"Call and Response" by Adam Grossi

As the nonfiction & reviews editor of the online journal Requited, it’s my pleasure to announce that Issue 6 just went live. In the Essays section you’ll now find:

• an autobiographical comic by Keiler Roberts (Powdered Milk Volume 5);
• a video essay by Julianne Hill (“So, Mary?”);
• and interviews with Robert Ashley, Vanessa Place, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Curtis White regarding the materials and habits of their respective writing practices (see the introductory note here).

There’s also a new review: Jeff Bursey‘s take on J. Robert Lennon’s story collection Pieces for the Left Hand.

And much more!

This time around, we have a special sound art section guest-edited by Ryan T. Dunn (see his introductory note here), which includes work by Eddie Breitweiser, Justin Cabrillos, Joseph G. Cruz, Chris Cuellar, Joseph Kramer, Ira S. Murfin, Katrina Schaag, Kim Walker, and Audra Wolowiec.

As well as:

• fiction by Emily Anderson, Michael Czyzniejewski, Tim Jones-Yelvington, and Melanie Roeder;
• poetry by C. L. Blesdoe, William Cordeiro, Tony Mancus, M. G. Martin, Alexis Pope, Anne Marie Rooney, Shannon Schmidt, Bret Shepard, and Gary F. Sheppard;
• and visual art by Barbara Cooper, Adam Grossi, Zeal Harris, Grace Lee, and the Poyais Gruop.

Enjoy!

&

Tragodía 1: Statement of Facts
by Vanessa Place
Blanc Press, 2010
430 pages / $45 (HB), $25 (PB)  Buy from Blanc Press

Among the individuals in Los Angeles who are responding to heavyweight issues exists an  uncanny force: Vanessa Place. A criminal defense attorney, she defends what some categorize as the lost, the wretched: indigent criminals, repeat sex offenders and violent predators. Some criminals learn valuable lessons while incarcerated; others leave prison refueled, angry and ready to re-enter what’s left of the world as a less worthy version of themselves, less interested in following pre-ordained rules. This is where Place steps in: the blurry space between offense and re-offense, perpetrator and victim, right and wrong, ethics and morality. Place explains, “I work as a combination street sweeper and factory worker. I follow what’s gone before, mopping up after the bloody mess, squaring the legal corners, assembling the lives disassembled by tragedy, and reducing reams of paper to bite-sized pellets.”(p.2)

In addition to The Guilt Project: Rape Morality and Law (Other Press) and Tragodía 1: Statement of Facts (Blanc Press), Place is also the author of Dies: A Sentence, an experimental, constraint-based work as one continuous sentence, the Los Angeles-inspired novel La Medusa, Notes on Conceptualisms (co-authored with Robert Fitterman) and multiple chapbooks (via Lulu and Ood Press). Place also co-directs Les Figues Press with Teresa Carmody. Even though Place’s background lies in the conceptual and experimental, she now decidedly focuses on how her writing practice both supplements her day job and reconciles with America―from a realistic and mythological stance. The movement from Place’s previous work to this legal system foray indicates her growing concern with her position. This shift also suggests that one should never confine their practice by following any previously charted precedent.

In The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and Law, Place sees the American justice system to be based upon oversimplified codes, actions deemed as crimes and complimentary punishments intended to compensate both the victim and those related to said victim, which create convoluted consequences as either a direct result or uncontrollable offshoot. The American prison system’s reality and its variable statistics are disappointing. Prisons are often privatized, transforming prisoners into fiscal commodities, prisoners are segregated using over-simplified categories (race, sexual orientation, ethnicity) to prevent violence, as well as assessed in ways meant to be preventative―in theory. America has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world, where criminals are predicted to re-offend if given shorter sentences. Yet, should this statistic grant the courts the right to incarcerate prisoners for unreasonable sentences as a prevention technique against recidivism?

Even though violent crime is on the uprise, Place reminds that too little reform (and often too late) occurs in regards to how the American prison system approaches rehabilitation, justifiable sentence length and any responsibility associated with proper treatment for prisoners singled out for either short and long-term incarceration. The author discusses how post-prison life or life available in America after being marked as a sex offender is bleak, lacking tangible opportunities to reintegrate into any community―even if the offense was a one-time-only affair. Being affected by a judicial system that is unable (or unwilling) to register shades of grey, instead choosing satisfaction in an absolutist world dominated by black-and-white extremes, it’s remarkably easy to taint a life with one flippant, erroneous decision. Place explains:

This definition is jumbled; it includes individuals who otherwise would not be considered rapists if it was not for the ‘ongoing’ aspect of this new definition. What once counted as one decision to either participate in consensual sex no longer applies, unless this one pivotal decision never changes over time. Place adds, “This categorical elasticity means there are now more rapists and molesters among us. There may be more people willing to report being raped, but there are also more behaviors classified as rape, more ways to become a rapist than ever before. We think we’re surrounded, but we’ve surrounded ourselves.” (6)

There are too many flaws in America’s judicial system to count, but Place responsibly examines them with a razor-sharp scrutiny and hard-earned logic. Her cool-headed tone allows an interested reader entrance despite the content’s awkwardness―even when The Guilt Project‘s subject matter  shares graphics of real-life crimes and twisted aftermaths. Even when it’s hard to turn the page, because of disgust, shock or an emotion associated with a once obscured tragedy now in view.

What makes The Guilt Project unusual in comparison to other law & society texts is Place’s decision to hybridize her subjectivity as a Los Angeles-based criminal appellate attorney with an objective examination of the law. Place slides smoothly between these two modes, with care and concern for the reader’s ability to grasp both her plight and that which belongs to America. How often is the firsthand perspective of a defense lawyer, one defending another who is most likely guilty, shown? Place comments:

Place’s duty is not to prove innocence when none exists, but rather a legal question of “did the State have the right to take the essence of these peoples’ lives, or how many lives are being sacrificed to a series of social expediencies, or to cultural arguments that have already been won?”.(9) For instance, should sexual offense be placed in the same category of evil (which Place defines as “an act, not a cultural metaphor, not a social backdrop, not entertainment”(10)) as genocide, as despicable as the Holocaust? Place notes that such repugnance towards anything deemed as an obvious evil is, in a way, a source of pride or merit badge based upon placing one’s self against any opposing force. And by doing so, an “us” vs. “them” dichotomy thrives, allowing “us” to believe that “they” are worth nothing: less-than-human.

Place does not play “devil’s advocate”―those whom she defends are usually guilty: “I pray that all my clients are guilty because if they’re innocent, something went hideously wrong at the trial, and that something is almost always impossible to undo.”(231-232) She illuminates how the American justice system fails to respond to heinous crimes effectively by following through with a series of oversimplified assumptions based on stereotyping, masked exploitation and calculated booby traps which ensure that a criminal cannot avoid re-offending once back on the streets. By the nature of faulty definitions, classification glitches and feigned concern for the well-being and future of these once-criminals-now-again-citizens, America sets itself up for an infinite cycle of wasted resources and disappointing statistics.

The author claims, “We have become a nation that insists on innocence. Unlike other countries, we’ve been able to dodge a lot of blame based on our lack of collective history.”(233) Place is not searching for redemption: “my accusations against the law are also my confession.” Perhaps, the best that America hopes for is thorough rehabilitation which overrides at least some damage caused to both victims and their perpetrators.

Place’s recent release Tragodía 1: Statement of Facts appears deliberately timed; it serves as an appendix to The Guilt Project. Tragodía 1: Statement of Facts is transcribed texts taken from legal documents and appellate briefs which focus on the prosecution and defense of violent sexual crimes and those involved. Place doesn’t offer answers or subjective opinions―she avoids cajolement, opting for hard facts. So many cases that one might grow nauseous and enshrouded in a fascination rooted in this miserable underbelly. Words recontextualized relay gruesome details of unfortunate scenarios which speak to one another in a medley, similar to a cultish lock-in or a wellness retreat gone awry.

Place provides facts and witness perspectives from physicians, forensic psychologists, private detectives, lab technicians, criminalists and experts of perceived authority. These individuals augment Place’s selection of briefs with unearthed evidence. This writerly ambition demonstrates a spectrum of socio-political concerns, confessions and depositions; Place encourages readers to take a closer, even exhaustive double-take at the conflicting state of American law and society. It is too common to overlook factual minutiae. Statement of Facts compels not only because it is a thoughtful appropriation exercise but because it metaphorically relays the world as a universal “book” which is edited either justly or unjustly―where entire chapters, paragraphs or footnotes are deemed accessible or cut from the final proof in one authoritarian sweep. The act of publishing material considered by the general populace to be too raw, difficult or unprofitable is necessary so as to advance future liberties rooted in flexibility.

Assessing the factual, in its pure and unadulterated form, is an immediate concern. Freedom of speech and expression continues to be tested, stretched and questioned; this is evident when considering recent incidents, ranging from the Wikileaks/Julian Assange phenomenon to the Arizona shooting of U.S. representative Gabrielle Gifford (and eighteen others). Both indicate how how political strain affects or bleeds into the responses from both citizens and the masses. Some may find Tragodía 1: Statement of Facts to be unreadable; the work also resides as part of Kenneth Goldsmith’s “Publishing the Unpublishable” series on UbuWeb. The editor explains:

What constitutes an unpublishable work? It could be many things: too long, too experimental, too dull; too exciting; it could be a work of juvenilia or a style you’ve long since discarded; it could be a work that falls far outside the range of what you’re best known for; it could be a guilty pleasure or it could simply be that the world judges it to be awful, but you think is quite good.

With this gesture of publishing that which is usually muted or forgotten, Place exalts our obsession with both truth and power to another level―even if difficult to reach. The future of writing depends upon uncomfortable frontiers.

***

Jacquelyn Davis is an American writer, arts & culture critic, independent curator and educator. She is the founding editor of the small publishing press and curatorial node valeveil which is devoted to strengthening creative connections between America and Scandinavia.

Though it is a monster of a book, in size in mind, I found I could not stop reading it once I started, blasting through all 616 pages in 4-5 days of continuous reading. Among its many forms and voices, it contains one of the most vivid scenes I think I’ve ever read: simply consisting of one of the main characters eating at a Mexican restaurant by himself, getting more and more drunk, and eating among a kind of mental fury, almost as if over the other pages of the book encasing him. It is truly a definition of how words can capture moments in a way no other art form is equipped for.

LA MEDUSA, I think, is a book of appetites, and cataloguing. There is something post-Beat in it in that way: lists (a list of strange barbies, a list of synonyms for vagina, though worked into the narrative thread somehow, a kind of shapeshifting that continually occurs in midst of the reading without managing to interrupt), and hyper consciousnesses, and combining the high with the low in these really rhythmic and syllabic and smart sentences. LA MEDUSA reminds me a lot of Lynne Tillman’s AMERICAN GENIUS, which is another of my all time recent favorites.

Anyhow, in the wake of my admiration, I spoke to Vanessa some about the ideas in the book, and her creative process, including ekphrasis, managing many voices, and craft.

Vanessa is also the author of DIES: A Sentence, which is literally a 50k+ word sentence, out from Les Figues Press (and is also a massive presence for innovative lit), which she co-directs. Her nonfiction book about sex-offenders and the morality of guilt will be published in 2008 by Other Press.

Do yourself a favor and check out her work: it is incomparable.

Interview after the jump.

—-

BB: (a) I’d like to open our discussion of La Medusa by asking about its birth in you, as an idea. Over the span of its 500 pages, the text manages to worm through quite an insanely number of shells and forms, I believe I read somewhere that you worked on La Medusa for quite a number of years, so I am particularly interested in how the shape of the book continued to evolve and expand within itself as you found yourself deeper in the pages.

(b) What I find really interesting, is that among this huge sprawl, too, is that the bulk of the narrative consists of a set of interwoven strands that focus on the main ‘camps’, if you will, of the discourse, which are in a way defined in the very first sentences of the book:

“Doctor Casper Bowles eyes his mirror’d visor.
Feena checks her pink Barbie mirror
while Athalie her mother looks at her own hand.
Jorge can’t see for shit ‘cuz of the sun,
And the golden-bellied woman stands blind as a proverbial bat.
Then there’s me, flattened & weeping in one hundred and one windows”

These strands are attended to so fervently, and with great poise, so that often it seems like some scenes in the book that may occur over a short period in the timeline of the narrative, actually sprawl out as if minute by minute, almost in the way that David Foster Wallace managed to capture time as time in ‘Infinite Jest,’ and also how Gass used language to define space in ‘The Tunnel.’ I was wondering if you could speak more about directing the complex trajectories of each of these narratives over time and perhaps some of the process involved in how the evolving form dictated content and vice-versa.

VP: I think I will collapse your two into one, just for fun. /Medusa/ began as a conceptual project: write everything that pops into the head for 41 days. One day longer than Moses spent in the desert, because I’m no mouthpiece of the divine. The characters are “camps,” as you note, though I hadn’t thought of them in these terms. But the term does fit the project: I wanted to write all of Los Angeles because they said it couldn’t be done, because Los Angeles is a city of many camps and no core. Similarly, the fragmented nature of the book reflects Los Angeles as fragmented city, the self as fragmented memory and the brain as fragmented whole which works in phase-space or chunks that operate more or less simultaneously with more or less coordination between parts. Thus /Medusa/ became a place of plate-spinning, dashing between spinning narratives sets to keep them going with sufficient attenuation to let myself go further in the in-between. As you also know, the entire work of fiction (and this is the closest thing to a pure novel I’ve written) is to attenuate. Delay. Delay more. Delay past the point of perception. Beckett knew this, and so studied Proust, and both perfected the ability to blow seconds up out of all proportion but not beyond sentiment. I have failed in this, and plan to continue failing: my current project is an attempt to go past time and my single-sentence book, /Dies: A Sentence/, to be in all time. I like the Gass comparison for /Medusa/, as I am an admirer of /The Tunnel/, as well as of Pound’s Cantos, and for the same temporal-spatial reasons. Pound cut space into time, Gass time into space. And the carving of the page into more than one space and the carving of the text into more than one time in /Medusa /spawned some typographical fluctuations and many text-boxes, which are a somewhat unsatisfying answer to the problem of multifarious existence.

BB: I like the delineation of ‘everything that pops into the head’: does this mean to say that you write in floods and bursts, sentence by sentence? I am interested greatly in the manners of controlling syllables and rhythm via confines of tiny spaces in large fields. In that, /Medusa/ is another kind of wonder for its array of self-contained rooms and structures, in the form of the aforementioned text boxes, as well as columns, clips, stage directions, etc. I was wondering how much of narration you develop was incurred or controlled by these spaces that you set up within the book, and at the same time how much perhaps the text dictates the space. I know from reading an earlier interview with you that /Medusa/ a lot of the text’s spaces were jarred out of ekphrastic responses to art objects, which made me wonder if there were some system to the objects chosen that then led into a larger intentional framework, or if this was something you allowed to develop out of itself via association and intuition?

VP: No floods & bursts, but crawling & crabbing, forwards, back & to the side. I work very slowly and with a jeweler’s eye. One great craft lesson I learned with Medusa was to set my screen margins to reflect an actual book page: there was a great deal of revision needed for the final to contain what had been in the larger/longer draft. And even so, certain visual elements had to be eliminated or otherwise significantly recomposed. Medusa was somewhat ekphrastic, though the project I’m now working on is much more so, in part because of the limits of Medusa. I was constrained in the novel by novelistic conventions, so the art objects chosen had to hover around or emanate from things already associated with other things. But what I began to do in Medusa, and have done deeper since, to quite literally treat the page as canvas, both procedurally and substantively. In other words, there’s not so much the cause/effect that you suggest, but more of a cut of temporal/visual space.

BB: Would you talk about the particulars of setting parameters on a text before or during its creation, and how those parameters, whether rules or dimensions, or other kinds of constraints, end up in a way dictating the text, or at least making you, the author, bring out words or ideas that you likely would have not without the imposition of constraint? I am particularly interested in how this method of controlled germination continued to change (or perhaps not change at all) over the creation period of Medusa?

VP: My parameters tend to be conceits: Medusa was dictated in part by the parts of the brain represented. The choice of brain parts was, in turn, dictated by some obvious tropes (wanting the language centers, for example), and some less obvious (wanting the sections to be half limbic, half cortical). Each section then became self-generative in the sense that there were plot/character/language turns that occurred simply as a result of the extended metaphor of that particular cerebral constraint (anger/fear in the amygdala section, asphasia in the Broca/Wernicke’s areas). Too, there was the plane of the page: using boxes (mirror frames) to enclose the Skull passages (up until those begin to break down and the seepage becomes apparent) meant that text had to be set in certain sized boxes, creating a variant of the lyric line break. (This fit nicely with the excess subjectivity being enacted.) These frames/breaks had to be constantly reconfigured as the dimensions of the page changed, and as the text waxed and waned. In my current project, I’m working with a set page dimension, and a ekphrasitic conceit, leaning more into the constraint/conceit of the page as image/text as image. This also comes into play in some of the appropriation work I’m doing. I suppose you could say it’s a combination of rules & rulers, of both the physical and subject variety.

BB: I really like your description of the containing and the contained, and how the shell in some way dictates itself innards. I wonder, then, how much of the progression of Medusa could be seen as cultivated more than purely dreamt: that is, if your process, in fitting to the forms, is more akin to a sculptor chiseling a form out of an amorphous face of stone, than say, someone taking photographs?

VP: I like the sculptor analogy as opposed to the photographic analogy, though only if we can agree that the sculptor is not finding the statue inherent in the marble, but putting form into another form. I might like the photographer comparison if we can carve out the part where the photographer is also creating artifice from the occasional real– sometimes the readymade isn’t quite ready enough. The progression here is thus neither cultivated nor dreamt but constructed and contained; certain angles surprise me in retrospect because they facet in ways I hadn’t anticipated.

BB: I’m curious, too, in particular, about the way the extremely varying styles and voices are arranged and affected by the forms as they shift. For instance, the character who speaks mostly as if freestyle rapping: I was pretty amazed by the great control you managed to assume over every single line, even in as free a form as freestyling. And, too, how spot on your were in nailing such a difficult format of voice. Rap is such a difficult style to incorporate into fiction, or written word, I think, in that so much of it is about tone and delivery, and yet there was honestly no point among all the rap sections that I thought you wavered from full on high wire prose. How did this particular voice germinate for you?

VP: Hours of dissecting pleasure.