Suicide
David Carradine hanged himself in a hotel in Bangkok. He was seventy-two. (It now appears it may have been a sex act gone wrong- click here to read the update.) After the jump, Anna Karenina also ends her life, although by a different method. In the comment section, bring on other great scenes from literature that illustrate a suicide. (Heart of the Matter comes to mind and my all time favorite, Madame Bovary. ) (This is not meant to be a celebration, but a contemplation, so you all know where I’m coming from…)
Power Quote: Thomas Bernhard
The matured idea is enough in itself to destroy most people.
– Correction, p. 203
Sentence by Sentence & Story by Story (2): ‘A Pursuit’
The second story in Brian Evenson’s ‘Fugue State,’ is ‘A Pursuit,’ which I have written up in full here.
My sentence to keep from this story (I can’t say favorite anymore, as there are too many, but choices hereon will be considered strong and representative at once):
Would it help if I were to swear to you, by the deceased individual of your choice, that I had nothing to do with my first ex-wife’s demise, assuming she is in fact dead?
This sentence, itself a whole graph in the text, is wonderful again not only for its Evensonian use of odd familial tags such ‘first ex-wife’ (I always go back to his ‘The Ex Father,’ and those weird overtones of relationship bounds), but for how it manages to begin to drag the reader (the ‘you’) as an entity into the text, another relationship that will continue to be put to use in the extremely odd and Bernhard-ian summoning that goes on in this text.
As I discuss in the full story review, Evenson is a master of blurring the lines of his occurrences, here as delivered on behalf of the narrator, in such a way that it is not only hard to condemn or not condemn the actions of the central figure, it also blurs the body of that narrator with the body of the reader, in such a way that the reading itself becomes an experience. You are caught in the narrator’s ongoing waddle into his own mind. You follow him along terrain that will not hold, etc.
The question is a question that eats the space out from between the reader and the narrator itself, which, how much more could you ask from a single line?
Sentence by Sentence & Story by Story: Brian Evenson’s ‘Fugue State’
Just got a galley of Brian Evenson’s new collection ‘Fugue State,’ coming out in July from Coffee House Press. I haven’t felt this giddy about a book in a while. As with each Evenson title that comes out, I feel he reroutes not only the terrain of what is possible in fiction, but my own mind and method of writing: the power of new blood page by page.
In the spirit of this, and because I’m so excited about it I can’t help not, I’ll be exploring the book and reviewing it or commenting on it story by story, between longer posts on my own blog, and over here, at Giant, sharing my favorite sentence from each story, beginning now, with the first piece in the collection, ‘Younger,’ which kicked off the book in massive, terrored form, if in a more subtle and understated way than Evenson’s past might have predicted, maybe even more so, for it, terrifying.
In this way, we’ll lead up to the release of the book in July slowly and then continue with posts thereafter with the book in people’s hands.
Here’s the sentence:
They weren’t getting anywhere, which meant that she, the younger sister, wasn’t getting anywhere, was still wondering what, if anything, had happened, and what, if anything, she could do to free herself from it.
I love the repetition in the short segments here, the repeating and recursing tonalities, but also the mental loop of the logic therein, the sentence trying to figure what it is saying out while it is saying which as a pocket in the story, about being locked in a moment of a life, hit full on in its pacing, with the kind of abstract but right-there verbiage and at-your-throat but aimed away construction that seems so difficult to nail, and yet which Evenson is unarguably a master.
My full post on the story itself is now live here.
More info on ‘Fugue State’ here.
Preorder ‘Fugue State’ here.
More all in thereon to be continued…
More on Golden Hemorrhoids and “Emerods in their secret parts”: The Bible
- Ouch! I posted earlier about Ernie Conrick’s wierd, pornographic story involving anal sex, hemorroids and, well, politics. On further, uh, digging, on the subject matter, I discovered Cornick’s not surprising, fantastic Biblical reference, quoted after the jump (King James Version):
Amy King: I’m The Man Who Loves You
I’ve been meaning to write about Amy King’s poetry for some time now and plan on a longer post at a later date. (Click here to go to her blog.) As a non-poet, I find writing about poetry intimidating and as a reader of poetry, I use very loose guidelines in my judgement of poetry. Here are my reasonings, and an Amy King poem:
I LIKE THE BOOK “UNDER MILK WOOD” MORE THAN I LIKE MOST OF MY FRIENDS BUT LESS THAN I LIKE FRUIT ROLL-UPS
i don’t remember when i first read dylan thomas’ UNDER MILK WOOD. but i have read it three or four times. which means it’s tied for most-read book with the instruction manual for the nintendo game BUBBLE BOBBLE. i don’t really like dylan thomas’ poetry but UNDER MILK WOOD is trill fucking good. i think if i took a picture of my face while reading it, i would look a lot like Squeaky Fromme when she was in court. UNDER MILK WOOD is a play about a small town and all the people in it. in order to account for things that can’t be shown, dylan thomas institues random voices to help narrate shit. i don’t want to spend a lot of time coming up with a review because that might ruin the book for me. so here are some random excerpts and my reactions.
(reactions after jump, take a peek!)
30 Comments
May 27th, 2009 / 10:57 pm
May 27th, 2009 / 10:57 pm
Literary Lessons from Metal Magazines: Goblin C*ck
This post is Not Safe For Work! Nor is it safe if you are a huge fan of Redbook Magazine. So, yeah. No need to read:
A cage went in search of a bird
February 23. Unwritten letter.
–Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks (Fourth Notebook)