'It is not just that Gary Indiana’s novel, Do Everything in the Dark, is about, or fictively triggered by, old photos (and letters), but that the form the book takes captures this random recall in its ability to fit its pieces together, almost. Is a roman à clef a story told on its head? Or is it merely standing upright, a little off center from the “real” story it simultaneously cloaks and exposes? Indiana ends this novel with an epigraph (with this placement, is it an epitaph for a generation or epoch?) by Guy Debord: “In a world that really has been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood” (from Society of the Spectacle). To this end, Indiana has posited that the former question I pose is true, perhaps; and so, false, as well. The sidestepping question, however, is also one that must be answered in the affirmative, as any retelling, of story or character, in these pages, offers a recognizability of the real world’s textual twins, and in that Indiana has created a story that works almost all the way around, literally, and even moves these characters (for which there are real-life (and deceased) referents) forward a little bit, into the now, not unlike ghosts for which substance has never been an issue.
'Do Everything in the Dark (a reissue; original publication year was 2003) consists of 74 entries, which focus on friends of the narrator, Gary, and how the lives of the friends intertwine. “I found Arthur’s letters in Jesse’s storage boxes. A letter always arrives at its destination. These had passed through Jesse on their way to me. I thought. It’s my destiny to collect any evidence that everyone’s life hasn’t been a hallucination, even if it feels like one.” (107), for this novel is a witnessing, of events, crimes, life, and death.
'These entries are not in chronological order, but in order of how and when they are remembered. With this, Indiana deftly uses bricolage to strive for a holistic picture, managing to bring back a particular lineage just at the moment the reader may fail to keep that particular line in mind. Given the devastation of the ‘80s and ‘90s among Indiana’s contemporaries, this feat of re-membering the dead is a beautiful endeavor, which he lands—by way of current-day entries—in 2001, in the months leading up to September 11. There is no real portent here, only events in their quotidian and spectacular, and spectacularly banal, happening.
'Indiana’s writing feels like reportage. As in his book about Andrew Cunanan, the man who shot and killed fashion designer Gianni Versace in 1997 (Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story, 1999) and in the novel about the Menendez brothers, Lyle and Erik, who were convicted of murdering their parents in 1994 by a California jury (Resentment: A Comedy, 1998), he carries the reader through events loosely, constructing distance in order to remind the reader that all representation occupies this very space of falsehood.'-- Michaela Mullin
Itna Press
'Faced with photos of a once-tumultuous New York art world, the narrator's mind in this scathing, darkly funny novel begins to erupt. Memories jostle for center stage, just as those that they are about always did. These brilliant but broken survivors of the '80s and '90s have now reached the brink of middle age and are facing the challenge of continuing to feel authentic. Luminous with imagery, cackling with bitter humor, and with a new foreword by the author, this roman à clé spares no one. It's a canny portrait of one era's vaporization, and a study of the perpetual need that some of us feel to reconstruct ourselves—atom by atom.'-- Itna Press
'With scrupulously intense sentences—pitch-perfect, pitch-dark—Indiana conjures a hugely sad New York novel that feels at once state-of-the-art and stunningly ancient.'-- The Believer
' ...a great book—melancholic and funny and wicked smart... '-- Michael Miller
'Gary Indiana delves into the minds of his creepy, appalling characters with such probing wit and lip-smacking glee that we actually enjoy our time with these amoral monsters.'-- John Waters
Excerpts
Boredom can be viewed as a kind of fossil fuel, poured into inertia and ignited with fabulous results, but I am skeptical of this view, which reeks of unempirical optimism. We were excited for a while by drugs and sex, sometimes by escape from stultifying provincial childhoods, by ideological manias that were in the wind, by Che Guevara and Mao's Little Red Book, by Rolfing massage and Maharishi meditation, by rock and roll, pun, rock, hip-hop, marketing brainstorms, junk bonds, liver transplants, by ever-refined electronic gadgets that seemed to afford some control over the gathering chaos. But eventually ever thing new became a short-lived palliative for the fatal gash of boredom. We began manufacturing problems that sounded deeper, worthier of analysis, than the Oblomov syndrome produced by getting older in an age when everybody had seen too much by the time they were thirty-five.
*
1
So people do, as the poet remarked, come here in order to live. Our necropolis with anvils of memory chained to every street and building, every tourist postcard view. All its sunsets and bridges and mutilated dawns. Haunted house of mortal dreams, ectoplasms flickering in obsidian windows. People come here to live, after all. You'd think they were here to die. Well, aren't we all. I will achieve grandeur, proclaimed another poet, but not in this apartment.
2
Last year I lived in Paris. Now I live here, more or less. People tell me things. I listen. I watch and wait. I have discovered the junction of lapidary beauty and sublime ugliness known as the spirit of the age. Like stout Cortez or fat Balboa, whose vicious eyes popped wide in wild surmise, however that dumb poem goes.
Zeitgeist is a historian's favorite hallucination: a confidence trick, quanta leaping over the specific. "These people lived and died clutching statistically measured expectations to their breasts, delusions wired into their brains by lulls in the convulsions of time." We missed the big picture because our eyes locked on some whirling dervish in the lower left corner. All of us, except a few far-thinking individuals, avatars who shift history with their bare hands, starvation protests, atom bombs, religious manias, or the raw will to power.
The rest of us were caught by surprise when we woke up buried to our necks in shit.
Let's assume, at least, that the big picture isn't a rectangle, a film of watered silk in a frame, or a mastermind's jump cut, but something more like an urn on a mantelpiece.
Not everyone gets buried. Some burn.
Last spring, an eternity ago, as I passed in front of the Brasserie Lipp, a boy hawking Le Monde Economique hollered, "Bush assassiné! Bush assassiné!," hoping to whip up trade. People going in and out of Lipp applauded him....
*
Something was taking its vile course.
I felt it in waves, in my sleep, when I woke.
I replaced the air conditioner. I got a haircut.
What news? I asked my demon. What news? What now?
It rippled the air as I walked down the Bowery to Leon Ivray's loft.
In the waning light, rainbow-skulled couples morphed into Micronesian cannibals. Tin ornaments and tattoos skewed flesh into mosaic dreamscapes. Weirdly angled dormitories, thrown up like mineralized shark fins over the parking lots where Joel Rifkin, mousy thrill killer, used to strangle prostitutes before taking their corpses for joyrides in his panelled truck. The buildings spewed a continuous stream of dewy cutenesses, cell phones sprouting from their ears. These podlike mammals draped themselves in product logos and designer alphabets, like free-ranging billboards. Men wearing sandwich boards used to roam sidewalks as ambulating publicity Now millions did it for free, like serfs declaring fealty to corporate gods. All right. Something vile was taking its course.
Did I really want to scream into those moist rodent faces, HOW FUCKING SOLD OUT CAN YOU BE? IS IT A COMPETITION? No. If I opened my mouth to scream, a blast of silence would fill my head and a moray eel I mistook for my tongue would slither out. People were turning into things, had already turned into things. Electric wires and plastic organs grew inside their bodies. If you sliced them open with a scalpel, you'd uncover a factory of blue winking lights and cathode tubes and microchips and fiber optic cables fused with scattered organic matter.
This is how it was, or how I was, that summer: I wanted to accept the world in its true condition, as it hurtled to its stony end. To meet it on its own filthy terms. Even force some pleasure out of it, though I couldn't. I did not believe that Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, Greenpeace, or the Nature Conservancy could rescue this lemming species and its cell phones. I wrote checks to these organizations as a futile, half-assed gesture. It was too late, too late, too late.
Office workers moved in ziggurat patterns toward the black cube in Astor Place, sucked into the subway like lint gobbled by a vacuum cleaner. Ruminant tourists dreamed of killing and dismemberment. Sleepwalkers armed with credit cards spilled along the sidewalks, filling outdoor tables of fifth-rate pizzerias and bistros--the East Village's Kmart parody of Montmartre. In the gray innards of a rockabilly joint, its facade open to the street, a band tuned its instruments, squawking feedback into the hum and gurgle of deaf automatons. A crackle of incipient mayhem strafed the area as the summer twilight blackened into night. The Bowery was a treadmill for exhibitionists and the criminally insane.
Sky, clotted clouds. As I reach Leon's corner, the temperature spills down, the clouds rip apart. Rain rakes the sidewalk, just enough to wilt my clothes. Then it falls hard, soaking me as I wait for Leon's sluggish new elevator to reach the lobby Through the wire mesh in the street door windows, I watch the elevator numbers light and fade, stalling at each digit long enough for thirty people to load the elevator with furniture.
Gary Indiana interviewed
Gary Indiana "Diving for Teeth"
Gary Indiana reads "Bella is Bella"
________________
'"You can’t force a story that doesn’t want to be told.” This is the first line in “1969,” an essay in Myles’s collection Chelsea Girls. Published in 1994, the book is a nonfiction novel, or a fictional nonfiction, a Künstlerroman (“artists’ novel”) about a young woman, named Eileen Myles, who is from Arlington, Massachusetts. She is a poet, and she likes women but “didn’t know there was anything you could do with those feelings.”
'The first thing I noted about Myles was that her voice on the page reads like she is reading to me. She was reading to me that day in San Diego, sitting on my Craigslist couch with grad-school applications laid out on the floor across the room, about to go study creative nonfiction, whatever that meant. Chelsea Girls is a book of prose that reads like memoir and is called fiction. I didn’t know this at the time. I thought it was all true, all about Myles, and in a big way I still think so.
'The essays jump around thematically and sequentially, beginning in a gay bar in Augusta, Maine, where Myles tackles a police officer: “I’m a poet, you fools, you asshole cops!” She describes New York in the eighties, taking the F train to Queens to collect her “light blue pills,” which she would buy for thirty-five dollars and sell for a hundred: “Go someplace out of your life, come back new, bring it around and make a little money. Clean your apartment. Write some.” Myles has a boyfriend: “I thought we looked alike … ‘Is that all,’ I asked as his dick ‘entered’ me. That’s all I’ve got, he said.” She has a girlfriend: “The first woman put her head between my legs and the complete sin, the absolute moment of sex came back and I was all in one piece coming apart. I was willing to sacrifice all for that moment.”
'She publishes a book of poetry, A Fresh Young Voice from the Plains (1981), and throws a party at her publisher’s loft, where her friends found her discomfort amusing: “How’re you doing, Eileen? [Ted] put this faggy little turn on ‘Eileen,’ like it was a made-up name, something I’m pretending to be. It sounded right.” She works at Little, Brown in Boston, a position “underpaid but prestigious,” sneaking poems on her electric typewriter. She lives in the East Village on $250 a month, and friends offer her drinks, drugs, and cigarettes, but she is too embarrassed to ask for a steak: “I was thirty-one years old and it was too humiliating to admit I wanted food.”
'She attends a kid’s birthday party and realizes she is the only adult who expects to get fed: “Kids’ parties were a spectator sport, and that any real adult would have known to eat before they came.” She recounts her sexual escapades to Jimmy Schuyler, her part-time employer in the Chelsea Hotel who paid her to make him French toast. How she has sex with women who are cruel, who are younger, who are involved with other people. How having an affair is “a gorgeous grey feeling.” She recounts what it’s like to have sex with another Catholic: “I loved the moment when Mary said should we go to a hotel. She kind of snickered like a dirty girl. I was glad I was not with a complete sophisticate.”
'Eileen is a mess, Chelsea Girls is a mess, and I was a mess when I read it. My writing meaning nothing and everything: “Wet words on soft limp paper. Holy Holy Holy.” I loved every one of Myles’s sentences; I couldn’t get enough. I could be like her, this fictional nonfiction character—this mild sort of fuckup—if I wanted to be. “There would be such a future because something would happen to me. Soon. I was sure of that.”
The Rumpus interview with Eileen Myles, April 28, 2011: “It’s a little hard, because I don’t want to be stuck, I don’t want to give the copyright to someone that I’m uncomfortable with. So a number of people have asked to publish Chelsea Girls, and what I keep waiting for is a publisher that I’m excited about. That was the plan with this book Inferno: A Poet’s Novel, but I’m always too weird. With fiction I’ve always had agents who are always like, ‘Of course you’ll be able to sell this book!’ And then people are so weird about my work. With Chelsea Girls it was like, ‘These stories just kinda crumble, they don’t, you know … arc.’ Or, ‘They kind of deteriorate.’ And I was like, Yes! Yes. I’ve had a few editors in the mainstream who have been interested. They’ll say to me—and this is even in the nineties when I had published a lot of books—they’d say, ‘We’ll have to work very closely with you because it’s a first book.’ It’s like, you’re kidding. So what I felt time and again is what I’m being told is they’re going to help me fix my work. Fix that bad English. Make those stories pop at the end.”'-- Rachel Hurn, The Paris Review
Ecco
'Eileen Myles has an incredible gift for nailing down a moment, or for that matter, a sweep of years. Each image is carefully chosen and tacked into place, and what rises is the edifice of a life. The metaphor is probably too static. Myles's prose is exhilarating even at its bleakest, it's full of breathless speed. There's plenty that is bleak here--a sad alcoholic father who dies before his daugher's eyes; an awful, floundering gang-rape; poverty, drugs, booze, ambition thwarted and bitterly fulfilled. It's the great American sadness, and it would be unbearable if Myles didn't write with such wit, elegance, and an utter lack of self-pity. The writer that comes to mind is Henry Miller, but a Henry Miller who didn't hate women.'-- A Customer
Excerpt
Robin
Right away, I’d like to separate this Robin from all the other Robins you or I have ever known. This Robin I am about to tell you about is not someone that any of us would know. She is somebody I found and I would like to tell her secret.
I call her Robin because she is red and black and angular and resembles a bird in her speed and in her cruelty. I fell in love with her briefly, last year. I’m just not in love with her anymore but there’s this residue.
She was sort of a famous junkie, which I thought was pretty exotic, never having been particularly involved with heroin, having had a taste here and there – I was at an art event a couple of years ago and a friend dragged me to the dinner table afterwards and Robin entertained our end of the table with a story about how she had been busted for dealing dope, but instead of going to jail she informed on somebody else. She knew that she would die in jail, she knew she couldn’t take it. I was appalled and thrilled by her coldness. She spoke carefully, slowly, halting, choosing her words... how is it that junkies talk, very ornate, piercing and hollow and obviously this girl was a prince. A dead one. She smelled of flowers, she smiled at me when she got up to leave. I’m so glad you’re here she said intensely like I was the only soul in the room, or a soul who had a soul like hers.
I knew Robin had a girlfriend. Historically, they were kind of merged. My friends who used to do heroin said Robin ‘n Babe as if it were one word. Babe played in a band, played ‘til all the band members were so strung out that they were no band. By then Robin n’ Babe were an item so they teamed up and Robin sold drugs and Babe did them and they held sort of an elite junkie salon for a few years. Robin knew everyone in New York. Everyone on that trendy glamour junkie circuit. She wanted to write, had been doing so for years. In notebooks, in between experiences I guess. I think I had what Robin wanted and vice versa.
One day I was in her apartment and I found myself touching her leg. Her apartment was nice. Actually it was Babe’s. It was hard to unravel where one stopped and the other began – It was Babe’s bombed-out junkie rock star haven and Robin moved in when Babe kicked Lulu, the old girlfriend, out. Lulu died of AIDS. She would up hooking on 3rd Avenue after they kicked her out of the band because she was so bad. The lives of drunks and druggies is such a treacherous moral landscape with avalanches and peaks and nasty pitfalls. Robin moved in and cleaned house, eventually at some point of successful drug dealing had extensive carpentry work done, the apartment had modernesque divides, shelves for aeons of rock star clothes and shoes, millions of records and Robin’s little dealing room lined with scales and books. There she sat with her extraordinary stark white-face, a weirdly shaped skull, kind of cubist and long, with ravenish black hair. I adored her because she was a masque. This, combined with her sensibility, literary and scrupulous, made her essentially Aquarian to me, an endless revolving door.
Just before I put my hand on her leg I asked her about her and Babe. We’re roommates she said in her voice that was of the air, tentative yet treacherous. Actually, she leaned forward stretching her arms down to her pointed toes. “I don’t really know. We don’t really talk about it. Babe is not disposed to discuss anything so abstract as our relationship. She is not...” She sighed, thinking the better of continuing. “I don’t know what she’s doing.” “Honesty,” her face telegraphed. Robin had a deep morality of which she never spoke, but she communicated it’s breadth and its depth, by her protective pauses. You knew she was a good person because she held back at moments of deepest revelation. She did not spill, and I always felt that to push her a bit would be sloppy and expose my own lack of a system to conduct.
So I put my hand on this woman who smelled so good. her fragrance was coming my way. When we smell a person’s perfume we think that we’re smelling their essence, their identity somehow. The body has to be there for the perfume to stick to, but when they’re gone it’s the perfume that we know. I’ve forgotten its name. I asked her once.
Some kind of sexy thirties jazz was playing on the stereo. I knew I was in her house now, not Babe’s. The design was hers, but the ornaments were Babe’s. Babe’s paintings and the guitars and record collection. She had made a home for Babe, kind of a mother or a wife. I found that so hot to discover an ex- heroin dealer in the middle of the art world who was really a good woman, once I told her that – I couldn’t believe how hokey it sounded and by her silence I knew she horrified. I bet she wanted to break the silence of our affair just to tell Babe some of the stupid things I said.
Okay well if this is alright I put my hand on her leg. It seemed seductive enough. I’m really attracted to you I said. The feeling is mutual she replied. Soon we were half-dancing half making out and it was really hot, I mean she had a hard desperate mouth, her hands were up my shirt and I was feeling her ass. All my instincts were on target in the particular way I felt like a bow and arrow notched, then release.
Soon we were on the bed, ripping our pants off and this was when I began to feel in the middle of their relationship because you knew you were going wild in the precise same place where a couple woke each morning and looked at that painting, Babe’s.
I think this is going to be a problem she said. She got up and sat on the chair, lit up a cigarette. A move I regard as “womanning” me – I’ve felt it before. It’s the gesture of a torn, or badly married, man.
Well, are you going to tell Babe. Yes, I’m quite certain that we are due to have a conversation about this, among other things. She bit each syllable as she spoke. Robin had to go to work, she was a cook, a neat transformation for a dealer, though actually she was a cook first, that’s how she started dealing drugs. Cooking in all of Ricky Mountain’s restaurants. Even sold him the drugs he’d OD’d on the legend says, though Robin says it’s not true. And she was the one who told me the legend. Someone else got him those. It was weird she said to have your boss coming in the kitchen to buy from you. They always came to me, she said of her connections. It was never something I decided to do. They knew I could help them, she said.
So she went to work, pretty wonderful, all vulnerable and pink. The pretty Robin. One of many. I guess I went home. I went running down in the
park by the East River. I needed to stretch out my feelings that were really making me crazy all furled & unfurled.
We had a date the next day at 4. I don’t know how I tolerated my home, I think I was working or something, some piece of writing, but I stopped at three to let feeling build, and then it was 4:15, 4:30 I was out of my mind. Quarter of 5 she called. Where are you? Well I’m out doing a few errands. It took a little longer than I thought. Are you coming over? Well I had thought I would still do that, but it is pretty late. She was almost needling me off the phone. Yeah, c’mon I said. Up the stairs came this angry woman who I sometimes thought resembled Elizabeth Taylor or Keith Richards and sometimes when she was really nice, Donovan. Hello, I said, holding the door. I was no longer in fun-affair with vulnerable married woman. In one day that was already over. She sat in her white jacket on the small orange couch. Do you want a drink? I had automatically stored exactly what she had served me from her refrigerator the day before. I was glad she said no because I would have been ashamed to reveal what a copy-cat I was. Raspberry Soho Cola. Your furniture is not very comfortable she said.
I feel nervous I confided nervously teetering over the counter that faced the itchy couch. “Why do you feel nervous, would it make you feel better to tell me?” These utterances thundered like the I Ching. What a jerk I am. I never wanted to go to hell, but I could date the devil. “I feel funny.” Do you want to go up on the roof I asked. No I don’t. Why would I want to go up on the roof? This is awful I have invited a wolf into my home. I went over and started knocking into, touching, kissing the wolf. It was the only thing I could think of doing. C’mere get up I huskily growled. Where are we going she whispered. Tamed.
(cont.)
Eileen Myles reads 'An American Poem'
Eileen Myles reads 'My Revolution'
Trailer: Eileen Myles's 'Inferno (a poet's novel)'
_______________
Susan Howe: I think you mentioned Bill Berkson’s workshop in New York —
Bernadette Mayer: It was my first connection with any other poets, except for the fact that I had known Vito Acconci since I was about fifteen years old, and he was devoted to becoming a writer. That enabled me to really think about that as a possible thing to do. He was more than devoted to it, I suppose. He was obsessed. He was really the first connection to the outside world. Then, in Bill’s workshop I met a lot of the people who are now considered to be the New York School of poets. They were the first poets that I ever talked to. It was a great workshop. Bill would bring in the complete works of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, and he would do wonderful things with them like pile them up side by side and say “Look how high Ezra Pound’s pile is and look how short T. S. Eliot’s pile is!” Bill was very eloquent and inspiring. I was in that workshop about a year or two before I started doing 0 to 9.
Howe: Was Vito in that workshop too?
Mayer: Well in the early years, Vito was a devoted writer. He didn’t actually think about conceptual art until towards the end of the last issue of 0 to 9, which was full of the works of Robert Smithson and many of the conceptual artists who were not well known at the time, and who had never published in magazines before. We broke the bank publishing that issue because it was full of illustrations. Not only could we no longer afford to publish the magazine as a result, but Vito decided as a result of that issue he wanted to go into that world, and he was very adamant about no longer writing. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. So then when we stopped publishing the magazine I began to think about it and I inadvertently started to write Moving. And after I finished Moving I realized I really still wanted to write, and not try to be an artist.
Howe: I would say that the conceptual artists brought your work a lot of strength, though. I mean, there’s a kind of experimenting going on in it.
Mayer: Well, there was also a rigorous kind of argumentation that was going on all that time that was really forcing everyone to think a little bit too hard. It wasn’t easy to defend writing at that point in time.
Howe: The two writers who, to me, it’s almost as if they were your parents in literature, would be, I assume, Gertrude Stein and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Mayer: What a couple! I suppose I could talk about them at once and in the same way, in the sense that here all these sentences that were endlessly interesting to me, both of those completely, two completely different kinds of sentences, from which I could lay them out side by side and tell you how I learned to write by just observing the sentences of Gertrude Stein next to the sentences of Nathaniel Hawthorne. I feel an affinity to those writers beyond that, almost in a mystical sense — although it’s “not okay” to talk about Gertrude Stein anymore, you know? She’s too famous now. But we can still speak of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Howe: You seem more closed talking in an interview than you do in some work you do, in diary work that you’ve done or dream work that you’ve done. Do you find the interview situation unpleasant?
Mayer: [Laughs.] I guess it’s just a self-protective feeling. One doesn’t want to particularly have a personality in an interview. Then again, the other thing that happens is, in writing, where it’s between you and the writing, and you can make great leaps. Those leaps and that ability to take the thing higher, a little bit higher, enables you to approximate the truth better. It relates to critical writing, too, because in discursive writing and in discursive speaking, then one feels that the truth is fleeting much more so. You always feel that you’ve possibly said the wrong thing. [Laughs.] It’s a moral attitude.
Station Hill Press
'Bernadette Mayer is among the most influential American poets of the late 20th century and the present, and much of that influence is based on her early books, previously available only in fragmentary form. As a Brooklyn high school student at the beginning of the 1960s, Mayer began writing with an embodied directness and resource belying her youth. Over the next two decades, this precocious start would culminate in a body of writing extraordinary in its range and impact. Even in a New York milieu given to radical practice—as evidenced in the journal 0 TO 9 that she co-edited in the late '60s—these books in their collective force represent an explosion of poetic forms and investigation as profound and sustained as any in contemporary poetry. The poems—some short, some book-length, written in the city as well as the country—are irreverent and sacred, jocular and aching, gentle and tough, erotic and reflective, rigorously fashioned and off the cuff—a poetic skill, intelligence and generosity scaling the heights.' -- Station Hill Press
Excerpt
from Moving
Bernadette Mayer 'Eve of Easter'
Free Verse: Bernadette Mayer
Bernadette Mayer 'New House Poem'
_______________
'You never quite realize what Lynne Tillman’s done until it’s too late. She takes formal adventures in flavors of novels that had never before welcomed them. She carefully embeds details deep in her texts that others would dutifully (and dully) trot out up front. She crafts what feels like one distinctive, coherent fictional reality without explicitly connecting any of her long-form stories to one another. Published over two decades, her five novels so far build and explore what I call the “Tillmanverse” through the eyes and ears of worldly, culturally keen women (and one man), shapen or misshapen by their undeniable compulsions, obscure fixations, and grimly complex senses of humor.
'The travel bug bites Motion Sickness’ unnamed American heroine harder, so much harder that she never stops traveling — indeed, barely pauses in any one place — rendering normal whatever “motion sickness” she suffers. This twitchy peripateticism offers Tillman the chance to structure the novel both in fragments and geographically: you read a shard of narrative in Paris, then one in Istanbul, then one in Agia Galini, then one in Amsterdam, then another in Istanbul, and so on. The protagonist’s financial support? A bit of savings and a small loan from Mom — no wandering aristocrat, she. Her cultural armory? Copies of The Interpretation of Dreams, The Quiet American, and My Gun is Quick, and a love of Chantal Akerman and Luis Buñuel.
'Despite her intriguing taste in books and films and merciless drive toward perpetual flight, this woman reveals remarkably little about herself. Yes, we’ve all read narrators who do and say much while concealing even more, but Tillman somehow casts aside even our standard desire to get further into her interior. A swirl of secondary characters, almost all compulsive travelers with a tendency to turn up in several different nations, offers a distraction: our heroine helps an aged eccentric assemble her memoirs, signs on to a tour of aggressive sightseeing with a pair of English brothers, drinks with an ill-fated ex-cop, separately encounters a Buddhist American single mother and her runaway husband, and falls for a Yugoslavian who argues, with increasing strenuousness, for the melancholic weight of history that supposedly hunches all Europeans.
'But does this supporting cast counterbalance the failure to probe of the narrator’s deeper character, or do the countless, always-developing nuances of her various relationships with them constitute her deeper character? Haunting cafés with one, momentarily shacking up in a rented room with another, writing postcards to many others but tearing most of them up — these actions, and nothing else, could prove enough to make a human being. “In a sociology course I took the professor said that what we call personality doesn’t exist except in relation to others,” Tillman, with an uncharacteristic explicitness, has her protagonist say toward the book’s end.'-- Colin Marshall, The Millions
Red Lemonade
'For the narrator of Motion Sickness, life is an unguided tour. Adrift in Europe, she improvises a life and a self. In London, she's befriended by an expatriate American Buddhist and her mysterious husband, or may or may not be stalking her. In Paris, she shacks up with Arlette, an art historian obsessed with Velazquez;s painting "Las Meinas." In Amsterdam, she teams up with a Belgian friend, who is studying prostitutes, and she tours Italy with deeply mismatched English brothers. And, as with an epic journey, the true trajectory is inwards, ever inwards, into her own dreams and desires... '-- Red Lemonade
Excerpt
There's a message at the desk which Pradip hands me absentmindedly. He's got headphones on. The small stud in his left ear is a new addition: He's reading an Indian movie magazine which his cousin brought back from New Delhi. He's laughing. I tell him I like fanzines. This one's mad, he says, really mad. I can borrow it when he's through. The message is from Alfred and Paul, They want to see a movie tomorrow night, at least Paul does, after dinner.
No one's ever in the hallway down below. People are in or out. I'd like to watch them spring from their rooms simultaneously. I never see any of them, or hardly ever hear telltale noises. No arguments. No grunts. No farts. I don't go to breakfast anymore. The chambermaid has been here, I see traces of her neatening touch. I jump on the bed and rustle the spread. I don't like tidy rooms. They reek of isolation. Neat beds, coffins and death. I'm glad I'm not married to my associations or forced to announce them in public. I might be set in stocks for them, socially humiliated. Maybe I am married to my associations and can never get a divorce. Jessica tells me that one of the worst things that can happen to an English person is to be embarrassed. It means something else here, she says. We can't possibly understand it.
In another world bloodhounds might be trained to sniff out humiliating episodes, devastating scenes. Or maybe that's how analysts are seen. This sniffing-?out-?the-?married-?man business that I ought to have done, according to Sarah, if I'd had the nose for it. With the machine called the simulator, Zoran would've been revealed in no time. Some police departments in the States use the simulator. It's a computer that shows movies and slides of crimes about to happen. The viewer, a cop, is hooked up to the machine and to a heart monitor which measures the cop's responses. As the cop's pulse rate goes up, the slides, chosen by the computer from a bank of images, display more threatening scenes. The pulse goes up. The heart doesn't lie. It can't be controlled. What you think you should feel is different from what you do feel.
It's in your body. The enemy within. The racist. The sexist. The bully. The selfish baby. Greedy miserable feelings can't be hidden or contained. The reporter Fowler says of his loss of the Vietnamese woman to the quiet American: “It was as though she were being taken away from me by a nation rather than by a man.”
I can't ask Alfred or Paul about embarrassment, though I'd like to. I might just wait until one of them is embarrassed. But how could I tell? If embarrassment is such an awful experience, their defenses must be powerful and subtle and I would never be able to discern telltale marks that another English person could easily recognize. Alfred hems and haws through dinner. Maybe I have embarrassed him. Or perhaps I ought to be embarrassed by something I've done. Something I will never understand. Finally, after three glasses of wine, I ask Alfred, What embarrasses you most? His cheeks blush pink. Paul clears his throat and answers for him, Direct questions.
Alfred leaves us without saying where he's going, just saunters vaguely into the night. To his girlfriend's fat, I suppose. Paul and I are going to see a revival of A Place in the Sun, with Monty and Liz. I don't know if I've ever seen it except on TV. Paul is delighted to view it with an American. It's based, he tells me, on Dreiser's An American Tragedy. l could tell him that I've read the novel. That might embarrass him. Instead I bear up under the weight of being a native informant. There's an amazing shot in the movie, when the boss's poor relation, Monty Clift, is seducing the poor factory worker, Shelley Winters. The radio is on the windowsill, romantic music's playing. Shelley and Monty are inside her dreary bedroom. Outside, the camera moves slowly, sinuously, along the bushes, rustling the leaves, heading toward the house and the open window. Behind the open window are Shelley and Monty. The camera settles on the radio which sits on the windowsill. The tune's poignant, melancholy, the soundtrack for a still and hot night. Shelley is being undone by Monty, factory worker seduced by factory owner's poor relation. The tragedy is set in motion and all will be lost.
Paul compares that camera movement, full of longing and prohibited desire, with what we both agree is the single most disturbing shot in movies. In Hitchcock's Frenzy the camera backs down the stairs in one continuous movement as the pervert is about to torture and kill yet another woman behind a closed door. The camera tracks down the stairs, pulling away from the closed door, out the front door, into the street, to reveal Covent Garden—when it was still a fruit and vegetable market—in all its ordinariness. A woman is being raped and murdered. The camera keeps moving back until the murderous space disappears into daily life. Paul and I walk to the tube. The train lurches forward more quietly than subways taking off in New York. I keep thinking about the camera moving toward the window, evoking longing, and tracking away from the door, evincing horror.
Sylvie running down the stairs after learning that Sal was murdered, the camera pulling back until she's out of sight. Out of sight and out of mind. It's funny about longing. Or how longing and horror sometimes meet inside oneself, in a private Dracula.
Vampirish need. When longing's absent, when I feel no specific desire for anything, anything I can name, I vacillate, feel determined, content or empty. With it inside me, a clenched baby's fist below my heart, probably in the neighborhood of the solar plexus, uneasiness surges through my body and I'm not sure where to look, what to eat, what to do. Alfred appeals to me. And fills me with a sort of low-?key horror. Since he has a girlfriend, and has had for months, maybe even since before we were in the hill towns, I'm assured that he can do it, but he's unavailable. I might like to lead him astray. Or be led astray. Hideous, ungracious longing. It would be better and more simple to push down treacherous desire, like swallowing poison or the awful truth. If Alfred were in front of me, I might permit myself a betrayal, my hand might touch the back of his neck, or I might permit myself a betrayal that would go no further than one thought traveling to another. Visitors can do that with impunity.
Lynne Tillman reading at the Poetry Project
Lynne Tillman on Bookworm [2003]
Reading by Lynne Tillman, 5.16.14
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p.s. Hey. I only realized this morning that that the Eileen Myles reprint doesn't come out until the fall, oops, but I recommend that you get the jump and pre-order it. ** James, Oh, that's just my antsy methodology, but there's value in letting things grow in your head for a while first, for absolutely sure. I have a pretty good imagination, but I don't think I would even need it to imagine that wrecking yards are scary at night. ** David Ehrenstein, Ha ha, I knew someone was going to add "Boys". Someone pointed out that New Yorker referencing me thing yesterday. That's nice. Thank you very much for alerting me. Have you watched 'Cucumber'? I haven't. ** H, I want that butterfly too. My finger was a borderline trigger finger when it found the Purchase button. A little duck! So nice. There's a pigeon building its nest on my window sill at this very moment. Now I have to find a different one to be my smoking window. ** Bill, I agree. I half-thought of asking Zac if he was into making the all-animal, all-puppet horror movie equivalent of Haynes's 'Superstar'. I must have watched the cat hand puppet video a dozen times. Terrifying. Oh, I can see the puppetry interest backgrounding in your videos now that you mention it. Huh, that's fascinating. I am liking this apartment. I has the internal, practical problems that come with a very old apartment, but not to a dissuading degree yet. The neighborhood is taking some getting used to. It's cool, don't get me wrong, but it's very touristy, which is disconcerting after living in the 10th, which tourists don't care about or visit. But, yeah, I like being here increasingly. ** Steevee, It's true. But I wonder if there aren't a slew of Japanese robot pet horror movies that haven't gotten international distribution. I just read yesterday how Tyler tweeted that OF is dead. No one seems to believe him, though. Holy crap: that DMX thing, that's hilarious. Thanks! ** _Black_Acrylic, Ghost Pet had a little something extra. Not only its great sense of humor. ** Hunter, Hi! Glad you came back! That's really, really nice and very kind of you to say. Thank you very much. Do you write yourself? Or ... What do you do and/or see yourself doing with your talents, if you don't mind saying? It's cool to get to talk to you too. ** Misanthrope, Not me, no. God knows where your false memories come from. It's the question all of America would be asking were most of America capable of deep inquisitiveness. Subway's bread is the boulangerie equivalent of those tiny sponge balls that you put in water and they magically expand into bunny rabbit shapes. The only fast food chain restaurant I eat at over here is Paris's one Chipotle. Loyalty is very important. Interesting phobia, especially given your addiction to fisting twinks. ** Sypha, The cat hand puppet is insane and rules. To be the weirdest person in a group is a status that everyone should always aspire to. No, I haven't gotten your new book yet, shit, thank you for reminding me. This new apartment has done a temporary number on many of my usual skills. Well, hopefully your co-workers will begin treating you as the superior being that you are, if they don't already, right? I think that's a logical outcome. ** Cal Graves, Hey ho hey ho, Cal. Yeah, the orphaned gif :( What's that saying, ... 'Die young, stay pretty.' I know, the robot butterfly, I hear you. Uh, I don't know if 'Victims' was hard to find. I doubt it was in, like, Barnes & Noble, but then I bet the reprinted version isn't either. I don't get the non-liking of anime either, but I don't get most things, I guess. I know a lot of people think their storylines are 'incoherent' as opposed to more exciting and less rote, which is the truth of the matter. I'm on the 'Fullmetal Alchemist' search, thank you! And 'Angel Beats'! Yum, coolness, thank you. Poems' foundations are the best. Awesome. Are you building upon yours yet? The-worst-is-when-your-lighter-dies-and-you-think-oh-I'll-use-the-stove-until-you-remember-that-you-have-an-electric-stove-like-I-do-ly, Dennis ** Fin. All of the books up there are very well worth your time, I guarantee you. See you tomorrow.