Yearly Archives: 2010

the problem with novels

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“By infallible presentiment he saw, that now always doth life’s beginning gloom conclude in gladness; that wedding-bells peal not ever in the last scene of life’s fifth act; that while the countless tribes of common novels laboriously spin vails of mystery, only to complacently clear them up at last; and while the countless tribes of common dramas do but repeat the same; yet the profounder emanations of the human mind, intended to illustrate all that can be humanly known of human life; these never unravel their own intricacies, and have no proper endings; but in imperfect, unanticipated, and disappointing sequels (as mutilated stumps), hurry to abrupt intermergings with the eternal tides of time and fate.”

(Melville, Pierre, or the Ambiguities, Book VII, “Between Pierre’s Interviews with Isabel,” p. 141.) 

steven moore, “the novel: an alternative history”, 1

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Steven Moore
The Novel: An Alternative History
(Continuum, 2010)

Moore’s introduction to this book is offputting. Part of the problem with Moore’s approach is that he’s treating what he’s terming “the novel” almost as if they were a set of artifacts devoid of cultural context: when you wrap this text in a book and set it next to this text in a book, you can find similarities, even if they’re separated by 2000 years. (A similarly maddening, if perhaps more fashionable, version of this might be John D’Agata’s project of describing many things as “lyric essays”. For D’Agata, almost everything is a lyric essay, even if the authors weren’t smart enough to understand this; for Moore, many of the same texts are novels.) The problem with Moore’s taxonomy is that it’s Linnean, based largely on morphology and how similar things look, rather than an evolutionary one; to Moore, a novel seems to mean a fictional narrative, though both of those words are similarly fuzzy.

An analogy might be drawn to the Metropolitan Museum, which contains a great many things (coffins, desks, jewelry, clothing, twentieth-century paintings) under the guise of “art.” The creator of a Mayan death mask, or the members of the society in which it was created, almost certainly did not see that object the same way that a Cezanne painting would have been seen by Cezanne or his contemporaries, or by the way we see that painting now. Certainly commonalities can be drawn – workmanship, originality, for example – but the reason that both of those objects appear in the same museum is historical contingency as much as anything: audiences saw that Cezanne was beautiful, and then realized that the Mayan mask was as well; in the nineteenth century, the Mayan mask would have been in the natural history museum. The art museum as it currently exists is a historical construct. 

To go back to taxonomy: Moore is a lumper rather than a splitter. If something looks like a novel to him, it is; even if Nathaniel Hawthorne labeled some of his books “romances,” they’re still novels (p. 5), while Gertrude Stein’s self-labeled “novels” are also novels (p. 32). This is partially a problem of his belief that while the word “novel” is unwieldy, it can be given a single definition if that definition is his. But there’s a weirdness to his use of terminology: consider his note at the bottom of p. 32:

The “antinovel” is associated with postwar French novelists – Sartre used to describe a novel by Nathalie Sarraute – but the term was actually coined by the experimental novelist Charles Sorel in 1633.

Both Sartre and Sorel would have spoken of “l’anti-roman”; but what they would have mean by it is almost certainly different. Sartre’s introduction to Portrait of a Man Unknown uses the word with reference to Nabokov, Waugh, and Gide. This is glossed over: for Moore, all anti-novels seem to be the same anti-novel, and the possibility that the same word could be used to mean different (or contradictory) things doesn’t seem to bother him.

A larger problem with Moore’s introduction is his us-vs-them argument. “Us” is the progressive novel with a long history; “them” is the Dickensian novel. “Them” is more specifically B. R. Myers, Dale Peck (for his review of Rick Moody), and Jonathan Franzen (primarily for his terrible Gaddis piece in the New Yorker) who wish that modern novels would stop being so modern. There’s an anti-academic slant as well, as if the academics had been hiding a secret history from the masses; but it seems like what Moore is doing is trying to simply change the places of the elites and the preterite. The problem with their canon seems to be that it isn’t his canon. John Ashbery is denigrated twice for being not with it enough to like the Velvet Underground; certainly Ashbery was from an older generation (presumably Gaddis didn’t like the Velvet Underground either), but casting him as an enemy of the progressive novel doesn’t actually make sense: Ashbery championed Roussel and Kenneth Koch’s The Red Robins among plenty of other notable instances of the avant-garde novel. Unfortunately, this makes a mess: I don’t know that battle lines are that carefully drawn. 

A major problem with his book is his neglect of how the market shapes our perception of which fiction is entertainment and which is avant-garde: the common history of the English novel rising with Richardson and Defoe is directly tied to the availability of mass-market editions of their work; until the mid-twentieth century, the novel was a major cultural force, at which point it was supplanted by film, television, and the Internet. The cultural function of the novel changes when other media arise; it probably isn’t coincidence that cries for a return to the values of Dickens in fiction started appearing soon after the Internet rose to prominence in American life. When the novel moves away from the cultural center, the way it’s used changes (becoming more than ever a signifier of the high-brow, or the old high-brow); similarly, long-form narrative before Gutenberg would have functioned entirely differently than a novel would have. 

There’s a sense in which this maybe the argument in this book is perhaps from another time. Does it still make sense to argue about what constitutes the canon in an age when so many books are instantly available? It doesn’t seem impossible to like Ashbery, Gaddis, and the Velvet Underground all at once; however, just because Rick Moody once wrote interesting books (which seems a very long time ago now) doesn’t mean that he’s always worth defending, especially when there may be more interesting work out there. The failure to acknowledge the market hamstrings the argument as well: right now, there are plenty of self-described “avant-garde” fiction being written by MFA writers primarily for an audience of other MFA writers; the avant-garde risks becoming just another marketing genre. How avant-garde these writers might actually be is certainly up for debate; but they certainly don’t align with the lines Moore is trying to draw: being an artist in the age of accreditation is a different sort of beast. Probably there are more avant-garde novels being written now; certainly, there are more bad avant-garde novels being written now. Given this present, returning to the canon starts to seem more desirable. What’s wanted more than ever is discernment: but that’s not Moore’s project here.

september 1–september 10

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Books

Films

  • Conte d’hiver (A Winter’s Tale), directed by Éric Rohmer
  • Guernica, dir. Robert Hessens & Alain Resnais
  • The Cameraman, dir. Edward Sedgwick
  • The Docks of New York, dir. Josef von Sternberg
  • Design for Living, dir. Ernst Lubitsch
  • Disco Dancer, dir. Babbar Subhash
  • The American, dir. Anton Corbijn
  • Free and Easy, dir. Edward Sedgwick

Exhibits

  • “Charles Burchfield: Fifty Years as a Painter,” D. C. Moore Gallery
  • “Toledo/Borges: Fantastic Zoology,” Instituto Cervantes
  • “Lee Bontecou: All Freedom in Every Sense,” MoMA

kristin hersh, “rat girl”

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Kristin Hersh
Rat Girl: A Memoir
(Penguin, 2010)

The first time I would have heard Kristin Hersh’s music would have been sitting in a station wagon in a dark parking lot somewhere in rural Illinois waiting to pick someone up. Occasionally in the car you could pick up the modern rock stations from Chicago, and what they played was more interesting that the omnipresent classic rock stations, with their monotonous diet of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Bad Company, Rush, occasionally mixed in with whatever new music might be masculine enough to fit in (Candlebox, maybe Pearl Jam). NPR was occasionally interesting, but not predictable; all in all, it was a frustrating state to be in when it was clear from whatever media did seep in that things were happening elsewhere, happening without you. It’s a state that wouldn’t exist a year later, when I went east to college & the Internet came along; but that’s how things were in 1994, near the end of something though I didn’t know it at the time. That was the environment in which I first heard Throwing Muses’ “Bright Yellow Gun,” the single off University: the song and then the record sounded like a transmission from another world. Faux-surrealism was stock in trade for rock lyrics at that point in time; but Kristin Hersh sounded more like she meant it than most: there was an awkwardness that wasn’t contrived, and the imagery couldn’t easily be resolved into standard adolescent concerns: something else seemed like it was happening.

Early artistic impressions can be hard to shake off; most of what one accords value when young is embarrassing in hindsight, especially when growing up in an environment of cultural deprivation. Throwing Muses were, as it turned out, one of the first bands I saw after arriving at college, a free show on the Esplanade in Boston in front of a crowd of drunken fratboys who clearly didn’t like them, validation in my eyes. It was easy, around that time if you were a certain sort of young person concerned with pop music, to get bogged down in Baudrillard and interminable arguments about fake authenticity; but Throwing Muses seemed to somehow be outside that argument. 

Writing about pop music is almost invariably awful, and this is only intended as background to my reading of this book. I don’t love memoirs; it’s a form that too often lends itself bad writing because of too easy recourse to the truth: the truth about most people’s lives is not art, even if it may be diverting. The rock memoir promises to be the worst of all possible books. But there are exceptions; and this might be one of them. Rat Girl is a memoir of Hersh’s 18th year, when her band was playing regularly in Providence and Boston, when she was ostensibly attending college, when she was diagnosed as being bipolar, when her band was signed to a British record label and recorded its first album, and when she unexpectedly wound up pregnant. What I like here is how much is left unexplained: the overtly Freudian title, an epithet that Hersh uses to describe herself throughout the book; how the members of the band appear to be living as homeless while Hersh seems to maintain a reasonably close relationship with her parents; how she came to be friends with Betty Hutton; how she came to have a baby in the first place. All the obvious questions that a journalist would like answered about Hersh’s early life are entirely disregarded in this book.

What remains is a record of experience; a note at the front explains that it’s based on a diary of the year, but nothing of that diary remains, and it’s difficult to imagine what might be in it. Hersh and her band seem to live like savages or baby rabbits, crashing in abandoned apartments, falling asleep whenever they stop moving, using a language that seems to be their own. There’s a strangeness here that can’t quite be classified. A sequence early in the book between Hersh and her drummer, who’s just brought in some trash to use as percussion:

Sitting up to admire his garbage, I notice that he’s wearing a coat. I’m stunned. “Dave . . . what the hell?”
     Dave and I always believed that coats were for wimps who couldn’t handle seasons: “coat slaves.” Geez, people, get a grip! Seasons happen! And that vision was for wusses: people who couldn’t hack the rough-hewn, fuzzy life we lived – slaves to their glasses – when we could play entire shows without seeing anything. It was the only thing we were smug about, really, our ability to live blind and cold.
     Then, a few months ago, he showed up at our attic practice space wearing glasses. I felt betrayed, but he was transformed. “Trees have individual leaves, even when they’re far away!” he insisted, his eyes and new lenses shining. (p. 62)

This isn’t the only point in this book where one thinks of Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. What’s most interesting is Hersh’s relationship with her songs: something that started, she says, when she briefly lived in an apartment she calls the Doghouse:

. . . by the time I raced out the door . . . it was too late. I was branded; tattooed all over with Doghouse songs – each one a musical picture etched into my skin.
     I know that when my band plays these ugly tattoos, people can see them all over me, but I don’t care too much. I mean, shy people are generally not show-offs, but the burning that the songs do, the fact that I’m compelled to play them, makes me think they . . . matter? Maybe that’s not the right word. That they’re vital. And I respect that. I can feel sorry for myself without judging the music. (p. 12)

This is also a memoir of mental illness: hit by a driver while on a bicycle when young, Hersh’s songwriting seems to be related to her bipolarity:

A few days later, lying in my hospital bed, I heard my first song: a metallic whining, like industrial noise, and a wash of ocean waves, layered with humming tones and wind chimes. Intermittent voices talked and sang. I thought it was the TV in the next room. The TV never shut up, though; nobody ever turned it off or even changed the channel. I started to worry that the patient next door had died or slipped into a coma. (p. 76)

Hersh doesn’t valorize her bipolarity as the source of her creativity; it’s simply something that’s there that has to be lived with, much the same attitude she has later when she discovers that she’s pregnant:

I really didn’t mind getting hit by a car, though – it was interesting, and probably my last chance to fly through the air in nonjudgmental fashion. I think if I got hit by a car now, it’d bug me, but before we learn to by whiny about our existence and how comfortable it isn’t, we’re still open to being thrown around, even if we bust our faces when we land. So what if sudden contact with the street makes your teeth fall out, maybe snaps off a foot or two? At least you know what that feels like. (p. 78)

There’s something very likable about this book: it’s not for everyone, and certainly my relation to it is going to be charged by personal experience. But it’s far more interesting than writing about music, than a memoir should be.

noted, self-promotion edition

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  • A piece by Linton Weeks at NPR’s website contains part of an interview with me.
  • I have a piece in the latest issue of Logos, a Dutch book journal. They appear to be charging $35.00 (plus tax!) to read the article. Hint: this article isn’t worth paying anything for!
  • Also I have an essay in The Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2009. I don’t think this is online anywhere, but I might be wrong. 
  • Less self-promotion: somebody seems to have scanned Barbara O’Brien’s Operators and Things, one of those books that’s probably worth re-reading.

aram saroyan, “coffee coffee”

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Aram Saroyan
Coffee Coffee
(Primary Information, 2009; originally 1967)

Coffee Coffee is a book of poetry consisting of 65 words – that is, if four occurrences of the syllable “ly” can be said to count as words and the two words of the title are discounted. It’s a small book, 40 leaves of paper; the versos are blank, and most rectos consist of a single centered word, though in some cases up to eight words appear, similarly centered.

There’s a rhythm that appears as one flips through this book, sounding out the words: generally three or four pages with a single word will be followed by a single page with four words: “hard / lookout / guarantee / oh / bird bird bird”. The three birds are stacked on top of each other: the reading speeds up after getting to them, especially after the slowness inherent in “oh”: looking at the word on the page, the reader slows down further: why does the word need an “h” to make a long “o” sound? Giving the words space to breathe makes all of them strange: “lookout,” for example, must be functioning as a noun, though given a single space it could become a command. The arrangement also bears scrutiny: hard seems more closely related to guarantee than it does to lookout; lookout, in turn, might be connected to bird bird bird.

The words function as signifiers as well as graphic shapes: early on, the reader encounters a page with four letters in two lines: “o r / o r”. The four letters form the corners of a square: a + of white space appears between them. We could read them as “or or”; we could almost as easily read them as “oo rr,” “oror,” or simply “o r o r”. What we’re looking at is four markings on a page: we give them meaning. Because previous pages have words on them (some multiple stacked words), we assume these should be two words as well. But it’s the act of reading that’s making them “or or”. 

Words existing on their own invite the reader to slow down and savor the sound: the “v”s that move through the final four words, “heavy / crying / velvet / favor”, the missing “v” in “crying” making the double “v” in “velvet” seem more luxuriant. Graphically, the words “sleep” and “sheer” aren’t very far apart; but they sound very different and bring out very different responses in the reader. In the middle of the book, a stacked “cigarette / cigarette / cigarette / cigarette” makes me think of Harry Mathew’s novel Cigarettes, where he points out that the sound of a train is almost exactly “cigarette, cigarette, cigarette”. 

The original version of this book was published as a stapled 8.5” x 11” book in 1967; it seems to have been created on a typewriter and then mimeographed. An excerpt from this book appeared in issue 2 of Vito Acconci and Bernadette Meyer’s 0 to 9; and a couple of these poems appear in the misleadingly titled Complete Minimal Poems that Ugly Duckling put out a few years ago. An online version of this book can be downloaded at the Eclipse archive; there you can find both a scan of the original edition as well as a reading copy, where the text has been reset, as is the case with the poems that appeared in the Ugly Duckling edition. 

Format is something that’s extremely important when dealing with visual poetry: a photograph of a piece of paper is not the same thing as a piece of paper, even though the words might be identical. Correspondingly, a great deal of care has been taken in the production of this book. There’s one major difference from the original edition: the size is much smaller, meaning that there’s less white space around the words. The text appears in text that appears to be typewritten; this isn’t hard to do on a computer, of course, but it appears to have actually been created with a typewriter. Looking closely at the page where “cigarette” appears four times, it becomes clear that these words are not actually identical in the way that a computer-generated page would tend to be: the loop of the “g” in each word is distinct. It appears that the original version was scanned into a computer, to be turned into a polymer plate for letterpress printing: moving one’s finger over the book, one feels the imprint of a printing press. There’s the temptation to think that impression is the impression of the author’s typewriter: but the original edition, mimeographed, would not have such an impression. 

It’s hard to get around thinking about aura with something like this. Sometimes looking at an old print of an old photograph – this happened to me most recently at the Muybridge show in Washington – one gets the feeling of continuity: of looking at what the photographer saw. Light reflected off the scene the photographer saw made a chemical impression on the film; that negative was chemically transformed, and when we look at it we see something that “saw” something that “saw” what’s being depicted in the photograph. This is an abstraction, of course; but it’s not quite as high-level an abstraction as the one involved in digital photography and reproduction, which we can never entirely get around. Because we’re enmeshed in the digital, earlier mechanical reproduction appears more real, more connected, even when it was deeply part of the technology of its day. But when we look at this, we think we can see the impress on the page made by Saroyan’s fingers. We do, sort of: maybe it’s possible to see where he would have hit the keys harder, leaving a darker impression, although presumably when making a copy for reproduction he sought to make the most normalized page possible. 

Reproduction thus becomes a tricky issue. Saroyan’s poetry straddles the fine line between text and the visual arts, as does all visual poetry; in Dick Higgins’s term, it’s an intermedium. We think of Saroyan as a poet rather than as a visual artist, and thus his poetry is read in books; however, Carl Andre, generally thought of as a sculptor, has similar typewriter poems displayed in vitrines at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa. Both presentation models might be seen as appropriate, though they have their drawbacks. An edition of Saroyan’s poems that deviates from his original presentation (even one that deviates as minimally as this one) loses something; but resetting the poems gets us away from the problem of venerating them as art objects. I like this edition: even though it’s well done, it’s cheap. A large part of the reason for visual poetry’s general lack of impact is the inaccessibility of the original works; it’s hard, for example, to find a copy of Emmett Williams’ and La Monte Young’s 1967 Anthology of Concrete Poetry for under $100, and I suspect that most of the copies that still exist are not being read. Primary Information is doing valuable work in making this available; I hope they continue to do similar work. 

august 23–august 31

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Books

Films

  • Kiss Me Deadly, directed by Robert Aldrich
  • I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street), dir. Mario Monicelli
  • Killer of Sheep, dir. Charles Burnett
  • Several Friends, dir. Charles Burnett
  • The Horse, dir. Charles Burnett
  • When It Rains, dir. Charles Burnett
  • The Saphead, dir. Herbert Blaché & Winchell Smith
  • He Who Gets Slapped, dir. Victor Sjöström
  • Battling Butler, dir. Buster Keaton
  • Spite Marriage, dir. Edward Sedgwick & Buster Keaton
  • Trouble in Paradise, dir. Ernst Lubitsch
  • Cockfighter, dir. Monte Hellman
  • Rififi, dir. Jules Dassin
  • The Man Who Laughs, dir. Paul Leni
  • Dude, Where’s My Car?, dir. Danny Leiner

joseph mcelroy, “ship rock: a place”

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Joseph McElroy
Ship Rock: A Place
(William B. Ewert, 1980)

This short book has the subtitle “From Women and Men, a Novel in Progress”; it’s a section of that much larger book published on its own in 1987. This was a limited edition, beautifully printed by William B. Ewert, who ran a small press in New Hampshire that seems to have mostly published poetry. It’s a lovely book; used copies are still floating around. It’s nice reading McElroy like this: it’s easier to concentrate on the language, rather than trying to balance the myriad themes webbing through his larger books. McElroy’s prose needs to read (and re-read) slowly: it’s hard to do this with longer books.

This is a book concerned with places, as the title suggests, and names: in particular a place in New Mexico called Shiprock or Ship Rock, as it is spelled in this book. Ship Rock is both a town and a natural feature:

The Rock rises upwards of fifteen hundred feet right up off the plateau. Half again that long at its base on this south side, it still seems less massive than lofty, for it is alone. That’s what the local Navajos cal it – the Rock. Pretty much one rock (mono-lith) with craggy crops lifting toward two westward peaks with a massed steady shift against downward veins of long, vertical sharding and against the backward pull of what starts two-thirds of the way up, a slow climb beginning at the top of what looks like sheer cliff and climbing from there so that, notch by notch, the eye that is taken along these splits and levels takes his whole crazy body into what he’s witnessing, until something is an event. (p. 11)

There’s a hint of why “Ship Rock” is used instead of “Shiprock” in the bisection of “monolith” in to its components, later elaborated: “And he thought he heard a car from far off toward the town of Ship Rock (spelled as one word with a small r, he later noted” (p. 34). The protagonist has heard the words ship rock spoken; he hears them as two words, not concatenated into a single word. Shiprock is a name; Ship Rock is a name and two words, both of which can signal. One of those words is factual: Ship Rock is a rock, albeit a very large one. The other is metaphor: people look at Ship Rock and see a ship. Much of this book is an attempt to make sense of the rock’s dual nature. Plot is incidental to this book: the protagonist, who is unnamed and whose profession is left unclear, has traveled to Ship Rock and stops to consider it for a while. 

There’s more than an echo of Wallace Stevens (or perhaps A. R. Ammons) here; as this text appears here, it’s barely fiction as it’s usually construed, and one could almost make an argument that this might be better understood as an extended prose poem. Certainly there’s a deep concern with language and its rhythms. Here the protagonist considers the word “neck” as geologists use it – Ship Rock is a type of formation often called a “volcanic neck” – though the geologists’ usage doesn’t make intuitive sense because there’s no head attached to the neck:

But wait, a voice says, we mean neck in the sense of throat. It doesn’t have to have a head on its shoulders. But the truth is that the throat is long gone: the neck is what’s left, the neck that was inside the throat, if you see.
     The way the heart is inside the stomach at seven in the morning after a hard night. God, he recalls necks of land with plates of Little Neck clams on them, but not in the noise of last night. (p. 26)

The voice that starts this is inside his head: he’s thinking about language, and trying to understand it: we understand geologic processes – a volcanic event – in terms of the more familiar. Association leads to more association; finally he ends somewhere else entirely. Little Neck, New York, where the clams are from, might get its name from a peninsula that looks something like a neck: a peninsula seems more obviously like a neck than a volcanic mountain does. But the language here catches: the last sentence sprinkles its iambs with anapests and begs to be read aloud. In the interjection, there’s an echo of the sixteenth-century “Western wind, when will thou blow” (“Christ, if my love were in my arms”).

McElroy knows, of course, and his protagonist presumably does as well, that the Navajos, when they called Ship Rock “The Rock” wouldn’t have actually used those particular words: their own words would naturally have sounded different. Later in the book there’s mention made of an organization with the initials “D.N.A.”; those expand to “Dinebeiina Nahiilna Be Agaditah,” an actual Native American legal aid organization with an acronym that functions, intentionally or not, two ways. Coincidence is a driving force here; a place is one thing, a name is something else entirely. Proust mapped this territory first. 

An interview by Tom LeClair in Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists (1983) has McElroy describing the writers that he was interested in while he was writing Women and Men, among them Alain Robbe-Grillet:

. . . God knows Robbe-Grillet can be pompous enough even in Jealousy, a fine book that represents I guess a desire that’s another side of me, to turn microscopic seeing into meditation – to be truthfully precise. But to what and through what? I’m sick of this dogma, a platitude supporting the virtue of concreteness without ever asking why concreteness, what philosophical conclusions does it rest on? (p. 239)

This might perfectly be describing what’s happening in Ship Rock. A rock, something as massive as Ship Rock, is nothing if not concrete: but understood geologically, it had to once be liquid to exist. References to Sandia Man, Cochise Man, the Pueblo Indians, the Navajos, dot the text; all of these groups inhabited (or inhabit) the area around Ship Rock: the rock would have appeared the same to them, but humanity exists on a tiny timeframe geologically.