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.
if all that all that yes if all that is not how shall I say no answer if all that is not false yes
all these calculations yes explanations yes the whole story from beginning to end yes completely false yes
-from How It Is
Yesterday was Beckett’s birthday (he’d have been 104).
To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.
-from Watt
Last semester, while I was studying theories of modernism with S. E. Gontarski, I got the opportunity to copy edit Jean-Michel Rabaté’s contribution to the just-released collection of original essays by leading Beckett scholars and biographers, A Companion to Samuel Beckett.
Rabaté’s essay is called “Philosophizing with Beckett: Adorno and Badiou.” It’s pretty interesting. Here’s a taste:
Frowns Need Friends Too
by Sam Pink
Sam says, “definitely a must-have for fans of good-ass poetry. this book is lines written from 2007-2009, including what little remains of the rare chapbook “yum yum i can’t wait to die”. journalists have dubbed the genre “schiz-emo.” and, you know my friends, i was touring for this book, in the phillipines, and, and i’ll never forget. after this reading, a little old lady came up to me, and, and, i’ll never forget it, she had this look on her face. and i said, “mother, what is the trouble.” and she took my hand in both of hers and she started to cry. and friends, i’ll never forget what she said. she said, “young man, your book, FROWNS NEED FRIENDS TOO, it, it gave me the courage to do what i thought i could never do: murder my first born son in his sleep.” the book also includes front and back cover art done by the author, me. many of the poems were published with journals affiliated with a college, so, you know. “
Earlier today Roxane posted about the merits of what she called “good stories.” She also invoked a discussion of the conventional/experimental split. I have just read her post and feel compelled to respond. (Thanks, Roxane, for providing such a provocative post!)
Let me admit right up front that this post is going to be impromptu, and therefore the organization of my thoughts will presumably be scattershot, and in no way comprehensive. I am not going to edit this post; I’m just going to type off the cuff and then post the post. I have to do it this way or else I’ll do like I always do, which is to say that I’ll tell myself I’m going to write a post responding to Roxane’s post, but then I won’t ever get around to doing it.
So here goes my thoughts as they occur to me…
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“The People of the Black Circle” is one of the original Conan the Barbarian stories, written by American author Robert E. Howard and first published in Weird Tales magazine in three parts over the September, October and November 1934 issues. Howard earned $250 for the publication of this story.
from Chapter VIII: Yasmina Knows Stark Terror
Yasmina had time but for one scream when she felt herself enveloped in that crimson whirl and torn from her protector with appalling force. She screamed once, and then she had no breath to scream. She was blinded, deafened, rendered mute and eventually senseless by the terrific rushing of the air about her. There was a dazed consciousness of dizzy height and numbing speed, a confused impression of natural sensations gone mad, and then vertigo and oblivion.
A vestige of these sensations clung to her as she recovered consciousness; so she cried out and clutched wildly as though to stay a headlong and involuntary flight. Her fingers closed on soft fabric, and a relieving sense of stability pervaded her. She took cognizance of her surroundings.
She was lying on a dais covered with black velvet. This dais stood in a great, dim room whose walls were hung with dusky tapestries across which crawled dragons reproduced with repellent realism. Floating shadows merely hinted at the lofty ceiling, and gloom that lent itself to illusion lurked in the corners. There seemed to be neither windows nor doors in the walls, or else they were concealed by the nighted tapestries. Where the dim light came from, Yasmina could not determine. The great room was a realm of mysteries, or shadows, and shadowy shapes in which she could not have sworn to observe movement, yet which invaded her mind with a dim and formless terror.
“The book is the subject and the object of the book.” (pg. 137)
“In a certain respect, [From Old Notebooks] represents little more than the garbage can of my imagination.” (pg. 75)
One afternoon I checked my facebook page and saw in the news feed thing a post by Evan Lavender-Smith, which included blurbs for his book From Old Notebooks. What struck me about the post was that instead of the blurbs being from other “creative” writers, they were from literary critics, and not just any literary critics, but some of the biggest names in Deleuze Studies: Claire Colebrook and Ian Buchanan, to name only two. Knowing nothing else about it, I automatically wanted to purchase the book and read it.
What follows are some thoughts, having finished it last night.
Uber cool Kate Durbin has created a new journal called Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writings and Art About Lady Gaga . Right now it features work from Meghan Vicks (a doctoral student of Comparative Literature at CU Boulder) and htmlgiant comrade Brian Oliu. Here’s the scoop:
Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writings and Art About Lady Gaga is a new technological breed of journal that intends to take seriously the brazenly unserious shock pop phenomenon and fame monster known as Lady Gaga.
Submit:
Critical Work (any format; any length) and Art (Creative Writings, Visual Art, Music, etc.), or any combination thereof, that intelligently interacts with the pop cultural manifestation that is Lady Gaga.
We are also interested in critical writings on the web that already exist, so please call these to our attention if you come across them.
Those who follow Gaga know that she moves as the speed of pop, which is far faster than the speed of critique; therefore, we have chosen the blogger format for now to allow us to keep pace with Gaga. We encourage pieces that are immediate (for example, critical responses to her newest performances, interviews, and music videos), though we are also eager for your more thought-over works as well. If your work is accepted, expect it to be published quickly–likely within a day or two of acceptance. You should also expect to interact with others in the comment boxes of the blog; permitting the peanut-crunching crowd of monsters to further the conversation’s evolution.
Our goal is to eventually create a book of the best works on this site, both in technological and physical form, possibly in collaboration with the Haus of Gaga.
Send all submissions to gagajournal@gmail.com
Last week I mentioned that I had asked Kyle Minor (author of In the Devil’s Territory, Dzanc 2008) to participate in a public conversation about our differences of opinion vis-à-vis literature. He was kind enough to take me up on the offer.
HIGGS: Let me start by saying thanks for taking time to discuss a topic I know we are both passionate about but approach from different angles: the creation of prose.
MINOR: We’ve been discussing it for a long time. I’m glad to finally do it in a more public manner.
HIGGS: Prose writing, for me, is first and foremost a form of art. I have this commitment to preserving the autonomy of art, i.e., art for art’s sake, which I think you don’t share with me.
MINOR: I agree that prose writing is a form of art. I also believe that it is a form of communication, and that on the other side there is a reader. I don’t think that the writer who believes in the reader is necessarily acceding to the tyranny of some particular imagined reader. But I do think that, for me at least, literature started in reading, and one of the things I aim to do when I write is to deliver to the reader pleasures akin to the pleasures that other writers delivered to me.
HIGGS: So when you sit down to construct, are you consciously thinking about the reader?
My friend (and highly respected Giant commenter) Kyle Minor has a new story called “The Truth and All Its Ugly” live at Harper Perennial’s Fifty-Two Stories.
I forgive him for being a storyteller only because he’s one of our generation’s finest.
Hopefully he’ll take me up on my offer to hold a public conversation here at htmlgiant about our differing perspectives on the art of fiction. He’s a powerhouse of literary knowledge.
At any rate, here’s a taste of the new story:
I kept walking, him on my shoulder, axe in my free hand, until I reached the clearing. Then, careful not to wake him, I unbuttoned my jacket and got it out from under him and took it off and laid it on the ground. Then I laid him down on it and made sure he was still sleeping. Then I lifted up the axe and aimed it for the joint where his head met his neck and brought it down.
Published in French in 2006, two years after his death, this book is a long lecture (which actually turned into a ten-hour seminar) that he wrote for the 1997 Cerisy conference on his work titled “The Autobiographical Animal.”
Here Derrida sets his sights on the philosophical problematic of the animal. Specifically, he is interested in exploring the limits of that interstitial space between that which we call animal and that which we call human. He coins the neologism “Limitrophy” to describe this exploration, “Not just because it will concern what sprouts or grows at the limit, around the limit, by maintaining the limit, but also what feeds the limit, generates it, raises, and complicates it. Everything I’ll say will consist, certainly not in effacing the limit, but in multiplying its figures, in complicating, thickening, delinearizing, folding, and dividing the line precisely by making it increase and multiple.” (29) He predicates this line of inquiry on his assertion that the entire history of philosophic discourse from Aristotle to Heidegger is guilty of misrepresenting or misinterpreting the basic ontological difference between that which we call animal and that which we call human.
He opens with a discussion of the Genesis myth, focusing on the way in which Adam is naked in the garden until he eats the fruit from the tree of knowledge. Instead of the typical reading of this action as a fall from grace, Derrida sees this as the inciting incident for the creation of humanity. Recognition of nudity, and the shame associated with it, is particularly interesting to Derrida because, as he puts it, “In principle, with the exception of man, no animal has ever thought to dress itself. [Thus] clothing would be proper to man, one of the ‘properties’ of man. ‘Dressing oneself’ would be inseparable from all the other figures of what is ‘proper to man,’ even if one talks about it less than speech or reason, the logos, history, laughing, mourning, burial, the gift, etc.” (5) These “properties of man” are the sites he wants to push against in this lecture.
Poetry. The anthology GURLESQUE: THE NEW GRRLY, GROTESQUE, BURLESQUE POETICS brings together eighteen poets of wide-ranging backgrounds, united in their ability to push the aesthetic envelope through radical, femme, Third Wave strategies, and pairs them with visual artists who do the same. At the turn of the millennium, we are witnessing the emergence of a vital–perhaps viral–new strain of female poetics: the “Gurlesque,” a term that describes writers who perform femininity in their poems in a campy or overtly mocking manner, risking the grotesque to shake the foundations of acceptable female behavior and language. Built from the bric-a-brac of girl culture, these works charm and repel: this work is fun, subversive, and important. (New Release — order from SPD)