Prediction:

Richard Froude’s FABRIC: Preludes to the Last American Book (Horse Less Press, 2011) is a sentence you will be hearing.

Wolf in a Field heard it from Seth Landman, and we hear it here (or you heard it from ____  _______ or from Selah Saterstrom, Alice Notley, Maggie Nelson, or Bhanu Khapil, who gets it just right in her “British blurb”:

I tried to explain to [the author] that he was doing something strange and beautiful in his writing, that was different to other kinds of writing. I said: “Have you ever considered the possibility that you’re actually a novelist?” He looked at me blankly, but now I think the prediction has come true. What is a novel? That’s separate. Ask Richard. Ask the person who mutates the given form.

Yesterday I tore FABRIC–its subtitle calls to mind, as does, at first crack, the blocks of poem and days inside, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric; its title, in turn, reminds one of another Richard (Rick Myersº) and the other Mayer, Rosemary, whose 41 Fabric Swatches I recently cataloged: does anyone know if there were ever swatches?–from an envelope, in which it was buffered by Thuggery and Grace (ed. Froude, Anne Waldman, & Erik Anderson), which is mailed to you, while it lasts, if you ask for it. Ask for it. Thing starts with Renee Gladman’s “Syntax and the Event of Reading”, which starts “I want to talk to you today about two possibilities of the sentence”: when Renee Gladman–who was reading, when I first read FABRIC, in the City where Lutz (“The Sentence Is A Lonely Place”) will be reading (update: read about it), as I read it again, with Lisa Robertson at SpaceSpace in the Poetry Time between; damn “I do not live in New York” (meaning: move) is a lonely sentence: at least there’s now a Poetry Time audio archive and there’s always when Gladman–wants to talk to you about the possibilities of the sentence, you listen. (Gladman: “It is usually from this perspective that the sentence begins to align itself with the city.” Froude in FABRIC: “I tried but could not write the city.”)

Also inside are two hearted Ohio poems by Sasha Steensen, Ohio’s own Merrill Gilfillan, goodgraphs from Noah Eli Gordon‘s Dysgraphia, Laura Elrick, and more, including two poems by Susan Scarlata, whose It Might Turn Out We Are Real is the other first full-length offering from Horse Less Press, of chapbook fame: Tobin, Cohen, Schapira, Schomburg, Starkweather, Browning, Rexilius, Becker, and so many more, including forthcomers Brian Foley, and Jennifer Denrow (four poems in T&G, and more at Brave Men Press), who took just the right photograph on the cover of FABRIC, which does everything I like to see a book do. Hear it go:

FABRIC: A Prelude to the Last American Book. (Preorder.) A preliminary catalog.

***SPOILER ALERT: heavy quotation from a 110 page book***

• Memorable epigraphs from Jabes, WCW, Woolf, Dock Ellis (…”I was zeroed in on the glove, but I didn’t hit the glove too much.”…), Jabes, etc.
• It has four sections (the fourth, anti-first, has three parts, the fifth section is a Preface), begins alphabetically (“At Bristol Zoo”) enough and ends equally. The sixth section is a blank canvas dashes everything forever
• St. George, New Year’s Day, all the days of the week, all the days/months/years, Deleuze/Cortazar/Darwin/Lincoln, The Great Fire of London and Portland stone, Wittgenstein’s (sister/perfection/design) “genius”/”failure,” Emerson/Sappho, Giotto, Caravaggio, Sartre, Satie:

From the first section, TYPE:

What is 1982?

A silent movie.

What is silence?

Simultaneously a window and a bird. Like similar movies, it would have often been accompanied by piano. When Erik Satie claimed to be a phonometrician rather than a musician, he meant that he measured and wrote down sounds. The word ‘poet’ makes me uncomfortable.

Like Satie (like Cage after, like Duchamp and Dickinson and Coolidge during), like Gladman, like Lutz, like Robertson, like Jabes, like Rosmarie Waldrop, like WC(like Diane)W, like Woolf (before Borges before Homer before Joyce), like Dock Ellis (like Eliot Weinberger), like Genya Turovskaya‘s DEAR JENNY (like Jenny Boully, like Jennifer Martenson’s UNSOUND), like Jean Day, like Stephen Rodefer, like Steve Benson, like Michelle Taransky, like Blake Butler & Dana Ward (Happyesterday), like Gertrude Stein, like Donald Sutherland (tho I guess Gallop said: “Pigeons on the granite, damn it.”), like Judy Garland (Wizard of Oz is all over FABRIC and vice versa), Richard Froude is a writer who makes lines (“straight and jagged”: between blanks, between other lines, between poetry and prose) uncomfortable.

{Placeholder: perhaps this post is a prelude to a new breed of Hybrid, measured with due louditude to New Wave/York/School(s) and (Big Other’s) New Sentence, & on the analogy of Vila-Matas’ Writers of the No (Wave), Writers of the Third Word? Probably not, tho I just read in Lewis Freedman’s notebook from when he was writing The Third Word: “measure / meant”}

When Satie enters, early in the book, I put on his furniture music, and was rewarded four pages later:

What is night?

It is best understood as rhythm. We gave most of our furniture away.

On the back of FABRIC, Khapil asks, What is a novel? In the first section alone, the book answers: What is 1982? What is silence? What is night? Another answer:

What is transition?

A movement between states. I am trying to remember the various ways I’ve understood the afterlife. For example, my uncle [...]

In Sartre’s No Exit, it takes the form of what the Eagles sing about in Hotel Californi–a strange boarding house from which departure is deceptively impossible. [...]

Similarly, I believed that when I died my mind would freeze. Whatever I was thinking at that moment I would think forever. At times when I suspected mortal danger (before a rollercoaster, on a plane) I would think only the best thoughts I could. This still seems reasonable. What troubles me is that I can’t remember what any of those thoughts were.

What follows are four more answers to “What is 1982?” (A Dorothy, Atari, Apocalpyse, and Augustine are not the answers, but close.)

In the second section, CONTEXTURE, another type of answer:

So, it is a work of becoming?

It is a work of straight and jagged lines onto which language is superimposed. The chamber does not exist in the original pattern but in the curvature that language affords. Such was the response of the patent office. Such is the story of the drugstore.

Midway through A Confederate General from Big Sur, Richard Brautigan refers to the ‘rivets in Ecclesiastes.’ Specifically, this is a reference to his lead character Jesse’s method of reading by punctuation. When I started writing this I understood its relation to the preceding although now it isn’t as clear. I think I am remembering Erik Satie: reading (as well as writing) can exist as a practice of measurement.

And another:

On a website where users post questions for others to answer, between ‘What does your birthday mean?’ and ‘How do Volcanoes work?’ I found ‘Have you ever seen a dead body?’

The third section, THE DASHES (A SILENT MOVIE, A DREAM) has answers by the name of Alfred:

Insistence on decisive battle will be retained into the twenty first century. I can offer no illustration but this mirror. Am I to play Alfred? I think so, for now.

In place of logic, may I offer you these trinkets?

Here are my medals. Here is my gun. Her silence is white. / Cut with a dah or needle. / Dear Marjorie: These are my wishes of the season.

I want to type everything that plays out between Alfred and Marjorie and THE DASHES, but I will stop short. I will type only three more pieces of many:

This disrupts the logic of prayer. The text becomes deranged, split into its constituent parts (though these parts are themselves deranged: one molecule strontium, one molecule zinc). These are weak bonds, the likes of:

After he was born it took Yuri Gagarin 34 years to die. It took Alfred only 40.

In the corresponding illustration, a garden. Alfred leads me down a path lined with pink rhododendron. he has led me this way before. Beneath a yew tree we stop at the bust of a gorilla. Its name is Alfred. We stare at it for days.

Such a prayer is conceived without discernible truth value.
I chew these terms until they turn to powder.

_            _            _

There was a rumor that ‘all’ meant ‘everything.’
There was a rumor that to breathe was forbidden.
Don’t you have a machine that puts food in the mouth and pushes it down?

In that excerpt, the three (actual) dashes (which actually top every page in every section) represent a page break. The next page looks (partly) like this:

What is a novel? The third section, like the whole book, begins with a book (a “prayer book”: but turning the page we learn that “The first eighty consist of three short plays”) and ends (after eleven wildly entertaining pages) almost as it began (“By January”). In between, it asks “Is this the argument?” (The third dash is offstage, but answers anyway.)

The fourth section, OCEANOGRAPHY (ANTI-TYPE) has two enviable epigraphs (Jabes, again–What, in fact, haunts me, is the last book: the one we will never write and which all our books try to look like, just as the universe in its becoming each day resembles a little more the pre-existing universe.–and Hejinian: Sway is built into skyscrapers, since it is natural to trees.) and three numbered parts (dashes?). One paragraph, respectively, from each:

1. Typically, recollections such as these are misconstrued. I first caught sight of her through stained glass windows. Her arms colored orange, her neck a deep blue and the twelve apostles danced sadly upon her saffron forehead. She drew my attention away from the vestry. Led it out onto the lawn. I followed her through the dusky streets as the last operational lighthouse, suspected of barbituate manufacture, quietly roused the trawlers.
2. Dear Gretl: I know that an American book is a book of movement. I know that movement is only seldom accompanied by silence. On her first night in the hospital, Marjorie heard a heart monitor flatline. It was the heart monitor of a woman two beds down on the opposite side of the ward. This is the ward to which I always return.
3. The last book is the unwritable book. The book that by its absence enables aperture, the means by which we touch the world. Jackie says that dying is like waking then realizing the life you thought you’d lived was a dream. And from this, instead of a new day, all that begins is your own absence. I have been calling him Jackie but his name is also Alfred. I can carry him no further.

Finally, a paragraph from 5. APOLOGIES FOR THE TIN MAN (A PREFACE), the last section of the book (at least the last with words) and the first with blanks:

What is a novel? What it’s not is not new.
Whatever else it is, FABRIC is a BOOK.

GO, etc.

ºI don’t know if Rick Myers is actually named Richard, but I’ve been wanting to remind myself to write about his work as well and why not now. After all, it fits this post that the work currently at the top of his page is called (in part) “(Afterimage Prologue)”

•