|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Hey I wrote a review of this for Colorado Review:
http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/r...
Here is the first paragraph:
Crime novels have always been about the traces crime leaves in the external world and within the psyche of the criminal, and how the...more
Hey I wrote a review of this for Colorado Review:
http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/r...
Here is the first paragraph:
Crime novels have always been about the traces crime leaves in the external world and within the psyche of the criminal, and how the criminal and those who follow him make meaning of these traces. Modern entries by authors like Kobo Abe (The Ruined Map) and Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy) have elaborated the genre into high literature while also underscoring essential deficits of meaning in traces in the post-industrial world. With many of the narratives of his predecessors tipping into the void, where is a literary writer of the hard-boiled to go? On one hand, there is a return to economy of plot and rugged realism as represented by Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and Urban Waite’s The Terror of Living. On the other, there is Jeffrey DeShell’s Arthouse, a piece of pulp fiction related to a Tarantino-esque pastiche of filmic styles translated into prose. Like Tarantino’s films, Arthouse is, by turns, banal, mystifying, and brilliant.(less)
|
|
|
Reading Butcher’s Tree, it seems like Feng Chen can do just about anything. While it would be easy to pigeon-hole this work within veins of poetry that are working to trouble conceptions of the body, gender, and humanness and Feng’s own interest in P...more
Reading Butcher’s Tree, it seems like Feng Chen can do just about anything. While it would be easy to pigeon-hole this work within veins of poetry that are working to trouble conceptions of the body, gender, and humanness and Feng’s own interest in Post-Human poetics, this is I think to miss out on a lot. What more it is or might be I can’t describe good but maybe better through these notes. 1st Poem, “By the Dark”: “Maybe they have a train to catch or the field of soft stone is a field of milk teeth
they cannot sleep as dreams snag in the esophagus tear through twin hearted flesh through bones made of shale.
One can see the other’s rage. His rage is small but dense. It catches the wet light by its webbed gravity. … Not going anywhere. His two hearts are growing teeth.” Proposes the land as bodied and the body as land. Though these equivalencies aren’t the ultimate point. The body is more—it is itself changing places with itself, the heart growing bones, the seat of the human ‘spirit,’ moved closer to that which tears, grinds and is not alive, the portals of the body. That there are also two hearts—the body itself lacking a center or cohesion. And the webbed, sticky rage. Constellations, networks, structures without centers. An image used to assert a particularly contemporary sense of being, resulting, and causing. Metaphysics? I first encountered this like most in Benjamin in the form of a constellation where what is important are the points and that which connects them is the mind perceiving relations. I don’t know Deleuze and get the rhizomatic thing second hand but it seems like these constellations planted. Roots, though, are often dry. Here they are sticky, viscous, the web which doesn’t bring forward a plant but is simply a mesh converting life to unlife and so on. The stickiness of the web that catches things is elaborated on in a collection full of membranes, messy efflorescences, pulp, reaching its climax in the absurd, powerful “Neon Parade” where the poem paints the reader as a clown proceeding down a world saturated with rain on stilts that sink further and further into the mud with each step, each step. Here Chen moves closer to the visqueux--another concept I am probably mangling—a vision of the world as “an undifferentiated gelatinous mess.” There’s a doubleness here: both a radical assertion of a world view and a sly commentary on the act of reading? I’ve been wondering where these slimy assertions of the world are coming from. They appear also in the torrents and hypersaturations of Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas. Lightning through jello. I could put forward a lot of dumb theories of my own but I’ll go with what the book itself provides in the poem “The Living” which opposes the potato like fact of a body—“My true face is that of a potato. I have many eyes, but see nothing”—that perceives in a multifaceted, decentralized way (and not through sight) to a skepticism of sight—“I am afraid too much sight can kill me” (43) and perhaps sight-based knowledge –“I drink with my eyes. When I try to explain anything, some part of something, somebody dies.” This situation, the roving, eye is basically the internet: “Eyes are like rubber tires. They take you places. / Do a lot of traveling. I try not to puncture mine, but they leak. / My great fear has always been immediacy. / Being pulled from a vapor state to the body world” (50). Make conclusions from this.
There’s great facility here, a movement between forms and syntaxes, assertions and indirections, and sympathy for how people want to see things that makes everything I’m typing wrong. Step 2: read it, then.
“The Midwest has the sort of personality / that makes me worship cold blank plains / like the face of someone I want love from, basic needs / tied up in a cloth sack, everything in it hard and dry / and clean.”(less)
|
|
|
"in the savage movement of things the wandering ideal collects inside naked happiness of feeling nothing for the thing a lifetime filled with renting"
My favorite lines.
Alert to infrastructures lost and present / those lost to the present. Drives throug...more
"in the savage movement of things the wandering ideal collects inside naked happiness of feeling nothing for the thing a lifetime filled with renting"
My favorite lines.
Alert to infrastructures lost and present / those lost to the present. Drives through the desert, the sand waking up under the crescent of a footstep, bus full of evacuated seniors burning on an interstate outside of Dallas.
The poems are elliptical sometimes but not heavily fragmented and sometimes not elliptical at all in providing a purposefully incomplete portrait of a thing in a place:
"I learned to smoke behind the San Fernando church. We smoked faros that looked like joints, so we imagined that too. The church was named after a saint that had suffered patiently through a complicated and unreasonable death."
The final Katrina sequence also gets a lot of mileage out of the titles/Newspaper headlines. They help to unify the utterances of each poem or often set the stage for an irony or compelling juxtaposition.
Liked best the sections unified by the repetition of a form. The first section was more varied in approach and subject. While themes are introduced are elaborated throughout the collection, some of the poems read more as sketches.
Overall though, I enjoyed the rhythm of the collection--Gomez' ability to move convincingly between lyric images, laconic prose passages, and poems that use white space. Would read more.(less)
|
"Hah!
"
|
|
|
--Hoooooooo … How Art was a silver paper moulded to the ceiling Where you cut your hair For your rebirth as Fata Androgyana The scissors-sister who slits where she goes-into Cuts as she cuts--)
Yesterday I was at a Lydia Davis reading and the prose guy who...more
--Hoooooooo … How Art was a silver paper moulded to the ceiling Where you cut your hair For your rebirth as Fata Androgyana The scissors-sister who slits where she goes-into Cuts as she cuts--)
Yesterday I was at a Lydia Davis reading and the prose guy who was introducing her kept saying there was no precedent for her, that her voice was her own, blah-be-blah-be-blah. And as soon as she started reading, I thought "Russell Edson." And when prose guy asked her about what she read when she was young she said Russell Edson. So riding high on having successfully noticed a thing once, I'm just going to guess here one part in the rhizomisphere in terms of the poetics of the poems and oppositional rhetoric of the prose: Amiri Baraka. For poetics, see constant enjambment of relatively short lines, rhymes of short vowels, and a general brilliance re: rhythm: “For a total of twelve hours at a clip The go-home-and-feed-the-baby milk of it That man is a mouth chased by ghosts Round a rainslicked hairpin off a cliff in” And like AB, McSweeney has been gleefully crossing and inverting genres (sci-fi, horror, etc—o man I wish I had time to read Baraka’s essay on Sun Ra’s sci-fi poetry right now), blowing up the expectations we bring to these genres as readers and, after the concussion, forcing us to re-assemble them out of the rubble. I’m still working out what is being said about the pastoral, anachronism and etc though if you want that, there are plenty of re-interpreters out there. What I’ve been thinking about is this: part of the supposed purpose of oppositional rhetoric is that it is catalytic. Some are mobilized and some are repelled. It seeks to create a divisive rupture in the audience, and a protected social space, a flammable wall, for those on behalf of whom the rhetoric is employed. That is, AB’s poetics and rhetoric were at times (and are) linked to a definitive social practice of a self-articulated group. Is McSweeney’s art arriving at a similar crossroads? Who is behind her flammable wall? It doesn’t have to be and there doesn’t have to be anyone. These are not questions of value but of relations. I feel agitations reading The Necropastoral. I don’t understand anything.(less)
|
|
|
|
|
|
"Rosaleen," "The Brother," and "Fires..." stand out to me. "Fires..." for doubling Dogtooth's ending within a week of watching Dogtooth. I do not want to be anywhere near a trunk or truck bed. The story's arc and twist and end in pleasing ways, revea...more
"Rosaleen," "The Brother," and "Fires..." stand out to me. "Fires..." for doubling Dogtooth's ending within a week of watching Dogtooth. I do not want to be anywhere near a trunk or truck bed. The story's arc and twist and end in pleasing ways, revealing truths about the hard place of Eerie and being on the edge of something there, maintaining an element of surprise without straining credibility ("Fires..." and "Rosaleen" slip into violence in ways that are discomforting in how it is just what is next and not something that tears up the fabric of the story). In terms of micro stuff, a lot of the writing has a kind of unobtrusive transparency to it. Even the stories in 1st. The stories are rooted in place but for some reason I want to the diction to locate them more firmly in the opposite poles of time (present and archetypical). Would I read more? Fuck yes.(less)
|
|
|