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.
After reading, and then listening to the recording of, Meghan Lamb’s gut-punching whirlwind “Girl” in the newest issue of the always excellent > kill author, I feel compelled to respond.
What is going on with that piece? It’s so absolutely mesmerizing, so uncomfortably pleasurable, so sick and disgusting and lyrically beautiful, so caustic and terrifying, so violent and raw.
In part, I think the appeal for me comes from the shock of becoming the text.
That voice echoes other voices I have become or other voices that have become me in the past, and when it gets inside it resonates in a particular way that simultaneously evokes both uncomfortable and pleasurable sensations.
Do you recall that scene in David Lynch’s Wild At Heart between Bobby Peru and Lula Fortune in the motel room?
An amazing resource is now available via the Burroughs Archive: complete scans of Ed Sanders’s Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts 1961-1965. I’m just now starting to peek into it…and wow!…its a crazy amalgam. Ginsberg, Warhol, Mary Mayo, Diane Wakoski, Artaud, the list goes on and on.
Looks like I did something similar in May of last year. Must be something about the season.
Anywho…
What follows this time is a showcase of ten good looking things I have piled around my desk in the ever-growing, ever-shifting, to-read pile: stuff I haven’t read yet, but am looking forward to…beginning with…
Consider this provocative statement from a recent post over at Montevidayo entitled “The Inhuman Art of Dying vs. Poetry’s Grief Police” by Lucas de Lima, “…by writing, we lose control of our narratives, and inevitably end up thwarting not just our intentions for a poem, but also the way we conceive of ourselves and our bodies as bounded, autonomous entities shaped through free will.”
…by writing, we lose control…
Like Brownian Motion: the presumably random drift of particles, which is, of course, among the simplest of the probabilistic processes, and thus serves as a limit of both simpler and more complicated stochastic processes, writing being one we might never have thought to correlate.
Which is to say, what may begin determined becomes random. A transformation. Or, perhaps, determination and control are always an illusion anyway…?
Consider the last breath of Jac Jemc’s forthcoming novel My Only Wife:
“My wife slid the key in the lock, turned it, and and then slipped down the stairs.
The one truth I know is that I came home.
I climbed the stairs, light and unknowing.
I slid my own key into the lock, turned and pushed.”
Notice the repetition of the word “and” in that top line. It’s a stutter so subtle it could be mistaken as a typo, but I hope it’s not a typo. I hope it’s strategically placed, because I believe it’s perfect. Such a small thing: the word and. But such a large thing it conveys.
Hesitation. Frozen in the moment, if only for a moment.
So beautifully rendered but emotionally wrenching, Jemc’s novel brings to mind images by Lucien Freud:
CH: Now then, while your definition (in Part 1) is certainly more elegant than mine in its brevity, it seems problematic to me in terms of its three main assumptions: unfamiliarity, the dominant, and schism.
Jakobson’s idea of the dominant, for example, seems patently antithetical to experimental literature because it supposes an integrity of structure that I’d classify as akin more to orthodoxy than heterodoxy. In other words, “a focusing component” tends not to be an attribute of experimental literature; in fact, it seems to me that the comportment of experimental literature stems from a distaste or distrust or disinclination toward such a notion.
ADJ: That’s a fair point, although I think even experimental fiction has its organizing principles. There are always some things the artist wants to do, and other things he or she doesn’t want to do—even if that changes from section to section, or moment to moment. The dominant is simply a record of those desires—and note that my definition does not require them to be conventional.
Would you say, then, that experimental fiction lacks any and all convention? Any and all integrity in its structure? And, if so, can you give examples of such texts (fiction that lacks any and all convention, any and all structural integrity)?
Consider this moment in Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl, “For now, Ruth submits to nothingness. My Sleeping Beauty. She lies in bed still and flat, frozen before an unopened day.”
Combine it with that moment when we first meet the sleeping heroine Robin Vote in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, “The perfume her body exhaled was of the quality of that earth-flesh, fungi, which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odor of oil of amber, which is an inner malady of the sea, making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire.”
Recall the moment of ghostly incantation manifested briefly in Hitchcock’s Vertigo:
Sommer Browning’s facebook feed reminded me of this 21st century Dadaist called SMOKERSOFCIGARSPIPES, who has over 5,000 videos including this one:
