Jean-François Millet’s “The Gleaners” (1857) shows three peasant women gleaning a field after a harvest of crops, its depiction of the lower class most irksome to the French upper class, who didn’t want rural poverty and intimations of the 1848 French revolution in their Salon. I imagine artisanal cheese melting in their mouths and coursing straight to their hearts. Millet is just as known for “The Sower,” later copied by Van Gogh, and from which Simon & Schuster’s colophon is derived. Realism is used to describe Millet’s paintings, implying a kind of artistic integrity or moral clarity necessary for the unglamorous staunch view of the world; the problem is that Realism is also used to describe our later Renoir and Manet, whose pasty bourgeois subjects are safe from the sun under parasols and hands of shadows taught by the leaves above to protect the smiling faces. In fact, from the field to the park, the real R-word is Romantic, the aesthetically adroit projection of an ethos by which the lesser, us, learn to live. In 1999, three actors were allowed to do what they, likely with grim office jobs themselves in their past before said success, had, like us, fantasized doing. They were told to walk into a field subconsciously on the perimeter of an office building and destroy a fax machine with only their feet, fists, and one bat. They took turns with the bat, a phallic democracy both homoerotic and most American. Directer Mike Judge (Office Space, Beavis & Butthead), whose genius shall not be argued here, later added a Geto Boys song as an ironic, and mildly racist, “juxtaposition” to the whiteness of their white collar plight and excised rapture. When faceless bureaucracies are embodied by the broken means meant to convey them, it’s time to freak out. That a fax from afar is printed on recipient paper and not the sender’s is often forgotten, with people getting angry at the sender for being out of paper. The age of reason is now unreasonable. To come full circle is to start all over again, and I sometimes wonder if I’d be happier before the industrial revolution. I’d have strong arms, a nice tan, and no tweets to worry about. If the reader does not know where this is headed, may he or she be pointed outside, to workers in a field, whose very work seems futile but is somehow necessary in small unseen ways, from flax to fax, of horrible jobs existing for a reason, of civilization moving along slowly, before the sun sets, through near darkness and its nightly requiem of crickets, until it rises again.

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In a recent interview with Bat Segundo, Dennis Cooper said, “Well, yeah, my books are in some fundamental way always about reconciling confusion. Because that’s of super interest to me. And language presents this idea that confusion can be corralled and all that stuff. And it can’t. And that tension does interest me.”

“Reconciling confusion” is a terrific way of describing the intellectual/affective exercise at the heart of what draws me to literature. In the absence of confusion, most books quickly lose my interest. Probably this is why I am drawn to “experimental literature” and why I see a connection between it and “genre fiction” (mystery, horror, and sci-fi especially — all three of which rely upon varying levels of confusion/opacity/defamiliarization).

I am currently reading Cooper’s newest book, The Marbled Swarm, which reinvigorates language in ways akin to how Godard reinvigorated cinema between 1961-1967. Affinities aroused so far include: Pauline Réage’s The Story of O, Vítězslav Nezval’s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, and various of Edgar Allan Poe’s finest stories (e.g. “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Pit and Pendulum”). I won’t say anymore about it yet, as I am still caught in its spell and must finish and untangle before expressing the flood of my admiration, but suffice to say: if you have not yet cracked its spine I implore you to do so immediately. Something dark and mysterious haunts each sentence. In the near future I intend to elaborate on how I see The Marbled Swarm as exemplary of an emergent constellation of texts I want to identify as Nouveau Gothic.

But not now. That’s just a teaser trailer. For now, below the jump, in lieu of music (as I’ve done the past few months) I’ll share with you the current cluster of tabs I have open on my computer. Food for your writing…perhaps?

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Finishing Line Press, 2011

Bat & Man:  A Sonnet Comic Book is a chapbook of sonnets about Batman.  They’re persona poems spoken in dialogue, between Selina Kyle and Bruce Wayne, with the driving narrative that she has woken him up from a nightmare, and he describes it to her, sonnet by sonnet.  Each one adds to what you might recognize as the ritual activity of most Batman comics and other media:  retracing what led Bruce Wayne to become Batman, revising that story in the process.  This revision is part Citizen Kane and part Yeats, with a kind of comic-gothic inflection to the whole thing that might be what Stephen Burt calls Lowellian, in his essay, “Poems About Superheroes.”

Available Now for preorder from Finishing Line Press

Cool questions!