Books
Films
Exhibits
Joshua Cohen
Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto
(Fugue State Press, 2007)
This book is a rant, one that goes on for 380 pages. It’s impossible, when discussing the rant as literature now, to escape the influence of Thomas Bernhard, who looms large in this book. The narrator of a much smaller book, William Gaddis’s Agapē Agape midrant on Bernhard’s Concrete addresses the problem of Bernhard:
Where the tissues, just get cold water on it stop the bleeding, you see? Scrape my wrist against this drawer corner tears the skin open blood all over the place it doesn’t hurt no, skin’s like parchment that’s the prednisone, turns the skin into dry old parchment tear it open with a feather that’s the prednisone, reach for a book reach for anything tear myself to pieces reaching for this book listen, you’ll see what I mean, opening page you’ll see what I mean, “From March to December” he says, “while I was having to take large quantities of prednisolone,” same thing as prednisone, “I assembled every possible book and article written by” you see what I mean? “and visited every possible and impossible library” this whole pile of books and papers here? “preparing myself with the most passionate seriousness for the task, which I had been dreading throughout the preceding winter, of writing” where am I here, yes, “a major work of impeccable scholarship. It had been my intention to devote the most careful study to all these books and articles and only then, having studied them with all the thoroughness the subject deserved, to begin writing my work, which I believed would leave far behind it and far beneath it everything else, both published and unpublished” you see what this is all about? “I had been planning it for ten years and had repeatedly failed to bring it to fruition,” but of course you don’t no, no that’s the whole point of it! It’s my opening page, he’s plagiarized my work right here in front of me before I’ve ever written it! (11–12)
The narrator of Concrete is of course writing on Mendelsohn; the narrator of Joshua Cohen’s book, a violin player named Laster, is speaking about a fictional composer named Schneidermann. (Prednisone, for what it’s worth, appears on p. 100 of Schneidermann.) One thinks past Agapē Agape to J R’s Edward Bast, another New York composer whose musical dreams keep getting shifted downwards by the world. Thematically, the Bernhard novel that leaps most quickly to mind is The Loser, a book about a talented musician friend misunderstood by the world, though stylistically this book is closer to Concrete. Laster, a violin player, has just played Schneidermann’s sole work, the titular violin concerto at Carnegie Hall; in lieu of the cadenza, he holds forth from the stage all night, a textual, rather than a musical, cadenza.
How does one escape the shadow of Bernhard? This doesn’t look like a Bernhard book: rather than a single long paragraph there are frequent breaks, often mid-sentence, which are given a triple indent. (A ragged right margin also makes this look slightly less like standard prose.) The indents seem to function as pauses for breath: most of these breaks appear mid-sentence, but the sentences run on and on, generally only reaching an end when they detour into rhetorical questions. Occasionally the indents move further in, an interesting choice for what is such an oral book: toward the end, when section breaks become more frequent, the margins shift more often, seeming less like prose and more like poetry. Though Bernhard’s books are deeply concerned with voice, they are not oral: they are written documents through and through, a writer attempting to explain something. Here, a speaker attempts to explain things; though there’s an exhortation to the audience at the beginning, we never hear from the audience, and one wonders, finally, if they exist at all. Carnegie Hall is, of course, available for rental: this might simply by a monomaniac’s indulgence.
One can’t help wondering, in a book like this, about the audience. The book takes as its subject the artist unjustly ignored; as a novel, it’s positioning itself similarly, in the tradition not only of Bernhard but also of Stanley Elkin, whose voices I can hear in this. Allusions to Henry Roth and perhaps J R also appear. I think also of Evan Dara’s two books, the first-person narration of which has a similar feel, though in those the perspective shifts seemlessly between characters; there’s no escape from Laster’s vice-like grip in this book. And the audience comes into play as well because the question of the survival of High Art – in the form of the classical tradition in music – is an immense part of the book. There’s a decided similarity in tone, if not in form, to the later David Markson novels, which stack up trivia about artists, ostensibly against oblivion. Schneidermann implicitly parallels the classical tradition to the survival of the Jews: it’s hard to know what to feel about that. The reader of this book is Cohen’s audience as much as the possibly non-existent audience in Carnegie Hall is Laster’s; one struggles to find a place to listen appreciatively while suspecting a certain amount of contempt. Maybe it’s not contempt: maybe it’s simply that the audience is by and large ignored. I wonder about that. I wonder as well about the narrative voice, which is, among other things, unlikeable: in an age when any other book is nearly instantly accessible, I wonder about the readers who have the temerity to persevere with such a voice. The audience is being challenged; Laster’s audience in the book don’t see fit to take up his challenge.
Writing about classical music in New York in 2007 is necessarily different from writing about classical music in Vienna when Bernhard was alive. I wonder, as well, about a young writer taking up an old man’s voice: while it works surprisingly well, it’s hard for the reader to get around the knowledge that this is very much an imagined past. (This might be the source of the repeated references to Thomas Taylor’s Hymns of Orpheus, which float behind this book.)
A parallel might be drawn between Schneidermann and James McCourt’s under-appreciated Now Voyagers, though that book was created under the shadow of Joyce rather than Bernhard and took as its subjects gays and the opera world in New York in the wake of AIDS rather than Jews and the symphonic after the Holocaust. The two books are constructed entirely differently: and McCourt’s is the work of an old man rather than a young one. But both attempt to reconstruct a world against oblivion; and neither of these books seems to have found its audience yet.
(source)
Jeremy M. Davies
Rose Alley
(Counterpath, 2009)
It’s a bit surprising to me how poorly Perec’s novels are read in this country. Everyone knows of A Void, at least by reputation, though few seem to have actually read it, or to have any idea of the reasons that Perec might have for using a lipogram in that book. There was a smattering of interest in the new edition of Life a User’s Manual, but one didn’t really sense that a lot of people were picking that up with the enthusiasm it deserves; it’s a book that people seem afraid of, which is unjust. One almost never hears anything about W, maybe because it was out of print in English for a while, though it’s an astonishingly powerful book. The book of Perec’s that one sees most often, around New York at least, is Species of Spaces, maybe because it was taken up by architects. But it’s hard to point to much recent American fiction (with the obvious exclusion of Harry Mathews) that bears the influence of Perec, which is odd: the short shelf of his work would seem to be a cookbook full of recipes for potential books.
This, however, is an extremely Perec-y novel, down to its index of locations, people, and works of art; I will admit that I am a sucker for a novel with an index. (Stanley Crawford has also played with that form, in Some Instructions, and of course there’s The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium.) The novel is based around a failed film shot in Paris in 1969; the film, also to be titled Rose Alley, after the spot in London where John Dryden was attacked in 1679 by thugs who may have been hired by the libertine John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, who was upset with Dryden’s verse.
A description of an earlier film by the director and screenwriter of Rose Alley (the film) seems like it could easily describe how Rose Alley (the book) works:
This was a collection of miniatures, thirteen still lifes in thirteen continuous shots, ninety seconds in duration each. An elaborate system of eleven predetermined categories, subcategories, and corresponding lists of objects matching each classification – either likely, unlikely, invented, or inconceivable – was coauthored by Krause and Wexler. (p. 8)
The book has thirteen chapters, all but one based around a character associated with the film; while each chapter takes off from a character, there is no dialogue, and no sense that any action is happening in real time, and stories tend to go backwards (and occasionally forwards) in time. Each chapter is structured around a character, but not in the voice of the character. The reader has the feeling that there’s some logic structuring these episodes, but what, exactly, that logic might be is never entirely clear. One thinks, of course, of Raymond Roussel, who came up with this method of structuring a book (I presume it’s not an accident that “Rose Alley” sounds like “Roussel-y”; other echoes of Roussel can be found through the text) and his followers: there are echoes of the organization of Life a User’s Manual and especially Mathews’s Cigarettes. (Mathews blurbed the book; he also appears obliquely inside the book, when the screenwriter has a poem rejected by Locus Solus, the journal he edited with Ashbery, Koch, and Schuyler.
Chapter 12 is the work’s clinamen: titled “Poet Squab”, it tells the story of Dryden’s quarrel with Rochester through what seems to be collaged text. One function of the book’s index is here revealed: some sources can be gleaned from entries such as “Burnet, Gilbert, 151 (qtd.)“: text from Burnet’s Life of Rochester appears on that page, though Burnet’s name does not. The index also allows the reader to trace narratives through the book: Chapter 6 tells the story of Wilhelmina Princep, a name which hasn’t appeared in the book to that point. Turning to her entry in the index, however, the reader discovers that she’s made eight different appearances in the text under different names. This is a carefully constructed book, and one that demands re-reading.
An index begs the question of who’s constructing it: the shadowy narrator, one presumes, is the only one who might know all of Wilhelmina’s guises, and all of his textual borrowings. The first-person narrator appears in the first sentence of the book and disappears in the last; one might assume that he’s a film historian, tracing out what happened to Rose Alley. Curiously, in the first sentence, he declares that he’s never been to Paris. But we quickly forget the idea of the narrator as a real figure when we move into the minds of the characters themselves in his description of them; by the next paragraph, he’s deep inside of Evelyn Nevers’s head, describing how a saltcellar stands as an analogue for her lover Prosper Sforza in her mind. (One might find Duchamp in that saltcellar; maybe that’s a reach.) This narrator might be an overly presumptuous historian, trying to tie things together; there’s also the hint that the narrator might be the subject of the last chapter, the film’s director Selwyn Wexler. It’s Wexler, we’re told early on, who’s most interested in Dryden and Rochester; in the penultimate chapter, we’re finally given his project for the film:
Wexler’s idea was that the cast and crew would find out as much as they could about their characters and the background of the film. Read Rochester and Dryden. Writer their own dialogue. Even the ones who couldn’t speak English. Myrna would be unnecessary. Everyone would be unnecessary. There wouldn’t be any need for props or sets. Which they didn’t really have anyway. The only necessary thing would be an organizing intelligence. Wexler’s. And the camera. The characters would relate directly to this eye. They would make their own context. (p. 144)
The narrator, perhaps, might be the camera’s eye; the first sentence (and another sentence towards the end of the book, where the narrator says he’s only been to London once) might well be misdirection. In the final chapter, the narrator describes a succession of versions of Rose Alley, all unfinished; the twelfth is the film diaries of Wexler. The thirteenth, we are led to believe, is this book, which invites careful re-reading.
Films
Exhibits
Books
Films
Exhibits
Jon Cotner & Andy Fitch
Ten Walks/Two Talks
(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010)
This is a book that I read entirely on public transportation: on the way to a party on Saturday night and making my way back home from a brunch in Brooklyn on Sunday afternoon. This feels wrong, to a certain extent: this is a book, as the title suggests, that’s about walking and talking. It’s difficult to square these pursuits with reading, which for the most part is a solitary activity and one that can’t be done while walking: to read is necessarily to abnegate the outside world. It’s not entirely impossible to combine reading and walking – I remember reading The Recognitions for the first time while on the mile-long walk between work and home one summer – but that was a walk that I’d taken many times over already, and I’m not sure how much I got out of that reading of the book. It was college: maybe it was more performative than not.
This is a small book, consisting of four sections, divided by seasons, each section introduced by a recaptioned reproduction of prints from Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. The first and third contain narratives of five walks from what might be five consecutive days in New York City; told in the first person, the narrators seem to alternate. The second and fourth sections contain transcriptions of two conversations between “J” and “A”, whom we might assume to be the authors: reading these sections, the reader can work out who is responsible for which sections of the walks. Upon scrutiny, the book’s structure becomes less clear: the walks sections are headed “Early Spring” and “Late Spring,” while the talks are “Early Winter” and “Late Winter”. The second talk refers back to the first talk, but the temporal location of the walks is unclear: we might reasonably presume that winter comes before spring, and that the talks are a result of the walks, but there’s no concrete evidence for that. Internal evidence in the walks sections suggest that they happen in March and April of 2005.
It’s in the talks that the project of the book becomes clear: these sections of the book presents a transcription of two conversations, with all the strangeness that appears when oral language becomes written language (as in, for example, Ed Friedman’s The Telephone Book, transcriptions of his telephone conversations). Conversation is a very different thing from a printed interview. Here, for example, is an extract from the first walk, headed “Central Park, 9:10 p.m.”:
J: Sure I’d wanted to cross the park today, but spent hours printing a writing sample for UCSD: a total, maddening loss of time. In fact one guy caught me losing my cool. I explained only printer troubles . . .
A: Let’s move down the mic a bit.
J: make me lose my cool.
A: I got I got caught bowing to the Huddlestone Arch waterfall by this shadowy figure who . . .
J: A scary . . . (p. 23)
Here the mechanics become apparent with the reference to the microphone that’s recording this conversation. The speakers’ voices overlap; punctuation is something that exists in written language, not spoken language. It’s possible there’s a certain amount of self-consciousness that comes with speaking when one knows one is being recorded: subjects bounce back and forth very quickly. (In the second talk, the recorder is switched off at a point when the speakers become aware of those surrounding them; then it is resumed, with the explanation that they’ve moved.) The reader can make sense of most of it with some effort.
Once it becomes apparent how the talks section works, the reader immediately starts wondering about the walks. A representative paragraph, from the last walk; the speaker is near Riverside Park:
A townhouse I otherwise appreciated held patriotic ribbons wrapped around the porch. A dog crossed with its owner calling Stephen, wait! Two Scottish terriers looked less intelligent side-by-side. An old Japanese woman wore a bowler hat. The question Was she attractive? made no sense I was attractive. She needed my gaze and I delivered it. (p. 57)
The speaker here is recording everything he does on his walk; however, this is written language, something not composed in the moment. One can’t very well walk and write at the same time; it’s possible he’s scribbling notes to himself, or using a voice recorder, but his person does seem to be in the moment. One wonders, in passing, if these walks, ostensibly taken alone, were actually taken together, with one of the authors walking and one recording; but that also doesn’t seem like it would pass without notice.
A passage late in the second talk explains the concerns at stake:
A: Yeah as soon as something gets put on paper [Cough] chance I’ll retain it. Or perhaps you know: when the Laotians began to write, which happened, I believe mid-seventies (a French priest designed a print language for them), they lost half . . .
J: Socrates talks about this in the Phaedrus. He refuses to write since it would weaken his memory.
A: Hmmm I’ve heard an implicit anxiety throughout Plato’s work is that, for the first time ap appears the potential for discource to be preserved – to pick up new interpretations the author couldn’t anticipate, interpretation justified by textual proof. And this anxiety leads to conceptions, you know Platonic conceptions of forms (an idealized world; a world more permanent than the written one coming . . .
J: So you think Plato’s disdain for the empirical world derives . . .
A: His . . .
J: [Muffled] books ambiguous?
A: Ambiguous in a way things hadn’t been. A new temporality develops through them, as Plato’s thought becomes our thought. (pp. 82–83.)
The book is an attempt to get back from language what’s lost when put on paper – with the recognition that it has to be a book. What Plato says on the pages of the Phaedrus doesn’t, in the end, matter quite so much as how we internalize it. The discussion then moves to the burning of the Library of Alexandria, and how we presumably lost many of the works of the pre-Socratics there; I was left wondering if the book might not be paradoxically more fragile than the remembered text, though on looking back, that’s not in this book.
In the first talk, we find the reason for the Hiroshige illustrations, in a discussion of how the light brings to mind one of the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo:
. . . . As always in winter months I’ve I value Asian, specifically Japanese art, for training us to recognize the splendor of bare branches.
J: That’s why I go back to Asian poetry and painting, to to track the beauty of each season but not catch myself . . . and escape the trap of longing for summer in the heart of winter. (p. 28)
One senses that this is what this book is attempting to do.
Danielle Dutton
Attempts at a Life
(Tarpulin Sky, 2007)
The first story in this book, “Jane Eyre,” effectively rewrites that novel as if it had been written by Robert Walser, with the short sentences, friendly appeal to the reader, and self-abasement of his narrators. It’s an exercise in compression: 400 pages become five and a half. Brontë’s book is rendered strange and unfamiliar. One realizes that the opposite process could be applied, and Walser’s short stories could be stretched out to become novels: but a good deal of Walser’s charm comes from his compression: The Assistant and especially The Tanners suffer in comparison to the magic of his shorter works. From the first paragraph, covering the first few chapters of the novel:
I read a lot early in life, and seriously craved love, but was accused of being a liar by my own family and set away to learn to sell my soul to the Lord, and also to knit. Abandoned at school, I befriended an extraordinary girl who soon died like a martyr in a series of consumptive fits. Small but a natural watcher, I lived on through that season of death to learn to speak French and to draw. (p. 3)
This is very funny, of course (the dangling “and also to knit” threatening to tip over the sentence); but the Jane Eyre narrating this story is a very different person from the one who narrates the novel, who couldn’t be imagined telling her story in this way. This much compression implies distance – be it ironic or damaged – a comprehension of one’s life as a written thing. It’s not by accident that one of the few details of Jane Eyre’s early life given above is how much she read: these are bookish pieces, as one might expect from a story rewriting a novel in the voice of another writer. A section named “Some Sources” at the end suggests that Robert Duncan’s “An African Elegy” feeds into “Jane Eyre”; the lines quoted in the poem describe Virginia Woolf, who isn’t mentioned directly in the notes. This is a story, one senses, about the way in which a life can be told; this comes through in the content of the story (a canonical story about the subjection of a woman) but more strongly through the style of the story, in the way that it scrutinizes how women write and are written about.
An argument could be made that these pieces are prose poetry, but there’s an emphasis on narrative that isn’t usually stressed so much in prose poetry. But like prose poetry (I’m thinking of Mallarmé), this is a firmly written language: they couldn’t really exist in spoken form, because they have to exist on the page. This comes out most clearly in the centerpiece of the book, “Everybody’s Autobiography, or Nine Attempts at a Life.” The title, of course, is from Gertrude Stein’s second autobiography, the first that she wrote in her own voice: rather than assuming Alice Toklas’s voice, she became everybody. In this piece there are nine short sections (several only a paragraph long), each with a first-person narrator explaining, in a different way, their life. The notes in the back suggest that it uses material from Jerome Rothenberg anthology of Modernist artists and poets Revolution of the Word, and it seems like the text was collaged from their biographies and works: though nothing quite adds up, and there’s the feeling that the reader is listening to Modernist ghosts reciting their lives. The language is familiar, but strange: the ninth section starts “I was born circa 1877 in Pennsylvania, and died in 1949” (p. 32); the narrator of the fifth, born in Mexico City in 1946, travels to Europe in 1972 and meets a woman who kills herself in 1950.
The language here is interesting: one can’t really say that one was born “circa 1877” (“circa” itself being the sort of word one finds in print more often than one hears it), or narrate stories with paradoxical holes in their plots with the assumption that a listener will believe. One can’t say “I died” because that’s a lie: if the speaker had died, he couldn’t be speaking. There has to be a suspension of disbelief. One could say it, maybe in the context of a play as there’s a suspension of disbelief inherent in the theater, but even there it doesn’t work: the audience would perceive the character as lying. There’s not quite the same convention of realism – we know that what’s happening before us is, in at least one sense, fake, being performed by actors who are not characters. Shakespeare, it’s worth noting, doesn’t show us sixteenth-century England directly. There’s a scene in de Chirico’s novel Hebdomeros where a play is being performed; a fight breaks out, and the viewers are confused as to whether it’s a real fight, the same conundrum that opens Joseph McElroy’s Actress in the House.
On the page, however, “I died” can be said: it’s a received convention of fiction that we can be spoken to by dead people. We accept the characters of a nineteenth-century novel behaving in a way that seems nonsensical because there is that suspension of disbelief: we’re willing to admit the possibility that the contemporaries of the novelist did behave that way. (A historical novel presents something very different, of course.) And in a sense, of course, books are the way dead people talk to us: a dead person can’t write, but someone who wrote can be dead. This is fantastically strange, but we tend to take it for granted.
It’s to Dutton’s credit that she gets at this: not hitting the reader over the head with it, but suggesting. That’s how, in a way, the sources in the back of this little book function: none really gives away what’s going on in the story they ostensibly inform, but they send the reader off to other books. This is a book with a perfect epigraph, from Gertrude Stein’s Lectures in America:
And it is necessary if you are to be really and truly alive it is necessary to be at once talking and listening, doing both things, not as if there were one things, not as if they were two things, but doing them, well if you like, like the motor doing inside and the car moving, they are part of the same thing.
Books
Films
Exhibits
“Nothing makes any difference as long as some one is listening while they are talking. If the same person does the talking and the listening why so much the better there is just by so much the greater concentration. One may really indeed say that that is the essence of genius, of being most intensely alive, that is being one who is at the same time talking and listening. It is really that that makes one a genius. And it is necessary to be at once talking and listening, doing both things, not as if there were one thing, not as if they were two things, but doing them, well if you like, like the motor going inside and the car moving, they are part of the same thing.”
(Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America, “Portraits and Repetition,” p. 170. )