http://www.christopherhiggs.org/
is currently pursing a Ph.D. in American Literature and International Modernism at Florida State University. In addition, he wrote a novel called The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney, published by Sator Press in 2010. He also curates the online art gallery Bright Stupid Confetti.
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.”
Fundraiser sale = 3 chaplets for $10.
With tons of good-sounding ones, including:
Amina Cain: Hunger
Danielle Dutton: from A World Called the Blazing World
Carmen Giménez Smith: Can We Talk Here
Bhanu Kapil: (a poem-essay, or precursor: NOTES: for a novel: Ban en Banlieues)
Vanessa Place: Untitled #5
Nada Gordon: SOng of My OWnself
Leslie Scalapino: ‘Can’t is ‘Night’
and many more!!!
Sale ends Nov. 15th, so get them while you can.
Also check out their Annual Benefit Performance and Live Auction on December 13th in NYC. Advanced tickets are on sale now.
Welcome to the fifth installment of my new series: Reading Comics. I’ve still got a bunch of great contributors lined up, but I’m also looking for more voices. If you’d like to contribute just email me and let me know! Without further ado….here’s Salvatore Pane…
The Strangest Moment of Your Life: My Trip to New York ComicCon
I’ve only been to two comic book conventions in my life. The first was in 1995 in a Holiday Inn lounge in Scranton, Pennsylvania. I was already an avid comic book reader and had a dedicated shop that handled all of my purchases. I went to the convention mainly to ogle the Star Wars collectible game cards. I played every day after school with my friends, and my chief tactic was putting IG-88 in an AT-AT and setting him loose on the sand dunes of Tantooine, a bit of universe defying logic I thought was both hilarious and charming. Two weeks ago I attended my second convention, New York ComicCon. I thought I knew what to expect. I’d seen coverage of San Diego ComicCon, NYCC’s more movie obsessed older brother, the familiar news clips of people strutting around conference halls dressed like Comet the Super Horse or Ego the Living Planet, clipped footage of the men and women of tomorrow here today in tight fitting spandex every color of the rainbow. I followed the comic industry via fan sites like Newsarama and iFanboy ever since I took a graphic novel course in college and discovered that bam, pow comics weren’t just for kids anymore. They were aimed at me. The nostalgic twenty-something who wanted to re-consume the tales of their youth. Trade paperback editions of Amazing Spider-Man and Daredevil sat perfectly on my shelves next to hundreds of hunted down Nintendo Entertainment System games and mostly unwatched DVD collections of Ducktales and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This rekindled interest in the preferred storytelling medium of my childhood led me to try my hand at writing comics. As I spent mornings working on prose, trying so hard to be literary, I spent nights in a world of joy and wonder, scripting rooftop scenes of madcap adventure. My best friend Mark and I co-wrote a comic, and it was accepted for publication. He was the one who suggested we go to NYCC, and as we drove across Pennsylvania and into New York City proper, I kept thinking about AWP. It had to be similar, right?
For Tim Jones-Yelvington, who recently began an interesting conversation about surfaces and the superficial…
PS – from the comment stream on Tim’s post, A D Jameson and I have decided to hold a conversation/debate/dialogue on experimental literature, the role/function of art, and other gooey topics, this December here at HTMLGIANT…so, stay tuned!
Welcome to the fourth installment of my new series: Reading Comics. I’m excited to report that I’ve got a bunch of great contributors lined up, and am myself working on a few entries. If you haven’t contacted me yet, but would like to participate, email me and let me know! Without further ado….here’s Peter Tieryas Liu…
100 Bullets are 100 issues packed with graphic brutality, tales of moral compunction, and the evolution of noir into a merging of both crime fiction and pseudo-history. Every gunshot exposes frailties in the cracks of a society pining for justice. The premise of the comic goes something like this. You’re the victim of an unforgivably heinous crime. Down on your luck, the mysterious Agent Graves informs you that the cause of all your suffering is Person X. He offers you an attaché case filled with a gun and 100 untraceable bullets that you can use in any way you want without legal repercussions. What would you do?
Yesterday I finally got a chance to read Dennis Cooper’s superlative interview in the new Paris Review. If you haven’t read it yet, you should treat yourself.
One thing that struck me was at the beginning when Dennis explains that he got interested in literature because he read an interview with Bob Dylan where Dylan mentioned Rimbaud. I had a similar experience in that I came to literature through Jim Morrison. I wonder how many other people found their way to books through musicians?
It’s Saturday. I’m working on a paper I’ll be presenting in two weeks at the A.S.A.P. conference in Pittsburgh, entitled: “Gen-Web: The Emergent Literary Coterie.” My goal will be, in part, to bring the current online literary scene to the dinner table of academia. If you should find yourself in PA between October 27-30, you should come by the Wyndham Hotel and catch a panel or two. It’s gonna be a kick-ass conference, because it’s geared toward bleeding-edge research and innovative approaches to literature. The president of the association is a mentor of mine, Brian McHale, who has written extensively about innovative literature, including the seminal volume Postmodernist Fiction. The advisory committee for the organization includes Charles Bernstein, N. Katherine Hayles, Linda Hutcheon, Michael Berube and many other internationally recognized and groundbreaking scholars and distinguished practitioners in the contemporary arts. So the atmosphere should be pretty cool. If you’re around Friday night, for instance, Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid) will be giving a plenary session at the Warhol Museum. Not to mention, Friday afternoon htmlgiant friends Johannes Göransson & Joyelle McSweeney will team up with Josh Corey and Monica Mody to present a panel on “The Pastoral and the Necropastoral.”
This post isn’t going to be about that, though. Instead it’s going to be about some music I’ve been listening to lately…
Welcome to the third installment of my new series: Reading Comics. I’m excited to report that I’ve got a bunch of great contributors lined up, and am myself working on a few entries. If you haven’t contacted me yet, but would like to participate, email me and let me know! Without further ado….here’s Bradley Sands…
Why I Like to Read Superhero Comics but Don’t Really Like Superheroes
I am 32-years-old and I have been reading comics since I was in elementary school. Although I enjoy “alternative comics,” the kinds of comics that intrigue me the most are the mainstream superhero comics published by Marvel and DC Comics that I’ve read off and on since childhood. Although the idea of superheroes excited me when I was young, they no longer have this effect on me. But what intrigues me about the comics being published by these two companies are qualities that no other narratives share (except for perhaps soap operas to a small degree, although I find them unwatchable).
Welcome to the second installment of my new series: Reading Comics. I’m excited to report that I’ve got a bunch of great contributors lined up, and am myself working on a few entries. If you haven’t contacted me yet, but would like to participate, email me and let me know! Without further ado….here’s Christopher Lirette…
“The Libertine Adventures of Scott and Jean, or Genocidal Orgasm and Mystical Unions in the Dark Phoenix Saga”
Over the last few weeks, my students and I read Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s 1980 Marvel comics classic “Dark Phoenix Saga,” the most popular story in Uncanny X-Men. I’m teaching a class focusing on superheroines and depictions of women kicking ass under the rubric of gender and sexuality. So far, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to teach that there’s more to studying gender in literature than pointing out moments of sexism—a harder task than I thought it would be, perhaps because our primary texts feature scantily clad women beating up villains and forming romance with dudes whose clothes get caught in their muscle striations. Although William Marston Moulton created Wonder Woman in 1942 to combat “the blood-curdling masculinity” he found plaguing titles such as Batman and Superman, it’s not until “Dark Phoenix Saga” that we get a comic book that truly addresses the problem of the deuxième sexe superheroique: a story that revels in the messiness of desire, one whose heroine’s problems, while mythic, symbolize the contradictory messages real people receive about gender.
Welcome to the first installment of my new series: Reading Comics. I’m excited to report that I’ve got a bunch of great contributors lined up, and am myself working on a few entries. If you haven’t contacted me yet, but would like to participate, email me and let me know! Without further ado….here’s Greg Hunter…
Daredevil #4 (Story by Mark Waid, Art by Marcos Martin)
Shortly before the arrival of DC Comics’ New 52, DC’s competitor Marvel released the first issue of a new series starring its blind crimefighter Daredevil. In light of the timing, the new Daredevil serves as a parallel study in what makes a relaunch succeed or fail. And, if the first few issues are any indication, a master class.
Now is an exciting time for comic book lovers and newbies alike, in part because DC comics has decided to restart their entire catalog. “The New 52” they’re calling it. A complete reboot: new writers, new artists, new storylines, and a reset to issue #1 for everything. I’ve decided to use this event as a motivator to get myself more involved with comic books. Over the past few years my interest in them has grown, but it’s still an unfamiliar world and I have a lot to learn, which is both exciting and a little intimidating. On that note, I thought perhaps I’d share with you some ideas, reactions, commentary about the comic books I’m reading — maybe make this an ongoing thing, a new series: “Reading Comics.” Perhaps I’ll also ask a few writers that I know of who are into comics to contribute to the series. (If you’re interested in contributing a few words about reading comics, email me at higgs dot chris at gmail.)
To begin, new comics come out on Wednesday. Here’s what I got today:
Swamp Thing #1
Animal Man #1
Frankenstein: Agent of S.H.A.D.E. #1
Severed #1 & #2
After the jump, I’ll share a bit about my history with comic books in order to contextualize my perspective. Then, in the not too distant future, I’ll offer a few thoughts about the comics on that list. So far I’ve read the Animal Man and Severed #1. Both are really good!
Geoffrey Gatza, the editor of BlazeVOX, has issued a statement. In it he writes:
BlazeVOX is not closing its doors.
That said, I feel like I should explain a bit further the co-operative nature of our business model. I am not going to change what we do, but I do acknowledge that perhaps I could communicate what we do a little better.
I, for one, am glad to hear that BlazeVox will not be closing down, and that Gatza has decided to work toward a more transparent policy.
Conversation abounds: Johannes Göransson, Shanna Compton, Michael Kelleher, Craig Santos Perez, Reb Livingston, Collin Kelley, Justin Evans, and Christopher Janke are among the voices to have weighed in on the subject.
I saw on Facebook where Matt Bell had written:
A really disheartening post at Bark about BlazeVOX’s new “acceptance” letter for book manuscripts, where they require a $250 donation from the author before publishing. BlazeVOX has published a couple books I’ve really loved, which makes me sorry and disappointed and angry to read this. I know times are tough, but preying on writers isn’t the solution.
I clicked on the link and read the article written by Brett Ortler, which outlines his exchange with BlazeVOX editor Geoffrey Gatza.
I echo Matt’s response: this is troubling and disheartening. For those of you out there who are new to creative writing, who are currently in the process of learning the ropes of publishing, it is considered unethical for a publisher to ask you to pay to have your work published. Back in the day, before the internet, there used to be this thing called The Writer’s Market (maybe it still exists?), which was this huge brick of a book that helped writers find places to send their work. It also included helpful essays about publishing. One of the first rules you would learn by reading The Writer’s Market is that anyone who asks you for money to publish your work should not be trusted.
Like Matt, I admit that BlazeVOX has published a few books I’ve loved (and written about or run promos for here), but this sort of pay-to-publish policy seriously threatens to diminish the press’s legitimacy in my eyes.
