Consider this provocative statement from a recent post over at Montevidayo entitled “The Inhuman Art of Dying vs. Poetry’s Grief Police” by Lucas de Lima, “…by writing, we lose control of our narratives, and inevitably end up thwarting not just our intentions for a poem, but also the way we conceive of ourselves and our bodies as bounded, autonomous entities shaped through free will.”
…by writing, we lose control…
Like Brownian Motion: the presumably random drift of particles, which is, of course, among the simplest of the probabilistic processes, and thus serves as a limit of both simpler and more complicated stochastic processes, writing being one we might never have thought to correlate.
Which is to say, what may begin determined becomes random. A transformation. Or, perhaps, determination and control are always an illusion anyway…?
The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am
By Kjersti A. Skomsvold
Translated by Kerri A. Pierce
Dalkey Archive Press, 2011
147 pages / $17.95 Buy from Dalkey Originally published in Norwegian as Jo Fortere Jeg GÂr, Jo Mindre Er Jeg by Forlaget Oktober A/S, 2009
Although I know I shouldn’t, sometimes I judge a book by its title.
At first glance, The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am might suggest some kind of self-help manual advocating weight loss by means of low-intensity cardiovascular exercise. But putting the title aside and judging instead from the book’s front cover, (something else I know I shouldn’t do,) it’s clear this could never turn out to be the case. The copy I have, the hardback Dalkey Archive Press 2011 translation, sports artwork reminiscent of a Marcel Dzama painting. In a forest of leafless trees against pink-purple sky there is a woman standing with her back to a trunk, iniscernible save for her white dress and white shoes. The woman turns out to be Mathea Martinsen, and the title turns out to be a reference to Einstein’s theory of relativity, and the book’s content turns out to be a candid portrayal of losses far greater than that of a few inches around the waistline.
Skomsvold writes from the point of view of the front cover’s indiscernible woman. Mathea is childless, widowed and “almost a hundred, just a stone’s throw away.” All of her life, she’s been overlooked. “The spun bottle never pointed at me, the neighborhood kids never found me when we played hide-and-seek, and I never found the almond in the pudding at Christmas…” Now she lives alone in the same apartment block in Haugerud, a suburb of Oslo, where she has spent all her married life. Mathea likes to knit ear-warmers, read the obituaries and start new rolls of toilet paper. She is surprisingly proud, yet appallingly lonely – so lonely she listens to the distant sound of sirens and wishes they were coming for her, so lonely her only sense of fellowship is achieved by buying the same groceries as strangers she passes in the aisles of the local store.
I just heard that Christine Brooke-Rose passed away.
I first came across her work thanks to Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction (1987), where he wrote about her 1975 novel Thru.
At the time, I was deeply into concrete poetry, in particular novelists who used concrete poetry techniques (Kenneth Patchen, B.S. Johnson, Ann Quin). So I was hooked. I picked up the 1986 Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus, which contains Thru as well as its three “companion” novels: Out (1964), Such (1966), and Between (1968). All of them are decidedly unusual; like Johnson and Quin, Brooke-Rose was heavily inspired by the French New Novel of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, and Nathalie Sarraute. (She translated Robbe-Grillet’s In the Labyrinth.) Like all of those authors, Brooke-Rose was a brilliant maker of contemporary fiction who deserves to be more widely read.
The Hanged Man is suspended, upside-down, by his still-incomplete thesis. Given the calm expression on his face, it appears he hasn’t been on any academic job-search boards yet. Around The Hanged Man’s Head is a yellow halo, depicting the fondness he feels toward his Freshman seminar students. This fond feeling will soon cease. The Hanged Man’s number is 12, reflecting the number of years he has spent in grad school thus far.
The High Priestess is high. She sits at the gate before the great mystery of experimental literature, passing beneath a narrative arc on ionic corinthian pillars. She no longer goes from point A to point B, but from point B to point J. She sits between darkness and light, half enlightened by the experimental text on her lap and half not knowing what the hell is going on. The tapestry hung between the pillars keeps punctuation out.
The Knight of Wands is an impulsive type of dude who frequently posts his rough drafts to Fictionaut. He provides status updates about his divorce roughly every four – six minutes. Drawing The Knight of Wands card in a tarot reading may foreshadow an unexpected event in one’s life, such as being cornered by The Knight of Wands at a “literary reception” and forced to talk with him about Bolano for over an hour. The Knight of Wands is the patron saint of open mic nights.
1. Seems to me we flash fiction folks don’t really get enough book contests. Hell, here’s one.
14. Duck tape and eggs greeted vehicles traveling down Highway 3 in the early morning hours of Friday, March 16.
5. We learned about student evaluations from a sociologist. She said studies show men rate female professors lower than male professors on student evaluations, but men and women rate male professors the same. OK.
You missed the live reading. Excerpts were spoken from:
Partyknife by Dan Magers
The No Hellos Diet by Sam Pink
Meat Heart by Melissa Broder
Skin Horse by Olivia Cronk
A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon by CAConrad
Crunk Juice by Steve Roggenbuck
Autoportrait by Edouard Leve
Fast Machine by Elizabeth Ellen
Percussion Grenade by Joyelle McSweeney
The Black Forest by Christopher DeWeese
Sister Stop Breathing by Chiara Barzini
Transfer Fat by Aase Berg
The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am
