http://www.christopherhiggs.org/
Christopher Higgs recommends Tierra Whack's WHACK WORLD, Otomo Yoshihide's ANODE, Marlon James's BLACK LEOPARD, RED WOLF, and a lunch of cucumber, tomato, red onion, feta, olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper.
Consider the singing of suspended telephone lines or the vibration of a car antenna at certain mid-gruesome speeds. (A similar aeolian phenomenon is “flutter,” caused by vortices on the leeward side of the wire, distinguished from “gallop” by its high-frequency, low-amplitude motion.) To do so would be synonymous with considering the Kármán vortex street: a term in fluid dynamics for a repeating pattern of swirling vortices caused by the unsteady separation of a fluid’s flow over bluff bodies.
–from Gabrielle de Vietri
The always awesome thought-space continent. has an excerpt from Jamie Iredell’s forthcoming nonfiction book, Last Mass, a memoir about growing up as a Catholic in California, and about the Spanish missionaries who first settled the state.
I can only imagine how golden the whole book will be, given that this brief excerpt covers dinosaurs, hallucinogens, Sir Francis Drake, Wallace Stevens, quantum physics, The Sound of Music, and the Devil, just to name a few. Here’s a snippet, then check out the whole thing:
For those of you who might be interested, click through for the reading list I’ve assigned the students taking my “Introduction to Experimental Literature” course this semester.
(the brainchild of Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer)
Some of the goodies you’ll find there include…
(1) Exclusive Interview with Thomas Ligotti on Weird Fiction (Includes Ligotti’s top picks for under-appreciated weird fiction!)
(2) “Maldoror Abroad” by K.J. Bishop (The author’s infamous tribute to Comte de Lautréamont’s Decadent classic “Les Chantes de Maldoror”)
(3) Reza Negarestani’s essay “All of a Twist” (An Exploration of Narration, Touching on Negarestani’s Novel Cyclonopedia)
(4) China Miéville’s essay “M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire Weird; Hauntological: Versus and/or and and/or or?”
(5) Algernon Blackwood’s short story “The Willows”
In a recent interview with Bat Segundo, Dennis Cooper said, “Well, yeah, my books are in some fundamental way always about reconciling confusion. Because that’s of super interest to me. And language presents this idea that confusion can be corralled and all that stuff. And it can’t. And that tension does interest me.”
“Reconciling confusion” is a terrific way of describing the intellectual/affective exercise at the heart of what draws me to literature. In the absence of confusion, most books quickly lose my interest. Probably this is why I am drawn to “experimental literature” and why I see a connection between it and “genre fiction” (mystery, horror, and sci-fi especially — all three of which rely upon varying levels of confusion/opacity/defamiliarization).
I am currently reading Cooper’s newest book, The Marbled Swarm, which reinvigorates language in ways akin to how Godard reinvigorated cinema between 1961-1967. Affinities aroused so far include: Pauline Réage’s The Story of O, Vítězslav Nezval’s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, and various of Edgar Allan Poe’s finest stories (e.g. “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Pit and Pendulum”). I won’t say anymore about it yet, as I am still caught in its spell and must finish and untangle before expressing the flood of my admiration, but suffice to say: if you have not yet cracked its spine I implore you to do so immediately. Something dark and mysterious haunts each sentence. In the near future I intend to elaborate on how I see The Marbled Swarm as exemplary of an emergent constellation of texts I want to identify as Nouveau Gothic.
But not now. That’s just a teaser trailer. For now, below the jump, in lieu of music (as I’ve done the past few months) I’ll share with you the current cluster of tabs I have open on my computer. Food for your writing…perhaps?
Finishing Line Press, 2011
Bat & Man: A Sonnet Comic Book is a chapbook of sonnets about Batman. They’re persona poems spoken in dialogue, between Selina Kyle and Bruce Wayne, with the driving narrative that she has woken him up from a nightmare, and he describes it to her, sonnet by sonnet. Each one adds to what you might recognize as the ritual activity of most Batman comics and other media: retracing what led Bruce Wayne to become Batman, revising that story in the process. This revision is part Citizen Kane and part Yeats, with a kind of comic-gothic inflection to the whole thing that might be what Stephen Burt calls Lowellian, in his essay, “Poems About Superheroes.”
I did this sort of post last month. Thought I’d do it again.
It’s Saturday. I’m reading L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine issue #6, which opens with a special section devoted to three chunks from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. Michael Davidson offers the first contribution in the issue, which he begins by making a distinction between the two ways that Stein scholars tended to categorize her work (granted this issue came out in 1978, but the categories still seem to be pretty paradigmatic examples of orthodox Stein interpretation): on the one hand, Davidson argues, her writing is seen as all play, deriving strictly out of her early research work with William James and automatic writing and later invigorated by Cubist formalism; on the other hand, her writing is seen as hermetically Symbolist, concerned with encoding sexual and biographical information in complex little verbal machines which contextualize their own environments. Both views, Davidson says, operate on either side of a referential paradigm: one wants her to mean nothing and the other wants her to mean intrinsically. But what makes Tender Buttons so vital, Davidson argues, is not the strategies by which meaning is avoided or encoded but how each piece points at possibilities for meaning.
I like this argument. It’s not about meaning vs. meaninglessness, it’s about exploring the possibilities engendered by the confounding nature of the text.
Anyway, here are five albums (plus two extra bonus albums!) I’ve recently been spinning, which I thought you might find interesting (hint: if you click on the artist and title it will take you to the magic place):
Pitchfork says: “Unfortunately, none of these songs actually feel like songs. Only a few have choruses or any significant chord changes. Instead, they’re set pieces, which makes sense: Lynch’s films often seem to be more about luxuriating in his atmosphere than about following his plots, and that carries over to this music as well.”
Paste says: “What a mess…Crazy Clown Time, recorded in Lynch’s personal studio with engineer Big Dean Hurley, isn’t exactly fart-blank, but this visual master shouldn’t quit his day job.”
The Atlantic says: “Lynch dares to disturb, and that requires a bravery that cares not for our comfort, but for the integrity of the art itself.”
NPR says: “It sounds absurd, yes, and Crazy Clown Time … won’t be for everyone. But you can be sure that no two people will come away with the same experience of this record, and there aren’t many artists working today who can make that claim.”
