Versal 9 was the January selection for Literary Magazine Club (details of our next selection, Monday). Did you read the issue? What did you think? My favorite story was Carmen Petaccio’s “Tornado,” where the writer personified a tornado and created a really imaginative story. I also admired Stace Budzko’s “To Be Glad And Young,” particularly the ending. Versal editor Megan M. Garr and I had a great conversation via e-mail about Versal, the proliferation of magazines, being based in Europe, arrogance, editorial humility, and more.

Versal—where does the name come from?

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, where he shortens the word “universal” to keep with the meter. It’s from a random comment by the nurse in act 2. Somewhere along the line the word “versal” also came to take on the meaning “single”. I liked that conflation, ten years ago when I was first figuring out how to live in a foreign country.

A “versal” is also that ornamental capital letter at the beginning of old texts – a fact that suits us, I think, with our attention to design.

How does your magazine work in terms of decision making? Who are some of the other key players involved in the editing and production of Versal.

We’re very Dutch about it. Everything rests on dialogue. The work that excites one or two editors is discussed by the whole team in what we call our roundtable. We read it out loud, we talk it through, we put pressure on it at certain points and see what falls out. If an editor’s enthusiasm endures that conversation, and if the work itself endures it, we’ll probably accept the piece.

Robert Glick is our prose editor. Shayna Schapp, my wife, is our art editor. Our managing editor is Sarah Ream, and she and I work with our business manager Annerie Houterman to make sure the journal stays afloat. We have another 12 or so active assistant editors on the poetry, prose and art teams – spread all over the world.
Skype and KLM should be our sponsors. Our combined bills for AWP are astronomical. You know that survey they send out? One of the questions is how much your organization spent to attend the conference. We each pay out of pocket, but still. They probably think we’re kidding.

Versal is based out of Amsterdam. How does that international presence influence the magazine?

When I moved to Amsterdam in 2001, I got ahold of all the “expat” or “anglophone” literary journals in Europe at the time: The Prague Revue, Van Gogh’s Ear, Kilometer Zero, Poetry Salzburg Review. They were full of foreignness, full of observatory narratives of the local urban scenery and the self, dealing with alienation—a very safe, upper class alienation, mind you. These journals bored me really quickly. In no way was I going to start a literary journal in this tradition, and being in Amsterdam helped. Unlike Paris or Prague or Berlin, there’s no literary mythology about Amsterdam. We’re Deep Space 9, you know, way out in the middle of a literary nowhere. We’re pretty removed from who’s-who and what’s-what, and we’re also removed from any Romantic illusions about our expatriated selves. I like that. It’s quiet. I like what that means for the poetry I’m writing, and for the work I’m interested in as an editor.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a healthy Dutch literary scene, but its crossovers internationally are usually either conservative white-man-poet or extreme in a way that fetishizes the other. I won’t stomach that. I can’t be a part of that anyway. And I keep tabs on things in the States through the internet, through sites like HTMLGIANT, and I go to AWP. My blurred sense of home affords me an aesthetic freedom, an exemption from some of the things you have to do as an American writer or editor or as a Dutch writer or editor, and that means that Versal has a lot of room.

Some writers working in translocal contexts like this complain that their homelands won’t publish them anymore, and maybe that’s true. I don’t know. I know I love what it’s done to my own writing, and I know I couldn’t have started Versal anywhere else

I notice that Versal 9 has a fair amount of artwork and really appreciated seeing that blend of fiction, poetry, and art. Why do you have that strong commitment to including art in a literary magazine?

How do you present poetry and prose in a beautiful, spacious way, not just make a book as a medium between writer and reader? I’m relieved so many editors are thinking about this now; ten years ago it felt really radical.

In 2002, Amsterdam’s international lit scene was all on stage, so I got up on it. We all did. I learned that “my work speaks for itself” is mostly bullshit. When you’re reading to a multilingual and not necessarily “literary” audience, you have to work differently, harder maybe, for their attention. You have to connect with your audience to make your work work. Their eyes and ears are as much a part of it as anything else.

We took this into Versal. We agreed we wanted to design the journal into an object in its own right. Give it a strong visual aspect. We were thinking about readers holding it, but also resting their eyes on it. I guess we were thinking more in terms of the walls of a gallery than in terms of the pages of a book. Art was never an add-on. It was just there.

How do you know when you love a piece of writing or art?

Something inside me freakin’ lifts off the ground.

Versal recently chose to start charging a nominal fee for submissions. I remember reading the initial post where you shared the decision and the logic behind the decision. How has it been, having the fee? Has it affected the quantity or quality of submissions Versal received during the last submission period? Will you continue to have a fee?

There are a lot of reasons that I’m glad we did it. From a purely financial point of view, our goal was to replace our ongoing workshop programming here in Amsterdam, which has partially funded the journal for over five years and which was becoming unsustainable, with a revenue stream that came directly from the journal itself. We did that.

I recently shared some initial conclusions on our blog. Submission numbers were down 39% overall. I think Duotrope’s no-fee policy accounts for much of this drop (they changed this policy two days before our reading period closed). The prose team tells me that the quality of work went up significantly. The poetry team tells me that the quality of work polarized: either it was really good or really bad. Art seems to have stayed the same.

Our business model is selling Versal, but we’ll continue to have the fee, at least in the foreseeable future. And I’ll continue to participate in the dialogue about financial models for lit mags, because I think Versal’s experience has a lot to offer these conversations. We’ve done good work here.

There’s a lot of fascinating work in Versal 9. A lot of the writing was really lyrical. Do you notice that themes emerge as you shape an issue?

You know, I hate theme issues, I don’t really know why. But every year there’s something that makes the editors say, “I’m reading so many poems about this or this.” I think Versal 9 had a lot of sea creatures. Or maybe just animals in general. But no, we try not to encourage themes from taking too much root in an issue. If anything, we try to disrupt them. But at the end of the day we just accept work we’re really excited about and see what happens.

Why do you hate theme issues?

Maybe hate’s a strong word. I heard that themes help sell journals, and I was like, really? Most themes just make me shrug. Love and violence? Beauty? The body? I like how Sidebrow handles it, with its “projects”, but a themed issue doesn’t make me buy a journal or not buy a journal. It just doesn’t matter to me.

What is your favorite piece Versal 9?

There were two pieces I fought hard for: Ken White’s “Oculus” and Suzanne Warren’s “The Reindeer Daughter.” Maybe I didn’t have to fight hard for them but I was ready to go to the wall at the roundtables.

I’d love to hear more about your roundtable. What happens in your deliberation process?

The roundtable is when an editorial team—poetry, prose or art—gets together and discusses work that’s been shortlisted for publication. I like to start the meetings by asking the team what pieces they’re excited about. We read the work out loud and dig into it. My job is to listen for enthusiasm, where the editors are converging and where they’re in opposition, and if that opposition is purely aesthetic or if the work has weaknesses that we can’t account for. Sometimes there’s a piece that everyone loves. But more often, only a few editors love it, and the others hear that and hear why, and the excitement about the piece kind of gets shared around. Like it’s contagious. When that happens, we accept the work. When that doesn’t, when an editor’s enthusiasm wanes over the course of the conversation, usually because there’s something in the piece that’s not working, really not working, then we let it go.

I’ve fought hard to make this process work. It means that each editor has to let their ego down a bit. We’ve lost editors because they couldn’t put up with the idea that they weren’t themselves the last word on what was good or what was not, or that a writer’s reputation alone wasn’t enough for acceptance. The roundtable hinges on that we listen to each other and how we listen to each other. It takes a great deal of mutual respect, sometimes even humility. Not everyone can handle it.

Do you ever work with writers on developing their writing?

We do. We try to give feedback as much as we can, even if we reject a piece. Sometimes we’ll work with a writer to tighten up an ending or a line before we go to production. But we see a lot of excellent writing, so if there’s still a lot of work to be done on a piece it seems more fair to go back to the writer with specific feedback and an explicit invitation to send work again next time. I also try to build relationships with our contributors. Many of them stay in touch with us, try new work out on us, so we get to continue dialogues with them about their writing, their development, successes.

You mentioned that there are some extremes in the lit scene with white man poets and the extreme fetishization of the other. What else is going on?

I think there are extremes in the way Dutch literature presents itself in an international setting, and the international literary events held here often fall into these extremes too. But Dutch literature has many parts, and those parts that are not white and not man are starting to gain better footholds, they’re just harder to see from the outside. And there’s more experimentation, too, with poets like Rosalie Hirs and Samuel Vriezen.

A Dutch poet once told me that the Dutch believe poetry comes from God. If that’s true, I can see why there is a really stable masculine and white hierarchy in Dutch literature. But that belief and the hierarchy seem to be breaking down. A few colleges have creative writing classes or even degrees now. This means, at least in some initial way, that Dutch literature is opening up.

Do you make an effort to publish European writers?

Yeah, but it’s not easy. American writers are raised to submit as part of the writing practice. This just isn’t the case elsewhere. In the Netherlands, if you’re a poet, then you make friends with other poets and editors and then you get published. There’s not really a  submission process.

A lot of American journals run theme issues where they focus on a particular national literature, and that creates a lot of buzz and gets the work in. Since we don’t want to do that, we want to gather rather than stockpile, we have to continuously cultivate relationships with people and organizations around the world so that the word gets out.

Also, my hunch is that the economy around translation is different in Europe, and so translators working here are less likely to send work in an open call. The translators I know in the Netherlands are paid for their work, commissioned by publishers or solicited by anthologies. Another problem has been that European writers try to translate their work themselves. I think this succeeds 1% of the time. We’ve had to reject a lot of Dutch poets for that reason, and they aren’t happy with us.

We worked with Laura L. Chalar, a Uruguayan poet and translator, for a long time. We would receive Spanish-language work, she would translate it, and then we would choose what to publish. That was exciting but the process wasn’t very sustainable – we couldn’t publish everything she translated, so she was doing a lot for very little payback. But through her we were able to connect to exciting poets like Alex Piperno, so the process didn’t fail entirely.

Anyway, it’s an ongoing effort.

Why did you move to Amsterdam?

I moved to Amsterdam for a girl. The same reason I’ve moved pretty much everywhere.

You remarked that ten years ago editors weren’t thinking as much about presentation. What other changes have you noticed in literary magazine publishing over the past decade?

The numbers! There are so many of us! Was this always the case? When I first started to publish, this would have been 1997, I feel like I had a pretty good handle on what was out there. I can hardly keep up now. This worries me a little. Does it still worry you? Flooded markets eventually freak. But there are good support systems, like CLMP, and some critical conversations being had, that should help us all navigate whatever’s going on.

If I lived in the States right now, I don’t think I’d start a literary journal. I would just try to join a community that already exists, give it what I’ve got, rather than splinter another group from it off.

The proliferation of literary magazines definitely worries me. Every time I see someone say, “I’m going to start a new journal,” I get really frustrated and I think, “WHY?” I never want to deprive anyone of the opportunity to edit, because it has helped me become a much stronger writer and editor, but at the same time, there’s no reason why would be editors shouldn’t simply join an existing magazine and contribute to helping sustain the magazines we do have. I have a particular peeve with all these magazines that don’t even bother to buy a domain name. Do you think it has become too easy to be an editor these days?

It takes ego to say, “I can pick good literature from the bad”. I was 23 when I started. What was I thinking? Sure, I had a specific goal, Versal was a way to bring writers together here in Amsterdam. A project, I thought, could build a community. And it did. But I won’t downplay my own arrogance, a young American in a new country starting a literary journal. I have to laugh at myself sometimes.

Publishing has become accessible enough that editing can seem, at least logistically, pretty simple. You’re right, editing is an important learning process. But in most larger towns in America there’s already something underway. Maybe it’s not perfect but new voices and new ideas can come in and make the project stronger. I’m especially surprised when I hear of a new journal in a place like Chicago or New York City. Really? Does a new community really form around that new journal, or is it just a way for an editor to position himself at the top of something quickly? I’m pretty suspect of that, and I should be. The history of literature is full of egos manifestoing themselves against other egos. Everyone has to do it new or do it better. But engaging in community as an ambitious, would-be editor—that can be harder, more confronting, put you in a more vulnerable position. It’s easier to sit home alone one night and start a journal on Kickstarter I guess.

You know, Luna Park Review just changed course, recognizing that there are so many forums now for what they set out to do that their mission is no longer necessary. I respect that. Our community is made stronger by that kind of honesty.

What do you love most about editing?

Here’s what I’m supposed to say, and it’s true. I love putting good work in the world in a really beautiful way. But here’s what I love too: I love what I learn from editing Versal. Several of our editors have said to me recently that they think their work wouldn’t make it through our roundtable. I also think this sometimes. It’s one thing to be a lone editor of a journal, where all decisions are made by you. It’s an entirely different thing when you’re part of a team. I have learned so much about writing, about aesthetics, about ego, about what makes a great poem or story, about what doesn’t really matter. Could I have learned so much if I had edited Versal alone? I don’t think so. At the very least, doing it alone would have been boring.

Have you ever been hypnotized? Tell me about it. I was hypnotized at my highschool “after-prom” party thing and it was amazing. The best way I would describe is that the while you are hypnotized the man who is telling you to do things has very good ideas. Werner Herzog hypnotized his entire cast to film Heart of Glass, which (despite my predisposition towards Klaus Kinski) is one of my favorite of Herzog’s films. In H.G. Lewis’s The Wizard of Gore, Montag the Magnificient hypnotizes all who watch him, even those watching him through a television, so he can kill people on stage under the guise of magic. I am interested in magic mediated by technology. There are so many books about “the language of power,” etc, and it all seems aimed at becoming a CEO or like how to seduce someone. I like the idea of mastering language to the point where it can be manipulated into the creation of an experience that transcends the page. I think it would be amazing to read a book that literally held power, could hypnotize a reader with no external control other than language. Is my desire for this book, this book that can hypnotize, fascistic? What if a book masquerading as narrative fiction held an ulterior narrative that hypnotized you into quitting smoking, overcoming trauma, controlling binge eating, etc? Is the moral operative of hypnosis what excuses it? I believe there’d be merit in the use of text-based hypnosis to create experience.

In Defense of Monsters

Most people have little room for magic or legend in their lives. Folks spend most of their formative years cultivating a certain amount of cynicism towards legend and work incessantly towards creating a sense of control over themselves and the world at large. To be human is to conquer – whether physically or mentally.

We keep doing our work, spend inordinate amounts of time “surfing” the web (surfing itself invoking an image of an uncontrollable wave, that of information, tamed by man) and we watch television where we have 24-hour news coverage and programs that reflect our tastes. (Although it can be argued the practice of watching television is, in its own way, an acceptance of a mythology in itself. The very idea of personal choice in the current media system is false. A great infographic from designers Frugal Dad suggests, at the very least, we should reconsider what we’re watching as personal choice.)

We have morphed into cynical, secular creatures, and created a Western reality built on entertainment that recreates old legends and story lines but without the danger of immediacy (or, some might argue, a moral base that unifies us. We rarely look towards scripture, myth or legend as a moral barometer, nor use these stories as allegorical lessons which we may benefit from) that the legends of old seemed to conjure. Or maybe, I’m cynical.

But even with this so-called control we believe we possess, we still have a surprisingly large amount of gullibility built into our being.

Let’s turn our focus to some modern hood-winkery – the alleged boy in the balloon of 2009 – as an example.

You might remember the story:

Father sends up balloon.
Father cannot find son.
Father calls media attention to the fact his son is in the balloon.
New cameras and federal agents follow balloon.
Balloon is empty when it lands.
Someone saw an object drop from the balloon.
Cue manhunt.
Boy is found in home attic.
Father is sent to jail for 90 days and ordered to pay $36,000.

This modern tale of Icarus (a boy flying too close to the sun) made the world privy to a suffering we could conjure. This story, so heart-rending, compelled us to imagine a world outside our own. Each of us became a father who lost his son to a balloon flying in the heavens.

It is a study in human behavior, a textbook case, that when the incident was found out to be nothing more than hot air (excuse the pun) the father was nominated monster of the year. Not because of the way he fooled police, interviewers, and federal agents, but because he fooled us. And like a monster, we forgot him and the story that brought us all together as if we were somehow abused and had to hide the memory away. We returned to our individual bubbles a little more wary and said to ourselves that next time, in no way, would we be so gullible.

Our need to prove that we’re in control is at odds with how easily we can be led astray. In a way, we want to believe. But, with hubris, we attempt to create a world that will bend to our will. Yet we ignore the faults that indicate we’re not 100 percent in control. So skepticism and hubris remain in a constant balancing act. How do we give equal weight to each?  More importantly, have we given up something by attempting to expel wonder from our existence?

In response to these questions, BJ Hollars – in his new book of essays In Defense of Monsters – argues that on the one hand, re-imagining legend (using the Sasquatch, a gigantic turtle living in a pond, and the monster of Loch Ness as an example) may help us utilize cynicism effectively. But with the scales balanced he warns that on the other hand, giving into imaginary creatures may, ultimately, lead us to distraction.

Hollars is quick to insist that in reality the Sasquatch existed in the form of the Gigantopithecus, a large land ape that came over on the Bering Land Bridge some 300,000 years ago.

The bones of this ancient Sasquatch were ground for centuries into a potentially life extending powder. The destruction of such precious evidence of the past, and our inability to confirm the existence of Sasquatch in our current time, may have led to our current inability to realize the legitimacy of the Sasquatch as a true being. Hollars wonders whether “we can validate anything while being hell-bent on invalidation.”

To further emphasis this point of validation, Hollars points to the 18,225 new species of animals discovered in 2008 alone, a quarter of which were mammals. Although none of the mammals were as large as a Sasquatch, similar sized – if not larger animals – were discovered in the past. Do these discoveries allow us the possibility that we may have given up too early on Big Foot?

The effect here is a blow of sorts; Hollars is asking you, before anything else, to consider the existence of the monster and put your cynicism on the back burner, if only till the end of the book.

Hollars suggests that the problem may lie in our hubris: to accept the legend of the Sasquatch is to give in to the idea that we’re wrong. This admittance would require a giving up of control. The fact that the Sasquatch bridges the gap between the human and the lowly ape may be another reason for our hesitation to admit its existence. The Sasquatch, unlike other monsters, is anthropomorphic, and is therefore all the more frightening.

The legend of the “Shelled Sasquatch,” a large turtle found in a pond in rural Indiana, serves as another reminder that monsters may lurk directly below the surface of modern reality. The turtle offered travelers and tourists the chance of discovery, of hope, and a reopening of the imagination. In this way, the monster became interchangeable with God by giving us a glimpse of the unknown, where nature and the mysteries of the universe intermingle.

The “Shelled Sasquatch” is also a tale of warning; Although Hollars suggests that we should, on occasion, give in to the allure of the monster as a mind expansion exercise, he also warns of the danger we face when giving faith the monster’s legend. He points to the destruction of the pond and the surrounding land from the footfall of monster tourists hoping for a glimpse of the monster, as a reminder that in the mad hunt for the unknown, for the answers to a false reality, a perfectly good reality was ruined.

Hollars suggests that the search for monsters take us away from another task of great importance: that of serving our fellow man.

In his essay on the Loch Ness Monster, Hollars is incredulous of the laws made to protect a monster that has shown little desire to be discovered. Harming Nessie, in any way, was made illegal by the Scotland Secretary of State, Sir Godfrey Collins in 1938. This, Hollars writes, was at the same time millions of Jews were being shipped by train to their deaths, much to the blind/turned eye of a European populous.

Earlier in the book, Hollars states that the Sasquatch may be the fittest of all of Darwin’s creatures because the Sasquatch has the good notion to stay hidden away from us and the unfriendly world we choose to live in. Maybe it isn’t that we choose to exist in a cynical reality. Maybe the focus of our cynicism is misplaced.

Although this book may be at first glance about defending the existence of monsters, BJ Hollars makes an even grander argument for humankind’s penchant for shortsightedness and our ability to give into one idea without broad reflection. To give up the idea of the monster is to also give up ourselves: because without monsters we lack the imagination for a bigger world. To accept the monster, however, we give into a world which negates reality.

Hollars’s essays never beg us to give in to the monster’s existence, nor do they suggest we should count out the existence of monsters altogether. The world will always exist in duality. Instead, Hollars asks us to look at both sides of the issue. The book, instead, simply asks us to be humble.

Well, it’s finally started happening. Penn State’s MFA program decided to commit harakiri rather than go on forcing its students to go into debt over a degree to no where. I don’t think it will be the last we’ll see to go. I don’t even know if it’s the first (and it seems likely that it isn’t.)

***There’s a good chance I wouldn’t have gotten an MFA if this was true, though, because the competition would have been so steep I would have been rejected or too intimidated to apply, and that’s fine by me. The MFA is a luxury, not a necessity.

Tell me how you felt. I mean this could be good. I’d like to hear your stories. I will NOT rip them off for my fiction, until I DO.

BONUS: Ever been fired? I was fired twice. Both lovely stories.

One year ago on February 16, 2011, as Odd Future made their television debut on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, maniacally performing “Sandwiches” in their nerd/hipster-thug stage presence, a girl dressed as Sadako from Ring (1998) and/or its remake The Ring (2002) listlessly stood around in clear view on stage with them, as if recently excised from hikikomori, a “midbrow” pop-conscious nod which I’ve always found interesting, if not brilliant. Where Warhol and Koons seem to didactically curate their references, attached to their affected semiotic detachedness, it is rap’s erratic and somewhat manic collision/collation of culture which is our “true,” or at least more effective commentary. At one point, near the loud climax of the song, cymbals crashing, bros screaming, Sadako cowers with hands over her ears — as if suddenly transported into the NBC studio on 49th street. Though it may be her fault, one imagines, her voluntary entry into our real world as she climbs out of the television, scaring the shit out of everyone in front of their own televisions at home. The artifice’s protective medium of the screen was now broken, its very transgression part of the narrative. And when Tyler the Creator jumped on Fallon’s back as the latter bid his audience adieu, the former made odd (somewhat unfortunate, immune to irony) Blackface expressions with almost apelike movements. It’s hard to know how subtle, if any, his sarcasm was. Was it the self-critique of concession to corporate complicity (a la Cobain’s “Corporate Magazines Still Suck” t-shirt for their Rolling Stone cover), or Tyler simply now had a friend in Fallon, a fellow conspirator in the conspiracy of success. One year later, they are not news anymore, the future turns old; another group of young highly intelligent men in an alt-rock or rap band will be heralded as the real deal. Every generation wants to believe what they see before them on a screen somehow transcends the shallow vapidity from which it cometh, even a cute girl on your floor, actually smiling behind all that hair.

Not this time.

In the opening extreme slow-motion shots (the only appetizing thing in the Melancholia, though these brief scenes seem to be leftovers of his style in Antichrist), Lars Von Trier pays homage to no less than four masters: Ingmar Bergman (the close-up of Kirsten Dunst), Alan Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (the giant hedge garden, with tree shadows this time), Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (the slow planetary movements to classical music), all of Andrei Tarkovsky, but specifically Solaris (the Breughel painting) and The Mirror (objects falling in slow-motion, a fire seen through a window)—the end of the world scenario while people bob and weave around an opulent country house is right out of Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice. Von Trier’s whole opening sequence mirrors the opening to his Antichrist (using Handel’s music instead of Wagner) which scintillatingly displayed intercourse and the death of a child. One can only hope that Von Trier will go beyond homage and create something compelling, but it is not to be.

What follows is an empty work. Whereas Von Trier’s brand of nihilism has worked before (Dogville and The Five Obstructions are last decade’s best examples), here the brisk “fuck you’s” of the mother of the bride at the wedding have no resonance, nor do the bloviating comments of the boss of the bride. His asking her to come up with a tag-line for an ad displaying naked women during her wedding (she doesn’t) is quite ludicrous as is the entire set-up with a “mysterious” man he hires to follow her around for a while in order to get the tag-line. If this is a critique of America (and the film is explicitly set in America) it is shallow, crude, unconvincing, and not even worthy of our semi-spineless country.

The sloppy hand-held camera work Von Trier has employed before to great effect (Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark) is only off-putting here because what the camera films is Von Trier’s own hackneyed solipsism, which has mostly successfully been fought by his being in touch with his unconscious (a place of no ego and a place where I’d argue his best scenarios and images come from), until now. It feels like Von Trier’s conception of the film was inhibited by the subject matter—his thinking that the end of the world might be compelling enough to carry a film is a grave misjudgment. It’s fine to have depressive characters (many of the most compelling in movies and books are) but they have to be artful and interesting in their melancholy (see Bergman and John Hawkes). If a character can’t seem to communicate why he or she is depressed to other characters (Dunst’s attempts to her parents consist of “I have to talk to you,” and to her husband “I need some time”) or the audience through facial expression and if a director can’t create a compelling mise-en-scene to swaddle this, the audience loses. In Persona, Bergman created a character (the actress played by Liv Ullman) who utters one word in the entire film, yet Bergman’s cinematography, editing, sound, and Ullman’s amazing face generate one of the most compelling studies of melancholy.

In Antichrist, the two main characters were given enough space (in terms of images and the screenplay*) to counter their mordant and morbid tendencies. The images worked with the actors to create something dynamic, whereas in Melancholia, because Von Trier has nothing to say (being afraid of the end of the world qualifies as that—the question “Why is one afraid of the end of the world?” is not asked), neither do the characters and by extension, the actors, who are often wooden and don’t seem to know why they are acting the way they are, specifically newcomers to the Von Trier stable, Dunst and Kiefer Sutherland.

Late in the film the Charlotte Gainsbourg character asks her now unwed sister to have a glass of wine on their veranda before the end of the world. Dunst simply answers that she thinks her idea is a piece of shit and walks away. The Gainsbourg character retorts that she hates her sister. This of course would be at least a little powerful if one cared about the characters, but the film’s vapidness precludes that and it makes any attempt at human feeling false, with Von Trier coming off like a floundering, churlish auteur who needs to again make art that communicates, and pays homage to, his own psychosis.**

**The news that Melancholia has won the most prestigious US critical prize (in my opinion), Best Film from the National Society of Film Critics, only sours this bitter film experience. Melancholia joins past winners like Blow-Up, Persona, Blue Velvet, as well as Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves

GREG GERKE’s fiction and non-fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Quarterly West, Mississippi Review, Rain Taxi, Brooklyn Rail, The Review of Contemporary Fiction and others. There’s Something Wrong with Sven, a book of short fiction has been published by Blaze Vox Books.

In so much art, I can smell the author’s desire for me to be more interested in how they and/or their characters interpret and inhabit boredom than actually doing something. Simple action. Anybody involved doing anything. I’m thinking here of The Stranger, The Third Reich by Roberto Bolaño, The Immoralist. The strung along. The boredom of relative luxury. How this seems to at least temporarily obliterate any internal gyre of philosophy or gut thought that would lead to decisions being made and bodies being moved, followed then by trailing thought, fallen out words. Is there a novel out there concerned mostly with people moving and acting with little thought, but in which plot in its traditional patterns of building (attention, suspense, terror) does not build its usual cores but delves or unearths something deeper in its time: meaninglessness? Beckett, I guess, right? Of Molloy. And not yet just a list of actions but a trail of subsumed desire, of wiped want, or cleaned out intuition. Belief born without a tail. Who’s out there? And how are they speaking? And in that smell, be it a pleasant suprasense or the shit of deadening culture, you can either yes to it or no and walk away, close the book. Off the screen. Say hi to a realm of light and seeming chaos that somehow provides you wind.

But meaninglessness is tricky. Just as the word impossible is framed by a language that both codes it and decodes it simultaneously (it’s a combustive word; no wonder artists take it as such an engine), meaninglessness doesn’t truly touch through the black skein of a void, the void, void. We know it just gestures. (from Mark Leidner: poetry like the Midas of meaning; everything you reach for is dissolved in the spectacle of the gesture) So we’re left with a hologram of a projection of deeper sense or finality: we’re left just out of reach of the point of cataclysm, or at least where the earth can break through enough to swallow its container. It’s not geometrical at all, nor is it a sphere without a skin: in a way, culture in its progression, bacterial (maybe moreso than a viral way), keeps as its form the method by which we can get as close to a system of thought’s event horizon. A hollow zone where the force holding you in place is milliseconds away from its pull toward another place: lesser star, complete off.

I dreamed earlier today about writing I am paralyzed. In the near immediate wake of death. And how, seeming to me then in the open dream, that must necessarily precede a statement of numerical precision: how many times the page itself I had typed or tapped onto white had been deleted. And reformed, necessarily. All I’m thinking about now is how the Dionysian and the Apollonian were easy outs. It seems to me both of those frames of vision have a third hand somewhere: just out of frame, the marble grates against its mate. Touch.

Below are some thoughts on those books.

A Craving for Swan by Andrei Codrescu
I went looking for a book of selected poems between 1970 and 1980 by this guy. The library said they had it, but the library says a lot of things. I flipped through all the Codrescu they had. As far as I can tell he’s a Romanian with quite a history and a track record of being funny and influential. He works for NPR and has for a long time. Nothing looked appealing. I was about to walk away when I noticed A Craving for Swan. I think maybe it was misplaced or something, or otherwise I didn’t care to look at it when I was flipping through the other books. Anyway, I opened it up. It’s a book of short essays, most  less than two full pages, that Codrescu had read on NPR’s “All Things Considered” between 1983 and 1985. I opened to a random page and read one of the essays. I don’t remember what it was about or what it was like. Then I went to the first page. The essay started with something like “One day I found myself with a strong craving for swan” or something. I stopped reading and took the book with me.

Rain by Don Patterson
I mistakenly believed this book to be the talk of the town. A book titled Rain had been recommended to me by several people, but I was confused. The Rain I’d been recommended is by Jon Woodward. Andrew Weatherhead was kind enough to point that out to me an email just minutes after the initial publication of this post. With regard to this Rain, I can see that it looks short. I wonder if it’s funny, but I have to assume it is not. The library had a lot of other Don Patterson books, but I’ll have to look at this one first before I even attempt to venture back to that section. His name reminds me of this kid I used to play baseball with—Dave Lawler. No reason to give that too much thought though.

Pee On Water by Rachel B. Glaser
Funny, I used to play baseball with a kid named Dave Glaser too, but I remember more clearly playing basketball with him. We bought fake blood capsules with a kid named Doug the first time we hung out. Anyway, I saw Andrew Weatherhead reading this once. He said it was very funny and there is a story where it talks about the history of humanity and how when we became most highly evolved, we chose to pee on water. Seems funny. I guess this is a short story book then. I never looked inside it. I think Andrew mentioned basketball too, but that guy is always talking about basketball, so who knows. This is the only book I checked out written by a woman. I looked at The Stupefaction by Diane Williams, but after reading two stories I thought “I can write better than this” and put it back.

Arcade by Gordon Lish
This one is subtitled a novel about writing novels if I remember correctly. Well that sounds really good to me I guess. I don’t really know how to do that, nor do I care, but that Lish character is always fun to read. What else do I even say about this one. Arcade. Arcade Fire. Arcadia. Stadium Arcadium. All that stuff references this book supposedly. It will be interesting to sift through it all find the connections, grasp a deeper understanding of art and culture. I guess I plan to read this in a sitting, as with all Lish novels.

Self-Imitation of Myself by Gordon Lish
Read most of this copy about a year and a half ago, sometimes on the subway, once in the very park I planned to read in today. I guess I wanted to pick this up again due to the conversations I’ve had/heard about the differences between Lish’s original publications of stories versus the Collected Fictions released in 2010. I guess he did a lot of editing and I’d like to compare some stuff as far as that goes. Also isn’t it just easy to read a book when it’s not in a big book? I find reading collected oeuvres much more taxing and time consuming than all the individual books. But hey, I’m kind of a bitch.

Krupp’s Lulu by Gordon Lish
I know what you’re thinking: this guy again?!?!! I guess these stories are probably also, in some form, part of Collected Fictions, and maybe I read them, but I’m guessing I didn’t. So here we go again. Need I repeat myself? No more.

****************************************************************************************************

In either case, here’s the punch line of the whole thing: I never ended up even flipping through a single one of these books in the park. I had it on my mind to finish the book I was almost done with first, before tearing into the loans—the book being Michael Earl Craig’s Can You Relax in My House. But by the time I’d made it through, I had plans to go skateboarding with my buddy Miles in Williamsburg. And so that’s what I did. Here is what I’m proud of doing from that: kickflips, grinded such that sparks came off my trucks, 180 off curb thing.