Ethan Canin
Random House ($27)

by Luke Finsaas

Judging by the fiction its famed Writers’ Workshop faculty produces, living in Iowa must be a lot like driving at night with no decent radio station in range: there’s not much to do, so you just mull over things. Take Ethan Canin’s new novel, America America. The novel is marinated in history, boiled in politics, and spiced with a sprig of murder: a recipe, it would seem, for lackluster melodrama. But instead, Canin offers a compelling story in the Iowa style—reading this novel is like sitting down with an articulate old timer and listening to him talk until the pot of coffee runs out.

Our narrator in America America is Corey Sifter, an elderly newspaperman. He’s a pensive man raised on hard work and honesty, and from the first sentence, you know that you can trust him—there are no syntactic pyrotechnics or literary cat-and-mouse games to be found in this novel. Corey tells a straight story, even though it may be a complicated one.

At age sixteen, Corey went to work as a groundskeeper at the Metarey’s elegant estate. For reasons he can’t determine, the patriarch, Liam Metarey, took a personal interest in him: he paid for Corey’s education, and when he decided to fund Senator Bonwiller’s 1972 presidential campaign, Corey landed a minor role as the Senator’s driver. In this way, Canin ushers us backstage to watch the machinery of politics, and the picture he paints is quite convincing. Most of the novel presents Corey distilling his memory, trying to understand his own involvement (and culpability) in Bonwiller’s presidential campaign.

As Senator Bonwiller begins to peak in the national polls, a damning article hits the street; the article touches on a frozen mistress and a crashed Cadillac, recalling the real-life Senator Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick tumble. But instead of handing the reader that luxurious, black and white morality, Canin leaves us wrestling with a complicated character: a good man who may have made a mistake.

That Canin forces his readers to ponder what they’ve read is the strength of America America. Unfortunately, the minor characters and the women in this novel are like decorative plates; none of them have their own volition. The eccentric alcoholic, the nihilistic reporter, and the apple-pie homemaker all remain stock characters on the operating table, waiting for the defibrillator.

One scene is particularly telling. During an exclusive party, Christian Metarey, the younger of the Metarey daughters, drags her yard-boy/boyfriend, Corey, into a barn. No, not to neck—to watch her father agree to fund the Bonwiller campaign. It’s a fun scene, but it’s obvious that Christian is merely a plot device here. And to make matters worse, after the big moment has passed, Christian murmurs “I can’t believe we saw that together“ and “presses her tongue between [Corey’s] teeth.” Since when did politics turn on teenage girls?

Still, America America is far and beyond the most ambitious book Canin has written. Weighing in at 480 pages, it’s about the big themes of politics, progress, and morality, but it doesn’t pander to any demographic. The characters aren’t quite well rounded enough to please readers of Proust, and there certainly isn’t enough throat slitting, warhead thieving, or disrobing to grab the thriller fan base. There’s both heavy-handed foreshadowing and ambiguous plot points, and cell phones pop up amidst the old-fashioned prose. Canin walks that wobbly tightrope between popular fiction and literature, and even if you don’t like the routine, you have to admire his bravado.

America America is, therefore, not a great book, but it is certainly a good one. For fans of Canin, it’s a fun read. For those who have yet to stumble upon his gentle prose, however, Emperor of the Air or The Palace Thief will make better introductions—America America gives a feeble first handshake, and for a writer that has penned so many strong, engaging works, it sells his brilliance a tad short.

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Daniel Grandbois
BOA Editions ($14)

by John Domini

In a quip that’s become dangerously famous, Stephen Dedalus insists on aesthetic distance: “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” Daniel Grandbois certainly fulfills the demand of Joyce’s surrogate in Unlucky Lucky Days, his debut assortment of fabulist flash fiction. The author’s nowhere to be found—not even in the penultimate entry, “The Author.” The story presents a portrait of the artist on a thumbnail, if not a pinkie-nail—indeed, nothing in the book runs so long as three full pages—and it eludes social and economic crosshairs. Instead it offers a few words about the sources of Grandbois’s fiction: a great-uncle’s photo, a daughter’s toy, the wife’s bedside reading. The brief piece charms, but its point seems obvious, a cheer for the unbridled imagination. “I dreamt of lion’s-head knockers loping through the neighborhood,” the Author explains, “ringing people’s bells.”

A brass lion’s head playing a middle-school prank seems typical of these metamorphoses. Unlucky Lucky Days divvies 73 surreal miniatures more or less evenly among seven sections labeled, as if he were a good Judeo-Christian, Sunday through Saturday. Yet the sensibility comes across as pagan; spirits reanimate the world’s common clay. One of the first to cast the collection’s peculiar spell is “The Prayer,” a relatively gloomy amuse-bouche. A Native American ancestor ceremony brings back to life the nightmare morning of 9/11, at the microscopic level of the prayer-blanket: “On closer examination, the hairs. . . were tall buildings with broken windows and people inside.”

With that glimmer of the high-tech present, Grandbois completes his recreation of Stone-Age myth. Similar last-minute reversals distinguish nearly all these dream-loops, sometimes healing and occasionally quite the opposite. The reversal, rather than the accident of where the Author got the idea, provides the impact. Consider “The Tunnel,” a Tuesday-piece here presented in its entirety:

A man and a woman stepped into a tunnel. It was lighter inside than they had expected. In fact, the deeper they went, the lighter it became until the light was so bright that it blinded them both.

Childlike yet chilling, both Tunnel of Love and Inferno, the story creates a climactic rush via the lack of commas and arrives at an irony rooted entirely in expectation upended. A number of other turnabouts are rooted in less—sometimes in as little as a play on words—yet nonetheless supply rightness and closure. At their best, these stories push cross-cutting valences to peak intensity, then abandon them.

In cases like “The Prayer,” when Grandbois strips his narrative onion, the reek recalls the kitchen sink—meaning on occasion there emerges a world we recognize. “Hat and Rack” might have to do with sexual secrecy (the final word is “closet”), and “The Sea Squirt” might make an environmental argument. But even when the stories lack such grounding, the writer negotiates the shoals of cuteness skillfully. He may work with a clumsy giraffe, with signifying wads of gum or, repeatedly, with articulate spiders (the jacket copy mentions Just So Stories, but Charlotte’s Web is also a touchstone), yet he nearly always strikes a balance between the ticklish and the haunting. Those wads of gum mutate into the Weird Sisters of Macbeth, then achieve the timelessness of geometry.

Just as “The Gum” makes use of Pythagoras, these stories prove rife with other texts, too much so for the children’s section. The language whirls into judicious puns, and it’s not averse to high rhetoric or subtle reference. Here Lolita teases Humpty Humbert into a great fall, and there we catch echoes of Bob Dylan. “Almost Borges,” in fact, may depend too much on bookishness; one has to recognize the dying old writer to enjoy the thrill as life comes to the household objects he so memorably invested with power.

Borges, what’s more, draped his fantasies with a larger cultural fabric, and Unlucky Lucky Days disappoints insofar as it lacks the same. Grandbois delights us in small, with his chiseled prismatic shards, but in large he frustrates the desire for greater vision, for the “conscience of the race” that Stephen Dedalus sought to forge. Such vision remains part of why we need book-length literary art; even the prankish young T.C. Boyle (an ancestor who goes unhonored here) dramatized the clash of the hippie pipedream and the American project. Still, these drifting, teeming Days merit the benefit of the doubt, since Grandbois shows every promise of taking on greater weight.

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Rick Dakan
PM Press ($15.95 each)

by Spencer Dew

The hackers—or self-described “trolls,” hackers of a particular, trickster type—who recently flooded the Epilepsy Foundation web pages with fluttering, seizure-inducing color fields, did so for the particular joy of disrupting other lives, finding gleeful amusement in anarchic disruption, expressing this unique pleasure via the subgenre of on-line laughter known as “lulz.”

The geek grifters of Rick Dakan’s crime fantasy novels pull similar pranks for similar thrills, but they’re also in it for the cash. “This is just what we do for fun,” one character says—except, of course, that it’s also what they do for a living. Blackmail, demanding ransom, counterfeiting certifications of value for comic books, running an underground party. . . the list of crimes quickly reflects the quirkiness of this particular “crew.”

“Flat-out robbery and theft and even extortion were not the business they wanted to be in. Nor did they want to steal from anything who couldn’t afford it. They were supposed to be Robin Hood (or at least that’s what they told themselves so they could sleep at night).” But Robin Hood robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. These kids are anarchists, or claim to be, interested in causing chaos and making money.

Are they nihilists as well? It’s a little hard to tell too much about these characters, as characterization is one thing these books markedly lack. Two people tell each other, for instance, that they are in love, and one woman cries after she uses a remote control rifle to blow off a man’s head, but the outward expressions don’t seem reflective of any real inner life, just gestures to help move the plot along, get the guy in bed with the girl, get the crew out of one danger and into another.

Geek Mafia is set some years in the past, with lots of Internet chatter and more of a pulp edge. Mile Zerois set in Key West, where the grifters live out a sort of adolescent fantasy of high-tech play. It reads at times like a homage to Scooby Doo (with, of course, a cross-dressing Kung Fu expert), and defies not only logic but also its own attempts at reference to the real world. While the time is “post-911” and “institutional paranoia and limitless homeland security spending” are referenced, our characters live safely on Red Bull and string cheese, playing video games and rolling marks, fucking from time to time and keeping Hello Kitty gas masks under the bed.

The absurdity of the plots—electrified floorboards of a fortified house, the seizure of a pirate museum for a confrontation with a villain—wouldn’t matter so much if these novels didn’t come across as disturbingly vacant responses to well-publicized trends of contemporary life. While we, the readers, live increasingly in a surveillance state, Dakan’s crew lives in a world with an endless supply of endlessly hackable cameras and video screens. While we live in a society defining itself via voyeurism and self-exposure, Dakan’s grifters drift in and out of nude patio bars and live “off the grid,” not through layers of carefully fabricated identities but simply by being invisible, holed up in their headquarters or chasing after bad guys and marks in total anonymity, all the watching cameras neatly turned off. And when an older character says he respects Hunter S. Thompson for his ability and willingness to “speak truth to power,” it’s anachronistic; in the world Dakan creates you make your own power, and “truth” isn’t much of a worry. “NSA intercepts and FBI investigations and CIA assassinations” are mentioned in a speech intended to sound darkly prophetic, but the character giving the speech has just been beaten, and is a paranoid relic of another era, the world of the Weather Underground and a yearning for revolution rather than the world of Grand Theft Auto and the small pleasures of criminal pursuit and nerdy style.

Perhaps most disturbingly, “classic anarchy” in Dakan’s brave new world is represented as the incorporation of different grifter crews: “Why not model ourselves after the paragon of right-wing capitalist greed and exploitation?. . . I’m talking about a privately held, foreign-based holding corporation that can let us pool our resources, launder money, provide ready-made cover, establish untraceable lines of credit, even buy and sell real estate and big ticket property. Hell, even provide health insurance.” Meanwhile, the sorts of crimes presented as “practically a victimless score” hurt not only individuals—say, the man who believes his daughter has been kidnapped by thugs—but also the ideals of a non-anarchic world, what we call “society.” Protesting franchise corporate coffee by spraying fake blood over a crowd as part of an elaborate plot to extort right-wing talk radio listeners because they are “the most credulous, illogical people out there” isn’t good satire, it’s just taking the conventions of democracy—critical thinking, civil conversation, and peaceful demonstration, to name three concepts Dakan’s characters would find painfully stale—and disrupting them for the sake of cheap lulz.

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Jim Krusoe
Tin House Books ($14.95)

by Michael Jauchen

Girl Factory opens with vintage Jim Krusoe hi-jinks. Jonathan, the book’s narrator, visits an animal shelter intending to liberate a dog named Buck, who, after years of secret government testing, has developed human-like intelligence. But through a case of canine mistaken identity, the well-meaning Jonathan accidentally uncages a rabid-man eater named Megamon who immediately kills a Cub Scout and an old woman shopping for pets, and then heads out the door on the hunt for more victims. It’s the perfect opening for a novel that, from beginning to end, runs rambunctiously wild inside Jim Krusoe’s fictional world—a world dictated by pure chance, where oddness is the norm, and where the strip-mall blandness of American suburban life is rendered hilariously surreal and violent.

After Megamon’s release fades from the newspaper headlines and Jonathan can once again show his face on the streets of St. Nils (which, book by book, is becoming Krusoe’s own Yoknapatawpha County), Girl Factory settles down into its central action. One night, as he’s finishing his shift at Mister Twisty’s yogurt shop, Jonathan goes down to the basement and discovers a makeshift laboratory where six women, completely naked and unconscious, are preserved in giant, glowing cylinders full of a mysterious yogurt solution. As if that weren’t shocking enough, one of the girls happens to be the spitting image of Jonathan’s first love, Mary Katherine.

This strange discovery launches Jonathan on a journey that eventually comes to include murder, a creepy support group for widows and widowers, a former sea captain who spins yarns while chronically watering his lawn, a gun-toting health inspector, a zoo that’s been converted to an upper-crust hangout where the patrons get their kicks by heckling panthers, and oodles and oodles of exotically flavored yogurt. Jonathan charges himself with the task of reviving the preserved women, and as he conducts his DIY experiments, he fills us in on the events of his life that have brought him to this point—including his relationship with Mary Katherine and, in one of the novel’s funniest scenes, his father’s death at a Mexican poncho shop.

What sutures all of these disparate tidbits together is the unbelievably attuned narrative voice of Jonathan. Like the narrators of Krusoe’s Blood Lake and Iceland, Jonathan can editorialize, rationalize, and soliloquize about anything. He talks around things a lot, and he presents his off-kilter world to us with skewed similes (many reminiscent of Richard Brautigan at his best), a manic eye for detail, a propulsive syntax, and a cool but completely offbeat logic that would befit any Kafka anti-hero. Here’s Jonathan, for instance, recounting a memory sparked by one of his nightly examinations of the woman who might be Mary Katherine:

Her shins were as streamlined and smooth as the legs on a Danish Modern coffee table my parents once had. Her knees, friendly and yet fragile, were a symphony of flat and rounded planes, dimples and sinew. How often I had held Mary Katherine’s right knee in my left hand while she drove the two of us to the donut shop just a few miles down the road from my dorm, moving my hand only to change the station on the radio of her old Dodge from rock ‘n’ roll to easy listening and then back again; my other arm resting out the open window, as all the while I looked toward the horizon for my first glimpse of the giant donut sculpture strapped to the shop’s roof that would signal our destination, and which, come to think of it, seemed a premonition of the life that awaited us, although in different ways, at Mister Twisty’s.

Girl Factory is packed with writing like this, and repeatedly, just as Jonathan’s tangents seem to be spinning out of control and the writing starts reaching a little too far, Krusoe reels it all back in with the elegance, surprise, and seeming effortlessness of a natural-born humorist.

Perhaps the greatest thing about Girl Factory (and Krusoe’s fiction in general) is that while it’s wacky and outlandish and extremely funny, it also possesses an authentic pathos. Hidden beneath Jonathan’s labyrinthine language and digressive insights is a deeply lonely human being, and Krusoe manages to tinge all of his joking with sharp pangs of authentic heartbreak. When we witness a melancholy Jonathan sighing longingly at a girl who might be his ex-girlfriend in a Plexiglass canister full of yogurt, the scene’s not just funny—it’s also, in a strange way, incredibly moving.

In Girl Factory, Jim Krusoe has served up a shaggy dog tale of the highest quality. It’s impressive that a novel with so much to offer is as tightly constructed as it is, and it’s refreshing to come across prose this free-wheeling and fun. And though you can easily spot Krusoe’s precursors—Sterne, Kafka, Barthelme, Lynch—presiding over this book as its surrealistic and humorous godfathers, Girl Factory still manages to remain a work that’s wholly Krusoe’s own: hilarious, oddly touching, and dizzily readable.

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Duncan B. Barlow
Afterbirth Books ($13.95)

by Christopher Lura

In Cincinnati, there lives a man who sometimes emits an electric spark so strong that it burns holes in fences and household furniture. He spends his days and nights either at the office of a somewhat dubious occultist physician, with a Russian dancer who works at a sex shop, or in pursuit of a mutant half-man/half-cat through the abandoned subway tunnels beneath the city. The man’s name is Gilles and he is the protagonist of Duncan B. Barlow’s mysterious and strange new novel, Super Cell Anemia. Through first-person journal entries, third-person narrative, and the occasional tract of modern anthroposophy, Super Cell Anemia offers a wide-ranging jaunt into a gnarly and somewhat schizophrenic urban universe.

Set over a period of thirteen days, the novel follows its main character through an extraordinary series of events and acquaintances. Gilles, an obsessive-compulsive young man afflicted by a rare illness that causes his muscles to generate large amounts of electricity, has moved to Cincinnati in order to be close to Dr. Moore, the only physician who has been able to help his suffering (all the others just sent him to a psychiatrist, assuming the illness to be psychosomatic). Dr. Moore has suggested that Gilles is in need of a muscle transplant and has prescribed copper strips for him to chew on as a way to control the potentially lethal electric surges in his body.

Although the novel utilizes some conventions of speculative fiction, the premise of Super Cell Anemia owes as much to the legacy of Kierkegaard and Kafka as it does to H. G. Wells and Edgar Allen Poe. Questions regarding illness and perception figure heavily into the novel’s conceit, providing an intriguing search for rationality in a world generally characterized by irrationality and medical confusion. The language of the novel is often laden with a gothic lyricism:

Gilles attempts to sit up, but four thick, black tentacles slither from the growing darkness and wrap around his chest. He can feel the bed sinking, and as it gains speed, he fears that his stomach might tear up through his mouth. For a moment, he can see himself with his stomach dangling out between his lips like a dripping wet balloon.

Between visits to his physician, Gilles lives a nervous and unconventional existence. He develops a fledgling, if somewhat challenged, romance with Charlie, a Russian immigrant’s daughter who was trained to be “the nation’s best dancer” but who now works in a sex shop. Part of Gilles’s time is spent attempting to understand why there is a mutant cat-man (whom Gilles dubs Calicoman) climbing up the side of his building at night. After some investigation, Gilles comes to believe that Calicoman is the leader of a local conspiracy to harvest human eggs and that two of Gilles’s neighbors are involved in the scheme—one of whom is sculpting regurgitated walnut seeds into small nests to serve as incubation chambers for the harvested eggs. Not all the people who live in Gilles’s apartment building are in on the conspiracy, however; Gilles’s landlord, an ingenuous and unexpectedly normal character named Roger, seems to be as surprised as the reader to find that one of his tenants is hiding nests made of regurgitated walnut seeds in heating ducts throughout the building.

The character of Gilles’s physician plays a central role in the novel. Because of his position, we might assume he is able to provide some answers for Gilles, whose world is characterized almost entirely by uncertainty. But Dr. Moore is also an outcast among the scientific community because of his passionate advocacy of the theories of Rudolph Steiner, the anthroposophist whose theories of education founded the Waldorf Schools and whose agricultural ideas were the first attempts at biodynamic farming. The novel has sporadic excerpts from Moore’s writings regarding “Spirit-Science” (the coming together of divine and corporeal realities that he believes Gilles’s electro-magnetic muscular condition embodies), as well as his social theories on community building. But the writings of Gilles’s physician are in a curiously antiquated dialect, and read like 19th-century religious tracts of an aristocratic prelate: “If a human lacks a connection to his spiritual side, he might never come to experience his full potential as a functioning member of society. Just as a blind man will never see, a percentage of degenerates will never come to good.” Although the doctor is represented as honest in his enthusiasm for his medical and spiritual causes, he also appears out of touch and not quite trustworthy in his analysis of Gilles’s condition or his own medical and theoretical pontifications.

Constructed as a story of intrigue, Super Cell Anemia relies less on questions of narrative suspense than on its own inexplicable oddness to drive the plot. The reader is not so much compelled through the pages to find out whether someone will catch the Calicoman in the act of harvesting human eggs or whether the police (who have it out for Gilles after he called them on a false alarm) will arrest Gilles for a crime he never committed. Instead, a progression of poignantly bizarre circumstances cause Gilles (and the reader) to keep pushing forward in the hope of arriving at some explanation for what is happening. Despite the surreal quality of the novel, Gilles’s quest for understanding is at root a human one, and the reader consistently identifies with Gilles’s sense of unease and desire to get a firm grasp on his bizarre existence. But Barlow hedges in proffering any physical rationale for the narrative’s obscurity; rather than hone in on a “solution” to the novel’s mysteries, he instead drives the story deeper into its own uncanny nightmare. Gilles’s search for answers over the course of the book develops from being generally hopeful to one characterized by insecurity and paranoia. One night, he follows Calicoman into the subway tunnels beneath the city and observes a woman there he believes is Charlie’s co-worker, becoming convinced that even Charlie is involved in Calicoman’s conspiracy.

As Gilles’s suspicions about those around him increase, the reader is forced to question the “truth” of the narrative, giving rise to the possibility that the story is less a recounting of events than a psychic contrivance of its protagonist—a sort of oneiric travelogue of a paranoid subconscious struggling to live in multiple realities. The final pages of the novel bring this issue of diegetic reliability to the fore, when Gilles’s confesses to Charlie his reluctance to trust people and his fear that everyone in the world is against him. Although Charlie suggests this fear is understandable considering his relationship with his mentally ill mother, for the reader, this admission addresses an issue that has dogged the story since the first paragraph, which indicated that all the doctors Gilles had ever seen said his afflictions were psychosomatic. Although the question of which reality is the “real” one is never entirely resolved, the novel does deal with Gilles’s own lack of mental self-control. Without giving away the surprise of the book’s ending, suffice it to say that the last moments of the novel are intensely unexpected and force the reader into reconsidering the events of the last 236 pages.

A striking and often gripping debut novel by a writer with a prolific and energetic imagination, Super Cell Anemia is charismatic, intelligent, and driven by an intellectual curiosity that substantiates its extreme imbrication of dream, illness, and reality.

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by Dennis Barone

From the top floor of our house, we can see the smoke filling the sky of the city. The wind is blowing toward Brooklyn today, and the smells of the fire have settled into every room of the house. A terrible, stinging odor: flaming plastic, electric wire, building materials.
—Paul Auster,“Random Notes—September 11, 2001—4:00 PM”

One of the most intriguing and satisfying pleasures in reading Paul Auster’s oeuvre is to note the linkages and variations between and among works. But also important are the changes. In Auster’s post-2001 writing, protagonists have gone from being hunger artists to ill artists, and instead of the fluidity of identity that characterized the earlier fiction, the recovery of identity has become paramount.

Sidney Orr in Oracle Night, Nathan Glass in The Brooklyn Follies, and August Brill in Auster’s latest novel, Man in the Dark, illustrate this new emphasis on recovery. Consider the first sentence of The Brooklyn Follies: “I was looking for a quiet place to die.” Nathan Glass, however, does not die; he recovers his health and his place in the world through his revived connection with others. Likewise, August Brill unburdens his soul to his granddaughter Katya and she, in turn, because of her grandfather’s love, patience, and comfort, begins her own tentative re-entry into a world that has been violently shattered.

Auster now seems to speak with a new urgency, a desire to express explicitly what has gone wrong with the political and public world, and to reconnect, at both the personal and national level, what has been ruptured. In the autobiography Hand to Mouth, Auster describes himself at Columbia University in the late 1960s as “a bystander, a sympathetic fellow traveler. Much as I would have liked to join in, I found myself temperamentally unfit for group activities. My loner instincts were far too ingrained, and I could never quite bring myself to climb aboard the great ship Solidarity.” And his earlier writing bore this out. But now direct criticism appears right in the reader’s face, like that terrible smoke on September 11—there’s no hesitancy about it.

Although it may be a matter of degree and not of kind, there is no question that Auster’s new work directly confronts the current political world. In The Brooklyn Follies Nathan’s nephew, Tom, “rails against the right-wing takeover of America. He cites the near destruction of Clinton, the anti-abortion movement, the gun lobby, the fascist propaganda of talk-radio shows, the cowardice of the press, the ban on the teaching of evolution in certain states.” Near the end of the novel Auster connects Nathan’s daughter’s miscarriage and Bush’s “illegal” election; Nathan calls this time “one of the darkest moments of that fall,” linking the personal and the national. Nonetheless, in this narrative of recovery that concludes at “eight o’clock on the morning of September 11, 2001,” Nathan’s final words are: “I was happy, my friends, as happy as any man who had ever lived.”

The connections between books written over nearly three decades are complex, and it may be overly simplistic to reduce a phenomenal body of work (thirteen previous novels as well as many works in other genres) to patterns and categories. Last year’sTravels in the Scriptorium, for example, describes a character in a hospital room (of sorts) rather than one who has just left such a room, as in the instances of Sidney Orr and Nathan Glass. In this one-day narrative, Mr. Blank remains caught in the realm of representation; he reads, but in his unspecified panopticon of the present, some external control photographs him while doing so. Like so many Auster protagonists he is a writer, and slightly before the mid-point one interlocutor chastises him: “Mr. Blank. . . you’re cruel. . . cruel and indifferent to the pain of others. You play with people’s lives and take no responsibility for what you’ve done.”

Man in the Dark, a one-night narrative, forms the inverse of its predecessor. Near the start of the novel, Owen Brick, the creation of August Brill during a sleepless night and the protagonist of the story-within-the-story, asks someone in the strange land he finds himself: “Now, if I said the words September eleventh to you, would they have any special meaning?” In Brick’s alternative world America did not live through a terrorist attack, but instead has been in civil war since the presidential election of 2000. The moral of the story in the post-Patriot Act world, Auster tells us, must be to take responsibility, to respect the lives of others, and to care deeply for oneself and one’s world. August Brill does so: he controls his fictional character Brick; he cares deeply for his daughter and granddaughter; he respects the lives of others. Nowhere does this become more apparent than in the differences between the somewhat parallel stories of the imaginary Brick and Brill’s young friend (and granddaughter’s boyfriend) Titus. But two-thirds of the way into this compelling work, Auster changes direction. The change explains much about this family; it becomes at times troubling, moving, cautionary, and relevant.

Auster once told an interviewer “stories are the fundamental food for the soul. . . It’s through stories that we struggle to make sense of the world.” In Man in the Dark Katya has left film school but watches movies non-stop. Brill tells us that at first she watched them to assuage her pain, but eventually her viewing turns active and she shares her thoughts with her grandfather. Katya’s mother, Miriam, works on a biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter, Rose. Brill himself, a former literary critic, has stopped writing for the moment but makes up stories for his amusement during sleepless nights, keeps Katya company in her film viewing, and then tells her the story of his life. This expressive household survives because everyone in it speaks. They will not be silenced.

August Brill believes that “the rotten acts human beings commit against one another are not just aberrations—they’re an essential part of who we are.” Yet somehow we continue. The story of our struggle “to make sense of the world,” Man in the Dark ends in a morning’s tentative first light.

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by Gavin Pate

At thirty-six, Stephen Graham Jones has emerged as one of the country’s most innovative and prolific young writers. Jones, a member of the Blackfeet Tribe, has written works that range from horror to thriller to science fiction, all the while confronting stale ideas about the limitations of genre with his unique approach to narrative. His great sympathy for his characters is filtered through the everyday detritus of contemporary American life—video games, horror films,’80s hair-metal—and the result is a picture of life that is frightening, hilarious, and all its own.

This summer saw the publication of two new novels by Jones, Ledfeather (FC2, $17.50) and The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti (Chiasmus Press, $14.95). In Ledfeather, we encounter the plight of the Blackfeet Indians through the life of Doby Saxon, a boy attempting to rewrite history while standing in the middle of a snowy road playing a life-and-death game of chicken. In The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti, we meet Nolan, the last man standing in a video game call-center, trying to make it through one last night before the ghost of his father comes through the telephone lines.

With four other novels, one collection, and over 70 stories published in magazines and on the web, Jones, who holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Florida State University and teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder, seems to have no intention of slowing down. His first novel, The Fast Red Road, won the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction (2001), and Bleed Into Me, a collection of stories, won the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse Jones Award for Fiction (2005).

This interview was conducted on a single Friday afternoon over the Internet, during which Jones managed to survive a sweltering bike ride, a rogue and deadly peanut, and what might be an unhealthy amount of Ambesol.

Gavin Pate: I want to start with an idea that keeps showing up in your books, and that is the idea of cycles, or recurrence. I suppose this could be seen as an obvious American Indian concern, and that aspect is surely illustrated in Ledfeather. However, what I find interesting is that it occurs in other ways: it seems central to Demon Theory, and of course the serial killer in All the Beautiful Sinners is perpetuating a repetitive violence. In fact, you end the first chapter of your first novel, The Fast Red Road, with the italicized plea: “Not again, please not again.”

Stephen Graham Jones: Yeah, cyclical stuff, iterations, rhythm (which is just repetition with variance)—I can’t seem to stay away from it. Not at all sure why. There’s nothing particularly Indian about it, though being cued into them helps, say, reading Silko. As for why I keep ringing that bell, though—could it be I’m trying to be all epic? I mean, I cut my teeth on fantasy. I could have just got my brain shaped that way, on accident.

GP: It does begin to take on an epic quality, even in a really short piece like “Conquistadors.” But I see the cycles on a smaller level as well, specifically within the family relations of your characters—sons trying to break away from these familial cycles, while at the same time being drawn back in. I wonder if these concerns are a result of childhood, or your role now as a parent, or neither/both.

SGJ: Never thought about it that way. But yeah, I guess, growing up, it was like I was in some spin-cycle: new dad, new school, new life, then bam—kickstart it all over again in a year or two. If anything, I’d always thought that kind of gave me an advantage for writing characters—each time we moved, after a while, anyway, my mom started letting me ‘edit’ my school records. So I was changing names on the road, showing up as somebody new, with a whole new story. All kinds of fun. And confusing. It felt a lot like writing feels now, I guess, when I’m deep enough into a novel that I start remembering it as experiencee, not as something on the page. At which point I start going faster and faster, just to get done, to get out, to come back. These cycles, though, I guess there's a cynical slant on it: the bad stuff keeps repeating itself, yeah? But it’s so, so important for there to be people within that cycle, people like Birdfinger [from The Fast Red Road], willing to sacrifice themselves in order to change things. And Dalimpere [from Ledfeather], he’s just part of the agent shuffle on the reservation back then. Worst cycle of all. But I keep coming back to Fast Red Road. The first novel you write, it’s every novel you’ll ever write. For better or for worse.

GP: You mention the bad stuff, and I was going to ask about violence, because your aesthetic includes a fair amount of it, both physical and emotional. I was wondering if you see a connection between violence as a subject of art and violence in the world, how one comments on or informs the other.

SGJ: I’m not sure it’s any different, violence in the world and violence in art. My heart slams in my chest the same, I mean. And violence, for me—the most violent line I can ever remember writing was inAll the Beautiful Sinners, a whole scene that got killed, for space. But it was one where Cody Mingus and Jim Doe meet up somewhere in Kansas, and Jim Doe steps all at once up into that Bronco (or was it a Blazer? No, couldn't be—would I ever write a Blazer? Surely not. Unless it was a bad guy...), and he just looks at the dashboard and says to Cody, How fast can this thing go? It destroyed me then, and it destroys me now, just thinking about it. There are moments in novels, where you accidentally do the whole thing all at once, in a mouthful of words, and you just kind of want to die then, because you're done, it’s over. Anyway, that's violence to me. At the keyboard. Shaking, crying, trying to go into a small ball that nobody’ll see, or step on.

But as for what you’re asking, I was on a panel once about this specifically, and when somebody asked me why there was so much violence in my stuff, it seemed obvious to me: that’s what I lie in bed at night thinking about. If I can’t sleep—and that’s a lot, nine times out of ten—it’s because I’m thinking bad, bad thoughts. Then dreaming even worse stuff. Sometimes I think that’s why I hunt; it’s not so much for the meat, but to get to cut flesh with all my knives. Though I love the meat, don’t get me wrong. Anyway, I could probably answer this a third way that wouldn’t really be an answer either, but I’ll cut it short here.

GP: No, I think that’s accurate, and it makes me think of Dalimpere’s problem with the Blackfeet once the army arrives with the food. Those scenes killed me; the violence of them was so total, so without reprieve. I think Dalimpere’s one of the most accomplished characters you’ve ever written, and you sure seem to feel a lot of sympathy for him, which problematizes the whole thing for the reader. I was particularly impressed with how you morphed your prose, especially in his third letter to Claire. It seems to evoke a poetic style very foreign to your other writing. Can I ask how this came about, and what was it like writing him?

SGJ: That antiquey way Dalimpere writes, all sentimental and over-the-top for Claire, it’s the most natural way for me to write. I’m just lucky to have found a character that that voice could fit. Before him, all I’d ever made work in that style was that "Captain's Lament" piece—I think that’s leftover Dalimpere, really—and early on in Fast Red Road, when Pidgin and Birdfinger are arguing, the word ‘pule’ gets mentioned. But Dalimpere, yeah, his diction was nothing but fun for me. And I really did care about him. I’m glad he problematizes the whole where-to-put-sympathy thing in an American Indian novel. That always needs to be problematized. Over and over.

GP: On that note, and while we are talking about Ledfeather, Doby’s parallel story to Dalimpere’s is what makes this novel so rich. I was particularly struck by the scene at the casino, where you narrate from the POV of the elderly white woman—seems like it could be a story all by itself, as if it slipped out of Bleed Into Meand smuggled itself into Ledfeather. This is the first time you’ve tackled casino culture in relation to American Indians, right? And that idea, that Doby is trying to sell her stolen pieces of his own heritage, it’s a pretty succinct commentary on the appropriation of Indian culture on the one hand and survival on the other.

SGJ: Yeah, things have worth only in relationship to how quickly they can be turned into cash, pretty much. For Doby anyway. As for casino-stuff—I’ve never done that? Can't think of anything specific, so maybe not. But yeah, I guess that would be fun to excise, the RV lady and their trip to North Dakota. Maybe I’ll run through it again, see if it’s something I should do aloud, at a reading.

GP: Ledfeather is pretty bleak—both it and The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti deal with suicide. Still, at the end, that touch in the back of the car, that human connection in the midst of all that tragedy, it seems to leave a glimmer, however slight, of hope. Is the touch enough?

SGJ: Man, it’ll have to be, I think. It’s enough for me, anyway. And, two suicides in two August books, both by me… sounds suspicious. Don’t know why I’d do that. Not on purpose, anyway.

GP: One of the real accomplishments of the book was your decision to use foreign perspectives to tell Doby’s story. I consider you an experimental writer, in narrative and language, but do you see yourself that way?

SGJ: No, I don’t see myself that way. I'm not a conscious innovator, anyway—don’t sit down, roll my sleeves up, and think “How can I do this all-different, now?” But I think there are two honest reasons to innovate or experiment, and one ridiculous one. The ridiculous one is because you don’t really have anything to say, but have all this ability bottled up, feel like showing it off. I say take up skateboarding or something instead, please. We don’t need tricks just for tricks’ sake. But the other two reasons to innovate, I think I’ve hit them both, maybe even at the same time. The first has to do with what people say about how a writer never really matures until his parents die, thus freeing him up to tell the stories that are closest to his heart. There’s a workaround to that, though, if you happen to have parents who started way early, so aren’t even near to Croaksville: you tell the stories that are planted deep, but you disguise them under all these literary pyrotechnics, so that nobody important will recognize what you’re doing. I think I’ve done that. Take Birdfinger after Clive’s funeral, when Pidgin, in the restaurant, from grief, wets his pants, and Birdfinger, to make him feel less alone, just pees in his pants too. That’s my uncle, pretty much, the guy I was closest with growing up, the guy who’s more responsible for who I am now than just about anybody. But it’s all buried in this novel with these twenty-thousand word parts, all very intentionally set up so that, if you look away, everything that came before kind of leaks out of your head, and you have to start over. I was trying at the time to kill the novel, to have it be not just something you read before bed. But I was hiding, too. Frantically.

As for the other reason, it’s that the story won’t conform to the norms. It absolutely refuses to stay between the lines, but instead twists itself into all these insane shapes, just to get told. Or, to get told economically, maybe I should say. The “Roses Are Red” chapter in Bird—which is about as good as I’ll ever write, I suspect—you could probably do that in sixty pages straight, maybe. Except, if you unfold each piece of Bird out like that, it’s going to be a 500-pager. So, instead, I found ways to compact it, to deliver it in ten pages. And it totally and absolutely melted my head. Like writing that middle part ofLedfeather, where Doby and Dalimpere are kind of passing each other in the story. I keep telling myself I’m not going to do that stuff anymore, that I’m going to learn to tell a normal straight boring little story. But things happen.

As for why I used everybody else to tell Doby’s story: it was just that he had no voice of his own. He was always in the distance. Terrified me, absolutely. Still does.

GP: I was going to ask about that middle part of Ledfeather, which reminds me of some of the places inFast Red Road. Since you mentioned them, Ledfeather was the third of your FC2 books, and in my mind they form a loose trilogy that differs from your other books (although Bleed Into Me seems to come out of the same concerns). You even suggest in the afterward to Ledfeather that LP Deal [from The Bird Is Gone] could have written it. I was wondering how you view the connection between the books, their relation to one another.

[At this point there was a slight lull in the conversation.]

SGJ: I hate peanuts, don't know why I keep eating them. Just ate, for about the 1000th time, a bad one that tasted like a corn nut, so was all dry heaving in the trash here. Not fun, but I’m back...

When I turned Ledfeather in to FC2, I kept casting around, kind of Tom Sawyerly, to see if I could get them to produce some kind of sleeve all three of these books could fit in together. Because, yeah, that structuring principle/nightmare of Fast Red Road, where things keep repeating themselves, with slight variation but the same effect, it’s what these three books are doing. Or, to say it different: I didn’t tell the story right enough with Fast Red Road, so tried again with Bird Is Gone, but then, even though each of those books kill me, and always will, I tried to do it a third and final time, with Ledfeather. And I say final because, for books like those three, you really do trade pieces of yourself. And you can’t get those pieces back. There’s so much stuff I wish I had access to still, but it’s all been burned away from writing those three books. From trying and trying to get it right. And, with Ledfeather, I think it finally is right. But, as for the sleeve, turns out they’re not all the same height, so it’d have to be a pretty ugly sleeve. You could always stuff all three into an old Frosted Flakes box or something, though. That’d be cool with me.

GP: I think you’re on to something there—recycling and marketing all in one. On the surface The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti is quite different from Ledfeather. It’s fiercely comedic, and for the most part a much lighter read than its cousin, at least until the end, where it, surprisingly, takes on a very sincere tone, once again exploring these dynamics in families. As you documented on your online journal, you wrote it in three days. Did you see the ending the entire time?

SGJ: No, didn’t see it all. Well, the pinewood derby car, I had a sense of that, yeah. But I had no real clue what it was going to mean for Nolan. But yeah, it reads light, for everybody but me. . . See that “innovation-as-disguise” thing, I suppose.

GP: Maybe light is the wrong word, because I think it is a serious book, but it’s just so damn funny—especially, strangely, the suicide notes.

SGJ: That dad, yeah, he’s me. It’s so strange for people to read this book. Like I’m walking around with a hole in my head, so they can just look inside.

GP: When I read his parts, I kept wondering how many infinite ways I might be messing up my kids.

SGJ: Yep. I get worried too.

GP: One of the greatest inventions of the book is the Camopede, the giant worm protagonist of the video game in the novel—seems like there is a whole other Camopede narrative just waiting to happen. You handle the material almost like a Borges story, where instead of writing the entire epic of the Camopede, you give it to us in shorthand, which works great. I think the worm gets a bad rap too; it's just misunderstood. Did the idea just come from endless hours of playing Centipede as a kid?

SGJ: I played my share of Centipede, yeah. And I always loved that Borges stuff, where there's this whole undertext that you never get quite direct enough access to. But the Camopede, he’s the real victim here, of course. And progenitor. I should maybe find a way to footnote Camopede into Demon Theory.

GP: Speaking of which, you're making a name for yourself as a writer of great afterwards. Why all the commentary when you’re finished with a book?

SGJ: Never thought about that. I guess what it really comes down to is that I know the publisher’s going to give me one page to do whatever I want. That they’re not going to edit, that’s not going to ‘count’ against me, anything like that. So I say what feels like it needs to be said, I guess.

GP: You have another collection of stories due out next year. Can you tell me a little about it, how it might be different from your last collection? And what’s it like working with so many different publishers?

SGJ: The Ones That Got Away is horror stories—the best of the horror stories I’ve written. Eighty-thousand words or so, I think, so not small for a collection. I’m very proud of the stuff in there, too. It’ll be published by Prime, and yeah, they’ll be my, what? Fifth publisher? I think that’s right. Eight books, five publishers, but three of the books are FC2. The reason for working with so many, it’s just that I keep writing different things. Rugged Land, which is now out of business, was all into me being a crime novelist—had my career mapped out, one book at this date, another at that date—which was great, except I also wanted to be doing weird little novels, and not necessarily “on the side,” just different than the whole crime thing. But big houses, houses with money, they want all of you, it seems. So things fell apart there pretty fast. And Nebraska, MacAdam/Cage, and Chiasmus: they’ve all been one-shot deals, which I like. Or, to put it another way, I hate that line in a contract about ‘first option.’ I always beg my agent to find some way around it, I just hate hate hate being locked in. Not because I’m scared of deadlines—I love deadlines, the stupider the better—and not because I'm worried about ever running out of stuff to write about. But because there’ll usually be a handful of months where I can’t submit anything around to other publishers. It leaves me where I am now, pretty much: a lot of novels already finished, just sitting around. Zombie Bake-Off, Flushboy, Seven Spanish Angels, The Dog Mother, one or two I'm probably forgetting. I think I even have enough science fiction/speculative stuff now that I could select a solid collection out of it. I don't know. What I need, I think, is a pseudonym. Or two or three. And also, of course, I want to do novelizations and tie-ins. I was hit up to ghostwrite once, for good money, and I should have done that, I'm sure. Probably would have learned something. Or at least paid a bill or two.

But I’ve gone off-track here. Working with so many publishers, I feel like I've learned the game a bit: from editors to production to marketing, they all do things differently, it seems. And it’s fun each time. I take what I learned from the last one and apply it next time. Also, talking FC2 specifically, my editor there, Brenda Mills, isn’t there anymore, so I’m not at all sure if I’ll have any more FC2 books. Though the only stuff I’d try to push through FC2 would be of the Fast-Bird-Ledfeather variety, and that cycle’s kind of done—except, and this is probably a self-jinx just to say it, a couple of weeks ago I did map out a sequel to Ledfeather. Maybe it’s how Louise Erdrich felt after Love Medicine: I don’t want to let these characters go. Or, maybe it’s not even the characters, but the narrative mode. I lucked onto a story that’s the same but different. So I’m tempted to start it right now. Except I just opened a new blank document to write a story about some hamsters. And I also have this other novel, set back in Texas, that I’ve been meaning to get on paper. Aside from ten other things I need to get on paper too, including two slashers. It’s the most elegant genre.

GP: Most people marvel at how much you have written. But not only do you publish almost constantly, you host an online writers forum, along with writers Will Christopher Baer and Craig Clevenger, called The Velvet, and you keep a pretty steady blog on your webpage. I was wondering how these other activities contribute to or interact with your writing.

SGJ: It’s a kind of circular way to say it, I guess, but the more I keep doing, the more I end up doing. Give me two weeks totally free from everything, and I’ll probably just rent the first couple of seasons ofMagnum P.I. or something. Or play a lot of basketball. Get intimate with every pawn shop within driving distance, that kind of stuff. Stack a lot of obligations on, though, even stuff I don’t have to do but know I’m going to do anyway, and suddenly I’m writing more and more. What it means, I think, is no rest, all play, always. But everything’s play for me. I tend not to take stuff serious enough.

GP: But your books are serious.

SGJ: Yeah. I don’t know. I know when I’m writing, I’m invested so much in the words on the page that it’s not very healthy. But when I’m playing basketball, I’m invested way too much there too. It’s why I always come away limping, I suspect. With everything I do, I have this immediate impulse, always, that I want to do it faster and better and harder and more perfect than anybody else has done it; who cares about the consequences, the consequences are always later, far away. I’m never cool with just cruising, just coasting along, taking it easy. Have always been jealous of people who can do that, really. So, to edit—yeah, it’s all play for me, but the play, it’s always serious. When I’m doing it. But then, after, walking away, win or lose, it didn’t really matter. But did you see that shot I almost made, when I was falling into the wolverine pit? It was worth it, a hundred times over. Every time.

GP: All right, last question, since you’ve been cool enough to give me half your afternoon: You told me earlier you were thinking about doing the three-day novel contest this weekend, but were trying not to. What are the odds at this moment?

SGJ: Kind of low, just for mouth-preservation. I have a reading on Thursday here in Boulder, and my mouth is already so trashed, I’m suckling on Ambesol every five minutes. Probably burning a hole in my stomach or something. A very numb, happy hole. But I guess this needs some explaining: way back in elementary, I got my tongue cut off, had to have it sewed back on. End result: it’s still not right. What, twenty years later? If I take enough of all the right kind of pills, I can keep it in check most weeks. But then there are weeks like this, when I can’t even understand myself when I talk. So, three-day-noveling it, I’ll start out with tea, sure, but I’ll graduate very quickly, I know, to Vanilla Coke, provided I can find it in the right quantities. And Coke, even Dr. Pepper—Pepsi’s the best of them, who knows why—it kills my mouth. As does chocolate. And how am I supposed to write a novel in three days without chocolate? Good grief. However, yeah, I’ve got a couple of boxes of Sixlets tucked away. Anyway, who knows. Not me. I did accidentally have a workable idea for a three-day novel yesterday. Not sure how the structure would fall out, but the voice is there anyway. And you can’t go anywhere without that.

Click here to purchase The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Ledfeather at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Demon Theory at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008

by Kareem Estefan

Acclaimed conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith is the author of numerous works of what he calls “uncreative writing”—books that in recording quotidian events or transcribing unliterary texts, nonetheless reveal permutations in the language and achieve a kind of sculpted beauty. Works in this vein include Fidget (a transcription of every movement Goldsmith’s body made over the course of a single day), Soliloquy (every word he spoke over the course of a week), and Day (a retyping of an issue of the New York Times). Goldsmith’s latest work, the “American Trilogy” of The Weather, Traffic, and Sports (all from Make Now Press), is reviewed in the current print edition of Rain Taxi Review of Books. Goldsmith has also edited I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, is the impresario behind the astonishing online archive UbuWeb, and hosts a weekly radio show on WFMU in New York City.

The following interview with Goldsmith, conducted by Kareem Estefan on WNYU Radio’s “Ceptuetics” show, took place on March 26, 2008, and has been lightly edited for publication.

Kareem Estefan: Let’s start out by talking about your most recent book, Sports, and the American Trilogy that’s now complete. Could you tell us a bit about the project on the whole?

Kenneth Goldsmith: Yeah, the project as a whole is, as you said, an American Trilogy, also known as the “On the Ones” trilogy. It’s three books: The Weather, Traffic, and Sports. The first book is a year’s worth of weather reports, all recorded daily and transcribed from 10/10 WINS here in New York (for those of you who are not from New York, it’s all news all the time—they give weather, traffic, and sports every ten minutes). The second part of the trilogy is called Traffic, and it is a day’s worth of traffic reports, recorded ten minutes apart from each other, transcribed for 24 hours. And the final piece is called Sports, and that is a full transcription of the longest nine inning Major League Baseball game in history, and that was August 18, 2006, the Yankees vs. the Red Sox, the second part of a double header at Fenway Park.

KE: I can’t tell how boring this one will be. [laughter] How long is it?

KG: It’s as long as the other ones, they’re all about 120 pages. Oddly enough, they’re all identical size. This is a very boring book, because it’s said that in a typical baseball game—which is two, two-and-a-half hours—eight minutes of action happens. This, being the longest one, is almost five-and-a-half hours, and only about 14 minutes of action happen. So how do they possibly fill the time for five hours? It’s absolutely painful. But it was a great game!

KE: It also seems like a good metaphor for your work. You’ve often said that your writing is “extreme writing” and that you’d win an Olympics medal for the boredom that you perform; you’ve also talked about writing in a kind of athletic way, the feat of writing. And this one is very much an American book, as all of your work has been.

KG: It’s also very New York. It’s the traffic in New York, listening to the names of the streets. I read from Traffic in California recently, and all the former New Yorkers came rushing up to me and said, “God, hearing that makes me wish I was stuck in traffic on the BQE! I’m so nostalgic for New York-style traffic jams.”

KE: [laughter] Yeah, it is very distinctly New York. I wanted to talk about another book that’s coming out soon too, your anthology of conceptual writing, called Against Expression, which is co-edited with Craig Dworkin. This movement seems to be getting a lot of visibility recently—you’re posting on the Poetry Foundation blog, definitely reaching a lot of poetry fans not normally into some of the more avant-garde strains of poetry, and there’s also a conference coming up called “Conceptual Poetry and Its Others” at the University of Arizona. Just wondering if you wanted to comment on the extent to which conceptual writing is now a movement (or is not), especially maybe in relation to Conceptual Art, which for a long time struggled with the narrowness of this name and struggled to define itself.

KG: Well, I often am fond of quoting Brion Gysin that “Writing is fifty years behind painting,” and that remains true today. So, in terms of Conceptual Art, which was finished about 40 years ago, we’re just getting to that now in writing. It really is a bit of a lag. There have been strains and gestures toward conceptual writing, but it always seemed like it was wrapped up in a more conventional pose of poetry—even what we consider to be the most avant-garde and innovative poetry of recent times still looked and felt very much like poetry. Our last avant-garde in poetry might be equivalent to Abstract Expressionism. And suddenly, in the early 60s in the art world, with ideas of Pop Art, painting became something in quotations, and hence leaping off into gestures of Conceptual Art, Minimal Art, and all the other visual strains of the 1960s.

So, in a sense, this is very much a break from what looks and feels like poetry, because most of the stuff really doesn’t. And yet it’s not fiction. It is received within the poetry world, so it has a very direct discourse with poetry—hence, I believe, making it poetry, because I can’t imagine what else it could possibly be. And the poetry world is very receptive to it, as opposed to the fiction world, which absolutely has no interest, no sense of what to do with this. In fact, poetry was looking for its next move and I think it’s found it here.

KE: Which is interesting also because most of the books of conceptual writing have the heft of novels. They look very different from most poetry books.

KG: Well, there’s a reason for that, because a lot of this type of writing is reflecting the environment that we’re living in now, which is an environment rife with multitudes of information. And a lot of that language is being recycled, and being managed, and being shoved and pushed around. So it really is a management of information sort of a movement now. You’re not going to tackle tactics of moving information by putting a few sparse words on a page. Most of this work is being done by pushing a great deal of text into some sort of form.

KE: Bruce Andrews was on this show two weeks ago and he was talking about how using a paper cutter really changed his work—it made his writing break up into a modular process, and you’ve talked a lot about cut-and-pasting, OCR’ing, all the new technologies available with the Internet and networks. It seems like both Language writing and conceptual writing are movements that emphasize the materiality of language. And this is something that has been coming up for a long time in writing, but what seems different to me about conceptual writing is the fluidity that comes with this new idea of language as matter, how everything can drip much more easily. So I was wondering if you saw that difference, or thought that was something that was also technologically rooted?

KG: Well, I think every movement is right for its time. Certainly, these types of ideas that are currently being informed by all the technology that’s around us couldn’t have possibly made any sense 30 years ago, 20 years ago when a type of writing like Language writing was in process. Of course, a paper cutter is what you had to work with then; back then, words were locked onto a page and the only way to get them off was not really to get them off, but you could Xerox them, and you have a new page with words still imprisoned on them. And the difference, I think, is that the language that we’re working with today is completely fluid; it’s lifted off the page and therefore able to be poured into so many different forms and take so many different shapes and really be molded and sculpted in a way that wasn’t possible before. So it strikes me that the move of conceptual writing is a writing for this moment, and 20 years from now, it too will seem tied to its time, and to its technologies, which of course will be obsolete by then.

KE: Which is great because your works do very much concretize a moment; looking at a work like Soliloquy, which was coming at the moment of the Internet’s arrival, everything there seems so dated and at the same time, you’re there in the book saying, “10 years from now, this is going to look so, so primitive.” There are a lot of temporal dimensions to your work and a constant negotiation with time and especially how that affects art and movements’ passings.

KG: I think that it’s sort of great that things get dated, because five years after something’s done it looks terribly dated, but 10 or 15 years later, it looks really cool and nostalgic and very hip. It gains this sort of patina of time. So you’re writing in the moment, you’re recording the moment, but it moves beautifully into the future – the moment gets better as we get further away from it.

KE: I wanted to bring up one of the aspects that separates conceptual writing from OuLiPo, which proposed many similar ideas based on constraint. And you’ve said elsewhere that you like the idea of realizing a work and seeing how it’s transformed by becoming more than simply potential literature. At the same time, though, you say that people don’t need to read your books and you offer “wrappers” instead, which are short summaries of the books’ concepts. So in that case, why move beyond the wrappers? There seems to be some kind of paradox there, both maintaining that you only need to know the idea of the work, but at the same time wanting to do more than the idea.

KG: I think that there is something to making a commitment and actually realizing the piece even if the results are identical from a mere cut-and-paste. Having gone through this, I think, adds almost an invisible dimension of credibility to the work. I once had a pottery teacher in art school and she said, “If you’re making a sealed jar”—that’s a jar with a lid that will not come off, you know, a decorative thing—she said, “you have to make the inside as perfect and as beautiful as the outside even though no one will ever see it, because it will radiate its aura through the outside. You will feel it.”

So in a sense, these things are very important to be doing. And actually, this is one of the ideas behind a realized text. Also, today because we are in the process of learning how to manage information as a writing practice, we need practice. We actually need to get our hands on massive amounts of this stuff and push it around and really see what it can do. To theorize about it, it’s an approach. . . I think Rob Fitterman often talks about a post-conceptual writing, which I find very interesting, and I think one of the strategies of post-conceptual writing will be a return back to a gesture, a suggestion, no need to realize it, and I look forward to that as well.

KE: That’s an interesting idea, and, not to out you here, but I also think it’s worth mentioning that many times the concepts don’t quite get realized. You’ve talked often about how Fidget failed in a way, or by its inherent nature could not have succeeded, but also The Weather, for example, is not a transcription of every day’s weather, there are actually about 200-some if I’ve counted correctly. And I wondered if that is something that happened consciously with you, if you kind of savor these moments where the realized book differs from the concept and if that’s a worthwhile point of discussion.

KG: One typo will change an entire book. . . if there’s one typo in it or one purposely misspelled word, it becomes an entirely new text. So the books are filled with errors, absolutely—because it’s absolutely impossible to read these things, nobody will sit down and properly proofread these things—they’re absolutely riddled with human error, which is fine because I am doing these things.

So I actually don’t have a problem with that—in terms of The Weather, I mean, I travel a lot and how in the world would I have done that back then, and I’m not going to not travel, so yes, the wrapper is different than the text. There are a number of surprises in the text and shorthand is shorthand—it can’t possibly say what a text can say. And people tell me, who have read these things, that in fact there’s great satisfaction from actually reading these texts. I wouldn’t know. I haven’t read them.

KE: I think I fall on that side of things, actually. What’s interesting is in “Paragraphs of Conceptual Writing,” which is of course a moment of stealing from Sol LeWitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” you and he write that “the basic unit should be deliberately uninteresting”—and this suggests a reading on the conceptual level rather than say, the level of the sentence. But especially with a book like Soliloquy, which I think you’ve talked about as a kind of transformative work because it made you hear language in a different way, there is the same experience for a reader who sits through it and gets to then afterwards walk around and hear the words that he or she says and experience what it would be like to be recording that.

And at the same time there are also some really interesting small moments in the book, where you have a line where you couldn’t understand the words that you were saying, I’m assuming, in transcribing. And the moments they happen are pretty funny sometimes—they seem like a moment you’re going to admit something that might be controversial or they seem like a moment where you would be embarrassed to admit what you were saying, and I love this kind of moment where we say, is he holding something back from us? There’s a lot of referring back to your performance of the books. So I was wondering what it’s like for you to perform a book like Fidget and Soliloquy, what it’s like during that day of Fidget, during that week of Soliloquy, to know this is going to end up as a book?

KG: Well, I would only do a little test for each one. For example, before I did Soliloquy, I would do some tests over maybe the course of a couple of hours and type it out.

You see, we don’t know what the books are going to look like, because how does one transcribe? This is why it’s important to realize these books. What decisions are made to make this book look this way? How are you going to punctuate this thing or are you going to punctuate this thing? Will it flow, will it be justified. . . there are thousands of decisions to writing the book outside of the performance. I don’t know what the books are going to look like until I sit down and I actually transcribe. In other words, I can theorize the work of literature but until it’s realized, I have absolutely no idea, and it’s always a surprise.

But I always find a sort of style in the transcription, I’ve got a very consistent style of transcription, it’s my very own way of writing. As a matter of fact, if I gave you the same exact tape to transcribe, say of the Sports game, you would transcribe it extremely differently than I would. So even though this is uncreative writing, often my point is that no matter how hard you try, you can’t stop who you are, how you operate, what your tastes are and what your decisions are.

Sometimes people in my classes come to me fearful that if I ask them to retype something they are going to become robots—but in fact, in the typing everybody somehow manages to very much express themselves.

KE: Since we brought up the class, how are they going? How are students reacting to the idea of uncreative writing and to doing this kind of work?

KG: I think that they are very, very good at this. They are very well-practiced at plagiarism, fraud, identify theft, repurposing papers. . . the question is what happens when you bring those practices out into the open and you say it’s OK to do that, as a matter of fact you must do that, and let’s examine what you’re doing and what choices you’re making. Suddenly the whole game changes and there’s all sorts of accountability that starts to happen for certain gestures that were never considered before, and it’s the same type of accountability that anybody who’s writing anything has to engage with. Certain questions need to be asked and certain questions need to be answered, and you need to be very smart, you can’t simply say “well, I don’t know.” You need to know exactly why you’re doing it and how you’re doing it, so it’s actually terrific, and I think that once one engages in a considered manner of all of these negative—or what the culture calls negative—dialectics, for lack of a better word, they find that their writing and their approach to language is forever changed.

KE: Since it really is a very strenuous process to come up with this kind of concept that you can defend from all angles, I was wondering, do you have a lot of work that goes unrealized precisely because you dispose of the idea, thinking this won’t come out in a way that I’ll be satisfied with. How often are you brainstorming and throwing things away?

KG: No, I have very few ideas. I have very few ideas, and I simply commit to doing that idea. You know, this trilogy is five years of my life, writing these three books. It takes a long time to do each one and the thing about books is they just have an incredibly long life that people don’t forget. A career builds, one upon another, particularly with books like this that are very easy to reference with a wrapper. Soliloquy was done, was recorded in 1996, so that’s 12 years ago. And yet it’s still, you know, you talk about it as if it happened fairly recently. In the art world, you don’t get this sort of thing. People can’t possibly remember what you did three years ago. And so, these very definitive gestures, if I’m going to make a gesture, to do a book, I’ll have to sort of feel that it was worth all that time, which can be up to 12 years of one’s life and possibly much longer.

KE: Since we’re on WNYU, I wanted to ask you a little bit about your shows on WFMU, what you’ve done on there and how it overlaps with your writing.

KG: Well, it’s my Dionysian side. [laughter] There’s a lot of shows that I do on FMU that are readings of my books: I think I spent two three-hour shows back-to-back reading Traffic, reading The Weather, and they’re also just insane conceptual gestures that happen during the course of the show. And a lot of stuff that comes out of radio ends up sort of becoming the corpus of my own work—for example, singing theoretical texts is something that came up out of a radio practice and now is viewed as part and parcel of what I do.

You see, my work is multi-pronged, and one prong of course is writing, another prong is pedagogy, which is the teaching that I do at Penn, which is really the same gesture as the writing, which is really the same gesture as the radio show, which is really the same gesture as UbuWeb, and they’re all one big piece of the pie. As a matter of fact, people have been saying that maybe UbuWeb really is the best work I’ve done. I haven’t framed it as an art work, but I’m ready and very happy to accept that as an art work, maybe they’re right.

KE: Yeah, it seems kind of like the direction that Lucy Lippard took. She often would exhibit works with many of the same strategies that the conceptual artists did, and at one point in Six Years, she says “critics are the original appropriators,” which I thought was great. In a lot of ways, the art of UbuWeb is speaking through the things posted on there and in a sense, is a form of exhibition-as-art.

KG: Well, it’s a new approach. Never before has a sort of general rubric or umbrella of the avant-garde been proposed and maintained of this volume. You’ve had fragments, you’ve had collections of things, but never has such an enormous amount of material that is tied together only by a vague idea of avant-garde . . . and by the way, the idea of what is avant-garde is always changing.

And yet these works are sort of living with each other and dialoguing with each other, often very, very low works and very, very high works all living in the same space dialoguing with each other in a very natural and organic way. So I think, again, it’s our technology and our time that permits us to create something like UbuWeb.

KE: Do you see UbuWeb as a kind of community for people who are talking about some of the same things? There’s a listserv, is it somewhere that you’re discussing your work? Is there creative work coming out of it, or uncreative work coming out of it?

KG: I don’t know. I mean, the usership is worldwide, it’s so vast. You can’t possibly imagine how much bandwidth and traffic this site draws. I really don’t know how it’s being used and I don’t foster community around it. It creates its own community, simply because as some sort of an institution on the web, it exists and draws certain like-minded people in large numbers to it. I think that constitutes an ideal community.

Click here to purchase Traffic at your local independent bookstore

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