I read a little more than half a Louisville Slugger’s worth. Not included: the books I started and didn’t finish. Included below but not pictured: books I’ve given to friends. It was a great year, though, in that I read more books that I know I’ll reread than in any other. In mostly scattered order:
I am teaching two courses this semester…here are the reading lists, feel free to follow along:
LIT 2230 – Global Literature
The European Avant-Garde 1900-1945
Alfred Jarry – Exploits and Opinions of Dr Faustroll Pataphysician
Tristan Tzara – The Gas Heart
Penelope Rosemont (Editor) – Surrealist Women: An International Anthology
Max Ernst – Une Semaine De Bonte: A Surrealistic Novel in Collage
Vitezslav Nezval – Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
Gherasim Luca – The Passive Vampire
Futurist, Dada, and Surrealist Manifestos
Antonin Artaud exerpts from The Theatre & Its Double
Clement Greenberg “Avant-Garde & Kitsch”
José Ortega y Gasset “The Dehumanization of Art”
LIT 2020 – The Short Story
Challenging Conventions:
20th-21st Century Experimental Short Stories
Gertrude Stein – “Composition as Explanation”
Susan Sontag – “Against Interpretation”
Ben Marcus – “Why Experimental Literature Threatens to Destory Publishing…”
R.M. Berry, Lance Olsen, Brian Evenson, Susan Steinberg, Michael Joyce – “The Question of Writing Now: FC2 responds to Ben Marcus”
Anne Carson – The Beauty of the Husband
Blake Butler – Scorch Atlas
Russell Edson – The Tunnel
Renee Gladman – Juice
Thalia Field – Point and Line
I earn more than I thought I would when I became a poet
And no reason to talk about the books I read but I still do
Don’t leave it all unsaid
Well, I wouldn’t object to being approached, put it that way
They said they respect me, which means, their judgment is crazy
If you really concentrate on the Top 40 there aren’t really that many striking individuals so it is rather easy within that block to be anarchic
Artists aren’t really people. And I’m actually 40 per cent papier mache
I find agreeable people immensely disagreeable
I was always attracted to people with the same problems as me. It doesn’t help when most of them are dead
Am I looking in the mirror?
Any fool can think of words that rhyme
There are some bad people on the rise
Sell all of your clothes
We hate it when our friends become successful
The traditional viewpoint is to scowl, but I don’t understand that
Rejection is one thing – but rejection from a fool is cruel
There’s more to life than books you know, but not much more
In the summer of last year, Featherproof released The Awful Possibilities, the fourth book by Philadelphia’s Christian TeBordo. It is an assemblage of extreme range in sound and direction, as TeBordo’s work manages to funnel a kind of well-orchestrated, rising mania across a range of perspectives and situations, including teenage suburban thug rappers planning a school shooting, a logic-fucked woman involved in shady black market business in a hotel, a dude trying to buy a new wallet, deathbed advice minds, and several other hybrid enactments than in other hands would lack the flair of TeBordo’s ability to funnel livelanguage and feeling into seemingly any kind of body. As says George Saunders: “Christian TeBordo shows that it is possible to be, simultaneously, a wise old soul and a crazed young terror.”
Last month, Christian and I took some time emailing about the book, Christian’s experience of influence by Brian Evenson and others, the process of assembling a text, getting along in sound and structure, approach, revision, and nudie pics.
* * *
BB: The Awful Possibilities is your first collection of short fiction after having published three novels. Do you see yourself more as a novelist, and is there a difference in your approach? Were these stories written over a long period of time?
CT: Let me answer these backwards, because that way it goes from easy to really hard. The stories in The Awful Possibilities were written over a little more than 10 years. One of the stories in there is the first I ever made that I considered a story. The most recent (the postcards), I sent to featherproof after they’d accepted the manuscript. Actually just before the book got laid out. I wrote and published my three novels during the same time. I don’t approach the forms differently when I sit down to write. For me it’s just the sentences and the persona that generates the sentences telling the larger work where to go. On the other hand, I try to do something different each time. People who read my last novel might recognize a sensibility or tendencies in The Awful Possibilities, but I hope nobody would be able to predict what one would be like having read only the other. The question of how I see myself is a little tougher. As a writer, I’m happy doing both. Stories are fun because sometimes you can just bulldoze through a draft in a sitting or two. Or you can spend weeks being really meticulous and crafty with a few paragraphs without getting disgusted by what you’re up to. Novels are fun because you have some sense of what you’re going back to each night and there’s more room to surprise yourself. The truth is, though, I feel more comfortable with short stories because I do want to be read, but I want my stuff to be an all-out assault, too, for now at least. I think people are more willing to put up with that for 10 pages than 200.
All you sentence-heads, Snooki’s on the sentence tip too: “Any juicehead will get some nut shrinkage. And bacne. They fly into a ‘roid rage, it is a ‘road’ ‘roid rage.” I mean, sound is sound: Knopf by way of the club. I’ve read worse; hell, frequently.
“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.” – John Cage
What do you expect to pay for a paperback book? What if it’s 700+ pages? Books are really cheap entertainment. Do you think they should cost more?
Gossip until it’s not, but anyway: James Franco to write/adapt & direct As I Lay Dying and Blood Meridian.
A childhood trauma:
I am five or six and I am watching the animated version of Russell Hoban’s The Mouse and His Child. At the end of this film, the mouse—a windup toy—and his child—same—find themselves at the bottom of a lake, and find themselves staring at a can of dog food. On the can of dog food is a recursive image: a dog standing next to a can of dog food with a label that features that dog standing next to a can of dog food with a label that features…
The toy mice are stuck at the bottom of the lake, peering into the label, the child tasked with counting the number of dogs. And so the child does forever and ever and ever, and the film ends, and I am sent to bed, and I spend the subsequent decades sometimes pondering the concept of eternity until I am filled with anxiety and my neck begins to sweat. One dog, two dogs, three dogs, four…
After the cut is the animated version of The Mouse and His Child. Skip ahead 50 or so minutes to watch the scene in question.
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