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Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate
Poetry. Cross-Genre. Fiction. Drama. "It would take a miracle to perform this pageant. For a start, you would have to reanimate Charlotte Bronte, Adolf Loos, and Ronald Reagan, and you would need an ungodly amount of wax. Most of the action is obscene, and therefore takes place offstage. The actors enter and report on scenes of spectacular violence that go on all the time every day. The audience is part of the spectacle too. We are all transformed into images somewhere in this script. At one point, all of Hollywood appears onstage on the form of dead horses, perhaps because Hollywood film continues to rely on narrative conventions that it exhausted long ago. The entire world also appears, played by a boy who, in a series of rapid costume changes, puts on increasingly pretty dresses"--Aaron Kunin.
82 pages, Paperback
First published May 15, 2011
2 people are currently reading
303 people want to read
About the author
Johannes Göransson
27 books39 followersJohannes Göransson is interested in approaches to writing that crosses boundaries – such as genre conventions and linguistic borders – and blurs the demarcations of the autonomous text. He is the author of three books of his own writings – A New Quarantine Will Take My Place, Dear Ra and Pilot (Johann the Carousel Horse) – with one more forthcoming in 2011, The Entrance Pageant. He wrote a performance piece The Widow Party, which was performed at Links Hall in Chicago in 2008. He is also the translator of the works of several modern and contemporary Swedish and Finland Swedish poets and writers – including Aase Berg, Henry Parland and Johan Jönson.
He has written critically about contemporary American and Swedish poetry, translation theory, the historical avant-garde, Sylvia Plath, and Gurlesque poetry and other neo-gothic aesthetics. In addition, he has a special interest in film, particularly the 1960s underground cinema of Kenneth Anger and Jack Smith.
Together with Joyelle McSweeney, Johannes publishes Action Books; and together with McSweeney and John Woods, he edits the online zine Action, Yes.
”For me poetry is inextricably bound up in issues of immigration, homelessness, translation.”
Interview: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/mainte...
He has written critically about contemporary American and Swedish poetry, translation theory, the historical avant-garde, Sylvia Plath, and Gurlesque poetry and other neo-gothic aesthetics. In addition, he has a special interest in film, particularly the 1960s underground cinema of Kenneth Anger and Jack Smith.
Together with Joyelle McSweeney, Johannes publishes Action Books; and together with McSweeney and John Woods, he edits the online zine Action, Yes.
”For me poetry is inextricably bound up in issues of immigration, homelessness, translation.”
Interview: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/mainte...
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
September 30, 2011
OHANNES GORANSSON'S entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate is one of those rare literary achievements, a work so new and brilliant and strange that a reviewer initially fumbles for any possible comparisons and antecedents to make sense of the text in-question. In this case, none of the ready comparisons really live up to this new object, not even that readiest of comparisons, the plays of Jean Genet, with their obsessions of identity, their masks, their pageantry, their crime and lust and perversity all rendered in an overstuffed and too-gorgeous language of musky flowers, thieves, and dead whores. Indeed, nothing really prepares the reader for pageant’s unrelenting deluge of horrific and make-up smutty images, narrated by a shifting cast of impossible size and historical identity, beneath various masks and disguises, and always in the same over-bursting and beautiful writing.
June 13, 2011
THE PROMOTER:
Beware of that bird-like child....He's been translated from another place: a blown-up place, a devouring place. Have mercy on his skin. He's flimsy. Gross. If you let him in, the play is lost. His dingle-dangle is a strange fruit. Get out of here if you don't know how to raise a child, how to save a child, from this disease. It's a disease of language. I suspect I have it already. Shit.
*
THE GENIUS CHILDREN:
You must use tweezers. Dummy. The shards are hard to pull out. Dummy. We are alive. Stop our bodies!
*
FATHER VOICE-OVER:
It may seem that I have lost my bark but that is not true. Bark.
Beware of that bird-like child....He's been translated from another place: a blown-up place, a devouring place. Have mercy on his skin. He's flimsy. Gross. If you let him in, the play is lost. His dingle-dangle is a strange fruit. Get out of here if you don't know how to raise a child, how to save a child, from this disease. It's a disease of language. I suspect I have it already. Shit.
*
THE GENIUS CHILDREN:
You must use tweezers. Dummy. The shards are hard to pull out. Dummy. We are alive. Stop our bodies!
*
FATHER VOICE-OVER:
It may seem that I have lost my bark but that is not true. Bark.
June 17, 2011
What can you even say about a book like this? It is definitely weird, but it is interesting to read. This isn't just random images thrown together. It certainly doesn't make normal, linear sense but it feels like it does. On some level I felt like I understood the flow though when I stopped to think about it, it made no sense at all. There was some level below conscious processing where I followed even though my conscious mind couldn't figure out what the hell was going on. To me, that is what makes this really interesting, that below conscious flow that can't be completely understood. Definitely wild and fun.
April 5, 2013
Violent and chaotic and like pornography I'd never want to see. It's not nonsense, but it might feel that way. It's not pretty but you might forget.
It's difficult to even say what it is, but whatever it is, it is a lot of it dressed in the wildest costumes imaginable.
It's difficult to even say what it is, but whatever it is, it is a lot of it dressed in the wildest costumes imaginable.
June 14, 2012
A phenomenal and enormously important book. Highly recommended.
August 20, 2019
Beautifully incomprehensible
August 3, 2011
...To pull off Göransson’s seemingly impossible pageant—as Aaron Kunin has previously noted—you’d have to resurrect Charlotte Brontë, Adolf Loos and Ronald Reagan, not just wax simulacra and trained actors to play them. Also, the actors would almost certainly have to be escaped mental patients and the pageant staged in a crowded suburban mall.
Göransson’s pageant will feature recurring themes of (but not limited to): riots, “invented erotics,” natives, guns, “jacklighting,” burns, penises, diseases, fish, untruths, organs, ridiculousness, animals (particularly horses), shells, meat, irises, hospitals, insects, fire, gasoline, The Twist, lye, sexuality, cinema, executions, necrophilia, the pleasure dome, photographs, Hollywood, anorexia, vaginas, eels, gasmasks, napalm, birds, orifices in general, strychnine, lipstick, wax, eyes, seizures, foxes, megaphones, shrapnel, cake, bodily fluids & functions, dolls, disinfectant, ovules, ganglia, cancer, feces, revolution and The Fall of the House of Usher. And like the pomp and circumstance-filled Society pageants, Göransson’s will require a good amount of audience participation, willing or otherwise...
Check out my extended review over at PANK Magazine: http://bit.ly/lCeecT
Göransson’s pageant will feature recurring themes of (but not limited to): riots, “invented erotics,” natives, guns, “jacklighting,” burns, penises, diseases, fish, untruths, organs, ridiculousness, animals (particularly horses), shells, meat, irises, hospitals, insects, fire, gasoline, The Twist, lye, sexuality, cinema, executions, necrophilia, the pleasure dome, photographs, Hollywood, anorexia, vaginas, eels, gasmasks, napalm, birds, orifices in general, strychnine, lipstick, wax, eyes, seizures, foxes, megaphones, shrapnel, cake, bodily fluids & functions, dolls, disinfectant, ovules, ganglia, cancer, feces, revolution and The Fall of the House of Usher. And like the pomp and circumstance-filled Society pageants, Göransson’s will require a good amount of audience participation, willing or otherwise...
Check out my extended review over at PANK Magazine: http://bit.ly/lCeecT
September 30, 2012
Grotesque, charming, what the fuck just happened
December 12, 2020
I started reading Goransson's work a month ago and I continue to be floored. This is the fourth (and my favorite) that I've read so far. It's set up as a play, with Goransson dropkicking a dozen animated personalities on a stage of endlessness and nothingness, leading to a series of persona-driven prose poems that dance with language and vision. Like a play in a banquet hall in your head. Like schizophrenia meddling in cocaine. I see this as a sister book to The Sugar Book, both of which will rip open your skull.
April 27, 2015
I'm not really sure what Goransson is trying to do all the time. Seems like this work is best read on the sentence level, but then there are supposed to be all these statements on race and gender and soceity, but I can't really find them.
Definitely intriguing, the sort of work where the artist is either a scam artist or a genius, but probably something altogether different. He has a few good lines, but then there is a lot of dross too. Anyways it made me uncomfortable, which was good and 'put me in a space'.
Seemed sort of juvenile at points which turned me off.
Also picked up 'Haute Serveillance' which I am looking forward to reading, so I might form a more full picture of Goransson's work.
Definitely intriguing, the sort of work where the artist is either a scam artist or a genius, but probably something altogether different. He has a few good lines, but then there is a lot of dross too. Anyways it made me uncomfortable, which was good and 'put me in a space'.
Seemed sort of juvenile at points which turned me off.
Also picked up 'Haute Serveillance' which I am looking forward to reading, so I might form a more full picture of Goransson's work.
June 27, 2013
I imagined myself getting a bunch of money from hollywood to produce this film, but never actually filming anything. I'd just get the actors and the special effects and try to make this come to life in my head. That would be the only way this book could be performed. For one weirdo who could afford it.
September 10, 2011
My in progress review: a difficult work of surrealism that is testing my limits for the form but curious enough to finish, and perhaps re-read. More a task than a pleasure at this point.
April 2, 2012
Genet on steroids. If I ever teach a grad class on postmodern works, this will be on my syllabus. Oh yes.
July 30, 2012
what a mind eff.
bizarre, but not unapproachable.
...
this is my head lopped aflame.
...
i'll be returning to it again, for some later bomb.
bizarre, but not unapproachable.
...
this is my head lopped aflame.
...
i'll be returning to it again, for some later bomb.
January 23, 2012
Had to read this for my class. All I have to say is: What?
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews