Prediction:

Richard Froude’s FABRIC: Preludes to the Last American Book (Horse Less Press, 2011) is a sentence you will be hearing.

Wolf in a Field heard it from Seth Landman, and we hear it here (or you heard it from ____  _______ or from Selah Saterstrom, Alice Notley, Maggie Nelson, or Bhanu Khapil, who gets it just right in her “British blurb”:

I tried to explain to [the author] that he was doing something strange and beautiful in his writing, that was different to other kinds of writing. I said: “Have you ever considered the possibility that you’re actually a novelist?” He looked at me blankly, but now I think the prediction has come true. What is a novel? That’s separate. Ask Richard. Ask the person who mutates the given form.

Yesterday I tore FABRIC–its subtitle calls to mind, as does, at first crack, the blocks of poem and days inside, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric; its title, in turn, reminds one of another Richard (Rick Myersº) and the other Mayer, Rosemary, whose 41 Fabric Swatches I recently cataloged: does anyone know if there were ever swatches?–from an envelope, in which it was buffered by Thuggery and Grace (ed. Froude, Anne Waldman, & Erik Anderson), which is mailed to you, while it lasts, if you ask for it. Ask for it. Thing starts with Renee Gladman’s “Syntax and the Event of Reading”, which starts “I want to talk to you today about two possibilities of the sentence”: when Renee Gladman–who was reading, when I first read FABRIC, in the City where Lutz (“The Sentence Is A Lonely Place”) will be reading (update: read about it), as I read it again, with Lisa Robertson at SpaceSpace in the Poetry Time between; damn “I do not live in New York” (meaning: move) is a lonely sentence: at least there’s now a Poetry Time audio archive and there’s always when Gladman–wants to talk to you about the possibilities of the sentence, you listen. (Gladman: “It is usually from this perspective that the sentence begins to align itself with the city.” Froude in FABRIC: “I tried but could not write the city.”)

Also inside are two hearted Ohio poems by Sasha Steensen, Ohio’s own Merrill Gilfillan, goodgraphs from Noah Eli Gordon‘s Dysgraphia, Laura Elrick, and more, including two poems by Susan Scarlata, whose It Might Turn Out We Are Real is the other first full-length offering from Horse Less Press, of chapbook fame: Tobin, Cohen, Schapira, Schomburg, Starkweather, Browning, Rexilius, Becker, and so many more, including forthcomers Brian Foley, and Jennifer Denrow (four poems in T&G, and more at Brave Men Press), who took just the right photograph on the cover of FABRIC, which does everything I like to see a book do. Hear it go:

FABRIC: A Prelude to the Last American Book. (Preorder.) A preliminary catalog.

***SPOILER ALERT: heavy quotation from a 110 page book*** READ MORE >

I’ve been pacing myself to write about the space in my mind that is Portland.

All know about the armsicles that are Octopus. Books. Magazine. Eight plus operation. Plus there’s Future Tense. Powell’s. Poor Claudia. Portlandia. Publication everything. But I wanted to write (and still will) about Airfoil, Peaches & Bats, Passages, and now Division Leap (recently relocated from NYC).

This weekend these world’s collided where all things do: the reading series of series, Spare Room, has organized marathon of Maximus for Charles Olson’s 100th yearday. It makes me happy to think about Zachary (Schomburg) and (David) Abel sharing a room. Both all-alphabet.

So there I was pacing myself and then Octopus had to go and do it again. It’s this:

It’s not year’s anymore but it’s still new and it’s always day. I mean, Octopus is no longer offering a free Octopus book with Genya Turovskaya’s NEW YEAR’S DAY, but Flying Object (which had its own other Portland other Olson day) is. By dint of this post, the first eight people to buy NEW YEAR’S DAY (or subscribe to Octopus) between now and when Zachary Schomburg reads at FO (mid-February) will get a free Octopus book and whatever ephemera is produced at that reading. READ MORE >

In the spring of 1931, on a lawn in Glendale, California, a man was bracing trees. It was a tedious job, for he had first to prune dead twigs, then wrap canvas buffers around weak branches, then wind rope slings over the buffers and tie them to the trunks, to hold the weight of the avocados that would ripen in the fall. Yet, although it was a hot afternoon, he took his time about it, and was conscientiously thorough, and whistled. He was a smallish man, in his middle thirties, but in spite of the stains on his trousers, he wore them with an air. His name was Herbert Pierce. When he had finished with the trees, he raked the twigs and dead branches into a pile, carried them back to the garage, and dropped them in a kindling box. Then he got out a mower and mowed the lawn. It was a lawn like thousands of others in southern California: a patch of grass in which grew avocado, lemon, and mimosa trees, with circles of spaded earth around them. The house, too, was like others of its kind: a Spanish bungalow, with white walls and red-tile roof. Now, Spanish houses are a little outmoded, but at the time they were considered high-toned, and this one was as good as the next, and perhaps a little bit better.

The first paragraph of Sonic Youth’s James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce. I agree with Steve Benson (see comments buried beneath the previous post for full context; thanks to my favorite writer for typing it out there) that despite the excellence of the famous opening hook of The Postman Always Rings Twice (which I’ll post in the comments below), “there is something still more astonishing…about the first graph of M Pierce.” Benson continues: “I don’t know if I am idiosyncratic or merely of my generation or responding to something more transgenerational or even possibly transcultural. Dunno.”

Does anyone know? Doesn’t this paragraph make you want to read the book?

The preview of the miniseries movie with Joan Crawford calls Mildred the “one word that tells a thousand stories”. Anyone think it’s a thousand words (or a “perhaps a little bit”) better than the book?

Seriously, though, Steve Benson, Sonic Youth, James M. Cain, Mildred Pierce.

& be sure to type out your Favorite First Paragraphs in the comments section…

P.S. Image is from the Sonic Youth video, linked above; great video (HBO should have had Sophia Coppola write/direct/star in their miniseries), I’d forgotten how Good the song is, one of the first they ever wrote, apparently. The original title of this post was the title of the demo version, and “was the half-serious proposed title for Goo for a while.”

That’s Robert Walser Maira Kalman.

These questions are Steve Benson’s mine:

1) Is there an opening paragraph anywhere more utterly compelling, such that you can’t avoid just choosing to read this whole book next, than that of Mildred Pierce?

2) I never read it before, and now I have to put off all those other novels I was given for Christmas to read this. What is it that grabs me so irresistibly?

[Plagiarist's twist: What books did you get for Christmas, what are you reading, what are you putting off?]

3) And would readers who are now in their twenties and thirties see anything in this at all?

Questions–and that’s not all–plagiarized from poet Steve Benson‘s brilliant facebook wall.

BUT FIRST:

B Y  F A R the BestBook I’ve read this year (so near) was the (Walser &) Co-BestBook last year (2010) and the best blog the year before.

Clue: Its author “loves Robert Walser more than you do.” READ MORE >