----
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'I wanted to write with a total continuity and total disjunction since I experienced the world (and myself) as continuous and infinity divided. That was my ambition for writing. Why should a work of literature be organized by one pattern of engagement? Why should a "position" be maintained regarding the size of the gaps between units of meaning? To describe how the world is organized may be the same as organizing the world. I wanted the pleasures and politics of the fragment and the pleasures and politics of story, gossip, fable and case history; the randomness of chance and a sense of inevitability; sincerity while using appropriation and pastiche. When Barrett Watten said about Jack the Modernist, "You have your cake and eat it too," I took it as a great compliment, as if my intention spoke through the book.'-- Robert Gluck
'You heard of Robert Glück? You should have. He basically started this thing called the “New Narrative” which started in the late 70s and is not so easily defined. Some say it’s gossipy but I think they miss the point with that word. It definitely is locked to sex and to the body and establishing a relationship with the reader. Of course, all books must establish a relationship with the reader in order to succeed,but maybe think of New Narrative as if the writing wants to establish a sexual relationship with the reader. This writing wants to fuck you and then tell all of its friends about what it was like fucking you. So, this is Robert Glück’s thing.'-- Vice Magazine
'Robert Glück is the author of the novels Margery Kempe (Serpent's Tail, 1994), Jack the Modernist (SeaHorse Press, 1985; Serpent's Tail, 1995), and three collections of prose and poetry: Reader (Lapis Press, 1989), Elements of a Coffee Service (Four Seasons Foundation, 1983), and Denny Smith (Clear Cut Press, 2004). He lives in San Francisco and teaches at San Francisco State University, where he is an editor of the online journal Narrativity. Through his own writing and a workshop he taught at San Francisco's Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center in the 1980s, Glück helped shape what became known as "New Narrative," a movement that included his friends and colleagues Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Kevin Killian, and Dodie Bellamy.'-- Clear Cut Press
11/16/2015 --- Robert Gluck
Robert Gluck « 851 in Exile
Robert Glück « The Other Fabulous Reading Series
Excited & Lonely: The 'Jack the Modernist' Website
'Shocks of Recognition: Robert Gluck's Scandalous Narratives'
RG's 'Experimental Writer Gets Sucked Off in a Field'
RG's 'Long Note on New Narrative'
RG interviewed @ Lodestar Quarterly
RG @ Project for Innovative Poetry
Audio: RG's readings @ PennSound
Buy Robert Gluck's books
Robert Gluck @ Facebook
![]()
There are contradictory reasons when I use "real" people in my work, and the contradictions comfort me. Any literary practice should, I think, derive from contradictory sources and motives... I name names to evoke the already-known, to make writing co-extend with the world and history, and to examine the fiction of personality, as well as the fiction of the word.... I propose self-community-story as a tonic for the loss of human scale; by naming self-community-story I participate in their disintegration, their progress from invisibility to something to be named and manipulated—to be reintegrated later in a new context, in a third term that history must provide.
Prolonged scrutiny can become an expenditure of self, a potlatch of self. I've come to experience the unreeling of interiority and sexual disclosure as such a loss, and also part of a historical trajectory. It's a writing activity that privileges the aggression of naming—an ongoing colonization of self into one's own language. Once something is named, you are in relation to it. Name the disease to cure it.
We want to see a story as we see other representations: being hiding behind appearance—that is, hiding and revealing the body. But the use of real names [in my work] reorders connections and disjunctions. I do mean fragmentation. I don't want to make the predictable distinction between story and fragmented writing. Naming names creates an open form that co-extends with the world. In a postmodern switch, it applies the open form of modernism to content by putting quote marks around the entire story, turning the story into a fragment, an example of a story. The story floats—as gossip does—between the lives of the people who are its characters, and the lives of its readers (in that thorny field of reader/writer dynamics). The problem of figure and ground becomes a social one, and some of what is existential in the content is subtracted and reintegrated in the relation between reader and writer.
... Using real names provides a relation between the writer and myself that carries some risk, like performance art. What I witness is always the same: any story hides and then reveals the body.
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'Set in the early 1980s, Robert Gluck's first novel, Jack the Modernist, has become a classic of postmodern gay fiction. Bob is excited and lonely. He meets and pursues the elusive Jack, a director who is able to transform others without altering himself. Bob goes to the baths, gossips on the phone, goes to a bar, thinks about werewolves, has an orgasm, and discovers a number of truths about Jack A paean to love and obsession, Gluck's novel explores the everyday in a language that is both intimate and lush.'-- Serpents Tail
'In this book self-exploration is so precise it becomes impersonal.'-- William Burroughs
'Robert Glück, in writing the story of Bob and Jack, writes about two individuals whose on-again, off-again affair rivets the attention of the reader. This postmodernist work requires readerly effort, but we are rewarded. Jack the Modernist makes gay people complicated, instead of the cartoons we usually are in fiction. Glück surprised me on every page with his language and his perceptions, his humor and his ironies. Do I want to be Bob? Or Jack? No. But I want the taut energy that leaps off the page whenever they appear.'-- John Treat
'Robert Gluck has found a new way of making fiction passionate. This novel is a strange, exhilarating love story rich with invention and observation.' -- Edmund White
One sleepless night my mother said, 'Think about happy things.' She sat down on the edge of my bed with a tired exhaling sound. That sigh added to my list of worries-- I did not want to outlive her. She was anxious to get away, to enjoy herself, word out after a day of children, fearing the expense of a demand for intimacy. My sole drawing card was misery. Happy things? I pressed her-- what specifically did she have in mind? Apparently she also drew a blank (there I felt we were united) because she finally replied Mickey Mouse. I thought the answer dismissive and contemptible-- did she think I was going to trade real misery for a cartoon mouse? I loved her more than anyone and I assumed she loved me that way: I still want her love, it's a design in me as structural as grain in wood, an imprimatur. Didn't she know me at all? If she didn't know me, who did? She was treating me like an abstract child: I was set adrift.
*
Oh I'm the guy they call
Little Mickey Mouse.
Got my sweetie down
In the chicken house:
Neither fat nor skinny
She's the horses' whinny,
She's my little Minnie Mouse--
So far so good; a ballad in Mouse falsetto. With a few deft strokes Mickey proposes as desirability itself the beauteous Minnie, Beatrice to his Dante-- not fat not, skinny, Mickey characterizes the shapely mouse (in daring leap from mouse to horse) as a whinny, a low and gentle neigh, perhaps a call or greeting that presages further developments in the song. These terms of respect and admiration do not mask the possessive nature of Mickey's attachment. Minnie is a sweetie that Mickey has 'got'; he sings, 'She's my little Minnie Mouse' (italics mine). We may condemn Mickey's patriarchal attitude toward women, or we may simply note the generic use of possessives in romantic ballads. But I would like to suggest a third interpretation: Mickey and Minnie are so meshed, so unified in their love that they literally do belong to each other and use the possessive with the same authority as, say, Tristan and Isolde. Mickey is not insensitive or unconscious but merely responds to a fact, indeed the central fact of his existence.
But to digress a moment: as I recall Mickey sings his tribute while steering a ship up a river. This ship captain has a strangely bucolic image bank, typified by chicken houses and horses. Perhaps Disney wanted to include many walks of life in the figure of Mickey in order that his experience appear 'universal'; perhaps Disney wanted to set the rapture of the Mouses' interior lives against the awkward social realism of their trades. But Mickey makes the boat toot and whistle, he transforms it into a wind and percussion instrument; the landscape is not unwilling, it can be pummeled and drawn out like taffy, trees shimmy and spasm, the banks of the river heave and convule with sympathetic vibrations. (The conventional French seventeenth century made a map of the land of love, La Carte de Tendre. My map includes Jack's apartment, Leadville, Colorado, and the Mouses' River and Farm.)
MICKEY: When it's feeding time
For the animals
They all howl and growl
Like the cannibals,
But I turn my heel
On the hen house squeal
When I hear my little Minnie--
MINNIE: Yooooo Hooooo
So Mickey and Minnie transcend the exigencies of commerce, which Mickey characterizes as the 'howl and growl' of cannibals (a racist image in keeping with Disney ideology). The whole getting and spending world weighs less than Minnie's call to love. In the figure of Mickey we recognize Count Mosca from The Charterhouse of Parma, a man whose informing quality is capability, an intelligent man who creates a brilliant career, yet comprehends that power is a bauble. As easily as a light finger on a chin pivots a head, passion turns him away from his past and present; he abandons them in a simple gesture towards happiness when he hears his love's preemptive Yooooo Hoooo. This is Minnie's first entrance-- how beautiful she is, with her eyelashes and stylish shoes. She shakes out her truck garden like a blanket; fertility. Now we see that Minnie is the root of Mickey's Georgics; and for Minnie speech is about rivers? Everything comes alive for them-- communication sails forth-- the world is at hand when Minnie Yooooo Hooooos in wild rapport.
*
Feel better? I lie back on my bed and let my breath out. There is not so much sensation as you might think, a subtle emphasis marks the borders of my body-- hands, feet, crotch and asshole more emphatic, more receptors, more expectation. I try to picture my dead self hosting the irrepressible life of worms and maggots but my own life returns as a shadow that only makes me more aware of feelings in inner mouth and tongue, my face pushing out, itchy skin above ribs, nipples like two pots gently stirred. Small pains and irritations begin to assert themselves, dull eyestrain and a throbbing above my right eye, itchy scalp. My right ball aches a bit. Lips and toes slightly prickly as if asleep. Soles of feet tingle and I hear/feel intestinal sounds like people moving around a house avoiding each other. I sort out the fretful noises-- bird, heater, parents, electrical-- before dismissing each as having nothing to do with me. I also feel/hear my pulse, my heart through my body as it continuously gulps mouthfuls of blood like a pious cannibal. Finally the high woodwind of empty room air arches between my ears. I wear hearing on the sides of my head. Does air have anything to do with me? Inhale. My first breath has the heavy lift of an airplane taking off. I try to locate some joy there but instead it is sluggish and unwilling-- my breath does not satisfy me. Could that be true? I find that if I contract my neck muscles I can follow a stream of breath past my face and throat into my lungs where it releases a sparkle of pleasure. Can that be true? The pleasure is akin to the tension of being drunk, the body reaching toward further intoxication, but the fealing is localized and after all, pretty faint. Still, there would be an accumulation. I let out my breath again and the pleasure remains, a tension in the form of a deep hum that takes place at the same level as my breathing only next to it.
----
*
p.s. Hey. The book spotlit up above is one you really, really should read if you haven't. It's one of the masterpieces of so-called New Narrative and way beyond. Think about it. You won't be sorry.
'I wanted to write with a total continuity and total disjunction since I experienced the world (and myself) as continuous and infinity divided. That was my ambition for writing. Why should a work of literature be organized by one pattern of engagement? Why should a "position" be maintained regarding the size of the gaps between units of meaning? To describe how the world is organized may be the same as organizing the world. I wanted the pleasures and politics of the fragment and the pleasures and politics of story, gossip, fable and case history; the randomness of chance and a sense of inevitability; sincerity while using appropriation and pastiche. When Barrett Watten said about Jack the Modernist, "You have your cake and eat it too," I took it as a great compliment, as if my intention spoke through the book.'-- Robert Gluck
'You heard of Robert Glück? You should have. He basically started this thing called the “New Narrative” which started in the late 70s and is not so easily defined. Some say it’s gossipy but I think they miss the point with that word. It definitely is locked to sex and to the body and establishing a relationship with the reader. Of course, all books must establish a relationship with the reader in order to succeed,but maybe think of New Narrative as if the writing wants to establish a sexual relationship with the reader. This writing wants to fuck you and then tell all of its friends about what it was like fucking you. So, this is Robert Glück’s thing.'-- Vice Magazine
'Robert Glück is the author of the novels Margery Kempe (Serpent's Tail, 1994), Jack the Modernist (SeaHorse Press, 1985; Serpent's Tail, 1995), and three collections of prose and poetry: Reader (Lapis Press, 1989), Elements of a Coffee Service (Four Seasons Foundation, 1983), and Denny Smith (Clear Cut Press, 2004). He lives in San Francisco and teaches at San Francisco State University, where he is an editor of the online journal Narrativity. Through his own writing and a workshop he taught at San Francisco's Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center in the 1980s, Glück helped shape what became known as "New Narrative," a movement that included his friends and colleagues Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Kevin Killian, and Dodie Bellamy.'-- Clear Cut Press
Media
11/16/2015 --- Robert Gluck
Robert Gluck « 851 in Exile
Robert Glück « The Other Fabulous Reading Series
Elsewhere
Excited & Lonely: The 'Jack the Modernist' Website
'Shocks of Recognition: Robert Gluck's Scandalous Narratives'
RG's 'Experimental Writer Gets Sucked Off in a Field'
RG's 'Long Note on New Narrative'
RG interviewed @ Lodestar Quarterly
RG @ Project for Innovative Poetry
Audio: RG's readings @ PennSound
Buy Robert Gluck's books
Robert Gluck @ Facebook
fromFame
by Robert Gluck
There are contradictory reasons when I use "real" people in my work, and the contradictions comfort me. Any literary practice should, I think, derive from contradictory sources and motives... I name names to evoke the already-known, to make writing co-extend with the world and history, and to examine the fiction of personality, as well as the fiction of the word.... I propose self-community-story as a tonic for the loss of human scale; by naming self-community-story I participate in their disintegration, their progress from invisibility to something to be named and manipulated—to be reintegrated later in a new context, in a third term that history must provide.
Prolonged scrutiny can become an expenditure of self, a potlatch of self. I've come to experience the unreeling of interiority and sexual disclosure as such a loss, and also part of a historical trajectory. It's a writing activity that privileges the aggression of naming—an ongoing colonization of self into one's own language. Once something is named, you are in relation to it. Name the disease to cure it.
We want to see a story as we see other representations: being hiding behind appearance—that is, hiding and revealing the body. But the use of real names [in my work] reorders connections and disjunctions. I do mean fragmentation. I don't want to make the predictable distinction between story and fragmented writing. Naming names creates an open form that co-extends with the world. In a postmodern switch, it applies the open form of modernism to content by putting quote marks around the entire story, turning the story into a fragment, an example of a story. The story floats—as gossip does—between the lives of the people who are its characters, and the lives of its readers (in that thorny field of reader/writer dynamics). The problem of figure and ground becomes a social one, and some of what is existential in the content is subtracted and reintegrated in the relation between reader and writer.
... Using real names provides a relation between the writer and myself that carries some risk, like performance art. What I witness is always the same: any story hides and then reveals the body.
Jack the Modernist
'Set in the early 1980s, Robert Gluck's first novel, Jack the Modernist, has become a classic of postmodern gay fiction. Bob is excited and lonely. He meets and pursues the elusive Jack, a director who is able to transform others without altering himself. Bob goes to the baths, gossips on the phone, goes to a bar, thinks about werewolves, has an orgasm, and discovers a number of truths about Jack A paean to love and obsession, Gluck's novel explores the everyday in a language that is both intimate and lush.'-- Serpents Tail'In this book self-exploration is so precise it becomes impersonal.'-- William Burroughs
'Robert Glück, in writing the story of Bob and Jack, writes about two individuals whose on-again, off-again affair rivets the attention of the reader. This postmodernist work requires readerly effort, but we are rewarded. Jack the Modernist makes gay people complicated, instead of the cartoons we usually are in fiction. Glück surprised me on every page with his language and his perceptions, his humor and his ironies. Do I want to be Bob? Or Jack? No. But I want the taut energy that leaps off the page whenever they appear.'-- John Treat
'Robert Gluck has found a new way of making fiction passionate. This novel is a strange, exhilarating love story rich with invention and observation.' -- Edmund White
3 excerpts
One sleepless night my mother said, 'Think about happy things.' She sat down on the edge of my bed with a tired exhaling sound. That sigh added to my list of worries-- I did not want to outlive her. She was anxious to get away, to enjoy herself, word out after a day of children, fearing the expense of a demand for intimacy. My sole drawing card was misery. Happy things? I pressed her-- what specifically did she have in mind? Apparently she also drew a blank (there I felt we were united) because she finally replied Mickey Mouse. I thought the answer dismissive and contemptible-- did she think I was going to trade real misery for a cartoon mouse? I loved her more than anyone and I assumed she loved me that way: I still want her love, it's a design in me as structural as grain in wood, an imprimatur. Didn't she know me at all? If she didn't know me, who did? She was treating me like an abstract child: I was set adrift.
*
Oh I'm the guy they call
Little Mickey Mouse.
Got my sweetie down
In the chicken house:
Neither fat nor skinny
She's the horses' whinny,
She's my little Minnie Mouse--
So far so good; a ballad in Mouse falsetto. With a few deft strokes Mickey proposes as desirability itself the beauteous Minnie, Beatrice to his Dante-- not fat not, skinny, Mickey characterizes the shapely mouse (in daring leap from mouse to horse) as a whinny, a low and gentle neigh, perhaps a call or greeting that presages further developments in the song. These terms of respect and admiration do not mask the possessive nature of Mickey's attachment. Minnie is a sweetie that Mickey has 'got'; he sings, 'She's my little Minnie Mouse' (italics mine). We may condemn Mickey's patriarchal attitude toward women, or we may simply note the generic use of possessives in romantic ballads. But I would like to suggest a third interpretation: Mickey and Minnie are so meshed, so unified in their love that they literally do belong to each other and use the possessive with the same authority as, say, Tristan and Isolde. Mickey is not insensitive or unconscious but merely responds to a fact, indeed the central fact of his existence.
But to digress a moment: as I recall Mickey sings his tribute while steering a ship up a river. This ship captain has a strangely bucolic image bank, typified by chicken houses and horses. Perhaps Disney wanted to include many walks of life in the figure of Mickey in order that his experience appear 'universal'; perhaps Disney wanted to set the rapture of the Mouses' interior lives against the awkward social realism of their trades. But Mickey makes the boat toot and whistle, he transforms it into a wind and percussion instrument; the landscape is not unwilling, it can be pummeled and drawn out like taffy, trees shimmy and spasm, the banks of the river heave and convule with sympathetic vibrations. (The conventional French seventeenth century made a map of the land of love, La Carte de Tendre. My map includes Jack's apartment, Leadville, Colorado, and the Mouses' River and Farm.)
MICKEY: When it's feeding time
For the animals
They all howl and growl
Like the cannibals,
But I turn my heel
On the hen house squeal
When I hear my little Minnie--
MINNIE: Yooooo Hooooo
So Mickey and Minnie transcend the exigencies of commerce, which Mickey characterizes as the 'howl and growl' of cannibals (a racist image in keeping with Disney ideology). The whole getting and spending world weighs less than Minnie's call to love. In the figure of Mickey we recognize Count Mosca from The Charterhouse of Parma, a man whose informing quality is capability, an intelligent man who creates a brilliant career, yet comprehends that power is a bauble. As easily as a light finger on a chin pivots a head, passion turns him away from his past and present; he abandons them in a simple gesture towards happiness when he hears his love's preemptive Yooooo Hoooo. This is Minnie's first entrance-- how beautiful she is, with her eyelashes and stylish shoes. She shakes out her truck garden like a blanket; fertility. Now we see that Minnie is the root of Mickey's Georgics; and for Minnie speech is about rivers? Everything comes alive for them-- communication sails forth-- the world is at hand when Minnie Yooooo Hooooos in wild rapport.
*
Feel better? I lie back on my bed and let my breath out. There is not so much sensation as you might think, a subtle emphasis marks the borders of my body-- hands, feet, crotch and asshole more emphatic, more receptors, more expectation. I try to picture my dead self hosting the irrepressible life of worms and maggots but my own life returns as a shadow that only makes me more aware of feelings in inner mouth and tongue, my face pushing out, itchy skin above ribs, nipples like two pots gently stirred. Small pains and irritations begin to assert themselves, dull eyestrain and a throbbing above my right eye, itchy scalp. My right ball aches a bit. Lips and toes slightly prickly as if asleep. Soles of feet tingle and I hear/feel intestinal sounds like people moving around a house avoiding each other. I sort out the fretful noises-- bird, heater, parents, electrical-- before dismissing each as having nothing to do with me. I also feel/hear my pulse, my heart through my body as it continuously gulps mouthfuls of blood like a pious cannibal. Finally the high woodwind of empty room air arches between my ears. I wear hearing on the sides of my head. Does air have anything to do with me? Inhale. My first breath has the heavy lift of an airplane taking off. I try to locate some joy there but instead it is sluggish and unwilling-- my breath does not satisfy me. Could that be true? I find that if I contract my neck muscles I can follow a stream of breath past my face and throat into my lungs where it releases a sparkle of pleasure. Can that be true? The pleasure is akin to the tension of being drunk, the body reaching toward further intoxication, but the fealing is localized and after all, pretty faint. Still, there would be an accumulation. I let out my breath again and the pleasure remains, a tension in the form of a deep hum that takes place at the same level as my breathing only next to it.
----
*
p.s. Hey. The book spotlit up above is one you really, really should read if you haven't. It's one of the masterpieces of so-called New Narrative and way beyond. Think about it. You won't be sorry.