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Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative
What is the best way to tell a story? In this anthology, the first-ever collection of essays by innovative, cutting-edge writers on the theme of narration, forty of the continent's top experimental writers describe their engagement with language, storytelling and the world. The anthology includes renowned writers like Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, Lydia Davis and Kevin Killian, writers who have spent years pondering the meaning of storytelling and how storytelling functions in our culture, as well as presenting a new generation of brilliant thinkers and writers, like Christian Bök, Corey Frost, Derek McCormack and Lisa Robertson. Contemporizing the friendly anecdotal style of Montaigne and written by daring writers of different ages, of different origins, from many different regions of the continent, from Mexico to Montreal, these essays run the gamut of mirth, prose poetry, tall tales and playful explorations of reader/writer dynamics. They discuss aesthetics founded on new explorations in the field of narrative, the mystery that is the body, questions of how representation may be torqued to deal with gender and sexuality, the experience of marginalized people, the negotiation between different orders of time, the 'performance' of outlaw subject matter. Brave, energetic and fresh, Biting the Error tells a whole new story about narrative. Biting the Error is edited by Mary Burger, Robert Glück, Camille Roy and Gail Scott, the co-founders of the Narrativity Website Magazine, based at the Poetry Center, San Francisco State University.
250 pages, Paperback
First published November 19, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
November 12, 2009
I'm working towards a writing that subverts sexual bragging, a writing that champions the vulnerable, the fractured, the disenfranchised, the sexually fucked-up. --Dodie Bellamy
when i write a character it must feel to me as if composed of bubble gum. a character is not a stable thing. a plasma. characters should always melt. --heriberto yepez
My dirty secret has always been that it's of course about me. But I have been educated to believe I'm no one so there's a different self operating and I'm desperate to unburden my self of my self so I'm coming from nowhere and returning. That's sort of classic. You just cannot underestimate the massive difference in writing out of female anonymity. It blows all the styles out of the water. -- Eileen Myles
are we not all a both or whatever sometimes? --kari edwards
when i write a character it must feel to me as if composed of bubble gum. a character is not a stable thing. a plasma. characters should always melt. --heriberto yepez
My dirty secret has always been that it's of course about me. But I have been educated to believe I'm no one so there's a different self operating and I'm desperate to unburden my self of my self so I'm coming from nowhere and returning. That's sort of classic. You just cannot underestimate the massive difference in writing out of female anonymity. It blows all the styles out of the water. -- Eileen Myles
are we not all a both or whatever sometimes? --kari edwards
January 27, 2022
I have dog eared this book so severely that it paradoxically is bigger on the inside than its outer binding, bigger than it was originally. But I think credit for that little magic trick goes to the many many slippery essays therein and not the diligent folding, a kind of squelching entropic muchness that umbrella springs from generally concise and communicative “ways in,*” too many of which sadly sound exactly like one another, but all of which have something to offer. Nibbled the clip off my clicky pencil which I was taking notes with over the course of reading this too, which is a funny little thing and not the proffered bitten error but maybe a little poetic binding burr or thought-Velcro. Such a strange array of takes and seemingly such an unlikely book at all, but I’m very grateful for it. If you write and you feel even remotely out of step with ‘writing right’ this is a great hub to interface with and then go out to seek likenesses from.
*hot-swap ‘in’ with ‘thru’ or ‘out’ at your leisure, and know that any spatial metaphors describing abstracted writing practices do not come with a guarantee of usefulness or truthiness.
*hot-swap ‘in’ with ‘thru’ or ‘out’ at your leisure, and know that any spatial metaphors describing abstracted writing practices do not come with a guarantee of usefulness or truthiness.
October 22, 2017
"I fit childish insights within rigid limits, writing shtick which might instill priggish misgivings in critics blind with hindsight. I dismiss nitpicking criticism which flirts with philistinism. I bitch; I kibitz – griping whilst criticizing dimwits, sniping whilst indicting nitwits, dismissing simplistic thinking, in which philippic wit is still illicit. – from ‘Chapter I’ in Eunoia" Christian Bök A Few Thoughts on Beautiful Thinking
"All days will return. We will see all times again. The clock didn’t strike but has struck. The poet didn’t write but has written. The barricades weren’t built but have been built. The simple past has been effaced from our language. There is no simple past. The present has multiplied." In Defence of Forgetfulness X. I. Selene
"(Body is the (contested) place where language originates, if one views, as I do, language as desire, desire as un- or many-gendered. Body is also place of exile, and language, as it is (mis)used, makes repeated (failed) attempts at return. Looked at that way, I suppose, it operates a sort of aliyah, and language’s reach in this context might be read as messianic (I am waiting (for it) to come). The thought hadn’t, until now, crossed my mind, but I won’t cross it out. There are so many places from which to begin and each of these bears its own antecedent.)" Echoes Enough of Echoes of Enough of Me: In Favour of ‘Not Going Anywhere’ Nathalie Stephens
"All days will return. We will see all times again. The clock didn’t strike but has struck. The poet didn’t write but has written. The barricades weren’t built but have been built. The simple past has been effaced from our language. There is no simple past. The present has multiplied." In Defence of Forgetfulness X. I. Selene
"(Body is the (contested) place where language originates, if one views, as I do, language as desire, desire as un- or many-gendered. Body is also place of exile, and language, as it is (mis)used, makes repeated (failed) attempts at return. Looked at that way, I suppose, it operates a sort of aliyah, and language’s reach in this context might be read as messianic (I am waiting (for it) to come). The thought hadn’t, until now, crossed my mind, but I won’t cross it out. There are so many places from which to begin and each of these bears its own antecedent.)" Echoes Enough of Echoes of Enough of Me: In Favour of ‘Not Going Anywhere’ Nathalie Stephens
August 10, 2020
i have spent the past few weeks immersed in this book. i am learning about narrative while i am editing a manuscript for publication, a long poem i have been turning into a poetic novella, this is what i'm calling it. or a novel poem. i'm not sure. Biting the Error is for me a book I needed for my writing. I regret that I did not read it earlier. In this book you will find musings about the role of traditional narrative and why such tradition needs to be fucked up. This book was a relief to me with its essays by Kathy Acker and kari edwards, its questions by Robert Gluck, its sentences by Lisa Robertson. it's a brilliant and necessary work for every student of the narrative. for those of us who do not have an academic background, it is a good introduction to some of the theorists such as Adorno and Barthes. I can't recommend this work highly enough. It is foundational.
December 2, 2007
'WHAT IS THE present? The present has never been described – how should we describe it?" Robert Glück asks in his introduction to Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative. A sort of investigative manual for cracking open narrative, the collection clamors with the voices of more than 40 North American writers as they grapple with the project of storytelling in our times.
Refreshingly, the book isn't a bunch of essays in support of a theory, and it doesn't overwhelm the reader with an overarching "tone." Most of the pieces are writers' explorations (in a riotous variety of forms) of their own work – and the personal leaks in quite a bit. What emerges from these investigations is a desire to break out, to crack open narrative conventions, which threaten to keep the writer, and by extension, the writer's story, in check. Picture narrative as a superficially smooth and glittering surface, at which the writer and reader together must keep looking, examining the jagged cracks from which untold stories are struggling to emerge. "The pen is a scalpel.... The surgeon heals through violence, a cut," Robin Tremblay-McGaw writes. "The excluded is invited in."
"How to include?" is a central question of the anthology. The familiar tropes of narrative – such as a unified "I" operating in a binary system of "givens" – are no longer useful. Traditional story constructs serve to obfuscate, rather than obviate, landscapes of personhood and social problems. How to tell a story where identity is split, or even spilt ("I believe it is possible to have one identity in your thumb and another in your neck," Roy writes); where language itself is suspect ("Disordered experiences cannot be forced to conform to already familiar styles of narrative," Doug Rice writes. "We must avoid being framed by languages, or worse yet, being used."); where the writer is "lodged in the cracks between categories, dynamiting [her:] way out" (Kathy Lou Schultz)?
The writers do not see themselves represented by mainstream categories. And anyway, they resist being pinned down. Contributor kari edwards questions where labeling leaves us: "the 'I am this_______(fill in the blank)?' is a first step in seeing one's self as other than formlessness situated in social shame," she writes, "but should this be the stopping point? does it do anything more than reinforce the 'I' as the ultimate achievement, where the endgame is the epiphany of late capitalism – to become a consuming self-controlling anorexic life form on automatic." Writing, "I know my I's are always in flux. Eye and eye and eye," Douglas A. Martin insists that he cannot be pinned.
This resistance to staying put doesn't end with identity. It's an ever-present questioning that keeps narrative supple. The writers question exclusions, binaries, and borders and invite the readers into these investigations.
It's notable that poets who've taken on narrative license are well represented in this collection. Pamela Lu's exploration of the distinctions between narrative and poetry (Lu sees the latter as "ideal for inhabiting the gaps between familiar idioms") and the necessity, to her writing, of both, is deliberate and lucid. Her essay is like an illuminated graph, charting their points of intersection. Eileen Myles's elegant conversation about the poetry-prose continuum in her work is itself a poem. Her casual urging that "poets should write novels en masse and reinvent the form and really muck up the landscape" is infectious.
In light of the ethos of resistance against delimitation, it's ironic that Biting the Error subdivides its investigation into categories. For the seasoned narrative radical, these may be unnecessary (naturally, one could easily argue that various pieces belong as much under one heading as another). For the hesitant or novice narrative experimentalist, however, the headings can be signposts (albeit some are cryptic) to cracks in the narrative horizon.
Refreshingly, the book isn't a bunch of essays in support of a theory, and it doesn't overwhelm the reader with an overarching "tone." Most of the pieces are writers' explorations (in a riotous variety of forms) of their own work – and the personal leaks in quite a bit. What emerges from these investigations is a desire to break out, to crack open narrative conventions, which threaten to keep the writer, and by extension, the writer's story, in check. Picture narrative as a superficially smooth and glittering surface, at which the writer and reader together must keep looking, examining the jagged cracks from which untold stories are struggling to emerge. "The pen is a scalpel.... The surgeon heals through violence, a cut," Robin Tremblay-McGaw writes. "The excluded is invited in."
"How to include?" is a central question of the anthology. The familiar tropes of narrative – such as a unified "I" operating in a binary system of "givens" – are no longer useful. Traditional story constructs serve to obfuscate, rather than obviate, landscapes of personhood and social problems. How to tell a story where identity is split, or even spilt ("I believe it is possible to have one identity in your thumb and another in your neck," Roy writes); where language itself is suspect ("Disordered experiences cannot be forced to conform to already familiar styles of narrative," Doug Rice writes. "We must avoid being framed by languages, or worse yet, being used."); where the writer is "lodged in the cracks between categories, dynamiting [her:] way out" (Kathy Lou Schultz)?
The writers do not see themselves represented by mainstream categories. And anyway, they resist being pinned down. Contributor kari edwards questions where labeling leaves us: "the 'I am this_______(fill in the blank)?' is a first step in seeing one's self as other than formlessness situated in social shame," she writes, "but should this be the stopping point? does it do anything more than reinforce the 'I' as the ultimate achievement, where the endgame is the epiphany of late capitalism – to become a consuming self-controlling anorexic life form on automatic." Writing, "I know my I's are always in flux. Eye and eye and eye," Douglas A. Martin insists that he cannot be pinned.
This resistance to staying put doesn't end with identity. It's an ever-present questioning that keeps narrative supple. The writers question exclusions, binaries, and borders and invite the readers into these investigations.
It's notable that poets who've taken on narrative license are well represented in this collection. Pamela Lu's exploration of the distinctions between narrative and poetry (Lu sees the latter as "ideal for inhabiting the gaps between familiar idioms") and the necessity, to her writing, of both, is deliberate and lucid. Her essay is like an illuminated graph, charting their points of intersection. Eileen Myles's elegant conversation about the poetry-prose continuum in her work is itself a poem. Her casual urging that "poets should write novels en masse and reinvent the form and really muck up the landscape" is infectious.
In light of the ethos of resistance against delimitation, it's ironic that Biting the Error subdivides its investigation into categories. For the seasoned narrative radical, these may be unnecessary (naturally, one could easily argue that various pieces belong as much under one heading as another). For the hesitant or novice narrative experimentalist, however, the headings can be signposts (albeit some are cryptic) to cracks in the narrative horizon.
June 10, 2013
I am always going to be "currently reading" this book. So far, this is the best book about writing I've ever read. The essays in this collection get into the depths of writing/narrativity by not only focusing on plot, character, etc. For instance, Lydia Davis discusses the function of the fragment and how it doesn't trap the subject in the text but allows it to live on after it's been written about. Anybody writing, or reading, or interested in writng, or any creative endeavors, might enjoy this.
February 27, 2008
A collection of some of my favorite writers writing about writing...specifically narrative. It is a wonderful trip through some of their life and career experiences with narrative, full of insight and innovation.
*Not Super Accessible Warning: A lot of it is pretty hyper-intellectual and definitely geared towards writers who are interested in non-traditional and experimental narrative.
*Not Super Accessible Warning: A lot of it is pretty hyper-intellectual and definitely geared towards writers who are interested in non-traditional and experimental narrative.
February 15, 2008
What?! Camille was a contributor to this? But she was like, one of my professors last semester. And I read this two years ago. Okay. Tried to read this two years ago. I don't get it. Henceforth, it must be brilliant.
July 4, 2007
This is an awesome collection of essays that explores some of the most exciting movements in literature today.
October 13, 2017
This is a gold mine. Lynne Tillmann Kevin Killian Kathy Acker. Cool reading about anglo/franco scenes in 80s Montreal.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews