Janice Lee is the author of KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015), and most recently, The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016), a collection of essays. She is Editor of the #RECURRENT Series, Assistant Editor at Fanzine, Executive Editor of Entropy, Editor at SUBLEVEL, and CEO/Founder of POTG Design. She currently lives in Los Angeles and teaches at CalArts.
The Malazan Book of the Fallen Series:
Gardens of the Moon (1999), Deadhouse Gates (2000), Memories of Ice (2001)
by Steven Erikson
One of the main hurdles epic fantasy has had to overcome has been making inroads with the literary crowds. However, in his piece “Easy Writers” for The New Yorker, Arthur Krystal observes that “the distinction between genre fiction and literary fiction has, of late, gotten less clear. Writers we once thought of as guilty pleasures are being granted literary status.” In a response to Krystal’s article, Lev Grossman wrote in a piece for Time that:
We expect literary revolutions to come from above, from the literary end of the spectrum — the difficult, the avant-garde, the high-end, the densely written. But I don’t think that’s what’s going on. Instead we’re getting a revolution from below, coming up from the supermarket aisles. Genre fiction is the technology that will disrupt the literary novel as we know it.
I think everyone can agree that good writing is good writing, irrespective of genre. Admittedly, for a while — particularly while I was in grad school — I’d been turning my nose up at sci-fi and fantasy (SF/F), ignoring the fact that the main reasons I wanted to become a writer in the first place were rooted in those two genres. Only upon closer inspection did I discover sub-genres, hidden within the minutia of those broad, overarching designations, particularly “epic-” or “high-fantasy” and “hard science fiction,” terms — similar to “surrealism” and “postmodernism” in that the practitioners of of each basically cringe at the labels — that showed me I was on the right track for discovering guilt-free SF/F reading that was also . . . dare I say it? . . . literary!
Gardens of the Moon opens with the armies of the Malazan Empire battling the free native city-states for dominance. It’s during an attempt by the Bridgeburners, one of the Malazans’ elite military units, to seize control of Darujhistan that we pick up the plotline. Epic events quickly begin to unfold from there.
Though it’s been mentioned around bookish corners of the Internet before, it certainly does bear repeating: do not expect much in the way of setup in Gardens of the Moon — Erikson sends you hurtling, face-first, into the Malazan universe where upon you land directly in the middle of the significant conflict I mentioned above. It can be a disorienting, even jarring experience. While the threat of an impending invasion by an oppressive empire seems like a bad thing, you still aren’t completely sure who to root for; you can’t definitively say who is “good” and who is “bad” (a distinction, like in Martin’s novels, that becomes increasingly more blurry as the series progresses); you are never totally sure of the stakes.
You just know shit is about to go down.
Among the Dead: Ah! and Afterward Yes!
by Becca Jensen
Les Figues Press, March 2013
75 pages / $15 Buy from Les Figues Press or SPD
Winner of the inaugural Les Figues Press NOS Book Prize as selected by guest judge Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
In Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s forward for Among the Dead: Ah! and Afterward Yes!, she identifies the “atmosphere of allusion” that Jensen creates in the collection: “the feeling of reading great books: of being inside an enormous bell, a bell cast from the world’s wide store of epics and elegies and tales and novels, unable to tell where one’s own voice ends and the reverberations begin.” The ambition of such a project is belied by the small, and thus manageable and relatable, lens of an absurdist nuclear family: an unnamed daughter, a Collector, and the parents Mr. and Mrs. G. The family speaks and acts through fragments of English literary canon; they fish, sail, swim, and drown in the heartbreaking lines of Tennyson, Eliot (both T.S. and George), Keats, and others, but the ties of family make Jensen’s work more than collage poems. Because the characters are real within the world of Jensen’s collection, they have mysterious histories, present foibles, and future prospects.
The sophistication in Jensen’s assembly of Among the Dead: Ah! and Afterward Yes! can be seen as an advocacy for the acknowledgement of poetry as a product of linguistic innovation that cannot shed its ancestors. But what is important about the way Jensen looks back on everything that has created her work? The family in Among the Dead, though abstracted through a lack of traditional narrative, does not take place solely in a nostalgic chamber of fragments. There is a lived experience, an authenticity that can be vouched for despite its “fiction-ness.”
Mr. Grumble Grumbles
Like many heroes who find themselves haphazardly at the center of the plot,
Mr. G concluded that
a) this was a very stupid story
&
b) he didn’t care to hear it again.
“Mr. Grumble Grumbles” is a poem that appears very early in Jensen’s book, a piece that is un-prefaced by any of the Collector’s fragments until much later. Instead, readers are presented with an exhibit from George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss.
Proving Nothing to Anyone
by Matt Cook
Publishing Genius Press, July 2013
86 pages / $13.95 Buy from Publishing Genius
Matt Cook’s newest collection of poetry opens with a telephone call: “The dry cleaner calls up and says he’s taking responsibility for my pants.” This line comes across as particularly mundane, even unpoetic, but starting a poem like you’d start a conversation has a long literary history. Back in 1959 Frank O’Hara wrote a whole manifesto about writing poetry this way. Of course, O’Hara was not entirely serious when he wrote “Personism: A Manifesto,” but the concept of directly placing the poem “Lucky Pierre style” between the poet and the reader has had a lasting impression on American poetics and Matt Cook’s Proving Nothing to Anyone reflects this pedigree.
Much like the poetry of Frank O’Hara, the poetry in Matt Cook’s Proving Nothing to Anyone has an air of artlessness to it, but this is a carefully calculated and constructed facade. Frank O’Hara’s work, especially poems like ”The Day Lady Died” are line after line of the banal, which abruptly shifts to the significant, creating a sense of the poetic sublime. The best of Cook’s poems are doing a similar thing. Take Cook’s “The Emotional Center” as an example. It starts off with the lines “Don’t mess with me right now, I’m all stirred up with emotion, man. / I’m in a rage right now because I can’t find my car keys” and continues to describe all the annoyances of life which are piling upon the speaker of the poem. The poem ends with this great description of anxiety:
Even though the words seem off the cuff, the perceptiveness of the lines really strikes the reader. The poetry in this collection reads as if Cook is on the other end of the telephone, or Gchat, or whatever popular means of communication is the equivalent of Frank O’Hara’s telephone analogy, and what Matt Cook has to say is really deep just as all 2 AM conversations have some element of deep importance beneath all the talk of bars and television.
I was recently introduced to the fantastic journal Music & Literature via their 2nd issue focusing on Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai and filmmaker Béla Tarr, both obsessions of mine. I was excited to have the opportunity to ask Editor-in-Chief Taylor Davis-Van Atta about the project.
(From their website:
Music & Literature is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization dedicated to publishing excellent new literature on and by under-represented artists from around the world. Each issue of Music & Literature assembles an international group of critics and writers in celebration of three featured artists whose work has yet to reach its deserved audience. Through in-depth essays, appreciations, interviews, and previously unpublished work by the featured artists, Music & Literature offers readers comprehensive coverage of each artist’s entire career while actively promoting their work to other editors and publishers around the world. Published as print editions (and soon to be offered as digital editions as well), issues of Music & Literature are designed to meet the immediate needs of modern readers while enduring and becoming permanent resources for future generations of readers, scholars, and artists.)
***
Janice Lee: Music & Literature is an exciting new project. Can you talk a bit about its inception and inspiration? I’m curious too about the very simple but semi-mysterious title? (For example, Issue 2 doesn’t seem to have very much music but a bit on film and photography.)
Taylor Davis-Van Atta: I sometimes think of Music & Literature as an act of frustration. It’s certainly a response to the longstanding shortage of high-quality arts coverage in English and, more recently, the austerity and cutting-back of coverage in our so-called traditional media. A lot of the arts review activity cut from newspapers has migrated online and proliferated there, and I often hear people say what a great thing this digital groundswell is, but I have to admit I find myself on the other side of this one… For the moment I’ll speak strictly about books and book coverage: while I can appreciate the benefits of a vast online book culture (broad coverage in terms of numbers of books, plenty of opportunity for young critics to strengthen their skills, etc.), the overall effect, it seems to me, is that a lot of attention may be drawn to the fact that a new book exists, but very little of quality and depth is actually written about the book. Add to this that discerning book and arts criticism has, for some time, been increasingly sequestered to the realm of academic journals—which are written and edited by academics, for academics—and I would argue that there is a missing class of accessible, smart, enjoyable critical literature available today to people who really love and wish to engage deeply with contemporary art.
All of this is just general talk, but maybe what I’m driving at (if anything) is this: if we agree that great art is inexhaustible, I think we need a class of literature that meaningfully engages that art, that offers new in-roads and allows us to explore the dark, recessed chambers of a book or symphony or film so we might see and experience it anew—or that simply provides the opportunity for us to discover an artist or piece of art we haven’t encountered before. This is the need we’re trying to address with Music & Literature. None of this is to say there aren’t venues—print and online—providing high-quality critical literature (I’ll not name names, since I’m bound to forget a few), but none that I’m aware of focus so intently as Music & Literature on providing art lovers with comprehensive, deep, and creative coverage of artists’ entire careers.
Since its inception, I have considered Music & Literature to be an arts magazine, broadly defined; that is to say, I’m interested in publishing all forms of art (and work about all forms of art)—and the more cross-pollination the better. While Issue 1 features two writers (Micheline Aharonian Marcom and Hubert Selby, Jr.) and a composer (Arvo Pärt), and Issue 2 features two giants of Hungarian art (writer László Krasznahorkai and filmmaker Béla Tarr) and a painter (Max Neumann), in each issue (and in future issues) readers will find, say, Noh theatre being discussed alongside the architectural nature of graphic scores, the musicality of an author’s prose discussed alongside the literary implications of a painting, and so forth. Though we chose not to feature a composer in Issue 2, the volume nonetheless contains quite a lot of musical material, including one of Krasznahorkai’s translators, George Szirtes, on the musical complexities of Krasznahorkai’s prose and the difficult pleasures of rendering them into English, as well as a discussion of opera and the nature of evil between Krasznahorkai and composer Péter Eötvös, and more… All forms of art are in constant dialogue with one another, and, for the individual, the experience of great art is the same regardless of the form that art takes: pleasure. For example, we marvel at the ingenuity of architects who reinvent space and encounter, but wither in buildings and structures that create anxiety. It doesn’t take much to intuit the parallels between uninspired architecture and uncreative music, for instance, because all art forms exercise our critical faculties. We enjoy it when our intellects are stretched and challenged: it’s the same part of us that revels in a great musical performance that is awakened by an architectural space that recognizes the human condition and works to incorporate and engage the individual.
As you know, I was first introduced to Music & Literature via Issue 2 (Krasznahorkai / Tarr / Neumann) when a friend of mine brought my attention to it. I was so excited to see both László Krasznahorkai and Béla Tarr as the focal points of a journal, as I’m working through these two figures in both my creative and critical work. What brought you to focus on these three figures for this issue? I’m especially curious since your website states your dedication to publishing work “on and by under-represented artists.” Do you feel these three are still “under-represented” as artists today?
As I suggest above, even the books that dominate chatter in the literary realm receive such little quality critical attention, much less resonate out into the broader culture. Despite some modest attention recently, I do think that Krasznahorkai and Tarr remain very much under-represented. Even if their names are recognized, their art remains largely obscured. This can be said, I believe, of all the artists we feature in Music & Literature. Micheline Aharonian Marcom, Max Neumann, Vladimír Godár, and Maya Homburger are known by very few, and their art resides in virtual anonymity.
Consider Phlebas
by Iain Banks
Republished by Orbit, 2008
On Amazon
***
When I think of the best science fiction, I never think of it as actual science fiction. Rather, tales of humanity revealing glimpses into its nature that would otherwise be difficult to convey without the facade of artificial quasars and exotic aliens. “Iain Banks has ruined most sci-fi for me,” said a friend who was recommending the Culture series to me. With the recent news that Iain Banks was suffering from a terminal cancer to his gallbladder, I felt it was time to dive into this long and branching series I’d been hearing about for so long. I started with the first book, Consider Phlebas, which on the surface is a space opera with swash buckling action. It’s set to the backdrop of a war that is taking place between the Culture and the religiously fanatical civilization called the Idirans. The machines of the Culture are more complex than humans and have unique personalities that help calculate/determine their future. When the Mind of a brand new Culture ship escapes into a Planet of the Dead, the two factions race to retrieve it. The protagonist is Horza, a shape-changer sent by the Idirans because he has special access to the planet that the others do not.
The title, Consider Phlebas, comes from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and like The Waste Land, there are mixes of satire and futurism in the chapters that balance fantastic elements with descriptions that make it easy for a reader to envision. Take for example, the description of an Orbital (an artificial planet/ring world) being destroyed by the Culture as a result of the war: “…a single narrow line of blinding white light appeared right across the breadth of the day side of the Orbital, a thin fiery blade of silent destruction which was instantly surrounded by the duller but still perfectly white cover of clouds. That line of light was part of the grid itself, the fabric of pure energy which lay underneath the entire universe, separating this one from the slightly younger, slightly smaller antimatter universe beneath… The Orbital was now a rosette of white flat squares backing slowly away from each other toward the stars: four hundred separate slabs of quickly freezing water, silt, land and base material, angling out above or underneath the plane of the system’s planets like flat square worlds themselves. There was a moment of grace then, as Vavatch died in solitary blazing splendor.” I could see Vavatch’s last moments in my head and marveled at the creative way Banks depicted the scene. There are many such moments and the imagery has a palpable intensity to it.
A Ring of Sunshine Around the Moon
by the Students of the Academic Leadership Community
Foreword by Paul Feig
826LA, June 2012
175 pages / $15 Buy from 826LA
&
Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane
by Stewart Home
Penny-Ante Editions, 2013
252 pages / $18.95 Buy from Penny-Ante Editions or Amazon
One of the most comic aspects of today’s debate surrounding education and its so-called “reform” is the minimal to nonexistent degree to which the research literature plays in shaping public policy. We have a particularly weird situation in the United States where it was not that long ago when Republican presidential candidates promised, if elected, to obliterate the Department of Education and abolish bilingual support for English Language Learners (ELLs). Is the Tea Party aware of the up to 150 empirical studies during the past 30 years that have detailed a positive link between bilingualism and students’ academic growth? And on the opposite side of the aisle, we have no less weirdly President Obama increasingly citing Race to the Top and South Korea, a nation of test prep factories, as the exemplar model for the United States. How many of our current political leaders are aware of the fact that there simply are no strong indicators for standardized testings’ efficacy? If anything, recent research shows that high-stakes testing actually hinders student growth.
It is precisely against this educational deadlock that I’ve been inspired to use Stewart Home’s many texts and pamphlets to promote students’ language acquisition. Though certain of my colleagues have perceived Home’s work as too obscure and difficult for “at risk” ESL students and English learners of low socioeconomic status, I have found that books like 69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess and Tainted Love are the ideal means of heightening student motivation and introducing academic language into a stale curriculum. After all, what teenager, “at risk” or otherwise, isn’t interested in sex and music? I’ve recently learned, to my surprise, that I am not the first to use the South London born enfant terrible for second language purposes; Tosh Berman’s Japan-born wife used Home’s The Assault On Culture to learn English. As a fond student of USC’s language acquisition expert Stephen Krashen, this comes as no surprise. According to Krashen the one and only task for the language instructor, other than making the lessons comprehensible, is to make the language content interesting. Recently he has even gone as far as to assert that it is not enough to simply make the lessons interesting, the language content must be startlingly compelling, in a word – profound.
Enter Mandy, Charlie, and Mary-Jane. Not unlike Mark Norris’ novel Art School, Home’s newest anti-novel captures the giddy wanderlust of campus life and the heady brew of incompatible concepts and referential chains in those schools where theory has some kind of impact. Though critics and fans alike have been drawn to the nihilistic and morally depraved acts of the main character Charlie, a psychotic cultural studies lecturer who frames a student for arson and detonates a bomb in the immediate aftermath of the 7/7 terrorist attack in London, Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane serves a critical function for my college-bound “ESL/English learner” students who are rebuked daily by educational stakeholders on the importance of college as a panacea for all of their economic ills and social difficulties. As Home himself acknowledged in a recent interview with Michael Roth, “[O]bviously universities are basically there to turn people into zombies – so that they can become trusted functionaries of the capitalist system. That said, we all reproduce our own alienation under capitalism, so I’m not saying that people shouldn’t attend or work in universities, just that we should be aware that they are about conformism and anyone who claims that higher education has very much to do with intellectual growth and development is either an idiot or an apologist for capitalism.”
The Blue Book
by A.L. Kennedy
Little A / New Harvest, March 2013
352 pages / $25 Buy from Amazon
In a New Yorker essay titled, “Everything Is Fiction,” Irish author Keith Ridgway persuasively argues that, well, everything is fiction:
Transparency is ironically pivotal to A.L. Kennedy’s latest novel, The Blue Book, a work riddled with deception. Its two main characters, Beth and Arthur, are scam artists guilty of conning people into believing they can contact the dead. As if to counterbalance the lies, codes, games, and fraud laced throughout the novel, Kennedy tells readers from the outset—in a direct address—that, here, this is a book, “your book.” She goes on to write, “It moves for you, this book, and it will always show you all it can.” The wild, wonderful sense follows that nothing is held back—not by the characters or by Kennedy. Kennedy is like a magician revealing the how of her tricks, but also insisting on the why and the nonetheless magic:
All fucking stories: what makes us nice, what makes us talk, what lets us recognize ourselves, touch others, be touched ourselves, trust loves—the fucking stories.
And they’re what works the magic: the hard-core, bone-deep, fingers in your pages and wearing your skin and fucking you magic—that magic. Inside and out.
You Can Make Him Like You
by Ben Tanzer
Artistically Declined Press, 2011
222 pages / $12 Buy from Amazon or Artistically Declined
Ben Tanzer’s You Can Make Him Like You bursts off the opening page with an intense stream of prose swathed in Hold Steady songs. The thirty-something narrator, Keith, is frenetic with lust and desires, and he also wants to have sex with his wife more often. Terse sentences spit out observations that meander between pithy and neurotically self-conscious. When confronted with an attractive intern who seems to be flirting with him, he wonders: “Why did I mention my wife. Why wouldn’t I mention her? The intern twirls her hair a little. Fuck, twirling hair is not good. Not good.”
Self-delusion isn’t a foible Keith suffers from. Self-analysis is as it paralyzes his actions. His candor is inimitable and torturously funny. Uncertainty mars every decision, particularly fidelity. Even as he fantasizes about other women, when given the chance to actually stray, he remains faithful to his wife, Liz. It doesn’t mean he isn’t impervious to temptation, as with the love of his life in high school who throws herself at him, or a neighbor who is aspiring to be a singer at Disneyland and invites him in. “It’s like bad porn, or worse, some masturbatory fantasy of mine where hot, barely dressed Opera singing neighbor comes to the door and says she has something for me before inviting me in.” After following her in, she offers him a gift. “‘They’re Mickey Mouse coffee mugs, one for you and one for your wife. They’re really cute and when I saw them I knew they were perfect.’” To which he mentally responds: “She definitely does not want to fuck. I am mostly relieved, though more than anything I realize that I am done, really done, getting myself into these situations. It’s not cool anymore. It never really was.”
Keith finds parallels to his life in popular TV shows like Mad Men and the Shield. The pop references become his lens through which he makes sense of his striving to be both a “human” and an “adult.” Even if you might not know a specific reference, the meaning is clear, as when he’s talking about a boy crush on Don Draper and how “doughy everyone is at those conventions on Real Sex.” Unlike the suave Don Draper or the savage Vic Mackey though, Keith isn’t as direct in his relationships and often tries to avoid confrontation. There’s a funny arc involving different neighbors because their apartment walls are so thin and they can hear everything next door. His wife wants him to talk to the loud neighbors, and because a stream of them moves in and out, they tease, titillate, annoy, irritate, frighten, and finally empathize. Empathy is a big part of why You Can Make Him Like You sucks you into the story. As Keith struggles with his work, his wandering eye, and Liz’s desire for a baby, Tanzer recreates the chaotic mumblings of the mind with its narcissism, longings, self-conscious doubts, joys, and moments of self-realization that also end in self-disgust: “It’s funny what envy looks like when you’re caught in the middle of it. It’s ugly and distorted, like the way your reflection gets warped on the side of a sweaty drink. It’s not you, but it is a part of you, the worst part, the weakest, least thoughtful, most irrational you, that for the most part you get to keep hidden until the moment it overwhelms your usual ability to filter out your more negative thoughts.”
X
by Dan Chelotti
McSweeney’s, 2013
82 pages / $20 Buy from McSweeney’s or Amazon
Equidistance is a matter of perspective. The Say It with Writing salon where I found Dan Chelotti’s debut poetry collection X is located midway between the rising North Avenue Arts District and Baltimore’s shabbily-mortared potter’s cemetery. Chelotti’s row house poetry is right at home between art and death. Short, but with a long back; and bald, but with a yarmulke of hair on his crown, the round-faced Chelotti is also a greedy one for transition words: I was thinking this, but then that happened. Welcome to the X. It’s what horse people call a cross, and what Italian horse people call a cavaletti. It’s the Bowie Knife mark you cut to suck the venom from a snake bite. It’s the way you remember where you buried those doubloons. It’s the man who preached about getting active against a context that won’t budge.
Like an associative poet, Chelotti uses more images than statements, but two thirds into most of his poems he places a hinged joint, a transition, and he uses very different associations to get out of the poem. “Thoughts over Foreign Sandwich” begins with a Swedish uncle cooing over the speaker. The speaker identifies with the “elderly contortionist” and wonders if he could have a new name, a Swedish name, “I would be Per. / And being Per, I would / adore calculus.” At the point where the poem is almost becoming too precious, Chelotti bangs us with his transition: “But dammit, / I don’t love calculus, / I don’t even know / what calculus is.” The poem argues against mere concepts, “My desk is a trap / into which I fall— / hands first” in favor of something more sensual.
Chelotti’s hinges are subtle. Most of his transitions would be lost in poems with stanza breaks, which may explain why he doesn’t have any. X contains sixty-two poems on seventy-nine pages without a single instance of “meanwhile, back at the ranch” or “let me come at this again” which a new stanza offers. Chelotti doesn’t even put his poems into sections so that the reader has a place to rest and absorb the arcs. Why? Because there are no arcs. These poems are one endless link of boxcars on a train that doesn’t have a whistle or a peg of rust. Chelotti’s writing is clean and tidy enough to pull this off. Consider the opening third of “Augury”:
Here, Chelotti wrestles with old adversaries—intellect and emotion—before finding his way to an irrational, but believable conclusion. The pace is slowed down; he doesn’t like to get out of second gear in any of these poems so that in spite of each poem feeling like a tiny apartment the reader isn’t constantly fiddling with his oxygen tank to get more air.
With the last of the SUMMER READS, the wonderful Anna Joy Springer tells us about her summer reading:
(in case you missed any, check out all the SUMMER READS here)
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For many literary arts and criticism professors, winter break is the time to read yummy light novels, while summer is time for texts that ask for more interaction. This summer I will read some things that require fuller attention than I can give during the school year, when I’m reading and analyzing student drafts.
I will read Hannah Arendt’s The Life of The Mind, finally. I’ve read the first two chapters, and I’m so glad to have saved her til now, so I can remember what boldness of inquiry and depth of offering look like.
Arthur Schopenhauer’s The Emptiness of Existence: “This cannot possibly be true says The Heart and even the crude mind after giving the matter (not-being for thousands of years, then being alive for a few decades, then not-being for thousands of years again) some consideration.” Because I recognize that sense if spiritual befuddlement and want to know more about possible connections btwn Germam Romanticism and Buddhism (and which Buddhism?)
Merce Rodoreda’s The Time of The Doves, translated by David Rosenthal, a Spanish civil war novel by a beloved Catalan lyric prose writer, called “the most beautiful novel published in Spain since the Civil War” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in early 1980’s and recently given to me by Aaron Cometbus because it illustrates an overlap between our very different literary tastes. (Graywolf Press)