Questions Stemming from a Reading of Steve Tomasula

Who are you? 

"Dr. Pashvani, Dr. Woo and thousands like them asking if all plants, animals, cells — all nature — could be used as rearrangable packets of information"

26 pages of genetic code pertaining to chromosome 12, for instance ...ACTAGCTCGAATTACAGGT...

"its data had been allowed to spill everywhere"

" just by clicking his mouse"

"With so many women passing under  [the digital retoucher's] cursor, how could he not begin to think of women as infinitely rearrangeable, highly tweakable"

Advertisements: "At $2.80 per base, Operon's DNA makes anything possible"

egg  & sperm auction: come up to beauty / come up to ron's angels, starting bods: $15,000 - 150,000 US"

Are we the mere victims of science, technology, and information run amock?

"I contain multitudes"

Our insides are known better by radiologists than by ourselves, the money we spend on medicine is known better by our insurance company than ourselves, our DNA is 'read' to us by people literate in that 'language'.

Is there a way to fight back?

How does one of Tomasula's characters, a model whose pictures were always retouched, "get her body back"? Is it by telling "a thousand stories from the same details, like Scheherazade"? To what extent is power and control in the hands of the storyteller, the interpreter, rather than the visual manipulator?

The model also claims that "the ads she now posed for showed photos of her as she was, her face her eye shape, her skin one, not those digitally manipulated ones." Are we to suppose the modeling and marketing companies she works for allow her to veto any efforts to manipulate her photos? Unlikely. What does she mean, "as she was"? Is she getting at how, in the very act of discarding the urge to fully control images of ourselves, we free ourselves to spin the yarns of our details, to allow us to make a self of our own?

Is this sufficient to offer hope?

"the world he had been writing into existence"

"History being written by the victor ...  In this case?"

Why does Tomasula add the "in this case"? The writing of history never ends, reinterpretations abound, the losers may at some other point even things up or even become winners: For instance, to what extent has feminism allowed women to recuperate a lost history? [This does not entail that I believe there is a political or economic balance between the sexes.]

What else about history? Have we always been digitalized, broken into pieces, 'read' by other people?

"I implore travelers to bag bodies whenever they observe a battle involving savages. Boil the bones in a solution of soda or caustic potash to rid them of their flesh. This process takes several hours, but it will provide material that is needed to complete anthropological collections.                                                                                                                                                                                    — Georges Cuvier, Father of Anthropology [qtd in Tomasula]."

An ancient man invents a wholly original, crude form of writing: "Once, in the market of Akkad, he had witnessed a hand being cut from each of two farmers who had tried to forge a clay tablet that bore their debt, and the hairs on the back of his neck tingled. That is, if he could set his speech in stone, could not that stone carry him to the bottom of the sea? Was this what the vision meant?"

Phrenology

 Is it that being in control of cataloguing and digitizing leads to power, or the threat of power? What are other historical examples?

"What is the king's majesty, I ask myself, indeed what is all civilization if not illusion? — a soap bubble borne upon the wind — an appearance created through the cut of our clothes, the movements Felipe taught his body till, like paint on canvas, these signs became a second nature. An image, I knew, because it was an image that I help'd nurture ... I now understood that paintings of royalty are not intend'd to reveal the character of the sitters but rather their status as rulers." [said by Diego, a court painter in Portraiture...]

In what ways does the portraitist control the king?

The Inquisition questioning Diego: What do your illusions of light and color say about the nature of the world? Or our ability to know it? What are you telling us with your unresolved spaces when other living artists order the haphazard world of appearance into the harmonious world of Art by a use of linear perspective?

What he could not tell the inquisition: "every portrait tells more of its creator than its subject; every portrait is and can only be a self-portrait; a portrait of its viewer, its author, a portrait of the I (nosotros)."

Since Tomasula, through the character of the court painter, suggests that the self-portrait is of the viewer and the painter, the authors, not the sitter, is he pointing toward a formative role for the various arts, whereby art (considered in the broad sense, not in the high-brow sense) in many ways forms and controls the political world through what we would now call propaganda?

If this is true, then can art also deform, expose, and subvert political forms (this is what seems to bring this painter to the attention of the repressive inquisition)? If it can't subvert political forms, can it at least create pockets of freedom, moments when we, through images and words, call our own bodies into the social world as we choose, thereby creating room and resources for others to do the same?

So, does propaganda help to create a form of what we take as given reality, and does art insist that this constructed reality is, in fact, created, and not natural? Should the distinction between high-brow, middle-brow, and low-brow culture give way to a distinction between propaganda and art? 

That said, is any artistic act wholly free of some sort of propaganda? To do so, would the work have to be impossibly pure, wholly without artistic, intellectual, and experiential assumptions? 

Is any work of propaganda wholly free of some sort of art?

Does Tomasula offer some hope?

Pages Lost

Unintelligible erasures

Vandalized in 1985

Pages Destroyed

The Inquisition

Text cut off

From a different historical period:                                                                                                     From my position of superior advantage [as a psychoanalyst], I was able to observe her freely, mark my own impressions, and create a gloss upon her words much as a painter might ... Her reclining body offered vistas of femininity that were most distracting despite my efforts to stay on task.

My record of [Miss P.'s] affliction is a portrait that contains no brushstrokes, the hand of a portraitist as invisible as the photography that has made the painter irrelevant.

She confessed that she had fabricated the entire story my analysis was based upon!

 Is this psychoanalyst displaying the unfounded, over weaning confidence in science that conveniently forgets its inherent instability, its always looking to prove itself wrong? Is a feeling of complete certain always dangerous?

The young woman neutralizes the male "superior advantage" of the psychoanalyst through the telling of believable "fabrications": Is Tomasula once again displaying the hope that can reside in art?

Collaged in — The unexamined life is not worth living.                                                                      — Socrates. and www.homecams.com, the site that lets you see inside 1,024 private homes

 If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide.

 __________________________________

 Everything in italics comes from two of Tomasula's novels, The Book of Portraiture (FC2, 2006) and VAS: An Opera In Flatland (U of Chicago P, 2003).  The quotations do not adhere to any order that appears in the books. Rather, I use quotations from various places in both books to explore the issues and ideas in Tomasula's work.

The art and design of VAS is the work of Stephen Farrell. It is quite astounding. I encourage you to see for yourself. The Book of Portraiture is also a fascinating hybrid of the visual and textual. Since I didn't feel that I could go into this aspect of Tomasula's work without displaying the graphics, I decided to stick only to the verbal side of his work. I hope that the resulting distortion is not too great.

 

FIC-BLOGOSPHERE MANIFESTO

by Finn Harvor

INTRODUCTON: FIC-BLOGOSPHERE MANIFESTO. Written ironically, its intent is deadly serious. The lit-blogosphere possesses great potential. It is an arena of discourse that might allow new forms of creative literary culture to flourish. However, it needs to learn to encourage its own.  

As David Barnett argued recently in the Guardian book blog, and as Harvor has previously argued in interviews conducted at his site CONVERSATIONS IN THE BOOK TRADE, indie literary writing is held to a standard that is more strict than that of other mediums. Unlike film or music, where being indie is considered admirable, the majority of book blogs take their starting point from a very conventional notion of literary culture; they implicitly assume this culture must be processed through the vetting of major publishers.  

As a result, there is a preponderance of blogs that are devoted to commentary on fairly big name books. If one is to speak generally, the lit-blogosphere is overly beholden to the corporatized book culture it supposedly stands in opposition to instead of encouraging online creativity ... something it could very easily do simply by paying attention to it.

*          *          *          *

THE FIC-BLOGOSPHERE MANIFESTO

There's a specter haunting the blogosphere, and it is the specter of too much commentary. The Internet was supposed to allow for a creative revolution in literature. It was hailed as the avant-garde technology of avant-garde -- oh, what the hell! just plain new! -- writing.But the lit-blogosphere has instead developed without any overriding artistic ideology devoted to the potential of the medium itself. As prolix but disjointed as an email written on a caffeine-high of organic dark chocolate and re-heated coffee at 2 a.m., it contains its fair share of brilliance. But to what end? Serving what purpose?

We acknowledge the vitality of the lit-blogosphere! We salute its prolific nature, its earnestness, its seriousness! May a thousand interesting comments threads bloom!

But we decry the lit-biosphere's extraordinary focus on blogging about yet another big-name author or yet another James Wood article! Did literature -- that great church now besieged by a million television-watching apostates, that dynamic economy driven into the ground by a zillion Kwick-buck Artists of Culture -- achieve its originally great stature by focusing on ... painting? Were most 19th Century novels about ... sculpture?

All great art forms achieve greatness through dialogue with themselves! All works of genius arise from a relationship between creator and audience! What is the lit-blogosphere an audience of? Certainly not itself.

Where is the contemporary artistic ideology which will look to the farthest horizons of the World Wide Web and grasp, in a single conceptual moment, its true nature? Where is the system of ideas that will measure the amount of commentary that exists on the Net and at the same time measure the amount of original fiction, and observe that the two exist disproportionately?

Literature as it once thrived did so because it ... made literature! The lit-blogosphere is -- at this historical moment -- too much a hanger-on, too much a fan-boy, too much a commentator-on-commentary!

If the lit-blogosphere is to lay claim to its own indigenous greatness, it must seize the moment! It must blog about its own creative content!

Ecrasez les posts au sujet de James Wood!

Assez des commentaires sur Messieurs Amis, McEwan, Nabokov et Mademoiselle Smith!

In an age when publishing at its highest levels has become a walled-off castle, a behemoth of slick-surfaced capitalist culture, do we really need post after post about the latest book to both win a major prize and top the best-seller lists? Do we really need an army of bloggers expending every last ounce of their energies as they march down The Road?

And let us clarify! We are not suggesting that mainstream, big-budget book culture be ignored! All we asking for is a little balance! For heaven's sake, think of the tithe! All the downtrodden on-line authors of the globe are asking for is a mere 10%! Even that much of the lit-blogosphere's attention would bring about ... radical change!

Consider it a duty at first -- the pleasure will follow! Start reading online magazines! Read their poems, short stories, novel excerpts, whatever! Click to a different URL besides that of the Guardian, New York Times or Canada's national newspaper, the name of which escapes me at the moment!

Turn from your obsessions, which, after all, are habits, and develop new habits and therefore new obsessions! Think carefully about how new forms of culture must exist as an ecology, and what elements are necessary to make an ecology thrive!

Yes, we know online authors need to revolutionize, too! We know they need to understand the limits imposed by the Screen, and write shorter, write punchier  (yet elegantly so). We know they will have to move to new technologies: the podcast, the YouTube-ified short story! Just give us time to figure out the friggin' technology and replace the computer we ill-advisedly kicked!

So of course, pay attention to Big Book Culture! Scroll through the works of Swollen-stream Media! But also, for the love of literature, the Brontes and a Modern-day Christ, pay attention to the Creative Aspect of the Internet! Read the occasional Totally Unknown Author Who Just Happens to be Online!!!!

          Finn Harvor
          email: fharvor@yahoo.com 

A Priori (published by if p then q) by Tom Jenks

reviewed by Richard Barrett

The poetic tradition that Jenks has been primarily influenced by is that of Concrete / Visual poetry. The influence of Cobbing is evident in Jenks’ ‘3 reel to reel recordings of birdsong’ and ‘labyrinth’; whereas Caroline Bergvall can be detected as an inspiration behind poems such as ‘protocols[1] – [4]’ and ‘waterway’ and ‘love of zero’. With this first major collection of his he already seems to be on his way towards transcendence of that inheritance though. Without exception, each of Jenks’ poems is stylistically innovative and forward-looking, which creates a tension in the collection: as A Priori seems, as far as the subject matter of a lot of the poems goes, to exhibit a preoccupation with childhood and the past.

In the piece ‘nine magickal figures’ diagrams next to squares of text tell the story of a lonely child caught in the space between the town and the country trying to use black magic to ensnare the girl he regularly sees ‘coming back from forest on bicycle of hers’. Childhood references abound: ‘meet you there with coleslaw and PIZZA’, ‘shoot them down with catapult’ and ‘make GOLEM from airfix kit’. The piece also succeeds in conveying a peculiarly English sense of nostalgia, with its talk of ‘suburban gardens’, ‘maybe whistle theme eastenders’ ‘ salt sachets stolen supermarket café’, ‘coal bunker shadows’ and ‘AMBROSIA custard in bowl’.

Those themes of childhood and the past are discernible as well in the sequence which opens A Priori: ‘protocols [1] – [4]’. What the reader is put most in mind of as those poems progress is a child’s preparations for a summer camping expedition: ‘Moon / no moon’, ‘In summer you must sleep in garden’; and there are instructions regarding what to do if lost in a forest, and how to construct a base-camp, and reminders to check our compass. Reinforcing the notion that it’s the activities of a child which are being described are mentions of a ‘secret drawer’ and ‘secret spaces’ – both things which you can imagine a child having. Yet, while on one level it would be quite correct to say Jenks is merely showing scenes from a childhood, it occurs that he may also be describing a strangely childlike and innocent adult. There is a suggestion of a troubled adult relationship; acknowledgement, yet simultaneous fear of a ‘sexy lady’; and the sophisticated awareness of a lack of significance to life. The idea eventually suggests itself that ‘the child lost in a forest’ aspect of the poems may be a metaphor for an adult lost and floundering in contemporary society.

Jenks incorporates into this sequence shopping lists, advice from magazines and lines from medical self-certification forms which he seems to be saying should be taken as the adult versions of the child’s map and compass.

The combination of concern for the past and celebration of a version of Englishness shabby and second-rate can be seen again in the two poems both entitled ’10 deleted scenes’. In the first of those poems we have: ‘Ex-miner walking his wife’s Yorkshire terrier. / One of their names is Algernon’, ‘Forgive me Lord for I have sinned, / once, in February 1983’ and best of all ‘Gorillas on the bowling green. / Old men in their white socks, sighing.’ The reader has to assume Jenks was aware of the closeness of that last description of his to a Haiku and that he chose to leave it a syllable short just to be contrary! The ‘Gorillas on the bowling green…’ captures perfectly a child’s perception of overly-hairy pensioners; the lines also manage to contain intense sophistication as it’s realised that those pensioners are whiling away their final years playing a ridiculous game.

The second ’10 deleted scenes’ ends with: ‘A man my age can carry off a monocle / but only if he has at least one eye’. Taken together the two poems are a compendium of non-sequiturs, absurdities, sharp observation and really great jokes.

At the same time as A Priori can seem to be harking back to the past there is a sense, also, that there’s a looking forward in the book. Strangely, the subject matter of the poems displays no sense of looking forward in a dynamic, go-getting kind of way, but in a drive to embrace dotage and decline kind of way. That’s detectable, to a certain extent, in the lines mentioned above, regarding the pensioners on the bowling green, but it’s especially noticeable in the piece – probably Jenks’ most traditional poem – ‘surveillance notes’. Therein it appears to be the lives of pensioners which are under the microscope; and whilst there’s undoubtedly a level of mockery in the recounting of the way they constantly rearrange the comestibles and jars of foodstuffs, and count the rain, there is also a great deal of sympathy and compassion for their lives as well.

It’s that tension in A Priori (between the compositional innovations and the backward-looking subject matter, or the rush towards old age) which gives the book its momentum – the reader is keen to see what kind of resolution is achieved.

Perhaps the most interesting poem in the collection is ’99 names for small dogs’. It seems to allude to Queneau’s Exercises in Style. Therein one insignificant tale is retold 99 times in different ways; Jenks’ version involves coming up with 99 different names for dogs. That isn’t all there is to the poem though: it’s a history of a 1980’s English childhood with its mentions of: ‘Captain Pugwash’, ‘Flash Gordon’ (presumably the film version!), ‘Giant Haystacks’, ‘Herr Schmidt’, ‘Reginald Perrin’ and ‘Shirley Crabtree’. The historical figures named delineate the English Secondary-School method of teaching history: all Great Men and wars and battles. Finally: there’s a brilliantly euphonious quality to the names chosen: ‘Arbuthnot’, ‘Doctor Billabong’ and ‘Norbert Dessentrangle’…the repetition of those names becomes like a form of music.

As well as the stylistic innovation one of the other most impressive aspects of A Priori is just how funny it is. Jenks completely up ends the notion that experimental, avant-garde writing has to be po-faced and self-consciously serious. There are poems amongst this collection which are laugh-out-loud funny.

So, not only can A Priori be recommended as representing a significant development of the Concrete / Visual poetry tradition but it can also be recommended because it will make you laugh.

A Cure For Suicide (Cervena Barva Press) by Larissa Shmailo

reviewed by Richard Barrett

The key to unlocking Larissa Shmailo’s A Cure For Suicide is found in the collection’s penultimate poem: ‘Exorcism (Found Poem)’. The primary subject matter of that piece is the My Lai massacre in Vietnam; the secondary subject is the showing of the linkage between the domestic and the international. In this specific case how lawbreakers in America, at the time, were given the option of joining the army as an alternative to imprisonment. The piece is making the point that with an army so constituted – i.e. made up to a large degree of soldiers who had no particular desire to be there and who were, furthermore ‘poorly trained’ – it’s surprising there weren’t repetitions of My Lai. It’s an understanding of how seemingly disparate subject matters are linked that Shmailo wants us to take from that poem; and it’s by applying that understanding to her whole, wonderful collection that we begin to get a handle on Shmailo’s worldview.

Reading A Cure For Suicide Shmailo’s themes and preoccupations make themselves known to us. There’s “movement”: the identifying of personal turmoil with the turmoil of nature, as explored in ‘My First Hurricane’. Then the whirling, spinning inebriated dancing of the title poem follows, which, in turn, is followed by the nihilistic ‘Dancing with the Devil’. She returns to contemplating the movement of nature in ‘Oscillation’, informing us how ‘The world was born in swing and sway’, going on, then, to consider movement of a poetically technical kind in ‘Sea (Sic)’, where she addresses us in the italicized parenthesis under the title: (Readers: Please read the stanzas in any order you like.)* So for Shmailo, even the words of her poems cannot be assumed to be stationery; even they are just as subject to the possibilities of movement as everything else in the world. 

As already stated, “nature” is also a feature of this collection. Besides the two poems mentioned above, there is ‘Vow’ which opens the collection, wherein the protagonist reassuringly describes to her lover how their affair will have all the characteristics of nature. Then there is the remarkable ‘Aerial View of the Rockies’: containing the wonderful image of ‘gods [who] like to trace their fingers in the world; / Like leaves from a primordial tree’ as an explanation for how the dips between mountains occur. The world is anthropomorphised as we are told ‘landforms / Bare their veins’. The poem displays a deep Eco-consciousness as we become aware that the person with the ‘Aerial View of the Rockies’ is realising the earth is slowly dying: ‘Clever of her to suicide this way / Leaving no one but me to know’.

The adoption of the standard feminine in the addressing of the earth in ‘Aerial View of the Rockies’ points towards another of Shmailo’s concerns: that of being a woman. In the appropriately hallucinatory ‘Abortion Hallucination’ the image of a snake recurs. In the poem the snake has multiple meanings: it has biblical connotations, is meant to symbolise fear and is also meant to represent the penis. Shmailo captures the occasional embarrassment of sex: ‘remember that I like / handling snakes     and smile / and as always he softens     grows smaller’. Present in ‘Abortion Hallucination’ as a disturbing undercurrent, as well, is a suggestion of child abuse.

In ‘Ayah’ and ‘Bhakti’ we find spirituality and gods. ‘Ayah’ expresses bafflement at how and why Christianity developed given its origins. ‘Bhakti’ appears a challenge to Hinduism – offering redemption to an outcaste woman.

Returning to the collections title poem – ‘How to Meet and Dance with Your Death (Como encuentrar y bailar con su muerte): A Cure for Suicide’  - we see the emergence of another of Shmailo’s concerns: the blurring of the boundaries of the self resultant from alcohol and drug consumption. In this piece, seemingly heavily indebted to Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano, the reader is provided with a recipe for intoxication:

‘2 gallons of pulque (fermented Mayan beverage), or if unavailable, gin

1 case tequila

several cases of beer

1 bottle Mescal

2 ounces good marijuana

carton cigarettes

three large peyotes

coffee as needed’

The drug experience is alluded to, again, in ‘Abortion Hallucination’.

Somewhat unexpectedly Shmailo also has a fondness for painting urban scenes with her poetry. She does it with great skill though; in ‘Untitled (Night, avenue…)’ we find: ‘Night, avenue, street lamps, the drug store, / irrational and dusky light. / Live another decade, two more - / It stays the same; there’s no way out’; and, in ‘Harlem Line’: ‘Auction: Sin City cabaret, Signs and awnings, / …Skate keys. Real estate. / Where open houses become closed. (All hope / like a lottery…’

What the reader needs to ask themselves – returning to the lesson of ‘Exorcism (Found Poem)’ -  is: what linkage does Shmailo want us to make between these apparently unconnected themes? And because it isn’t mathematics we’re dealing with here, but poetry, every reader will answer that question differently.

I don’t think it’s a dodging of the question for me to say I’d prefer not to impose my own interpretation of A Cure For Suicide on any reader of this review, as I think the order that I’ve addressed the collections themes has gone some way towards suggesting how they may be linked (or at least how they seem linked to me); it’s just that I’d rather the collection's ambiguity be allowed to remain intact, in order for every reader to make of it what they will.

One final note: the most linguistically innovative poem of the collection is ‘Bloom’ – perhaps not surprisingly as it’s to a large extent inspired by the Molly Bloom stream-of-consciousness at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses. Herein we find Shmailo free-associating (‘Ill-bred, no bread / Dirty whore’s puking / Just giving me head…’) and punning wildly (‘A weak bird’ referring to herself, using the English colloquialism of “bird” to mean “woman”, whilst at the same time extending the use of the bird images, meaning actual creatures of the air, which populate the poem; and ‘I’m a mammal, / I have mammaries,’). As ‘Bloom’ comes just before the end of A Cure For Suicide, it can be called a great note on which to close a great collection. 

* An idea I first came across with the novel The Unfortunates (1969), written by the English experimentalist B.S. Johnson. Each chapter of the book was produced as a self-contained booklet and sold in a box. The readers only instruction was to read Chapter1 first and Chapter 20 last; the in- between Chapters were to be read in any order.

Interview with Drummer Leonard King

Click here

On my website entitled "Experimental Writing / Explorative Music" I am placing audio reviews with writers and musicians. The first podcast is a 90-minute interview with the important drummer Leonard King. Although best known as James Carter's drummer — he appears on Out of Nowhere, Live at Baker's Lounge and In Carterian Fashion — Leonard is himself a unique bandleader and composer. The following wide-ranging interview covers everything from the dubious origins of the word 'jazz' to the open cultural possibilities in Detroit in the 50's and 60's to the Vietnam war and  all the way back to how fun it is to play with James Carter and Gerhard Gibbs in The James Carter Organ Trio.

Savor it.

Waterbaby by Cris Mazza (Soft Skull Press)

          reviewed by Elizabeth Burns

I’ve not met an apt title like this one:  Waterbaby: Baby in the water, baby found in the water, baby rescued in a toilet, swimmer convulsing in the pool, baby rescued between two mattresses bound and thrown overboard to survive a sinking ship.

In the early part of the novel, we read of Tam, her brother Gary, her fairly benign sister Martha, her mostly silent mother, Tam’s former lover/swim coach Denny, and a haunting, sexy figure named Nate. It would be giving away too much to the reader to detail Tam’s adventures from here, but a preview is in the weather. In fact, the weather is its own character here, and the only triumphant being: The coast of Maine, sure of its place, consistent, egalitarian, and beautiful. Perpetual fog shrouds the histories, the past, the identities, and even the lovemaking.

Tam begins her journey for two reasons: one is to remove herself from the pained past, and the other is to research her lineage. The protagonists are guided by the beam of a lighthouse—a high and sturdy building that serves as a beacon against danger. Some readers might be reminded of those sweatshirts or other apparel that enumerate lighthouses. But how many wonder about the inside? (Hmm. Somehow I don’t think this is Cris Mazza’s audience.)

The novel weaves historical fiction and research with present day character development. It is a detective novel in the way that all novels are detective novels — but more so, because the story looks for answers for motivations of characters from the immediate past, the present, and one hundred years ago. I won’t tell you that they are all related.

Enjoy this book for the deep excavation of the soul it offers. Even though that seems like a perilous undertaking, know that you are safe in Mazza’s stunning prose.

Juliana Spahr: Interview

Juliana Spahr's "barely truthful" memoir The Transformation (atelos 26) explores her experiences from 1997 when she first received a teaching job at the U of Hawai'i through her living in New York during the September 11 attacks. During those years she was trying to come to terms with deep complications: she was living with two men in a three-way relationship, she quickly learned about the tension between the colonized and colonizers in Hawai'i politics and everyday life,  she questions what her poetry has to do with these extraordinarily thorny issues. What follows is an e-mail interview with Juliana that concerns the book, and that took place in the summer of 2008. If the questions seem terribly personal, it is because the book is unswervingly honest and intimate. These are the sorts of questions it raises. 

I thank Juliana for her time and energy: she recently became a mother. Congratulations to her.

You say that this is "a barely truthful book." But it does follow some of the facts of your life: your moving to Hawaii, your life as one member of a relationship that consisted of you and two men living amorously under one roof, the move to NYC, and your being there for Sept. 11. My first question has to do with embarrassment. You reveal so much in this book. Why? How does it make you feel?

Urgh. I confess, sometimes I curse myself for some things I say in it.  There was a funny moment last week where the three of us were having a fight and one of the loosely veiled characters in the book goes and gets the book and says what did you mean when you wrote this about me. It was slightly comedic, slightly horrifying.

When I wrote the book I felt somewhat isolated. When I was in Hawai’i I felt as if I could write anything and no one would really read it. Or very few people within 2,500 miles. If I were to make a list of the people within the 2,500 miles who might read it, the list might have five to ten names on it. So I felt as I wrote this if I could say anything and it would not resonate very far.

I had, in other words, an incredible yet illusionary feeling of freedom. And I’m not sure that I will ever feel that again. I certainly do not feel as if I have the freedom to write a version of that book right now. Instead I feel very much like I need to protect my private life. I think this has something to do with having a child. (I wish I did not have to say that; I’m freaked out by any suggestion that having a child is a limitation on a writing life.) And it has something to do with being involved in a semi-permeable and somewhat public community of friends and frenemies in a different way than I was in Hawai’i.

At the same time, I understand that one writes things in the moment and one has to do it like that. There is no other way. And I’m not sure this book embarrasses me more than other things I have written. Isn’t it all embarrassing at some point? And isn’t that just part of being human? Being embarrassed and dealing with it?

The book is unrelentingly intense and unwaveringly honest. Do you live at that sort of fever pitch? Or is this one of the changes that made this book "barely true"?

Are you asking, am I neurotic and slightly obsessive? Am I driven crazy by myself? If so, the answer is yes.

Why is it narrated in the third person plural ("they")?

Part of me wants to say because I wanted to. And by that I meant it felt right to me. Several people who read earlier drafts of this suggested that I change it and I refused to even entertain the idea. What this might mean is that I felt that in order to say endlessly embarrassing things about myself, I needed to use a distancing pronoun.

But the story that I told myself about this “they” was that I needed to embrace what it meant to not be a part of a “we” but to be the outsider, not in the marginal sense but in the sense of the colonizer.

You mention Renee Gladman and Pamela Lu's work as "being on my mind" when you began this project. I also felt I heard echoes of Hejinian's My Life and any number of Stein books. The difference is that The Transformation is explicitly political, political to the point where you confess the ways political events affect your bodily organs. What do you see as The Transformation's contribution to this group of works?

Those are all writers/books that I love. And so I’m not sure I see The Transformation as making much of a contribution to what has already been done so well but I do like to think of it as in dialogue with these writers/books. I am a thief. Both literally (I often steal entire sentences) and philosophically (I steal ideas of those who are smarter than me). I call it homage.

Did anyone get mad at you as a result of what you wrote in the book?

It is a prickly book. I sometimes feel it has something in it to make anyone who was in the same space with me at the same time annoyed. Some who lived parts of that book have told me they didn’t like it very directly and those discussions have been very helpful to me. I am grateful for them. Susan Schultz, for instance, had many issues with the Hawai’i parts of the book. And I changed some things after discussing them with her. I probably didn’t “fix” things completely. (I don’t want to imply her endorsement, in other words, because some of her complaints I imagine would still exist). But it was generous of her to spend time with me on it, even as some of her complaints freaked me out.

Others have implied that they have problems but have not gone into them.

And I should admit that there are some things that are misrepresented in the book. And sometimes I wonder why I did that. I tell almost nothing, for instance, about the 4 year very intense fight that took over the English department that was about whether faculty members who were both writers and critics, such as myself, were qualified to teach creative writing. I tell almost nothing about the fight around race in Lois Ann Yamanaka’s work that took over both the English Department and the local writing community. I think at the time that I felt as if I couldn’t fit them into the book. But I also wonder sometimes about the politics of not mentioning them. Should I have confessed that my vision of the university was probably colored by the inevitable disgruntlement that accompanies a long fight about my and others qualifications that involved slightly nutty things like some faculty organizing a letter writing campaign where people were asked to tell the chair to save creative writing from “postmodernism and cultural studies.”

The book seems to have five threads that wind through it. They appear, disappear, and reappear, usually reframed and recontextualized. I noticed the love triangle, environment, moving, politics, the academy, and language as your principle concerns. Am I missing one? Why these concerns? What did you learn about them in the course of writing this book? 

Those are probably the main ones. I might add the word “identity” before politics and I might add “poetry” or “literature” to the list.

Did writing the book help you to come to a clearer place in regard to your relationship to these issues?

Some what. Most of it though just feels as if the book was a baby step to beginning to get to a clearer place, that there is so much work left to do.

Why the repetitions? The most common one is your characterization of "avant-garde" poetry as using "fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax, and so on." You also repeatedly describe the U.S. government as "the government that currently occupies the continent."  Why do you repeat it so often?

I like repetition. I like it as a rhythmical device. I think it sounds good (which I know is not shared by everyone). I use it instead of counting syllables or alliteration or…

But a lot of those baroque nomenclatures are attempts to avoid terms that aren’t totally working. “Avant garde” is one of those terms that doesn’t totally make sense. What we call “avant garde” is full of forms that have long traditions. The term “indigenous” (which I avoid with “genealogical ties to the island from before the whaling ships arrived”) has a certain circumstantial sense (everyone, after all, is indigenous to somewhere but the term “indigenous” used in a colonized place clearly does not include everyone). With “the government that currently occupied the continent” I wanted to point to how the US government is a colonial government, despite the electoral system.

You seemed to lose some faith in the efficacy and relevancy of this poetry as the book moved on?You even mention in one part that government officials begin using the language of "fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax, and so on," leaving activist, "avant-garde" poets no leg to stand on?

I don’t know if it is a real lose of faith. I am still very devoted to the thinking that happens in and around poetry. But I guess thinking about the literary traditions that fit a little uneasily into the US, and I would say that about Hawai’i’s various poetries, made me have to rethink some of the things I took to be true. I’d probably also say that this rethinking also opened a space for me to think some more about why I am still devoted to poetry. I’ve been working on a critical book this summer where I try to think about this devotion some more. So I’m not without faith finally.

What is "The Transformation?" Learning that you are a colonizer? feeling your political alienation from the rest of the country? feeling political alienation from what you believed you believed? Are there a number of transformations?

Yes and yes and yes and yes. The book had many titles. I couldn’t settle on one. It was called koa haole for a while. (Koa is a majestic tree that is endemic to the islands and is very important to building things like canoes; haole is the word for people from afar or white people or colonizers or…; koa haole is a small tree from Mexico that is very invasive in Hawai’i and that resembles the early growth of the koa.) And then it was called passiflora. Etc, etc. Jennifer Moxley, who generously read a draft of the book before it was published, told me that she kept calling it something else, something like “the take over” maybe. And I decided on The Transformation as a less loaded version of her suggestion.

The machine that says: "I'm possible"

a review of Michael Peters' Vaast Bin; n Ephemerisi (Calamari Press, 2007, ISBN: 978-0-9798080-0-5)

by Michael Jonik

Michael Peters has not written a book of poems, nor drawn a series of diagrams, nor composed a score.  He has built a machine.  What type of machine? His Vaast Bin; n Ephemerisi is clearly a text-machine or word-processor, at once a sound-poem, visual-poem, and tone-poem, but to call it any of these alone would be to arrest it in its motion.  It is at once star-machine, animal-machine, imagination-machine, desire-machine, blade duplicator-machine, elektrope-machine, and absorption plate-machine. It combines a spare part from Klee’s Twittering Machine and one from Alan Turing’s Machine, it takes the keypad from Joyce’s typewriter and the sharp-point of Brahe’s stylus. Yet, the Vaast bin is maybe better labeled a locomotive-machine. The experience of reading the Vaast Bin; n Ephemerisi is much like the experience of a boy watching a freight-train roll by for the first time.  Its genre is excitement, excitement in the now, of the now, what the now means in extension, etc etc etc…

To a great extent, Peters’ work is textual investigation of this now, of the stroboscope of train-cars passing before the mind’s eye. Through its innovative inter-combinations or words, ideas, graphs, and marks, it works to say this “at once,” – at once in its structure and genesis. For Peters, this now is divided or is division itself, it is the cut, the present’s perpetual becoming-other, its ephemerisi.  As Peters writes in “Vaast bin – 1 } 15” (read “vast bin minus one becoming fifteen”): “a noth is in the now } in bird laughter/in wind synchronous to an un-power…in a spanning happening”  The now, the “spanning happening” is the opening of the instant, an opening of blank (textual) space into which we write each instant.  Time and again throughout the series, Peters opens and reopens how we can think of this now, providing us with a rich, varied and dynamic vocabulary for how to articulate its opening forth.  The now is the possibility of all our æffects and attractions, it is the radiating, radiant, and radical opening of the new in life, its celebration. It is each new now of words pressing to be said “Right now!” in the unguarded heat of the instant of living. Peters renders a sound-picture of the ongoing performance of this perforation, puncture, or punctuation of language in the instant, always forward “to ward the word.” 

Thus Peters approaches Joyce’s exfoliation of the “myriadminded instant” in Finnegans Wake, but with a cardinal difference: Peters never reintegrates his exfoliation back into a systematic cosmic all-now (the HCE family, reterritorialized language, the wholeness of the Book, even as a recursive structure) as Joyce attempts to. Rather he unhinges the now into an unbounded series of potentials, opening language, locution, and our ongoing temporal experience of each.  To be sure, Peters’ sonic and graphic language games, puns, captions and diagrams are a sub species of the Joycean æternity. But Peters lets his star points each go super nova, to shoot like comets (or comas or commas) across the black-ink of night.  In other words, to maintain for one more moment this Wakean lexicon, Peters allows the “nonce ends” of each instant to open out in both directions. The vaast bin is the vastness of what has been, its coordinate is the crossroads of Chronos and Aeon.

This evidences the often explicitly Deleuzian charge of the bin: its series follows the form of the n-1, whereby the n becomes the container or vaast bin itself, never filling quite to completion but always subtracting something as it accretes, always leaving something over for the next in the series.  Repetition is always difference, in that it gains in complexity as it becomes other than itself. In its succession (again the spanning of happening) it always is becoming other (and thus less than it was and at once more as it progresses in the series). Peters in this way could be said to explore notions of seriality Deleuze outlines in the Logic of Sense. But, in his Vaast Bin, Peters proposes a sort of “Logic of ‘Nonce ends.’” Though we must be quick to add, if Peters produces a logic of “non-sense,” it is non-sense in the best sense.  It is the (non)sense that overflows each instant of language, “rendering the sense of all yet’s unsung”

Including Deleuze, Peters hides his interlocutors, or rather immerses them within the welter of his word-static. His affinity is clearly with the poet-thinkers: Kostelantz, Blanchot, Charles Olson, Allen Fisher; the thinker-poets of other media and materials: Robert Smithson, R. Buckminster Fuller, Franz Kline, Petr Kotik, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and lesser known figures like Fleury Colon (modernist engineer and architect, the Norman cum Quebecois counterpart to Fuller), and contemporary sound and visual poets such as the Be-Blank consort. Each becomes another, perpetually joining or rather co-joining the “chorale machinations of distortion” of his noise-writing-machine.  He sets each of his sources in motion. He polishes Colon’s keen sense of metallurgy into further alchemico-textual potentials in a way that would make Brahe jealous. He draws up a living rhizosphere, gesturing to the vast earth-brain of Gustav Fechner; he scopes out a star chart or two, but smashes the quadrant with as much gusto as Ahab ever would. By bringing together all these sources into the penumbra of the bin (philosophical, aesthetic, musical, scientific), the Vaast bin, fits in the lineage of experimental works that each have that have both substantial referential resources and the rare ability to lift themselves out of themselves, to move. Peters thus draws a line in the sand for the current avant-garde. Like Schwitters, Cage, or Joyce, or later sound and concrete poetry, the bin opens out onto all perceptible planes. Peters’ drawings and animations perform an extension of his typographical figures, allying them with and extending them into a series of related geometrical shapes.  Punctuation marks proliferate: periods, apostrophes, commas, dashes, colons, and “beaks ( })” etc. commingle with if not “beak-come” the spiral, the cone, the and point in his drawings. The drawings, along with Peters’ handwritten titles, give us the point of his own stylus, superposing another intimate plane onto the textual face. Besides all this, the bin often offers us some sound advice: “ride your bird”; “you’ll have tilt your star machine projector out”; “you’ll have to pour your form from a sphere/into genealogies of dispersal, into radiant white combers”; and, perhaps best of all, “Un-practice yourself.” 

If, as Frank Zappa once said, the “crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe,” for Peters the cookie is a priori crumbled; he thus presents everything as it is, fractured, fractaled, plural. All is a “fertilized (fertilizing) cluster.”  Unlike Stefan George,  for Peters, where word breaks off every-thing must be, the everything that is the same as the opening itself, or the opening for the self.  If the vaast bin is another way of saying the immensity in which we find ourselves, it’s “bin” is the ontological statement of us often lost, in our own locomotion, in the midst of everything. (“O I am, am I?”).  It is indeed the apostrophe (or the “strophe slanger” as Peters writes) that keeps the “impossible” as the “I’m possible.”  His text performs the joy of this “I’m possible” the crux of which is its apostrophe, its spacing, its etcetera. It says: “I will stand amidst everything” no matter how impossible it might seem – everything that is, in its crumbled, chaotic multiplicity.

It keeps on saying:

          — "everything"

and yet

    here I am

The Last Novel by David Markson

"David Markson's The Last Novel is composed entirely of short, one to three sentence factoids, reflections, and allusions, usually about historical and contemporary high cultural figures, that are separated one from another by a blank line. There are no conventional chapters, plots, settings, or characters, except for "Author," who appears in the third person in about 30 of the shorts."

         Jefferson Hansen, Experimental Fiction & Poetry

"Yes, that’s all there is, those little things. Those itty-bitty, disconnected paragraphs that read like a litany of writers’ and artists’ triumphs and woes and many, many deaths. From first to last page. No chapters, no breaks. That’s all there is."

          by Catherine Texier, New York Times Book Review

"The author notices a pharmacist noticing his threadbare coat. He calls the answering machines of friends recently dead, just to hear their voices on the outgoing message. But for the most part, if we want to know who the character is that's telling the story, all we have to go on is his choice of moments from the lives of others that he catalogs here. 'Vermeer died in 1675. at which time one of his largest debts was, in fact, to a Delft baker.'"
          posted by Suzanne Kleid

"It is both very easy and very difficult to quote from. On the one hand, it is filled with interesting, brilliant, funny, and depressing little bits of text, but on the other hand, shorn of the greater context the book begins to appear like some sort of reference work—unreadable and emotionally distant. This is distinctly not the case."
          review by Derik Badman, The Quarterly Conversation

"Take these examples, all from the same two pages, among hundreds: 'Old age is not for sissies. / Said Bette Davis.' 'Freud, born in 1856, being asked in 1936 how he felt: / How a man of 80 feels is not a topic for conversation.' 'Shaw, at 94, being asked the same: / At my age, one is either well or dead.' As in a fugal composition, an anecdote might be picked up a few pages later, or a passing thought might respond to an earlier one, mimicking Novelist’s mind jumping around and coming back to its obsessions in tighter and tighter circles.

"In rhythm and tonality, if not in content, The Last Novel hints at the incantations of the Kaddish — it sometimes evokes the beat of author Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish” and “Howl.” As the witty, playful surface and the spellbinding incantations accumulate, the faint contours of a story reveal that Novelist is not only worried about getting old, but is also most certainly sick."

          by Catherine Texier, The New York Times

"There's a lulling beauty here — and a crackling wit, too — but readers will have to ask themselves: Does the end of this 'seminonfictional semifiction' justify the means?" 

          Booklist

"Since Reader’s Block in 1996, Markson has spent the last 11 years working within a genre he claims to have invented. Essentially, he produces book-length lists of some of the most interesting and/or scandalous minutiae in the history of Western culture (especially literary culture)."

          reviewed by Justin Taylor, book slut

"Markson takes some bizarre stands in this book. He writes: 'Future generations will regard Bob Dylan with the awe reserved for Blake, Whitman, Picasso and the like. Said an otherwise seemingly rational writer named Jonathan Lethem.' There are a few things wrong here. First, whatever Markson personally thinks of Bob Dylan, there’s almost no question that some substantive portion of Dylan’s work will live on."
           reviewed by Justin Taylor, book slut

"Question: should we assume that the pronouncements of 'The Author' are true, rather than invented by Markson, and should we assume that 'The Author's' views are the same as Markson's?"
           Jefferson Hansen, Experimental Fiction & Poetry

"It's really easy to get lazy and conflate Novelist's thoughts and opinions with David Markson's. But he's way too much of a trickster to be so obvious. However, it isn't easy to shake the suspicion that Markson is putting one over on you, and he's enjoying your boredom and confusion." 
          posted by Suzanne Kleid

"Both the structuring and the reading of collage fiction often involves an aleatoric component that recalls not only the Cubist work of Braque and Picasso, but also the Dada and Surrealist work of Duchamp and Breton: interest in the found object, the readymade, the chance encounter."

          Lance Olsen at http://nowwhatblog.blogspot.com/

The book ends:
 

          "Is it true then, what they say — that we become stars in the sky when we die? Asks someone in Aristophanes.

          Access to Roof for Emergency Only.

          Alarm Will Sound if Door Opened."
                       David Markson, The Last Novel

"Can we end up as stars if the door to the roof is closed?"

           Jefferson Hansen, Experimental Fiction & Poetry

        "Ernest Poole. Margaret Wilson. Julia M. Peterkin. Margaret Aye Barnes. T.S. Stribling.

          Being five of the first fifteen winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction."

               David Markson, The Last Novel