Carolee Schneemann - The most thorough visual overview of the work of groundbreaking and celebrated feminist artist

Carolee Schneemann, Unforgivable, Black Dog Publishing, 2015.

The most thorough visual overview of the work of groundbreaking and celebrated feminist artist Carolee Schneemann. Her prestigious career spans seven decades and encompasses the diverse artistic media of painting, sculpture, performance, film and video.

Carolee Schneemann is one of the most important artists of the postwar period. Her work in a range of media—painting, film, video, dance and performance, constructions and installations, the written word, and assemblage—presents an unparalleled catalogue of radical aesthetic experimentation. Meat Joy, 1964, Fuses, 1964–1966, Up To and Including Her Limits, 1973–1976, and Interior Scroll, 1975, are now considered canonical projects, required entries in any meaningful account of contemporary art, belying their once notoriety as feminist challenges to the very concept of the art historical canon.
Throughout the last 50 years, Schneemann has participated in the most significant formulations of the avant-garde, having made crucial contributions in Fluxus, happenings, expanded cinema, and performance cultures, while complicating generic definitions that might cohere to her work. Schneemann has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and publications throughout her career, and her work is in the collections of Tate Modern, Commune di Milano, Centre Georges Pompidou, Muzeum Współczesne Wrocław, Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art.
Carolee Schneemann: Unforgivable is the most thorough visual overview of Schneemann’s work to date. Organized by five interrelated categories—Interviews and Correspondence, Painting, Cinema, Sites, and Technological Processes—this volume brings together previously published essays and interviews by authorities on the artist’s work. The texts, many scarce or out of print, examine the significance of Schneemann’s work in its historical context, and its vital urgency for our present.

Contributors: Stéphane Aquin, Emily Caigan, R Bruce Elder, Ron Hanson, Juan Carlos Kase, Brett Kashmere, Anette Kubitza, Erica Levin, Scott MacDonald, Thomas McEvilley, Ara Osterweil, Melissa Ragona, Maura Reilly, Kristine Stiles and Kenneth White.

Supplanting the Postmodern - the early years of the 21st century have seen a stream of critical formulations proclaiming a successor to postmodernism. Intriguing and exciting new terms such as 'remodernism', 'performatism', 'hypermodernism', 'automodernism”, 'renewalism', 'altermodernism', 'digimodernism' and 'metamodernism' have been coined

Supplanting the Postmodern An Anthology of Writings on the Arts and Culture of the Early 21st Century, David Rudrum, Nicholas Stavris, eds., Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.

For more than a decade now a steadily growing chorus of voices has announced that the 'postmodern' literature, art, thought and culture of the late 20th century have come to an end. At the same time as this, the early years of the 21st century have seen a stream of critical formulations proclaiming a successor to postmodernism. Intriguing and exciting new terms such as 'remodernism', 'performatism', 'hypermodernism', 'automodernism”, 'renewalism', 'altermodernism', 'digimodernism' and 'metamodernism' have been coined, proposed and debated as terms for what comes after the postmodern. Supplanting the Postmodern is the first anthology to collect the key writings in these debates in one place.The book is divided into two parts: the first, 'The Sense of an Ending', presents a range of positions in the debate around the demise of the postmodern; the second, 'Coming to Terms with the New', presents representative writings from the new '–isms' mentioned above. Each of the entries is prefaced by a brief introduction by the editors, in which they outline its central ideas, point out the similarities and/or differences from other positions found in the anthology, and suggest possible strengths and limitations to the insights presented in each piece.

“I'm more than happy to see the postmodern supplanted. It's time!” –  Linda Hutcheon

“Rudrum and Stavris have put together a fascinating collection of speculations, arguments, and manifestos that engage in very different ways with the question of postmodernism's demise. That this question is shown to involve asking whether there actually is or was a single cultural tendency that can be labelled "postmodernism", or whether its aftermath can be similarly labelled by a single term, is a sign of the editors' own open-minded (postmodern?) approach.” –  Derek Attridge

“It may well be, as the editors suggest, that postmodernism was the last time we looked coherent enough to oppose ourselves. If so, then Supplanting the Postmodern provides the dual service of recalling, as postmodernism becomes forgettable, its inescapability, while doing away with all efforts to prolong it. I have difficulty imagining serious aesthetic discussion apart from the background this book provides.” –  R. M. Berry

Ian Curtis - a set of facsimiles: the lyrics of Joy Division's Ian Curtis on note paper, complete with lines scratched out in pen.

Ian Curtis, So This is Permanence: Joy Division Lyrics and Notebooks,  Chronicle Books, 2014.                               

When you’re equal parts book and music fan, it’s a special treat to speak to both interests at once. Enter So This is Permanence, a beautiful pale grey volume of Ian Curtis’s personal notebooks. It’s hard to not to feel a special connection reading through the intensely personal writings of one of the most enigmatic and influential songwriters of the 20th century.
So This Is Permanence contains never before seen handwritten lyrics, as well as a beautiful forward from Deborah Curtis. Deborah was widowed by Ian after he took his own life in 1980, leaving the world stunned that such a talented songwriter’s life ended in tragedy. “Seeing those manuscripts in his distinctive hand and in chronological order goes some way to explain the turmoil he felt. Those human issues and concerns will always be relevant; and although the poetry readily stands alone, his voice and the music that is Joy Division is there to be listened to and absorbed as one perfect body of work as intended,” wrote Deborah.
The book also includes a substantial introduction by writer Jon Savage, and an appendix featuring books from Ian’s library and a selection of fanzine interviews, letters, and other ephemera from his estate. Listen to a specially curated Joy Division Spotify playlist inspired by material in So This is Permanence below. And, don’t forget to comment below with your favorite Joy Division song and you’ll be entered for a chance to win a copy of So This Is Permanence. This offer is available to U.S. residents only.

"Beautifully bound and printed, So This is Permanence is primarily a set of facsimiles: the lyrics of Joy Division's Ian Curtis on note paper, complete with lines scratched out in pen. But the introductions by Curtis' wife Deborah and critic Jon Savage are revealing and insightful on the erudite performer undone by epilepsy and the mounting pressure of stardom. After Curtis' 1980 suicide, Joy Division regrouped as New Order. He left behind a parcel of intriguing, disturbing songs, including the unforgettable impression of an impending breakup, 'Love Will Tear Us Apart.'" -Shepherd Express

"'This is Permanence' reveals the personal writings of Joy Division lead singer and influential songwriter Ian Curtis in a beautiful cloth-bound anthology. Curtis committed suicide in 1980 before the British band's first US tour, and the book includes a foreword by his widow, Deborah, as well as song lyrics, an appendix listing his personal book library and a selection of interviews from his relatively short but important career." - Cool Hunting

"Permanence offers rare personal insight on an artist otherwise basked in mystique. His poetic brilliance, ominous and beautiful, remains startling even when stripped of its aural component and regardless of a familiarity with the group's chilling post-punk." - Austin Chronicle
"So This Is Permanence collects his handwritten words, setting them next to typeset versions of what they would become. (Sometimes they're the same, but there are plenty of differences.) The book-lovely and clothbound to resemble the band's posthumous collection Still-also features reproductions of old fan letters and flyers that Curtis' widow had kept." - A.V. Club





TO LISTEN to Ian Curtis sing is to wonder why we sing at all. This sort of reflexive thinking is hard to come by when listening to, say, Whitney Houston, whose vocal gymnastics make “why” or “what for” seem beside the point. But Curtis’s voice is a blunt instrument. Should it have a color, it would be UPS brown. Personified, it would be a Freudian father figure or a mid-level bureaucrat. In the lower registers, the young frontman sounds like a bad opera singer, and you can hear the effort it costs him to get the notes out. The austerity forces attention on what’s being said and the fact of it’s being said.
What Curtis said is central to the Joy Division story. The three other members had their instruments; Curtis had words, and they were notoriously dense. Notable extracts from his lyrical vocabulary: “life,” “time,” “feeling,” “sensation,” “isolation,” “control,” “failure,” “stranger,” “blood sport,” “obtained.” The language tends toward loaded ideas, clinical terminology. The words for “Novelty,” an early Joy Division track, were written by Peter Hook, the band’s bassist, and it’s funny to hear a line like “You’ll just fall behind like all the other sods” sung by Curtis. This isn’t to say that “sods” is an inherently silly word, but rather that it’s slangy and casual, a Britishism that affixes the lyrics to a particular place. This is antithetical to Curtis’s style — and partly why a book like So This Is Permanence, the most comprehensive collection of his writing to date, can be published in the year 2014 with reasonable expectation of meeting interest.
Those who knew Curtis say that he would have been a writer if it weren’t for the band. His lyrics reference Gogol (“Dead Souls”), Kafka (“Colony”), Burroughs (“Interzone”). When he and his wife moved into their home in Macclesfield, they immediately refurbished a room as his writing space. Blue carpet, blue walls, and a blue sofa, upon which Curtis would sit with cigarette and notebook. At some point he tried his hand at fiction as well, but it’s hard to imagine Curtis’s words as freestanding narrative, unanchored in music. The lyrics were the seat of his vision, which alchemized with sound to unmistakable effect. When Curtis delivered his poetry of powerlessness and confusion in that blocky, proletarian baritone, he transformed into something like a possessed everyman, a street-corner prophet.
Curtis would step onto the stage in a button-down tucked into pleated pants, as though arriving straight from the Macclesfield employment exchange, the day job he kept to support his wife and baby daughter. But when the music swelled, he’d fling his arms in quick upper cuts and scuttle to and from the microphone, appearing bewildered by his own movements. Curtis had epilepsy in fact. As it worsened, his dancing often brought on seizures, and he would be dragged off stage and have his tongue held by a bandmate to stop him from choking. Curtis loved David Bowie and Iggy Pop, but his performance had little of his heroes’ feline grace and delicious inhabitation of the stage. Curtis was ruthlessly graceless.
But neither was he Johnny Rotten. Like other Manchester bands that got together in the late 1970s, Joy Division was fired up by punk’s anyone-can-do-it attitude, its flagbearers the Sex Pistols. Curtis, who understood that inspiration can be a cage, chose to keep his shirt on and practiced stern articulation where punk was screamy. Joy Division, photographed brooding against Manchester’s stark industrial landscape, developed a reputation as the fare of arty intellectual types and miserable twats. When Curtis hanged himself in 1980, the doom-and-gloom reputation seemed all but proven in court. He was 23. He was supposed to leave for the band’s American tour the next day.
Unsurprisingly, Curtis’s suicide has cast-ironed him into the tortured genius archetype and thrown a permanent shadow on his work. His lyrics have been bagged in plastic and presented to the jury. With that in mind, perhaps the recent release of So This Is Permanence presents yet another opportunity for morbid, torpid dissection — when, really, what’s engrossing about the book is how it physically documents the living, mad-dash energy of Curtis’s pen pushing.
The collection — edited by his wife Deborah Curtis and music journalist Jon Savage — features scans of Curtis’s handwritten lyrics, some recorded and others not, with comparatively few personal jots scattered throughout. All but seven of the Joy Division songs he authored are represented in the book. The insights are largely material. You can see the type of scrap written upon (“Macclesfield District Council Memorandum”) and the curvy scrawl that he usually set in all-caps. You can also see his edits, from the small tweaks (“Where is your past?” becomes “Where have you been?”) to wholesale eliminations that leave black clouds at the top of some pages. By and large, though, the lyric drafts hew closely to what you hear on the records.
All three of his bandmates have stated that they did not pay great attention to the lyrics when Curtis was alive. In rehearsals, Stephen Morris would begin with a drum riff, upon which Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook would add layers of guitar and bass. Meanwhile, Curtis would rifle through the notebooks and A4s in his plastic carrier bag and try out the words that fit best. So preoccupied were the others with their respective instruments that it was simply a relief to have someone supplying the words — whatever they were. “Who cared what he was saying as long as he said it like that,” is how Hook describes his attitude during rehearsals. “All I really heard was a scream.” Sumner goes so far as to say that they “studiously ignored what he was writing about.” When they took a closer look after Curtis’s death, the lyrics inevitably took on the character of a cry for help — “frightening,” “quite detached and aggressive” — that they felt remiss to have brushed aside.
The guilt is palpable in Unknown Pleasures (2012), Hook’s entertaining, if idly titled (it’s the name of Joy Division’s debut studio album), autobiography. He describes the guys as jape-loving “yobs” who didn’t understand the extent of their frontman’s epilepsy and domestic troubles (Curtis’s marriage suffered as Joy Division prospered, especially when he met a Belgian woman named Annik Honoré). It didn’t help that Curtis waved away his own problems, eager to move ahead with work and loath to inconvenience others. Here’s Hook reflecting on the band’s second studio album, Closer, released two months after Curtis died:

People turn round to you and say, ‘God, you’d been hearing these lyrics for weeks — why didn’t you realize he was so bad?’ You hadn’t. He wasn’t slumped in the corner with a lone fiddle in the background; he was fucking going for it. I suppose that’s the contradiction: on the one hand, he was ill and vulnerable; on the other, he was a screaming rock god. That’s what was confusing.

This broaches, of course, the age-old question of the divide between the life and work of an artist, of the temptation to project a unified personality where there is actually fracture. “Does singing about desperation come from being desperate or is it empathy?” asks Morris in his foreword to Touching from a Distance (1995), Deborah Curtis’s account of her rocky marriage to Ian. Her own stance is clear. Her husband’s “intentions and feelings were all there within the lyrics,” Deborah writes of Closer. “While he lived they were equivocal, but with hindsight all was disclosed when it was too late for anything to be done. Such a sensitive composition could not have happened by accident.”
In biographical accounts, Curtis is often described as a people-pleaser, saying the right thing to one person even if it contradicted what he said to another. The way Deborah tells it, his lyrics glowed with a truth that he couldn’t express through normal channels; therefore, as the Curtises’ communication broke down, she saw, not without some desperation, his writing as a safe house for the ineffable. Had they owned a cassette player, and had she been able to listen to the recording of Closer that Ian brought back from the studio, for example, she perhaps “could have gained an insight into what was happening in his mind.” Deborah wasn’t alone in holding up his lyrics to her life’s mirror in order to read them. Honoré, who stayed with the band while it recorded Closer in London, allegedly hated the album because she believed Curtis felt as guilty about their relationship as the lyrics suggested.
For Ian’s stone at the crematorium, Deborah requested the inscription “Love will tear us apart.” The band’s manager, Rob Gretton, had told Deborah that the song was about her (of course, we don’t have this directly from the source, Ian). Gretton was nonetheless “stunned” by her choice of inscription, Deborah writes, “but there seemed little point in changing it as it seemed to encapsulate all I wanted it to say.” It’s hard not to share in Gretton’s astonishment. Then again, hearing “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” you can see why Deborah took it so personally. Of the lyrics Curtis wrote, it’s possibly the most tangible in content and imagery. But the broader theme is one that underpins much of his writing: the simultaneity of alienation and intimacy. The speaker and his lover have “this appeal that we’ve kept through our lives.” But the moments of physical and communicative closeness turn into humiliations: “Why is the bedroom so cold? / You’ve turned away on your side” and “Do you cry out in your sleep / All my failings exposed.”

Photo credit: Deborah Curtis

Outreach fails (“I tried to get to you”). Miles lie between two people standing nose to nose (“Me in my own world, yeah you there beside”). Dancing in your room to the radio — a “live transmission,” as Curtis informs us with killjoy precision — is actually an act of disengagement: “Staying in the same place, just staying out the time / Touching from a distance, further all the time.” That last line might be the best encapsulation of Curtis’s theme of displacement at the moment of contact. And what better stage than the self for feeling this way? For feeling lost precisely when you should feel at home? Curtis often sings of numbness to “the pleasures of a normal man,” seeming to pinch his own skin as he observes himself from outside:

I’ve walked on water, run through fire,
Can’t seem to feel it anymore.
It was me, waiting for me,
Hoping for something more.
Me, seeing me this time, hoping for something else.

As might be expected, Curtis didn’t have explanations for his lyrics (“I don’t know what they are about. It depends really…er…”), but the closest he might have come is when he told an interviewer that “some of the things come out of confusion” and proceeded to recount feeling overwhelmed by his freedom after finishing school. What am I going to do? What am I going to do? he remembers thinking. “It was awful.” The idea pops up in one of his few non-lyric notes, in which Curtis loosely describes confusion as the “overactive, culmination of ideas, feelings.” If an album can reveal a person’s psyche, then you might say that Unknown Pleasures (1979) is confused, while Closer (1980) is not confused about being confused.
The first words of Unknown Pleasures: “I’ve been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand.” Tucked into nebulous contexts are localized images — “in a room with a window in the corner,” “on the tenth floor, down the back stairs,” “four, twelve windows, ten in a row” — so that the specificity is more destabilizing than orienting. The perspectives are multiple (“I’m watching you, I’m watching her,” “who is right, who can tell”), the senses are gorged (“lights are flashing, cars are crashing,” “a change of speed, a change of style”).
Closer has a clean, dead weight. The scattershot energies of Unknown Pleasures are strained through a net and centrifuged into a hard bullet. Joy Division’s final album has a scientist’s regard for its own terror — brutal, unblinking. Here’s a verse from “Heart and Soul”:

An abyss that laughs at creation,
A circus complete with all fools,
Foundations that lasted the ages,
Then ripped apart at their roots.
Beyond all this good is the terror,
The grip of a mercenary hand,
When savagery turns all good reason,
There’s no turning back, no last stand.

The disillusionment is decisive. But Curtis’s resignation rarely feels listless. The lyrics on Closer have a quality of sadomasochistic excavation: you sense Curtis digging as far as possible, to “the darkest corners of a sense I didn’t know,” only to find that “beyond the day in hand, there’s nothing there at all.” The words are electric with awareness, almost earnest — there is resignation because there once was pursuit. It’s this earnestness that makes Curtis’s writing tender and expansive under what can seem like mere bleakness. Closer’s closer, “Decades,” is a thing of terrible beauty:

Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders,
Here are the young men, well, where have they been?
We knocked on the doors of hell’s darker chamber,
Pushed to the limit, we dragged ourselves in,
Watched from the wings as the scenes were replaying.
We saw ourselves now as we never had seen.
Portrayal of the trauma and degeneration,
The sorrows we suffered and never were free.

Where have they been?
Where have they been?
Where have they been?
Where have they been?

In her biography, Deborah recalls hearing the lyric “I remember when we were young” and thinking that “Ian sounded old, as if he had lived a lifetime in his youth.” When she asked him if the lyrics for “New Dawn Fades” (a different song on Unknown Pleasures, featuring lines like “A loaded gun won’t set you free”) reflected his true feelings, he “refused to confirm or deny any of the points raised and he walked out of the house.” Can he be blamed? Curtis was young, but, as “Decades” suggests, age has nothing to do with the number. The magic of art is that it countenances all feelings, that we can see “ourselves now as we never had seen” — the rightful bearers of trouble and imaginations, in no need of justification in hell’s refinery. Art does not see 23 years. Art sees decades. Where has Ian Curtis been? A place where he left behind that name and became someone else. That’s why it’s a place we know, too. - Esther Yi

A. J. Carruthers - Can utopia be lived inside the work? Is there a place for the political in the poem? What is the fate of community, of the chorus, of lyric time? Could there be such a thing as poetic geography? Poetic science? What doesn’t poetry know about music?

A. J. Carruthers, Axis Book 1: ‘Areal’, Vagabond Press, 2014.

How to begin a long poem? In Axis Book 1: ‘Areal’, the inaugural part of carruthers’ long poem project, each ‘axis’ cuts, layers, folds, and accumulates language in two columns. One side often plays the support role, an ‘accompaniment’ for the other side. Elsewhere they merge, intersect, cross, or even obliterate each other. Book 1 is the first test of this structure, a laying out of fields, of poetic ‘areas.’ It asks questions about questions: Can utopia be lived inside the work? Is there a place for the political in the poem? What is the fate of community, of the chorus, of lyric time? Could there be such a thing as poetic geography? Poetic science? What doesn’t poetry know about music?

Big, bold, brainy. An experimental tour de force.– Kate Lilley

Playfully provocative, urgently provisional, Axis, Book 1: ‘Areal’ begins an ambitious mapping of poetry as imagined area and airing of the real, as space for epic renewal rather than that which is simply anew. As an extended chorale, it splices traces of past voices — poets, musicians, the dictionary, blackbox recordings — with a more intimate contemporary ‘we,’ replete with asides, suspicions, splutters, and mis-soundings. Carruthers meditates on what it means to be in common, what language and its rhythms can carry or elide across time, friendships, and cultures. Attention is drawn to both the scale and pace of experience, moving between ordinary routine and a more global witness or exchange, between the drawn moment to a series of quick, quirky riffs. Crossing the poetic, dramatic, critical and dialogic, this volume fi netunes our sense of the modal while always returning to the materiality of word and sound. Delightfully challenging, citationally swift, notationally profound, Axis is, in all respects, a virtuosic debut.
– ANN VICKERY

For the poet-critic — never mere hybrid or moonlighter — the task of writing is always a symphonics. Notation, citation, edge note, floating index, list, query and lexicon contribute to the complex labour of occasioning the poem and its critical orbit, the essay and its poetic afterimage, the score and its rippling extension. Carruthers engages a scholarship at once promiscuous and keenly focused: his is an inquiry attuned to tuning and to the intersections of grapheme, phoneme, line and break that constitute a poem, a conversation, a position statement, a speculation. Axis, Book 1: ‘Areal’ is the first of a projected long poem and scores the material of Carruthers’ significant engagement with poetics, philosophy, politics and community. Its gesture is one of boundless generosity — to those who track alongside, called in, or remembered.
– ASTRID LORANGE

Axiom

A. J. Carruthers’ Axis promises to be a long poem, perhaps a very long poem. This “projected life-long” work belongs to the tradition of the “life-poem” which has emerged in late twentieth-century American (and, with Carruthers, Australian) avant-garde writing. Perhaps its most accomplished practitioner is the American poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis, whose five-volume poem Drafts, which ended with ‘Draft 114’ in 2014, in many ways defined the genre. Charles Olson’s Maximus and Ezra Pound’s Cantos, the most obvious precedents in American literary modernism, are both archaic not only in their subject matter but in their attitude. Wrestling as they do with the writer’s responsibility to continue a tradition and be its next instantiation, they are poetic monuments attesting to great histories. DuPlessis, over more than two decades, took it upon herself to produce a living edifice which is constantly re-writing, re-drafting itself, and that dynamism is possibly her strongest mark on Carruthers in this first volume.

Book 1: Areal opens with a quotation from Carla Harryman’s 2008 sequence of prose poems Adorno’s Noise: “History meets incident along vertical axis.” This quotation comes from her poem ‘Dream’, which describes both emotional and abstract dream-visions, and concludes: “I believe these sophisticated abstractions are signs related to structures I ought to be attentive to when writing or facing personal disappointment.” This establishes the role of the ‘axis’ (or axes) that Carruthers seeks to map, a kind of geometry of feelings and ideas. Throughout the book, lines, columns, and grids provide the one-dimensional grounds that force concepts to come together. Most of the poems follow an ‘axial’ layout (the other principal meaning of the title), two long thin columns in parallel. In Axis 3, ‘Axiom’, the two columns see “Nature” and “Capital,” later “Speaker” and “Spoken,” placed in dialogue, and yet we see how one relates to the other: the end lines “ethical / aristocrats’ partner ‘in E flat / major,” with the letter ‘e’ from ethical matching the musical key, and “major” reflecting “aristocrat” in, by contrast, a conceptual resemblance. We are made to imagine a line drawn between two points, even if we are not aware of the significance of the connection, and therefore the reader’s urge to make connections begins to emerge from the crowd of commonalities between things the parallel columns put next to each other. This commonality is the point of departure for Axis.

Aperture

However, not all of the poems follow this particular axial structure, and indeed, each of the poems of Axis makes use of space in a different way. Axis 25, ‘Aperture’, curls across the pages, its words interspersed with pieces of dance notation. Axes are also rotated around, and here the path of the text on the page could be the wobbling of a planet or the orange-peel slices of a map of the globe. Rather than a dependence on literary forms like the sonnet or even the stanza, ‘axial’ poetry adopts a formalism of space. Even between the poems written in two columns, there is variation in how they use space; some are twinned, like Axis 20, ‘About’, while others feature so many gaps that we read parts of them almost in a zig-zag, like Axis 29, ‘Account’.

‘Account’, the introductory note explains, argues for Theodor Adorno’s theory of musical notation being applied to poetics. Olson, in his famous essay ‘Projective Verse’, compared the poet’s use of the page to the musical score, and Carruthers certainly invites this comparison as well. This reviewer is not at home with music, and I often find comparisons to poetry irksome. What do either classical or folk music have to do with the modern traditions of experimental writing that I find the most valuable? They are usually so far away from song forms that the usual trite comparison seems meaningless. But in Axis, what is borrowed from music is its formalism, by which I mean both its attention to form and its understandability through forms: chords, octaves, repeated phrases – symphony, the great coming-together of sounds. In Axis, it is a coming-together of words, their ideas, and their forms on the page.

As such, many of the poems have a deliberately jarring or eye-catching look, for instance Axis 24, ‘Aerial’. Printed in white text on black, this poem is divided into seven individually-titled prose paragraphs, something between mini-narrative and mini-manifestos of the theory of Axis. It also puns on the title of the book as a whole, ‘Areal’, and draws our attention to it, as it is visible (and in a sense readable) even when the book is closed. It talks about lines as “staves,” like those in Roland Barthes’ S/Z; in that text, the final nail in the coffin of structuralism as poststructuralism was being born, Honoré de Balzac’s short story Sarrasine is deconstructed to within in inch of its existence. As Barthes sets the theoretical stage of this exhaustive commentary, he describes the “classic” literary text as a “full score,” with the various elements of the text – meanings of words, cultural allusions, symbols, actions of the characters – are like different instruments, so that each part has a structure that makes sense, but they only become the full poetic performance when considered together.

Reference to Barthes is only one of Carruthers’ rich network of allusions beyond poetry; it is not even the limit of his reference to the fertile ground of French theory, whose love of, and exasperations with, rococo cultural apparatuses Carruthers clearly shares. Gerard Genette’s 1987 book Paratexts gives a catalogue of all of those things which exist around the sides of a text: colophons, blurbs, tables of contents, footnotes, marginalia, and so on. (Indeed, what you are reading now is a paratext, because one of Genette’s chapters is about reviews.) Areal is a book alive to the possibilities of its paratexts. Genette’s original French title for his book, Seuils (‘thresholds’) appears on the first page of Axis 1, ‘Axiality’:

to have written           : the fold

to have write               : stars

to have writ                 : veils

sails                              Seuils

sailing by                     in time

The left-hand column sees “to have written” devolve, in a manner that seems to echo the conjugation of a verb, into “to have writ,” the “have” changing from auxiliary to primary verb and “writ,” a noun, emerging out of a verb. Each stage in this transformation is commented upon in the line facing it. “the fold” refers to one of DuPlessis’ key concepts in Drafts, whereby each poem is turned back to comment upon earlier parts of the series. Drafts is self-paratextual, the “fold” moving the margin or threshold of the text. Carruthers comments in a transcribed interview that follows Axis 17, ‘Auricular’ in the book: “we read paratext everywhere anyway. Read the terms and conditions!” This latter comment can be taken to mean both that that questioner should have “read” or understood the grounds on which such a project is undertaken, and that “terms and conditions” are an example of a surrounding text, a paratext. “to have writ” is paired with “veils” because writing, at some point, goes from being a process of writing to the noun “writing,” a series of surfaces, boundaries – veils – and then these veils can become sails. Through examining the resemblances of words, which as we know are arbitrary and therefore matters of chance, patterns emerge. There is nothing intentional about the relationship between “sails” and “Seuils,” but Carruthers’ poem shows it to us like the results of a divination, its significance derived from our experience of it.

Adapt

This is often the hardest idea in experimental art for the sceptic to swallow: that the reader can be left responsible for so much of the ‘work’ of making sense of it. But with the really enjoyable and worthwhile texts, it is not work at all, but play. Before the gramophone, people would buy sheet music and play it on their instruments at home; the first time they heard it might be coming from their own piano or fiddle. Reading across the columns of Axis is like reading a music of concepts, carefully composed, but brought together by one’s own process of thinking.

Sad to say, Australia’s experimental poets are neglected in Britain. This is not for lack of trying on their part – the regular appearance of the online Cordite Review, for instance, brings a consistently high calibre of work to our door. I can only urge those interested in the future of truly innovative poetry to look to Australia for new takes on the traditions, and, as innovative poetry has always offered, on the idea of tradition itself.

Axis Book 1: Areal is the beginning of a vast experiment. For a new poet to outline such a vast swathe of intellectual territory for the future is ambitious, but the texts it models itself on, like Drafts, are some of the most ambitious recent projects and poetry and also the most worthwhile. Axis 27, ‘Adapt’ centres around a majuscule letter C plotted on a grid, its slightly stylised shape forming most of a circle. In the first drawing of the figure, there are lots of circles of different sizes, overlapping, each tracing parts of the elegantly formed letter: the outer curve, inner curve, its serif, and so on. We are told that the letter is “always incomplete, harbouring a gap.” The second time the figure appears, the letter is filled in, is now black, and some of the lines of the grid have been replaced with crosses in the white space the “C” encloses. The language of an exhibition catalogue describes the image, and the poem ends, “now, show / your restive book.” As this incipit to Axis shows, poetry must always be restive, never settling on its grounds but moving along a proliferation of axes. - Calum Gardner

A.J. Carruthers is a poet and scholar in long poems and musico-poetics. He has published poems in the Anthology of Asian-Australian Poets (Puncher and Wattmann), a chapbook, The Tulip Beds: a toneme suite (Vagabond, 2013), and an assortment of artworks / artists' books. Axis Book 1: ‘Areal’ is his first full-length collection and the first book in the first part of a lifelong long poem: Hemisphere. 

Hugh Aldersey-Williams pulls the unfairly neglected yet enormously influential writer Thomas Browne out of the obscure pages of Pseudodoxia Epidemica and into the 21st century, to apply his generous curiosity and rational intelligence to the vagaries and contradictions of life today

Hugh Aldersey-Williams, The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century, Granta, 2015.

A profound and delightful jeu d'esprit of a book, mixing biography, etymology, cultural history and quixotic scientific experiments. Aldersey-Williams pulls the unfairly neglected yet enormously influential writer Thomas Browne out of the obscure pages of Pseudodoxia Epidemica and into the 21st century, to apply his generous curiosity and rational intelligence to the vagaries and contradictions of life today. Browne has had some impressive fans (Sebald, Woolf, Borges, Poe, Marias) but this book will revive him, bringing his extraordinary genius to a whole new audience.

‘Aldersey-Williams has written the sort of book the good doctor might himself applaud. Not a conventional biography, this [is a] genial, generous but tough-minded excursion through its subject's life and afterlife’ - Boyd Tonkin

‘[A] richly detailed book... Written with passion and affection... Its greatest virtue is that you come away from it liking both Browne and Aldersey-Williams... A delightful read’ - Colin Burrow

‘[A] delightfully eccentric homage... The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century is a triumph. With humour, humility (from the Latin humus, earth) and intelligent generosity, Aldersey-Williams brings Sir Thomas splendidly to life, urns and all’ - Ian Thompson

‘An elegant, pleasantly obsessive study ’
‘Engaging and thoughtful...Like some of the most compelling biographers, Aldersey-Williams partly inhabits his subject. [It is] less like a biography, more like a mental inhabitation’ - Claire Preston

‘A playful erudition permeates this biography of Thomas Browne... Aldersey-Williams zips between our time and Browne's to reveal the man and his work’ - Barbara Kiser

‘[This] is not a conventional biography. It is more a conversation with an old friend. Engaging and often funny’
‘Superb... Aldersey-Williams has produced not a standard biography but a fascinating genre-bending melange of life story, medicine, science and human culture. The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century is a deft blend of erudition and trivia, formality and chattiness, high and low culture. With luck this fine tribute will bring Browne the wider readership he richly deserves. Illuminating and entertaining’ - Malcolm Forbes

‘This is just the kind of celebration Thomas Browne needs and deserves: not a conventional biography but a meditation filled with intellectual curiosity, tolerance, humane observation and gentle wit. It shows Browne as a man caught in the currents of his times while musing on timeless questions - and, like Aldersey-Williams, determined to weigh up the evidence without dogmatism, and to enjoy the richness of the world’ - Philip Ball

‘A wonderfully erratic, promenading book, in which we see how different, yet how similar we still are today to that most serene, most enigmatic science pioneer and literary master, Sir Thomas Browne, whose prose style is one of the highest peaks in English literature, according to Borges and to my humble self ’ - Javier Marias

W.G. Sebald greatly admired the writing of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) perhaps above all others. The two men, separated by three centuries, were in many ways kindred spirits. Here is Sebald reflecting on Browne (and, by extension, himself) in The Rings of Saturn:
The invisibility and intangibility of that which moves us remained an unfathomable mystery for Thomas Browne, too, who saw our world as no more than a shadow image of another one far beyond. In his thinking and writing he therefore sought to look upon earthly existence, from the things that were closest to him to the spheres of the universe, with the eye of an outsider, one might even say of the creator. His only means of achieving the sublime heights that this endeavor required was a parlous loftiness in his language. On common with other English writers of the seventeenth century, Browne wrote out of the fullness of his erudition, deploying a vast repertoire of quotations and the names of authorities who had gone before, creating complex metaphors and analogies, and constructing labyrinthine sentences that sometimes extend over one or two pages, sentences that resemble processions or a funeral cortège in their sheer ceremonial lavishness. It is true that, because of the immense weight of the impediments he is carrying, Browne’s writing can be held back by the force of gravitation, but when he does succeed in rising higher and higher through the circles of his spiralling prose, borne aloft like a glider on warm currents of air, even today the reader is overcome by a sense of levitation. The greater the distance, the clearer the view: one sees the tiniest of details with the utmost clarity. It is as if one were looking through a reversed opera glass and through a microscope at the same time. And yet, says Browne, all knowledge is enveloped in darkness. What we perceive are no more than isolated lights in the abyss of ignorance, in the shadow-filled edifice of the world. We study the order of things, says Browne, but we cannot grasp their innermost essence.

In his compelling and entertaining new book The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century (Granta, 2015) Hugh Aldersey-Williams does his best to locate the innermost essence of Browne. The book opens as Browne sets off on a journey from Bury St Edmunds to his home in Norwich (where Aldersey-Williams also lives). “What was he thinking?” Aldersey-Williams wonders. Browne, a physician by trade, but also “a philosopher and writer, a coiner of words, a Christian moralist, a naturalist, an antiquarian, an experimenter and a myth-buster,” had just testified at the trial of two women accused of being witches. Browne’s testimony suggested that their actions reflected the subtlety of the devil. They were found guilty and were hanged. Aldersey-Williams, who clearly wished Browne had testified differently by exposing the unscientific thinking behind the charges of witchcraft, decides to retrace Browne’s journey home from the trial. And he was going to make the trip slowly, on a bicycle. “I want time to think about what was going through Browne’s head.”  The portrait of Browne that emerges is at once thoughtful and impassioned. His complexities and contradictions are carefully weighed and examined.

The title of Aldersay-Williams’ book suggests that the time travel he will take us on will be limited to only one direction, when, in fact, he shuttles continuously back and forth in both directions across four centuries. To understand Browne’s legacy and to understand him better in our own terms, we must see how his ideas and discoveries play out in the 21st century.  But to understand Browne himself, we must understand the 17th century better. Aldersey-Williams, a science writer, is well-versed in the history and zeitgeist of Browne’s century and perhaps his finest accomplishment is to give the reader access to the mindset of a 17th century physician, living in a country divided by civil war and profound religious beliefs. Today, we tend to think of the 17th century (and pretty much any earlier period) as a time dominated by superstition and misinformation. As Aldersey-Williams demonstrates, unless his reader can momentarily grasp the given landscape of basic religious beliefs, assumptions, and arguments that pervaded 17th century England, when “belief in the devil was necessarily a concomitant of belief in God,” we will never understand how Browne could testify as he did at the witchcraft trial. Browne’s myth-busting stopped only at the boundaries that his faith required and protected.
So little is known about Browne’s life that a full-fledged biography is simply not in the cards. Instead, Aldersey-Williams focuses each chapter on a key theme from Browne’s life and career:  Physic (that is, medicine), Animals, Plants, Science, Tolerance, Faith, Melancholy, and Objects (in which Aldersey-Williams attempts to track down the actual objects of Browne’s life). The chapters turn into time-traveling essays that encompass the evolution of ideas and practices over the centuries. In the chapter on Melancholy, for example. Aldersey-Williams slowly makes his way through a discussion of Browne’s obsession with death and with ancient burial practices (Browne rushed to be a first-hand witness to several newly unearthed Roman or early English burial grounds) to the broader 17th century conception of melancholy (think of Shakespeare’s Hamlet from the early 1600s and Robert Burton’s magnificent tome of 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy ) and finally into a careful dissection of the modern understanding of depression and its various clinical definitions in the latest edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).
We tend to think of Shakespeare when we think of writers who coined new words and creatively expanded the English language, but Browne, who wrote with “delirious” style, was every much his equal in this regard. He is credited with creating 784 new words, including medical, precarious, insecurity, incontrovertible, hallucination, electricity, cylindrical, and ferocious – as well as providing “the first evidence of the true sense of another 1,616” words.
“Thomas Browne is my obsession,” Aldersey-Williams admits, but he is overly modest when he makes no major claims for his book, saying that he hoped only to “have found a way to bring Thomas Browne wide notice.”
I cannot extend Brownean scholarship. I have made no historical discovery about him, found no lost book, no forgotten manuscript (O happy author). Indeed all I seem to have found is that many of the objects supposed to have an association with Browne have disappeared. Nor can I offer the definitive interpretation of his texts (O naive author).
Like Sebald, Aldersey-Williams finds a kindred spirit in Browne. “I have chosen Thomas Browne to accompany me on this exploration of knowledge and unknowable truth. He may seem an odd, even perverse, companion to take. He is often wrong about things, and even when he is right, his scientific knowledge is bound to be out of date. But I have done it for good reasons: because I am fascinated by him, of course; because I am fascinated by his period; and above all because I believe the way he sees the world has lessons for us today.” And the two traits of Browne’s that Aldersey-Williams seems to most anxious for us to understand in the early years of the 21st century are civility and tolerance. Browne had an “almost boundless tolerance for the individual” (as opposed to the  often irrational collective behavior of the crowd).
His attitude towards other religions and races, shaped by his European travels and wide learning, is mostly exemplary; it stands up well to scrutiny today. By the standard of his day, it is almost miraculous in its benevolence. He speaks up for the classes of humanity that were often ostracized or demonized.  - Terry Pitts

It would be all too easy to portray the 17th-century physician and writer Sir Thomas Browne as an amusing oddball. Here is a man whose rather short list of publications includes an essay on funerary urns, a treatise on planting trees in patterns of five, and the catalogue of a fantasy museum. (Among the exhibits were a landscape painting depicting “the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea” and a crucifix made from “the cross Bone of a Frog’s Head”.)

His greatest work was an encyclopedia of false belief and superstition, grandiosely entitled Pseudodoxia epidemica, of which the standard English title, Vulgar Errors, is a rough translation. In it, the claim that bear cubs are born as formless lumps and then literally “licked into shape” by their mothers was solemnly disproved. So too was the idea that the root of the mandrake plant screams when it is pulled from the ground. And Browne patiently explained why all paintings of Adam and Eve were faulty, as they depicted them with navels, even though neither of them had emerged from a mother’s womb.

What has kept Browne’s name alive is not so much the contents of these works – though once you start reading Vulgar Errors, it’s surprisingly difficult to stop – as their style. In turn languorous, pointed, grandiose, crisp, mellifluous and sententious, Browne’s prose brims with verbal, aural and intellectual delight. Even a simple sentence such as the opening one in his essay “On Dreams” transports you immediately to a different level: “Half our dayes we passe in the shadowe of the earth, and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives.” No wonder, then, that Browne has been the private passion of a series of great stylists, from Coleridge to Virginia Woolf.

But to think of him just in terms of odd preoccupations and an exotic style is to get the man badly wrong. He was a highly qualified medical expert, educated at Oxford, Montpellier, Padua and Leiden; he knew Latin, Greek and Hebrew; his reading was broad and deep, and he corresponded with some of the leading intellectuals of his day. His interests were not at all quaint. The essay on urns involved not just a meditation on death (and what could be more serious than that?) but also an exploration of Roman archaeology, and the treatise on tree-planting broadened into a much wider study of geometrical patterns in nature, of a kind that biologists were just beginning to engage in. Had he not lived in Norwich, he might well have attended the meetings of the Royal Society and become one of its Fellows.

Most importantly, Browne was an anti-dogmatist: he believed in the value of rational doubt, considering all sides of a question, and avoiding peremptory conclusions. His other great work, Religio medici, was an essay on religious belief, which explained how it was that a scientifically minded physician could also accept the mysteries of Christian faith.
The science writer Hugh Aldersey-Williams describes Thomas Browne as his obsession. Living in Norwich, he is frustrated to find that few people there recognise Browne’s name, and dismayed to learn that Browne’s private meadow, where he studied wild plants, has become a car park. (His house, or rather the site of it, now contains a branch of Pret a Manger.)
Aldersey-Williams is keen to find fragments of his hero’s existence and eager to tell us the details of his life and thought. But while this book is less than a biography (not pretending to perform that task), it is much more than an affectionate portrait or a work of local piety. For Aldersey-Williams is convinced that Browne is very much a man for the modern age.
What does that mean? It’s rather hard to say. This is a very personal book, essayistic, digressive and idiosyncratic. In places, the author wants to tell us how Browne contributed to the modern world – his forward-looking approach to archaeology or biology, for example. He also informs us that Browne invented many words that we now take for granted. (This seems to be true of “electricity”, but most of the other examples he presents are faulty, based on out-of-date information in the Oxford English Dictionary.)
Above all, he thinks that we could benefit from Browne’s ability to combine rational scientific thinking with a calm acceptance of the idea that there may be greater truths that lie beyond science. One of the things we learn about Aldersey-Williams (and we learn almost as much about him as about Browne) is that he is an atheist; but he is also offended by antireligious intolerance, and sees Browne as a better intellectual role model for us all.
Parts of this book work very well, and parts do not. (Memo to all writers of quasi-biographical studies: never write a fantasy dialogue between you and your subject. It induces stylistic seasickness, mingled with sheer embarrassment.) Any attempt to interest people in Thomas Browne’s writings must be a good thing. But his deepest belief was that every detail of the world is suffused with order and meaning by God. He was absolutely a man of the 17th century, and can only look uncomfortable when dressed up in 21st-century clothes. - Noel Malcolm

Tadeusz Borowski - In spare, brutal prose he describes a world where where the will to survive overrides compassion and prisoners eat, work and sleep a few yards from where others are murdered; where the difference between human beings is reduced to a second bowl of soup

Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Penguin, 1976.
excerpt

Tadeusz Borowski’s concentration camp stories were based on his own experiences surviving Auschwitz and Dachau. In spare, brutal prose he describes a world where where the will to survive overrides compassion and prisoners eat, work and sleep a few yards from where others are murdered; where the difference between human beings is reduced to a second bowl of soup, an extra blanket or the luxury of a pair of shoes with thick soles; and where the line between normality and abnormality vanishes. Published in Poland after the Second World War, these stories constitute a masterwork of world literature.

"I saw the death of a million people – literally, not metaphorically," wrote Polish poet and author Tadeusz Borowski in 1946, in a letter. Borowski was arrested by the Gestapo in Warsaw in 1942, shortly after publishing his debut book of poetry. Following two years in Auschwitz, he had been liberated from the Dachau concentration camp by the US Seventh Army in the spring of 1945. He published another collection in 1945 before switching to short stories, which he abandoned after 1948 to write communist propaganda. He committed suicide in 1951, aged 28.
Relatively few in number, his stories occupy a unique position in Holocaust literature and in fiction generally. In Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust, Christopher Bigsby identifies him as a link between Kafka and Beckett. Borowski called his brutal stories "a voyage to the limit of a particular experience". That experience was daily life in Auschwitz as a kapo, a non-Jewish inmate who works, schemes and exploits to survive amid daily slaughter.

In "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen", Borowski's narrator Tadek describes a day working on the ramp, unloading transports of Jews and directing them on to trucks that take them to the nearby gas chambers. The work is hard – barely is one transport emptied before another arrives – but the job is a choice one: while money and other valuables are Reich property, food and clothing can be claimed by those working on the ramp. These are key items for survival.
This state of affairs makes Tadek and his fellow prisoners complicit in the camp's murderous purpose, a fact the stories repeatedly acknowledge. At the end of "This Way for the Gas", Tadek remarks: "Suddenly I see the camp as a haven of peace. It is true, others may be dying, but one is somehow still alive, one has enough food, enough strength to work." His readers' tendency to see Tadek as Borowski (Tadek is the diminutive of Tadeusz) annoyed the author, but the Polish critic Jan Kott asserts that the close identification of character with creator was a deliberate moral decision on Borowski's part, "an acceptance of mutual responsibility, mutual participation, and mutual guilt for the concentration camp." In his book on artists under communism, The Captive Mind, Czesław Miłosz identifies one of the exceptional elements of Borowski's stories: "In the abundant literature of atrocity of the 20th century, one rarely finds an account written from the point of view of an accessory to the crime."
In Borowski's stories atrocity is piled upon atrocity, in frank, dispassionate prose: "They were undressed and Oberscharführer Moll either shot them with his rifle or pushed them live into a flaming trench." Tadek clears "squashed, trampled infants" out of the emptied train carriages "like chickens, holding several in each hand". People are dehumanised: Jews flow between train carriage and gas
chamber "like water from an open tap"; "Around us sit the Greeks, their jaws working greedily like huge human insects"; "From afar the women were faceless and ageless. Nothing more than white blotches …"

Yet Tadek is repeatedly confronted with the humanity of these "insects", these "blotches". "These women," he later notes, "were not so much alike as it had seemed when we looked at them from another sector." But apprehensions like this, threatening the cynicism with which Tadek seems to defend himself, don't lead to any transformative epiphany. Having recognised the humanity of the victims he remains powerless, and possibly even unwilling, to prevent their deaths. Indeed, he continues to help operate the mechanism that murders them.
Certain errors are common to readings of Borowski; one, committed even by such attentive readers as Neal Ascherson and Tony Judt, is to describe his stories as memoirs. In her survey of Holocaust literature, A Thousand Darknesses, Ruth Franklin argues that "to consider any text 'pure testimony', completely free from aestheticizing influences and narrative conventions, is naïve." This is especially true in Borowski's case, and not only because the testimony of his fellow inmates suggests he was quite different from his conniving, often cruel narrators. His stripped back style, although not as extreme as that of Hemingway, whom he read avidly, is crafted just as sedulously. His metaphors reflect the reality of the camp, as with "the empty pavement that glistened like a wet leather strap", and equal care is applied to structure. "A Day at Harmenz" describes a "normal" day at the camp. Amid details of backbreaking labour, random violence and arbitrary executions, it can go almost unnoticed that Tadek faces death on three separate occasions, each threat arising suddenly and requiring a different tactic to evade it. This lethal picaresque ends with him giving food to a Jew who is going to the gas chamber later that day. The unexpected act of charity is complex – it even seems a perversion of some kind, so distorted is the environment in which it occurs – but Borowski withholds the commentary a memoirist would supply.
Another error concerns morality. Al Alvarez describes the atmosphere of Borowski's stories as "a kind of moral silence, like the pause which follows a scream". It's a memorable description, but misrepresentative. Borowski's despair itself is moral. As Miłosz writes, he is "a nihilist in his stories, but by that I do not mean that he is amoral. On the contrary, his nihilism results from an ethical position, from disappointed love of the world and of humanity." If his cold prose belies this it's because, as his narrator muses in "The People Who Walked On", a "man has only a limited number of ways in which he can express strong emotions or violent passions. He uses the same gestures as when what he feels is only petty and unimportant. He utters the same ordinary words."
Borowski's distrust of his stories' ability to convey what he wanted, coupled with his inability to escape Auschwitz as a subject, left him in an impossible artistic position. His work had already been denounced in Poland, and when the Polish Writers' Association officially espoused socialist realism in 1949 there remained no place in fiction for his astringency. He produced reams of boilerplate propaganda, but private comments suggest his faith in Stalinism had eroded completely by the time of his suicide. The precise reasons for his death are uncertain, as are many other details regarding this troubling witness to the Holocaust, but the dreadful power of his stories remains undiminished. - Chris Power

'This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman" is the title piece of a short story collection by the late Polish Holocaust survivor Tadeusz Borowski. Borowski was not a Jew, but a poet who suffered from clinical depression. This was sufficient reason for him to be detained at Auschwitz and Dachau as a political prisoner. Because of his non-Jewish background, however, his views toward both his captors and his fellow prisoners are somewhat different than those normally reported by concentration camp survivors.
It's not that he views his incarceration in any more sanguine terms than the Jews with whom he was imprisoned. It's simply that Borowski does not seem able to separate the prisoners and the captors into villains and victims. He views the entire situation as evil, not evil perpetrated upon the innocent by the guilty, but a situation in which the Jews buy into their own fate because they are too foolish to suspect the totality of the corruption of human nature.
This is a view of the Holocaust which is even darker and bleaker than the our usual interpretation of it. At least in the Anne Frank view of those terrible years, we are able to see the survivors as noble and courageous people who, despite the loss of seven million Annes, came out of their experience determined to make sure that such a terrible thing never happens again..
Borowski, on the other hand, sees precious little noblity or courage anywhere. In the title story, the narrator, Tadek, is a member of a force responsible for going through the Jewish victims' personal possessions in search of any valuables they can salvage for the coffers of the Third Reich. Tadek knows that most if not all these people are under a death sentence, and yet he does not tell them this; although he feels deep shame about his job, he justifies it on the grounds that he believes the Jews to be responsible for their own imprisonment.
He even feels that it is these same miserable Jews who have condemned him to feeling badly about himself. He says, "...I am furious, simply furious with these people -- furious because I must be here because of them. I feel no pity. I am not sorry they're going to the gas chamber. Damn them all! I could throw myself at them, beat them with my fists."
Tadek's skewed argument is that even the concentration camp prisoners who worked for the Nazis suffered, and the fact that they were allowed to survive but forced to work for their captors is even more dehumanizing than being allowed to die. Captive workers were forced to carry dead Jews to the crematorium, as well as witness a myriad of other sickening and despicable acts. Borowski argues that whatever the captive laborers did in the camps they had to do, or else their insubordination would have signed their own death warrants. Through Tadek, he argues that he is not guilty, but he is nonetheless overcome with shame.
Clearly Borowski's feelings toward his Holocaust experience are very conflicted, as evidenced in the wide range of emotions exhibited in his story. At the beginning of the story, he is anxious for the next wave of affluent Jews to come in so he will be able to loot their belongings. When they actually come, however, he has to watch, and to some degree participate in, the barbaric treatment shown these people.
He writes, "I go back inside the train; I carry out dead infants; I unload luggage. I touch corpses, but I cannot overcome the mounting, uncontrollable terror. I try to escape from the corpses, but they are everywhere: lined up on the gravel, on the cement edge of the ramp, inside the cattle cars. Babies, hideous naked women, men twisted by convulsions. I run off as far as I can go, but immediately a whip slashes across my back. Out of the corner of my eye I see an S.S. man, swearing profusely. I stagger forward and run, lose myself in the Canada group. Now, at last, I can once more rest against the stack of rails."
Tadek is unquestionably sickened by his situation, but his conflicted feelings coalesce into a kind of extreme existentialism. He feels there is no point to anything, literally no point at all, and this lack of meaning in his life became unendurable; it is scarcely surprising that six years after the end of the war, Tadeusz Borowski committed suicide.
Yet saddest of all is the fact Tadek's suggestion that his point of view was not an uncommon one among the non-Jewish survivors of the concentration camps. Tadek's reactions to the Jews range from indifference to intolerance to hostility. Under the extreme pressure of existence in the concentration camp, these feelings harden into a kind of numbness, because this is the only way he can get from one day to the next. As his friend Henri says "[It] exhausts you, you rebel -- and the easiest way to relieve your hate is to turn against someone weaker. Why, I'd even call it healthy." Understandable, possibly -- but healthy, never. - Karen Bernardo

Tadeusz Borowski was born in Soviet Ukraine in 1922, in a Polish community that would, under Stalin’s rule, become the first national minority targeted during the Great Terror, ultimately resulting in the death of 600-700 thousand Poles. When Borowski was four years old, his father was arrested and sent to the Gulag; four years later, his mother was arrested and sent to Siberia. Borowski and his brother were placed in an orphanage until 1932 when the Polish Red Cross succeeded in getting them resettled in Poland. His parents were eventually released and repatriated to Poland where, in poor health and in poverty, they strived to establish a family life again.
History did not give them much time. Tadeusz was only 17 when Germany invaded Poland. He continued his studies in underground schools and began writing poetry published in the underground press. At 21, he was arrested by the Gestapo, stepping into a trap when looking for his fiancée, Maria, who had just been arrested as well, along with a friend, another student.
After the war, he returned to Poland and began writing again, but this time in prose because his experiences made poetry impossible. His stories about Auschwitz were published under the title, Pożegnanie z Marią (A Farewell to Maria), later published in English under the title, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Borowski joined the Communist party in 1948, thinking that this could be the only hope for humanity. A year later, his friend, the same one who had been arrested with him by the Gestapo, was imprisoned and tortured by the Communists. Borowski tried, but failed, to help him. In 1951, he committed suicide.
Borowski’s book is agonizing to read. He spares the reader nothing, nor, for that matter, does he spare himself or anyone else at Auschwitz. It is a record of searing, terrifying brutality, made all the more so by the helplessness of the prisoners enclosed in a sealed environment.
For many people, This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen… is considered an essential record of the horrors of Auschwitz; but for others, it is too unsettling. It is not “lyrical” enough, not sympathetic enough. He offers us no theories, and not a single redeeming possibility. Unembellished, because, as he wrote, “there can be no beauty if it is paid for by human injustice, nor truth that passes over injustice, nor moral virtue that condones it.” Surely there was no need to ask for sympathy?
Perhaps that is why this book is less well known than others that followed. We do not like what we read; it is very disturbing. Borowski wrote this book when the memories were fresh; he was still a young man and still desperately trying to find something to believe in. But he lived with his nightmares, and he wrote them down. Nothing ever relieved his pain.
Borowski gave up poetry. What about other art forms? Can there be music? A German professor of music, an admirer of the difficult modern music composed by Poles after the war explained to me that this harsh music was historically imperative: Poles could not, in those years, compose a pretty melody. After a few notes, the music would collapse with an angry, agonizing crash.
Can there be art? This Way…, the book under discussion, was inspired by a design competition for the cover of a new edition of Borowski’s book. The winning cover was designed by Anna Zyśko of Poland. In all, 241 entries from 44 countries were received and evaluated by a jury comprising John Guzlowski, J. Marek Haltof, Alicia Nitecki, Jae Jennifer Rossman and Marco Sonzogni. The images included in the book were selected from the competition entries as well as from designers specifically commissioned for this book. Some of the cover art is quite conventional, fairly straightforward representations of the book title. Some, however, show an extraordinary depth, blending horror, pain, despair, death and some, even a glimpse of beauty beyond the camp. - Irene Tomaszewski   

Holly Pester - Using anecdote as a method to generate a collection of poetry, critical fictions and literary fragments this book performs a response to the history and function of the Women’s Art Library

Holly Pester, Go to Reception and Ask for Sara in Red Felt Tip, Book Works, 2015.
www.hollypester.com/

Anecdote literally means unofficial, unpublished knowledge. It is non-quantifiable and contrary to evidence; anecdotal data won’t ever support a rule, or provide the basis of a law or theory. Here’s an anecdote for you: in The Percy Anecdotes, a collection of nineteenth-century literary tidbits collated by the Percy brothers, it says that “anecdote” was ancient Greek slang for an unmarried woman. Personified, the anecdote becomes aberrant and female, an example of marginalia. As a form of practice and research, the anecdotal is a complex of “theory in the flesh of practice”. Archives are full of fragments and proper scholarly practice honours this incompleteness. The anecdote, however, fantasises connections, negentropically forming stories from fragmentary information. Materiality and story come together over the bones of an archive.’ – Holly Pester

Using anecdote as a method to generate a collection of poetry, critical fictions and literary fragments this book performs a response to the history and function of the Women’s Art Library. The stories segue through the archive of personal correspondence, artists’ slides and administrative papers, as well as a poster archive documenting exhibitions, parties and activism in 1980s Feminist art movements. Anecdotal, gossiped and mistreated histories form aberrant narratives as a result of an inverted mode of archival research.

Ask for Sara: A Day of Gossip, Anecdote and Feminist Art Practice in Archives

Timeline Date (Date published / Date of event): 24 April 2015
      

‘What would it mean to let the custodian, archivist, librarian guide a research enquiry through her personal testimony of the histories, people and drama of a collection’s narrative? To court the anecdote is to do bad research. To court gossip – the anecdote’s deviant cousin – is to subvert research altogether.’
– Holly Pester
Drawing on the archive as a repository of unofficial and unsanctioned knowledge, Ask for Sara is a one day event that will feature leading scholars and practitioners in art, feminist practices, queer theory and archival research in discussion and debate about radical forms of knowledge production.
Through performance, readings, talks, and critical questioning, the subject of gossip and anecdote becomes both object and agent for the exploration of aberrant archival engagements that position ‘knowledge as surreptitious appropriation’. 1
Ranging from personal narratives to diverse testimony and exchange, story and fabulation to critique and informal history, the event features: Librarian and curator of the Women’s Art Library, Althea Greenan, in conversation with Nina Wakeford, on the archive and the experimental production of material.
Writer and media historian Kate Eichhorn will present Epistemologies of Excess: Gossip and Rumour in the Archive, a paper expanding her work on the roles of readers and writers in the formation of communities of practice and resistance, and the afterlife of texts in archives.
This will be followed by a diversionary storytelling and anecdotal panel discussion between the academics, writers and artists: Ben Cranfield, Rita Keegan, Anne Tallentire and Holly Pester chaired by Gavin Butt.
The event will conclude with an afternoon of readings and performance by poet, writer, editor and translator Paul Buck; writer, academic and performer Season Butler; and poet, interdisciplinary writer and lecturer Holly Pester. The event concludes with the book launch of Go to reception and ask for Sara in red felt tip.
Holly Pester is a poet and multidisciplinary writer. She has worked as an archivist, lecturer and practice-based researcher with readings, performances and sound installations featuring at Segue, New York, dOCUMENTA 13, Whitechapel Gallery, and the Serpentine Galleries. She teaches courses on Oulipo and Poetic Practice at the University of Essex.

Jessica Lee Richardson's debut collection teems with double magic - families of spiders, monsters in triplicate, and panels of bleacher-sitting grandfathers (who live in a diaphragm!) cohabitate with a starker, more familiar kind of strange in a hyper real and living tapestry of teenage porn stars, lovelorn factory workers, and art world auctioneers

Jessica L. Richardson, It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides: Stories, Fiction Collective Two, 2015.
read it at Google Books
www.jessicaleerichardson.com/


Jessica Lee Richardson's debut collection It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides teems with double magic - families of spiders, monsters in triplicate, and panels of bleacher-sitting grandfathers (who live in a diaphragm!) cohabitate with a starker, more familiar kind of strange in a hyper real and living tapestry of teenage porn stars, lovelorn factory workers, and art world auctioneers. From a woman who awakes from a short kidnapping with an unquenchable need for risk to a concrete boat ride gone off the rails, from Los Angeles to the Bronx, from the Midwest to North Korea, these stories explore the absurd in real spaces and the real in absurd spaces, seeking a way into something else entirely. Here environments participate in agency, and voice compels movement forward, through, and in. Richly patterned language refuses singularity and the finger trap of the binary, seeking permeability in its reflection, a soft net to catch collective echoes. The collection begins and ends with stories that literalize descent and ascent, bookending the mirrored shape of the book's arrangement as a vision of an inverted arc. The shape of story is literalized. We slide down from a mountaintop all the way to the inside of a womb and back, slipping on slopes unmarked by signs, catching stunning glimpses along the way. The journey along the track of desire might be frightening if it weren't for all the water, if it weren't for the bounce of the ride.

Then a surprising thing happened, which is that we didn t die. Jessica Lee Richardson s brief, jagged, lit-up stories present a world of precarity in which the precincts of the sentence propel the protagonists towards and away from peril with the capriciousness of wanton gods: I dropped through the trap door at the bottom of the bottom and came out on top. In this world of prodigious and acute risk, in which every angel is drug tested and Baby Girl Bristol reads the writing on the wall, radiant hyperfluency is both a necessary skill and an interface through which all the toxic mediumicity of our present moment can flood. I looked in the mirror and it was like I could see the halo. Now I have Beyonce in my head. Google. Amen. -  Joyelle McSweeney

“This book has heart and heft and heat and equal doses of wonder and quirk to keep us on our toes, not knowing what might be waiting for us, not just on the next page but inside the next sentence. Richardson’s tongue is an organ of the eye. Her prose sings cleanly, her ear hears with its hand not just cupped around it but it reaches out to pull us in and hold us all a little closer.” —Peter Markus

“You know how you keep that piece of paper and pen next to the bed to capture those brilliantly enriched osmotic mots justes emanating from the edge of the edge of waking sleep? And you know how the vivid quarry eludes you; how you’re left with the snare of scribbles, memories of the memory, in the morning light? The stories in Jessica Lee Richardson’s teeming It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides are goddamned Google maps of those saturated hypnopompic, hypnagogic states, rendered with such exacting detail and pristine clarity that you can do nothing more than conclude the murky margins of the world have been turned inside out and the meanest meanings ever meant are sunbathing there, plain as day.” —Michael Martone

Jessica Richardson’s first collection is as dexterously crafted as its content is deviant and feral. The collection gains its title from a line in the last story “Shush,” in which an unidentified group plunges over a waterfall in a concrete boat and survives, ending up amidst a flock of flamingos. If it sounds weird, it is, and Richardson is drawn to such weirdness, though in an older sense of the word, where its definition is “fatefulness.” Macbeth’s Weird Sisters are the Fates. And in It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides, Richardson plays all three.
Richardson writes in such a way that a colony of the most awkward animals on the planet are suddenly “kissing and licking feathers, biting themselves and each other, soft beaked. A flamboyance of pink necks, the letter ‘S’ multiplied….” Richardson imbues what-if scenarios with high stakes and poignancy. In speaking of the collection, it’s hard not to want to simply catalog the ground situations of Richardson’s stories, which are, again, wild enough to be entertaining simply in terms of their premises. Of course, this flattens the genius that not so much saturates Richardson’s writing as it does provide the scaffolding for her premises and execution.
Each piece in It Had Been Planned diverges from what comes before and after, except for “No, Go.” and “No, Go. Continued,” the two-part story that forms the hinge of the diptych into which Richardson has formed the collection: “Descent” forms the first half of this diptych, “Ascent” the latter, a decidedly hopeful configuration, or at least one that suggests redemption.
Every piece of text in the “No, Go”’s is an email interrupted with messages from a censoring software called NoGo, or a chat message from NoGo customer service reps. The story simulates the collapse of language, suggesting language is a bridge that can only take so much weight. Richardson traps the reader in a crossfire of rhetoric aimed at different parties: a husband’s at his wife who won’t share custody of their son; the same husband’s toward three different customer service reps; the wife’s toward the husband; and the messages the husband leaves for his son at the bottom of his messages to his wife. These last messages become increasingly disjointed and oddly punctuated so that the NoGo software can’t interrupt with its useless recommendations, like replacing the word “manipulating” with “managing, directing, controlling.” The result is messages to a young son that look like this:

B u t, M.I.K.E.Y?
In C)a)s)e
W e\are/separated-

Bever

Bever

Is this desig Nogo snag

know this: i.a.m.a.w.e.e.d.m.i.k.e.y.a.n.d.s.o.a.r.e.y.o.u….w.i.l.d.n.o.c.o.n.c.reet can

While “No, Go.” and “No, Go. Continued.” occupy a strange form for a common phenomenon (divorce), other stories describe strange phenomenon in plot structures that look suspiciously like Freytag’s pyramid. Take “Not the Problem,” a story of an old woman who takes an interest in a family of highly human spiders in her assisted-living apartment. A traditional plot arc and a third-person point-of-view combine to lure the reader into the belief that the story’s content and purpose will also be familiar and recognizable. But because “Not the Problem,” like most of Richardson’s stories, meditates on the ugliest kinds of love, and because such love is unpredictable, Richardson’s stories come off like magic tricks: you sense you’re about to witness something wild—the shape of the plot dictates it—though you can’t guess what that wild thing will be. The beginning of “Not the Problem” suggests the granddaughter who martyrs herself (not literally) to “care” for her grandmother will be the climactic catalyst, but that’s not the climax. The climax occurs when the grandmother’s anger prompts her to eat one of her spider friends—her very favorite one. With this action, Richardson shows how real love works: it’s as ugly as it is unexpected. It’s nearly the same with her plots: they are as inevitable as they are unexpected. The grandmother eats her favorite spider because the ones we love the most we bite the hardest.
The same dirty, unexpected love also shows up in the collection’s first story, “Call Me Silk,” in which the narrator’s thrill-seeking takes her to a homeless camp where she is attacked. Like “Not the Problem,” it’s possible to identify a mounting tension familiar to any Freytagian plot, but it is the chasm between the reader’s expectation and narrator’s reality that is so destabilizing.
“It wasn’t the first time I was raped,” the narrator tells us, “and I don’t want what I’m about to say to diminish how dark a crime it is to attack the nexus of intimacy. But this time I loved it. It wasn’t one of those fantasy come true situations—it’s dirty and wrong so it’s hot, like your groin is full of flaming pennies. It was heaven, ambrosia and harps, clouds turned to cream laced with cherries, whatever your image for heaven—this was mine, this rape. …‘I love you I love you I love you,’ I rattled in spats. …I don’t care what you call me…because I dropped through that trap door at the bottom and came out on top. Power is circle we oval so vertical it appears line thin.”
The climaxes (plot-related and otherwise) of It Had Been Planned surprise even the most veteran reader, though Richardson balances such spontaneity with believability. Who could have predicted that the way the narrator in “Call Me Silk” would “win” her rape was through loving her attacker, though by the end the story, the scales have fallen from our eyes and we see the narrator’s love is inevitable and powerful and ugly.
And most of Richardson’s stories deal with ugly love. In an era of irony and deflection, I acknowledge that this is a dangerous claim. But I would also claim that irony and deflection are being killed off, hallelujah, thanks to New Sincerity and probings into the word “sentiment” and also writers like Richardson, whose battle-axe in the war against normal is earnestness.
There’s an anecdote Carl Wilson relays in his 33 1/3 book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, which is about Celine Dion’s music. He tells of how Elliot Smith met Dion at the 1998 Academy Awards, and how she was so kind to him before his performance, so earnest, that Smith had to admit “she was too human to be dismissed.”
Richardson’s stories are too human to be dismissed, too human to require much suspension of disbelief, even if she is writing about preening flamingoes or a family of spiders or a box full of exotic animals that can be killed and revived at the whim of the little girl who receives them as a gift.
For the stingier reader, who remains unconvinced of sentiment, behold the Other, whose presence in her stories is about as ubiquitous as that of dirty love. Richardson finds a way to write convincingly about the chronology of environmental, labor, and family laws, and also the scientific invention of a body suit that protects swimmers from the jaws of the beasts they will almost certainly encounter. She has a new master carpenter creating doors and cabinets and even place settings with detail so fine, it seems she derives her content from past lives, years of personal experience and expertise.
It Had Been Planned’s population would shine in any diversity index, and, in the same way Richardson rescues love from triteness, so does she write with the compassion and detail necessary to pull off a likely encounter with otherness. At the same time, the collection shrugs off political benchmarks for diversity and narrows its focus to the micro-level of emotion, leaving the reader transfixed by humanity instead of shrinking back from an agenda.
In “Check and Chase,” eponymous child twins believe their house eats their toys. Richardson leaves a breadcrumb trail up to the belief that the twins’ druggy mother has been selling their toys for the product she craves. But then out of the ether comes this: “The house wondered why the kids were such pussies. It felt it deserved competitors of greater merit. These kids were practically feeding it their toys…. The house searched itself for something that would be properly missed.”
There’s magic at work here. Richardson paints a specific picture of this family: a mother who’s sleeping if she’s not doping; young kids who are in charge of feeding their even younger brother; “hope of a stepfather with his own DS system”; crap uselessly stockpiled amid shitty furniture; toys “distributed by Charity Santa”; Check’s “cheek, which was darker than hers [Chase], the color of cardboard in the rain.” There are a million familiar places this story could go, and again, we think we recognize the trail. But the magic comes with Richardson’s pulling the house’s sentience out of nowhere, a rabbit out of a hat. Such a switcheroo not only allows for the kids to be labeled “pussies”—is there anything more politically incorrect?—but it also validates and literalizes their belief, however rife with child-logic, that the house stands against them. To describe this move in terms of pop-culture lexicon, Richardson leaves it right there, allowing the reader to deduce analogs to poverty or test the textures of the kids’ rough world.
The already-mentioned “Call Me Silk,” the first story in the collection, and perhaps its keystone, similarly shunts aside political expectation. For all the politics that could be brought to bear on its events—rape, gender dynamics, self-sabotage—“Call Me Silk” is also about extreme sports, a simpler but no-less interesting premise that allows the story to be read for entertainment as much as intellect, in the same way that Shakespeare’s plays reward a scholarly analysis and a scatological sense of humor. Richardson’s collection is Carnival: expectation is turned on its head, though no topic or emotion is too dark or sacred to be left behind. - MEGHAN TEAR PLUMMER

Falling asleep in public places, surrounded by people, I have felt the ambient chatter of other peoples' conversations overlapping and converging with the thoughts inside my head as they drift away from being thoughts altogether, on the edge of coalescing into the images that demarcate the beginnings of dreams. Like these moments, the voices in the opening suite of stories in Jessica Lee Richardson's It Had Been Planned And There Were Guides seem to spin on unseen axes, their narration existing in a space outside the body of the characters that expectation would suggest they speak for. They seem to float just above the skull, like the cartoon angel and devil of conscience, were they to free-associate for the sake of amusing each other rather than debating to determine how a human should act. The way one thought follows another feels dissociative-dosed, uninterested in attempting insight about, say, working in the porn industry, to name the basic premise of a story called "Haut Culture." That's a loaded topic, but the perspective on it found here is almost like someone trying to recount a news story only half-recalled, for the sake of making some anecdotal point about the conversational subject at hand, the connecting point being a minor detail that overlaps in both instances. These sentences seem capable of going way out, into deep space, but never go inside, to be present within the realm of what the stories are ostensibly about.
Take this passage, from the opening story, "Call Me Silk":
I don't care what you call me either, because I dropped through that trap door at the bottom of the bottom and came out on top. Power is circle we oval so vertical it appears line thin. I would offer a scene to show what happened when I stopped dropping, but I don't want you picturing me. I believe in messages of bliss slipped under the crack into the bottles of you, breadcrumbs in your wood, though.
In this passage there is an anthemic fist-pumping quality, but it's delivered as if standing unsteadily on a floor littered with ball bearings and thus is unable to commit to a rousing effect. It is possible, then, to mistake this for "bad writing," but these stories' use of the first-person perspective seems to say that to be an I is to be forever explaining oneself to yourself as well as to others, and to only be able to do this using the signs floating about, either in the ether or in your immediate surroundings, creates multiple double-binds of miscommunication. This is true, and a big thing, and it's felt far more viscerally here than in the short stories of those whose attempts at mimesis of the observable make a more persuasive case as to the reality of what they describe. These stories are not defined by a failure to get inside their character's heads, but are about the floating feeling of trying to make sense of yourself and your situation.
These stories are demarcated into a section marked "Descent." It's followed by two small sections, "Impasse" and "Ascent," that split in half a two-part story where, following the thread of language's derangement, a man attempts to type an e-mail expressing his frustration with his ex-wife over the custody of their child after installing lawyer-recommended software designed to stop him from saying anything that would reveal his rage. We read the text he attempts to compose, the interruptions he receives, and his struggle to communicate a single thought without interruption. We see it all on the page as it would play out on screen, the thoughts mediated by machinery, rather than the mind, and so we understand that the disconnect at work in the "Descent" section is the result of a mind so self-conscious it breaks itself.
The second half of the book, marked "Clearing," is unobstructed. What we can see is the mess we've made, how far we've fallen, the way we derange ourselves. The subject, to a degree, becomes communication, how to do it clearly. The plotlines are immediate, the storytelling antecedents recognizable. "Two Angels," premised on ideas of social-media-style approval functioning inside corporate culture, feels like a George Saunders story. "The Best Deal," with its use of fantasy elements as a way of relaying a thought experiment, is in the vein of Borges, or Millhauser, or Silvina Ocampo.
It is the story "The Lips The Teeth The Tip Of The Tongue" where my feelings shifted from "this is interesting" to "this is really good." The sense of the self as being split between two doubles, a private name (Janie) and a performing alias (Baby Girl Bristol), is made explicit, and it feels like Richardson is explaining herself and her method, in the story of an auctioneer, who in her fast-paced multi-syllabic song sneaks in secrets no one hears. When she is confronted with the idea of having one of her performances being recorded -- and remember that being recorded is essentially a ubiquitous part of twenty-first-century life -- she begins to panic and plan a deliberate performance where she will not be herself:
But BGB was so accustomed to merging her inner life and mind's eye with figures that separating the two proved tiresome. Not just tiresome. She felt like a stone. She wavered between feeling like a stone and bursting into tears over goat cheese crepes.
A later sentence makes the connection between the character and the author more explicit: "Conducting a room was about going there, meeting people in their self-spaces and the only out into them, was in, into her."
The space between outside and in is a messy line, like the sight of a brutal murder, and Richardson navigates it with humor, making puns of the slippage between larger culture and private memory. Another way to say it is that these stories go for the juggler, and that for every ball dropped it is a dizzying experience, keeping your eye on what's in the air. - Brian Nicholson

Richardson’s debut collection of short stories, which won the FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, seems pretty trippy. It “teems with double magic—families of spiders, monsters in triplicate, and panels of bleacher-sitting grandfathers who live in a diaphragm,” according to the jacket copy. Stories unfold in Instant Message conversations with computer programs, or through entries from an old woman’s scrapbook, or on placards at an art museum. I opened to a random page and encountered this sentence: “He punctuated his comment with a sip from his cherry pie vodka, like he simply didn’t give a single fuck anymore.” - Katy Waldman


I have never had my palm read, though I am enchanted by palmistry, fates, and other mystical practices. As it goes, there are six major lines on a human palm upon which a fortune teller bases their predictions. Every individual may not present all six lines, and while the lines are individually important, they say as much in conversation as they do alone. A quick browse online reveals my palms lack several of the six key lines, though I won’t say which ones.
A drawing of a hand, palm facing out to the reader, fingers outstretched, features on the cover of Jessica Lee Richardson’s FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize-winning debut, It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides. This hand—raised and open—serves both as a greeting and a warning for the stories this collection contains. The title and author’s name are carved in black ink onto the palm and wrist of the hand; this, too, bears a sense of duality, as it reminds us both of benign teenaged note-taking practices and the more morbid yet classic TV device of a moribund friend passing along a clandestine message, as from Charlie to Desmond in Lost or Dr Sanjay to Mulder and Scully in the new X-Files. Several of its six lines are missing too.
The title of the collection is echoed on the first page of the final story, “shush,” where it is meant as a calming agent to reassure the reader that riding downhill in a concrete boat is not a totally insane decision. The sentence, “It had been planned and there were guides,” also dictates the form of the book; the contents are divided into four sections: descent, impasse, ascent, and clearing. They are quite literal representations of the stories classed within this system.
descent is by far the most gut-wrenching section of the book, and while moments of beauty appear like gemstones in the rock face, Richardson doesn’t care what you think of stereotypes. Her cast of characters can be ‘gritty’, sometimes infuriatingly so, as in the opener “call me silk” and in “haut culture”, both of which I think detract more than they add to the collection as a whole. I would hesitate to suggest avoiding any stories altogether, but maybe don’t read those two first. My assessment of the descent isn’t all bad, just as my assessments of the rest of the collection are not all positive. The racially and socio-economically charged “check and chase” tells the story of the twins’ search for their beloved train set in a house that regularly eats their possessions.
impasse and ascent each contain half of a longer, more formally experimental and tonally playful set called “no, go.” This set is centered around a computer privacy software program called Nogo that operates through your email service provider to encourage cautious and constructive interaction but, as it turns out, creates far more chaos once installed than it is able to reign in. Unlike the harrowing descent, I found myself laughing out loud during “no, go” parts one and two—an unusual, unrestrained reaction to protagonist’s interactions with his ex-wife, his lawyer, and various hapless employees of Nogo. This middle section—a blockage and then a climb out of the darkness—is representative of both the contents of “no, go” and It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides as a collection.
Then there is the clearing, the fourth section and our final destination. The ten stories contained here mark a return to the traditional prose form; while certainly not all uplifting, they resonate differently than descent in mood and subject. If the first section was political, this final one is magical. A grandmother speaks to a family of spiders in “not the problem,” forming a kinship with them that she is unable to achieve with her own granddaughter in her final days. Crabapples and approvals dominate the mind space of an associate at Berryman Consultants in “two angels.” Several birds and an extinct monkey are resurrected in “the best deal.” This section is charming, considerably lighter than the descent—despite tackling death, heartsickness, and monsters.
Now, after we’ve descended fully into the pit, flopped along for a bit on our bellies, and been pulled out arm over arm by a kind stranger, I am going to suggest something daring. After having gushed over the merit and clarity of the section titled clearing, I’ll say I’d like to cut it out of the book altogether. Then, I would turn my scissors to the descent and create a new space for us to walk around in the clearing before the ground opens up beneath us and we fall into the pit. This is a controversial move I approach with more than a little of my own skepticism, as I would hesitate, again, to advocate for changing a book’s form. But it is something we can all practice at home—and it is a practice which would allow us to avoid ripping out stories from the descent with our teeth as we go.
My approach to reading short story collections tends to be similar to my approach to listening to music: I want the whole album, I want it start to finish, and I want it to mean something. I want it to add up to something more than its parts. Without a doubt, It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides achieves this on all levels. But I will be perfectly honest: I think if I had been tackling the collection as a fresh reader and not also as a reviewer, I would have stopped after “call me silk,” and that would have been a shame. So here is where you, as readers, have a choice to reorder the tracks, to pick out favorites like “not the problem,” “the best deal,” and “check and chase” and reread these often, to make the collection your own. Sometimes, this is what a book demands of its reader; sometimes, that is what it allows. - Carolyn DeCarlo

Links to Work Online
Roebling at The Collagist
House Hunt at The Masters Review
Songbun Song at Joyland Magazine
Not the Problem at PANK Magazine
All She Had at Hobart
Free Baby at Corium Magazine
“but her hands are miraculous” at The Reprint