Janice Lee's Blog, page 20
January 8, 2014
The L.A. Telephone Book Vol. 2, 2012-13
The L.A. Telephone Book Vol. 2, 2012-13, edited by Brian Kim Stefans is out now as a free PDF download.
The L.A. Telephone Book Vol. 2 2012-13 is a collection of new work by contemporary Southern California writers and text-artists compiled and designed by poet and digital artist Brian Kim Stefans.
Including new work by:
Will Alexander
Diana Arterian
Thérèse Bachand
Molly Bendall
Guy Bennett
Byron Campbell
Geneva Chao
Andrew Choate
j.s. davis
Larkin Higgins
Erin Jourdan
Siel Ju
Janice Lee
Deborah Meadows
Béatrice Mousli
Dennis Phillips
William Poundstone
David Shook
Chris Stoffolino
Daniel Tiffany
AJ Urquidi
January 4, 2014
The Transparent As Witness Book Release / Jan 18
Coming up soon, a book release party for my poetic collaboration The Transparent As Witness out on Solar Luxuriance.
Will Alexander, Janice Lee, and Ivan Argüelles
7-9 PM Saturday, January 18, 2014
Alley Cat Books
3036 24th Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
“The Transparent as Witness as a collaborative text is not so much a fusion as a call and response between two linguistic poles, the extra galactic igneous superstructures of Will Alexander responded to by the sub numinous ghostly human corollaries of Janice Lee. Seemingly disparate at first, two spectacular voices reacting to each other’s cosmic reverberations and echoes, the two slowly meld and enigmatically a third voice seems to manifest, making the text both more complex and surprisingly more luminous. Side by side we encounter such assertions as these: ‘The fragile shudder of the dream wolf who nudges at the small of your back. You are in the wrong place. Or this is the wrong time.’ ‘…in-human suns rising and setting over the wrathful sky of Saturn.’ This is an apocalyptic read, immaculate with surface tension yet riddled with the mysteriously ineffable encounters of consciousness with its other.”
- Ivan Argüelles
The Transparent At Witness Book Release / Jan 18
Coming up soon, a book release party for my poetic collaboration The Transparent At Witness out on Solar Luxuriance.
Will Alexander, Janice Lee, and Ivan Argüelles
7-9 PM Saturday, January 18, 2014
Alley Cat Books
3036 24th Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
“The Transparent as Witness as a collaborative text is not so much a fusion as a call and response between two linguistic poles, the extra galactic igneous superstructures of Will Alexander responded to by the sub numinous ghostly human corollaries of Janice Lee. Seemingly disparate at first, two spectacular voices reacting to each other’s cosmic reverberations and echoes, the two slowly meld and enigmatically a third voice seems to manifest, making the text both more complex and surprisingly more luminous. Side by side we encounter such assertions as these: ‘The fragile shudder of the dream wolf who nudges at the small of your back. You are in the wrong place. Or this is the wrong time.’ ‘…in-human suns rising and setting over the wrathful sky of Saturn.’ This is an apocalyptic read, immaculate with surface tension yet riddled with the mysteriously ineffable encounters of consciousness with its other.”
- Ivan Argüelles
December 19, 2013
Damnation Reviewed by Christine Wertheim in BOMB Magazine
A new review of Damnation appears in the winter issue of BOMB Magazine. Read the review here.
Excerpt:
Perhaps this is less ekphrasis or conceptual writing than a new and novel-form of concrete? This is exactly the project that Balzac and Flaubert articulated at the dawn of modernism; they called it the writing of stone.
December 4, 2013
In Conversation with Davis Schneiderman @ The Nervous Breakdown
At The Nervous Breakdown, Davis Schneiderman and I talked about my new book Damnation, contemporary literature, and the expectations of “identity” from the readers, editors, and publishers.
Excerpt:
Something I’ve been thinking about is, what the point of these terms anyways, especially terms like “innovative” and “experimental” vs. “conventional” and “traditional” and “realistic.” There’s a history and context here, of course, but also these terms are less and less productive. To me, it seems that a term like “experimental” or “innovative” seems to want to be an empowering term, to legitimize types of writing and ways of writing, to lend them authority, especially politically. But at the same, these terms are marginalizing in themselves, that in seeking to categorize something to lend it some sort of power and authority in a certain context, it also allows itself to be categorized in that manner, allows itself to be marginalized as an other category and becomes complacent in this way.
December 3, 2013
Interview: Virginia Konchan w/ Janice Lee @ The Conversant
I talk with Virginia Konchan about Daughter, mourning mother, and grief at The Conversant.
Excerpt:
The wonderful synesthesia of Daughter (as one reviewer put it: in Daughter, ”splayed” is a color; “competence” is interchangeable with “space”) attenuates the tension—rather than attempting to resolve it—of the stigmatized, iconicized “mother,” both historical and real.
Mother and child become interchangeable and the narrator (mother/master signifier) is as malleable as the created subjects themselves. In Daughter, the choice to forget seems a more survivable fate than the pain of remembrance and lived trauma—of the mother’s abandonment, death, or our own societal scapegoating and sacrificial murder of the mother in order to have a voice, and survive.
December 2, 2013
New Review of Damnation in The Quarterly Conversation
A new review of Damnation appears in the issue of The Quarterly Conversation. Thanks to Joe Milazzo for a really great, thoughtful review and to Scott Esposito for running the review.
An excerpt:
Janice Lee’s latest novel, Damnation, may initially present itself as a work of “critical theory” in disguise. A rumination upon cinema—specifically, the collaborations of director Bela Tarr and novelist László Krasznahorkai—the book is more broadly concerned with the experience, in all its torpor and extravagance, of watching films. Though perhaps it is more accurate to say that Lee has performed here a sort of clinical study, demonstrating with a delicate obsessiveness the procedures of a self-medication whose prescription is obsessive film-watching. In actuality, however, this is a book that turns several faces to the reader. There are the faces of the characters that occupy this novel’s diegesis, their features never delineated, but faces that are nevertheless always open in their looking, their anxiety, their defeat, their unaging weariness. And there are those related faces drawn for us in the book’s appendix, which also serves as a record of the author’s visions (not purely imaginary) of these same characters. Construed as either ekphrasis or exorcism, Damnation impresses most as portrait of spiritual crisis, albeit one that is not colored by any theology, any moral imperative, or any transcendence.
November 29, 2013
New Review of Damnation @ The Constant Critic
A huge wealth of GRATITUDE & ADMIRATION to Sueyeun Juliette Lee for this most amazing & incredibly thoughtful review of Damnation on The Constant Critic.
An excerpt:
The emotional squalor that Damnation wallows in suggests there’s little hope. What is commonly considered a great human trait—that of perseverance—in practice emerges as our curse. However, as spiritually destitute as the book’s characters are, there’s a desperate beauty in their perseverance. Their endurance isn’t willful. It simply exists. They have no way to elect it for themselves. Much of Damnation’s magnetism comes from the way that their persistence sensitizes the characters to the squalor of their condition. It’s a terrifically hard text to put down.
Works in With+Stand 6 & FANZINE
November 25, 2013
Notes on Satantango (the Book and the Film) – Part 1/3
Read the full post here.
Excerpt:
What one can’t shake throughout the scene is the ticking of the clock, the incessant ticking that induces a strange but familiar anxiety in the reader’s body even (it almost seems as if Futaki himself is swaying back and forth to the rhythm set forth by the ticking, and then I’m reminded of the Jackie Chan/Sammo Hung movie Wheels on Meals where there is a guy who walks around ticking like a clock). The book instigates this strange feeling of protracted time differently than the film, with the description: “Time was passing very slowly and, luckily for them, the alarm clock had long ago stopped working so there wasn’t even the sound of ticking to remind them of time” (13). On the other hand, the film’s sound design exaggerates and emphasizes the presence of the craze-inducing ticking. The book emphasizes the clock’s absence. This long take also has some of the most beautiful framings of three people, where each seems to take a turn being relegated to the background as a third wheel, so to speak. How does the hierarchy of people and objects within a visual frame or space relate to the rhythm of passing time?
