Jeff Hansen interviews writers of new fiction

Over at his blog Experimental Fiction/Poetry, my longtime friend, poet and fiction writer Jeff Hansen (author most recently of the novel ...and Beefheart Saved Craig) is beginning a new group of interviews with some of the fiction writers who appeared in the 2009 issue of Big Bridge.

Up so far is his interview with me about my forthcoming novel The Quarry and The Lot, as well as an interview with Stephen-Paul Martin, author of many collections of stories including The Possibility of Music.

Experimental Fiction/Poetry is an excellent resource for reviews, commentary, and interviews on both contemporary literature and music. If you haven’t checked it out already, I hope you will.

Noticed a Lot of Facebook Posts from People Claiming They Can't Sleep

And I thought of this unpublished section of my probably now likely to remain unfinished novel Bug/Man, which is only the first half of this particular section (part two perhaps to follow):


Except when there were angry controversies, which happened often enough, the low point of nights at the Globe came for Richard when it was time to go. Especially if he wasn’t drunk enough, which he rarely was anymore. Not that the gatherings themselves couldn’t be unsatisfying in their own right, one more evening of talking nonsense as a barrier against the abyss. But to walk out of the tavern alone, or to part with people at the front door and plunge into the city night, was like holding his nose and diving directly into the atmosphere he had been avoiding. Of course he wasn’t really avoiding it. He was just building up to the right moment of misery. Just drunk enough to be blurry and slow without any exhilaration. His friends were already gone. “Good night, good night,” he said, but he was talking only to the streets.

Although the city nights were certainly an abyss, they were hardly empty. Other people out there were falling into it with him. The homeless had already fallen. A few roving groups of weeknight revelers, mainly men, who didn’t want to go home or back to their hotels. A few staggering drunks who didn’t even know where their homes were. And then those who, like him, were headed home not because they wanted to but because they had no other choice. It was a question of where you were when realized you had nowhere else to go. It had to do with the kind of society you were living in and what your place in that society was. “Where’s my society?” Richard said loudly on a street corner when it seemed nobody could be listening. He was one of those people whose place was still off the street, who used the street as a conduit from place to place instead of the place where they spent their lives. As Nancy said, that meant he was lucky. He had somewhere to go, if only to his own apartment where nothing much was. He wasn’t stuck out here limping, insane, or thrown away by everyone. But on nights like this, he could feel himself pressing a little closer to that boundary, the dividing line between people whose society used the streets and the people whose society was the streets. He could feel—or told himself he thought he could feel—what it was like to tip over. Not that he was so deluded that he believed he knew what life on the streets was like. He knew he didn’t. But as he’d told everyone earlier, he wasn’t sure he had the will anymore to hold his life together. It was probably romantic nonsense. He knew that. Then again he wasn’t sure what he knew.

“A little disintegration won’t really hurt me, will it?” he asked the humid air. It was a hot night, although a few days earlier there had been the first cool suggestion of fall. That suggestion was gone now. The air was smoggy and dead. No wind anywhere to carry off the heavy unpleasant odors: garbage, the metallic grease of fast food shops still heavy long after they had closed, a festering odor stew that should have been hauled off. It was one of those nights when he constantly had to blink to keep things out of his eyes. The air was no more than a jumble of splintered filth.

What always amazed him about the smell of the city on a hot night, and the lives stuck down on the street among it, was that they had no correlation to what the city looked like. Rows of office buildings rising squarely into the sky with a forbidding distance that seemed to have nothing to do with poverty, confusion, homelessness or stink. Likewise with the apartment buildings, no less functional and dull than the offices except for patches of plants arrayed around their lighted front entrances in pretense of welcome. He had been to cities where the decay in people’s lives seemed reflected in the architecture, and cities which retained a sense of liveliness through the night. In DC though the buildings were closed off, dead. The life that moved outside their walls was as firmly separated from what went on inside as if the buildings had stood behind fences. Finally, it was that separation that most appalled him. A city built on separation, and for it, dividing him and everybody else up at all times. Dividing him from others but also from himself, like he was looking through the building walls at an image of himself resting comfortably inside.

He was thoroughly depressed by the time he reached his building. Not that he hadn’t been depressed all evening. But now that he thought about it, even his theory of the city streets as a contemporary hell contained a perverse kind of apocalyptic excitement. Just so much literary playtime. He came into his apartment, sat on the couch for a moment, cooled off in the air-conditioning. There was nothing apocalyptic about his actual condition. What a comfort if there had been. Redundance had no heroic quality, none of the romance of existential emptiness. He was a semi-employed, thirty-eight year old man who lived alone. His last girlfriend had left him and he had left the one before that. It didn’t matter so much anymore who left who. It was part of a routine that by now was too choreographed, as if the moment he met a woman he was interested in he already knew how the situation would play out. He had aging parents living in the suburbs and a brother who was an accountant who he liked well enough as long as they didn’t spend time together and who, feeling the same way, invited Richard out to his own family’s house maybe once or twice a year in a necessary show of family solidarity. He had published four books of poems which had been reviewed a few times, more or less positively, but the world of poetry he knew was a self-contained network that had close to no reverberations in the world outside its own contexts. He liked poets on the whole, although many he didn’t; as a group he liked them more than other groups but not by much. But he didn’t believe in the world of literature. Not that he had ever really expected that it would gain him much, but what had his commitment done? He taught a few classes at local universities as one of the marginal intellectual castoffs paid a few dollars for his time. He did occasional piecemeal editorial work in different offices. Sooner or later the situation would become untenable. The part-time work would dry up and he would enter some dead end office job on a low rung, doing work he couldn’t tolerate and didn’t believe in, that is if he hadn’t killed himself in the meantime, on purpose or accidentally.

No one could say he hadn’t worked hard, but he was pretty sure he hadn’t worked wisely. He hadn’t devoted his life to a process of professional advancement that increasingly squeezed all other types of intellectual life out of existence. He couldn’t tolerate the day to day falseness, the world of lies that passed as good sense. And even if he had tried to, the people of that world saw through him, for some reason he could never discern. It had to be something about his face, something in his expression that blatantly said, “I don’t believe you.” So maybe, as Nancy had said, he was Bartleby, but he hadn’t even been that on purpose. He had tried over the years to participate. He hadn’t refused. He had been refused. The difference was crucial, even if his own behavior had played a role in the refusal. For reasons that were partly mysterious, partly obvious, the contemporary world had no use for him and no interest. He wasn’t even old-fashioned. His redundance was absolutely a function of the same world that had rejected him. He wasn’t an outsider to that world. He was its product. Wriggle as he would, assert again and again that he had the power to change things and to change himself, that everyone could struggle against the position in which they found themselves—and even in the face of evidence that other people had done just that—for some reason, he hadn’t. Here he was, still wriggling, a little less vigorously now, and with even less hope of success, but still with an overwhelming desire to protect himself and his illusions. As he sat there, he could see that even these fits of melodramatic despair were themselves a kind of protection. Melodrama was preferable to truth. And the truth was? That it didn’t really much matter, except to him, whether he continued to struggle, and he wasn’t convinced it even mattered to him.

These weren’t the sorts of thoughts helpful for sleep. His sleeping patterns had been disordered for awhile and played a role in his recent exhaustion. Many nights he didn’t sleep much, although every now and then he slept through a night so obliviously that he woke up stunned, sluggish, his head a blur. A more common pattern was flailing around, unable to sleep, for most of the night, passing out just long enough so that when the alarm woke him he felt too heavy to move. To be awake when he needed to sleep and asleep when he needed to wake up. His best chances to sleep came if he went to bed in an unworried state of mind, but that didn’t happen often. When he was overtly worried, he couldn’t sleep at all. But worst was when he was worried in a way he had partly repressed. He would go to sleep for a bit then at some point wake up, staring, startled, afraid, his mind spiraling downward into ever greater degrees of paranoia: why had so and so said what they’d said, was he going to be out of work starting tomorrow, did he have some kind of disease. The repressed worry was the worst way to go to bed because during the brief time he was asleep, the strict mental protection he erected around himself while awake vanished. When he woke up, dangers flew at him from every direction and his mind could do nothing to stop it.

Finally in bed, he couldn’t get to sleep at all and tonight it had something to do with the temperature. One minute he was hot and threw off all the covers, leaving his skin open against the manufactured air-conditioned air that felt like it had lost all coolness. Then he was cold, pulling several blankets over him and wrapping in a ball, shivering. Hot, cold, hot, cold. How long could it go on? What was the point of even trying to sleep? It was exhausting. He had no job, women knew he was a creep, his poetry was worthless pretentious rambling, and his heart was pounding because he had undiagnosed high blood pressure and was due for a stroke any moment. Was that a fire alarm in the distance? In his building, or the next one over, was somebody being murdered right that instant?

“Goddamnit, no,” he shouted, threw the covers off and sat up. “Anything’s better than this. Maybe I’ll try to read.” He got out of bed, went into the living room and sat on the couch. He felt unable to turn on the light.

The Purpose of Book Reviews

Probably most people reading poetry blogs already know, but just in case some don’t, over at the Lemon Hound blog, a number of writers have been responding to a series of questions Lemon Hound has asked regarding their ideas about book reviewing.

I agree with some of the responses more than others, but all are worth reading.

The list of writers who are responding is quite impressive. Lemon Hound manages, as usual, to be one of the few bloggers who can reach across many of the most well-worn dividing lines among contemporary poets.

My own response went up on Saturday, January 9.

Many of my first published pieces of writing were reviews. My first reviews were music reviews, written for college newspapers and then for some other small publications around Washington, DC. In graduate school I eventually began reviewing books. Reading books of contemporary poetry with an eye towards reviewing them really helped me at the time to learn about what was out there, and I still think reviewing books is an excellent way to become involved in the world of literature. But rather than talk more about book reviews here, I’ll just stop here and encourage you to go read what’s over there.

Poetry in Baltimore and the i.e. reader

i.e. reader
Narrow House Books
150 pgs.
$16

Contributors:

Elena Alexander, Bruce Andrews, Michael Ball, Sandra Beassley, Lauren Bender, Bill Berkson, Charles Bernstein, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Miles Champion, Norma Cole, CA Conrad, Bruce Covey, Tina Darragh, Ben Doller, Sandra Doller, Buck Downs, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, kari edwards, Cathy Eisenhower, Graham Foust, Heather Fuller, Peter Gizzi, Adam Good, Jamie Gaughran-Perez, K. Lorraine Graham, Jessica Grim, P. Inman, Lisa Jarnot, Bonnie Jones, Beth Joselow, Michael Kelleher, Amy King, Doug Lang, Katy Lederer, Reb Livingston, M. Magnus, Tom Mandel, Chris Mason, Kristi Mexwell, Megan McShea, Anna Moschovakis, Gina Myers , Chris Nealon, Mel Nichols, Aldon Nielsen, Tom Orange, Bob Perelman, Simon Pettet, Tom Raworth, Adam Robinson, Phyllis Rosenzweig, Ric Royer, Ken Rumble, Justin Sirois, Rod Smith, Cole Swensen, Maureen Thorson, Chris Toll, Edwin Torres, Les Wade, Rosemarie Waldrop, Ryan Walker, Mark Wallace, Terence Winch, Rupert Wondolowski, John Yau, Geoffrey Young



I’ve just finished reading the recently released i.e. reader, a chunky collection of poems from a variety of writers who have read at the i.e. reading series, hosted by Michael Ball, which has been running in Baltimore since May 2005. Michael is one of those people who works very hard in his own local environment to create opportunities for other people in the world of literature. He’s an energetic, restless, and sometimes even practical visionary who doesn’t come from any fancy side of anywhere, literary-wise or other, and whose work life, which I can’t claim to be entirely sure about (construction worker, handyman, painter and I don’t mean of paintings, things of that kind), nonetheless hasn’t taken away his love not just of literature but of helping to make literature happen. He’s a fine poet too, although it’s characteristic of his modesty that none of his own poems are included in a collection of work from a series he himself curates and hosts.

In the brief curator’s note that opens the collection, Michael mentions his indebtedness to the folks from Narrow House in Baltimore, the publishing group that has put out books and CDs from a significant group of contemporary poets and which produced and published the i.e. reader. Justin Sirois has been the founding brains and braun of Narrow House, and he works these days with Lauren Bender and Jamie Gaughran-Perez and, I think, in earlier days worked with others. Michael also mentions his close working connection to those of us who were running (and many of course still are; it’s just me who’s moved away) a variety of reading series and small presses in Washington, DC.

Although I don’t remember the date exactly (it must have been some time early in the 2000s), I remember first meeting Justin and some of the other young Baltimore poets. At the time, it felt like a significant change in the poetry energy in that part of the world. There hadn’t been much of an avant/experimental poetry scene in Baltimore before that, at least not any that I was aware of. All of a sudden there was a new group of energetic young writers traveling into DC for readings and doing their own events and publications in Baltimore.

Sometimes, it really doesn’t take any more than a few interested people willing to work hard and pay attention to get a literary community on its feet and on fire. In the early years of this decade, much of the new energy from Atlantic-area poetry below the Mason Dixon came from that Baltimore crowd, an infusion that I at least felt was very important for those of us in DC who were getting a bit woozy from years of effort.

I last read in Baltimore in May 2006 at an event hosted by Michael, and I think I met him for the first time that night. A man a few years older than me who had the marks of having lived a life of fairly tough experiences, he wasn’t immediately one of that younger crowd of poets but he had every bit the same level of enthusiasm and energy. His effort during the reading and afterwards made for a lively and memorable day that’s actually chronicled in a piece of my own writing called “We Need To Talk.”

As the list of contributors shows, the i.e. reader contains work by a combination of well-known avant poets, up-and-coming poets, and poets who have labored a long time making poems in Baltimore. For me, reading the book was some combination of nostalgic and informative about just how the world of poetry in that area has shifted since I moved away from the east coast.

There’s going to be an i.e. reader poetry event happening in Baltimore tomorrow night. Along with last weekend’s 20-year anniversary reading for Edge Books in Washington DC, it has clearly been a time for celebrating some of the significant literary work that has been done in that part of the world. It’s a subject worth celebrating. Needless to say maybe I’m more than a little sorry that I’m not going to be a direct part of either event. Just couldn’t get away from California in time, although right about now I sure wouldn’t mind being elsewhere. I’ve got the travel bug today and I’ve got it bad.

There are a lot of intriguing poems in the i.e. reader. Like a few other collections and anthologies that focus on a local scene but don’t feature exclusively local writing, the i.e. reader probably makes most sense for people who are part of the area community, or who are aware of the dynamics that make literary communities work, or who have some significant understanding already of directions in contemporary avant work. Yet I’m also going to use the book in a creative writing class this spring because of the impressive range of poetic approaches on display. It doesn’t contain explanatory or contextual material, not that by any means it automatically needs to, but it certainly constitutes a record (although, of course, not even close to a complete one) of what a group of people can do if they decide to work together where they live to make poetry an essential part of an active life that always involves much more than poetry.

As anyone who’s paying attention knows, the field of poetry, like any other, is regulated by systems of power and influence and connection and all the small foibles of who knows who and why and what’s in it for anyone. But it’s also made up of people who don’t stay at home, waiting for someone to discover them, but who make the effort to create opportunity for themselves and others. For me, that sense of working with people to make something happen is easily as important as anything else that literature may supposedly be about.

And if I don’t post again before that, Happy Holidays to everybody.

DVD of my Ghent, Belgium performance now available

For anyone interested, a DVD version of the reading I gave in Ghent, Belgium along with K. Lorraine Graham is now available. The DVD was created by Svend Thomsen (shown by his equipment in the photo above) as part of his Trekanten Video Formidling (TVF) project. The quality of the DVD is impressively high, especially considering how so many literary reading films turn out. I’m grateful that on this particular film I don’t look like too much of a large, overbearing goon pretending to be a writer.

Anyone interested in obtaining a copy can write Svend directly at:

tvf@artvideo.tv

More information about other available TVF videos can be found on the tvf website:

www.artvideo.tv

This particular set is actually a two DVD set, the first (62 minutes) featuring Helen White’s introduction, my reading, and then K. Lorraine Graham’s reading.

The second DVD (45 minutes) features the reading and performance that followed our event featuring a variety of poets and performance artists who live in and near Ghent or were visiting at the time, including Olaf Risee, Leila Rasheed, Wouter De Bruycker, Eddy Debuf, N.N., Tine Moniek, Josef Hajas, Philip Meersman, Réné Mogensen, Xavier Roelens, and Jelle Meander.

I blogged earlier about the variety of work that I heard presented that night, an excellent cross-section of the kind of poetry being practiced in Ghent among several generations of writers and particularly among an active younger generation.

My reading on the DVD is a bit unlike other readings I’ve given, although it shared my usual tendency to try to present different kinds of work at a reading. I was aware that I was going to be reading to an audience of individuals with different degrees of fluency in English, although as Helen White had told me, everyone or nearly everyone in Ghent speaks at least some English. I thought that a variety of my more minimalist poetry might work better than denser, more overwhelming or linguistically disruptive material, although I presented enough challenges, I hope, to conventional notions of poetry.

Watching the DVD, I also came to the conclusion that this reading was one of the most consistently and directly political readings I’ve given. Politics and social issues are always a part of my work, but I tend to think of the most explicitly political elements of my writing as part of a more varied framework that tries to engage politics as only one element (although a significant one) of the social and linguistic concerns it explores. I tend to work with the political as one aspect of the fabric of experience and language, rather than either trying to purge the political or make it the whole point. Still, in this particular reading, because of choosing more minimal poems, a more direct politics and cultural criticism than usual seems to come out.

Lorraine’s reading looks and sounds good too, although the most minimal aspect of it is perhaps her understated use of the hoola hoop. Her pieces, many from her book Terminal Humming, constitute a kind of reportage about the various language styles of people in Washington, DC, from state department confuse-speak to the language of young women and men on the prowl for love, although the linguistic game playing and appropriation and sheer sonic invention she works with are much more than simply reportage.

By the way, Svend Thomsen has made it clear that he doesn’t discourage bootlegged versions of the TVF material he shoots, so if you’d rather contact me than him about the DVD, please feel free. But I doubt that he’ll ask for all that much money, so please do consider contacting him first.

California Public Higher Education: What's Happening to Students in the California State University System

The article I have linked to here does a good job of explaining some of the main problems facing students in California who are seeking a college degree at an affordable cost though the California State University system, which as the article points out is the largest university system in the U.S., one for which student applications admissions are continuing to grow rapidly.

I hope everyone will remember that though there are genuine financial issues involved, the changes that are happening in California public education are not inevitable but are happening because of specific political decisions. Those who want California's students to have affordable education in the future (and that would certainly include, I hope, those who have benefited from it in the past) can make a difference by supporting education awareness drives and, crucially, by supporting California politicians who believe in the value of public higher education.

Thanks to Lauren Mecucci for pointing the article out to me.

300: Contemporary Fascist Film-Making, American-Style

When I watched the movie 300 about two months ago, I was astounded, in the proverbial jaw-dropping way, to be seeing a film that struck me as one of the purest examples of a fascist aesthetic ever filmed, rivaling even a film like Triumph of the Will for the sheer promotional quality of its ideological implications, and in fact exploring more deeply than Triumph many aspects of fascist ideology. It’s amazing, in fact, that 300 makes Triumph of the Will look rather reticent regarding the ugliest parts of fascism. That a film this starkly fascist could have been made in the U.S. in 2006 and toured the usual run of suburban and urban multiplexes seems to me both intensely fascinating and horrifying. Whether it surprises me is something I’m still trying to figure out.

When I posted a brief Facebook (where I’ve been spending a lot of time lately) comment about the fascism of 300, a friend of mine wrote back to challenge me to define what I meant by “fascist aesthetic.” So, thanks to John, I put together the list below.

This list doesn’t for the most part describe my individual take on fascist art. I consider it just more or less a description of the main elements of fascist art work as it was defined by Hitler and other artist-fascists at work in the Nazi regime and elsewhere. If you would like my personal take on fascist art though, I’m happy to offer it: I don’t like it. Now there’s a surprise. Fascist art works through an avoidance of history and any actual material conditions of the world. It offers a violent mythology and epic cartoon designed to blur and hide anything resembling actual history.

As Michael Theune pointed out in his response to me on Facebook, another thing that 300 illustrates is that a fascist aesthetic can indeed result in a boring film, not to mention an absolutely preposterous one. Still, by watching the film with the sound off and my own alternative soundtrack blaring, as well as with a generous serving of long commercial breaks courtesy of TNT (you don’t think I rented the damn thing, do you?), I was able to watch 300 in compact snippets that really highlighted the film’s affects and goals.

Of course, an argument can be made that the Spartans, the subject of the film, really were the world’s first main proto-fascists. Still, nothing about 300 is designed to be historically accurate, so claiming that historical accuracy was the reason behind taking such an approach obviously won’t wash.

And now my list of the basic characteristics of fascist art:

1) Belief in the moral corruption and physical and mental inferiority of dark-skinned people, homosexuals, and the physically disabled (all of which groups are, in fact, more or less interchangeable, in some degree).

2) Belief that the only true calling for a man is that of soldier, and that there is no greater honor than to die for one's country.

3) A promotion of the muscled male physique in a standardized, glorified way.

4) Belief that governments and democracy are corrupt hindrances to the activities of great moral soldier-leaders, who deserve the right to make decisions for all without the input of corrupt, morally and physically weak others.

5) A monumental, cleanly lined architecture whose goal is to emphasize physical strength both of building and of human physique.

6) Obfuscations about freedom and conformity; all free men must look, think, and act alike.

7) A sense of being a small, embattled moral elite in a world of corruption and decadence.

8) As that small, embattled elite, the group must finally die in defense of its values. Oddly, in fascist art, success is less beautiful and emotionally fulfilling than death.

9) A mythological landscape on which the fascist drama can be played out, one that describes even the environment of the world as a pure function of fascist values. No actual material messiness is allowed in the details.

This list may not be complete, but I hope it’s at least a good start. Of course, many of these values can be found in other art that is by no means fascist. It's the total combination of these characteristics that makes for fascist art, and that also makes 300 such a significant and unexpected new addition to the genre.

And have a happy Thanksgiving, everyone.