Janice Lee

http://janicel.com

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.

Reviews

Nate Pritts’s Big Bright Sun

Big Bright Sun
by Nate Pritts
BlazeVOX, 2010
100 pages / $16  Buy from Amazon

 

 

 

 

 

Nate Pritts’s Big Bright Sun celebrates witness, of one’s self and the self’s relationship to the world.

All of this is, frankly, // too much. When the bright red fire truck / zips (brightly) by I want to yell, “Here / is your emergency!” The red stop sign / sways gently in the bright wind not working // as usual. Today is still today. Time, / though brighter, passes normally. The difference // is that I can see exactly what I’m doing.

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1 Comment
September 16th, 2011 / 11:00 am

Reviews

Utterance

Divorcer
By Gary Lutz
Calamari Press, 2011
120 pages / $13  Buy from SPD

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s no wonder that someone who might be said to live in the sentence would apply its logic—and its subversions—to his lens on the higher-order structures of life. In Divorcer, Gary Lutz tinkers with each level of human-linguistic interaction, cascading from social power structures, to family dynamics, personal relationships, full-scale utterances, isolated sentences, words, morphemes and phonemes, with an eye to at-once humorous and devastating exposure of the failures of empathy and failures of semantic coherence echoing throughout.
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9 Comments
September 12th, 2011 / 12:00 pm

Reviews

There will be nothing left here but the sea

Campeche
Poems by Joshua Edwards
Photographs by Van Edwards
Noemi Press, 2011
112 pages / $15  Buy from SPD

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the national artistic dialogue, there are usually but two coasts: East and West.  The Gulf Coast barely enters the radar screen and, when it does, it’s normally because of a great tragedy like Katrina or the BP Horizon disaster. A chance for artists to express their solidarity or disgust or anger or sadness or pity.

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5 Comments
September 9th, 2011 / 12:00 pm

Reviews

Rays of Creation: Sunshine in the Valley by Kyle Muntz

Sunshine in the Valley
by Kyle Muntz
Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2010
222 pages / $14  Buy from Amazon


 

 

 

 

 

 

Through its ecstatic sweep and baroque grandeur, Sunshine in the Valley by Kyle Muntz espouses rays of creation that both illuminate and transfigure the atmosphere. It has an ethereal quality of infinite expansion, with a poetic opulence relating to a kind of freedom without a hint of anxiety or any inhibition. The feeling is like embracing the sky in fullest light – a celestial glow imparting splendor bathed in Uranian auras of mystery and rapture. Gazing through this diamond prism is a true delight.

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1 Comment
September 5th, 2011 / 12:00 pm

Reviews

Dream Memoirs: A Conjuration

Dream Memoirs of a Fabulist
by Doug Rice
Copilot Press, 2011
$35 (Limited Edition) / Buy from Copilot Press

 

 

 

 

This book does not start with an I, but a ghostly he that becomes a she, that vanishes and becomes an I. In this body-text, the I perhaps does not exist as the reflection does, in this book that questions the naive categorizations of gender, the dizzying abyss of self-imposed identity, and the gravitational field of language itself, the pronouns textually speaking to one another, dragging memory from one space into another. READ MORE >

2 Comments
September 2nd, 2011 / 12:00 pm

Graphic Text Readings

I know Christopher Higgs just posted his superb fall semester reading list, so I’m being a sort of copycat perhaps, but also, would just love to get some thoughts and ideas from you all.

I’ve been teaching a class called Graphic Texts: Looking at Text and Image Combined on and off for a couple years now, and am always looking for new material to fold into the class.

The class is basically a survey class that looks at various different kinds of “graphic texts” in all senses of the world. Students read, have critical discussions, and create graphic text projects of their own.

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Behind the Scenes / 40 Comments
August 29th, 2011 / 4:07 pm

Reviews

Fantasies of Trauma and the Experiment of Coherency

The Flame Alphabet
by Ben Marcus
Knopf, Jan 2012
304 pages / $26  Buy from Amazon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ben Marcus wrote this book, which is to say he either typed it into a computer or used a stylus, pen or pencil to scratch pigment into a page or roll of paper—the tools available to us humans at our particular anchor in time.* He did this in roughly a year, after developing the concept: a man—through his own somewhat distorted lens on reality—relates his recent experiences in a world wherein language, spoken and written, is discovered to harm its producers and recipients. I will try not to ruin it for you, but the inhabitants of this world eventually determine that the formation of meaning itself—the moment of insight, in which the gestalt of the lexeme coalesces in the mind of the listener/reader—is the problem; i.e. when you understand a word, you become sick: and more words, more understanding makes you sicker.

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14 Comments
August 29th, 2011 / 12:00 pm

Reviews

not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them

not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them
by Jenny Boully
Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2011
80 pages / $14  Buy from Tarpaulin Sky

 

 

 

 

 

 

First, there was the 1902 novel The Little White Bird, by J.M. Barrie, which we all might know of, but probably haven’t read. It blossomed into a play, “Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up,” which became the 1911 novel Peter Pan and Wendy, or, later, just Peter Pan. In 1953, Disney presented the world with a lasting image: chipmunk-faced, androgynous Peter Pan.  Playboy-bunny Tinkerbell. Matronly Wendy in her prim blue nightgown. Hook, with his long, angular face, knife-sharp mustache, wild black curls.

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9 Comments
August 26th, 2011 / 12:00 pm

Reviews

Degrees by Michel Butor (Part 2)

Degrees
by Michel Butor
Trans. Richard Howard
Originally published: Simon and Schuster, 1961
Reprint currently available from Dalkey Archive Press, 2005
351 pages / $13.95  Buy from Dalkey Archive

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Read Part 1 of this review here]

“I should like to be able to restore to your memory this moment, this hour which is already so far in the past for me that, despite the attention I was paying to you, to your whole class, I am capable of recovering with certainty which gestures you might have made, at which moments you were listening, at which you were distracted.

To help you realize what you yourself have been, in other words, where you come from, in other words where you are going—what is the vector of your present—I must already make a great imaginative effort of reconstruction, I must put myself in your place, try to see myself through your eyes and consequently let you speak, thereby destroying the equilibrium of this narrative.”  (104) READ MORE >

5 Comments
August 22nd, 2011 / 12:00 pm

Reviews

Degrees by Michel Butor (Part 1)

Degrees
by Michel Butor
Trans. Richard Howard
Originally published: Simon and Schuster, 1961
Reprint currently available from Dalkey Archive Press, 2005
351 pages / $13.95  Buy from Dalkey Archive

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is painful to report as much, especially here at the outset of this review, one of whose ostensible purposes is to attract readers to a classic of first-generation French postmodernism, a nouveau roman that was for many years unavailable in English and, even when it was, was not widely discussed. Yet it necessary to reveal that this is a novel [1] concerned with writers and writing. Its main character / protagonist / hero / narrator is a writer, and every dramatic action in the book both originates and terminates in “the literary.” The aesthetic, social and moral quandaries all authors face are accorded some reflection in its pages, and, with the turn of each page, the novel grows in self-consciousness, as if such awareness-of-being-aware could accumulate in measurable deposits, like the nacre in a pearl. And make no mistake: objects matter in the world created by this novel. For this novel proposes to be a manuscript, and a rescued one at that; this manuscript’s (re-)assembly in the form (one both ideal and literal) of a book is not just a plot point which the reader is asked to mark, a scope through which the reader is to track and focus the novel’s action. The making of this particular book (that is, the manuscript “within” the novel) is something only we, as disinterested yet absorbed readers, can achieve. We aren’t just reading pages, reading in the sense of digesting them. A page of this book, once read, is much like a page once it has been written upon. It grows in thickness under the influence of our attention, just as it must have swelled with ink and sweat and  the pressure of the author’s hand as it was being composed. Each page thus acquires a distinct texture and profile, and can be stacked, will lay flat, but each page lends its own disarray to the sequence of pages being so collected. Each page will lay less “true” than it did when it was only blank, and the array of pages each reader puts aside (or places behind him/herself) rests disjointed and askew.

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7 Comments
August 19th, 2011 / 12:00 pm