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Torpor
These compelling, often surreal works reveal a cryptic yet beautiful world in which nothing can be taken for granted. "Yates is singular in that he writes like himself; he has no leaders, no fellow travelers. He lives on intimate terms with fact and imagination—the result is this rare purity of language." —Charles Lillard
146 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
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December 14, 2022
"Some men die in one small corner of one small room; (he) died in all the rooms of all his buildings" J. Michael Yates 1938-2019.
Incidentally, to say this wasn't the book I was expecting is not a congratulatory statement. I made an interlibrary loan request for Chris Kraus' Torpor and received this from the University of New Brunswick instead. Some small part of my brain recognized the author's name from a reading list from Christian Bok's essaying on Canadian avante-garde, so I held onto the book. Indeed Yates is someone who I'd unsuccessfully gone looking for some time ago, and come up empty handed. Now I had perhaps a greater treasure than what I had sought initially with my loan request.
Even so, I went into this reading completely cold, with no idea what might be to come. Anything that Bok may have written about him I had forgotten. From the word go I could have sworn that I was reading Borges. Each story in the collection is a special bag of new tricks with great writing, often more than bordering on poetry, carefully crafted sentences and word selection, innovative language, and highly technical and introspectively controlled thought.
Take this:
"The spider: Latrodectus Schoicetans: things must have names: often, perhaps always, they have nothing definite except for their names: there is a certain tenuous comfort in the constancy of the marks upon a page which configurate a name: Latodectus Shoicetans.... There were, of course, other webs before its web-by spiders of a different name. And spiders of the same species, but of different physical reference. And by this same spider which has been changing all along, but has borne all along this same name. Each of these earlier webs has been incorporated, although to watch the Latrodectus work, one would conjecture there had been no earlier webs-and that nowhere within our sense of space is there a spider corresponding to this one working at the moment, One would suppose this unless he were capable of a consciousness which would direct itself to concentration on the two-dimensional spaces between strands."
What is Yates doing if not entwining the reader in an intentionally crafted webbing of language as he describes the life of a spider?
I feel that I've been selected to encourage readership for this one, and for Yates. No time better than the present. If not me then who? The acclaim and recognition on dustjackets of his works has faded, or at least their meaning has, with the modern readership being crickets on goodreads. Where did these readers go? The copy I've just read is a 1989 edition. I'm its first reader. There is not a single mark on the book, and its library card shows that it has never been touched before. And yet there is evidence that there may have once been a readership. He was widely published in popular lit rags, and received various awards including an Olympic arts award (google them, they were real).
Besides poetry, fiction and playwrighting, Yates drew inspiration from a life spent as a logger, a powder monkey, a motorcycle racer, a broadcasting executive, a broadcaster, an advertising executive, a print salesman, a commercial photographer, a publisher, a maximum security prison guard and SWAT team member, and taught languages, history of ideas, and science. William Vollman is the only other writer that I can come up with that has a commensurate background of life lived.
Yates writes: "We are editing the unspent possibility, the lost future, if you will, of a dead man." If his other works live up to it, I hope to edit the unrealized, as of yet, future of Yates readership - even if by a reader or two. Stay tuned, stay open-minded.
Incidentally, to say this wasn't the book I was expecting is not a congratulatory statement. I made an interlibrary loan request for Chris Kraus' Torpor and received this from the University of New Brunswick instead. Some small part of my brain recognized the author's name from a reading list from Christian Bok's essaying on Canadian avante-garde, so I held onto the book. Indeed Yates is someone who I'd unsuccessfully gone looking for some time ago, and come up empty handed. Now I had perhaps a greater treasure than what I had sought initially with my loan request.
Even so, I went into this reading completely cold, with no idea what might be to come. Anything that Bok may have written about him I had forgotten. From the word go I could have sworn that I was reading Borges. Each story in the collection is a special bag of new tricks with great writing, often more than bordering on poetry, carefully crafted sentences and word selection, innovative language, and highly technical and introspectively controlled thought.
Take this:
"The spider: Latrodectus Schoicetans: things must have names: often, perhaps always, they have nothing definite except for their names: there is a certain tenuous comfort in the constancy of the marks upon a page which configurate a name: Latodectus Shoicetans.... There were, of course, other webs before its web-by spiders of a different name. And spiders of the same species, but of different physical reference. And by this same spider which has been changing all along, but has borne all along this same name. Each of these earlier webs has been incorporated, although to watch the Latrodectus work, one would conjecture there had been no earlier webs-and that nowhere within our sense of space is there a spider corresponding to this one working at the moment, One would suppose this unless he were capable of a consciousness which would direct itself to concentration on the two-dimensional spaces between strands."
What is Yates doing if not entwining the reader in an intentionally crafted webbing of language as he describes the life of a spider?
I feel that I've been selected to encourage readership for this one, and for Yates. No time better than the present. If not me then who? The acclaim and recognition on dustjackets of his works has faded, or at least their meaning has, with the modern readership being crickets on goodreads. Where did these readers go? The copy I've just read is a 1989 edition. I'm its first reader. There is not a single mark on the book, and its library card shows that it has never been touched before. And yet there is evidence that there may have once been a readership. He was widely published in popular lit rags, and received various awards including an Olympic arts award (google them, they were real).
Besides poetry, fiction and playwrighting, Yates drew inspiration from a life spent as a logger, a powder monkey, a motorcycle racer, a broadcasting executive, a broadcaster, an advertising executive, a print salesman, a commercial photographer, a publisher, a maximum security prison guard and SWAT team member, and taught languages, history of ideas, and science. William Vollman is the only other writer that I can come up with that has a commensurate background of life lived.
Yates writes: "We are editing the unspent possibility, the lost future, if you will, of a dead man." If his other works live up to it, I hope to edit the unrealized, as of yet, future of Yates readership - even if by a reader or two. Stay tuned, stay open-minded.
Displaying 1 of 1 review