On John Bennett, and The Book of Shards
So, there it is in my mailbox: The Book of Shards (Hcolom Press, 2013). And I'm thinking "Big Whoop." Indeed, I've seen most of the contents already; either they've been published here in the Bicycle Review, or I've read them via email. (I subscribe to John Bennett's email list, and he usually sends out at least one shard per day.) How characteristic of Bennett that before I can get my mitts on his latest book, he's already given it away to me for free, out of urgency. John knows better than to think he's writing for the money. As Charles Bukowski said of Bennett's writing: "You've fought a harder, cleaner fight than anybody I know." It's as true today as it was then.
...So...despite the fact that I've read most of this stuff before, I open the thing up. People love to send me books; books that fall, as books will, somewhere on a scale between the simply rottenly horrible and the highly readable and maybe even a little bit brilliant. Lucky for them, I take a lot of buses and trains, and unless the books are just too unbelievably badly written, I stuff them in my backpack and read them, and sometimes even write about them if I feel like I've got something to say. I read them on my way to work and on the way back home, mostly. I do this with Bennett's book.
Sure...I've seen all this stuff before. I've read nearly every one of these poem-ish prose tales that John calls "Shards". And...oh, but look...here's that one again. That one did always crack me up. Ah, Bennett, you're so dark, yet so fucking hilarious. And who could forget this one, here? What's John doing in there? He's turned Buddhist, stabbing chickens in the closet, coming out of it as gay, then in the next breath making love to a woman who looks suspiciously like a Chevy? No, that's not it. That's not what he was doing. That's not, as Prufrock was said to have said, what he meant at all. I've got it all slightly wrong, I find. This is why I find myself reading them all again, even finding one or two I missed on those days when I felt like I was drowning in other people's words, hard pressed for time, panicked, sifting through virtual stacks of virtual pages, hitting "archive" on this or that Shard file, just to give myself room to breathe as I trod the deep waters of my inbox. I hit the "archive" button. I'll get to this one some day. Sure I will. Sometimes I did, too, believe it or not. The thing about these Shards is they're always a pretty quick read. A lot can happen, mind you, but it always happens fast. Ten, twenty, fifty years go by in the course of one page. For the most part, even the archived Shards eventually get read, are spared the limbo of permanent archival exile.
You want to read them again, though you're not quite able to remember why until you do. Shards, you see, are like dreams; or like being really really drunk. You remember what happened in a general way, but the details are a little fuzzy. You know you were having sex with that woman, but just exactly how you ended up in that bedroom when only a minute ago you were flipping burgers in the back of a moving and suspiciously quiet ice cream truck is anybody's guess. If you could dream your dreams over again, the experience would be something like re-reading a Shard.
Reader, John, I read them all again. And what better endorsement for a book can there possibly be than that? That was me, on the 800 bus, cackling away like some demented hag at the special kinds of truth that can only be re-discovered through fiction. John Bennett has done it again.
Share the Road,
J de Salvo
...So...despite the fact that I've read most of this stuff before, I open the thing up. People love to send me books; books that fall, as books will, somewhere on a scale between the simply rottenly horrible and the highly readable and maybe even a little bit brilliant. Lucky for them, I take a lot of buses and trains, and unless the books are just too unbelievably badly written, I stuff them in my backpack and read them, and sometimes even write about them if I feel like I've got something to say. I read them on my way to work and on the way back home, mostly. I do this with Bennett's book.
Sure...I've seen all this stuff before. I've read nearly every one of these poem-ish prose tales that John calls "Shards". And...oh, but look...here's that one again. That one did always crack me up. Ah, Bennett, you're so dark, yet so fucking hilarious. And who could forget this one, here? What's John doing in there? He's turned Buddhist, stabbing chickens in the closet, coming out of it as gay, then in the next breath making love to a woman who looks suspiciously like a Chevy? No, that's not it. That's not what he was doing. That's not, as Prufrock was said to have said, what he meant at all. I've got it all slightly wrong, I find. This is why I find myself reading them all again, even finding one or two I missed on those days when I felt like I was drowning in other people's words, hard pressed for time, panicked, sifting through virtual stacks of virtual pages, hitting "archive" on this or that Shard file, just to give myself room to breathe as I trod the deep waters of my inbox. I hit the "archive" button. I'll get to this one some day. Sure I will. Sometimes I did, too, believe it or not. The thing about these Shards is they're always a pretty quick read. A lot can happen, mind you, but it always happens fast. Ten, twenty, fifty years go by in the course of one page. For the most part, even the archived Shards eventually get read, are spared the limbo of permanent archival exile.
You want to read them again, though you're not quite able to remember why until you do. Shards, you see, are like dreams; or like being really really drunk. You remember what happened in a general way, but the details are a little fuzzy. You know you were having sex with that woman, but just exactly how you ended up in that bedroom when only a minute ago you were flipping burgers in the back of a moving and suspiciously quiet ice cream truck is anybody's guess. If you could dream your dreams over again, the experience would be something like re-reading a Shard.
Reader, John, I read them all again. And what better endorsement for a book can there possibly be than that? That was me, on the 800 bus, cackling away like some demented hag at the special kinds of truth that can only be re-discovered through fiction. John Bennett has done it again.
Share the Road,
J de Salvo
John Domini on Talking Heads: 77 (interview by J de Salvo)
Talking Heads: 77 is one of those novels that only come around every so often, of which it can truthfully be said that the author has created their own literary form. There has never been a book written that is quite like it, and any attempt at imitation would be far too obvious for even the most unscrupulous plagiarist. It is the kind of book that makes other writers feel, if not jealous, at least less clever. Perhaps what is most impressive though, about TH77, is simply what an enthralling read it is. John Domini has accomplished, but more effectively, what David Foster Wallace set out to do with Infinite Jest: find a way of presenting a fragmented text without disrupting the reader’s enjoyment of the story. I was honored to be asked by John to interview him about one of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors. The novel was published in print by Red Hen Press in 2004, and will be re-issued later this year as an Ebook by Dzanc Books.
J: How did TH77 come to be? The format of the novel is something I’ve never seen done anywhere else.
John: Like most first novels, mine had a complex genesis. I don't mind saying that some of my first grappling w/ the book's material came about the time the story's set, in '78 or thereabouts, when I was in Boston. Of course, it took another 20 years for me to perceive my mess of notes & drafts & such (stuff I picked at on & off while I was doing other projects & other books) as an historical novel -- & more than that, about history. That really helped things cohere, seeing the story as a way to probe greater shifts in what mattered, & in our media for identifying what matters. The media was key, too, in how I got my mind around the novel. Kit’s underground odyssey found its map when I pictured the two documents w/in the document: the double-column newspaper-style stuff & the long dot-matrix printout from Kit's wife Bette. When I saw those two things contained, I saw the whole container.
J: Can you explain the title for those who might not have read the book? That titular scene where Kit is kind of losing it, and he stumbles across the window display for the TH77 album by the band Talking Heads. Why that band?
John: I liked a number of the Heads' hits -- & love them still, I don’t mind admitting. In Boston, in the days when the novel’s set, no question I was exposed to them a lot. That scene where Kit confronts a window full of Heads LP covers, I imagine that happened to me at some point. It was a common form of advertising, & that brings us back to the media, doesn’t it? Still, in point of fact the musical heros for me, as a five-chord strummer, were more the singer-songwriters. Bob Dylan & Elvis Costello, both get references, not-so-veiled quotations, in the novel. Still, you were asking about Byrne & the Heads, & I can say that, for this book, they took on a greater importance, a greater meaning, than any of my personal favorites. They were part of the distance I suddenly achieved in the late ‘90s, when the book asserted its shape & purpose. Byrne & the Heads embody the scene change, the dawning of a new perception, that I was trying to dramatize.
J: That really comes across in the book. That scene in front of the record store and the part in the prison, where Kit goes in to interview Junior and things get extremely nightmarish are two of the big climaxes in the novel. There’s so much going on in this book: Kit’s ups and downs with Bette, which don’t really ever get resolved, all the stuff with Zia and inside Kit’s head about the Boston Punk Scene, Kit’s struggle to tell the story around “Monsod Prison”. There has to be some personal background behind all this.
John: Lots of personal background, naturally. I wrote for a number of alternative newsweeklies, as they were called, back then. At the Boston Phoenix, between about '78 & '83, I rose up to something like "Regular Contributor," publishing, sheesh, at least 50 byline pieces, mostly on books & writers. Note, though, that my beat was culture, not politics. A lot of what my protagonist goes through, in TH:77, is entirely made up. Then there was my primary Phoenix editor, who's since come to be regarded as a behind-the-scenes master (w/ stints in NYC & LA, & he deserves the praise), & I ripped off his name -- Kit Rachlis. But again, that Kit was nothing like my Kit, neither physically nor (especially) temperamentally. Also, in those same late '70s in Boston, I was in the first years of my first marriage, & some of the turbulence she & I experienced must've found expression in the novel. No point denying it.
After all, one of the essential elements of the story is to have both those young people dig deep into themselves, confirm just what they're made of, & establish whether it can coexist w/ the person they've chosen as partner. Still, I've got to emphasize, the narrative at last fell into place long after I’d lived through anything even remotely like it -- & I do mean remotely. The specifics of me & my ex just won't match up w/ Kit's & Bette's. The differences go beyond looks, tastes, or schooling. Drab old me & mine, we suffered no such drama, no confrontations on a winter beach on Nantucket. Our sex life was something else entirely, too.
J: As writers, I think we can always find the nucleus of what we create in something we’ve experienced, however transformed it may be by the time it makes it to the page. There’s a kind of creative cause and effect principle at work.
Continuing along these lines, I’ve always felt that there was something you hit upon in this book that most writers wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole in a piece of literary fiction, but which you managed to explore with an impressively even hand. Punk, new wave, etc., were very often misunderstood as very scary, nihilistic things, not only by their critics, but also from inside. The reality was, of course, more complicated. Zia’s character feels very illustrative of the dangers of being seduced by that surface image.
John: Look, in ‘77 & the years around then, for anyone over 16 & under about 32, the punk scene was everywhere. In the novel I tried to explore a bit the demographics on which it depended, & the dangers it could pose to a fragile sensibility like Zia's. I was part of the scene, sure, sort of. The radio DJ Oedipus -- instrumental in exposing American ears to punk/new wave -- floats above the novel, & occasionally lands on the text, & he's an actual person, & he became a friend because of our shared musical tastes. I had brief encounters w/ Chrissie Hynde & others, nothing consequential. Human Sexual Response was a real band, its leader unusual for being out of the closet. But all that demimonde existed, of course, in nooks & crannies of more serious corruption, more damaging. Boston's an old city ruled by a destructive old cronyism, & building scandals like the one in my "Monsod Penitentiary" were forever coming to light. About 1980, I recall, the Phoenix & other papers exposed some particularly vicious web of cash for contracts. So too, the arson wave that concerns Kit, that threatens him over the course of the novel -- I mean, there was one of those every couple of years for decades.
J: So many great independent papers started or bloomed during that time, many of which have been consolidated or gone belly up, sadly. I think that TH:77 is a great document of a time when independent journalism had much more credibility. On the one hand, individuals have more access now, but that’s forced a lot of great papers to get blurbier, run more ads, shave word counts. I’ve always thought that the book was also a kind of defense of idealism, or at least (here comes that word again) a rejection of nihilism. Any thoughts?
John: Okay, let’s say TH:77 came to me in a vision, 20 years after the fact of its fiction (sorry; couldn’t resist). Let’s say you’ll indulge me. Okay, then what the vision revealed was just the face-offs & paradoxes you’re talking about. I mean I perceived the fading of reliable independent voices – here’s a salute to I.F. Stone’s Weekly, sacred of memory – their fading into the cacophony of the internet. If everyone’s his own newspaper, where’s the neutral, the synthesis, the touchstone? Plus I heard the uproar of the punks, shredded & damage-dealing far all the musicians’ personal fragility, or their dependence on Daddy’s station wagon & Mommy’s pasta. I saw them as callow youth, naïve as Zia is naïve, & mighty vulnerable, & yet I fell for their cacophony, giving it greater credence, somehow, than the rising white noise of self-replicating hardware & software of Mac & PC, even as I recognized that the Talking Heads, for instance, were themselves dependent on high-tech, the woofer & tweeter & FM radio... & in that wobble & clang of contradiction I traced a story, & if that isn’t anti-nihil, I don’t know what is.
J: Well, I think we can leave it there. Thanks John, it’s been an honor.
J: How did TH77 come to be? The format of the novel is something I’ve never seen done anywhere else.
John: Like most first novels, mine had a complex genesis. I don't mind saying that some of my first grappling w/ the book's material came about the time the story's set, in '78 or thereabouts, when I was in Boston. Of course, it took another 20 years for me to perceive my mess of notes & drafts & such (stuff I picked at on & off while I was doing other projects & other books) as an historical novel -- & more than that, about history. That really helped things cohere, seeing the story as a way to probe greater shifts in what mattered, & in our media for identifying what matters. The media was key, too, in how I got my mind around the novel. Kit’s underground odyssey found its map when I pictured the two documents w/in the document: the double-column newspaper-style stuff & the long dot-matrix printout from Kit's wife Bette. When I saw those two things contained, I saw the whole container.
J: Can you explain the title for those who might not have read the book? That titular scene where Kit is kind of losing it, and he stumbles across the window display for the TH77 album by the band Talking Heads. Why that band?
John: I liked a number of the Heads' hits -- & love them still, I don’t mind admitting. In Boston, in the days when the novel’s set, no question I was exposed to them a lot. That scene where Kit confronts a window full of Heads LP covers, I imagine that happened to me at some point. It was a common form of advertising, & that brings us back to the media, doesn’t it? Still, in point of fact the musical heros for me, as a five-chord strummer, were more the singer-songwriters. Bob Dylan & Elvis Costello, both get references, not-so-veiled quotations, in the novel. Still, you were asking about Byrne & the Heads, & I can say that, for this book, they took on a greater importance, a greater meaning, than any of my personal favorites. They were part of the distance I suddenly achieved in the late ‘90s, when the book asserted its shape & purpose. Byrne & the Heads embody the scene change, the dawning of a new perception, that I was trying to dramatize.
J: That really comes across in the book. That scene in front of the record store and the part in the prison, where Kit goes in to interview Junior and things get extremely nightmarish are two of the big climaxes in the novel. There’s so much going on in this book: Kit’s ups and downs with Bette, which don’t really ever get resolved, all the stuff with Zia and inside Kit’s head about the Boston Punk Scene, Kit’s struggle to tell the story around “Monsod Prison”. There has to be some personal background behind all this.
John: Lots of personal background, naturally. I wrote for a number of alternative newsweeklies, as they were called, back then. At the Boston Phoenix, between about '78 & '83, I rose up to something like "Regular Contributor," publishing, sheesh, at least 50 byline pieces, mostly on books & writers. Note, though, that my beat was culture, not politics. A lot of what my protagonist goes through, in TH:77, is entirely made up. Then there was my primary Phoenix editor, who's since come to be regarded as a behind-the-scenes master (w/ stints in NYC & LA, & he deserves the praise), & I ripped off his name -- Kit Rachlis. But again, that Kit was nothing like my Kit, neither physically nor (especially) temperamentally. Also, in those same late '70s in Boston, I was in the first years of my first marriage, & some of the turbulence she & I experienced must've found expression in the novel. No point denying it.
After all, one of the essential elements of the story is to have both those young people dig deep into themselves, confirm just what they're made of, & establish whether it can coexist w/ the person they've chosen as partner. Still, I've got to emphasize, the narrative at last fell into place long after I’d lived through anything even remotely like it -- & I do mean remotely. The specifics of me & my ex just won't match up w/ Kit's & Bette's. The differences go beyond looks, tastes, or schooling. Drab old me & mine, we suffered no such drama, no confrontations on a winter beach on Nantucket. Our sex life was something else entirely, too.
J: As writers, I think we can always find the nucleus of what we create in something we’ve experienced, however transformed it may be by the time it makes it to the page. There’s a kind of creative cause and effect principle at work.
Continuing along these lines, I’ve always felt that there was something you hit upon in this book that most writers wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole in a piece of literary fiction, but which you managed to explore with an impressively even hand. Punk, new wave, etc., were very often misunderstood as very scary, nihilistic things, not only by their critics, but also from inside. The reality was, of course, more complicated. Zia’s character feels very illustrative of the dangers of being seduced by that surface image.
John: Look, in ‘77 & the years around then, for anyone over 16 & under about 32, the punk scene was everywhere. In the novel I tried to explore a bit the demographics on which it depended, & the dangers it could pose to a fragile sensibility like Zia's. I was part of the scene, sure, sort of. The radio DJ Oedipus -- instrumental in exposing American ears to punk/new wave -- floats above the novel, & occasionally lands on the text, & he's an actual person, & he became a friend because of our shared musical tastes. I had brief encounters w/ Chrissie Hynde & others, nothing consequential. Human Sexual Response was a real band, its leader unusual for being out of the closet. But all that demimonde existed, of course, in nooks & crannies of more serious corruption, more damaging. Boston's an old city ruled by a destructive old cronyism, & building scandals like the one in my "Monsod Penitentiary" were forever coming to light. About 1980, I recall, the Phoenix & other papers exposed some particularly vicious web of cash for contracts. So too, the arson wave that concerns Kit, that threatens him over the course of the novel -- I mean, there was one of those every couple of years for decades.
J: So many great independent papers started or bloomed during that time, many of which have been consolidated or gone belly up, sadly. I think that TH:77 is a great document of a time when independent journalism had much more credibility. On the one hand, individuals have more access now, but that’s forced a lot of great papers to get blurbier, run more ads, shave word counts. I’ve always thought that the book was also a kind of defense of idealism, or at least (here comes that word again) a rejection of nihilism. Any thoughts?
John: Okay, let’s say TH:77 came to me in a vision, 20 years after the fact of its fiction (sorry; couldn’t resist). Let’s say you’ll indulge me. Okay, then what the vision revealed was just the face-offs & paradoxes you’re talking about. I mean I perceived the fading of reliable independent voices – here’s a salute to I.F. Stone’s Weekly, sacred of memory – their fading into the cacophony of the internet. If everyone’s his own newspaper, where’s the neutral, the synthesis, the touchstone? Plus I heard the uproar of the punks, shredded & damage-dealing far all the musicians’ personal fragility, or their dependence on Daddy’s station wagon & Mommy’s pasta. I saw them as callow youth, naïve as Zia is naïve, & mighty vulnerable, & yet I fell for their cacophony, giving it greater credence, somehow, than the rising white noise of self-replicating hardware & software of Mac & PC, even as I recognized that the Talking Heads, for instance, were themselves dependent on high-tech, the woofer & tweeter & FM radio... & in that wobble & clang of contradiction I traced a story, & if that isn’t anti-nihil, I don’t know what is.
J: Well, I think we can leave it there. Thanks John, it’s been an honor.
On Calamity Joe, by Brendan Constantine
"Calamity Joe" (Red Hen Press, 2012) is a huge step forward for Brendan Constantine. There's something deeper and, at times, darker about this collection than his two previous books. Constantine has always been a poet who was admired for his wit, his line, and for inventing situations which combined comedy and substance so effectively that it was hard to think it could get much better than that.
With this new effort though, it does. This is not so much a collection of selected poems as a poetic narrative. "Joe" seems to be not only one person but also many different versions of that person: a "Legend". Were there some even more removed way of writing about personality than in third person, Constantine's treatment of his character would be it. These kinds of effects in poetry are better experienced than described, but so it goes.
The reader (This reader, of course.) feels that it must be monotonous for Joe to have been so revised. The pleasure is all theirs, never Joe's. We are almost watching him undergo a kind of psychological torture. It seems there is no way for him to make his situation work. In all his incarnations, he neither fails nor succeeds. He has to start again, in the same surroundings (Simply: "a lab", though what is or is not done there may or may not be known.), which are suddenly quite different. His birth, death, and resurrection on the page are micromanaged. Maybe with this set of circumstances: a talking mouse to interview, a nine-fingered woman perhaps, Joe can escape all these lingering rumors and subtext of deaths and strife in his family.
Joe is haunted by the ghosts, both literal and metaphorical, of this family of his. He could easily be some kind of supernatural figure himself...so it's possible that all the players in this psychodrama are the inventions of inventions, spooks spooking spooks. Most of the time, when we meet Joe again, in a new "lab" in a new poem, the title is, inevitably: "The Legend of Joe." Constantine uses the repetition of this title throughout the book to enthrall us all the more as he confuses us. It's a very writerly trick: reclaiming the reader's attention through the use of repetition, like a hook in a pop song, but he has found a way to make it new again. And again. And again.
Legends need heroes, and --as Constantine may or may not have meant to suggest-- what is heroic about Joe is his normalcy, his lack of hubris, his ability to show up every day and roll with whatever Constantine throws at him. He is the kind of hero that should be emulated, for in reality it is most often restraint which holds back the darkness which lurks on the periphery of our consciousness on Earth, 20__. Joe can't go dashing around fighting dragons, demanding justice, waving his sword. The best weapon in his arsenal is humility, reliability; being the one who waits, the one who remembers.
It is bearable that today we wake up as flamingos, that parental wraiths refuse to stop visiting us, that our brothers will be arrested for their unknown kafkaesque "crimes". (All this and more does happen to Joe, at least once, err, I think.) Tomorrow we wake up; we must rise, like Joe, and join a different version of a world we don't understand as much as we'd like to, haunted by our memories and our revised memories.
Share the Road,
J de Salvo
With this new effort though, it does. This is not so much a collection of selected poems as a poetic narrative. "Joe" seems to be not only one person but also many different versions of that person: a "Legend". Were there some even more removed way of writing about personality than in third person, Constantine's treatment of his character would be it. These kinds of effects in poetry are better experienced than described, but so it goes.
The reader (This reader, of course.) feels that it must be monotonous for Joe to have been so revised. The pleasure is all theirs, never Joe's. We are almost watching him undergo a kind of psychological torture. It seems there is no way for him to make his situation work. In all his incarnations, he neither fails nor succeeds. He has to start again, in the same surroundings (Simply: "a lab", though what is or is not done there may or may not be known.), which are suddenly quite different. His birth, death, and resurrection on the page are micromanaged. Maybe with this set of circumstances: a talking mouse to interview, a nine-fingered woman perhaps, Joe can escape all these lingering rumors and subtext of deaths and strife in his family.
Joe is haunted by the ghosts, both literal and metaphorical, of this family of his. He could easily be some kind of supernatural figure himself...so it's possible that all the players in this psychodrama are the inventions of inventions, spooks spooking spooks. Most of the time, when we meet Joe again, in a new "lab" in a new poem, the title is, inevitably: "The Legend of Joe." Constantine uses the repetition of this title throughout the book to enthrall us all the more as he confuses us. It's a very writerly trick: reclaiming the reader's attention through the use of repetition, like a hook in a pop song, but he has found a way to make it new again. And again. And again.
Legends need heroes, and --as Constantine may or may not have meant to suggest-- what is heroic about Joe is his normalcy, his lack of hubris, his ability to show up every day and roll with whatever Constantine throws at him. He is the kind of hero that should be emulated, for in reality it is most often restraint which holds back the darkness which lurks on the periphery of our consciousness on Earth, 20__. Joe can't go dashing around fighting dragons, demanding justice, waving his sword. The best weapon in his arsenal is humility, reliability; being the one who waits, the one who remembers.
It is bearable that today we wake up as flamingos, that parental wraiths refuse to stop visiting us, that our brothers will be arrested for their unknown kafkaesque "crimes". (All this and more does happen to Joe, at least once, err, I think.) Tomorrow we wake up; we must rise, like Joe, and join a different version of a world we don't understand as much as we'd like to, haunted by our memories and our revised memories.
Share the Road,
J de Salvo
On Edmond Caldwell's Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant
On the back cover of this novel are three boxes, each carrying an explanation of what should be found in it: the blurb; the synopsis; the author biography. They aren't; only the absence of them.
This is witty, and sets the tone, the purpose, and the approach of the novel. It is, then, an anti-novel, a novel-in-reverse, a demolition job - blowing up the novel from within - and the explosion releases a huge amount of linguistic and literary energy, and a great deal of fun.
There is a rationale to this, as the text explains: the "realist" novel, as portrait of the Universe, would need to include everything, which is impossible, rendering every novel a failure. A novel can thus only succeed by a systematic breaking of the novelistic rules, one by one: plot, character, motivation; what we are then left with is a novel-shaped hole. An intricate and often very funny hole it is, too.
It starts with a series of discrete chapters, showing the anti-hero and his (heroine?) wife in an American airport terminal, a hotel complex in Paris for "bumped" air passengers, the tourist sites of St. Petersburg, a highway rest-stop, an art gallery. All of them neutral spaces, In-Between places.
The art gallery is showing an exhibition of Joseph Cornell boxes. Thus the chapter turns into a brilliant mise en abyme of the novel: each chapter forms a similar discrete peep into the anti-hero's life. It also introduces a running gag to the novel: a metamorphosing James Wood; and a funny riff on Moleskine notebooks, the "notebook of choice of Hemingway" and, as it happens, our anti-hero.
Then follows a subversive chapter on Taylorism, the early Time-and-Motion approach to industrial (and literary?) production, foundation of American corporate success (and avidly copied by Lenin). The meditation on this takes place in a bookshop, a B. Dalton Bookseller shop, the writer is at pains to explain, and written in the style of Thomas Bernhard, the acidulous Bernhard of Cutting Timber. And Caldwell is every bit as acidulous, every bit as funny.
But the mood darkens as another running joke comes to fruition. The writer suffers from "facial dismorphia" - an obsession over his appearance. Although of Portuguese/American descent, he is convinced his looks are Semitic, Arabic or Jewish, and expects at any time to be mistaken for a terrorist. Not the literary terrorist he is, but a real, honest-to-goodness Al Qaeda-type terrorist. Which naturally is what happens, even if only imaginatively.
But first, a non-realist plot loop gives him actual Semitic origin, masked by early adoption. This sets up a back-story involving the Israeli cleansing of Lydda in 1948, which in turn, by means of a haunting image of a soundlessly screaming woman, segues into a chapter involving Dr. Johnson, his cat, the ubiquitous James Wood, and a lost Beckett play - Human Wishes.
The spirit of Beckett hovers over the whole novel, along with Bernhard, Celine and Kafka. But it's Kafka who presides at the end. As Kafka's parables became hideously literal in Nazi Germany - humans turned overnight into vermin - so here, the final chapter, parodying Metamorphosis at the start, turns into a combination of The Trial and In The Penal Colony, a nightmare interrogation, part of the "war on terror", in which the anti-hero (maybe now a hero) sees his past box-lives rerun, but in a macabre light, a Kafkaesque nightmare that is, despite its anti-realism, sickeningly plausible.
This attempt at synopsis is, like the realist novel, doomed to failure; it is not finally reducible to synopsis (which is one more reason for there not being one in the cover box). What the attempt may do, I hope, is to prompt you into reading Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant for yourselves, very slowly, savouring every joke and flourish.
"Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant" is available from Say it With Stones Press at: http://sayitwithstones.com
Copyright 2012 by David Rose
This is witty, and sets the tone, the purpose, and the approach of the novel. It is, then, an anti-novel, a novel-in-reverse, a demolition job - blowing up the novel from within - and the explosion releases a huge amount of linguistic and literary energy, and a great deal of fun.
There is a rationale to this, as the text explains: the "realist" novel, as portrait of the Universe, would need to include everything, which is impossible, rendering every novel a failure. A novel can thus only succeed by a systematic breaking of the novelistic rules, one by one: plot, character, motivation; what we are then left with is a novel-shaped hole. An intricate and often very funny hole it is, too.
It starts with a series of discrete chapters, showing the anti-hero and his (heroine?) wife in an American airport terminal, a hotel complex in Paris for "bumped" air passengers, the tourist sites of St. Petersburg, a highway rest-stop, an art gallery. All of them neutral spaces, In-Between places.
The art gallery is showing an exhibition of Joseph Cornell boxes. Thus the chapter turns into a brilliant mise en abyme of the novel: each chapter forms a similar discrete peep into the anti-hero's life. It also introduces a running gag to the novel: a metamorphosing James Wood; and a funny riff on Moleskine notebooks, the "notebook of choice of Hemingway" and, as it happens, our anti-hero.
Then follows a subversive chapter on Taylorism, the early Time-and-Motion approach to industrial (and literary?) production, foundation of American corporate success (and avidly copied by Lenin). The meditation on this takes place in a bookshop, a B. Dalton Bookseller shop, the writer is at pains to explain, and written in the style of Thomas Bernhard, the acidulous Bernhard of Cutting Timber. And Caldwell is every bit as acidulous, every bit as funny.
But the mood darkens as another running joke comes to fruition. The writer suffers from "facial dismorphia" - an obsession over his appearance. Although of Portuguese/American descent, he is convinced his looks are Semitic, Arabic or Jewish, and expects at any time to be mistaken for a terrorist. Not the literary terrorist he is, but a real, honest-to-goodness Al Qaeda-type terrorist. Which naturally is what happens, even if only imaginatively.
But first, a non-realist plot loop gives him actual Semitic origin, masked by early adoption. This sets up a back-story involving the Israeli cleansing of Lydda in 1948, which in turn, by means of a haunting image of a soundlessly screaming woman, segues into a chapter involving Dr. Johnson, his cat, the ubiquitous James Wood, and a lost Beckett play - Human Wishes.
The spirit of Beckett hovers over the whole novel, along with Bernhard, Celine and Kafka. But it's Kafka who presides at the end. As Kafka's parables became hideously literal in Nazi Germany - humans turned overnight into vermin - so here, the final chapter, parodying Metamorphosis at the start, turns into a combination of The Trial and In The Penal Colony, a nightmare interrogation, part of the "war on terror", in which the anti-hero (maybe now a hero) sees his past box-lives rerun, but in a macabre light, a Kafkaesque nightmare that is, despite its anti-realism, sickeningly plausible.
This attempt at synopsis is, like the realist novel, doomed to failure; it is not finally reducible to synopsis (which is one more reason for there not being one in the cover box). What the attempt may do, I hope, is to prompt you into reading Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant for yourselves, very slowly, savouring every joke and flourish.
"Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant" is available from Say it With Stones Press at: http://sayitwithstones.com
Copyright 2012 by David Rose
THE DAY THE AIR STOPPED SINGING:
IN REMEMBRANCE OF SCOTT WANNBERG
i sat across from the ducks in the kitchen
talking over coffee and cigarettes and whiskey
about how the earth hung
how love could come true on water
any water
even the water that owns us inside our bodies
“the air began singing” - Scott Wannberg
It was the summer of ’92 and I was led to a mystical place where dreamers were encouraged to dream. The long defunct Iguana Café in North Hollywood, California was a hub for adult misbehavior and the celebration of the written word. One Sunday
afternoon I was introduced to a jolly giant fond of tie-dyes and imbibing “jazz” cigarettes. His reputation for poetic wizardry had already preceded him, a genuine folk hero of open mics and the Los Angeles poetry scene. But aside from his behemoth frame, he seemed too affable to be the man “they” claimed him to be. And then of course he took the stage at Iguana-land and the world I knew shook and was suddenly torn asunder. Scott Wannberg was a brilliant writer and poet and perhaps, yes, even a genius. He died Friday, August 19, 2011, at age 58.
Those familiar with the legend know that Scott Wannberg was a member of the Beat Generation inspired poetry performance troupe “The Carma Bums”. He was also the conspicuous John Prine caterwauling Deadhead employed as a bookseller for over two decades at Dutton’s in Brentwood. But I, a young poet sprat in the 90s, was privileged to know Scott socially, and on many a booze-soaked occasion words were hashed about a myriad of subject matter that had nothing to do with the poem.
We actually never discussed his work or anyone elses for that matter. Besides there were plenty of laughs induced shenanigans and other topics to fill the time. I suspect I’ll never find another cinephile friend that admires a good Sam Peckinpah flick like he did. Scott and I shared a movie addiction and we’d talk about them for hours, they were our dancing women dressed in dark rooms. In fact, he often educated me about certain films, the directors, the story development, anecdotes about the leading actors, etc. One night I asked Scott, why he never turned to screenplay writing. It always seemed
like a given in his case. He told me he had enough trouble wrestling forth a good poem.
Imagine that! Here I was thinking that poems moved through him extemporaneously and with minimal effort. I’d watch him turn it on at parties and improvise, taking feverish stream of conscious dictation from the muse. How could such a creative paradox be true?
Perhaps he did indeed hold the written work to a higher standard, as I review Scott’s poems now it’s hard not to see a polished craftsman, a true carpenter of verse. Those were his little movies.
oxygen passes itself around,
all spectators become participants,
i got lost in the tall wilderness
being born in god’s vulnerable shoes.
days and nights argue over not all that much
as traffic jams grow children,
men and women plant their hopes and fears
they become tall cities
in which we can hide.
“god’s vulnerable shoes”
The merits of Scott’s work, academic and otherwise are undeniably clear. I’d always felt it would be impolite and unwelcome to broach the subject with him firsthand. Nevertheless there was an obvious discourse building, and many of us borrowed and riffed and copied Scott’s prolific creative breakthroughs. These devices included Scott’s explosive interpretation of e.e. cumming’s enjambment style and use of punctuation or lack thereof; the marvelous unpredictability of the poems too, aleatoricism harkening to the Beat spirit of William Burrough’s surreal juxtapositions and the musical blank verse meter like the “cut-up technique” on steroids. Then there were the recurring themes of “singing”, the old West images, and of course, always, “the dance.” Even in the old days I knew it - Hell, everyone knew it, though it remained largely unspoken, that being with Scott meant being in the presence of something very awesome.
the delirious boys are waltzing us to the new Armageddon
they want to paint the walls with rapture
but i reckon i should stick around
let my bones deteriorate at their own rhythm
“a pint of whiskey will get you through part five”
Whenever I’m driving somewhere and I hear a Dead song on the radio, I think of Scott. Why is that? Whenever I see an old western playing on TV late at night, I instantly think of Scott. Whenever I see a print of Degas’ dancers, I invariably think of Scott. Is that weird or what? For me, these are all oddly post-modern relics of Scott’s work. They have been assimilated into the indelible matrix of those magnificent iconographic poems.
Because those poems have forever altered the way my eyes digest the world. And thus, all those things seem incredibly “Wannbergian” now. Scott owns them all.
The last time I saw Scott was at Beyond Baroque prior to making the move to Florence, Oregon. And since he left, I again have been privileged to correspond with him socially, well, in the “social network” sense of the word. But the recent poems held a peculiar fury, many were passionately descriptive and a pointed indictment of our country’s flawed system of government. They pounded like a gavel on this platform, a rallying cry, a one man protest against social injustices and political criminality.
Norquist strangles government in a tub
and the washerwomen all sing in key,
while the speaker of the house
forgets which house is friendly
to his key turning in the lock.
the ossified cannibalized alibied contrived denied
snide one-way ride
asks you to sacrifice your feet and hands
for the better angels
slurping statistics made of
sake.
“my government broke it’s funny bone blues rag ...”
But Scott’s words still contained hope, hope in the fire of this maddening world. This is the very last poem I received from him, dated Tuesday, August 16, 2011:
the cleaning women will tell you what you need to know to get by
all the gleaming eyed carnival barkers
suddenly begin to itch something frenetic
when the spotlights find them
attempting to vanquish
all remote corners
of the
room.
a remote corner once
tired of its anonymity
bribed a swank fashion photographer
to shoot it in such a way
all sentient people
would begin to know it
and even
perhaps
love it.
love does migrate this way
more so during summer.
vanquishing a remote corner
can get slightly messy,
if you don't wear a bib
as you commit a thousand per cent
to the vanquishing.
once i saw a man vanquish, utilizing so much muscle,
he never walked the same
again.
as for people faced with 20 year sentience,
they do feel parole could still
wave its fading hand,
especially when they are allowed to walk around
in fugues
while the cleaning women
dance and sing
as they
dust
all the technology
that still attests
it cares.
the limos are in high octane conference.
new menus are reportedly being violently thrashed out
in reader friendly homeopathic smoke signals.
the gleaming eyed barkers
they sometimes fall short of
the winning number,
and their gleams become rusty
and get thrown into the garage
where if one is not sufficiently persistent,
will stupor into forgetfulness.
all the miracles in candy bags
are way way high on the shelf.
if you truly
desire to partake
bring
stilts.
There is a pall over the Los Angeles poetry community this week, an early winter in tribute of Mr. Wannberg’s mark, his inestimable contribution to the very fiber and spirit of what we artists do. Maybe it wasn’t so dramatic as I’ve suggested, okay. Many of us are quite confident Scott’s voice will remain current and enjoy a rich, posthumous appreciation, so perhaps it wasn’t the day the air stopped singing this past Friday. And to you reading this now who are unfamiliar with the trove of poems Mr. Wannberg has left behind for you: Go now! Find something he’s written and commit it to your eyes and your heart. You will not regret it. The words still have his breath now; he was wild and he
listened. He was a bear. Goodbye, old friend.
Christian Elder
August 22, 2011, Los Angeles, CA.
talking over coffee and cigarettes and whiskey
about how the earth hung
how love could come true on water
any water
even the water that owns us inside our bodies
“the air began singing” - Scott Wannberg
It was the summer of ’92 and I was led to a mystical place where dreamers were encouraged to dream. The long defunct Iguana Café in North Hollywood, California was a hub for adult misbehavior and the celebration of the written word. One Sunday
afternoon I was introduced to a jolly giant fond of tie-dyes and imbibing “jazz” cigarettes. His reputation for poetic wizardry had already preceded him, a genuine folk hero of open mics and the Los Angeles poetry scene. But aside from his behemoth frame, he seemed too affable to be the man “they” claimed him to be. And then of course he took the stage at Iguana-land and the world I knew shook and was suddenly torn asunder. Scott Wannberg was a brilliant writer and poet and perhaps, yes, even a genius. He died Friday, August 19, 2011, at age 58.
Those familiar with the legend know that Scott Wannberg was a member of the Beat Generation inspired poetry performance troupe “The Carma Bums”. He was also the conspicuous John Prine caterwauling Deadhead employed as a bookseller for over two decades at Dutton’s in Brentwood. But I, a young poet sprat in the 90s, was privileged to know Scott socially, and on many a booze-soaked occasion words were hashed about a myriad of subject matter that had nothing to do with the poem.
We actually never discussed his work or anyone elses for that matter. Besides there were plenty of laughs induced shenanigans and other topics to fill the time. I suspect I’ll never find another cinephile friend that admires a good Sam Peckinpah flick like he did. Scott and I shared a movie addiction and we’d talk about them for hours, they were our dancing women dressed in dark rooms. In fact, he often educated me about certain films, the directors, the story development, anecdotes about the leading actors, etc. One night I asked Scott, why he never turned to screenplay writing. It always seemed
like a given in his case. He told me he had enough trouble wrestling forth a good poem.
Imagine that! Here I was thinking that poems moved through him extemporaneously and with minimal effort. I’d watch him turn it on at parties and improvise, taking feverish stream of conscious dictation from the muse. How could such a creative paradox be true?
Perhaps he did indeed hold the written work to a higher standard, as I review Scott’s poems now it’s hard not to see a polished craftsman, a true carpenter of verse. Those were his little movies.
oxygen passes itself around,
all spectators become participants,
i got lost in the tall wilderness
being born in god’s vulnerable shoes.
days and nights argue over not all that much
as traffic jams grow children,
men and women plant their hopes and fears
they become tall cities
in which we can hide.
“god’s vulnerable shoes”
The merits of Scott’s work, academic and otherwise are undeniably clear. I’d always felt it would be impolite and unwelcome to broach the subject with him firsthand. Nevertheless there was an obvious discourse building, and many of us borrowed and riffed and copied Scott’s prolific creative breakthroughs. These devices included Scott’s explosive interpretation of e.e. cumming’s enjambment style and use of punctuation or lack thereof; the marvelous unpredictability of the poems too, aleatoricism harkening to the Beat spirit of William Burrough’s surreal juxtapositions and the musical blank verse meter like the “cut-up technique” on steroids. Then there were the recurring themes of “singing”, the old West images, and of course, always, “the dance.” Even in the old days I knew it - Hell, everyone knew it, though it remained largely unspoken, that being with Scott meant being in the presence of something very awesome.
the delirious boys are waltzing us to the new Armageddon
they want to paint the walls with rapture
but i reckon i should stick around
let my bones deteriorate at their own rhythm
“a pint of whiskey will get you through part five”
Whenever I’m driving somewhere and I hear a Dead song on the radio, I think of Scott. Why is that? Whenever I see an old western playing on TV late at night, I instantly think of Scott. Whenever I see a print of Degas’ dancers, I invariably think of Scott. Is that weird or what? For me, these are all oddly post-modern relics of Scott’s work. They have been assimilated into the indelible matrix of those magnificent iconographic poems.
Because those poems have forever altered the way my eyes digest the world. And thus, all those things seem incredibly “Wannbergian” now. Scott owns them all.
The last time I saw Scott was at Beyond Baroque prior to making the move to Florence, Oregon. And since he left, I again have been privileged to correspond with him socially, well, in the “social network” sense of the word. But the recent poems held a peculiar fury, many were passionately descriptive and a pointed indictment of our country’s flawed system of government. They pounded like a gavel on this platform, a rallying cry, a one man protest against social injustices and political criminality.
Norquist strangles government in a tub
and the washerwomen all sing in key,
while the speaker of the house
forgets which house is friendly
to his key turning in the lock.
the ossified cannibalized alibied contrived denied
snide one-way ride
asks you to sacrifice your feet and hands
for the better angels
slurping statistics made of
sake.
“my government broke it’s funny bone blues rag ...”
But Scott’s words still contained hope, hope in the fire of this maddening world. This is the very last poem I received from him, dated Tuesday, August 16, 2011:
the cleaning women will tell you what you need to know to get by
all the gleaming eyed carnival barkers
suddenly begin to itch something frenetic
when the spotlights find them
attempting to vanquish
all remote corners
of the
room.
a remote corner once
tired of its anonymity
bribed a swank fashion photographer
to shoot it in such a way
all sentient people
would begin to know it
and even
perhaps
love it.
love does migrate this way
more so during summer.
vanquishing a remote corner
can get slightly messy,
if you don't wear a bib
as you commit a thousand per cent
to the vanquishing.
once i saw a man vanquish, utilizing so much muscle,
he never walked the same
again.
as for people faced with 20 year sentience,
they do feel parole could still
wave its fading hand,
especially when they are allowed to walk around
in fugues
while the cleaning women
dance and sing
as they
dust
all the technology
that still attests
it cares.
the limos are in high octane conference.
new menus are reportedly being violently thrashed out
in reader friendly homeopathic smoke signals.
the gleaming eyed barkers
they sometimes fall short of
the winning number,
and their gleams become rusty
and get thrown into the garage
where if one is not sufficiently persistent,
will stupor into forgetfulness.
all the miracles in candy bags
are way way high on the shelf.
if you truly
desire to partake
bring
stilts.
There is a pall over the Los Angeles poetry community this week, an early winter in tribute of Mr. Wannberg’s mark, his inestimable contribution to the very fiber and spirit of what we artists do. Maybe it wasn’t so dramatic as I’ve suggested, okay. Many of us are quite confident Scott’s voice will remain current and enjoy a rich, posthumous appreciation, so perhaps it wasn’t the day the air stopped singing this past Friday. And to you reading this now who are unfamiliar with the trove of poems Mr. Wannberg has left behind for you: Go now! Find something he’s written and commit it to your eyes and your heart. You will not regret it. The words still have his breath now; he was wild and he
listened. He was a bear. Goodbye, old friend.
Christian Elder
August 22, 2011, Los Angeles, CA.
