creamy and delicious

LE DON

2009-03-12T01:56:00.001-07:00

SUPERMAN?

2009-02-25T15:24:00.000-08:00

ARC EN CIEL

2009-01-28T00:51:00.001-08:00

Painter and occasional porn actor Zak Smith's stories from working in the adult film industry, along with drawings and paintings of the same.

A WRITER OF ENORMOUS NOVELS

2009-01-27T23:43:00.001-08:00

Product Description
Talking bugs, electricity, the founding of empires, hobos, Nazis, whores, violence, drugs, murder, secret cabals, Heaven, Hell - William T. Vollmann is a writer of enormous novels that are stuffed with entire worlds of creation and destruction. This first ever book-length critical study traces his career to date with chapters devoted to each of his novels, as well as his short stories and major nonfiction. Vollmann is a writer of obsessions, and this study concentrates on three of them - freedom, redemption, and prostitution - while arguing that the author that dwells on them is worthy of being called one of our greatest living American writers. Also included in this title are seven interviews spanning the years 1991-2007 that reinforce the persistence of Vollmann's attraction to these themes.

IM MEMORIAM

2009-01-14T10:12:00.001-08:00

NICHOLSON BAKER

2009-01-07T10:33:00.000-08:00

Nicholson Baker's new novel, The Anthologist, is narrated by Paul Chowder, a poet of some little reknown who is sitting in his barn most of the time trying to write the introduction to a new anthology of poetry called Only Rhyme. He's having a hard time getting started because his career is falling apart, his girlfriend Roz has recently left him, and he is thinking about the poets throughout history who have suffered far worse and actually deserve to feel sorry for themselves. He has also promised his readers that he will reveal many wonderful secrets and tips and tricks about poetry, and it looks like the introduction will be a little longer than he'd thought. What unfolds is a wholly entertaining and beguiling love story about poetry, among other things; Paul tells us about all of the great poets, from Tennyson, Swinburne, and Yeats to the moderns (Roethke, Bogan, Merwin) to the contemporary scene as well as the editorial staff of The New Yorker's editorial department. And what he reveals about the rhythm and music of poetry itself is astonishing and makes you realize how incredibly important poetry is to our lives. At the same time, Paul manages just barely to realize all of this himself and what results is a tender, wonderfully romantic, often hilarious, and inspired novel. The Anthologist bears all the beloved hallmarks of Baker's novels: it is witty, erudite, breathtakingly articulate and stylish, and full of the whimsical, compulsive elements that have made its author a worldwide success.

DENIS JOHNSON

2009-01-07T10:17:00.000-08:00

From the 2007 National Book Award-winning, bestselling author of Tree of Smoke comes a sly, suspenseful
thriller set in the American west.
Jimmy Lutz—a small time crook in Bakersfield, California—is behind on his gambling debts. He isn’t too worried, until a man named Ernst Gambol comes to collect. When Jimmy takes desperate measures to escape, he begins a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse that pits him against both Gambol and Juarez, Gambol’s vindictive boss. Enter Anita, a tough con artist who’s been accused of embezzling a couple of million dollars. Anita doesn’t have the money—or so she claims—but she knows how to find it, and she wants Jimmy to help her. With Gambol at his heels, Jimmy joins forces with Anita on a tense, riveting journey to cash in on the money—and to stay alive.
NOBODY MOVEis an homage to one of the most popular genres: The American crime novel. Touched by echoes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, NOBODY MOVEis at once a fond tribute and an outrageous variation on a literary form, marked by the verve and energy we’ve come to expect from Denis Johnson, a master of American fiction. Sexy, suspenseful, and above all entertaining, NOBODY MOVE shows one of our greatest novelists at his versatile best.
Denis Johnson is the author of six novels, a collection of poetry, and one book of reportage. His novel Tree
of Smoke was the winner of the 2007National Book Award. He lives in northern Idaho.

GRAVITY

2009-01-03T04:19:00.000-08:00

« You were in London », she will presently whisper, turning back to her wheel and spinning it again, face averted, womanly twisting the night-streaked yarn of her past, « while they were coming down I was in’s Gravenhage »- fricatives sighing, the name spoken with exile’s lingering- « while they were going up. Between you and me is not only a rocket trajectory, but also a life. You will come to understand that between the two points, in the five minutes, it lives an entire life. You haven’t even learned the data on our side of the flight profile, the visible or trackable. Beyond them there’s so much more, so much none of us know… »
But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. This is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice, guessed and refused to believe – that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return. Yet, they do move forever under it, reserved for it’s own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the Rainbow, and they its children….

Passage magnifique, et crucial….on ose à peine regarder la traduction française. Michel Doury, ancêtre de Google trad ? A quand une nouvelle traduction de Claro ?

(pour le fun :
Elle murmure :
-Tu étais à Londres quand ils tombaient…moi j’étais à’s Gravenhage quand ils décollaient (elle prononce le nom étrange avec la nostalgie de l’exil), entre nous il n’y a pas seulement la trajectoire d’une fusée, mais toute une vie. Tu finiras par comprendre qu’entre ces deux points, pendant les cinq minutes du vol, une vie entière s’écoule. Tu ne connais pas les chiffres de notre côté du plan de vol. Il y a tant de choses derrière que nous ignorons …
Elle dit cela à voix basse, faisant négligemment tourner la roulette derrière son dos, comme si c’était son passé qui se dévidait.)

POIDS LOURDS 2009 (PART 2)

2008-12-29T07:39:00.000-08:00

The Original of Laura is a novel that Vladimir Nabokov was writing at the time of his death in 1977. It has never been published and its contents have been viewed only by Nabokov's son, wife, and a few scholars. Nabokov had requested that upon his death the work be destroyed. His family debated for over 30 years whether to carry out this wish to destroy an incomplete but perhaps important literary work. In April 2008, Nabokov's son Dmitri Nabokov announced plans to publish the work, in what Newsnight later said was "likely to be the literary event of 2009."
Based on discussions with unidentified scholars, The Times summarizes the plot as follows:
Philip Wild, an enormously corpulent scholar, is married to a slender, flighty and wildly promiscuous woman called Flora. Flora initially appealed to Wild because of another woman that he’d been in love with, Aurora Lee. Death and what lies beyond it, a theme which fascinated Nabokov from a very young age, are central. The book opens at a party and there follow four continuous scenes, after which the novel becomes more fragmented. It is not clear how old Wild is, but he is preoccupied with his own death and sets about obliterating himself from the toes upwards through meditation. A sort of deliberate self-inflicted self-erasure.
According to Newsnight, The Original of Laura "apparently concerns a portly academic called Philip Wild, and Flora, his much slimmer, 'wildly promiscuous' wife. Flora catches Wild's eye because of her resemblance to a young woman he had once been in love with. Wild is preoccupied by his own mortality, and resolves to obliterate himself from the toes upward, through the power of meditation."
According to his diaries, Nabokov first noted his work on the project on December 1, 1974 under the title Dying Is Fun. By the summer of 1976, he noted that the story was completed in his mind, but by then his health was failing rapidly.
When Nabokov died on July 2, 1977, he was still working on the novel, since retitled The Opposite of Laura and finally The Original of Laura. The incomplete manuscript consists of Nabokov's own handwriting across about 125 index cards, the equivalent of about 30 manuscript pages. The use of index cards was normal for Nabokov, also used for many of his works, such as Lolita and Pale Fire.

From the National Book Award winning author of The Echo Maker, Generosity (october 2009) a playful and provocative novel about the discovery of the happiness gene.
Thassa Amzwar, a 23-year-old survivor of the endless Algerian civil war, arrives in Chicago, taking night classes at an arts college in the South Loop. Her instructor, Russell Stone, expecting a damaged refugee, is astonished to find her an extremely solid and buoyant young woman, contagiously, relentlessly happy. Psychological examinations reveal her to be hyperthymic— blessed with a productive, continuous mania without the depression, hardwired for happiness. She comes to the attention of Thomas Kurton, a genomic researcher committed to the prospect of genetic understanding and control. Kurton and his fellow researchers declare Thassa’s happiness to be the product of a suite of genes that produce elevated well-being, an association that they promptly move to patent. When media, the infotainment industry, bloggers, politicians, religious leaders, Big Pharmacology, and other national interests get wind of the story, the future of the race’s well-being goes up for grabs and Thassa Amzwar and Russell Stone go on the run.
Sur un thème assez proche, donc, du superbe essai qu'il a publié il y a quelques semaines dans le Guardian et qu'on trouvera ici : http://men.style.com/gq/features/landing?id=content_7481

Under the Dome is a novel currently being written by Stephen King. It is a rewrite of a novel King attempted writing twice in the 1980s, under the titles The Cannibals and Under the Dome. As King stated on his official site, these two unfinished works "were two very different attempts to utilize the same idea, which concerns itself with how people behave when they are cut off from the society they've always belonged to. Also, my memory of The Cannibals is that it, like Needful Things, was a kind of social comedy. The new Under the Dome is played dead straight."
King described the novel as "very, very long," saying "I tried [writing] this once before when I was a lot younger, and the project was just too big for me."] King has stated the novel is twice as long as his most recent, Duma Key, at "over 1,500 pages in manuscript",and "deals with some of the same issues that The Stand does, but in a more allegorical way."The first draft was completed in late August 2008, with the manuscript weighing 19 lbs (8.6kg). According to the publisher, the book is due to be released in the fall of 2009.

POIDS LOURDS 2009 (Part 1)

2008-12-27T15:25:00.000-08:00

Blood's a Rover is a 2009 crime fiction novel by James Ellroy. It is the sequel to American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand and the final volume in the American Underworld Trilogy. According to Ellroy's literary agent, the book will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in the fall of 2009. The title is taken from a poem titled "Reveille" by A.E. Housman:
Clay lies still, but blood's a rover;
Breath's a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad; when the journey's over
There'll be time enough for sleep.
Blood's a Rover will span the years 1968 to 1972, encompassing the Vietnam War, the death of J. Edgar Hoover, and the presidency of Richard Nixon.
Ellroy's literary agency, Sobel Weber Associates, posted a brief blurb for Blood's a Rover on their website in September 2008. It mentions the novel's three protagonists - two rogue cops and a kid private eye - and briefly outlines some of the novel's major plot points. These include the reappearance of Howard Hughes and J. Edgar Hoover, an FBI infiltration into militant black power groups, Mob activity in the Dominican Republic, and "voodoo vibe in Haiti".
Ellroy's agent has said the outline for the novel was some four hundred pages long, compared to three hundred for American Tabloid, suggesting that this will be the longest novel in the trilogy.

Back to Blood is the working title of Tom Wolfe's fourth novel, to be published by Little, Brown in 2009. The novel, to be set in Miami, will focus on the subject of immigration.
The novel has been described as Wolfe's take on "class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption and ambition in Miami, the city where America's future has arrived first."Racial anxieties were a key source of tension in The Bonfire of the Vanities—Back to Blood will similarly feature characters of Cuban, Haitian, Russian, and French ancestry in the melting pot of Miami.
The Miami Herald recently reported: "Back to Blood characters include a young nurse of Cuban ancestry married to a famous French-émigré sex doctor; a freshman journalist on the trail of a Russian-mob-comes-to-Miami story; his wary editor; a second-generation Cuban police officer; a woman of Haitian descent who passes for Anglo."

CARDINAL IN A FORSYTHIA

2008-12-26T23:00:00.000-08:00

Lost: Sister's wallet. Her guitar. Her boyfriend. Eyeglasses. Smoking jacket. Copy of Flip Your Wig by Hüsker Dü. Joy about composing these lines. Joy about composing any lines. Joy about reading anything at all. Taste for bourbon. Copies of everything Vargas Llosa ever wrote. And Gombrowicz. Ability to remember passages of poetry and lines from books. Sense of outrage. Names of some people kissed. Addresses of many people loved. Ability to be really rude. Unobstructed view from deck. Morning glories. Sparrows who used to nest in the birdhouse on the side of the shed. Belief in the redemptive power of a transcendental and omnipotent agency. Belief in political change. Several bicycles, some of them stolen. Virginity. First true love. Second true love. Third true love. Faith in true love. Cheap synthesizer bought in New York City and used in band in college. Sid and Nancy T-shirt. Ability to be mad about my childhood. Field recordings of people singing love songs in Ecuador. Certain words. Word nemesis. Greek and Latinate words that used to seem glamorous. Tolerance for abstraction. Tolerance for solitude. Paperwork. L. L. Bean table bought when there was no money for any other table and kept for ten years. Sister. Innumerable pets. Dial phones. Subway tokens. Strip clubs in Times Square. Peas from a can. Evening News. Forty-fives. LPs. Prerecorded cassettes. Whipped cream from a tub. Tortellini. The IBM Selectric II with correcting key. Sweet Tarts. Tom Seaver. Jerry Koosman. Another pair of eyeglasses. A lot of weight. Certain causes, e.g., hunger strikers at Long Kesh; the Sandinistas; the Tibetans; the Cambodians; the East Timorese. Faith, calm, serenity, self-respect, innocence, anything left to lose.

Found: Redemptive power of a transcendental and omnipotent agency. A sense of insignificance. A violent distaste for the political process. The community of other human beings. Good luck. Massive amounts of good luck. Memories: most of them wrong, or massaged into a shape that flatters. An indifference to my personal suffering in certain circumstances. Willingness to change. A desire to listen to the stories of others. Twenty dollars. Ten dollars. Fifty dollars. Sunglasses. Ten pounds. The cellular telephone. The laptop computer. The Internet. Surveillance cameras on street corners. Compact discs. DVDs. MP3 players. Blogs. Vlogs. Things to look forward to. My singing voice. Tenacity. Saggy flesh. Memories of sister laughing, memories of sister dancing; memories of other deceased people, Lucy Grealy, e.g., memories that start to crowd out things happening concurrently. A bad knee. A bad back. A bad ankle. Tonsillitis. Paperwork. Nieces and nephews! Anglo-Saxon words like guttersnape, giddyhead, cobblestone, nonesuch, fribble, and sockdolager. A taste for the Beats. A taste for beets, olives, capers, mustard, and some varieties of cheese. Violin lessons. Many causes, like the hunger strikers at Long Kesh; the Sandinistas; the Tibetans; the Cambodians; the East Timorese; the rights of gay persons to marry; the rights of animals not to be consumed by humans simply because humans think they're smarter; faith, calm, serenity, self-respect, innocence, more things to lose. A cardinal on the deck. A cardinal on the lawn. A cardinal under the bird feeder. A cardinal and his mate. A cardinal and her mate. A cardinal and a red-winged blackbird. A cardinal and a chickadee. A cardinal and a brace of mourning doves. A cardinal and a pigeon. Two cardinals on different branches of a locust tree. Female above, male below. Cardinals alighting. Cardinals startling up. Cardinals foraging. Cardinals singing. Cardinals and a blue jay driving them off. A cardinal in a forsythia, in April, when the bush is in bloom, and he is attempting to attract the opposite number. A cardinal in a forsythia, certain of the bright perfection of his plumage against a yellow backdrop. Why didn't I stop to notice?
Rick Moody

MEANING OF LIFE

2008-12-26T09:10:00.000-08:00

"THE SEARCH FOR MEANING is not a whole lot different than the yearning for certainty, which is to say, an unsuitable pursuit for any who might aspire to nimbleness of mind, amplitude of soul, or freedom of spirit.   Our human purpose, inasmuch as we have a purpose, is to consciously, deliberately evolve toward a wiser, more liberated, and luminous state of being; to return to Eden, make friends with the snake, and set up our computers among the wild apple trees. When there’s meaning in this, it’s because individuals created that meaning to their own specifications, rather than discovering an intrinsic, universal secret.   Deep down, all of us are probably aware that some kind of mystical evolution—a melding into the godhead, into love—is our true task. Yet we suppress the notion with considerable force because to admit it is to acknowledge that most of our political gyrations, religious dogmas, social ambitions, and financial ploys are not merely counterproductive but trivial.  Our mission, then, is to jettison those pointless preoccupations and take on once again the primordial cargo of inexhaustible ecstasy. Or, barring that, to turn out a good thin-crust pizza and a strong glass of beer.   Now, despite the absence of a single pixel of verifiable evidence, the pious maintain that there’s an afterlife in which the tap is eternally open, the oven forever hot. However, since their tap would doubtlessly dribble only lemonade, and since those of us who’ve broken their rules would end up inside their oven, it’s probably best that we eat, drink, love, and strive for higher consciousness in this one life we can actually count on, leaving the gamble on postmortem fulfillment to those who find earthly existence to be overly carbonated, too fraught with garlic and spice." Tom Robbins

REIF LARSEN : THE SELECTED WORKS OF T.S. SPIVET

2008-12-25T05:31:00.000-08:00

C'est ce qu'on a lu de meilleur depuis longtemps en provenance d'outre-atlantique (depuis Children's Hospital?) , un jeune auteur qui construit un texte ludique (sans, toutefois, succomber aux tics de la bande McSweeney's Believer) d'une intelligence formelle rare, une voix vraiment neuve (plus proche en qualité de Danielewski que de Steven Hall, et oui!) - le premier opus peut-être d'une oeuvre qui pourrait s'avérer importante. Ce sera l'événement du printemps US - et on en recausera plus longuement ici même...

One ordinary August evening twelve-year-old genius cartographer T.S. receives an unexpected phone call from a certain Mr. G.H. Jibsen, Under Secretary of Illustration and Design at the Smithsonian, announcing that T.S. has won the prestigious Baird award for his contributions to the field of science. And so begins a wild cross country adventure, taking young T.S. from his family ranch just north of Division, Montana to Washington, D.C. to claim his prize. Ever the scientist, T.S. meticulously maps, charts, and illustrates his exploits. The reader comes to see this world through T.S.'s eyes, and encounters a sensibility that is fiercely intelligent, oddly sensitive and utterly unique.

A fairytale: A 28-year-old Columbia M.F.A. student named Reif Larsen wrote a novel about a whimsical child from Montana who likes maps, and suddenly all kinds of famous editors in New York were calling his agent, Denise Shannon, and telling her they really wanted to publish it.
Norton offered to preempt with an advance in the neighborhood of $400,000 if Ms. Shannon took the book off the market and sold it to the publisher right then and there. The editorial director of Dial Press, an imprint of Random House’s Bantam Dell Doubleday group, offered to pay half a million for the same privilege.
Ms. Shannon said no to both and confidently took the book to auction. Within days, according to three sources, she’d sold North American rights for a sum just shy of $1 million to Ann Godoff at the Penguin Press, gravely disappointing editors at Random House, Viking, Riverhead and elsewhere. The book was also sold to publishers in Canada, Germany and Italy, and at press time, deals were being negotiated for the U.K. and the Netherlands. The book, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, is scheduled to come out in the U.S. next summer.
All of which begs the question: Who is this Reif Larsen and how did he get away with this?
Ms. Shannon, who has also represented Gary Shteyngart, Lydia Davis and Francine Prose, says it’s because the book is so good, obviously. “The fact is that it comes down to the work itself,” she wrote in an e-mail, “and in this case we are talking about a novel that is startlingly original and intelligent and well-written.”
But don’t lots of people write pretty good debut novels? Why did T.S. Spivet send all of New York publishing into a frenzy?
According to several people who saw the manuscript, it’s partly because it has lots of cute pictures in the margins.
An editor who considered bidding on the book agreed: “He’s an interesting writer who also marries aspects of cartography, illustration and, you know, bits of diagrammatica to the narrative.”
And a literary scout summed it up: “It’s a combination of ‘It’s really good and it’s really cool to look at.’ It was one of these books that got people interested the more they saw it, not the more they heard about it. It picked up relatively slowly, but as people started laying their eyes on it, they started getting more and more excited because of the way it’s put together: all of these documents and pictures and sidebars, which not only are really neat to look at it but also contain key elements of the plot.”

ZAPPA

2008-12-24T09:18:00.000-08:00

"I really like books in which interpretation seems to be fused with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and this massive, 600-page analysis of the work of one of popular music's true iconoclasts certainly exhibits the full spectrum of symptoms. It manages to include Freudian, Marxian, even Derridean perspectives, while taking on both the well-known Zappa works as well as the tricky, somewhat indefensible later efforts." Rick Moody

THE PRESIDENT'S ANALYST

2008-12-23T17:04:00.001-08:00

« If I was a psychiatrist, which I am, I would say that I was turning into some sort of paranoid personality, which I am! «

Gloire pour le Dr Sidney Schaefer choisi par le président des Etats-Unis pour être son psy particulier. La tâche néanmoins ne s’avère guère gratifiante, puisque FBI et CIA le tiennent cloitré dans une maison, de luxe, certes, relié par un tunnel aux appartements du président. Plus encore, ses conversations avec son patient sont, bien sûr, ultra secrètes et il ne peut en parler à personne. Le stress de cet emploi si particulier aidant, le bon docteur devient très vite paranoiaque, pensant que tout le monde l’espionne, ce qui est vrai, suspectant même sa fiancée d’être de la CIA, ce qui est également vrai. Alors que des agents secrets de tous bords tentent de mettre la main sur lui et sur ses secrets, que la CIA et le FBI tentent de l’éliminer afin qu’il ne parle pas, Sydney est heureusement recueilli par une bande de Hippies. Echappant de justesse à une tentative d’enlèvement d’agents secrets canadiens déguisés en rock band, il est sauvé par un membre du KGB qui a pour mission de le faire passer en Russie. Heureusement quelques séances de psychanalyse font vite comprendre à l’agent russe combien sa dépendance vis à vis d’un système est aliénante. Reste encore une cellule ultra-secrète de la compagnie du téléphone américaine, bien décidée à se servir de Sydney pour mettre en route un étrange complot…..

Avec l’impeccable James Coburn dans le rôle du psy, cette superbe comédie d’espionnage mise en scène en 1967 par le bien nommé Théodore J Flicker est inédite sous nos latitudes. C’est un tort.

ANONYMOUS CELEBRITY

2008-12-23T03:06:00.000-08:00

Ignacio de Loyola Brandao. Anonymous celebrity. Celui-ci, on l'attends avec impatience! (Aout 2009, Dalkey)

What if a man were so shallow that he couldn't believe his life had meaning unless he was loved and desired by millions of people? What if everything he learned from his television, from the movies, from what he heard on the radio, was treated as an absolute and incontrovertible truth? And what, then, if this man was amoral, cunning, and willing to lie, seduce, and kill to save himself from anonymity?

With an army of consultants, a library of "howto" manuals, and an endless variety of product placements at his behest, the hero of Anonymous Celebrity sets out to become king of his own little world—which unfortunately turns out to be the same one the rest of us live in. Equal parts Nabokov, All About Eve, and Big Brother, this is a bawdy, irreverent indictment of our self-absorbed culture of celebrity, where to be anything less than famous means being something less than human . . .

SELF CONDEMNED

2008-12-22T15:37:00.001-08:00

"Wyndham Lewis's greatest novel, Self Condemned (1954; currently available from Black Sparrow)-written after he had gone blind, in Canada and about Canada, in condemnation of Canada, in condemnation of himself for inexplicably abandoning England and coming to Canada, whose bleak unlit winters bore upon even a blind man-was received with some interest in Canada but with unopen arms, selling 7,000 copies during its first two years there. Not bad for Lewis, not bad for Canada, but even in Canada it failed to achieve the audience it ought to have had, an audience which, had it been there, would have condemned the book just as its protagonist, Harding, was condemned for writing the Secret History of World War Two, which didn't kowtow to the Allies enough and whose pacifist proclivities were interpreted as fascist leanings, dismaying Harding as Harding might have been dismayed had Harding been dismembered, and driving him out of England into exile in a cold Toronto hotel where his marriage comes apart, too, like seams held by rotten thread. The book's movement is glacial and grinding, the writing brilliant, the mood cold and sterile, but the hotel is set on fire (as Lewis's was) only to become a fire hose's frozen shell, like Harding himself, who, after his no-longer-loved wife is crushed under a car where she's rolled herself, is empty enough now, hollow enough now to become an American academic." WILLIAM GASS

ENDLESS SUMMER

2008-12-21T16:18:00.000-08:00

Petit décryptage, si tout est signe…..l’illustration de la fameuse couverture de Inherent Vice, qui semble-t-il fait débat, est de l’artiste hawaïen Darshan Zenith. On notera que la boutique devant laquelle est garée la Cadillac, « the endless summer surf shop » est un clin d’œil à la compilation Endless Summer, des Beach Boys, sortie en 1974 (155 semaines dans les charts, 3 millions d’albums vendus). Thomas Pynchon et les Beach Boys ?

« In his March 1977 Playboy article, "Who Is Thomas Pynchon...And Why Did He Take Off With My Wife?", Jules Siegel claims he visited Pynchon in his one-room apartment in Manhattan Beach, California, while on assignment to do an article on Bob Dylan for The Saturday Evening Post, to wit:

"I told him [TRP] about the Dylan assignment. 'You ought to do one on The Beach Boys,' he said. I pretended to ignore that. A year or so later, I was in Los Angeles again, doing a story for the Post on The Beach Boys [ultimately published by Cheetah magazine]. He had forgotten his earlier remark and was no longer interested in them. I took him to my apartment in Laurel Canyon, got him royally loaded and made him lie down on the floor with a speaker at each ear while I played Pet Sounds, their most interesting and least popular record. It was not then fashionable to take The Beach Boys seriously.

"'Ohhhhh," he sighed softly with stunned pleasure after the record was done. 'Now I understand why you are writing a story about them.'"

Then later...

According to the 2006 bio of Brian Wilson, Catch A Wave: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson (Peter Ames Carlin, Rodale, 2006), Jules Siegel and Pynchon paid a visit to Brian in Beverly Hills:

When Siegel brought his friend Thomas Pynchon up to the house one night, the famous hipster novelist sat in stunned, unhappy silence while the nervous, stoned pop star — who had dragged him into his then-new Arabian tent to get high — kept kicking over the oil lamp he was trying to light. "Brian was kind of afraid of Pynchon, because he'd heard he was an Eastern intellectual establishment genius," Siegel recalls. "And Pynchon wasn't very articulate. He was gonna sit there and let you talk while he listened. So neither of them really said a word all night long. It was one of the strangest scenes I'd ever seen in my life." (p.103-104). »

Pour en finir avec la couverture, c'est finalement la version bleue plutôt que la rouge du catalogue Penguin qui semble avoir été retenue.

UNPLUGGED

2008-12-21T03:19:00.000-08:00

Tres Pynchonien, le prochain Jim Knipfel. Toujours agréable à lire, même si on reprochera à ces auteurs (Brian Françis Slattery) de chausser une thématique, sans grande vision personnelle, surtout, sans un grand intérêt pour la langue. Rien ne pousse à l'ombre des Sequoias?

Eleven years after the mysterious events in Tupelo – now widely assumed to be the work of Australian terrorists – life in Brooklyn hasn’t been the same for Wally Philco. When he finally snaps, he finds refuge with the members of an underground movement of Unpluggers – fighting for just a few minutes of peace and quiet. With a cast of Dickensian characters, from Wally’s prying neighbour Whit Chambers to stroller-wielding Brooklyn mothers, former Kennedy spooks, and Norwegian cowboys, UNPLUGGING PHILCO is a wildly funny look at our life and times, filled with sharp cultural references and vivid, witty prose that testifies to a keenly perceptive mind behind the madness.

MAIS QUE FOUTENT LES EDITEURS? (Part 10)

2008-12-20T02:47:00.000-08:00

Carter Scholz, Radiance. Si les quelques années entre la chute du mur de Berlin et le 11 septembre 2001 ont pu paraître à certains comme une époque calme et heureuse, ce n’était certainement pas le cas pour les entreprises dépendant de la défense américaine qui ont du faire des pieds et des mains pour conserver leurs budgets. Ainsi le laboratoire fédéral nucléaire de Radiance, qui bien que ne produisant pas que de l’armement, dépends étroitement du ministère pour continuer ses activités. Quel salut pour la science en dehors de ses applications militaires, telle est la question qui tourne en boucle dans ce superbe ouvrage dont la langue et les thèmes ne sont pas sans évoquer William Gaddis et Richard Powers. Comment le langage même de la science traduit la faille morale de cet adultère, comment dès l’origine la science est pervertie par le commerce et la guerre, comment Quine (sorte de JR scientifique) va-t-il négocier sa rencontre avec l’activiste écolo Lynn Hamlin, autant de questions qui définissent un paysage moral (et donc linguistique, la morale étant aussi une affaire de langage) d’une complexité fascinante qui, par instants, fait penser au Lost Scrapbook d’Evan Dara. On conseillera aussi, du même the amount to carry, peut-être le meilleur recueil de nouvelles que j’ai lu depuis l’homme qui apprenait lentement.

« On the walls, abandoned by the prior occupant and by Quine untouched, hung graphs and pictures, seismographs of bomb tests, the branched coils of particle decay, a geological map, electron micrographs of molecular etchings, a fractal mountainscape, all overlaid by memos, monthly construction maps, field test schedules, Everyone Needs To Know About Classification, cartoons, Curiosity Is Not A Need To Know, a whiteboard thick with equations in four colors so long unwiped that that Quine’s one pass with a wet rag had left the symbols down one edge ghosted but not erased, and a second desk, loose papers cascaded across its surface, the computer monitor topped by a seamsplit cardboard carton BERINGER GREY RIESLING and buttressed by books manuals folders xeroxes Autoregressive Modeling, Rings Fields and Groups, Leonardo da Vinci Notebooks, Numerical Solution of Differential Equations, Selling Yourself and Your Ideas! and under the desk banker’s boxes DESTROY AFTER, and D NULL in black marker. »

THE NIGHT

2008-12-18T17:05:00.000-08:00

history is made
of loss
the day
of night
night
a, of, in solitary act
the time timing
the times ...

renewed

MAIS QUE FOUTENT LES EDITEURS (Part 9)

2008-12-18T16:40:00.000-08:00

Que Keith Mano soit resté largement sous le radar est un mystère complet qui ne cessera longtemps de tarauder tous ceux qui un jour ont ouvert Take Five. Avec ce pur chef d’œuvre dont la lecture fait d’emblée oublier, à 3 ou 4 titres près, l’intégralité de la production éditoriale de ces cinq dernières années, nous sommes face à un de ces monstres américains du siècle passé, sorte de bâtard mal léché de JR et de la Confrérie des imbéciles, à la sauce Falstaff. L’échec du livre (c’est peu de le dire, puisque même les veilleurs français, de Pétillon à Chenetier sont passés à côté), laissa l’auteur sur le carreau, qui ne produisit presque plus rien par la suite. Le conseil du soir de Pugnax, donc, les 5 jours de Simon Lynxx – laissez le cyclone vous emporter.

Welcome to the world of Simon Lynxx and to one of the great overlooked novels of the 1980s. Con-man, filmmaker (currently working on producing "Jesus 2001", what he calls the religious equivalent of The Godfather, best known for his movie "The Clap That Took Over the World"), descendent of a wealthy and prestigious New York family whose wealth and prestige are on a sharp decline, racist and anti-Semite (though Simon dislikes all ethnic groups equally), possessor of never-satisfied appetites (food, women, drink, but most of all, money and more money), and the fastest talker since Falstaff, Simon is on a quest that goes backwards.
Through the course of this 600-page novel, Simon loses, one by one, all of his senses (taste is lost when trying to siphon off gasoline for his roving, broken-down production van), ending in a state of complete debilitation in which he is being made ready for eternity and salvation.
As energy packed as a William Gaddis novel and as rich in language as a Shakespearean play, Take Five is a modern masterpiece that is at once a celebration of life and a morality play on excess, as though anticipating the self-indulgent "me generation" of the decade

RECONNAISSANCE

2008-12-17T12:21:00.000-08:00

"How...how fragile situations are. But not tenuous. Delicate, but not flimsy, not indulgent. Delicate, that's why they keep breaking, they must break and you must the the pieces together and show it before it breaks again, or put them aside for a moment when something else breaks and turn to that, and all this keeps going on. That's why most writing now, if you read it they go on one two three four and tell you what happened like newspaper accounts, no adjectives, no long sentences, no tricks they pretend, and they finally believe that they really believe that the way they saw it is the way it is...it never takes your breath away, telling you things you already know, laying everything out flat, as though the terms and the time, and the nature and the movement of everything were secrets of the same magnitude. They write for people who read with the surface of their minds, people with reading habits that make the smallest demands on them, people brought up reading for facts, who know what's going to come next and want to know what's coming next, and get angry at surprises. Clarity's essential, and deatil, no fake mysticism, the facts are bad enough. But we're embarrassed for people who tell too much, and tell it without surprise. How does he know what happened? unless it's one unshaven man alone in a boat, in all this .... all this .... Listen, there are so many delicate fixtures, moving toward you, you'll see. Like a man going into a dark room, holding his hands down guarding his parts for fear of a table corner, and ... Why, all this around us is for people who can keep their balance only in the light, where they move as though nothing were fragile, nothing tempered by possibility, and all of a sudden bang! something breaks. then you have to stop and put the pieces together again. But you never can put the pieces back together again. but you never can put them back together quite the same way. You stop when you can and expose things, and leave them within reach until you can bring them back and show them, put together slightly different, maybe a little more enduring, until you've broken it and picked up the pieces enough times, and you have the whole thing in all it's dimensions. but the discipline, the detail, it's just....sometimes the accumulation is too much to bear."
— William Gaddis (The Recognitions)

EASY CHAIN

2008-12-17T10:25:00.000-08:00

“In the libraries, he had also seen the affinity between progress and reduction. Day after day, in one library after another, he had noticed the cadenzas of rapt attention played to minutiae, as larger concerns grew foggy with neglect. Increasing acuity of perception driving wider blindness, evident & necessary visions falling on eyes without feeling. It was evolutionary: to continue, to flourish & prosper, whittle yourself to the barest functional minimum, then pass this on. Again, reason has produced its flipside, history has worked its dull revenge”

SURPRISE

2008-05-24T02:55:00.001-07:00

A Persian translation of John Barth’s first novel, The Floating Opera, recently won a literary prize in Iran. According to a story published on the Tehran Times Web site, Barth would’ve been happier about the award if he had approved the publication of the translation:

In a letter to the Qoqnus publishing company, American novelist John Barth has asked Iranian publishers to publish the copyrighted books only with the permission of the copyright owners.

However, he stated that it is a great pleasure for an author to see that his books are translated into other languages and published in other countries and that he feels honored by the recent publication of his 50-year-old novel in Iran.

John Barth was not the first writer who objected to the unauthorized publication of his book in Iran, [Qognus managing director Amir] Hosseinzadegan added.

He explained that many foreign publishers do not sign agreements with Iranian publishing companies and many of them who sign agreements are not satisfied with their royalties since book prices are much lower in Iran compared to Western countries.

DISTEMPER

2008-05-16T14:00:00.000-07:00

Il était passé sous le radar – là ou se situe, après tout, l’essentiel de ce qui est vivant (paranoia will destroy you) – on est allé le chercher, on le rapporte, on le conseille. Vollmann aussi (« A beautifully written catalogue of various kinds of unhappiness..). Il y a pire complicité.

The literary debut by the Iowa-born, Valley-based Nulick is a hallucinatory, pitch-black love story — set in Phoenix — that incorporates references as far afield as Hitler, Marilyn Manson, Warhol, Nabokov, Kafka, skateboard culture, beekeeping, the old let's-put-LSD-in-the-municipal-water-supply trick, and tow-truck drivers who've been driven to drink by hellcats on wheels.
"I tell people it's a love story," Nulick says. "It's about people who get obsessed with other people in ways that are unhealthy, plus there's kind of a riff on schizophrenia in there."
Ya think?

LE LIVRE DE LA SEMAINE?

2008-05-09T16:10:00.001-07:00

POWERS INEDIT

2008-05-09T15:52:00.000-07:00

L’art de la fugue, les derniers quatuors à corde de Beethoven, l’Othello de Verdi, Parsifal….Adorno s’était intéressé au « late style » des compositeurs, le quatuor Brentano s’est intéressé aux « late works » dans une série de concerts données ce printemps. « Examining late style » : parmi les intervenants conviés à écrire un texte pour le programme, Richard Powers. Un texte intitulé dénouement.

« Stories start in last things. As T. S. Eliot writes at the end of “East Coker,” “In my end is my beginning.” I hear in this conclusion no supernatural paradox, but simply the everyday fact of how narrative works. We wait to see where a story lands. Only then can we say what the journey means. The act of reading consists, in Peter Brooks’s memorable phrase, of “the anticipation of retrospection.” In the unreflective time of daily life, the past is fixed and gradually forecloses on the open future. In the reflexive time of narrative, the pre-existing future constantly changes the mutable past. You read page ten, already knowing it will mean something very different by page 300. And sure enough, by page 300, page ten has changed utterly, although it remains word for word the same. Page ten posts itself forward, waiting for page 300 to intercept and reinterpret it. And every new page added to a story alters every page that generated it, all the way up until the end, when the last page changes all. So it goes when we listen to the story of an entire life: late style seems to hold the secret of arrival, the key to reinterpreting everything that has come before. The Tempest magisterially deepens all previous revels. Finnegans Wake reveals the consummation of a process now retroactively clear in the earliest experiments of Dubliners. We can’t help ourselves: we carry along inside us the sense of an inexorable narrative arc: exposition, development, climax and denouement. But for all that we know of growth — its broadening and deepening, its sometime slowing, perhaps its darkening — the shape of the final work is never inevitable. Shakespeare, in fact, wrote more drama after Prospero. Joyce died planning another book about adventure and the sea. Perhaps half the meaning that we find in last wills and testaments lies not in late style but in ourselves. Frank Kermode opens his consummate book, The Sense of an Ending, with a question: what sound does a clock make? Many languages say something like English’s tick tock. But for the clock, of course, there is no tock. Listen closely, and be surprised: it’s pure tick, all the way out to the horizon. As Kermode says, “Men die in mediis rebus, and to make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends.” We are born in the middle of things, we grow in the middle of things and we die in the middle of things. It’s not enough. We want a bigger story, some truth that only a transcendent last word can deliver. We age, yes. Grow, certainly. We stumble forward toward some obscure destination. We rewrite always, given more time. But maybe it’s just that provisional, interrupted, eternal revision that we’re left with. Perhaps when we listen to an artist’s last word, we might give it space to mean something even more than consummation. Maybe we should hear in arrival just the draft of a draft of something else that might have come along, given more time. Remember that denouement does not mean summing up. It’s just a fancy term for untying. There is no end, except in again beginning. » Richard Powers

OMEGA PRIZE

2008-05-09T15:36:00.000-07:00

On en a déjà parlé - et on en reparlera.

Belgian author Paul Verhaeghen tonight secured a double honour from the Independent foreign fiction prize for his novel Omega Minor. The £10,000 purse has hitherto been divided between author and English translator for "an exceptional work" of foreign language fiction by a living author. But this year Verhaeghen, who himself translated the book, is entitled to take the full prize for himself - although he does not plan to do so.

"It's always amazing when people like your work, and it's absolutely amazing when four leading intellectuals say it's the best book they've read all year," Verhaeghen said after learning of his victory. However, while he is delighted to receive the endorsement, he has decided not to take the money. "Part of this book is about the rise and aftermath of Fascism in Nazi Germany. And it's hard to miss the analogous things happening in the US. I refused the Flemish Culture award after I realised around $5,000 (£2,555) of the winnings would go to the US treasury. So this time, I decided to give the money to the American Civil Liberties Union, which works for civil rights. The money won't be liable for tax."
Moving back and forth through the last century, Omega Minor, translated from the Dutch, is a story of love and death on the grandest possible scale. Its whirlwind plot takes in Berlin, Boston, Los Alamos and Auschwitz, and characters including neo-Nazis, a physics professor who returns to Potsdam to atone for his sins, a Holocaust survivor going over his trauma with a young psychologist and an Italian postgraduate who designs an experiment that will determine the fate of the universe.

The book is Paul Verhaeghen's second novel and his first to be published in English. Aside from his writing career, Verhaeghen also works as a cognitive psychologist where his work focuses on memory and ageing. He currently lives in Atlanta, where he is associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The book has sold well in Germany, Holland and France and his publishers will be hoping for repeat success in the UK in the wake of the prize. Antonia Byatt, director of literature strategy at award sponsor Arts Council England and the non-voting chair of the judges, said: "I am delighted Paul Verhaeghen has won ... It is a highly ambitious novel which tackles some of the major issues of our time. He deserves such recognition in England, not only for his remarkable writing but also for his huge achievement in translating his own work."

Verhaeghen said he undertook to translate his own work after the Flemish Fund for Literature commissioned some trial translations from other people, and I didn't recognise my own voice. It was the first time I realised I could have an English voice." The resulting book, he explained, "is maybe more American than the original, but I can still recognise it as my novel."

The judges for the prize were literary editor of the Independent, Boyd Tonkin; writer and teacher Abdulrazak Gurnah; literary editor of Le Monde Florence Noiville; and Arts Council England literature officer Kate Griffin.

Boyd Tonkin described the book as "one of those fantastic, big, rich exciting novels that turn up from time to time. If you're looking for comparisons, they would be the Don DeLillo of Underworld and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. It is vast and sprawling - and I think it's OK to say that it is quite uneven, because 80% of it is absolutely brilliant."

Le Jour J

2008-05-09T13:19:00.000-07:00

Le jour idéal pour un come back, non?

Freebird Books, Brooklyn, Là ou il fallait être?

3 pm, Sunday, May 4 JUST ADDED!!! Thomas Pynchon birthday bash  Mark your calendars for the literary event of the season: Thomas Pynchon turns 71 and Freebird Books and greater Red Hook won't let him forget it.  Join us for a backyard barbeque and fax-a-thon celebrating America's greatest literary cipher. We'll dine on foodstuffs famously vomited by Gravity's Rainbow's Tyrone Slothrop: burgers, homefries, chef's salad with French dressing, Moxie, after-dinner mints, Clark bars, salted peanuts, and "the cherry from some Radcliffe girl's old-fashioned."  And yes, we'll be faxing birthday greetings to the great elusive one via the miracle of outmoded techology. One fax per customer, please. Please check your Kakutani hate mail at the door.  What? You want more?! OK, OK, we'll be screening a rarely-seen Italian documentary and giving away lots of foolish prizes.

UN NOUVEL AUSTER

2008-03-10T15:35:00.000-07:00

Paul Auster August 2008
MAN IN THE DARK

A man lies in the dark telling himself stories in an attempt to hide from his fears. The man is August Brill, who is seventy two years old and living in a house of mourning in Vermont with his daughter and grand-daughter. Someone has been murdered, and in order to combat sleeplessness Brill tells himself stories. Brill imagines America at war with itself. Following the 2000 election results riots led to secession as state after state pulled away from the federation. And so while George W Bush rules some states, the independents are beyond his reach - and the war between the two is very bloody indeed. In this parallel universe Owen Brick, a small time magician and children’s party entertainer from NY, finds himself waking up in a ditch, at the mercy of another man’s imagination and in a country at war. As August Brill tells stories in the dark, the imagined and the real merge, and what he is so desperately trying to avoid insists on being told. A love story, that is also a story of betrayal and emotional violence, finally leads him to the story of another war and a grotesquely violent death.

IM MEMORIAM

2008-01-18T09:45:00.000-08:00

A quand le grand roman sur l'invraisemblable psyché du Glenn Gould des échecs?

AUTO-JOURNAL

2008-01-16T09:04:00.000-08:00

Dans le Los Angeles Times du jour, rubrique Automobile, l'essai de la nouvelle Subaru Impreza WRX STI

"The car you see on this page is subtle. No, seriously, ignoring the blown-out front fender deltoids, the heinous sacrilege of sport tires and roof-extending rear wing the size of a snowboard, and ignoring the Talmudic specificity of the name -- Subaru Impreza WRX STI -- there is a lot of nuance here. It's nuance fired out of a howitzer at point-blank range into your face, but you could still easily miss it. Yes, that's what impresses me after a rib-bruising half-hour with this 305-hp, all-wheel-drive samurai license-killer: its deep allusiveness and indirection. It's practically Pynchon-like."

A quand Deleuze dans l'Auto-Journal?

LA FETE AU VILLAGE

2008-01-15T14:40:00.000-08:00

What a trip!

« Pont Saint-Esprit, un joli village au bord du fleuve Dieu le Rhône , dans le Sud de la France, est célèbre non seulement pour son pont historique mais aussi, malheureusement, pour ce qui arriva à ses habitants à partir du mois d’août de l’an 1951 et qui a été nommé par la suite “l’Affaire du Pain Maudit”. C’est dans ce petit village que, vers la moitié du mois d’août de l’an 1951, les médecins Vieu et Gabbai remarquèrent que certaines familles présentaient un syndrome particulier, caractérisé par des sensations de froid, de la nausée, des vomissements et de la lipothymie. A ces symptômes-là s’en ajoutaient d’autres, plus graves et, notamment, des convulsions, des hallucinations visuelles, des illusions sensorielles, de l’euphorie, des crises dépressives et des tendances suicidaires.
Les comptes rendus décrivent Pont Saint-Esprit comme une espèce de cercle dantesque où des personnes qui hurlent se déambulent, terrorisées, dans les rues envahies par le hululement des sirènes des ambulances. Ce cauchemar parvint à son point culminant pendant la nuit du 24 août qui, par la suite, sera décrite par le docteur Gabbai comme « ma nuit d’apocalypse » (Giraud, 1973). Voilà comment Fuller la décrit : « Toute cette nuit-là, des voitures, des charrettes, toutes sortes de moyens de transport amenèrent à l’hôpital des malades gémissant ou hurlant, en proie à des phantasmes de violence ou de peur… ». Et aussi le matin suivant, dans les premières heures de la journée : « Les malades se croient entourés de flammes ; c’est ce qui les poussait vers les fenêtres… ils étaient éblouis de visions violemment colorées… » (Fuller, 1968).
Les effets psychiques s’évanouirent après quelques mois et, vers la fin d’octobre, la situation retourna à la normalité (Giraud, 1973). Le bilan final fut de presque une dizaine de morts et des centaines de malades, qui habitaient tous à Pont Saint-Esprit ou dans les environs, dont une soixantaine fut emmenée dans les hôpitaux psychiatriques de Montpellier, Nîmes, Avignon, Orange et Lyon.
On a supposé qu’il s’agissait d’un empoisonnement alimentaire dû, notamment, au pain infecté par de l’ergot de seigle. Cette hypothèse est confirmée par le fait que ceux qui sont tombés malades avaient tous ingéré du pain vendu par la même boulangerie, dont la farine contenait de l’ergot (Gabbai et al., 1951), ce qui a été prouvé par une analyse pharmacologique effectuée à Marseille.
Outre l’hypothèse de l’empoisonnement dû à l’ergot, on a avancé d’autres hypothèses à propos des évènements de Pont Saint-Esprit. Selon une de ces dernières, l’empoisonnement aurait été provoqué par la présence de méthyle mercure, un agent fongicide bien connu (Bouchet, 1980), alors qu’il y a trente ans Moreau (Moreau , 1982) a considéré une moisissure qui infecte les denrées céréalières, lAspergillus fumigatus, la vraie responsable de ce syndrome.
Cependant, aucune de ces trois hypothèses est vraiment convaincante et « l’Affaire du pain maudit » reste un mystère irrésolu."

LE LIVRE DU MOIS

2008-01-10T14:52:00.000-08:00

This collection of conceptual fictions enacts the misalliances of lovers, coworkers, families, and friends, following out the unlikely conjunctions of postmodern America to their often preposterous ends. At the work's comic center is an invention that transgresses the boundaries of fiction and fraud. Just who is Jirí Cêch? A businessman, vampire, and artist from Czechoslovakia? A website? A hoax? An American con artist whose racism and sexism, although obnoxious, only heighten his allure? Or is he Debra Di Blasi herself? Obsessed with everything as enigmatic as himself, whether platypuses or Emily Dickinson, Jiri seems determined to become an obsession for us as well.

In her third work of fiction, Debra Di Blasi explores the process of writing, not merely as an arrangement of words, but as the creation of pages, of signifying colors and forms in two-dimensional space. The Jirí Chronicles & Other Fictions is writing for the eyes, with illustrations and digital images defining this work as a response to our collective lust for visual information. Di Blasi's ability to generate tension results from her integration of these pictorial codes with exquisitely designed sentences:

The poet bored of living dead, so loving the living dead - Emily with her clever dash of pause and breath, little here-to-there line demarcating the fat-swarming world here she inhabited there on her page in her mind, that line a slit through which she'd slip, like a finger between labia, and all the wetness of creation a swooning banquet of word-interlaced silence.

These mixed-media fictions are as fun as they are intellectually provocative. The Jirí Chronicles & Other Fictions is a masterful work by one of America's creators of a new literary medium.

BACK TO BLOOD

2008-01-03T16:08:00.000-08:00

Little, Brown has acquired a new novel from Tom Wolfe. Back to Blood, the author's first work of fiction since his 2004 book, I Am Charlotte Simmons, published by Wolfe's longtime house FSG, will be set in Miami and deal with recurring themes for the author such as class and race.

OMEGA MINOR

2007-12-21T15:19:00.000-08:00

Grâce au blog du toujours impeccable Claro, je suis allé voir d'un peu plus près Omega Minor, de Paul Verhaegen - sans en être encore revenu. Qui aurait pensé que dans les derniers jours de l'année, un livre allait détrôner Tree of smoke, de Dennis Johnson, au titre de meilleur livre 2007? Et bien c'est fait. Cela faisait des mois que je n'avais pas ressenti un tel plaisir de lecture, une telle évidence, de celle qui vous frappe lorsque vous découvrez Les trois fermiers s'en vont au bal, Purple America ou encore White Noise. Je pense, et j'espère que Fausto en parlera plus longuement, et sûrement de façon plus précise que moi dans Tabula Rasa, nous sommes là en présence d'un grand, d'un très grand, d'un immense livre. Richard Powers a une fois de plus raison, en disant que "tout le 20ème siècle est dans ce livre", sur le fond comme dans la forme - Hitler, Himmler, Mengele, Speer, Heisenberg, Honnecker, Gorbachev, de Potsdam à Los Alamos en passant par Auschwitz, le Berlin d'après la chute du mur, Verhaegen nous offre un grand moment d'histoire, un grand moment de littérature. Que vous souhaitez de mieux pour bien finir l'année - ou commencer la nouvelle : plongez-vous vite dans Omega Minor - vous en ressortirez émerveillés, foi (jaune) de Pugnax! Et merci encore à Claro! (Sur ce, je m'en vais tranquillement franchir l'année seul avec les oeuvres complètes de Daniil Kharms sous le bras!)

Une mise en bouche (si j'ose dire), les premières lignes du livre :

"Im Anfang war die Tat – In the Beginning was the Act.
And to conclude the act – that serpentine pas-de-deux so skillfully performed against the satin backdrop of the blackest night – a lightning bolt hurls itself upward, a blinding curve of pristine white, the laws of gravity suspended for a quarter-second. A gushing garland spouts into the springtime air pregnant with moonlight, a string vibrating with unbound energy, and then a scream of triumph – and with a dull thud the alabaster blob flops on a silken belly, smoothly shaven, tan and taut. In the panting silence after the touchdown the room echoes with the silent howl of half a billion mouths that never were: 23-chromosome cells thrash their tiny tails in terror on the barren skin. The illicit hand elicits another power surge from his penis, fiercer still than the first, and a compassionate tongue descends, its trembling tip dipping into the basin of his navel. A sticky thread of pearls connects the woman to the Center of the man’s Being (his hara? Hare Krishna! Silver-blue G*d of futile Creation!), but only for an instant, for then she swallows – she drinks my seed, he thinks, she WANTS my seed, and the thought makes his heart swell, not with love but with misguided pride – and then her lips slide full over his lingam and the last fruit of her labor slides down her shiny throat. And while the man’s mouth is still screaming in triumph the gametic hordes yell out in Todesangst, for their worst nightmare has come true: In the woman’s churning stomach the cell membranes break open, the molecules dissolve, and the strands of the Code itself unwind, and naked lies the Blueprint, the secret of who Goldfarb is – the nucleic acids adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine swirl in irreparable chaos; their alchemy forever lost. Here lies a man, and he exults over the demise of a world population.

In the Beginning – beresheet – was the Act.
And the Act was sterile. That didn’t make it less pleasant. Or less meaningful. Mystic, maybe, or even magical, that act, but certainly maniacal.

‘Cigarette?’
It did not occur to Goldfarb to ask the question: ‘Was it as good for you, maa’m, as it so clearly was for me?’ Goldfarb does not need verbal confirmation. Goldfarb observes the cosmos. In Goldfarb’s presence, a woman’s body never lies. Goldfarb’s women are always satisfied. Right?
‘Cigarette?’

The technology is with us. We can use the permanence of memory to our advantage.
We rewind time, we force the clock to swallow its own digits. We choose the starting point and we take it – slowly – from there. Remember. It is springtime. Even though there is still a dusting of snow on the ground, the daffodils outside the Gästehaus wave their heavy crowns in the golden light of the lamp that hangs above the entrance. Time rewound through memory’s trickery. The young woman withdraws her lips from her lover’s cock, a narrow thread of pearly liquid flows from her mouth onto his belly, and then that stream suddenly jumps back into his puffed-up glans. Watch how it swells; see her tease the creamy harvest back down to his balls – and is it not so much more exciting to watch this in slow motion? Let us release the clock again: Behold the purple head that sways so swiftly on its heavy stalk; see how it glistens with her spit and juices; watch the little crater at the top spit out its zigzag line – out shoots the slime, the whirling weathervane, the drunken comet climbing past the stars, and in the moist cloud chamber of Donatella’s room a signal lights up in silvery white, an almost perfect circle described by the tumbling ribbon of spunk, an acrobatic snake snapping at, but missing its own tail – an ancient Greek symbol, the letter Omega, capitalized – Ω. "

Alexander Theroux

2007-12-20T03:54:00.000-08:00

Le Scandale est né dans le New York Times, il commence à se répandre ça et là sur la toile, dans la presse écrite. Le héros de Laura Warholic serait raciste et mysogine. Donc Laura Warholic serait raciste et mysogine. Donc Alexander Throux serait raciste et mysogine. Les cons.

NEVER AGAIN

2007-12-12T14:50:00.000-08:00

On avait bien aimé Negativeland - on va essayer ça : Doug Nufer writes fiction, poetry, and performance pieces that seem to be based on formal constraints even when they are not. Never Again, the most audacious example of his work to date, is a novel in which no word appears more than once. It is the story of a gambler who narrates how he set out to avoid the mistakes of his past by doing (and saying) nothing he ever did (or said) before.

THE FARTHER SHORE

2007-12-12T14:18:00.000-08:00

Après THE ROAD et TREE OF SMOKE, un petit nouveau qui, d'emblée, se hisse au niveau des massifs. Matthew Eck, un nom à retenir!

A unit of young American soldiers lost in an unnamed city in an unnamed desert nation struggle to maintain a tenuous grip on their lives in this haunting debut novel by Eck, a veteran of U.S. Army efforts in Somalia. Narrator Joshua Stantz recounts his wanderings with such quiet objectivity that the horrors he witnesses evoke winces and poetic details stand out in contrast: there are wounds that hiss and bubble, but there is also a girl's lone eyelash falling from the creases of a letter. Early in the book, Joshua is part of a group of six soldiers who, separated from their unit and under murky circumstances, kill two boys, but almost everything else about their circumstances remains unclear: where exactly are they and why? and who is the enemy? With these questions in the air, the formal rules of engagement become all but useless as the troops navigate a landscape rife with dangers-warring clans, armed thugs, the elements. Eck goes beyond the on-the-ground chaos of battle to capture the physical and psychological disorientation of modern war.

LAURA WARHOLIC

2007-12-04T09:58:00.000-08:00

Enfin, le monstre arrive. 600 pages. (On préférait le premier projet de couv.......)

Book Description
A brilliant satire from one of the great novelists of his time.

In his first novel in nearly twenty years, Alexander Theroux, National Book Award Nominee, returns with a compendious satire, a bold and inquisitorial circuit-breaking examination of love and hate, of rejection and forgiveness, of trust and romantic disappointment, of the terrors of contemporary life. Eugene Eyestones, an erudite sex columnist for a Boston cultural magazine, becomes enmeshed in the messy life of a would-be artist named Laura Warholic, who, repulsing and fascinating him at the same time, becomes a mirror in which he not only sees himself but through which he is forced to face his own demons. Not only does she inadvertently supply him with material for his columns, but she exemplifies all that Eugene considers wrong with contemporary America (of which the publishing profession and its recognizable denizens serves as a microcosm)—a garish and dunce-filled Babylon that Theroux scorches with inventive and relentless satire. Nostalgic for the old days and old manners, a way of life lost to grace, loving from afar a mysterious beauty named Rapunzel Wisht, Eugene fights against the rising tide of stupidity, focusing on Laura in the hope that by saving her he can validate his ethical beliefs. But feckless Laura and the colorful but bizarre cast of characters surrounding Eugene—brilliant bigots, nihilists, Generation-X slackers and zanies of all sexual persuasions—threaten to pull him under, leading to the novel's unforgettable conclusion, a climax of betrayal and redemption of Dostoevskyan power.

As in all of Theroux's works, his maximalist and pyrotechnic prose style and searching intellect are the chief attractions, capable of outrageous comedy, nuanced philosophical discussions, winsome love scenes, flame-throwing tirades, subtle theological musings, and an unflinching genius for a profound if merciless look at the human condition. Horrifying and hilarious, damning and demanding, Laura Warholic in its uncompromising power will surely be one of the most talked-about novels of the season, and for years to come.

Love-Lies-Bleeding

2007-11-19T13:53:00.000-08:00

Love-Lies-Bleeding, Don DeLillo's third play, is a daring, profoundly compassionate story about life, death, art and human connection.

Three people gather to determine the fate of the man who sits in a straight-backed chair saying nothing. He is Alex Macklin, who gave up easel painting to do land art in the southwestern desert, and he is seventy now, helpless in the wake of a second stroke. The people around him are the bearers of a complicated love, his son, his young wife, the older woman -- his wife of years past -- who feels the emotional tenacity of a love long-ended.

It is their question to answer. When does life end, and when should it end? In this remote setting, without seeking medical or legal guidance, they move unsteadily toward last things.

Luminous, spare, unnervingly comic and always deeply moving, Love-Lies-Bleeding explores a number of perilous questions about the value of life and how we measure it.

Marco Knauff's Universe

2007-11-17T08:56:00.000-08:00

44.

The existence of the Invisible cannot be refuted.

For example: many believe an invisible Zoo exists. How else explain the animal sounds that issue unaccountably from "seams in the air"? (Not to be confused with the "Caruso Effect" [5 & 34].) Or a mauling on the Lawn one afternoon in which no assailant was seen.

Some produce, in evidence, recordings of chamber music made by an invisible string quartet. The adagio is "unearthly" and few can resist weeping.

Some have brought leaves into the Rest House {7} that, they allege, dropped onto the Lawn from no apparent tree. These leaves are treasured as relics. They are said to possess healing properties.

I myself have a hat of a style unknown to us. I found it in the vestibule of the Rest House in which I take my leisure. The hat is precious to me.

It has, in the hatband, a feather of a bird our zoologists cannot identify.

All these are—are they not?—evidence of the Invisible?

ODYSSEE

2007-11-17T08:39:00.001-08:00

Les épreuves sont arrivées ce matin au courrier – et je peux déjà vous annoncer (une centaine de pages plus tard), le petit chef-d’œuvre. On revient dessus très vite !

With brilliant prose, a rich body of authorial knowledge, and a terrific imagination, Zachary Mason has fashioned a book that might have been one of the classics of world literature, if only it actually dated from the time of Homer. Following the structure of the ancient Greek classic, The Lost Books of the Odyssey features alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions of Homer's original Odyssey and, equipped as well with a faux-authoritative scholarly introduction, richly carries off the illusion of being the lost ur-text of Homer's masterpiece. Constructed by an author who is part poet and part computer genius, The Lost Books of the Odyssey employs theories of artificial intelligence and the creation of fractals in its composition, traces of which are effaced by the sheer beauty of the language and scope of its accomplishment. This postmodern novel is by no means simple game-playing, but an elegantly written, frequently beautiful book, justifying comparison with the great postmodern fictive hoaxes of Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, and Robert Coover. This is a one-of-a-kind book that is destined to become a classic in its own right.

"“Zachary Mason’s astounding glosses of The Odysey plunge us into an unforeseeable and hypnotic dimension of fiction. Of the three possible interpretations of the work that he proposes — Homeric stories anciently reproduced by recombining their components, a Theosophist dream of abstract mathematics, and pure illusion (that is, it was all made up by him) — the result is one and the same. This enthralling book is his doing, whether as translator, conjuror, or author. I vote for number three.” Harry Mathews

A VOIR

2007-11-17T08:16:00.000-08:00

Une nouvelle aventure pour Mcsweeney's (http://mcsweeneys2.net/)....on attend de voir. Il est vrai que si la revue, puis le site, avaient à leurs débuts suscités pas mal l'enthousiasme du fait de leur originalité, le soufflet était retombé ces derniers mois, l'ensemble étant tombé dans une sorte de banalité gentillette. (La banalité, qui est à l'originalité, comme chacun sait ce que l'eau est à la glace, la cigarette à l'amour, ou l'homorphisme aux monoïdes libres non triviaux)

QUINNEHTUKQUT

2007-10-26T09:18:00.001-07:00

Allez, le week-end. Feu de bois. Lecture.

Set in a region of northern New Hampshire that in the 1830s declared itself an independent nation, JoshuaHarmon's debut novel traces the real and imagined travels of Martha Hennessy, a girl wishing for a life beyond her family's farm. QUINNEHTUKQUT interweaves Martha's story with those of dreamers and drifters whose lives intersect hers: an American soldier scarred by the first World War, a mythical and murderous tramp seeking lost Indian gold, a man haunted by his memories of Byrd's expeditions to Antarctica, an industrialist longing to become a woodsman, and an old woman forced to leave her home due to the planned flooding of a valley. A vivid study of the New England landscape, Quinnehtukqut reveals how people inhabit place and how place inhabits people.

"Joshua Harmon's magical postmodern epic ranges across time, threading fragments of oral history, diaries, and news accounts into parallel tales of mystery, wonder, and tragedy"--Jayne AnnePhillips.

Quinnehtukqut evokes the impressionistic sweep and lyrical beauty of The English Patient alongside the brilliant idiosyncratic vitality of Mason and Dixon. But Joshua Harmon is a thoroughly original writer, who is doing no less than reinventing storytelling before our eyes, by means of a dazzling, ever-shifting formal innovation, the primary allegiance of which is always to music. Quinnehtukqut is mesmerizing line by line." - Mary Caponegro

"Through a series of loosely linked fictions that toy with both the mythologizing and the dislocating effects of language, Quinnehtukqut provides a mesmerizing picture of a place over time. Teasing a complex and compelling narrative out of a vast array of voices, documentation, and styles, this is historical fiction at its most eccentric and best."
- Brian Evenson

TABLE DE CHEVET (2)

2007-10-22T04:52:00.001-07:00

Le dernier "opus" de Chapman, que l'on suit depuis longtemps, auteur des splendides Daughter, I forbid your reccuring dream, Stet et Glass. Avec un extrait, étonnant, là : http://www.fuguestatepress.com/howx.pdf

This unusual novel comes in the form of a libretto for an oratorio, completed by a fictional composer just before his death in the 1990's. After an introduction that gives us the bare outlines of his personal history, most of our knowledge of his inner life--his emotion at the death of his wife, and the way he is dealing with his own illnesses--comes to us from his libretto.

The libretto consists of dozens of scored quotations from outside sources (many of them invented) around the subjects of illness and the fear of death. Particular obsessions of the composer--the life and death of contralto Kathleen Ferrier (who died mid-life of breast cancer, as the composer's wife did), the illnesses of composers and performers Leonard Bernstein, Glenn Gould, Gustav Mahler and Alfred Schnittke, as well as Hindu poetry, German history and many other matters, provide the reader with a ghostly outline of the life story and soul of a dying artist.

The most unusual formal innovation here is the musical scoring, indicated by columns--the density of simultaneous sung quotations will increase in moments of great emotion; spareness and "white space" become more frequent as hope recedes. We come to know the composer as one who had already withdrawn from the world, allied only with the woman he loved. And we see what is left for him once he has lost her.

The last musical work of fictional composer Eckhard Rabindranath Unruh, produced in his last year on earth. A musician born in India of German parents, he was trained in Hindu classical music, served in the British army in WWII. He could find no outlets for his music in postwar Germany and so supported himself by working in a plant nursery. "Unruh had an instinct for making his work undesirable." He emigrated to the United States and tried to get his career on track in California, all to no avail. He was known to a few aficionados. That was all. "Unruh's time may have passed before it ever arrived." Unruh was an odd bird, much more so than the average odd bird that many artists are.
Fugue State Press has sent an advance copy of Chapman's novel in spiral-bound double-page layout with a fugal element. There are English-language translations for the words of the speakers who utter parts in languages from Hungarian, Sanskrit, Sumerian, Portuguese, Czech. There are four spoken recorded tracks, two separate choruses, live speakers #1 and #2, and instrumental soloists all going simultaneously. In concert, performance time is supposed to last 53 minutes. The obsession of the variegated libretto is death, its many manifestations, the descent into nothingness, the triumph of disease, rotten corpses "too filthy for the dogs to eat." Quotes from various cultural works and reminiscence follow in rapid recititives, with contralto, with baritone. The truth emerges from these complex juxtapositions.
Chapman gets his point across and does it in an original manner by his choice of these cultural antecedents joined together in a Greek chorus of despair. Let's try to get used to techniques like these. An artist has license to engage in such irregularities, using the voices of others in an oratorio of the damned. Once again, Chapman develops the theme of the artist in the postmodern world. The theme bedevils him as it did in Stet. It wouldn't surprise me if he returns to it again. How is This Going to Continue? is an unusual fiction of originality filled with the high purpose of Chapman's vision.
--Arnold Skemer, ZYX

TABLE DE CHEVET

2007-10-22T04:49:00.001-07:00

Limit Point, a new work of fiction by Michael Brodsky. Limit Point focuses on people in deep crisis. In the title piece, the drifter-hero s involvement in a heist, including his dangerously ambivalent relationship with two enigmatic women, ends in disaster. The tale goes far beyond beloved B-movie conventions to yield unsettling insights into the criminal mind as well as images of startling beauty. In Midtown Pythagoras , the efforts of a shamus straight out of Raymond Chandler to save his oddball client are stymied at every turn by Manhattan s special brand of 24/7 irrationality. Crisis in the Life of an Actress , set in the avant-garde theatre world of a decade ago, reveals how uncontrollable envy can destroy the creative spirit. Confronted head-on in Limit Point are subjects that have obsessed Brodsky over more than 30 years of unstoppable productivity casual humiliation as the hair-trigger of violence; identity theft through sexual surrender; the tragicomedy of institutional rehab; and the disconnect, engineered by the demon of language, between the dark world outside us and the even darker one within.

SERGENT MAJOR

2007-10-18T15:21:00.001-07:00

Le retour du grand Clarence....Chapeau bas!

My Amputations

The author of the acclaimed novel, Reflex and Bone Structure, returns here in My Amputations, to the question of identity, the double, adventure, detection and mystery, but with more hypnotic power and range. In My Amputations he has his protagonist, Mason Ellis, (who may just be "a desperate ex-con" or a wronged American novelist out to right the wrong done to him) jump through flaming loops like a trained dog, so to speak. In other words, there seems to be no end to the troubles Mason Ellis faces.

His story takes him from the South Side of Chicago, to New York, with a stint in Attica prison, across America, Europe and into the primal depths of Africa. Mason, all the while, tries to convince the reader that he is the important American writer he says he is. Upon his release from prison he sets out to prove his claim. After an audacious bank-robbery and a couple of burglaries that are hilarious, he goes into hiding to escape the malice of one of his cohorts; and eventually flees to Europe. The irony is that he is now as much the runner as the seeker. After encounters with a Zuni ex-folksinger, kidnappers, the New York underworld, literary groupies, an Italian swordsman, a violent German secret society, an anti-bellum cotillion in rural Greece, he finds himself face to face (behind a mask) with his own destiny.

2007-10-17T06:11:00.000-07:00

How the Dead Dream
Lydia Millet. Counterpoint, $24 (256p) ISBN 978-1-59376-184-4
Millet proves no less lyrical, haunting or deliciously absurd in her brilliant sixth novel than in her fifth, the acclaimed Oh Pure & Radiant Heart. As a boy, T. keeps his distance from others, including his loving but vacant parents, preferring to explore his knack for turning a dollar. Before long, he's a wealthy but lonely young real estate developer in L.A. Just after he adopts, on impulse, a dog from the pound, his mother shows up and announces that T.'s father has left her. His mother, increasingly erratic, moves in; meanwhile, T. finally meets and falls in love with Beth, a nice girl who understands him, but a cruel twist of fate soon leaves him alone again. As his mother continues to unravel, T. finds unexpected consolation in endangered animals at the zoo, and he starts breaking into pens after hours to be closer to them. The jungle quest that results, while redolent of Heart of Darkness and Don Quixote, takes readers to a place entirely Millet's own, leavened by very funny asides. At once an involving character study and a stunning meditation on loss—planetary and otherwise—Millet's latest unfolds like a beautiful, disturbing dream. (Jan.)

JIM KRUSOE, LE RETOUR....

2007-10-10T04:54:00.001-07:00

This was the first time ever that Spinner had trusted me with the keys to Mister Twisty’s, but at any rate I was feeling very tired myself, and for some reason, a little sad also. From the basement I could hear the hum of the giant cooling machines as I sprayed a little Windex on the counters to wipe away the stickiness, and rubbed down the swirl machines with chrome cleaner. And I was just about to go home when I heard, or thought I heard, a difference in the intensity of sound coming from below me. For a moment I thought I might be coming down with a cold, or maybe the flu myself, but when I shook my head and pressed my sinuses everything seemed fine. It was probably nothing, but just suppose there was some kind of a malfunction in the equipment downstairs, or even one of the old guys had had a heart attack and fallen into the machinery. We never really kept track of who went down and who came back up, and for all I know there might be someone down there, dying this very minute. I knew that Spinner had said he’d been working on the equipment a few weeks earlier, but I also knew that he had told me once, when I first began to work there, never to go down to the basement for any reason at all.

Once at the foot of the stairs, I was slightly surprised to see that the dull, yellow glow came, not as I'd imagined, from some bare bulb suspended from the ceiling, but rather from the walls and corners, from what looked like giant, softly glowing Popsicles. Not only that, but the basement itself was much larger than I had ever guessed. It was far larger in fact than the whole floor of the yogurt parlor above, and must have stretched at least to McReedy's Hardware, and possibly even beneath Pets Incorporated, at the far end of our corner mall. The stairs from Mister Twisty's, however, appeared to be the only entrance or exit to the place, and as my eyes slowly grew accustomed to the light, I could see a cooling machine certainly more grand than any I'd imagined — four or five times bigger in fact than any yogurt refrigeration apparatus I'd ever seen in trade magazines, possibly ten times more powerful than would be necessary to supply a modest frozen yogurt outlet such as Mister Twisty's.

This was the time, I decided, to take a closer look at those glowing objects placed around the walls. I chose one set of pipes running out from the central compressor and followed it to a tall cylinder with a sort of a burnished metal cap and a shiny metal base, out of which stuck three silver fins, strangely like those early rockets that landed on London in newsreels of years ago. Or, to use a more modern analogy, it resembled a seven-foot tall version of one of those fancy Italian espresso boilers you sometimes see in trendy coffee bars, hissing and wheezing out phlegmy portions of java. Between the base and the cap was a wide band, about six feet tall, of cloudy glass, or possibly Plexiglas. It was that glass which was the source of the dim glow.

I placed my hand against the glass, and felt a slight hum, almost a pulse. Moving my hand then to the bottom of the cylinder, down between the fins, my fingertips inadvertently brushed against what felt like a toggle switch. I hesitated, wondering whether it might be connected to an alarm, but then I reasoned that you don't go around installing alarm switches in the hopes that a burglar will deliberately set one off. My forefinger slipped under the smooth metal ball at its tip and I flipped it upward. At first nothing happened. Then there was a flicker from behind the surface, and slowly the glass brightened from its faint glow to reveal the form of a young and actual and completely naked woman--somewhere in her twenties, I guessed. Her hands were at her sides; her blue eyes were open wide; her hair moved slowly as a whisper in the liquid that had held her there, for who knew how long?
--Jim Krusoe

MAIS QUE FOUTENT LES EDITEURS? (Part 8)

2007-10-08T14:50:00.000-07:00

Après l’excellentissime Blue Guide To Indiana, dans lequel Martone attaquait, pliait, transfigurait le guide de voyage dans un exercice beaucoup plus Sanderso-Barthien que Molvaniesque, notre homme se consacre dans son dernier livre Michael Martone à la notice biographique. Celui-ci offre en effet quarante-neuf notices biographiques (et un remerciement) toutes consacrées à Martone himself, écrites par quarante neuf contributeurs différents (Mais que fait lot 49 ?). On y voyage au gré des multiples vies, morts et renaissances de l’auteur. Sans atteindre une dimension Borgesienne ces variations autobiographiques sont néanmoins réussies à 100%. Des mémoires fractales et distordues devraient faire le bonheur des lecteurs de Curtis White ou de… Régis Jauffret. Un extrait for the road :

Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and he was educated in the public schools there. He attended Indiana University in Bloomington where, as a freshman, he took part in the famous Kinsey Report by completing a survey of his sexual history during orientation. Alfred Kinsey, a biology professor at the university, had begun his famous work on human sexual response when he was teaching, after the war, the "marriage" course, an early attempt in the health curriculum to provide information in what was called then sexual hygiene. One day, a co-ed, who was to be married that summer, approached Kinsey after a lecture to ask what she could expect from her husband, and Kinsey, always the scientist, couldn't answer her since he didn't have, he realized, any hard scientific evidence. "I'll get back to you," he told her, and began his decades long project collecting oral interviews, written personal narratives, taped anecdotal commentary, and computer scanned surveys from a vast range of informants in order to build a workable database of sexual behavior.

There, years later, in a crowded lecture room in Ballantine Hall, Michael Martone participated in the very same ongoing effort of data gathering, carefully blackening with the provided No.2 pencil the appropriate bubble corresponding to the numbered response most accurately representing such desired information as his masturbatory habits and history, his sexual preference, his preferred positions (there were illustrations), and the time, to the nearest minute, of his recovery after "performing vigorous coitus." The room fell silent as the freshman class bent to this initial collegian task required of them, the quiet broken only by the scratching of pencil lead on the rigid manila IBM cards and the counterpunctual response of the rubbing of rubber erasers.

Afterward, Martone remembers racing from the building into a bright fall day, the trees of Dunn Meadow just taking on the color of the season. That night, he called his mother, who had also been a student at Indiana University to ask her if she, too, had been recruited to contribute to Professor Kinsey's report, indicating to her, as best he could, the extent and duration of statistical instrument he had just endured. "No," his mother responded, "they didn't have that when I was there. I did take this facts-of-life course the spring before I married Daddy." She went on to say that she didn't learn much, that the class had been dry and very statistical in nature. "I even asked the professor about it." It hadn't mattered, she concluded, since shortly after that meeting with the professor who had told her he would get back to her about her questions, she and her soon-to-be husband figured out how to go about the very thing that had been so mysterious.

Late one night, in a classroom where, in his senior year at Indiana University, Martone would take a class on Chaucer, his parents, ignorant of contraception in spite of the courses they took, managed to conceive their son. Though when asked, years later, by her son for further details, his mother simply said she couldn't recall much more about that night but that she could make something up if that would help. »

29 INCHES

2007-10-04T12:29:00.000-07:00

Petit précis de Technoluxure (pour repartir à petites foulées)…..le nouveau « tour de farce » de Mark Amerika – diablement contemporanoïde et sympathiquement anecdotique– on finit néanmoins par préférer sa modestie aux derniers Palahniuk (voire, scandale, au Hype Danielewskien), ne serait-ce que pour donner un coup de chapeau au travail de Chiasmus, éditeur rare et précieux.

I'M BACK

2007-10-04T10:40:00.000-07:00

De retour, enfin. Peut-être aurez-vous du mal à me croire mais je suis parti début juillet sur un beau Paquebot blanc affrété par une étrange compagnie promettant monts et merveilles – en particulier un jeu de novo-loto auquel, alors que nous voguions au milieu des mers du sud, j’ai lamentablement fini bon dernier, en conséquence de quoi j’ai du renoncer à deux de mes organes, les échanger plutôt, contre deux nouveaux aux fonctions inédites, que j’ai « choisi » les yeux bandés dans la piscine ou surnageaient de multiples amas glaireux calamaresques, gluants, spongieux et souvent grotesques, et que l’on m’implantait au moment où le bateau a fait naufrage près d’une île inconnue de toutes les cartes, univers désertique et quasi lunaire peuplé seulement de quelques indigènes dont la mémoire collective, chose étrange, était, à mon arrivée quasi semblable à la page 93 d’Ou finira le fleuve d’Angelo Rinaldi, et qui, curieusement, peut-être grâce à ces deux organes nouveaux que, je l’avoue, je ne maîtrise pas encore tout à fait complètement, ressemblait davantage, lors de mon départ sur le dos d’un fœtus diplodocuso-flaubertien, à la troisième ligne de l’édition anglais de 1922 parue chez Constable and Company Ltd. de Pierre ou les ambiguïtés d’Herman Melville. Le retour ne fut pas sans encombre, mais je suis heureux de me retrouver parmi vous ce soir.

Pugnax.

PYNCHON AU CARRE

2007-07-07T07:46:00.000-07:00

La fusée postale (Roberti, 1935)....vente à la criée d'un lot arc en-ciel?

MODERATION

2007-07-03T13:44:00.003-07:00

"IL BELIEVE IN ALL THINGS IN MODERATION - INCLUDING MODERATION" KEITH RICHARDS

ZEROVILLE (Steve Erickson)

2007-07-03T11:53:00.000-07:00

1.
On Vikar’s shaved head is tattooed the right and left lobes of his brain. One lobe is occupied by an extreme close-up of Elizabeth Taylor and the other by Montgomery Clift, their faces barely apart, lips barely apart, in each other’s arms on a terrace, the two most beautiful people in the history of the movies, she the female version of him, and he the male version of her.

2.
This is the summer of 1969, two days after Vikar’s twenty-fourth birthday, when everyone’s hair is long and no one shaves his head unless he’s a Buddhist monk, and no one has tattoos unless he’s a biker or in a circus.
He’s been in Los Angeles an hour. He’s just gotten off a six-day bus trip from Philadelphia, riding day and night, and eating a French dip sandwich at Philippe’s a few blocks up from Olvera Street, the oldest road in the city.

3.
There in Philippe’s, a hippie nods at Vikar’s head and says, “Dig it, man. My favorite movie.”
Vikar nods. “I believe it’s a very good movie.”
“Love that scene at the end, man. There at the Planetarium.”
Vikar stands and in one motion brings the food tray flying up, roast beef and au jus spraying the restaurant —
— and brings the tray crashing down on the blasphemer across the table from him. He manages to catch the napkin floating down like a parachute, in time to wipe his mouth.
Oh, mother, he thinks. “A Place in the Sun, George Stevens,” he says to the fallen man, pointing at his own head, “NOT Rebel Without a Cause,” and strides out.

4.
Tattooed under Vikar’s left eye is a red teardrop.

5.
Is it possible he’s traveled three thousand miles to the Movie Capital of the World only to find people who don’t know the difference between Montgomery Clift and James Dean, who don’t know the difference between Elizabeth Taylor and Natalie Wood? A few blocks north of Philippe’s, the city starts to run out and Vikar turns back. He asks a girl with straight blond hair in a diaphanous granny dress where Hollywood is. Soon he notices that all the girls in Los Angeles have straight blond hair and diaphanous granny dresses.

6.
She gives him a ride, staring at his head. She seems odd to him; he wants her to watch the road. I believe perhaps she’s been taking illicit narcotics, he thinks to himself.
“Uh,” she finally starts to say, and he can see it right there in her eyes: James Dean, Natalie Wood . . . what will he do? She’s driving and, besides, she’s a girl. You can’t smash a girl over the head with a food tray.
“Montgomery Clift,” he heads off her blunder, “Elizabeth Taylor.”
“Elizabeth Taylor,” she nods. “I’ve heard of her . . .” pondering it a moment. “Far out.”
He realizes she has no idea who Montgomery Clift is. “You can let me off here,” he says, and she drops him where Sunset and Hollywood boulevards fork, at a small theater —

7.
— where he goes to the movies.
A silent European film from the late Twenties, it’s the worst print Vikar has seen — less a movie than a patchwork of celluloid — but he’s spellbound. In the late Middle Ages a young woman, identified in the credits only as “Mlle Falconetti,” is interrogated and hounded by a room of monks. The woman doesn’t give a performance, as such; Vikar has never seen acting that seemed less to be acting. It’s more an inhabitation. The movie is shot completely in close-ups, including the unbearable ending, when the young woman is burned at the stake.

DAVID MARKSON

2007-06-27T05:50:00.000-07:00

En fouinant sur le web.....Magnifique couverture pour un Lot 49 qui semble se relooker avec succès.

"L'auteur de ce livre envisage d’arrêter d’écrire. Las du manège romanesque et de ses vains artifices, il accumule alors anecdotes, citations et autres « curiosités culturelles » sur les artistes de tous les pays et de tous les temps, compilant les causes de décès, soulignant les ironies de la postérité, signalant des hasards surprenants… Peu à peu, certains motifs émergent de cette litanie terrifiante, tels que la vanité de l'art ou l'absurdité de la mort, tandis que l'hypocondriaque « Écrivain » s'efforce de donner un sens à son refus de jouer le jeu littéraire.

Joute verbale entre le sublime et le ridicule, florilège piégé autant que monologue intérieur, Arrêtez d'écrire questionne notre culture, notre mémoire, et finit par évoquer un énigmatique jeu de l'oie où le lecteur, sans cesse déstabilisé, ne peut s'empêcher de relancer à son tour les dés pipés de la lecture."

ENTER,NO

2007-06-20T14:10:00.000-07:00

enter no(silence is the blood whose flesh
is singing)silence:but unsinging. In
spectral such hugest how hush,one

dead leaf stirring makes a crash

-far away(as far as alive)lies
april;and i breathe-move-and-seem some
perpetually roaming whylessness-

autumn has gone:will winter never come?

o come,terrible anonymity;enfold
phantom me with the murdering minus of cold
-open this ghost with millionary knives of wind-
scatter his nothing all over what angry skies and

gently
(very whiteness:absolute peace,
never imaginable mystery)
descend

EE Cummings

Mais QUE FOUTENT LES EDITEURS (Part 7)

2007-06-20T14:05:00.000-07:00

De retour de Londres, Cartwright est victime d’une tentative d’assassinat.
Quelques jours plus tôt, l’appartement de son ami Di Gorro a été cambriolé, la pellicule du documentaire que Cartwright et lui ont tourné quelques années plus tôt exposé à la lumière, détruit.
Qui en veut à Cartwright ? Qui peut être menacé par le contenu du film ?
Il s’agissait avec celui-ci de donner la parole à des révolutionnaires, des terroristes, des groupes radicaux, des tenants du complexe militaro industriels et autres cultes ésotériques – voyage dans la contre-culture, la folie technologique et la contestation violente, de Londres à Chartres, en passant par Bastia et Stonehenge, sans ligne narrative – images brutes ouvertes à la libre interprétation de chacun.
Cartwright fait retour sur le film, à partir du journal de tournage. Les occurrences se multiplient, les pistes se recoupent, il se retrouve bientôt au milieu d’un réseau aux mailles multiples.
Qui se cache vraiment derrière Outer Films, la société qui a produit le film ? Qui a engagé cette seconde équipe, qui tournait en même temps que Cartwright et Di Gorro ? Un deuxième film, serait venu doubler le leur – pour quelle raison ? Et si un autre montage révélait une autre vision des choses ? A-t-on volontairement tenu Cartwright à l’écart des implications réelles du film ?
Et les proches de Cartwright ne sont-ils pas partie du complot ? Si plus encore que le film, c’était sa famille que l’on cherchait à détruire ? Claire, sa nièce, employée par Outer Films, Monty Graf, le petit ami de celle-ci, la mystérieuse Jane Aut, sœur de Monty, et épouse de Phil Aut, propriétaire de Outer Films. Et Reid, le fiancé de Jenny, la fille de Cartwright – sa propre femme : tous semblent en savoir plus sur le film qu’ils ne veulent bien le dire.
A moins qu’ils ne fassent tous qu’interpréter le film en fonction de leurs intérêts personnels, de leurs structures psychiques ? Chaque rencontre que fait Cartwright semble en effet ouvrir à une signification nouvelle de son film – qui, finalement, semble n’exister que dans un espace indéfini entre son interlocuteur et lui, avec un sens différent à chaque fois (Conception Powersienne en diable !)
Cartwright arrivera-t-il au cœur du mensonge ? Et pour trouver quoi ? Le véritable objet du film n’était-il pas la manipulation ? Cartwright n’est-il alors qu’une marionnette – et qui tire les ficelles ?

Les informations se coupent, se recoupent, les connexions se multiplient, les interprétations se chevauchent à l’infini, au gré de courants contraires. Expérience de la prolifération de sens. Plus Cartwright recueille d’informations, plus le bruit augmente, moins son idée du tout est claire. Jusqu’au moment où enfin il change de perspective et se met en quête non plus d’informations mais de relations, se plaçant ainsi au centre d’un réseau, puis d’un ensemble de réseaux, dans lequel la vérité, le sens du Réel et du Vrai s’estompent, pour ne laisser comme seule issue que la recension, le catalogage, la topographie d’un monde ou le référent a sombré. Plus de clarification possible dans un monde ou la donnée a fait place au symptôme – place à la seule perception et à la mesure. Trouver sa place au centre d’un réseau, d’une multitudes de systèmes. Prise de conscience de n’être pas au centre, mais un centre parmi une multitude. L’homme comme laboratoire de fiction, appréhension instable du réel, nébuleuse du système nerveux, le langage comme interface imparfaite : multiplication des interprétations, des ramifications, des appréhensions, des réseaux du possible. Et si le monde échappait à toute prise, même subjective ?

« Les évènements de LC ne sont pas linéaires ; ce sont des collections de dispersions en direction de ce que vous pourriez appeler désordre, ou des transitions provisoires, des noeuds ou des points magnétiques ou tout ce rassemble. Transcender la métaphore et aller vers l'homologie, voilà mon propos. » Joseph McElroy

Fiction neuronale par excellence, Lookout Cartridge, est le frère de sang de Gravity, paru la même année. Tirons un seul des fils de ce chef d’œuvre absolu, dont l’absence ici tient du scandale, la perte de la contre-culture dès le début des années 70, et le nouvel environnement technologique. McElroy écrit – et prends la mesure à ce moment précis, tournant crucial, de ce qui est en train d’arriver sous ses yeux. Plus que la destruction d'un film, c'est de la destruction de l'idéalisme dont il s'agit. Le changement historique, qui avec l’avènement des médias finit de bouleverser l’idée d’une Vérité ultime derrière les apparences. Plus que le film, c'est l'espoir de cette vérité qui est détruit. Conséquence immédiate, au cœur même du roman, l’impossibilité qu’il y a désormais à traiter les évènements, les faits, les existences mêmes en dehors d’une technique (écrite ou non) qui par nature déforme en ajoutant du sens. L’impossibilité d’une neutralité.

Hormis le fait de cacher au public français cette vérité cruelle – que DeLillo est un nain austère – impossible de savoir pourquoi Lookout, comme l’ensemble des œuvres de McElroy, n’a jamais franchi l’atlantique. Vous me direz qu’il a bien fallut vingt ans à Powers avant de nous arriver. Si, pourtant, messieurs les éditeurs, il devait n’y en avoir qu’un….

CREAMY

2007-06-20T07:10:00.000-07:00

THE INFORMATION HIGHWAY

Before long someone does settle in across the table, with a pasta salad and a peach melba. The woman wipes her spoon and fork with a napkin that she puts in her pocket, and then unfolds another for her lap, tucking the corners under so it makes a hexagon. She smiles at Adeline. The metal braces in her mouth are disturbing, like visual static. Metal braces on older faces make Adeline uneasy because her mom never had money for an orthodontist when she was young, and she grew up thinking her mouth needed improving. Now that she has the money, she doesn't want to bother; but now, seeing this woman makes her run her tongue across her teeth.

"I'm Sybil from accounting. I don't think I've seen you in here before. Are you from customer service?"

"No. I'm a programmer. My name is Dolores," says Adeline.

"I thought it was just customer service and accounting in here from one to two. Aren't your people supposed to be eleven to twelve?"

A woman who knows the rules. Adeline likes that, "They made an exception today, because of my problem."

"Pleased to meet you, Dolores." She sucks down a few swirls of rotini. "Which problem is yours?"

"My boyfriend."

"Oh, boyfriend problem."

"Yeah, that one." Adeline swallows a spoonful of chowder, and then starts to speak. "We've been living together more than three years. He's a great guy, a little old-fashioned, a writer; well, not really a writer. He's a novelist. I actually love him a lot. He's sensitive and he's loyal. I don't know. Sometimes we take separate vacations, but we're usually together. Sex is good. It lasts forever." Adeline suddenly feels in her belly she is going to tell too much too fast, but she can't stop herself. "He knows things. Like the history of the forklift, and how it changed warehousing. Sometimes he tells me that. That's good. Isn't that good? He was a forklift operator for years, before he changed his name from Ralph to Roger and became a novelist. We always get along great, until this weekend, and we didn't even argue." Sybil is expressionless. The recessed lighting glints off her braces as she slowly eats. "But I'll tell you, he was doing something to me; I mean, down there, like he does. Usually I like it, but this is going on too long, and I pull on his ponytail to see if I can get him to stop, and something very weird happens." Adeline waits for Sybil to ask what, but her silence continues. "I pull on his ponytail and his head comes off."

The pause is heavy, a moment like a balloon that can't shed its ballast. Nothing rises. Nothing from Sybil. Sweet Roger, Adeline thinks. She wants to say, "O woe is me. Oy yoy yoy yoy yoy!" Sybil remains expressionless, and Adeline feels the silence packed with monotony. Tears heat her eyes. A fleck of pasta is caught on Sybil's braces.

Sybil asks, "What is his social security number, please?"

"I don't know, Sybil. Right now I feel like I'm out here, you know, on the edge of nature, with all the smaller shadows. Shadow of the inch. Spoonshadow. The wild minkshadow. Wee shadows. Of a comma. Shadow of the tampon. But I just held his head up and it was still talking. That's impossible. Wrong! But he was talking. Oy yoy yoy yoy yoy!"

"What is his middle initial? His daytime phone number or a number where he can be reached, like a cell phone or fax number?"

"And then his body was walking around with a big, you know? Everything going into the deeps. Down the well. Shadow of the chestnut. Shadow of moth. Pillshadow." Adeline was earnest, but also enjoyed the words she was starting to talk. She could be the queen of shadows. Or King Shadeline. "It was a big erection. You know, shadow of a tiptoe. Dropshadow. Shadow breathshadow."

"Has he done business with D-M before?"

"I need to find something out. What does the red mean? What happens in the blue?" Adeline brushes a tear from her cheek. "And then when I was working, I started seeing it and hearing him."

" Is this a private or a corporate account? Is there an 8oo number? To what address will we send the statement?"

Adeline sees now that the employee is looking into her face as if it was a monitor, and she is waiting for the responses to come up. There is no satisfaction here for Adeline.

(...) Suddenly, rather like a mudball some kid splats against a window, she is hit by the recognition that she has forgotten how many letters there are in the alphabet. She thinks it's an even number -- twenty-two, or twenty-six, or twenty-four. It's in the twenties. Maybe twenty-eight. Or maybe she's wrong, and it's an odd number after all -- twenty-five or twenty-seven. Maybe that's wrong and it reaches the thirties. She's quite sure it's not in the teens. That's too few.

She'll recite the whole thing, she decides, and count them each by one; so, she leans her head back against the car and starts from the beginning. "A B C D..." She gets pretty far, all the way to K, before she has doubts. She sniffs the air. Still something familiar. She isn't so sure about the J. Maybe she put it in too early. It comes after O, before T. O J T P; then she can't remember if N comes first, or M. At least she knows they come together in the sequence, she's pretty sure. M N L U R? N M W...? M O N U R Y...? N U M I N O...? numino? minemony? No. Not two N's. She pushes ahead with it, and knows it's coming to the end when she hits L U W Y Z V X. She's satisfied. X at the end satisfies Adeline.

Gracie goes to schooner school

2007-06-17T14:18:00.000-07:00

Throughout my so-called career (I'm more inclined to think of it as a "careen"), my goal (seldom articulated, even to myself) has been to twine ideas and images into big subversive pretzels of life, death and goofiness on the chance that they might help keep the world lively and give it the flexibility to endure. The degree to which I've been successful I suppose only history can judge, provided history is not too preoccupied watching digital video to pay any notice to wood-pulp junkies like me. In any case, it doesn't matter much because after nearly 40 years of pursuing phantasmagorical novels down shadowy hallways, I've recently aimed my cognitive flashlight at an entirely different corner of the crumbling castle of literature.
Specifically, I've decided to write a children's book. A children's book about beer.

I got the idea from a cartoon in The New Yorker. Don't sneer, ye purists, ye holders of lofty ideals. Marcel Proust, around 1913, took one glance at a cookie and was inspired to pen a 900-page tome that some experts rank high among the greatest novels ever written (and that despite the fact that the number of Americans who've actually read "Remembrance of Things Past" cover to cover would likely fit inside the cookie oven at any commercial bakery). When it comes to inspiration, a witty drawing has got to be as trustworthy as baked goods, unless, of course, one happens to have the munchies.

Anyway, the New Yorker cartoon depicts two men sitting several stools apart in a bar. One of the men wears a conservative business suit and a no-nonsense expression. The other is shabbily dressed, unshaven, and looks as if he makes a habit of lingering too long at the tap: in other words, your typical writer. In the caption, the businessman is saying to the sad-sack scribe, "I doubt that a children's book about beer would sell."

Now, most readers would simply chuckle or smile at this little joke, turn the page and forget about it. Not I, I'm afraid. For better or for worse, I took it as a challenge.

Let me emphasize that my kiddie brewski opus is not intended as satire with which to amuse cynical adults. Neither is it to be a cautionary tale designed to warn the young away from the perils of irresponsible suds surfing. On the other hand, it certainly isn't meant to entice kids to take up drinking at an earlier age than most will anyway: kindergarten keggers are probably not in society's best interest. Such an approach would not only be unconscionable but as the cartoon businessman predicts, it likely wouldn't sell.

No, my purpose is to enlighten, to decipher for curious children another of the adult world's perplexing mysteries (knowing that most parents talk to their offspring about the ubiquitous presence of beer in our culture with no more frequency or lucidity than they address the subject of sex). And, obviously, I'm also out to make the children's best-seller list if not actually win the Newbery Medal.

Okay, then, without further ado (although I'm rather fond of ado), here's how my book begins.

***

Have you ever wondered why your daddy likes beer so much? Have you wondered, before you fall asleep at night, why he sometimes acts kind of "funny" after he's been drinking beer? Maybe you've even wondered where beer comes from, because you're pretty sure it isn't from a cow. Well, Gracie Perkle wondered those same things.

"Mommy," Gracie asked one afternoon, "what's that stuff Daddy drinks?"

"You mean coffee, sweetheart?"

"Not coffee. Ick! That other stuff that's yellow and looks like pee-pee."

"Gracie!"

"You say pee-pee."

"Well, when I'm talking about potty time I might. But I don't say it about somebody's beverage."

Gracie giggled. Her mother, who was busy at the ironing board, suggested without looking up, "I believe, dear, you're talking about beer."

"Oh!" squealed Gracie. "That's right. Beer. That stuff that's always on TV." She deepened her voice. " 'Better tasting!' 'Less filling!' "Better tasting!' 'Less filling!' " She giggled again. "Is it kinda like Pepsi for silly old men?"

Mrs. Perkle smiled, but it was such a weak, wimpy smile a kitten could have knocked it halfway to Milwaukee. She paused in her ironing to stare out of the laundry room window. The clouds themselves looked like a big pile of dirty laundry. That was not unusual because, you see, the Perkle family lived in Seattle.

Do you know about drizzle, that thin, soft rain that could be mistaken for a mean case of witch measles? Seattle is the world headquarters of drizzle, and in autumn it leaves a damp gray rash on everything, as though the city was a baby that had been left too long in a wet diaper and then rolled in newspaper. When there is also a biting wind, as there was this day, Seattle people sometimes feel like they're trapped in a bad Chinese restaurant; one of those drafty, cheaply lit places where the waiters are gruff, the noodles soggy, the walls a little too green, and although there's a mysterious poem inside every fortune cookie, tea is invariably spilt on your best sweater. Mrs. Perkle must have been feeling that way, for she sighed at the limp pork dumplings (or were they wadded Pampers?) in the sky and said to Gracie, "If you want to know about beer you should go ask your father."

Never mind that she was wearing fluffy fuzzy bunny slippers, Gracie still tiptoed into the den. Her daddy was watching football on their new flat plasma screen, and if the University of Washington was losing again, he'd be in a grumpy mood. Uh-oh. She overheard a naughty word. UW was losing. Gracie was relieved, however, when she noticed that Uncle Moe had dropped by to watch the game and, of course, to mooch a few beers from her dad.

Uncle Moe didn't take sports very seriously. He called himself a philosopher, if you know what that is. He'd graduated from about a dozen colleges, seldom ever seemed to work, and had traveled just about every place a person could go without getting his head chopped off. Mrs. Perkle said he was a "nut job," but Gracie liked him. It didn't bother her that he had a face like a sinkful of last night's dinner dishes or that his mustache resembled a dead sparrow.

Timidly, Gracie tapped Mr. Perkle on the elbow. Her voice was shy and squeaky when she asked, "Daddy, can I please taste your beer?"

"No way," her father snorted over his shoulder. His eyes never left the screen. "Beer's for grown-ups."

Gracie turned toward Uncle Moe, who grinned and beckoned her over, as she had suspected he might. Uncle Moe extended his can -- and just like that, behind her daddy's back, little Gracie Perkle took her first sip of beer.

"Ick!" She made a face. "It's bitter."

"The better to quench your thirst, my dear."

"What makes it bitter, Uncle Moe?"

"Well, it's made from hops."

Gracie made another face. "You mean them jumpy bugs that ...?"

"No, honeybun, beer isn't extracted from grasshoppers. Nor hop toads, either. A hop is some funky vegetable that even vegans won't eat. Farmers dry the flowers of this plant and call them 'hops.' I should mention that only the female hop plants are used in making beer, which may be why men are so attracted to it. It's a mating instinct."

"Moe!"

The uncle ignored Gracie's father. "In any event," he went on, "when brewers combine hops with yeast and grain and water, and allow the mixture to ferment -- to rot -- it magically produces an elixir so gassy with blue-collar cheer, so regal with glints of gold, so titillating with potential mischief, so triumphantly refreshing, that it seizes the soul and thrusts it toward that ethereal plateau where, to paraphrase Baudelaire, all human whimsies float and merge."

"Don't be talking that crap to her. She's five years old."

"Almost six," chimed Gracie.

"In Italy and France, a child Gracie's age could walk into an establishment, order a beer and be served."

"Yeah, well those people are crazy."

"Perhaps so -- but there's far fewer alcohol problems in their countries than in safe and sane America."

Mr. Perkle muttered something vague before focusing his frown on UW's latest booboo. Uncle Moe removed another beer from the cooler, holding it up for Gracie to admire. "Beer was invented by the ancient Egyptians," he said.

"The ones who made the mummies?"

"Exactly, although I don't believe there's any connection. At least I hope not. The point is, the Egyptians could have invented lemonade -- but they chose to invent beer instead."

While Gracie thought this over, Uncle Moe pulled the metal tab on the top of his beer can. There was a snap, followed by a spritzy hiss and a small discharge of foam. Uncle Moe took a long drink, wiped foam from his tragic mustache, and said, "Speaking of inventions, did you know that the tin can was invented in 1811, but can openers weren't invented until 1855? It's a fact. During the 44 years in between, hungry citizens had to access their pork 'n' beans with a hammer and chisel. They were pretty lucky, don't you think, that in those days beer didn't come in cans?"

At that moment there was a time out on the football field and Mr. Perkle got up to go to the bathroom. You yourself may have noticed that beer causes big strong men to piddle like puppies.

"Have you heard of Julia Child, the famous cook? When she moved to Paris in 1948, she brought along a case of American beer. Her French maid had never seen beer in cans before, and she tried to flush the empties down the toilet. Naturally, it overflowed. Took a plumber nearly three days to unclog the pipes."

Gracie laughed. She looked at the empty cans lying around the den, thinking that flushing them down the toilet might be a funny trick to play on her daddy. Or would it? She'd have to think about it some more.

Once again, Uncle Moe passed his beer to Gracie. She hesitated, but being an adventurous little girl, she eventually took another swallow. Although she didn't say "ick," it didn't taste any better than the first time.

"Your pediatrician isn't likely to mention this -- unless he's Irish, of course -- but beer does have some nutritional value. The Chinese word for beer means 'liquid bread.' " Uncle Moe paused to drink. "Even the most wretched macrobrew contains a six pack of vitamins: thiamine, riboflavin, pantothenic acid, pyridoxine, biotin and ... oh yes, cyanocobalamin. Can you say cyanocobalamin?"

"Cyno ... cyho ... cyoballyman ... cy ..."

"Okay, close enough. Presumably, they're each a member of the vitamin B family but precisely what health benefits those little jawbreakers provide I haven't a clue."

Gracie didn't care what benefits they provided. As far as she was concerned, vitamins were even ickier than beer.

"I'll tell you what," said Uncle Moe, almost in a whisper. "On Monday, we'll inform your mother that I'm taking you to Woodland Park. Instead, we'll secretly ride the bus out to the Red Hook brewery. We'll go on their tour and you can see for yourself exactly how beer is made. Most educational, my dear, most educational. After the tour, I'll sneak you into the taproom and we'll watch the bartender water the monkeys. It's better than the zoo."

Practically burping with excitement (or was it the beer?), Gracie skipped out of the den. Now she had something to look forward to.

***

All right, that's as far as I've gotten. Over the next several weeks I'll continue to scribble, hopeful that when I'm finished I shall have furnished exhaustive, authoritative, entertaining, and even practical answers to our youngsters' often unspoken yet ceaseless puzzling over that lustrous liquid brush with which so many millions daily fresco their tonsils.

Beer, however, will not be my sole focus. As in my novels, I'll attempt to lay down an underlying stratum of serious philosophical speculation. The message I wish to impart to the children goes something like this:

The world is a wonderfully weird place, consensual reality is significantly flawed, no institution can be trusted, certainty is a mirage, security a delusion, and the tyranny of the dull mind forever threatens -- but our lives are not as limited as we think they are, all things are possible, laughter is holier than piety, freedom is sweeter than fame, and in the end it's love and love alone that really matters.

What about it? Do you think it will sell?

ACID TEST

2007-06-17T11:24:00.000-07:00

"Quelques 40 ans après sa publication, le roman hallucinatoire de Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, sera adapté pour le cinéma et le réalisateur Gus Van Sant (Elephant, Paranoïd Park) devrait le diriger d'après un scénario de Lance Black."

Pas un scoop mais on l'attend de pied ferme. En espérant que l'adaptation sera meilleure que celle des cow girls. Croisons le pouce.

(Coup de Pouce, puisqu'on y est, à Milton Glaser, le graphiste responsable de la superbe couverture du Tom Wolfe. Et de l'affiche mythique de Dylan 67!)

UNE PENSEE AMICALE

2007-06-12T14:18:00.000-07:00

Co-Tangent Press. Vollmann, William T. Book of Candles. Sacramento, CA: Co-Tangent Press, 2006. $10,000

Artist’s book, one of 10 copies, each signed by the author / artist, William T. Vollmann on a page of the text as well as in the box housing the book. Page size: 19 inches x 16 inches; 75pp; (2pp. per folio sheet, 32 sheets in all + 2 unnumbered double-page spreads). The text is a suite of eight religious and blasphemous love-poems to prostitutes and was composed in the Philippines in 1995 and relief-printed on Rives de Lin paper by the author over a period of years (1997-2003). The text blocks were photo-etched magnesium plates as were some of the illustrations. Other illustrations were woodcuts done in Thailand and Cambodia on Chinese ulo wood. These were colored a la poupee and further hand colored with watercolors and acrylics. Housed in a sailcloth-covered basswood clamshell box which the artist / author has painted, collaged with hand-painted woodblock prints, and suitably adorned with gewgaws. The outside dimensions of the box are 31 inches high x 24 inches wide x 2.5 inches deep. The woodcut image on the underside of each box is different. Four Japanese “doughnut hold” coins have been screwed in to the underside of the box to comprise protective feet. Inside each box, a narrow channel, collaged with painted paper, runs around three edges, leaving the spine side open. Within this are set two wooden corner blocks mounted with selenium-splotched flower-engraved brass plates, a strip of painted walnut engraved with a print of a female nude, two engraved beeswax candles on engraved brass supports wrapped round with brass wire. Even the brass screws of these assemblies are engraved and rubbed with oil-based ink. On the inside of the spine are one engraved and inked aluminum plate and one engraved and inked brass plate which is signed and numbered. This is certainly the most labor-intensive project undertaken so far by William T. Vollmann’s Co-Tangent Press. (9851)

INDISCRETIONS

2007-06-12T14:06:00.000-07:00

Paul Auster, Dans le scriptorium : 65 000 ex
Regis Jauffret, Microfictions : 32 000 ex
Cormac McCarthy : Non, ce pays n’est pas pour le vieil homme : 21 000 ex
Roberto Bolano, Les détectives sauvages : 9300 ex
Antoine Bello, Les falsificateurs : 9000 ex
Percival Everett, Blessés : 8700 ex
Martin Amis, Chien Jaune : 8500 ex
William Gass, Le Tunnel : 7200 ex
Celine Minard, Le dernier monde : 7200 ex
Olivier Cadiot, Un Nid pour quoi faire : 6000 ex
Enrique Vila-Matas, Docteur Pasavento : 5700 ex
J G Ballard, Que notre règne arrive : 4000 ex
Steven Milhauser, Le roi dans les arbres : 2050 ex
David Mitchell, Cartographie des nuages : 1200 ex
Brian Evenson, Contagion : 1200 ex
Gilbert Sorrentino, Salmigondis : 1000 ex
Dave Eggers, Pourquoi nous avons faim : 880 ex
Laird Hunt, Indiana Indiana : 700 ex

MAIS QUE FOUTENT LES EDITEURS (Part 6)

2007-06-09T17:19:00.000-07:00

THE LOONY, Christopher Wunderlee.
Albert Locner est astrophysicien. Albert Locner a des hommes à ses trousses. Albert Locner a des secrets. Albert Locner aurait-il aidé le gouvernement américain a simuler l'aterrisage sur la Lune d'Apollo? Serait-il responsable de l'assassinat de JFK? Pynchonien dans les idées, dans la structure, dans la langue même ce coup de chapeau à Gravity's Rainbow aurait pu être rien moins que sympathique sans la langue, remarquable, de Christopher Wunderlee, qui catapulte The Loony bien au-delà du simple hommage. Disons que Gravity's Rainbow est la première escale de cet Apollo, promis à de biens jolis voyages. Christopher Wunderlee est poète, The Loony (une centaine de pages) est son premier roman. Et Wikipedia est, cette fois, d'une justesse rare :
"In 2005, the Loony appeared, the story of an estranged scientist’s supposed role in faking the Project Apollo moon missions in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Again, the title of the book mirrors the subject matter, as the protagonist appears to be either suffering from ‘lunacy’ or he is the victim of an elaborate conspiracy to keep it secret that the Apollo missions were faked. The main characters are Albert Locner, an astrophysicist who becomes embroiled in the plot. An apparitional love interest named Harris who is allegedly a military spy who uses sex to blackmail prominent enemies of the state and/or another victim of the plot. And, “the Colonel”, who is either the military officer in charge of Lochner’s case or a psychiatrist. It has been suggested that they are postmodern counterparts to Dante, Beatrice and the Devil, or Don Quixote, Dulcinea, and the narrator. The story, using experimental narration, follows Albert Lochner’s life from conception to his downfall, when he joins the team to fake the lunar landings. After they accomplish their goal and fool the world, Lochner is blackmailed when Harris is supposedly abducted. In order to save her, he must agree to a number of unspecified demands, one of which is that he spends several years being driven randomly around the U.S. by two agents, why is never explained. He later escapes to find Harris, in attempt to discover whether she was truly a victim or an accomplice in the conspiracy. The plot is infused with unique devices, including the repetitive use of lines from David Bowie’s Space Oddity song, “out-of-room-voices” who chime in to offer commentary or break into song (it has been suggested that these ‘voices’ are actually patients at a psychiatric ward and that the entire or at least some part of the book takes place there) and “file footage”, or scenes from movies, television shows, propaganda films, and other media (again, potentially simply what is playing on the television at the hospital). These plot devices combine with the unique, loquacious prose style to mirror a state of lunacy, whether this is because the protagonist is indeed mentally ill or because of the situation he finds himself in is the big unanswered question of the novella. Because of its symbolic parallels, stylistic innovations, and distinctive narrative style, The Loony is considered a groundbreaking work of fiction. Comparisons of the novella were made to Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Joseph Heller, and Vladimir Nabokov."

JEU DE PISTE

2007-06-08T14:24:00.000-07:00

Allez un simple indice : "Wendell Apogee" pour ceux qu'intéresserait ce premier roman qui sort en août et semble déjà faire grimper aux rideaux ses premiers lecteurs. On évoque un mix Pynchon Matt Ruff repeint par Dali. Waow. Creamy en diable?

SALUBRITE PUBLIQUE

2007-06-08T13:54:00.000-07:00

IF WE ACCEPT THE NOTION THAT USING POWER AGAINST THE powerless is wrong, a clear enough set of corollaries begins to emerge. We become able to distinguish, as populations (thought not always their rulers) have usually been able to do, between outlaws and evil-doers, between outlawry and sin. Not much analysis is needed, because it is something we can sense in all its dead-serious immediacy. "But all they are are bandits," the rulers whine indignantly, "motivated only by greed." Sure. Except that, having long known the difference between theft and restoration, we understand the terms of the deal whereby outlaws, as agents of the poor, being more skilled and knowledgeable in the arts of karmic readjustment, may charge no worse that an agent's fee, small enough too be acceptable to their clients, ample enough to cover the risks they have to take, and we always end up loving these folks, we cheer for Rob Roy, Jesse James, John Dillinger, at a level of passion usually reserved for sports affiliation.
Stone Junction is an outlaw epic for our own late era of corrupted romance and defective honor, with its own set of sleazy usurpers and Jacobitoid persistences -- though the reader who's expecting eighties nostalgia or, have mercy, some even earlier-type romp through the pleasures of drugs, sex and rock and roll, should be warned that lurking herein, representing the bleaker interests of that consensus ever throbbing along despite and apart from all the fun and pleased to call itself "Reality," are to be found some mighty evil contract personnel, who produce some disagreeably mortal plot developments. One of the book's manifold graces is its author's choice never to dance away into wishful gobbledygook, remaining, rather, conscientiously grounded in our world as given, where, as Pam Tilli, in a slightly different context, reminds us, Destiny turns on a dime.
The other day in the street I heard a policeman in a police car, requesting over his loudspeaker that a civilian car blocking his way move aside and let him past, all the while addressing the drive of the car personally, by name. I was amazed at this, though people I tried to share it with only shrugged, assuming that of course the driver's name (along with height, weight and date of birth) had been obtained from the Motor Vehicle Department via satellite, as soon as the offending car's license number had been tapped into the terminal -- so what?
Stone Junction was first published in 1989, toward the end of an era still innocent, in its way, of the cyberworld just ahead about to exponentially explode upon it. To be sure, there were already plenty of computers around then, but they were not quite so connected together as they were shortly to become. Data available these days to anybody were accessible then only to the Authorized, who didn't always know what they had or what to do with it. There was still room to wiggle -- the Web was primitive country, inhabited only by a few rugged pioneers, half loco and wise to the smallest details of their terrain. Honor prevailed, laws were unwritten, outlaws, as yet undefinable, were few. The question had only begun to arise of how to avoid, or, preferably, escape altogether, the threat, indeed promise, of control without mercy that lay in wait down the comely vistas of freedom that computer-folk were imagining then -- a question we are still asking. Where can you jump in the rig and head for any more -- who's out there to grant us asylum? If we stay put, what is left to us that is not in some way tainted, coopted, and colonized, by the forces of Control, usually digital in nature? Does anybody know the way to William Gibson's "Republic of Desire?" Would they tell if they knew? So forth.
You will notice in Stone Junction, along with its gifts of prophecy, a consistent celebration of those areas of life that tend to remain cash-propelled and thus mostly beyond the reach of the digital. It may be nearly the only example of a consciously analog Novel. Writers since have been obliged to acknowledge and deal with the ubiquitous cyber-realities that come more and more to set, and at quite a finely chopped-up scale too, the terms of our lives, not to mention calling into question the very traditions of a single author and a story that proceeds one piece after another -- a situation Jim Dodge back then must have seen coming down the freeway, because the novel, ever contrarian, keeps its faith in the persistence of at least a niche market -- who knows, maybe even a deep human need -- for modalities of life whose value lies in their having resisted and gone the other was, against the digital storm -- that are likely, therefore, to include pursuits more honorable that otherwise.
One popular method of resistance was always just to keep moving -- seeking, not a place to hide out, secure and fixed, but a state of dynamic ambiguity about where one might be any given moment, along the lines of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Modern digital machines, however, managed quickly enough to focus the blurred ellipsoid of human freedom even more narrowly than Planck's Constant allows.
Equally difficult for those who might wish to proceed through life anonymously and without trace has been the continuing assault against the once-reliable refuge of the cash or non-plastic economy. There was a time not so long ago you could stroll down any major American avenue, collecting anonymous bank checks, get on some post office line, and send amounts in the range "hefty to whopping" anywhere, even overseas, no problem. Now it's down to $750 a pop, and shrinking. All to catch those Drug Dealers of course, nothing to do with the grim, simplex desire for more information, more control, lying at the heart of most exertions of power, whatever governmental or corporate (if that's a distinction you believe in).
You look at Windows 95 blooming on to the screen, and you think, Magic. But those who understand the system down to molecular level, nothing magical remains -- all is revealed as simple repetitive drudgery, what we might even denounce as a squandering of precious operating time, were it not for Technology's discovery of how to tap into velocity situation prevailing down at the smaller scales -- Nnggyyyyow-w-w! like the Interstate down there! -- and leave all the kazillions of brainless petty chores to their speedy new little devices.
Stone Junction's allegiance, however, is to the other kind of magic, the real stuff -- long-practiced, all-out, contrary-to-fact, capital M Magic, not as adventitious spectacle, but as a pursued enterprise, in this very world we're stuck with, continuing to give off readings -- analog indications -- of being abroad and at work, somewhere out in it.
The fatal temptation for a fiction writer who must accept the presence, often a necessity, of magic in his own work, is to solve difficulties of plot, character and -- more often than is generally suspected -- taste, by conveniently flourishing some prop, some ad hoc amulet or drug, that will just take care of each problem as it arises. Fortunately for us here, Jim Dodge, by the terms of his calling, cannot indulge in that particular luxury. Magic is in fact hard and honorable work, and cannot be deployed at whim, not without consequences. A good deal of Daniel Pearce's character growth comes by way of learning the business and earning the powers -- making Stone Junction a sort of magician's Bildungsroman -- in which teachers, more or less unorthodox in their methods, appear to Daniel one by one, each with particular skills to pass along, all linked in an organization known as AMO, the Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws, a proto-Web that tends to connect more by way of pay phones, mail drops and ESP than linked terminals, over overseen by the enigmatic, not quite all-powerful Volta.
Through all this meanwhile runs a second plotline -- a whodunit, in which Daniel must solve the uncompromisingly earthly question of who murdered his mother, Annalee Pearce, in an alleyway in Livermore, California when he was fourteen, complete with multiple suspects, false trails, the identity of the killer not revealed till the final pages. The story traverses a map of some moral intricacy, sure-footed as Chandler, providing twists as elegant as Agatha Christie, as all the while Daniel's education proceeds.
Will Bill Weber teaches meditation, fishing, waiting. Mott Stocker teaches Dope, its production and enjoyment. Ace safecracker Willie Clinton (yep) instructs the boy in how to get past all kinds of locks and alarms, rendering him thus semipermeable to certain protected parts of the world, setting him on his path to total dematerialization. For a while Daniel teams up with poker wizard Bad Bobby Sloane, roving the American highways in search of opportunities to risk capital in ways that cannot be officially controlled, climaxing in a legendary Lo-ball confrontation with the cheerfully louche Guido Caramba, in a literary poker passage as classic as it is funny, and in its appreciative devotion to a game where the moral stakes are so high, ranking up there with comparable parts of Kawabata's The Master of Go.
The shape-shifting genius Jean Bluer teaches Daniel the arts of disguise -- another illicit skill, given it's already forbidden to impersonate policemen, doctors, lawyers, financial advisors, and who knows what all besides, as if someday all varieties of disguise will be statutory offences, including Impersonating an Ordinary Citizen. At last Daniel comes circling back to Volta, by now also one of his prime suspects in Annalee's death, who teaches him the final secret of Invisibility. None of your secular Wellsian tricks with refractive indices and blood pigmentation here, but rather the well-known and time-honored arts of ceasing to be material.
At last Daniel is ready to set off on the metaphysical Quest all these teachers have been preparing him for, which now swiftly unfolds as an elaborate technocaper, with a mysterious and otherworldly six-pound Diamond as its target. Too early in those days for keyboard dramas, emergency downloads, and cyber-fugues to relentless countdowns at the corner of the screen, the technology Daniel goes up against is mostly of analog sort -- optical surveillance, strain-gauge sensor grids and thermostatic alarms -- his nondigital responses to which include nerve gas, plastique, and invisibility.
He takes the Diamond, and then the Diamond takes him. For it turns out to be a gateway to elsewhere, and Daniel's life's tale an account of the incarnation of a god, not the usual sort that ends up bringing aid and comfort to earthly powers, but that favorite of writers, the incorruptible wiseguy known to anthropologists as the Trickster, to working alchemists as Hermes, to card-players everywhere as the Joker. We don't learn this till the end of the story, by which point, knowing Daniel as we've come to, we are free to take it literally as a real transfiguration, or as a metaphor of spiritual enlightenment, or as a description of Daniel's unusually exalted state of mind as he prepares to cross, forever, the stone junction between Above and Below -- by this point, all of these possibilities have become equally true, for we have been along on one of those indispensable literary journeys, taken nearly as far as Daniel -- through it is for him to slip along across the last borderline, into what Wittgenstein once supposed cannot be spoken of, and upon which, as Eliphaz Levi advised us -- after "To know, to will, to dare" as the last and greatest of the rules of Magic -- we must keep silent.

Introduction to Jim Dodge's Stone Junction
-- By Thomas Pynchon, 1997

STEVE TOMASULA : BOOK OF PORTRAITURE

2007-06-08T12:11:00.000-07:00

08:12:02:18:59
Pecker hopping. Bare chest and thighs shiny with sweat. Nothing they hadn’t seen before, thought I__, an Investigator for Family Pharmacy & Foods Inc., trying to make out the face looking at him through the glare of an apartment window across the courtyard, the someone watching him as he jumped rope naked.

He kept up the rhythm while the someone—a woman?—a man with hippie hair?—settled in, watching. As steadily as a camera.

1011 1101 0110 1111 1100 1101 0101 1100 1101 1....—a choreography of bytes....

It was like being in a movie….

Family Pharmacy. Standing before glossy models on the covers of magazines, Q__ felt eyes on her. Instinctively she stashed her meds in her army jacket and looked up—a bowled security mirror collaged her own bowed face with the reflections of a store manager, standing behind the cash register, pretending to work though she could tell he was actually scoping her out; he began diddling with his bowtie—the polka-dot bowtie all Family Pharmacy managers wore—companies as bad as the army about making everyone dress alike so they’d think alike—this stooge looking away as quickly as people always did when she caught them watching her. The Creep.

What kind of movie?

Odd, thought I__., skipping rope in his living room, that he, an Investigator for Family Pharmacy & Foods Inc., a person who knew how surveillance could turn anyone to glass, could be so untroubled....

My Neighbor’s Affair?

Name:_________________

The View Into Apartment 3-G?

It was like being visited by a shade, U__ thought, naked except for matched black panties and bra (Without-a-Trace™). Ghostly shades, she considered, that were everywhere and therefore nowhere even if night by night they made her a little more like them. She shifted her weight from one spiked heel (Armani) to the other, waiting for the photographer to finish adjusting the flood lights shining into her eyes. They would take her picture—she was sure it was her that they were photographing because her body was there—then one of them would come, make her a little more—a little more obscure—and by the time she saw her other self, the self that appeared in catalogs, on packaging, in brochures and the ads she modeled for, she was different: duskier skin, softer silhouette, anime eyes. Different her, yet her.
"Raise the key beam,” Photographer told his Assistant. Or at least she assumed it was Photographer. With the lights glaring in her eyes, the people beyond came to her as disembodied voices, fussing about whatever it was that they worried before they took her picture.
She shifted to the other foot. Odd, how something as tiny as a tired muscle or a paper cut could remind a person that the world was solid and too real all around though you yourself could seem so— What?— Not there? And this is how U__’s story began: wondering how the stone walls of the wine cellar she posed in could have such gravity while most of what made up who she was was lighter than the web of stories and negatives and pixels that modeled her career out of thin air. As Stylist put a wrap around U__’s shoulders to keep the cool, wine-cellar air from goose-pimpling her flesh, U__ took inventory: this morning, her bathroom scale said she weighed one hundred and seven pounds; mail addressed to her was delivered to the apartment she inhabited. And of course her driver’s license listed a name (Organ Donor?—NO!).
But in an age of interlocking subdivisions and identical restaurants, in a world that each year generated 100,000,000 Miracle Slacks™, each of which had to be filled—HELLO! MY NAME IS:_______________—in a country of actuary tables, of ZIP codes, of an endless supply of service manager uniforms (filled out by Service Managers), census forms (filled in by Citizens), personalized mail-order catalogs, identical parking garages and their tiers of look-a-like vans (Forest Green or Goldenrod) bearing vanity plates (2HOT4U) stamped out by some 51 prisons (a form of living to be sure), of Neilson ratings, and Frequent Flier Memberships—an age when the Japanese went through thirteen Prime Ministers in nine years without blinking, when every American City greeted tourists with local versions of the same Sports Heroes, News Teams and other types—Bag-lady, Alderman, Shopper, Cop—that is, for the purposes of a story of her time, did the particulars of name matter?
What was important was that the world at this time required Models, just as five hundred Fortune 500 companies required five hundred CEOs, just as airports required Airplanes, just as Hollywood always required about six Action Heroes, four Teenage Heart Throbs, and one, but no more than one, overweight Funny Guy. Just as most divorces still required at least one Jerk, Top 40 lists required forty Top Songs, best-seller lists required Best Sellers to be best sold and talk shows required Hosts to talk, Guests to talk to, and Viewers to call in; Teachers required Students, History required Revolutions, Economies, Wars and Peace to fill it—and Historians to make it mean. If you light up fluorescent lighting over an expanse of office cubicles, everyone knew, Accountants and Phone Solicitors, Web Designers and Xs and Ys and Zs would soon fill those cubicles, as surely as a crossword puzzle invited Letters or vending machines promised to dispense Product. Thus, if some Photographer set up floodlights, sooner rather than later, a Model would appear to stand in their glare as was U__, dressed in black Lycra, Without-A-Trace™ Panties and Bra (seamless shaping!), shifting limbs heavy with boredom while she waited for him to take his meter readings, adjust his light umbrellas and do whatever it was that photographic apparatus required a Photographer to do.

A movie others were making.

This is stupid, Q__ thought, the store’s Manager’s eyes weighing on her in that old exhausting way as she brought a magazine up to his register. Even though he probably thought she was shoplifting, she kept the meds she’d paid for back in pharmacy hidden in her army jacket because— Because she didn’t want every Tom, Dick & Harry knowing about her meds. Because she didn’t want him to think she was only buying a magazine because—
Because she hated having to ask.
X__ said his Family Pharmacy nametag, the rest of his name hidden by the lapel of his blazer. She placed the magazine—Look—on the counter, fished around in her purse—the Manager’s ratty, piss-holes-in-the-snow eyes unbuttoning her blouse?—

1011 1101 0110 1111 1100 1101 0101 1100 1101 1....—to and fro and up into the card reader of the cash register.

On the monitor below the counter, Queenie Qunt, and other info linked to the credit card X__ had just swiped appeared across a live video of her face. Most customers didn’t notice the decal on the door giving Family Pharmacy permission to videotape them, he knew, but so what? If they weren’t doing anything wrong they had nothing to hide.

APPROVED.

After paying, Q__ stared straight ahead as she asked, “Do you have a public restroom here?”

Store 046616

“Yes.”

...firm melons....

TORSE ARCHAIQUE D'APOLLON

2007-06-04T11:48:00.000-07:00

L'homme du jour, le mystérieux "hwygaustrey", sans nul doute.

Et une spéciale dédicace :

Nous n'aurons jamais vu sa tête légendaire
Aux yeux mûrs comme des fruits
Mais nous voyons son torse encore incandescent
Flamme vacillante pourtant, mais qui
Perdure et brille.

Sans elle d'où viendrait la lumière
Qui suit, éblouissante, la courbure des muscles?
Et comment le sourire issu du fin mouvement des reins
Coulerait-il jusqu'au sexe lourd, à la mi-temps du corps?

Sans elle ce roc se dresserait
Court et difforme à la chute diaphane des épaules;
Il ne scintillerait pas comme une peau de fauve.

Il ne jaillirait pas hors de ses limites
Comme font les étoiles: car il n'y pas de lieu
D'où l'on ne t'aperçoit. Tu dois changer ta vie!

R M Rilke.

La suite se fera ailleurs, autrement.

L'ESPRIT 1968

2007-05-21T08:55:00.000-07:00

Il y d’abord dans l’air la voix de Dylan, It’s alright ma (I’m only Bleeding).

That he not busy being born
Is busy dying.

Ils roulent tranquilles un après-midi de beau temps sur une route de campagne déserte – ca doit être un dimanche puisque Sarko est en bras de chemise. Une chemise verte foncée, unie. Hortefeux est au volant du pick-up – chemisette blanche, chapeau blanc. Derrière eux, suspendues à la vitre arrière du pick-up, deux Winchester. Devant eux, deux motards.

Hortefeux : Regarde-moi ces raclures….
Sarko (décrochant une des Winchester) : Approche toi. On va leurs foutres les boules !

Le Pick Up arrive à la hauteur du deuxième motard. Par la vitre ouverte, Sarko braque la Winchester sur le motard.

Sarko : Tu veux que je te fasse sauter la cervelle ?

Hortefeux ricane. Sarko semble content de lui. La bonne blague.

Là, le motard, impassible, lève la main de son guidon pour présenter un majeur levé à Sarko. Puis repose, tranquillement la main sur le guidon

Sarko : Pourquoi tu ne vas pas te faire couper les cheveux ?

Le coup de fusil. Le motard s’effondre,

Hortefeux : Qu’est ce qui s’est passé ?

Il accélère. Le pick-up passe devant le premier motard, qui stoppe. Fait demi-tour. S’arrête aux côtés de son pote en sang sur le bord de la route.

-Billy ! Bon Dieu…Je vais chercher de l’aide !

Quelques centaines de mètres plus loin, le pick-up continue sa route, tranquillement.

Sarko : Je crois qu’on ferait bien d’y retourner.

Le premier motard enlève son bouson de cuir, en couvre son ami. Au dos du blouson, un drapeau américain. Puis, il remonte sur sa moto et part chercher des secours. Il croise le pick-up qui entre temps a fait demi-tour. Lorsqu’il arrive à sa hauteur, Sarko, le fusil tendu devant le visage de Hortefeux, toujours au volant, fait feu du côté de la fenêtre conducteur. La moto s’envole, perds une roue, atterit dans un champ, prend feu, explose. On ne voit pas le corps du motard, mais la rivière qui serpente le long de la route.

Là, on entends la voix de Roger McGuinn, le leader des Byrds. The ballad of Easy Rider.

The river flows, flows to the sea
Whereever that river goes that's where I want to be
Flow river flow, let your waters wash down
Take me from this road to someother town

All he wanted was just to be free
And that's the way it turned out to be
Flow, river flow, let your waters wash down
Take me from this road to someother town

1973

2007-05-21T08:41:00.000-07:00

Ca commence par quelques pages noires avec des notes de bas de pages, ne renvoyant pas à grand chose, sinon à « l’intrigue » principale du livre à venir – ca continue par des collages, un récit de guerre, un conte de fées, des relevés d’entretiens, des délires typos, etc….c’est The Bonnyclabber de George Chambers, un vieux complice de Sukenik et de Federman – et c’est malheureusement bien oublié (Faut dire que lire ça sous le gouvernement Fillon, ca fait un drôle d’effet – l’impression de venir en combinaison Latex à un congrès UMP). C’est de 1973 (comme La Ballade Sauvage, La dernière corvée, Le Privé, Pat Garrett et Billy Le Kid, L’Epouvantail et La Grande Bouffe) Et c’est le conseil du jour de Pugnax qui, bien abattu par son époque a choisi de demander l’asile politique à la décennie 1965-1975.
« Qu’est-ce que t’en as à branler, Boswo, si j’écris des conneries ? Qui a prétendu que le roman, fallait que ce soit quelque chose de précis ? Ca peut être tout ce que ça veut, un roman : un vaudeville, les infos de six heures, les grognements d’hommes en plein délire qu’enfourchent les démons. » Ishmael Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down.

CURIOSITE

2007-05-10T12:51:00.000-07:00

L'ART DU VIOLON FUNERAIRE....

BIG SAM

2007-05-10T12:41:00.000-07:00

L'excellent Mumpsimus à la plume....En espérant qu'après la triste cessation du toujours impeccable label Désordres de Laurence Viallet (Sa survie aux éditions du Rocher tenait du miracle) un éditeur courageux reprenne le flambeau!

"Dark Reflections is a novel unlike any other Delany novel -- it's probably closest to Atlantis: Three Tales, but it's more straightforward and fictional, and one of the most immediately accessible novels Delany has written in ages. This is not to say it lacks complexity -- it's intellectually rich and structurally impressive, with hardly any moment lacking echoes and reiterations elsewhere in the book.

The story is that of Arnold Hawley, a not-very-successful poet, a black gay man who has lived most of his life in celibacy on the Lower East Side. Delany has, of course, included many black, gay poet characters (not always in that configuration) in his work from the beginning, but this is the first time I can think of that he has devoted so much attention to a character who hardly ever has sex. There are scenes that Delany has depicted before -- scenes of hustlers, scenes of public bathrooms -- but this time they are portrayed through the consciousness of someone who is mostly frightened by them, wary of them, even disgusted by them. (...) Hawley is a sad life, but not one we as readers are put in a position to laugh at or dismiss out of hand, because he is portrayed as possessing dignity -- much as the more socially marginalized characters in Dark Reflections and many of Delany's other novels are portrayed as possessing dignity, making them worthy of empathy.

Dark Reflections is a very literary book -- a book about a life propelled by literary passions more than any others. Names of books and writers populate the pages, and we get a more vivid view of Arnold's reading than of almost anything else. There are descriptions of people and places throughout the book, but they are secondary to the parade of names and titles. At first, this bothered me, but by the end the effect is extraordinary, much like that of a David Markson novel or Caroline Maso's Ava. Here, the technique efficiently builds character, giving us a sense of what Arnold most cares about and a sense of the depth of his reading life, the most vivid life he has.

Coincidence is also important to the novel, for better and worse. The middle section relies on a coincidence that I didn't find convincing, because it is tied to the book's most dramatic and violent moment, and seemed necessary more for narrative convenience than anything else. A less startling coincidence at the end brings some different strands of the book together, and this one I found both convincing and moving. The last pages of Dark Reflections are beautifully paced and evocative, ringing thematic and contextual notes from throughout the book, so that even though Arnold's life is not given any sort of clear resolution, the novel itself is satisfyingly whole and complete.

LECTURES DE SAISON...

2007-05-06T05:31:00.000-07:00

DESERT DES TARTARES

2007-05-06T03:52:00.000-07:00

Un séjour dans les librairies américaines a tout ces derniers temps d’un remake du Désert des tartares mâtiné d’On achève bien les chevaux (Film post-Sarkozien par excellence?). Rien ne vient – ou si peu. Pas une dissonance, pas pas un coup de feu, rien pour troubler le petit concert très comme il faut de l’édition américaine. (Voir la liste des meilleurs livres de ces derniers mois publiée par The Believer, et en ligne) Même les indépendants semblent tirer la langue pour trouver quelque chose d’original, de différent, de novateur. Il y a des jours comme ça. Epuisant. Restent, heureusement, les librairies d’occasion ou le sang neuf continue à affluer. Enfin trouvé, par exemple, le Teitlebaum’s window de Wallace Markfield, Okla Hannali de R.A Lafferty ou le Cadenza de Ralph Cusack, que je cherchais depuis longtemps. Mis la main sur le formidable Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine de Stanley Crawford, dont tout le monde me parlait, et qui est effectivement un très grand livre. Surtout tombé devant A Short Rhetoric for leaving the family, de Peter Dimock, que je ne connaissais pas et que je vous conseille de lire, de traduire, de publier,toutes affaires cessantes.

EFFROI

2007-05-05T17:51:00.000-07:00

Faster than you, you fuckin' son of a--
I saw you comin', you fuckin' shit-heel.
I'm standin' here. You make the move.
You make the move.
It's your move.
Don't try it, you fuck.
You talkin' to me?
You talkin' to me?
You talkin' to me?
Then who the hell else are you talking-- You talking to me?
Well, I'm the only one here.
Who the fuck do you think you're talking to?
Oh, yeah?
Listen, you fuckers, you screw-heads.
Here is a man who would not take if anymore.
Who would not let--
Listen, you fuckers, you screw-heads.
Here is a man who would not take if anymore.
A man who stood up against the scum...
the cunts, the dogs, the fifth, the shit.
Here is someone who stood up.
Here is--
You're dead.

POUR BURROUGHS?

2007-04-16T16:58:00.000-07:00

A L.A

Non, le mystère n’est pas mort. Dans le cour normale de la vie telle que l’ont faite à leur triste image ceux qui se sont institués les tenants de ce Monde, on ne tient pas assez compte du mystère. Il revient sans cesse, des profondeurs. L’abîme un peu partout s’offre aux pieds insouciants de tous. Il y a quelque chose qui boîte légèrement dans l’univers, dans la psyché, dans l’âme. Et rien ne sert de mettre une cale morale ou idéologique à cette machine branlante, de glisser le code civil sous le talon de l’inconnu, nul ne peut compenser la claudication perpétuelle de la vie. Tout d’un coup quelque chose se détraque dans le visage le plus pur. Attention à la raison, aux convenances, à la morale, à la langue même, mon cher : cela bascule. Fini les belles dents de la sociabilité. Il y a une heure ou n’importe qui à sa chance, la chance de voir sa vie basculer, il suffit d’un signe, d’un signe de n’importe qui. Il y a une heure pour l’abîme. Le mystère est dans cet instant soudain où tout semble heureusement se détraquer. Alors l’échelle des gestes et des paroles change. Et leur nature. Tout se passe comme si vous étiez le vaincu d’une bête énorme. La défaite serait dans le dégoût.

FALLING MAN

2007-03-26T12:07:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-25T14:48:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-23T16:32:00.001-07:00

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

2007-03-19T11:56:00.000-07:00

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.....

2007-03-18T14:44:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-10T08:33:00.000-08:00

Est ce le futur?

what should fiction do?

2007-03-09T12:51:00.000-08:00

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

2007-03-04T13:44:00.000-08:00

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

2007-03-02T15:09:00.001-08:00

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

2007-03-02T07:16:00.000-08:00

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

2007-03-02T02:41:00.000-08:00

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

2007-03-01T14:18:00.000-08:00

-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

2007-03-01T13:24:00.000-08:00

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

2007-03-01T13:20:00.000-08:00

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

MERCI

2007-02-28T15:37:00.000-08:00

Un challenge de faire trois lignes sur le Tunnel sans employer d'adjectifs. Disons simplement que cela arrive deux à trois fois dans une vie de lecteur, guère plus. Je pense qu'on aura compris.

RED, WHITE, BLACk AND BLUE

2007-02-27T09:24:00.000-08:00

Peut-être le meilleur scénario de polar de ces 10 dernières années...qui dort dans des cartons. Scandaleux. Par Andrew Kevin Walker, l'auteur de Se7en et de Sleepy Hollow.

http://www.awesomefilm.com/script/redwhiteblackandblue.html

HIDEOUS MEN

2007-02-27T09:02:00.000-08:00

La nouvelle la plus strange du moment....John Krasinski, un des acteurs de la série de The Office, va faire ses débuts devant la caméra en adaptant Brief Interviews With Hideous Men de David Foster Wallace!!!! Un sexe, mensonge et vidéo PostModern? On demande à voir.......

GRAVITY

2007-02-27T08:58:00.000-08:00

Une page par jour......(d)étonnant.

http://dearmisterpynchon.blogspot.com/index.html

ZEROVILLE

2007-02-27T08:43:00.000-08:00

Zeroville. C'est le titre du nouveau Steve Erickson, à sortir en 2008. L'histoire d'un homme qui arrive à Hollywood en 1969 avec, tatoué sur le crâne, des images d'Elizabeth Taylor et de Montgomery Clift. Voyage aux enfers au pays des cinéphiles et cinéphages, visite des bas fonds hollywoodiens et de tous les déjantés qui y fleurissent - et finalement découverte d'une conspiration internationale à travers des messages véhiculés via le montage de certains films. On en salive d'avance.....

THE GALILEE HITCH-HIKER

2007-02-26T14:41:00.000-08:00

Baudelaire was
driving a Model A
across Galilee.
He picked up a
hitch-hiker named
Jesus who had
been standing among
a school of fish,
feeding them
pieces of bread.
“Where are you
going?” asked
Jesus, getting
into the front
seat.
“Anywhere, anywhere
out of this world!”
shouted
Baudelaire.
“I’ll go with you
as far as
Golgotha,”
said Jesus.
“I have a
concession
at the carnival
there, and I must not be
late.”

R Brautigan

RENDONS A CESAR

2007-02-26T14:22:00.000-08:00

Soyons les premiers à l'annoncer (il faut rendre à César...) : le nouveau Steve Katz, sobrement intitulé Kisssssss dans les bacs à l'automne prochain chez FC2. Yé!
(Au programme aussi chez FC2, It Was Like My Trying To Have a Tender-Hearted Nature, de Diane Williams, dont le Romancer Erector, qui date d'il y a quelques années déjà, était un petit bijou : "One day, someone will decode these cryptic, sinister, upsetting stories by Diane Williams. But by then she will no doubt have forged yet further into the lonely far limits of radical storytelling. This is the writing of the future, a prose of sophisticated disturbance and sorrow." --Ben Marcus)

DU COTE DES ANGLAIS....

2007-02-26T14:13:00.000-08:00

Du côté des anglais, les deux découvertes du printemps ont pour héros des amnésiques (après la vague schizo, la nouvelle tendance ?)

-On nous dit grand bien du roman de Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts, qui met en scène des poissons conceptuels se nourrissant de cellules grises et de sentiments du moi. Le héros, un jeune amnésique réussira-t-il à semer ces prédateurs métaphysiques qui sont à ses trousses ? On nous annonce le croisement improbable (certes) de Matrix, des Dents de la mer et de Memento. Faut voir…….

-Et Remainder de Tom McCarthy, un amnésique là aussi, donc, qui, après avoir touché une somme faramineuse, reconstruit son existence en fonction de ses sentiments de déjà-vu.

Pour ma part, j’attends avec impatience Twilight Time, le nouveau Simon Crumb, dont le My Elvis Blackout, est un petit chef d’œuvre en son genre. et Tainted Love, de l’inénarrable Stewart Home, dont le 69 things to do with a dead Princess est à lire toutes affaires cessantes !