FALLING MAN

Keith Neudecker émerge de la tour ou il travaille dans un nuage de cendres et de fumées pour rejoindre son ex-femme et son fils. Le lieu : New York. La date : 11 septembre 2001. Dans son nouveau roman, Falling Man,De Lillo nous fait partager la vie de plusieurs personnages directement liés aux Evenements (Témoins directs, victimes, etc.) et les conséquences,les années qui suivent, sur leurs vies et celles de leurs proches . Après l’image de l’assassinat de Kennedy qui longtemps hanta son œuvre c’est celle de l’effondrement des tours qui devient centrale dans ce roman mosaïque attendu en juin aux Etats-Unis.(Le titre est évidemment une référence à la photo de Richard Drew reproduite ci-dessus)

TRILOGIE

Ce projet fou est le troisième tome (tant attendu) d'une trilogie épatante. Tiens, un petit quizz - qui va en trouver l'auteur? Deux superbes extraits en ligne, si vous savez les trouver. On y revient dans quelques jours....

"Breeze Avenue tells the story of an alcoholic Scrabble player and poet, Michelangelo Goldberg, who gives away a fortune in order to move to Venice Beach and find God. Over the years, Goldberg creates a number of outlandish works that form the basis of a gigantic novel.

Goldberg becomes entangled in the death of a young autistic woman who works at the beach as a clown, blowing up balloons for children. This, among other situations, forces him into a spiritual reappraisal, disclosing a heavenly realm, an interior world that is ultimately expressed as a radical revision in the nature of fiction.

There are twenty-six "elements," or distinct texts, in Breeze Avenue. The novel is three million pages in length and will be permanently installed in a reading room in Los Angeles in 2007.

Sections of the book draw upon information from Egyptology, architecture, metaphysics, software development, screenwriting, geology, Vedic and Biblical studies, graphic, fabric and product design, ornithology, performance art, linguistics, film production, astronomy, political, literary and social theory, material science, acoustics, musical instrumentation, animation, cryptology, sleep theory, mathematics, entomology, photography, and lexicography. Documents are produced in Latin, Yiddish, Mongolian, Egyptian and Sanskrit, as well as in English. Many of the elements are poetic in nature. The texts, in many cases, spawn concrete objects and occurrences that have a life of their own outside the novel"

LES ADIEUX

Grande lassitude entre « Devenirs du roman » et le Technikart hors-série littérature ou l’avenir semble se résumer à la simple question : « Comment faire du neuf avec du vieux ? »
Qu’il y ait des désirs d’écriture au XXIème siècle, certes, comment le contester ?, des essais d’écriture, l’encombrement, mais une transcendance qui pose la littérature comme terme plein d’une alternative avec le monde – une littérature Totale, une littérature Monde - on en guette vainement la trace ces dernières années en librairie.
L’anecdote est connue, Haydn en 1772 conclue avec sa symphonie N°45, Les Adieux, non par un mouvement vif mais par un adagio – les instruments se taisent les uns après les autres, chaque musicien souffle sa bougie avant de quitter la scène, ne restent à la fin que deux violons qui soufflent leur bougie, et continuent, dans le noir, à jouer la tierce.
Il ne me semble pas d’image plus parfaite pour la littérature au XXIème siècle – en attendant d'être détrompé. Sans trop d’espoirs néanmoins.

MEMENTO

Après les schizophrènes, qui tenaient les rênes ces dernières années, c’est depuis quelques mois aux tours des zombies, des vampires et des amnésiques de se disputer la place d’honneur sur les étagères des libraires américains. Air du temps. Si les deux premiers sujets semblent encore en attente d’un leader (On conseillera néanmoins, pour le fun, le Zombie Survival Guide et le Already Dead, de Charlie Huston – rien à voir avec le chef d’œuvre éponyme de Denis Johnson), on mentionnera, bien entendu, dans la dernière catégorie Echo Maker de Richard Powers, déjà longuement évoqué ici, et Remainder de Tom McCarthy. Dans ce dernier, sorte de Memento littéraire, le narrateur se voit peu à peu privé de souvenirs, de mots, de concepts, le processus narratif commence lui-même à dérailler. Un livre assez étrange dont on a du mal à savoir quoi penser. Pas un chef d’œuvre, certes, mais une curiosité. D’abord publié à Paris en langue anglaise à 2000 exemplaires, par un tout petit éditeur qui gagne vraisemblablement à être connu, Métronome Press, (dans la lignée du légendaire Olympia Press ?) le livre a reçu un bel accueil outre manche, on commence à en parler beaucoup aux Etats-Unis, Hachette Littératures le publiera en langue française l’automne prochain. Je l’évoquais, je crois, il y a quelques semaines, avec The Raw Shark Texts de Stephen Hall, présenté comme le nouveau Danielewski, finalement à mourir d’ennui. On lui préférera le Children’s hospital, de Chris Adrian, qui reste pour moi le grand livre de ces derniers mois.

RELAYONS.....

Reading Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, Against the Day
Appel à contribution


One-day conference :
Reading Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, Against the Day

Friday June 1, 2007
Organized by the GRAAT
Universite Francois Rabelais
Tours, France

Call for papers

With the first wave of critical response to Against the Day now abated, and with the June 2008 International Pynchon Conference, which will probably mark the onset of more ambitious academic studies, still months away, it seems to be the right time to acknowledge the event, and to think about what the French academic tradition can bring to the study of the novel. If papers concerned with such necessary and illuminating spadework as critical reception, intertextuality or possible sources are welcome, the emphasis will be put on close textual analysis, especially inasmuch as it is articulated to the question of the reader's position. This position is best described as shifting and unstable, both during reading and along the gradual process by which the critical enterprise attempts slowly to incorporate the novel, just as in the novel itself America becomes gradually incorporated. The aim is not only to delineate possible directions for the critical endeavour, but also to make the most of the indeterminate Zone or Wedge the critical field still is, before the ineluctable imposing of grids.

Please send abstracts of around 250 words to Gilles Chamerois (gilleschamerois@wanadoo.fr) by April 20th, 2007.


Url de référence : http://www.graat.fr

BOOK SEARCH

Est ce le futur?

what should fiction do?

what should fiction do?


Lance Olsen says:
In The Middle Mind, Curtis White maintains that the narratives generated and sustained by the American political system, entertainment industry, and academic trade have taught us over the last half century how not to think for ourselves. Essentially, those narratives shun complexity and challenge; avoid texts that demand attentive, self-conscious, and self-critical reading; and embrace The Middle Mind’s thoughtless impulse toward the status quo. In a phrase, what we are left with is the death or at least the dying of what I think of as the Difficult Imagination. What writers can do is attempt to revive that Difficult Imagination by exploring various strategies that call attention to, reflect upon, and disrupt the assumptions behind conventional narratives, thereby challenging the dominant cultures that would like to see such narratives told and retold until they begin to pass for truths about the human condition. “Our satisfaction with the completeness of plot,” Fredric Jameson once noted, is “a kind of satisfaction with society as well,” and I would add much the same is the case with our satisfaction with undemanding style, character, subject matter, and so forth. My orientation, then, rhymes fairly closely with those posed by Viktor Shklovsky for art and Martin Heidegger for philosophy: the return through complication and challenge (not predictability and ease) to perception and thought.


brian evenson says:
I don’t think that writing should be doing anything in particular, but I do think it should be “doing.” It’s easy for writing to slip into old tired patterns where it doesn’t have to “do”, where it’s follow the same groove in the same record, where it’s covering the same tired ground, where it’s one of the millions of cars on the same superhighway, inching along with everyone else. How much better if the writing is traveling down disused back roads getting knocked by branches and trying to make it around places where the road has been washed out. Or threading itself thinly down an animal track. Or hacking its way deep into the thicket of being without having decided in advance what it’ll find there. The more effort, the better….

AMERICA

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January
17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I
need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not
the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back
it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical
joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday
somebody goes on trial for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid
I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses
in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle
Max after he came over from Russia.
I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by
Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner
candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Business-
men are serious. Movie producers are serious.
Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.
Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of
marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable
private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour
and twenty-five-thousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of
underprivileged who live in my flowerpots
under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers
is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that
I'm a Catholic.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly
mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as
individual as his automobiles more so they're
all different sexes.
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500
down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Com-
munist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a
handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and
sentimental about the workers it was all so sin-
cere you have no idea what a good thing the
party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand
old man a real mensch Mother Bloor made me
cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody
must have been a spy.
America you don't really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen.
And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power
mad. She wants to take our cars from out our
garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Readers'
Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia.
Him big bureaucracy running our fillingsta-
tions.
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read.
Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us
all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in
the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes
in precision parts factories, I'm nearsighted and
psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
- Berkeley, January 17, 1956

From Collected Poems 1947-1980 by Allen Ginsberg

NEXT

On a déjà parlé ici de quelques livres attendus pour 2007 (le DeLillo, le Gibson, le McElroy, etc…) – rajoutons à la liste Bridge of Sighs de Richard Russo (on espére toujours qu’il va finir par se transcender), The Water Cure de Percival Everett, Das Kapital de Viken Berberian (un ami, avouons-le), The last novel, de David Markson ou encore le How the dead dream, de la géniale Lydia Millet.

GRANTA

Granta Announces list of the 21 Best Writers Under 35

Daniel Alarcon
Judy Budnitz
Kevin Brockmeier
Christopher Coake
Anthony Doerr
Jonathan Safran Foer
Nell Freudenberger
Olga Grushin
Dara Horn
Gabe Hudson
Uzodinma Iweala
Nicole Krauss
Rattawut Lapcharoensap
Yiyun Li
Maile Meloy
ZZ Packer
Jess Row
Karen Russell
Akhil Sharma
Gary Shteyngart
John Wray


Mouais.....rien de très neuf sous le soleil. Content néanmoins que Brockmeier y figure, c'est une surprise - son Brief history of the dead est une recommandation du Pugnax...

EXIT

Military Brats in Love
By WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN
Published: January 14, 2007

EXIT A
By Anthony Swofford.
287 pp. Scribner. $25.
Imagine my satisfaction,'' reads the Scribner publicity office's form letter that came with an advance copy of this book, ''when I found myself immersed in a dark love story that was all at once sensual, moody and elegant.'' Imagine my dissatisfaction when I found myself not in the least immersed in a love story to which none of these adjectives apply, not even ''dark.'' For this is a novel that ends as follows: ''He wanted to find answers to other questions, too, some of his own, some of hers, but they would answer those later. Together.'' This is a fair sample of Anthony Swofford's prose in his first novel, ''Exit A,'' prose that befits a Harlequin romance novel more than functioning as (to quote the publicity office again) ''confirmation of Swofford as a major literary talent.''
Do you want more? ''They ate in silence. He could ask: Hey, sweetheart, what's going on?'' And: '' 'What's the number?' She dialed the phone and ordered. They went downstairs to wait for the delivery.''
I hate to write reviews like this. I especially hate to disparage the work of someone who, like Swofford, has put his life on the line for the ostensible purpose of preserving my freedoms and civil liberties, such as they are. In the hope of finding something more constructive to say, I decided to read Swofford's first book, the memoir ''Jarhead.''
''Jarhead'' deserves its acclaim. The reason it does is made plain right on Page 3, in sentiments of which Hemingway would approve: ''What follows is neither true nor false but what I know.'' This expert knowledge is precisely what makes the book believable, valuable: ''Our days consist of sand and water and sweat and piss.'' Moreover, Swofford takes the trouble to observe and analyze the context of his experiences: ''By late September the American troop count in Saudi reaches 150,000 and the price of crude oil has nearly doubled.'' From a strictly literary point of view, this last is not an impressive sentence, but it does not need to be; the implied connection between its two statements is important; we Americans owe it to ourselves and our country to decide whether it is valid and, if so, what the implication may demand of us.
''Exit A'' deserves no acclaim because it doesn't convey life vividly or believably. It analyzes nothing. Whatever distinctions and connections it makes remain superficial at best. Swofford's ability to create character is vastly inferior to his capacity to describe reality as he himself experienced it. He frequently commits the error of trying to amuse us with grotesquerie while simultaneously expecting to engage our empathy. For instance: ''General Kindwall sat in his office, constipated and paranoid.'' General Kindwall is the heroine's father. It is his impending death from cancer that will bring about the reconciliation of all parties. (Never mind a few loose ends: ''They would answer those later. Together.'') For this wrap-up to be at all effective, we need to feel sorry for Kindwall, but he remains sufficiently constipated and paranoid to make that impossible.
''Exit A'' is about a pair of neglected children raised on Yokota Air Base on the outskirts of Tokyo. They come briefly together, separate for a long time and, as has already been revealed, come back together at the end. Severin is a callow football star whose innocence, rendered by pedestrian sentences, makes him dull. Virginia is a privileged half-Japanese girl who gets into crime because she is bored. She seduces him with the aim of employing his athletic body in the strongarm business. He falls in lust with her, and at some hazy point in the book we seem to be expected to call this love. (More immortal prose: ''They were lovely breasts. His heart rate climbed. His mouth watered.'') ''Exit A,'' already crippled by this temporary union between dislikable Virginia and uninteresting Severin, now commits hari-kari by foisting on us a mind-bogglingly implausible stretch of thrillerdom: Virginia becomes part of a North Korean kidnapping ring! Severin has already bowed out. Virginia gets caught and goes to jail. Years go by. Here's what happens when they meet again: ''He removed her shirt. No bra underneath. 'Small,' she said, referring to her breasts.''What baffles me about this lifeless failure of verisimilitude is that ''Jarhead'' -- a triumph of verisimilitude -- reveals the following: Swofford lived on an Air Force base in Tachikawa from age 4 to 7, and not long after his enlistment he was on base in Okinawa, where he enjoyed a brief infidelity-romance with a restaurant owner's daughter named Yumiko. In short, there is no reason why the Japanese scenes of ''Exit A'' couldn't have been better.
What makes things all the more peculiar is that parts of the second book are reworkings of the first. For instance, near the beginning of ''Exit A,'' Virginia entices Severin off base and into an alluringly, intimidatingly alien warren of alleys. They arrive in a preordained tattoo parlor. In ''Jarhead,'' Swofford, who must have been much younger than Severin, gets lost in just such a labyrinth when he seeks a birthday present for his sister. He wanders into a tattoo parlor where a couple are getting each other's faces pricked into their chests. The setting is vividly achieved. Swofford judges the man ''lucky'' in this, because he is ugly and the woman is beautiful. ''I didn't understand the permanence of the shared act.'' In ''Exit A,'' this very permanence becomes vital to the plot when Severin gets Virginia's Japanese middle name tattooed on his arm, an act that will help destroy a marriage and bring about a future in which Virginia and Severin will answer all questions ''later. Together.''
In other places, ''Jarhead'' gets not so much reworked as recycled. In further evidence I cite the once slender soldier who now scarcely ever exercises, and the tricky heartbreaker named Lisa.
Interesting sentences can in fact be found in ''Exit A,'' but they are as rare as four-leaf clovers in a field of Astroturf. Here are three of them: ''First she heard Severin's English, the sound of two boards being beaten together in an empty concert hall.'' ''He thought of his hands as a cave.'' ''She focused on the road and the traffic, a puzzle made of pavement and rolling metal.'' The three-page prologue and parts of a longish episode about an adulterous affair show signs of life. But nowhere do we meet with the grimly powerful aphorisms found in ''Jarhead'' -- for instance, the assertion that ''through profanity and disgrace'' the grunt ''has communicated the truth of his being.''
It is only my admiration for ''Jarhead'' that impels me to express my disappointment in ''Exit A'' so bluntly. I hope and believe that Swofford, who has many books ahead of him if he chooses to write them, can achieve true greatness on a future occasion.

William T. Vollmann's new book, ''Poor People,'' will be published in April.

Ride in the Whirlwind

-Interval (1967) le scénario de Carole Eastman (Cinq pièces faciles), vision paranoïaque du monde du Rock, inspiré de Blow Up.
-L’adaptation de la même Carol Eastman du Up Above the World (1967), de Paul Bowles.
-Fat City (1969), de Leonard Gardner.
-The Last Picture Show (1969), de Larry McMurtry.
- Il était une fois la Révolution (1969), produit par Sergio Leone.
-L’Âge de Cristal (1969), produit par George Pal.
-Sa propre adaptation de Henderson the Rain King (1970), de Saul Bellow, des Deux Visages de Janvier (1970), de Patricia Highsmith, de La Maison de Rendez-Vous (1971), d’Alain Robbe-Grillet, avec Sean Connery dans le rôle principal.
-Son scénario original sur de les filières de la Cocaïne, King of White Lady (1979), produit par Coppola.
-Ses adaptations d’Obsession (1982) de Lionel White, le livre qui a donné lieu à Pierrot le fou, d Un Thé au Sahara (1984), de Paul Bowles, de The Last Go Round (1993), de Ken Kesey, de Freaky Deaky (1995) d’Elmore Leonard.
Etc, etc…..

L’impression finalement que les projets avortés de Monte Hellman, l’homme le plus passionnant du cinéma contemporain, à qui on n'aura laissé ces dernieres années que le privilège de diriger la seconde équipe de Robocop 2, constituent un massif à peu près aussi imposant qu’une œuvre qui, finalement, « se réduit » à quatre chef d’œuvres absolus….

SALMIGONDIS

C'est le mois, décidément. Pas vu encore la VF, même si, en feuilletant hier mon vieil exemplaire de chez Grove, je constate combien tout cela a quand même un peu vieilli - contrairement au Tunnel qui, lui ne bougera pas. Un peu Zappa VS Malher, finalement. (Curieusement et en dépit d'une légère appréhension le Darconville's cat semble lui se bonifier avec les années....comme si, finalement, de Theroux à Gass c'était "l'expérience humaine" qui, au-delà des bouleversements de la langue et du texte, (encore faudrait-il argumenter sur cette dualité fallacieuse) donnait à la fin son "corps" à la postérité - un corps immortel dans une âme passagère, en somme....hips!)

NAME DROPPING

Arrivé à Roissy ce matin, je tombe sur un sympathique exercice de name-dropping Pomo dans Chronicart. On conseille, bien sûr.