The last time I saw Norman Mailer on the television – I never met him personally – he was on C-Span2 on one of that channel’s all-book days, talking at Austin where presumably his archives are going. Shrunken by age, he looked elfin. Except for the ears, which frankly were vast. How odd, I thought, that time alone can do that to us, rendering this larger-than-life character into something more closely resembling a hobbit. Or maybe time and bourbon. Hearing him speak, however, particularly on the subject of America under George W. Bush, you could tell that he had lost not one scintilla of the razor wit that made him such a unique writer.

One test of a great novelist, any great writer really, I’ve always thought lay in the size of their vocabulary and the ease with which they deployed it. I always come away from Shakespeare, for example, hyperconscious of how much more there is to the language than what I normally hear in daily life. Just this past week, after a phone presentation with one of the customers on my day job, a multibillion dollar global systems integrator, I got an email from the lead person on the customer’s team, thanking me for using the word “loquacious” & reminding him that a world existed where such terms could be used.

After the high modernists, especially Joyce & Faulkner, the two novelists who do the most to expand one’s vocabulary are Henry Miller & Norman Mailer. DeLillo & Pynchon aren’t bad in this regard, either. Miller of course is better known for the frankness of his writings on sex, but it’s the vocabulary’s scope that persuades me, not just the use of an occasional four-letter word.

With Mailer the two books that I find matter most are Armies of the Night, easily the best prose work about American political life in the 1960s, and the remarkably off-kilter Why Are We in Vietnam? I’ve always felt that latter book was an attempt to channel a later version of Jack Kerouac in a way that directly anticipates, of all people, Donna Haraway & Greg Tate. Here is just the first paragraph of “Intro Beep 1”:

Hip hole and hupmobile, Braunschweiger, you didn’t invite Geiger and his counter for nothing – hold tight young America – introductions come. Let go of my dong, Shakespeare, I have gone too long, it is too late to tell my tale, may Batman tell it, let him declare there’s blood on my dick and D.J. Dicktor Doc Dick and Jek has got the bloods, and has done animal murder, out out damn fart, and murder of the soldierest sort, cold was my hand and hot.

It doesn’t quite work, which actually proves to be an important part of its charm, critical to the linguistic vertigo that sucks the reader in. 224 pages of this can feel exhausting, but you aren’t actually going to open up to the work until you get to that moment, not some sort of suspension of disbelief, but rather through disbelief completely. It’s a move that takes Mailer out of the pallid circuit of Bellow, Roth, Doctorow & Updike & places him more fairly against Kerouac, Olson, Melville. While I like Doctorow, only Mailer can write with the intensity, word to word, of those poet-novelists even if it doesn’t come through in everything he did.

Here be some links that popped up in the days since he died:

New York Times

Village Voice

London Times

New Yorker

The Nation

Kansas City Star

BBC

LA Times

London Telegraph

Associated Press

Salon

Salon (again)

Time

San Francisco Chronicle

The Guardian

NPR

Chicago Tribune

Huffington Post

Boston Globe photo essay

New York Sun

Tributes from various folks,
including the President of France

From around Atlanta

Ed Barrett, left, with Bill Corbett

I had the strangest experience with Ed Barrett’s “prose poem novel” (as it says on the rear jacket) Kevin White. I read the first half of it over two days, then got interrupted by what daily life was throwing at me, then couldn’t remember which backpack I’d put the book in so took a few more days before I picked it back up and finished it. But the experience was of two almost completely different books. During my first stint, I was definitely reading, feeling, seeing the prose poem on every page, even if it was a remarkably cohesive set of same. Here is the very first poem, from the book’s first (of nine) sets, “Kevin and John”:

I saw Kevin White’s mind disappearing into heaven as he bent down to pick up a tea bag John Wieners left on I-93 Southbound to remind oncoming traffic and the Big Dig that we have been set to – Boston, a mound of curly tight shiny law in the mind of Kevin our charge – and holding it like a ribbon to give a pretty girl, he placed it on his tongue and spoke to the Virgin Mary his language of tannin.

A single sentence prose poem that incorporates the former mayor of Boston, its most iconic poet, its most infamous “improvement” project, the Boston tea party, the Catholic church – dichtung don’t get much more condensare than that as Pound might have put it.

But when I returned to it, Kevin White had indeed turned into a novel, as elegant as anything plotted out by David Markson, each page as realized, both symbolically & visually, as Don DeLillo at his best. I went back & started over attempting to see it as I had at first, as a “collection” of separate poems around a series of recurring motifs, but I just couldn’t. Somehow the book had actually transformed itself. It was (is) a very spooky bit of magic.

For a guy born in Brooklyn, Ed Barrett “does” Boston pretty thoroughly. In addition to Wieners and White, other folks who show up in this book’s not-quite-80 pages include Whitey & Billy Bulger, Nomar Garciaparra & Pedro Martinez, Bill Corbett & Fanny Howe, the Virgin Mary & Deborah Hussey, whom a search of Google reveals to be the “last known” murder victim of Whitey Bulger.¹ If the book doesn’t have a plot in the usual sense of that term, it still fits together quite a bit more tightly than, say, Thomas Pynchon’s most recent effort.

Barrett has, in fact, been in Boston for some time, twenty years at least, during most of which he has been associated with various MIT programs that focus on the intersection between computing & writing. Where another poet so positioned might be inclined to use that intersection to drive endless amounts of techno-centric media exploration (imagine, say, Alan Sondheim in the same job), Barrett seems to have gone rather in the opposite direction. Choosing a poetry that is taut, highly constructed, with layers of allusion & irony used rather the way the painter Jess liked to heap up oil in some of his portraits. He gave a reading & talk at Writers House not quite 18 months ago & the MP3s of the two events, well worth listening to, return again & again to the same two names – Bill Corbett & John Ashbery – as touchstones for Barrett’s practice.

In fact, he’s not really like either, or at least this book isn’t. At first I thought of Kevin White as being closer in its sensibility to the sort of booklength poem that takes advantage, say, of genre vocabulary & devices, rather the way James Sherry’s 1981 In Case deployed the language of the hardboiled detective novel. But really it’s the city, not a genre, that’s the organizing principle here:

Flight Into Egypt

I saw former Red Sox pitcher Bill "The Spaceman" Lee take something from a dumpster in front of the Corbett house. "Watch it!" said Lee, "dreams are not hard science like colonoscopy and laser hair removal-dreams don't even know your name, Mr. Wally Cox, and therefore they come to you but could just as easily visit someone else when all you wanted was to have your head patted like a child. And I am Bill Lee, making a voodoo doll of Carl Yazstremski whose dream came to me by mistake and said Yaz was living in the Corbett house, upstairs under the eaves." "Is Bill moving?" I asked, "What's he need a dumpster for, anyway?" "Ask him yourself, here he comes," shouted Bill Lee as he ran down Columbus Avenue, sideways like a crab. "Bill, I don't understand, what is this all about?" "Dreams," snarled Corbett, "Who the hell is Bill Lee to talk about dreams!" And we walked into his study which was filled with life-size voodoo dolls of Bill Lee, each wearing a different set of legs: deer legs, grasshopper legs, rat's feet, and still twitching in the corner, a doll with legs of a blue-claw crab taken from the Gowanus Canal when Bill was visiting Brooklyn where the crab population, long crushed under the weight of pollution, now floats and copulates in the currents around Brooklyn like a blue halo. "Dreams know your name, Ed Cullen Bryant, like a real estate agent knows a price. Through my black art I torment Bill Lee with more sets of legs climbing up on him than some of the poor souls who once worked as prostitutes on Columbus Avenue. But now Boston has these dumpsters where our true past, which is unclaimed dreams, gets shoveled out each morning!" And Bill kicked the side of the dumpster so hard some trash spilled out revealing a child's Burger King paper crown from a lost day in the lost life of the nameless real, its gold paper glistening in the sun. Just then the soul of John Wieners stood beside us and when he picked up the Burger King crown and set it on his courtly brow, you could see it wasn't paper at all, but the live body of a blue-claw crab, its shell delicately balancing on top of John's bald spot, its legs in the air like a Boston prostitute, and in each of its needley pincers a birthday candle glowing in the blue smoke of the Virgin Mary's cigarette.

This is the lone poem in the final section of the book (&, in fact, is the final work Barrett read at Writers House as well, a good piece on which to close). The return here of John Wieners makes me realize that the deeper model in Kevin White, deeper than the novel, just might be the serial poetry of Jack Spicer, especially the run of great books that began with Heads of the Town Up to the Aether & ran through Book of Magazine Verse. That’s the kind of cohesion I sense page-to-page, section-to-section, tho with none of the acrid sarcasm that characterizes so much of Spicer’s use of public figures.

Oddly, as I write, Small Press Distribution has no copies of Kevin White on hand & the Pressed Wafer website hasn’t been updated even longer than that of the National Poetry Foundation, so it may well be that you can’t buy this book at the moment. Which is a shame. Hopefully this will be corrected shortly.

 

¹ Tho I note her body was buried where Bulger had already stocked two other bodies, one of them a drug trafficker & jewel thief by the name of Arthur “Bucky” Barrett.

I finally got around to seeing Ron Howard’s film adaptation of The Da Vinci Code and it’s every bit the disaster that the reviews said the film was when it first came out. If you have never read the book, this flick, just released to DVD in time for your heretical holidays, very probably is going to seem unintelligible, moving as rapidly as it does, virtually leaping from plot point to plot point without the slightest pause for reflection. The characters have no opportunity to gain any real sense of connection with one another. Why the Parisian police cryptologist is rescuing the American “symbologist” (sic) is never very clear, nor why he believes her when she insists he’s in danger in the first place.

The essence of this story is that three sets of people, each with very different motives, are racing to solve the very same mystery, a puzzle in the form of a treasure hunt, the object the secret, literally, of the Holy Grail. Even in the book, the narrative is complicated to the edge of intelligibility because one of the three operates parasitically, letting the others do all the work, intervening just enough to make everyone’s actions a little muddy. Here, to squeeze everything into two-plus hours, Howard has drained the monks of any inner life they might have had, so that we are given just enough detail about their actions to understand that Our Heroes are at risk. But everyone feels instead as if they have been trimmed back to stick figures. The result seems more like you’re looking at the story boards for a motion picture than a film itself.

It’s a waste of good actors, doubly so since so many of them – Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Jean Reno, Alfred Molina – are terribly miscast for their roles. You want them to have the time somewhere to try & develop (rescue) their characters, even just as an acting exercise, and it makes you wish that Howard had either stripped out perhaps an hour’s worth of plot, or else given himself the extra time – this film is long & feels much longer – to do this. There are moments in the film – the bank manager’s betrayal, for example – that seem to exist entirely out of all context, because his back story is completely missing & he acts thus without motivation.

In the end, this film really fails either because Ron Howard lacks self confidence – he has shown in the past that he knows better, even if he is a relentlessly Hollywood director, not the sort of brooding type who might have had more intuitive sense about the film’s spirit of darkness (it’s more than how you light the scene, Opie) – or because Ron Howard doesn’t have the power to make this his own film in the face of bottom-line driven execs.

So the problem is that it’s the author’s film that’s been made. As I’ve noted before in some detail, Dan Brown is a hack & the book itself is little more than a hyperactive plot machine. But it was a monster success and is no doubt what audiences expect. Yet consider, instead, how Peter Jackson & his writing partners far more successfully adapted The Lord of the Rings, omitting major characters, developing one entire picture out of a couple of paragraphs. Howard & screenwriter Akiva Goldsman (Cinderella Man; I, Robot; A Beautiful Mind) collaborate instead to give us a faithful but surprisingly unguided tour of the original plot, adding in only the smallest new details to try & keep some of the book’s narrative gaps – most notably the motivations of French police captain Bezu Fache (Jean Reno) – from sinking this bloated mess even deeper.

Because it’s Brown’s film more than Howard’s, taking some extra time to develop the characters & their evolving relationship to one another is pointless – they’re hardly any deeper in the book, although there readers get to see quite a bit more from the perspectives of Sophie, Silas, the Bishop, the banker, even the butler than we do in the film. And, contra Tolkien (or for that matter, Harry Potter, the other big film adaptation franchise of late), the myriad plot points are what the book is about. If it feels like a roller coaster ride, that’s because it is a roller coaster ride.

So often when films fail, it is because of bad writing. The producers spend a fortune on stars, sets, special effects, but appear to have forgotten to hire a writer. The variable history of Philip K. Dick stories as motion pictures could itself become a film course in the strategies of adaptation. The tales that work best as film – Blade Runner, Minority Report – are sometimes the flimsiest of Dick’s works, because in the movies, it’s easier to build from too little than it is to cut from too much. And, in sharp contrast to Brown’s bad book, few viewers of a Dick film are sitting in the theater with checklists ascertaining the veracity of the translation from page to screen.

This film fails as writing also, but not at the tactical level of bad dialog. It fails instead on writing’s broadest horizon: envisioning just what the experience of the film should be.

It’s ironic that I should find myself in a dust-up over the question of blurbs right at the moment when I am reading what I at first took to be a novel written entirely as a series of blurbs. As it turns out, that’s not quite what’s going on in the late Gilbert Sorrentino’s Lunar Follies. Rather, the book is a series of 53 short texts, some of which might be blurbs, some of which might be reviews, at least one of which is nothing but a lengthy list in the form of a paragraph, and some of which might just be gallery guides for imaginary (and sometimes impossible) art exhibitions. Here is “Gassendi,” which carries the subhead, “Banville Teddie:Late Works”:

This small, exquisitely mounted exhibition shows works from the Gassendi Foundation’s collection of Teddie’s last miniatures. It is provocatively, if somewhat inaccurately presented under the title “In the Months of Love,” a phrase from the juvenilia of Ingelow MacGonagall, a Scottish poet much admired by Teddie, and comprises a group of late paintings from the mysterious “Primavera” series. They are hopefully dreamy, their microscopically gestural bravura “in love,” so to say, with the notion of ideal beauty, their colors almost vengefully Parassian. And yet, this dreaminess is quite proper, perhaps, to aesthetes, while not yet quote so to poets, to whom, en masse – as we know from Teddie’s recently discovered diaries – these delicate miniatures were dedicated, and for whom they were most certainly executed. This dreamy quality of Teddie’s work is often thought of as a flaw, and yet one cannot remotely conceive of the paintings otherwise. Teddie increasingly thought of himself as a poet, and of his colors as words, his forms, as he once put it, “[as] a shifting syntax, of sorts,” and his canvases as his “well-thumbed, scratched over, blotted” manuscripts, all brushed by the hand of the Muse, “yet no more than her hand, no more, no more.” The canvases, one must declare, are much smaller, even, than miniatures, and are each dominated by a cool, sherbet-like color, although other colors, tints, shades, tones, and highlights, lurk everywhere. These are, perhaps, after all, “the months of love.” Perhaps not. The pictures, so small as to be made out with no little difficulty, are madly ambitious, a kind of paean to a strange Teddiean spring, to his beloved primavera, and to the sun, the sun of the artist’s cherished Ringo Chingado Flats, the side of his last isolated studio; and, of course, to flesh, the flesh of his fellow humans, mostly women, that he honored and adored, even as he exploited, brutalized, and despised it.

Not unlike some of the work of Kent Johnson & Gabe Gudding, this is a high concept mode of satire – if you read such reviews, particularly in off-brand art journals of the sort one finds at some distance, say, from New York City, a piece that is at once both this pretentious & this vague is utterly plausible. Indeed, there are a few blogs out there of which one might say the same. It’s not the sort of laugh-out-loud humor of the New York School 2.0, but I find the silliness here quite delicious: Ringo Chingado indeed! And that’s exactly what this book is, one long & extremely rich dessert, richer still if you catch all the allusions Sorrentino makes in his work. For example, there was a 19^th century French poet by the name of Théodor de Banville.

Perhaps Lunar Follies  feels to me like a novel because the chapters are all in alphabetical order (this makes for a positively spooky table of contents!), so you sense the procedural logic from beginning to end. Each chapter title is taken literally from the surface of the moon. Gassendi is the name of a crater as well as that of Pierre Gassendi, 17^th century philosopher and mathematician.

Yet each piece, like the above, is perfectly capable of standing on its own, and indeed without any knowledge as to its indirect or sly references. There is nothing to suggest any inherent continuity between sections, at least at the level of content. For example, there is nothing to suggest that the same authorial voice stands behind each piece – in fact, there is a lot to suggest otherwise, as the tone seems to lunge from one vocabulary & diction to another. Lurking behind all of these is a lifetime of reading critical prose & art prose intensely, understanding where they fit together &, even more important, where they merely pretend to do so.

But if there isn’t a single voice to this project, then in fact we have something quite unlike the novel with the fictive’s obsession with character. Imagine a book with no narrator & that’s not so far from what you’ll find here. This gives Lunar Follies much more the feel of a prose poem, such as those written by Aloysius Bertrand early in the 19^th century. Bertrand didn’t know he writing prose poems – Baudelaire had not yet declared the form – and I don’t think Sorrentino did either. Rather, I think that Sorrentino may have had a more fixed concept of the prose poem & that this project, lying outside it, therefore was/is something different.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter. What does is that many readers will find this book to be scrumptious – tho Sorrentino expresses attitudes, as he does at the very end of the piece above, quite consistent with the New American Poetry’s sense of gender relations (and, beyond that, a 1950s’ conception of these relations) – LeRoi Jones, the editor of Four Young Lady Poets, after all, was a close collaborator with Sorrentino during that period. All of which is to say that women here often are placed on a pedestal, but sometimes are found up there naked & prone. In this regard, Sorrentino may be a “guy’s writer” simply because history & his own limitations have closed him off to subsequent generations of female readers. Given that Something Said may be the one of the two or three best critical books to come out of that period & that Sorrentino subsequently developed into a master of the novel, this is a shame. But this is not a week in which I want to ignore the obvious (see aforementioned dust-up).

Debra Di Blasi, with whom I read at the KGB bar in New York the week before last, has two books out, Drought & Say What You Like from New Directions, Prayers of an Accidental Nature from Coffee House Press, with a new book, The Jirí Chronicles, forthcoming from Fiction Collective 2 – that is sort of the hat trick among post-avant fiction publishers.

Drought, which won the 1998 Thorpe Menn Book Award, was also made into a prize-winning short film by Lisa Moncure with a script by Di Blasi. Reading the novella, which accounts for a little more than three-quarters of this 90-page book, you can see how the story translates without too much difficulty into a medium like film. Its short chapters virtually storyboard themselves as scenes. Here, in its entirety, is “Name”:

She turns into the light. To no one – not even herself – she says, “Kale.”

This takes up the whole of page 11 in this 68-page tale, which gives you some idea of just how quickly this story goes by. Only one chapter, the very last, goes beyond a single page. And it does so just by three paragraphs, two of which are composed of single sentences. And those sentences are just two words each.

This is a story set vaguely somewhere east of the Rockies & told with chapters so brief that you can’t help but think of Faulkner’s great As I Lay Dying as something of a model for the genre – spare to the point of Zen-like, albeit some goth version of Zen noir. Like Faulkner’s little masterpiece, this is the tale of a family, but whereas Faulkner’s family is large & multigenerational, each chapter given the name of the person who is “speaking” or perhaps “thinking” its words, Drought is done much more in the third person, and if there is a point of view, it belongs to Willa, the painter-illustrator trying to survive a loveless & still childless marriage to a writer, the aforenamed Kale, a couple that has returned to the family farm tho neither seems particularly suited to making their living at such a difficult, all consuming endeavor. Willa’s father makes a brief appearance early on & her brother Richard, the object of three letters, is the narrative framework for the last chapter. But mostly this is Willa & Kale, almost entirely from Willa’s point-of-view. Here, for example, is “Heron”:

The oar moves in slow deliberate strokes through the water, first on the left, then on the right. Within the ripples gathering on the surface is the distorted reflection of an arm, its muscles contracting with each downward sing of the oar.

At the far end of the point where the bank shifts from clay to buckbush, a diseased elm stands dying against the colorless sky. A single branch – skeletal, a dry gray bone – sways from the sudden weight of a great blue heron. The bird cocks its head to the side, listening, then forces a mournful call into the silence it discovers.

The oar stops. The muscles relax.

This is, tho it appears fairly early on, an important chapter and that first sentence in its second paragraph strikes me as capturing a great deal of what is going on in this story. It’s well crafted, especially up to the comma, but the key terms of the latter half – diseased, dying, colorless – overwhelm me. If I hadn’t picked up the subtext by now, skeletal & bone in the next sentence will drive it home two more times. Yet the last sentence in this paragraph is simply magnificent – it’s one of those sentences I wish I’d written – forces a mournful call into the silence it discovers is about as good as writing is allowed to get. Anyone who has spent much time watching great blue herons will know exactly what Di Blasi means.

Di Blasi’s economy of writing is so spare that there are moments when I think of chapters here as being not unlike Hemingway’s Nick Adam stories, his very best work. Or possibly influence by the work of Wright Morris, who more than anyone, found a style that wedded what was powerful about both Faulkner & Hemingway, and who also took that great plain that is Nebraska, Kansas & Missouri as his subject as well.

This is an interesting – and in some sense most radical – aspect of Di Blasi’s work. I often sense, for example, that when post-avant writers are visibly taking up influences from high modernism that there is a strain of nostalgia at play in the work – consider Ondaatje’s Hemingway in The English Patient, for example, or Walker’s Faulkner in The Color Purple, or Maso’s Beckett in Ava. Not so Di Blasi – my sense is that she is doing something closer to Jurgen Habermas called for in his great talk on postmodernity, going back to modernism to finish the project right this time. In this sense, Di Blasi’s own stance is probably closer to language poetry, whose own impulses as a collective activity always struck me as neo-modern in much the same way. (And in this sense, someone to read alongside Di Blasi might be Carla Harryman, the language writer with the deepest engagement in fictive structures.)

This feels even more true in Say What You Like, the second novella – really a short story in 39 chapters.¹ In Drought, the characters have names, back stories, a sense of place. In Say What You Like, character is reduced to gendered pronouns, there are no back stories, there is no “location.”

Gender relations are key to both tales & Di Blasi is not an optimist on relations between the sexes. While women are allowed here to feel aroused – and to act on it – force is seen as central to the dynamics of sex. That observation is something akin to a gyroscope here – it is what gives balance and motion to both of these tales.

 

¹ Printed here over 18 pages, tho it probably would have worked better to have run it, like Drought, one section to a page, one of those mind-boggling design decisions that New Directions sometimes makes, making you wonder even more why they would go out to get a great cover artist like Tim Davis & then scrimp on paper.

There is a certain aptness to reading Nicole Brossard’s 1987 novel Le Désert mauve in translation: Mauve Desert, which was recently returned to print by Coach House Books, is superbly rendered by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood. It’s a high-risk endeavor for any translator, since one key dimension of this novel is the presumption that it is itself “translated” as well as “written.” Indeed, what we have here is a Borges-like project – a tale of just 36 or so pages that we are told is Mauve Desert as written, presumably in English, by one Laure Angstelle. This is followed by a meditation on translation itself, a section called “A Book to Translate,” which in turn includes other sections on Places and Things, Characters – one is a photo essay of sorts – Scenes, and Dimensions, a further meditation on translation¹ and finally Mauve, the Horizon, as translated by Maude Laures, which reads a great deal just like the original. Here is a three-paragraph passage from the second chapter of Mauve Desert:

Here in the desert, fear is precise. Never an obstacle. Fear is real, is nothing like anguish. It is as necessary as a day of work well done. It is localized, familiar and inspires no fantasies. Here there are only wind, thorns, snakes, wolf-spiders, beasts, skeletons: the soil’s very nature.

At the Motel though, fear is diffuse. televised like a rape, a murder, a fit of insanity. It torments the mind’s gullible side, obstructs dreams, bruises the soul’s trouble.

I was fifteen and I’m talking about fear, for fear, one thinks about it only after the fact. Precise fear is beautiful. Perhaps it is possible after all to fantasize fear like a blind spot producing a craving for eternity, like a hollow imaginary moment leaving in the pit of the stomach a powerful sensation, a renewed effect of ardor.

Here is the same passage 156 pages later in Brossard’s book, as “translated” in Mauve, the Horizon:

In the desert fear is exact, well-proportioned, wears no mask. It is useful, precise, does a good job. Fear, here, is frequented like a natural history. It is exceptionally succinct, a few illustrations: beaks, fangs, stingers, forked tongue.

At the Motel though, fear frightens. On the screen as in thought, it fragments bodies, assassinates daily. Fear sniffs boredom and sends chills down the back. Fear insists, amplifies the torment of living, permutates certitude and farfetched stories in the brain.

I was 15 and I’m talking about fear still for it always takes me by surprise. But exact fear is beautiful. Every night it can be seen wandering, strong remnant of eternity in the petrified forest. Yes, exact fear kindles the plexus and plaits strange suns in the eyes.

In addition, each chapter of the twin works operates in two parts – one very factual passage concerning a crazed scientist – the Los Alamos testing ground is referenced on numerous occasions – named Longman in the original and in the photo essay, O’blongman in the “translation,” then a longer section recounting events from the perspective of Mélanie, the 15-year-old daughter of a motel owner (Kathy Kerouac!), a woman who appears to have only recently taken on a lesbian lover. Much of the “story” told in the two versions of this book consists of Mélanie sensing her mother’s heightened sexual feelings, her own half-envious/half-appalled (it is, after all, her mother) emotions, a trip to visit a close cousin with whom she may or may not be experimenting sexually, driving around the desert, especially at night, and then dancing in the motel bar with the one woman scientist she knows from Los Alamos.

Thus we have referential characters and characters who exist entirely as writing styles – we sense the presence of a translator how, precisely? In one section of the long meta-chapters that separate Mauve Desert from Mauve, the Horizon, the translator “interviews” what she concedes is the imagined author. But she does so through the persona of the woman scientist.

Of all the elements of fiction, character is the most “meta-“. Here, at moments, we have Mélanie seen through at least three layers – her self, her writer, her translator. We have key elements, even key objects, picked apart theoretically. There is a gun in the glove compartment of the car Mélanie drives and we are told, repeatedly, that it is hot or warm. Yet one gun does go off in this story, and it is not that one.

In a sense, Brossard’s Mauve Desert (as distinct from Angstelle’s, or from Laure’s translation) is a narrative onion – peel and peel until at last you get what exactly? The layers of onion are the onion.

There is one thing I ought to make clear amidst all this – Mauve Desert is also, at all points, a fascinating, even entertaining read, even just at the “he said this, she did that” level. The level of control of the writing is always completely precise, which is exactly what empowers passages like the two above, neither one of which can be truly said to be the “it” of referentiality. If Longman / O’blongman seems a little under-realized as a character, that is also his role in the narrative itself. It’s no accident that you never see a face in the photo essay that is “his” portrait.

Nor is it any accident that Nicole Brossard is the most widely translated Canadian francophone author. Mauve Desert is a classic of post-avant writing because it manages to do more things well at once than other novels would dare attempt. But if you try to get to the “there there” behind the writing, I swear you will only make yourself dizzy.

 

¹ Marcella Durand has a terrific interview with Brossard on the subject of “self-translation,” which includes a discussion of Mauve Desert, in the second issue of Double Change.

Lionel Essrog is the direct descendant of Benjamin Compson, the developmentally disabled narrator of the opening section of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. But, as anyone who has read the two books knows, Faulkner’s classic is itself a worshipful homage to James Joyce’s Ulysses. But style in Ulysses, especially first-person style, whether that of Stephen Dedalus or Leopold Bloom, is relatively free form, playful – Joyce is making a point about realism’s commitment to a single uniform model of representation. Stream of consciousness, so called, is put through a variety of paces, shifting chapter by chapter, hour by hour as Bloomsday passes. Faulkner, on the other hand, deploys the device strictly to shape the character. If Quentin Compson is a pale version of Stephen Dedalus, it is Benjamin and his rapacious brother Jason who represent the triumph of this literary device, Benjamin especially because his developmental challenges rob him of an ability to interpret what he sees:

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.

One of the great first paragraphs in the history of the novel – and one of the great first sentences of the 20^th century – this description of the game of golf functions not just to set the context for what happens next, but also to prepare us for the heavily filtered lens through which we will have to view the action. One might quibble that the verb “hunting” requires too much interpretation here, and it’s true that Faulkner was no psychologist – Benjamin is as much a projection of stereotype & narrative needs as he is a person – but after Faulkner any novelist in English became able to use literary form to shape the narrator of a tale – one might read this as a colonization of the techniques of dramatic monolog (and which might explain the steady decline of that genre throughout the 20^th century). From Faulkner to Alice Walker, David Markson & Carole Maso is a very short leap indeed.

Lionel Essrog, however, is not stream of consciousness, but rather the first-person memoir mode of so much American detective fiction. The protagonist of Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Broooklyn has Tourette’s syndrome, a tic disorder, one that in Essrog’s case shows more signs of palilalia and echolalia than the more infamous coprolalia – chronic obsessive swearing – that is often associated with the disorder. It’s a condition that stigmatizes the protagonist, but more importantly it enables the author Lethem to work with multiple layers, shifting between the hyperliterate narrator – other characters complain about his bookishness – and the touchy, ticky first person EatMeBailey character who is apt to punctuate even the simplest statement with inappropriate riffs:

“You shouldn’t make fun of – Lyrical Eggdog! Logical Assnog! – you shouldn’t make fun of me, Julia.”

Freakshow, as Essrog is called by most of his closest associates throughout the book, is one of a quartet of misfits recruited literally out of an orphanage by a Fagin-like character, Frank Minna, who is a penny-ante hood who does errands for geriatric made guys not so terribly different, say, from Uncle Junior on The Sopranos. Minna is killed in the book’s opening scene & what ensues is your classic whodunit, as told through Tourette’s & involving not only a rich portrait of life in Brooklyn, but curiously involving the inner workings of a Yorkville Zendo.

Lethem – who once worked at Pegasus Books in Berkeley back when its manager was Steve Benson – has a tremendous ear for language, spoken, written or ticked. One of the baddies here, a mammoth murderer, is labeled for his snack preferences the Kumquat Sasquatch, a phrase I’ve been rolling around in my head & mouth for a week now. What makes the novel work is just how well Lethem negotiates the multiple realms of narrator & actor in this drama, a distinction that is going to be a considerable challenge for Edward Norton’s screenplay for the forthcoming film adaptation. Unlike Faulkner, Lethem has the advantage of living in a time when the works of Oliver Sacks have demystified many neurological phenomena & Lethem actually thanks Sacks in a list of credits in the back of the book. Thus, to a degree unmatched elsewhere that I can think of, the outside of Lionel Essrog, the Human Freakshow, is radically unlike the person beneath.

Motherless Brooklyn was named “book of the year” by Esquire, received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Macallan Gold Dagger for crime fiction and the Salon Book Award, only one of which seems a likely candidate for a genre work. The book transformed Lethem’s career. He won a Macarthur last year & is Bob Dylan’s interviewer in the current issue of Rolling Stone. Uncharacteristically, he actually deserves all of these good things. If Motherless Brooklyn isn’t the best novel I’ve read in the past five years, it certainly is up there with the best of Joe Torra or DeLillo’s Underworld.

The Danish documentary Thomas Pynchon: Journey into the Mind of P. inadvertently demonstrates the problematics involved with anonymity in literature. Part of the problem is simply that the two filmmakers, Donatello & Fosco Dubini, have about 45 minutes of actual information, but have determined to pad it out to a full-length feature 90. But the real problem is that they have no there here. The film, the closest I suspect Pynchon will ever get to his own E! True Hollywood Story¹, is an attempt to identify the living person behind the books. Rather than the “magic tricks” that I suggested yesterday with regards to reading anonymous works of literature, this is an attempt to learn something concrete about a real human being who is very determined to remain very private indeed. And, in E! True Hollywood fashion, it has not occurred to our intrepid filmmakers to actually read the freakin’ books!?!

What we get instead is a tour of some elements of the Thomas Pynchon industry – not the academic one, composed as it is of people who’ve read his works – the closest they get is a short talking-head spot with the late George Plimpton reminiscing about a review he wrote of V. – but the over-the-top fans who have their own fansites on the web & speculate – at length – that since Pynchon & Lee Harvey Oswald were in Mexico at roughly the same time in the 1950s, therefore Pynchon must be in hiding because of what he knows about the assassination of JFK. This is accompanied with much stock footage of Lee Harvey Oswald passing out “Hands Off Cuba” leaflets in New Orleans & Jack Ruby gunning Oswald down on Nov. 23, 1963.

The high point of the film – or at least the furthest up they get from that low one – is some interviews with Jules Siegel & his ex-wife Chrissie Jolly. Siegel, a one-time classmate of Pynchon’s at Cornell who had also spent some time in Mexico after graduation, met up with Pynchon in Manhattan Beach, California, where Pynchon was living & writing The Crying of Lot 49. Jolly & Pynchon, according to her, fell instantly in love & carried on a romance behind Siegel’s back, which he later recounted in an article published in, of all places, Playboy. The film follows Chrissie as she wanders the narrow streets that lead down to the beach before finding the one where she had her tryst with Pynchon. She & the film crew persuade a very reluctant current tenant to let them in & film the basic efficiency apartment, noting such details as the size of the bathroom (small). In passing, she also talks about Pynchon’s writing process (longhand first, followed by the typewriter), at least as it was in the 1960s – and that he thought seriously about attending the 1968 Democratic Convention to protest the war in Vietnam. But other than that, his preferences for drugs (weed & hash) and that he would walk down to the beach & spend a couple of hours there every morning “without ever getting the slightest tan,” or that he once showed up at a hotel the Siegel’s were staying in, wearing a black cape, are about the level of depth we get. That is illustrated with stock footage of George Reeves playing Superman from the 1950s TV show.

The remainder of the film is devoted to people who think they have seen Thomas Pynchon, including an Aussie journalist who staked out an uptown Manhattan residence (whose address he had gotten by tracing details in public records related to the death of Pynchon's parents) until he decided that a certain 60ish male walking down the street with an eight-year-old son was Pynchon & snapped a photograph that, even blown up, is little more than generic pixels. CNN did likewise once and then decided to simply do a story on Pynchon’s reclusiveness while showing many people walking down the streets of Manhattan before telling the audience that one of the people they had just seen was Pynchon, without identifying which one. The film ends with Siegel & the filmmakers focusing in on one guy in a Kansas City Royals baseball cap whom they say CNN told them was Pynchon (Siegel doesn’t believe it, preferring instead a guy who looks a lot like poet Geoffrey Young).

In fact, Pynchon’s only public appearance ever has been on the Simpsons, where you do get to hear his voice & see the portrait above. Does this mean that his skin is really yellow or that he only has four fingers on each hand?

I never have asked the poet Allen Fisher, who published some of Pynchon’s essays in chapbook form, how he got in touch with the elusive author, tho I did once ask Mimi Fariña – whom I knew somewhat during the early 1970s – what Pynchon was doing then (he had been the best man at her wedding, her husband having also been part of the Cornell writing scene in the 1950s). This was during the silent period between Lot 49 & Gravity’s Rainbow. Pynchon was, she said, selling vacuum cleaners door to door, having exhausted his earnings as a writer. It was hard to envision then & I still don’t know if Mimi was teasing me.

My point is that it didn’t really matter then & it doesn’t now, but minutiae like this have been turned by Pynchon himself into part of a great puzzle that, I think, detracts from what actually is valuable in the man’s writing. As I noted yesterday, context is one of the six functions of language &, if you make a point of hiding a part of the context, you can pretty well count on readers foregrounding exactly that one element. Do we really need to know about J.D. Salinger’s bouts with Scientology, Hinduism or that he drinks his own urine? It’s Salinger who has made these tidbits a part of his fiction, precisely by making his actual life a mystery. Pynchon has made the same mistake.

Robert Duncan once told me that his own 15-year hiatus from publishing books post-Bending the Bow had been an accident. He had said it half in jest to New Directions publisher James Laughlin simply because Robert didn’t have the work ready in what Laughlin – who had been expecting maybe one big book every three years, Duncan’s rate of production since the 1940s – thought of as a timely manner. But Laughlin had told everyone & now everyone was treating it as a major position that Duncan had adopted. What that meant was that most of his readers knew that what they had heard about Duncan being diffident, imperious & impossible to work with had to be true, because look at this – he’s not going to do a book for 15 years. And in retrospect, it’s true – Ground Work is only now being read as something more than as an afterthought to that career ending hiatus. The non-decision not to do a book for 15 years became instead a large part of the context that adhered to his writing.

Thomas Pynchon has a new novel, Against the Day, forthcoming this November. You can even read a passage by clicking that link. At 1060 pages from a novelist who is now 69, it may well be the last big book we ever get from Pynchon, and it’s only his sixth one. It would nice to imagine that people will read it for what it is, and not as a cryptogram for deciphering what the author doesn’t care to share.

¹ The only other film relating to Pynchon would appear to be a German adaptation of Gravity’s Rainbow entitled Prüfstand VII that appears never to have had American distribution.

Just about everyone I know thinks of Jack Kerouac as a novelist who wrote poetry. But what about Gilbert Sorrentino? Before Mulligan Stew and the other long prose fictions that made Sorrentino justly famous as a novelist, he was a successful poet (and a superb critic of poetry). Along with the then-LeRoi Jones, the always-on-the-road Paul Blackburn, and youngsters George Economou, Rochelle Owens, Robert Kelly & Clayton Eshleman, Sorrentino was part of Projectivism’s presence in & around Manhattan throughout the 1960s & ‘70s. Sorrentino’s Selected Poems covers the period 1958-1980. But I’m not aware if there has been much, if any, poetry since. It’s as though the man had one successful career & then chose to follow it with another, very different such career. Not unlike Bill Bradley, an athlete, then a politician.

Another poet with an even more ambiguous relation to these genres has been Toby Olson, again a second generation Projectivist. Because he’s published in both forms throughout his life, I’ve always suspected that his work has been underestimated in each form. The very same silliness that bedevils the bookstore clerk who cannot decide whether Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate is fiction or poetry*, let alone Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, plays out in the minds of readers more generally when it comes to considering the lifework of different authors. Case in point: Hilda Doolittle.

Almost everyone thinks of Doolittle as a poet who also wrote some fiction, as well as translations & memoirs. Yet H.D. published, for all extents and purposes, just a dozen or so books of poetry during her lifetime, going long periods between volumes after the appearance of her first Collected Poems in 1925. And that number shrinks if you treat Trilogy as one book, instead of three. During this long productive career – just under half a century – Doolittle also wrote 19 novels and collections of stories, according to Susan Stanford Friedman’s 1987 chronology of H.D.’s writing, published in the special issue of Sagetrieb devoted to Doolittle’s work. They include the following:

<![if !supportLists]>·         <![endif]>Paint It Today, novel

<![if !supportLists]>·         <![endif]>Asphodel, novel

<![if !supportLists]>·         <![endif]>Pilate’s Wife, novel

<![if !supportLists]>·         <![endif]>Palimpsest, novel (interlocking stories)

<![if !supportLists]>·         <![endif]>Nike, novel

<![if !supportLists]>·         <![endif]>Hedylus, novel

<![if !supportLists]>·         <![endif]>HER, novel (published as HERmione)

<![if !supportLists]>·         <![endif]>Narthex, novella

<![if !supportLists]>·         <![endif]>The Usual Star, stories

<![if !supportLists]>·         <![endif]>Kora and Ka, novellas

<![if !supportLists]>·         <![endif]>Nights, novella

<![if !supportLists]>·         <![endif]>The Hedgehog, novel

<![if !supportLists]>·         <![endif]>The Seven, stories

<![if !supportLists]>·         <![endif]>Bid Me to Live, novel

<![if !supportLists]>·         <![endif]>Majic Ring, novel

<![if !supportLists]>·         <![endif]>The Sword Went Out to Sea (Synthesis of a Dream), novel

<![if !supportLists]>·         <![endif]>White Rose and the Red, novel

<![if !supportLists]>·         <![endif]>The Mystery, novel

<![if !supportLists]>·         <![endif]>Magic Mirror, novel

Not all of these novels ever made it into print. Friedman’s note for Nike simply reads “Destroyed.” Biographer Guest politely notes that “Hipparchia: War Rome (Circa 75 B.C.)” has “none of the polish or professionalism” of H.D.’s later work, and I would pass a similar judgment on Paint It Today. Friedman lists Pilate’s Wife as “submitted and rejected,” & White Rose and the Red as “probably rejected.” Yet 19 booklength works over a 35-year span (H.D. appears to have begun writing fiction in 1921, after her life began to stabilize somewhat with the presence of Bryher; the final item, Magic Mirror, was written in the mid-1950s) demonstrates a considerable emphasis, a commitment of time & effort. Indeed, between the first Collected Poems in 1925 and her next book of poetry, Red Roses for Bronze, in 1931, Doolittle produced seven novels & collections of stories, plus the verse drama Hippolytus Temporizes plus her work on the film Borderline.

One could make the case that Doolittle was, in fact, a novelist – tho not a successful one – who wrote poetry at least as much as she was a poet who wrote fiction. While that may seem like a difference within a distinction (& vice versa), it has, I suspect, real consequences in terms of how H.D. saw herself & thus how she envisioned her career as author. Did she feel satisfied? Was she pleased at what she had accomplished? These are, I think, legitimate questions. During a poet’s life, they have everything to do with how the writer decides what’s next, and even how to proceed. At one level, the writer in me would love for an Emily Dickinson, say, to understand the breadth & depth of her achievement, the power of her impact on the world. At another, younger writers are constantly confronted with options, nearly every one of which is an incentive to stop writing poetry. What if, for example, Jack Spicer had finished his detective novel & it had proven to be a best-seller, followed with a major motion picture? What if, in precisely the other direction, Trout Fishing in America had not been so fabulously successful? Would Richard Brautigan still be alive today? Would there be a west coast tradition of the humorous lyric as widespread as that which flowed from the New York School? So many what-ifs flow out of such a distinction: was a H.D. a novelist who wrote poetry?

In practice, I haven’t seen anything yet to suggest that this is how Doolittle saw herself, albeit I am still acquainting myself with the territory & I have a long way still to go. Nonetheless what I want to be conscious of, at least for today, is how the H.D. we know / I know is a construct. That is, we define her as the poet & in so doing condition many of our responses to new information, setting our expectations accordingly. The fiction that is in print, such as it is, for example, appears to have been published to fill out the oeuvre of the poet, not because anyone thought that it might transform a history of the novel (although, in fact, it is historically important to the degree that H.D. was writing overtly lesbian fiction at time when this was hardly done at all, & only at some risk). Which is to say that all of the reasons for publishing H.D.’s fiction have little or nothing to do with its actual quality as fiction.

* Hint: bad fiction, worse poetry.