structures do appear (thankfully), as if the A.I. is learning (uncannily).
Though the A.I. is programmed for English, it speaks a foreign dialect. “It’s not quite human level,” says Goodwin, “more like an insect brain that’s learned to write.” The odd poetic idiom produces unexpected turns of phrase that are sometimes funny, sometimes profound, and often nonsensical. There is an inescapable, and perhaps unhelpful, urge to find a pattern in its loose grasp of grammar and lottery word choice.
Because of this linguistic tic, sentences that read more or less as normal, like the opener, are applauded, as one would do with a toddler. At other times, these sensible words carry a degree of gravitas: “It was nine twenty-five in the morning. He lifted his head and said, You know, I was not looking for you, you know. Its a mistake. I wouldnt [sic] want to be with you.” The clarity of the statement cuts through the jungle of words and commands special attention. It is like listening to an elder suffering from Alzheimer’s who, for a brief moment, is lucid and strains to voice a last request.
The experience of reading 1 the Road is not unlike being on a road trip. If the car is the pen, then, in a funny way, reading 1 the Road is almost like riding shotgun. Once the reader gets a handle of the writing patterns and the poetic idiom, it is easy to go on cruise control. By that I mean it is not necessary, nor enjoyable, to read this novel closely. It is best skimmed, page after page, like stripes on a highway. Luckily, there is a steady stream of poetic breadcrumbs to keep the reader nourished and motivated. 1 the Road is equal parts profound (“Car on the road had been looking into each others [sic] faces, which had to be descended to the police station behind them”), poetic (“A patch of water was still looking for some organization, and his lips were falling in vain, a distant silence. The water is dark and seems to be a container, and the stars are still breaking out”), and always unexpected (open to any page).
The time is thirteen minutes after five in the evening, and I write this from a train, wondering, what would this train write as it catapults down the Hudson River and shores up in the dark tunnels of Grand Central? I do not know, but I would like to find out. - Connor Goodwin
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/ross-goodwins-1-the-road/



On March 25, 2017, a black Cadillac with a white-domed surveillance camera attached to its trunk departed Brooklyn for New Orleans. An old GPS unit was fastened atop the roof. Inside, a microphone dangled from the ceiling. Wires from all three devices fed into Ross Goodwin’s Razer Blade laptop, itself hooked up to a humble receipt printer. This, Goodwin hoped, was the apparatus that was going to produce the next American road-trip novel.

A former ghostwriter for the Obama administration, Goodwin describes himself as “a writer of writers.” Using neural networks, he generates poetry, screenplays, and, now, literary travel fiction. I first encountered his work when his algorithms transformed the Senate’s 2014 torture report into a novel. In Narrated Reality, his master’s thesis at NYU, Goodwin loaded his backpack with devices (a compass, a punch clock, and a camera) that fed their data into long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks as he walked around the city, churning out weird associative poetry. A sample: “All the time the sun / Is wheeling out of a dark bright ground.” So, when a machine hacker in Biloxi finished fabricating a custom piece of hardware for him, Goodwin decided to upgrade his nascent AI and take it cross-country.
The aim was to use the road as a conduit for narrative experimentation, in the tradition of Kerouac, Wolfe, and Kesey, but with the vehicle itself as the artist. He chose the New York-to-NOLA route as a nod to the famous leg of Jack Kerouac’s expedition in On the Road. Underneath the base of the Axis M3007 camera, Goodwin scrawled “Further.”

Along the way, the four sensors—the camera, the GPS, the microphone, and the computer’s internal clock—would feed data into a system of neural networks Goodwin had trained on hundreds of books and Foursquare location data, and the printer would spit out the results one letter at a time. By the end of the four-day trip, receipts emblazoned with artificially intelligent prose would cover the floor of the car. They’re collected in 1 the Road, a book Goodwin’s publisher, Jean Boîte Éditions, is marketing as “the first novel written by a machine.” (Though, for the record, Goodwin says he disagrees it should bear that distinction—“That might be The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed by a program from the ’80s,” he tells me.) Regardless, it is a hallucinatory, oddly illuminating account of a bot’s life on the interstate; the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test meets Google Street View, narrated by Siri.

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On the day they were set to embark, Goodwin and his travel companions—his sister Beth, his fiancée Lily Beale-Wirsing, his friend Nora Hamada, Kenric McDowell and Christiana Caro of Google, and a small film crew led by Lewis Rapkin, who would follow along in a van to document the journey—gathered near Ross’s Bushwick apartment to rig the system onto the Cadillac. (Google, which had become interested in his work at NYU, footed the bill for the car rental and the camera—a year later, the search giant would hire him to work on its Artists and Machine Intelligence program.)

The spooky genius of artificial intelligence

“The reason it’s a Cadillac, by the way,” Goodwin tells me in a phone interview, “is we wanted it to be done in an authoritarian vehicle, and we couldn’t get a Crown Vic.” He worried that if passersby saw a car loaded with home-brew electronics, wrapped in wires, they might mistake it for a terrorist vehicle; instead, he wanted to nod to the tacit acceptance that federal agencies routinely carry out such surveillance. “I wanted people to see it as something associated with government officials.” Mission accomplished, apparently: Goodwin says he learned later that as they were preparing to leave, a nearby bodega owner saw the car and the surveillance equipment and decided to keep his shop closed for the day. “It’s not an ad for Cadillac,” he laughs. “In fact, they turned us down.”
The machine received its first jolt of inspiration just as soon as Goodwin and his traveling companions fired it up in Brooklyn. It wrote: “It was nine seventeen in the morning, and the house was heavy.” For an opening sentence in a book about the road, it’s apropos, even poignant.

“This is a beautiful line in my opinion,” Goodwin says. “In this case, the seed was the time—everything that comes after ‘nine seventeen’ was generated from the time.” What had happened, essentially, was this: The clock registered the time, which sent the data into the LSTM neural network that Goodwin had trained on one of three corpora of literature. (Each was approximately 120 megabytes, or 20 million words; one was comprised mostly of poetry, one of science fiction, and one that Goodwin describes only as “bleak” literature. “Together, they represented the voice I wanted the book to be written in,” Goodwin tells me, “one that I thought would match the terrain of our journey, its historical and literary significance. I did not want to train on Kerouac or other American road-trip material directly, as that felt like it might be cheating in a way.” Goodwin could swap them out at will.) Letter by letter, the neural net, learning from its corpus, would eke out a new sentence. “The lexicon completion is the same way we translate English to French,” Goodwin says. So, the ensuing words were a product of the system’s literature-informed understanding of that time in the morning.

Throughout the journey, data from the different sensors produced sentences of varying poeticism: Latitude and longitude coordinates were printed verbatim and appended with mysticism (“35.415579526 N, -77.999721808 W, at 154.68504432 feet above sea level, at 0.0 miles per hour, and the first flat of the story in the country is the first in part of the world”). Images were converted into ghostly prose (“A ski lift business for the last time the train was already being darkened and the street was already there”). Locations recognized from the Foursquare dataset were surrealistically remarked upon (“Eagles Nest Diner: a american restaurant in Goldsborough or the Marine Station, a place of fish seemed to be a man who has been assembled for three days”). Dialogue from the mic was captured and mutated (“I somewhat when i’m on why i didn’t get hurt yeah my car is an every down i know?”).
The AI translated the sights and sounds of aging East Coast infrastructure, a right-wing protest that halted traffic for a while, the passing flora and fauna, and, presumably, the stop at a convenience store where Goodwin tells me he had to pick up an extra power adapter for the cigarette lighter because his system wasn’t getting enough power.

Data visualization, inspired by Jack Kerouac

“Each sentence in this book is an independent generative process and each occurred in a point in time.” Goodwin says. “They were connected by the road trip and a car that contained the sensors dictating what it was narrating, and that’s what creates the art. All of it corresponded to what it was seeing.” The process is not unlike Kerouac’s, who famously mythologized his opus by saying he’d written it in three weeks, in a Benzedrine-fueled, in-the-moment dash to transfer detail and observation onto a single roll of paper.

Lewis Rapkin, who produced a short film based on the journey, tells me in an email that the AI “was a bit unsettling at times.” Especially early on, they all closely watched the system’s output, guessing at its meaning, its process. “Is the machine associating this abandoned factory with the history of people coming from the countryside to the city for factory work?” Rapkin says. “Is it recognizing that this is just the first story of the country, and technology is going to be the second? Is it associating our urban blight with the Middle Ages because our country is falling apart and looks like something centuries old?”

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Goodwin clearly views the four-day journey as a success, even a surprising one. “I thought there was a possibility that there would be an arc, that it would feel like a novel,” he tells me, “and that’s what happened. Aspects of it feel like a novel.” He says the fact that the car itself serves as a character gives it a sense of continuity that much AI-generated fiction lacks.
“I’ve read the whole thing, in case anyone’s curious,” Goodwin says, laughing. “Coherent prose is the holy grail of natural-language generation—feeling that I had somehow solved a small part of the problem was exhilarating. And I do think it makes a point about language in time that’s unexpected and interesting.” So do I, actually. I sat down to read the whole thing in one sitting, as Goodwin suggested I do, and more or less succeeded. I’m not sure there’s a cohesive arc in any classic narrative sense—but there is plenty of pixelated poetry in its ragtag assemblage of modern American imagery. And there are some striking and memorable lines—“the picnic showed a past that already had hair from the side of the track,” struck me, for one.

1 the Road reads as if a Google Street View car were narrating a cross-country journey to itself. This approach is compelling because it offers an opportunity to commune, for a few hours, with the vast network of data-collecting vehicles—drones, cars, devices—that now crawl our geography. “Much like the American literary road-trip books that inspired this project, it’s about capturing the time and place, and right now we’re in a time where we’re pretty confused and amazed by AI, so it captures that wonder and confusion,” Rapkin says. “Is it profound or is it nonsense? It’s both.”
It’s a tour of the built and noisy world, as interpreted by those machines. It’s surveillance-technology fiction, written by the same species of technology that is conducting the surveillance and processing the data. What might an AI author teach us about a world already so totally sculpted and impacted by the kind of data it’s gathering that a human writer can’t?
Goodwin seems committed to finding out. “This is very much an imperfect document, a rapid prototyping project. The output isn’t perfect. I don’t think it’s a human novel, or anywhere near it,” Goodwin says, but “there are characters in it, which is really strange.” A mysterious painter, for instance, appears in the third line to ask, “What is it?” It continues to show up throughout: “A body of water came down from the side of the street. The painter laughed and then said, I like that and I don’t want to see it.” Insofar as it’s tempting to locate the writer (or writer of the writer) in the work—as we inevitably do in road-trip fiction—the painter seems the most logical stand-in for Goodwin himself. “I could have made a big start off,” the machine-generated painter says at one point, making it easy imagine it’s talking about the project itself, nodding to new frontiers. “I want to go away from here, the time has come.” - Brian Merchant

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/automated-on-the-road/571345/


Ross Goodwin: Adventures in Narrated Reality: New forms & interfaces for written language, enabled by machine intelligence

https://medium.com/@rossgoodwin

All That Is Evident Is Suspect: Readings from the Oulipo 1963-2018 - the first collection in English to offer a life-size picture of the group in its historical and contemporary incarnations, and the first in any language to represent all of its members (41)

All That Is Evident Is Suspect: Readings from the Oulipo 1963-2018, Ed. by Ian Monk & Daniel Levin Becker, McSweeney's, 2018.


Since its inception in Paris in 1960, the OuLiPo―ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or workshop for potential literature―has continually expanded our sense of what writing can do. It’s produced, among many other marvels, a detective novel without the letter e (and a sequel of sorts without a, i, o, u, or y); an epic poem structured by the Parisian métro system; a story in the form of a tarot reading; a poetry book in the form of a game of go; and a suite of sonnets that would take almost 200 million years to read completely.
Lovers of literature are likely familiar with the novels of the best-known Oulipians―Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, Harry Mathews, Raymond Queneau―and perhaps even the small number of texts available in English on the group, including Warren Motte’s Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature and Daniel Levin Becker’s Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature. But the actual work of the group in its full, radiant collectivity has never before been showcased in English. (“The State of Constraint,” a dossier in issue 22 of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, comes closest.)
Enter All That is Evident is Suspect: the first collection in English to offer a life-size picture of the group in its historical and contemporary incarnations, and the first in any language to represent all of its members (numbering 41 as of April 2018 ). Combining fiction, poetry, essays and lectures, and never-published internal correspondence―along with the acrobatically constrained writing and complexly structured narratives that have become synonymous with oulipian practice―this volume shows a unique group of thinkers and artists at work and at play, meditating on and subverting the facts of life, love, and the group itself. It’s an unprecedentedly intimate and comprehensive glimpse at the breadth and diversity of one of world literature’s most vital, adventurous presences.
DISCUSSED: Sharks as poets and vice versa, the Brisbane pitch drop experiment, novel classifications for real or imaginary libraries, the monumental sadness of difficult loves, the obsolescence of the novel, the symbolic significance of the cup-and-ball game, holiday closures across the Francophone world, what happens at Fahrenheit 452, Warren G. Harding’s dark night of the soul, Marcel Duchamp’s imperviousness to conventional spacetime laws, bilingual palindromes, cartoon eodermdromes, oscillating poems, métro poems, metric poems, literary madness, straw cultivation.


Contributors include:
Noël Arnaud
Michèle Audin
Valérie Beaudouin
Marcel Bénabou
Jacques Bens
Claude Berge
Eduardo Berti
André Blavier
Paul Braffort
Italo Calvino
François Caradec
Bernard Cerquiglini
Ross Chambers
Stanley Chapman
Marcel Duchamp
Jacques Duchateau
Luc Étienne
Frédéric Forte
Paul Fournel
Anne F. Garréta
Michelle Grangaud
Jacques Jouet
Latis
François Le Lionnais
Hervé Le Tellier
Étienne Lécroart
Jean Lescure
Daniel Levin Becker
Pablo Martín Sánchez
Harry Mathews
Clémentine Mélois
Michèle Métail
Ian Monk
Oskar Pastior
Georges Perec
Raymond Queneau
Jean Queval
Pierre Rosenstiehl
Jacques Roubaud
Olivier Salon
Albert-Marie Schmidt




The Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (‘Oulipo’) was created in Paris in November 1960 by François Le Lionnais and Raymond Queneau. The Oulipo would seek out, according to Raymond Queneau, “new forms and structures that may be used by writers in any way they see fit.” The application of mathematics and the sciences to literature, more specifically formal constraints, is used to liberate the writer’s creativity.
There are (or have been) forty -two members of the Oulipo, some are deceased, and the newly published collection ‘All That Is Evident Is Suspect: Readings from the Oulipo 1963-2018’, contains works by every member to date. The book contains fifty-four pieces, one co-authored.
The book opens with a short work by founder Raymond Queneau himself, undated and titled “Slept Cried” (translated by Ian Monk), it is a single page “elliptical evocation of the whole of existence”, a pertinent way to open the collection;
Started this diary today: desirous as I am to note down my first impressions. Unpleasant.
Hot milk, as they call it is disgusting: not nearly as good as amniotic fluid.
Having been washed and rubbed down, here I am still blind, back in my crib. Very interesting.
Slept twenty hours. Cried four. I quite clearly am not taking to hot milk.
I also pooed: in my linen.
To close the piece, after an “interruption of seventy-four years”, the diary is revisited. Is the Oulipo “extremely tired”?
As per any collection from a variety of writers this book is uneven at times, some pieces feeling clunky in their construction, this could be as a result of the translation as a constraint in French would be difficult to translate into English using the same constraint (for example, the piece “Invisible Cities: Lille” by Olivier Salon (translated by Ian Monk), “is a lipogram variant called a bivocalism: like the city’s name (Lille), it contains no vowels besides E and I.”)
Having said that the vast majority of the collection is very readable, stimulating and intriguing.
The piece by Italo Calvino “How I Wrote One of My Books” (translated by Iain White) “outlines the algorithm governing the interchapter narrative in his 1979 novel ‘If on a winter’s night a traveller’. Calvino stipulated that the explanation was never to be published in Italian.” Having read Calvino’s book twice before I now feel the need to revisit it for a third time given the complex algorithm in play.
I have previously referred to two pieces, from this book, regarding the structure of Georges Perec’s ‘Life A User’s Manual’ however the collection is not simply explanations as to the constraints used by the writers in other works, in fact these are minimal, generally consigned to the short explanatory paragraph accompanying each piece.
Some personal highlights, Latis’ “The Atheist Organist” (translated by Daniel Levin Becker) a small sample of his novel that contains “seven prefaces, a preface to those prefaces, a post-face, a postlude and no actual novel.” Jacques Bens “How to Tell a Story” (translated by Daniel Levin Becker), a short story taken from ‘Nouvelles désenchantées’ a collection that was awarded the 1990 Prix Goncourt de la Novelle (the award for short stories).
On Tuesday, April 25, 1989 – which was the Feast of Saint Mark, one of the four evangelists and, accordingly, one of the patron saints of writers – at around ten past two, a student in the sixth grade at the Collège Saint-Jean raised her hand and asked:
“How does one go about telling a story?”
Matthew had not been expecting this.
“Which story?” he said.
“I don’t know, just a story!”
“Well, that’s just it, you need to know, because not all stories are told in the same way. Look, let’s take the first idea that comes into your mind. It might be about a situation, or about a character. The story would develop differently depending on which. And usually you have both at the same time, because it’s rare to have one without the other. Then you have to give your hero a name, which is always sort of complicated. What’s your name?”
“Poems of the Paris Metro” by Jacques Jouet (translated by Ian Monk), fifteen and a half hours in the creation it was written covering every station in the Paris Metro, where the first line is composed mentally between the first two stations, it is then written down when the train stops at the second station, and so on. Stanza breaks are made when you change train lines, the work was based on graph theorist Pierre Rosenstiehl’s “Frieze of the Paris Métro”, a piece where he planned out the journey, so Jacques Jouet could write his exhaustive poem. Here’s the first few lines;
If governing, governing the coming hours, is more a matter of surprising myself than                                                      planning ahead,
the first few minutes have already rather put me out.
I have more than enough time to explain why.
Outside, I had hoped for slight rain so as to enter into the concept of shelter,
keeping a slight wetness, on the backs of my hands, for my thirst,
but this night at 5:30 a.m. was dry and mild and black like a black dress lit up from inside
by a body standing up in its fullness.
Jacques Jouet’s other contribution, “The Republic of Beau-Locks” (also translated by Ian Monk), is the first book in an ongoing serial novel, one I now need to hunt down.
Seven novel outlines by Paul Fournel, retells the same story from seven different perspectives, the piece translated by Daniel Levin Becker, it is playful and although a repetition the narrative shifts dramatically, voices include a parrot and a bunch of flowers.
Anne F. Garréta’s “N-evol” (translated by Daniel Levin Becker) opens with a set of six “givens”, starting with “1. the obsolescence of the novel, its inadequacy to everything a subject today might live, observe, experience, and think; 2. The boredom provoked in me by reading a “contemporary” novel;” the piece then observes various activities in nightclubs, toilets, using the voice of the DJ (sound familiar to readers of Garréta’s “Sphinx”?).
There is a very moving graphic piece by Étienne Lécroat (translated by Matt Madden), “Counting on You”, an homage to Lécroat’s sister who died just before her fiftieth birthday, it commences with a panel containing fifty words and a drawing with fifty strokes, then moves to a panel with forty-nine words and a drawing with forty-nine strokes and so forth until an empty final panel. A beautiful homage indeed.
Other notable, enjoyable pieces are Jacques Roubaud’s “Arrangements” part of his ‘Great Fire of London” project, this piece using 111,111 characters, Bernard Cerquiglini’s collection of emails presented as “A Very Busy Year”, Daniel Levin Becker’s “Writer’s Block” a consideration of a concrete sculpture using 999 words to ask 99 questions, the contemplation of a wordless poem by Marcel Bénabou, and Eduardo Berti & Pablo Martín Sánchez’s absurd “Microfictions”.
Overall the work is a wonderful introduction to forty-two different writers all using constraints within their work, and a great starting point for readers who are interested in the works of the Oulipo. An extensive coverage of the styles and types of works and one whereby you can have a taste of a writer before delving further into their work. If you want to add something a little different, something experimental and thought provoking to your library, look no further.
https://messybooker.wordpress.com/2019/01/08/all-that-is-evident-is-suspect-readings-from-the-oulipo-1963-2018-edited-by-ian-monk-daniel-levin-becker/

James Krendel-Clark - This essay takes the point of view that the ruinance brought on by the death of God is not so much an “ethical” problem, but a crisis of representation (and of therefore of subjectivity)

James Krendel-Clark, The Future of the God-Hallucination: Reflections on the Nietzschean Lifestyle-Brand, Voidfront Press, 2018.                    




This essay (in the authentic sense of the word, an attempt), takes the point of view that the ruinance brought on by the death of God is not so much an “ethical” problem, but a crisis of representation (and of therefore of subjectivity). The Christ-event, like the Nietzsche-event, was a question of a certain Absolute force, a certain universality which was, for a time, concentrated within the soul of a single “human” actor, such that a certain voice was heard, no longer merely a question of the occasional inspiration of the prophets, but of an Absolute which spoke with authority for itself, in the durational form of a life. If Nietzsche proves that this event is performative in the most profound sense of the word (from Austin's famous “I now pronounce you man and wife”, we arrive at “I am not a man, I am dynamite”), we must wonder whether it is possible to isolate certain aspects of this performance, in order that we might learn to make use of them for ourselves, in our own attempts to make this grotesque thing speak, this famous “Absolute”, and in order that it be made to speak not in the name of a cowardly piety, but in the name of a megalomania bolder than ever, with enough force to shatter all of the idolators of “science” and “morality”, with a voice as terrible as the ages, with an electricity that explodes the faux-rationality of “networks”, and with a complicity worthy of the crime-nourished “friendships” of the novels of the Marquis de Sade.

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.)

****

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

****

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.

****

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.

****

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…

****

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.

****

                         ***

**                       

  *                       

*                            

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/