What is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions: Vi Khi Nao}
Vi Khi Nao lives in Iowa City. Fugue State Press recently released her novella, The Vanishing Point of Desire. She appears in the 2011 edition of NOON.
POP: A Polemic on a Contemporary Language-Based “Objectivity”
I do not like metaphor. My personal education pertaining to literature takes a very French bent, and it is here that Robbe-Grillet himself, king of the nouveau roman one could say, has denounced metaphor, preferring, I suppose, some sort of metonymy, but–if anything–participating in the creation of a style of fiction in which the surface is more important than a subtext.
I think that this adherence to the surface, at least in terms of language, is good, positive, because it removes an additional level of signification, which brings us, as a reader, closer to the experience the language itself is hiding, carrying, revealing. Though often, in the creation of atmosphere, metaphor can be adequately used to help evoke a mood, I feel like there are often more interesting ways to do this (and I suppose that here, by “interesting,” I mean “heterogeneous, diverse, wildly more creative”).
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Printers
McNaughton & Gunn
Even though my experience is very basic, people often ask me to recommend printers. Here is a list of printers I have used, and some thoughts. READ MORE >
Jordan Castro and his band, The Ohioans, have released their debut studio album, also called The Ohioans. Bros are really good, I’m impressed.
Rethinking Experimental Literature / the Avant-Garde / what Henry Miller calls “the inhuman ones”
"Pond Scum" by Bill Benzon
I love Benzon’s photos of pond scum, especially because many of them feature manmade objects amidst the polluted water, which creates an interesting tension between the living and the dead. The juxtaposition of “nature” and “industry” also appeals to me. Bio and synthetic. Both are contagions. Neither are innocuous. Alone they seem dormant, put together they seem toxic. Or at any rate, they seem removed from humanity, forgotten, neglected, afloat in their own private universe. I’m beginning to think of “the avant-garde” synonymously: both living and dead: undead. Or more precisely, not-human, inhuman, unhuman, or as a kind of desire to dehumanize.
Conversation is cracking over at Montevidayo lately on the topic of “the avant-garde.” I tried to join in by offering some preliminary ideas about the connection between the avant-garde and dehumanization. But then other obligations got the best of me and I fell out of the conversation. Then, in the comment section of an interview I did with Noah Cicero over at WWAATD, I responded to questions by Stephen Tully Dierks and tried to extend some of these ideas by showing their application via specific literary texts (Beckett, Barnes, and Burroughs).
All of this to say, I figured maybe I’d do a thinking-out-loud post here on the topic.
Reincarnate hard
In Funny People (dir. Apatow, 2009), Adam Sandler, since diagnosed with cancer, teases his oncologist about looking like Karl, the blond villain in Die Hard (1988) who rises from the dead at the end of the film for a final shot at John McClane (Bruce Willis), only to be shot dead by the black cop, played by the guy who ended up playing Urkel’s neighbor. (I’ll spare you my theory on the subconscious racism of how all “good cops” are black, as if such casting were some progressive affront to the more common implicit stereotype.) It is sadly wonderful how all of you know what I’m talking about, these names and faces closer than our own cousins — that there are semi-dense clusters of cells in our brains dedicated to remembering these things, that we are somewhat thwarted by them, yet continuously rewarded. In Hollywood’s game, people can be anything, and Apatow is aware of the pleasure we derive in getting the reference, the erratic yet embedded memory of Karl, as Bruce Willis and John McClane are equally distilled with meaning in this regard. (“Where you try to kill Bruce Willis” is Sandler’s punchline.) The question is did the script call for an actor who looked like Die Hard’s Karl, or was the script cleverly revised, ad libbed even, once they noticed the similarity? The answer is less important than its instigator. Karl since has risen from the dead twice, an unlikely Jesus, save the perfect Aryan hair.
Online Literature Calender at Zine-Scene
Zine-Scene is a website devoted to promoting online literature through journal reviews, author spotlights, and its own literary quarterly, which reprints fiction that previously appeared in print only. Keeping with this mission we have launched an Online Literature Calendar. The calendar displays the release dates of online literary magazines and makes finding new literature easy and user friendly.