____________________
'My feeling about English is that the subject-verb-predicate order enforces a pattern. Having the body as an extra means of communication is one way of addressing that limitation, but the body still imposes another kind of order. You age and can’t communicate because you can’t spend three minutes in a backbend or whatever. I really wanted to place the sound of the language in an Eastern European space, that felt important, a heavy consonant presence, I’m really drawn to that. I also started speaking this language, before I called it Ravic, aloud with a friend, so I could only say what my voice would allow me to say. Because of English and because I studied Spanish there was a lot of vowel presence I had to get rid of. With a name like Luswage Amini, syllables get pronounced the way a black Southerner speaks. It’s like Lu-SWAGGE, kind of slow, drawn-out. I wanted that to be there. It’s still this black girl who’s writing about this place that’s far away and not necessarily in conversation with her culture. One of my “Calamity” essays is about how I think black people and Eastern Europeans should have a conversation about possible overlaps between their experience, and what if I were to call myself an African American Eastern European, or is it an Eastern European African American, because I think about that. ...
'I came up through poetry, but I am a sentence writer. I don’t know if it’s so much creating narratives as narrative space. I’m interested in time and experience and the sound of telling a story as opposed to the story itself. I have a love and deep interest in fiction, especially fiction in translation, so I teach that. But often in my workshops now I’ll bring in texts that are hybrid, cross-genre works. It’s useful as a way to get students to take more notice of language. I have students read poetry and then enter it from a sentence space. ...
'Fiction is interested in a certain kind of unfolding or sequence of events. Time is more intact in fiction. Prose, I think, introduces the element of the awareness of yourself in language as you are unfolding things in time and allowing yourself to be distracted or interrupted, allowing yourself to question the difficulty of what you’re doing and be stalled, not to move. I want more fiction to do this, because it changes the way we read and understand story. With fiction that repairs all doubt and interruption and experiment by being fluid, coherent; what we expect doesn’t leave much room for me as a reader. But I think the more you talk about these categories, their distinctions, the quicker they break down. Ultimately, what I want is for there to be a blur over everything.'-- Renee Gladman, triple canopy
Dorothy
"ANA PATOVA CROSSES A BRIDGE is the third volume of Renee Gladman's magnificent, melancholy series about the city-state of Ravicka, or about the architectures of its absence. It is tempting to read the Ravickian books as an extended allegory—of architecture itself, perhaps, except that architecture is already half-allegorical, its every element raised to prefigure whatever meanings can make their way to them. If any can. In Ravicka, meanings—indeed most contact of any kind—remain in abeyance, building, in absentia, the constitutive negative spaces of the narrative. There is a plot; it lays out zones of sheer ambience. Experiences, of which there are many, unfold as a redolent lingering in the structures of immateriality, the radical realities of the insubstantial. Gladman is a philosopher of architecture, though not that of buildings. Rather, she thinks (and writes) the drifts, partitions, and immobilities of identity, affect, communication, the very possibility of being human. Profound, compelling—haunting, even—the story of Ravicka is astonishingly ours."-- Lyn Hejinian
Excerpt
Hausen wrote a book that everyone
was reading. It went that way with men,
and yet this was a book that meant a lot
to me and led to a book of my own.
Hausen wrote a book in the time before
the crisis and people carried it around
in their back pockets; it was mass
produced. In the book, a man walked
over a bridge and entered a building,
where he jumped into a pool with a
mineral-green bottom. He swam back
and forth. He did a breast stroke, he
worked from his back, he banged his
body against the water, he sang, he
shouted. He climbed out and exited
the building, leaving a trail of water. The
book described the water as text; the
drops were signs. They doubled the story
of Hausen’s character. He was a man
who swam at night in empty buildings.
The man went home to someone who
did not seem quite like a woman, but who
also was not identified as a “man.” The
man coming home lay on top of this
person and swam and told a story, which
was a confession, and the body gasped,
but we did not know if the man’s story
was causing this gasping or whether the
cause was his writhing. The reader couldn’t
hear the story, but Hausen had the language
around the story crack and drop heat on us.
And the body writhed on top of the other
body and whispered to it about something
done and undone in the city, something
sitting under water, something terrible.
* *
The city that existed ran like a film
playing in a small movie house on a
forgotten street in the blown out part
of the city we swore never to enter,
never to grace, because of some tragedy
no one remembered but which haunted
our movements in the “safe” parts of
the city, which counted for most of
Ravicka. It was too imbalanced: that
there was this block of streets, off limits
to our living, and within this block
breathed the real body of our city, the
one that existed rather than painted itself
to exist, the living one, at least as I came
to think of it, though I had never seen
that film. I tried to arrive at the movie
house, but got turned away each time.
It was the film of the decade and would
tell me how to live and would open into
new streets, where bodies were possible,
where architecture exceeded itself and
took care of the environment, brought
the park into itself, danced around the
canal, where water ran next to and
summer bodies floated by. It wasn’t a
utopia playing there but the real built
environment, the one that went with the
language you spoke, that could handle
the verbs of your language. It was the city,
but was unreachable, was violent, without
victims and without perpetrators, and
violent, though there were no crimes.
* *
Every time I wrote a sentence something
disappeared, and after many thousands
of sentences, some of which I didn’t keep
or didn’t like, I began to look for those
vanished things. I also wondered whether
it was more that they were invisible than
vanished. I thought writing had something
to do with invisibility and the world tried
to show you this as often as it could, but
disappearances seemed to have more to
do with not writing, from the way things
looked in the city, among my friends and
acquaintances. You were losing hope if
you weren’t writing, which isn’t the same
as things going invisible. You were losing
hope, too, if you were writing, but it was
a different kind of loss, because there was
always something you had more of when
you were done writing, even if it was
sentences that you hated. I wrote
sentences about how men sleep and my
wooden spoons vanished, or perhaps
were no longer visible to the eye. Most
of the sentences I wrote I did so without
thinking of the consequences of objects
going missing. I was often trying to write
about the crisis, which was hard and
took everything you had, which was
almost all your language for that day.
One day I stopped writing and asked
after the vanished things; I wanted to
know where they were. It was strange to
have had them go away so silently. I
asked into the room where they were
and wondered about the thing and all
the things that replaced it. Would they
all come back at once?
Renee Gladman Reads
Renee Gladman at Georgetown University
Renee Gladman Reads 2
_____________________
'In I Am Ready To Die A Violent Death, Heiko Julien presents to us a kaleidoscope of images, ranging from the suburban, to pop culture references, memes, and the internet, presented through a meditative narrator questioning everything they see, while at the same time doubting what they are saying. Ironically the writing is both positive and self-deprecating at the same time, mirroring the multi-faceted life we inhabit online through different personas; we are both the nice, tolerant and compassionate person, and we also want to die a violent death, alone, so we can feel something that is real in a physical sense, not just through social networking.
'What strikes me first of is that these pieces began as either self-published e-books, Tweets, or Facebook posts. This way of sharing ‘content’ online seems to be central to ‘Alt lit.’ Heiko has already begun a dialogue with his audience before the book has been published; I had read most of these pieces online before coming to read this book. This is quite a unique trend that is happening in the publishing world; there isn’t one way of ‘being a writer.’ And the idea of publishing itself has become quite flexible. I feel that Heiko is aware of this, and the writing in this collection reflects the continued dialogue he has with the Alt Lit community, which he seems to be a major part of.
'For Heiko, as well as others in the online community, memes also constructed through online ‘brands’ or ‘personas’, where ones identity becomes a meme. This feels like one of the central themes to not just Heiko’s writing, but to the ‘genre’ of Alt Lit. What makes Alt Lit a unique genre, however, is that it feeds into the aspects of an online community members and environment which Heiko references a lot in his writing, and the online community all construct different personas, or identities, through different social media outlets. In this way, Heikos writing puts a mirror up not just to himself, but the community he responds to. The writing does not just reflect the community that is Alt Lit, however, it also stems from something else, something more ‘human,’ or ‘natural‘, whatever that may mean in the ‘internet age‘ that we all live in. Social stereotypes become crystalized through online media, which in turn become memes, and a part of the online language that Heiko channels in his pieces.'-- Rhys Nixon
Civil Coping Mechamisms
“I have huge admiration for Heiko Julien’s I Am Ready To Die A Violent Death. Prose that actually feels like the 21st century. Rare. Exhilarating. I love this work.” -- Mark Leyner
“Heiko Julien’s prose pieces, poems and fragments are where the Buddha meets the internet—the trope of the shark, the void and the triangle in a state of simultaneous orgasm with the holes we feel we need to fill, the terrifying reality, the wanting to be a man of the people (but slightly better than the people) and the fear. Julien is a writer who never says ‘or’ only ‘and.’ This book is non-duality at its most neon.” -- Melissa Broder
“What’s constant in Heiko Julien’s work is that he’s engaging directly and nakedly with his experience of being a human being. He’s a poet in the old sense: he’s trying hard to find wisdom and truth, like Socrates or something. That’s an important aspect of literature to keep alive as we move forward into the forms of the Internet. Heiko Julien is a model of someone who refuses to live an unexamined life.” -- Steve Roggenbuck
Excerpt
c h a p t e r 1
My zen so fresh don’t never catch me not being real no no.
Our ideal western courtship begins:
See me inventing new yoga moves in the McDonald’s Playplace. Ask me out to dinner at a different McDonald’s.
Save the date for our Fast Food Wedding.
Preacher wears the drive-thru headset.
Ring bearer rolls up to the second window and delivers the ring.
Bride and groom’s families in the main dining area.
Kids in the ball pit.
c h a p t e r 2
I want straight up bliss. Want you to pour warm water down the back of my shirt while I’m at work and I’ll pretend to get mad and then we go home.
Push me off a cliff, and here’s the twist: The inside of the canyon is full of the stuff dreams are made of. Talking every Nirvana CD down here.
Human beings will be back in the forests sooner than we think, ripping bark off of trees and crushing skulls on rocks. It’s a comforting thought. Stick with me and I’ll show you everything I know about how to make cool jpgs on the computer and also true love. I will take care of you even though I don’t believe in that sort of thing.
The Native Americans used to use every part of the buffalo.
Including the pink slime.
Just wander out into a cornfield and eat some corn.
This is America.
This is God’s country.
c h a p t e r 3
Pitching a TV pilot where I teach kids how to live cool lives by learning to enjoy common things like putting their shoes on slowly and drinking water in real-time.
Like to think I could pull off a certain post-9/11 Mr. Rogers vibe. Fancy myself an otaku Captain Kangaroo. Steampunk Mr. Wizard and all I want from you is actual friendship.
But I’m still.
Real Life Bart Simpson.
Yeah I’m throwing cats into a basketball hoop by their tails.
Haha. pizza for breakfast.
Turtle power.
I’ll never die.
____________________
'Comedians are sometimes called stand-up artists. I always liked this idea of the job just being a person standing up and talking. Especially I like that this rather personal, almost quaint occupation survives — and in fact thrives (in comparison to the personal, almost quaint occupation of the novelist) in an era of entertainment defined as visual spectacle. In addition, and maybe more importantly, this novel is structured as a series of monologues. A monologist is a particular type of character, trapped by the sound of their own voice and in the deep gravity well of their own point of view. One goal of the book was to show a long series of these moated, solipsistic monologues (which we sometimes trade with one another and then dignify the exchange with the term conversation) as a rendering of everyone’s dazzling alienation. I thought a “stand-up artist” might be a good one to start off such a series. ...
'When I first moved to New York, in the late 90s, one of the highlights of my week was reading J. Hoberman’s film criticism in The Village Voice. He’s terrific, a giant, and much of the cinema ideas in the book owe a debt to him. The totalitarian state in the novel probably comes equally from reading about the CIA’s so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” and Abu Ghraib and the incredible kidnapping and escape story of Eun-hee Choi and Sang-ok Shin. I’ve never been on a cruise ship. I’m not sure where all the elements in the book came from, but I can say that I wanted the sections to be complete and whole in tone and style yet disparate from one another. And then the odd sections are placed next to each other with just a few, vital threads holding the pieces in place. ...
'Continuity is a (useful) illusion. And I think we experience it something just like that. It’s an illusion we allow ourselves to be convinced by. However, semi-secretly from ourselves, parenthetically, we know it’s a utility, not reality itself (or if so, then only one aspect of it). I wanted the book to operate somewhat like that as well. Within a section I aimed for it to have its own physics and sense of unity and be an integrated whole. However each would then be placed next to another equally whole narrative. Could they survive the juxtaposition? Lines of poetry can. Elements of a collage can. Our senses of self do.'-- Eugene Lim
Black Square Editions
'What an astonishing book! Beautiful, original, with delicious surprises lurking at the heart of sentences, of events, of all the engines of communication.'-- Harry Mathews
'THE STRANGERS is like a cabinet of curiosities put together by Georges Perec and Andrei Biely, hilarious and utterly seductive, a sharp commentary on the social and political architecture we cling to at our peril. And yet, while pulling the rug out from under the reader, Eugene Lim’s book is a total pleasure.'-- Susan Daitch
'Beautifully written, so precise and accurate to real life that it is (fantastically) convincing, Eugene Lim’s THE STRANGERS, with its multiple interwoven strands, reveals one surprising character and relationship after the next, and culminates in a skilfully devised and satisfying resolution. A fascinating and engrossing tale.'-- Lydia Davis
Excerpt
It’s when the cop is punching my face that I make the decision. I decide to go look for my sister. My whole life I’d indulged in a stupid thrill, a very risky habit. In the middle of the night I’d sneak through the town and deface posters of the beloved president. Sometimes just a mustache over his beloved pudgy face. I kept it scatological or primitive. For fifteen years I’d done this and never got caught.
The cop is working me over pretty good. I’ve never taken a punch before. I worry about my brain and whether he’ll bust something inside me and I’ll die slowly as things that aren’t supposed to meet mix inside my sloshy guts. I’m a wet animal and I’m weeping like a child and very ashamed that I am and I’m scared.
He beats me up and then lets me go.
One of the twins is me. They’re playing a game of hide-and-seek together, which—with only two people—is also tag, capture the flag, and hot-and-cold. We didn’t call our game any of those.
This is when we’re eight. The war is looming but we don’t know anything at all about that except an exhaustion familiar already in our bones and a subdermal panic that shimmies constantly up and down our backsides.
Even though I know now all kinds of impossible things about the bomb that is about to destroy our home, it always surprises me. For instance I know that the engineer who perfected its targeting system so that it can fly around corners was a Haitian educated in Canadian universities and now retired happily to Nantes, France. I know that the casing is coated with a polymer most commonly used today in plastic wrap and discovered accidentally by a Dow Chemical worker, that the nitroamine in the bomb was developed for the US government by the son of Jews escaped from the pogroms and that this explosive was, at the time, one of the most powerful in the world, used to begin fission reactions in nuclear weapons. The government that launched the bomb was an invading nation fighting another invading nation in our soon-to-be divided poor sap of a country in a ridiculous contest called a proxy war. Does it help to know your maker? I think they were aiming for a bridge a half mile south of us.
The girl I’m playing with is older than me by fourteen minutes. We share our father’s analytic nature—he was a factory engineer—and our mother’s depressive seasons. She’s better than me at fighting, which embarrasses me since I’m a boy. I’m the better drawer and it’s a tie when it comes to sums. Right now she’s doing a slow count to ten with her eyes closed and her forehead pressed against a tree. I’m hidden behind a big rock that fell into the ditch that runs along the road to town and which we’d often use as a landmark to visitors. (“At the big pink rock in the ditch, turn left through the woods,” we’d say.) When she gets to four, the bomb explodes our home and kills our parents.
(more)
Eugene Lim reads from Fog & Car
Eugene Marten reads from Waste at the Ellipsis Press launch party
Watch Eugene Lim read at Apexart here
*
p.s. Hey. ** Torn porter, Hi. Your prize goes in the mail to you today. Hopefully the French mail system won't be its sometimes procrastinating self on this first leg of the journey. Thanks for letting me see the pix. They brought it out really well, I think. Oh, it was in-store gig, no? That Shivers song is kind of nice, yeah. I'm going to Berlin for a mostly business/art-related quickie. ** David Ehrenstein, Marvelous is a good adj. for Stern's work. Oh, that's good news about the Spike Jonze. I'm very intrigued and hopeful that he can make a really good film without Kaufman, because I thought 'Wild Things' was abysmal. ** Sypha, I'm really sorry about your grandfather. It's really tough. Hugs, James, and I certainly hope your Canadian friend can tough out his kidney's disloyalty. Fingers very, very crossed on the friend's and your behalves. But, of course, the news on the finishing of your story collection is very good news! Big congrats to you and, eventually, to us! ** Cassandra Troyan, Hi, Cassandra! Gosh, thanks about the blog's recent run. Very cool about the LHB thing! Do, do hook us/me up please! Your email ... yes, I'm just way behind on opening my 'letters'. I'll go open and read it as soon as I get out of here. Sorry for my slowness. ** Scunnard, Hi, man. I don't know why Stern is news to you, but he's a great one, I think. Often is the answer to your query about whether I have non-working brain days. Uh, there are several homeopathic brain sharpener pills and so on out there. I've tried a couple. One of them maybe subtly worked, although, who knows? I don't remember its name. I'll find out if you want a earthy helpmate that might or might not help. ** Steevee, I'll go search for that. Seems like the right search terms should get me it or at least similar type things. Thank you so much again. Very interesting about the new Coens. I'm generally a fan of theirs, and I'm especially excited to see this one based on what I've read, and your report is certainly encouraging. Thanks greatly for sharing your thoughts, S. ** Brendan, Yeah, me and Minnie were the perfect couple, at least on film, kind of. Awesome to see you, buddy! I was just talking to a friend about how one Melt Banana gig that I saw at the old Spaceland was the most hearing destroying gig I ever attended, but I don't regret a thing. I'm good, quite good, thank you. What are you up to precisely within that 'always are' thang. ** _Black_Acrylic, Love to read about the percolation of Art 101. Your words seem all coked-up with your excitement. Nice contact high. ** Flit, Flit! Hey, pal! Yeah, I was briefly/lengthily fucked up in the head and emotions for a spate just the other day. That went the hell away. Yours will. I'm counting on it. ** Etc etc etc, Hi. Oh, great that you're sending out your novel. Chilly/Jeff has a great brain to pick. Happy to add my two-cents or make my head bouncy for your ideas if you like. We could Skype or something if you like. Bret is starting a podcast? No, I did not know that. That's interesting, that's an unexpected turn. I'll go find out where it is. And keep me apprised either way, yeah, if you don't mind. I have a slew of projects that I'm in the middle or early stages of, but my novel writing is always at the center of what I do, and it's growing steadily, and I'm excited for it, and thanks for asking. It's very, very not like 'TMS', although I learned some new things while writing it that I'm definitely employing in a different way. Film's future being like 'Holy Motors' is such a good idea. Let's hope. ** Kyler, Hi, K. Really glad you liked it. ** Paul Curran, Hi, Paul. Tokyo sounds yum. I'm really hoping to get there in January, and hoping to get that cemented in place this coming weekend. Of course, man, about my words on the book. Let me know the when, how, etc. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. I had this thought that you might particularly like or get something from Stern's work, I don't know why. Great that rehearsals went so well, and cool re: the mysterious venue. I so wish I could catch that version of the Mike Kelley retrospective. The reason -- or one of the reasons -- that it's notably different than the Stedlijk one is because the Pompidou's very edited, very poorly presented squib version of the show angered a lot of the people who'd leant works to the retrospective, and a number of them subsequently withdrew permission to use the works in the show's tour after that. Interesting about the Shawn play. He hasn't spoken about why he made that change? The new novel goes very well, I think, I hope. It's growing steadily in the way that I think it needs to grow. I'm doing things I've never tried to do before, and so there's a lot of experimenting and trying to ace the technically unfamiliar, which is exciting and which also requires a lot of patience and concentration, which is what's happening, I think. Thank you a lot for asking. Otherwise, the porn film may be about to become a definite or not, so that's preoccupying. And the beginnings of new Gisele theater piece are all on my shoulders at the moment, and it's the toughest thing to figure out and write that she's ever asked of me, but I'm slowly getting that started. And the Scandinavia book is, I think, progressing but in fits and starts. ** Grant maierhofer, I'll keep my eyes on HTMLG today just in case. DFW/Fugazi is a strangely conducive combo somehow. Great, fingers crossed, about the possible pub. of your short fiction book. I'm good, thank you. Guy Picciotto is awesome. He's the only Fugazi member with whom I've ever met and talked, and, yeah, he seemed like a super great guy in addition to the mega-talent and all that. ** Misanthrope, Well, yeah, that's why I don't watch those shows. Granted, they're less omnipresent here, although more and more of them are encroaching on the French airwaves. Skip them, man. The phenomenon of them is a billion times more interesting than them, and you only need to experience a few episodes to get the phenomenon's illustration, right? Cooking, cool. How is your mom doing? ** Bill Porter, Hi, Bill. Really glad that the Eddo Stern work tweaked your brain. I'm a big fan of his, obviously. I've never played any Eddo's actual game-artworks all the way through. I've fooled around with them, and I've seen a number of his works in gallery and museum shows. I was lucky enough to include his work in a gallery exhibition I curated a while back -- the 'windmill' piece -- and I went to a few of the C-Level events and watched those 'games' being played and participated in them in the onlooker capacity. Bon day. ** Bollo, Hi, J. Yes, Buche de Noel time is fast approaching. I've begin gathering the candidates for this year's DC's Buche Beauty Pageant, and it should go up here soonish, as soon as most or all of the candidates have been declared. ** Right. Up there are three books that I very highly recommend to you. Check them out. Not a one of them will make you sorry you dug your nose into them, I promise. See you tomorrow.