Story by Story: Brian Evenson's 'Fugue State' (18) 'Traub in the City'

It's been several months since my last speech re: Fugue State. I've been in a blank mode of my own, circling, recircling, in small rooms, reading texts within texts, thinking about sleep. In this time I've read this next text in the order, next to last, also the shortest, 'Traub in the City,' at least a dozen times. This weekend, I reread The Open Curtain, followed by The Wavering Knife, and then returned again to pick up at the second to last and smallest text inside this book, and found there in the shortest scrim the longest shouting. The book enveloping itself. This is not surprising in Evenson at all, considering his propensity for disclosing volumes within volumes (today 'Moran's Mexico' from The Wavering Knife about made me dizzy, with its room of teeth and tunnels in), and that even in seeing the small spacing of the two pages I knew something laid there ready to eat again in its eating, having learned what I've learned since last touching its face. These ideas could be called hyperbole in their intent, but this year for certain I've begun to feel that the certain thing I've tended toward in these last years can be felt only in such terms, or in the description around the center of the center, as I've gone on about here: that certain things have hyperbolic faces because the body on which they sit is made of something else. I won't continue in the circling of the circling of that meat body, but to say that herein, in the several months since returning to this two page spread, having read Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, and his Cinema 1, and with them begun searching for doors beside my doors, literally, this text, in two pages, owns a context for perhaps a whole body of work, an understanding, the groundwork on which Evenson's fictions sit gathering their power not even out of simple sound, as I've rattled on about in past months, but also in the borrowing of an other dark, of "several faces, coming one after another, quicker and quicker," all while underneath a very fine and sublime curtain, such as the curtains described in 'House Rules' from The Wavering Knife that, when lifted, show that the windows outside the house have been boarded down, allowing in only little stream of light where cracks make the space between the boards, hardly enough to illuminate any part of the whole house. As Traub here sees the bodies of a public metro all part of one vast and unnameable body, continually shifting and amorphous, he continues to try to draw the spaces, knowing he can not, knowing even in that vast amorphous massively spread face the air that makes the room around him does not touch any other object there inside it, does not touch him correctly, like all these texts in their becoming in this book here, in all the books, only a slightly further stretch to define that nowhere space, himself an oddly renamed image of a body already depicted in this very book, the mirror elongation of the slightly earlier 'Bauer in the Tyrol,' and yet he can not disturb that will to draw that space, confining and confined, elongated over several books within books, each ejecting and drawing into their black centers some massive fabric that will not be delineated or erased, will not lose its way in magic among these sentences and the rendition in their flood of something that is just above us and something in the stomach of this stomach in and of this house, a skin.

BEEOUU

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

scorblidditotchburssis

My write up of the 16th story in Brian Evenson's Fugue State 'Alfons Kuylers' is up now at Conversational Reading. Thanks Scott!


Today while in Providence got to go by and read for Brian's Writers on Writing class at Brown with Rob, we both read and answered questions, it was an honor and a blast. Brown seems really good. Sushi and beer was really good. Brian is too kind. Joanna Howard is really excellent also. Excited for her new book On The Winding Stair, which just came out from BOA.


Having a really killer time on the book trip so far with Sam and Rob, laid back and fun and many excellent people coming out, I feel happy. Things are good.


I feel happy. Things are good.


Last night in the lobby of this hotel in Providence a guy approached the front desk while I was on this public computer and told the desk clerk that everybody he walks by on the street has been making stabbing motions with their hand at him. He did not want to go home as he thought there were people there trying to get inside and hurt him. He was Irish and here at Brown studying engineering. The police were called. He was afraid of the police too, told them he was afraid they were going to try to stab him, the cop said something like "The only thing I have that I could stab you with is my keys and I don't want to get blood on them." They talked to the guy for 45 minutes trying to figure out what was wrong, he was sober and not on drugs, they called his father in Ireland, asked him if he was lonely or homesick, he kept nodding at me and saying again that he thought people wanted to stab him and that he just wanted to go to "the safest place." Then I had to go outside and the firemen came and more police came and an ambulance came and they walked the guy out and he got in the ambulance quietly and they drove off.

Story by Story: Brian Evenson's 'Fugue State' (15) 'Life Without Father'

Fifteenth in the order of stories in Brian Evenson’s Fugue State (out now from Coffee House Press) is ‘Life Without Father,’ which originally appeared in Lit.



In so many of the stories in Fugue State, the power has laid not in the saying of the thing itself, but in the circling of that saying. Elucidating the black center by describing it in relief, as it is a center that can not be described, thus its horror.

In ‘Life Without Father,’ however, it is no longer as much the circling of the unsaid, as the face of the unsaid thing itself. In handling a situation wherein there is a very clear emotional response to be intoned in any reader (specifically, a daughter dealing with her father’s peculiar death), Evenson evokes a further response by, rather than stoking the gross layer, inverting it, entering the unsaid.

This kind of tension has been used to great ends in horror films rather extensively⎯the thing the audience can see but the persons on the screen can not⎯but here it is allowed a rather different kind of intoning, as the unsaid comes from a blank spot in Evenson’s protagonist, as the daughter can not quite explain the condition of her father’s death⎯nor can the reader. There is an emotional distance, then, which in its revolving around the hazy and terrifying approach to death (as laid bare and gruesome in the first graphs of the story), becomes more volatile by having no volatility at all.

What is odd about the function of this kind of ununderstanding in ‘Life Without Father,’ is that in its function in the characters’ lives, it opens in them a unspeakable clarity, a “new period of… existence, a step closer to… death” (144). Thus, in the sort of circling and continuous unreckoning of the blank spaces of the previous stories, there is a smaller, calmer kind of awakening, which in its manifestation becomes inexplicable, and thus ends the story here itself.

The result is again rather Bernhard-ian, making the repeated phrase “Correction,” here in the story used as a demarcation of the shifting of the mind between new modes, an embedded homage, both directly in the naming, and in the taut and seemingly harmless manner of circling a great horror than Evenson so aptly wields to shape the blank.



Further Bernhardian method is used here to great ends, in the face of the unreckoning, by resorting to description of minute, seemingly mundane details to distract the reader from what is looming on its face. As in: here, in seeing her father’s strange, inactive manner of moving into death, and into clarity, the daughter focuses on making hashmarks in her school book for each time she alters his body, paying close attention to the count, a number that she will then revisit as the nature of that death is called into question, opening her own door into herself.

In the course of the stories here in Fugue State we are entering the tunnel out of the book, as it were, a point which, in folding against the first half of the book seems to mirror the beautiful, quiet but unnerving moment of ‘Girls In Tents’ that we wormed through on our way in. In a way, it is even more unnerving realizing that this story, which in most any other book would seem violent and revolting, here seems a moment of breathing in⎯which in realizing that realizing makes me think again of all I am breathing in among this reading, and in this very room where I am sitting with the book unable to see behind my chair.

It is in such ways that Evenson’s books are not books at all, or even books within books⎯they are weapons, they are tools and tunnels.

Solo on that ass

3:AM has published Friend Helmet, list of 50 #43, which is a monologue made up of lines jacked from conversations in gmail with a variety of wondrous people, including maybe you? Biggest props to H, who is the majority, and the good. It should be read as 1 mind.




My write up of the 13th story in Brian Evenson's Fugue State, for 'Bauer in the Tyrol' is posted at Writers Bloc.





This photo probably very well encompasses the general mindstate of the 2nd half of the Dollar Store Tour as well as anything could ever (there with our rapist van behind us, bless its black heart):





Swore to myself I'd be inside my head today, trying really hard to get back in the swing of this mess, I am going there now.

'my mother's letters addressed to nonexistent hotels'

People wondering about the results of the Scorch Atlas Remix contest: I've been slowly reading and things are coming together. We plan to have the results to you announced in early July, and the publication of the remix book coming shortly thereafter. More on that as it arrives.

The Scorch Atlas books themselves are about to be on their way: shipped from the printers door tomorrow.

Anybody interested in reviewing who isn't already on my list, please drop me a line with where you think you could place a write up. I'd love to send you a book.




Also, will be on Featherproof Dollar Store tour from July 3-14th, selling early copies (it won't hit stores until Sept.), check dates from Texas to NYC and elsewhere here.

Also will be doing another tour in September mostly in the Northeast with Robert Lopez and Sam Ligon, more on that soon.








A huge honor to have Dennis Cooper name EVER in his candidates for his Best of 2009 Top Ten Lists.

An insanely cool collage of art objects and powerhouses, from the man himself.








My review of the 11th story in Brian Evenson's Fugue State 'Invisible Box' is up at the Identity Theory blog Book Rate








I feel behind on so much, it is impossible to keep up, how does anybody do anything









Telling you now: Mike Young's MC Oroville's Answering Machine is a power energy monster. So happy to have that series of texts together in one place. It's $3.5. You just have to buy it.





Attila Bartis's 'Tranquility' (from the incredible Archipelago Books) is also stroking me inside:

But what would you do, Mr. Writer, if at pig-slaughtering time they handed you the blood bowl to hold, eh? You'd drop it like a hot potato, wouldn't you? About that, Mr. Principal, you are mistaken; I'd just get a better grip on it.









I'm really going to try now to write on this paragraph-turned-novel that is now entering 15k words from having meant to be 500 | saving in the filename 'black fields.doc' | I am really going to pay attention |

Story by Story: Brian Evenson's Fugue State (9) 'In The Greenhouse'

** In case you missed it, my post on FS's 8th story 'Wander' appeared at EWN.

The ninth story in Brian Evenson’s Fugue State, ‘In the Greenhouse,’ is interestingly, and perhaps pointedly, the only previously unpublished story in the book.



The text begins with an author who is attempting to write a study of another author, who in the first paragraph gives up on the project 170 manuscript pages in, burning them. The remainder of the story then is follows an author named Sindt’s subsequent interactions with the would-have-been subject, Craven.

What is perhaps most haunting about ‘In the Greenhouse,’ then, besides that it is a truly gripping and aura-ed story, and particularly with its placement in the order of texts here, is Evenson’s seeming bent to open the text beyond the text, to pull the doors that have so far been crowding his subjects’ lives into the direct meat of the reader/author relationship. We’ve already come through a rather heavy line of identity-blurring and psychic terror, and yet here we are sunk deeper, in the actual meat of what is being made⎯as, this is a book after all, not an actual flesh and blood nightmare (right?)⎯and so what further ways can the text therein claim our heads?

In writing about writing about writing, Evenson further opens the clearly constructed ontology of circling and encasement⎯here, perhaps, is the book within the book within the book.

Clearly, and by the example of the weight of the other works before it in the way even weeks after having read them I still feel pressed against my back, ‘In the Greenhouse’ (the title itself a seeming metaphor for the overgrown hotbox of what must be plumbed in creation), the pages are riddled with the indication that the reading itself, as well as the writing, has as much, if not more, power to enter and alter the flesh and mind.

“The imaginative process could ruin a good house in a matter of days,” Craven says in passing to the protagonist, in touring his strangely sparse and abstrusely described home (77). Later, this thought will be echoed by the protagonist in the midst of his own self blurry, a turn of page so horrifying I should not to even talk about it. “The imaginative process can ruin a good head…”

Via Craven, we are offered glimpses of strangely and provocatively titled texts such as Knife Diet and Box of Sky, which begin to worm their worm into the narrator’s perception both of the strange subject-author, and the protagonist’s own otherwise entirely shaded existence, which in their expounding in Sindt’s head begin to enter his ideas, his waking, and perhaps further on, become.

At another point, as Sindt attempts to more closely examine the Greenhouse by using the only eyeglass sort of piece in the house that he can find: a glass tumbler, which “while it admittedly magnified things, severely distorted them at the same time.” Like the text, then, and the text’s creation, and its induction, all which in concert both act as a portal and a creator of the hole. A systematic method of simultaneous creation and destruction, resulting in a wholly other state.



Exactly what Evenson’s rooms and minds and modes here are aiming at is not the message. Instead, it is the incitement of those passages, and the passages within passages, as by now the book itself has become so riddled with the worming mazeways that we can not wholly regard it as a sequence of associated texts, but as something asking something us, in. As well, the circlings are circled, the doors have doors, the halls further halls, as we, like the people in the book, worm. The circling in ‘In the Greenhouse’ operates more as spirals than as the simple recitation of obsessions found earlier in Fugue State⎯here the text’s two lone men (author and reader), to the point that Sindt begins to imagine that Craven is several people, infused around him, locked in a book inside a book, etc, wherein “they spent their days circling one another, excessively formal (he realized this was a description as well of Jansen and Jansen’s interactions in Craven’s Moody Mouths).”

The result is perhaps the deepest elucidation of the hole state we’ve had here yet, and perhaps more personal, direct, stroked into the ravenous, gluing hemispheres Fugue State has already been fluent in, an ultimate realization of encircling and obsession, circling of self. “…it seemed that the syntax of Craven’s sentences was rewiring his head,” perhaps somehow also in the way that the texts surrounding ‘In the Greenhouse’ seem to be piling up, building a shell around the reader, building, perhaps, an entrance to an even deeper hole within a hole, an exit.

Tickle marriage with bacon ceremony for queet

My write up of the 8th story in Brian Evenson's Fugue State is live now at the EWN, please check it out?



As I typed that I was brought my contributor copy of Dzanc's Best of the Web 2009, in which I have 3 pieces and an interview, it looks amazing as an object and to hold, I can't wait to dig in.



Recently I have been writing a series of short paragraphs in the mind of Bernhard's The Voice Imitator one at a time, on Saturday I started one and ended up writing 2000 words, which since then has become 6000 words, and I think there is a novel in the oncoming, as the further I go in the writing the more there is to need to say.

I haven't felt in a while like I was writing something that feels the way this does, but it feels good to be in the presence of something moving.

The paragraph had become inspired directly by reading Evenson's 'Bauer in the Tyrol,' which hit me, strangely, with an idea rather than a sentence, as I had not written in the mode of 'ideas' in a long while, but instead being thrown forth in chasing an initial sentence, and following the sound and rhythm of that sentence to its end.

Evenson is interesting I think in that his stories manage to both have the battery and brains of an idea based text, in that there is a mode there and a palpable growing of mood and direction, but also sent forth on sentences that are driven by sound and tone.

This is different than, say, Beckett, who is less about ideas and more about sound completely, letting the sound dictate the ideas more than vice versa, and also different than most 'narrative' texts, where the plot or pushing forward often seems less interested in sentences that carry themselves than they are about sentences that carry forward some propulgation (even if they sound good).

Writers I like that I would say let their sentences dictate the mode more than the idea (which then fuels the idea): Christine Schutt, Joyelle McSweeney, Ben Marcus, Jean Genet, Diane Williams, Ander Monson, David Markson, Peter Markus, Robert Lopez, William Gass...

Writers I like that I would say let their ideas dictate the mode more than the sentence (which then fuels the sentence): Donald Antrim, George Saunders, Dennis Cooper, Gert Jonke, Derek White, Stephen Dixon, Paul Auster, Matthew Derby, Donald Barthelme, W.G. Sebald, Robert Coover, Steve Erickson, Jesse Ball, Jose Saramago, William Gay, Amy Hempel, A.M. Homes, Kelly Link, Norman Lock, David Foster Wallace, Julia Slavin, Nicholson Baker....

Barry Hannah I think falls into all of these camps in different hats, as does maybe Cormac McCarthy and William Burroughs. Michael Kimball and Stanley Crawford also both have made works that might, in feel, seem split between the two modes.

zodes soda hats eeky



AHHHHH



It is an interesting divide, somewhat, in that the authors whose sentences seem the inspiration more than what is being said are of a certain ilk, as is how is the saying, while those of the idea tend to have a different texture, which is communicable among the reading as clearly as it likely feels to be in the minute of the word.

I have spent all of this year so far entirely writing in the moment of the sentence first, with the story therein divising itself from the language, leading me without really knowing where I am going. This has always been a much more palpable way of saying something that surprises me, which as I have said before, How can you expect to surprise anyone if you are not surprising yourself?

But what about when the idea comes first, and then asks for you to divine the sentences that push it? This has always been slightly more difficult for me, a mixed bag wherein I often fail more often than I succeed, though when I do use the idea first and am able to make the sentences live up to it, it often seems the thing that resonates even longer. Why?

Sentences carry their own ideas, in the blood.

Ideas do not carry their own sentences, the sentence must be derived or divined.

Humans are ill at ideas, rare is the human idea that is new and good, and yet ideas can likewise be divined, perhaps? Ideas can shit down out of nowhere like a money box, and stutter through you like the words do, maybe?

Ideas can be channeled, funneled, too, in the way of not knowing,

so the question then begins about impulse

becomes about how in the body to trick the mind into saying the thing it did not know it was going to say in its front part of its face but knew in knowing that it wanted to say, and had wanted to say, and will continue to try to keep saying


The less-thought thought borne from the sentence or from the idea being the cake meat you were hiding

and can then walk on

and be less hungry and more hungry

dualities being the bomb

and







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ass talk is fun, how bout i eat my dick eh

as is what makes you say what you should have been saying is doors to teach yourself mmmm light

13 Jun 02:15:50 PM www.google.co.in why there is a shape of hill on vegiana

The man who lives alone next to my parents has been putting up this sign on the front of his house for a week or so at a time every other month, when he feels it:



Some days before they stopped letting him have his kids but while he was under review this guy would have pool parties at his house and would rent a PA and play music and then talk on the microphone between songs to the kids, saying very constrained polite and fun things. He organized them to eat popsicles together and had contests in the water. The PA was very clearly meant so the neighborhood would know what a good dad he is, which made the hearing of the children sounds and music with his talking to them very uncomfortable even if on its face it sounded OK.

As for whatever else happened I don't know.







The always wonderful Amelia Gray reviewed EVER on her blog. An excerpt: "The deal with this book is that it offers a puzzle like The Exquisite but instead of dissecting reality, it dissects surreality as it wobbles in a frame of reality, which essentially turns you on your ass and shoves a prism up there. Needless to say, I recommend reading EVER in the bathtub."

Thanks Amelia!



The also always wonderful Pratha Lor also wrote up EVER on his blog, concentrating mostly on the musical aspects of the work, really nice: "Butler' work is episodic, presenting a paradoxical landscape to explore that is both physically constricted, yet mentally elusive--requiring much more unravelling and sensing on the part of the reader."

Thanks Prathna!






My 6th post on Brian Evenson's Fugue State is on the illustrated 'Dread,' and has been guest posted at Ghost Island.

Thanks Ben!

Sorry I got out of order on those. The 7th story in Fugue State is still here.




Belong is an excellent band.




The Tyrant just took a story that I think is the best thing I've ever written, 5000 words about a mother destroying her child. It had been rejected quite a bit, I

I

I

I want to think out loud about ideas dictating sentences in fiction vs. sentences dictating ideas but I'm a little hungover. Some other time then.

Story by Story: Brian Evenson's Fugue State (5) 'Desire With Digressions'

(read part 4, guested on Corduroy Books blog, here)

Fifth in the order of stories in Evenson’s Fugue State is ‘Desire with Digressions,’ which originally appeared in Conjunctions.




What is odd about this story, even in the rungs of odd that come before it, and surely after, is how the language herein hangs uncentered around a center.

Though in a way, on its face, this story seems to have less palpably happen than any other Evenson story in any of his books that I can recall⎯I could not help but feel even in the midst of its seven pages, a central door, a hole, a black square. Through what is essentially the narration of a man moving in orbit from his home, for a very vaguely rendered reason dealing with the blanked face of a loved one, Evenson seems to have centered, in his uncentering, the unnamable space that delineates not only his work, but the work of the truly human macabre of everyday, its inexplicable lining.

“There is,” our narrator digresses, “in every event, whether lived or told, always a hold or a gap, often more than one. If we allow ourselves to get caught in it, we find it opening onto a void that, once we have slipped into it, we can never escape” (p. 50).

This is the terror space of the dream of Winky’s found in Mulholland Drive; the Shining’s elevator bursting with blood. It is the enormous fields of red or gray color in Mark Rothko’s painting. It is the silence millisecond blips in between certain chords or percussion of true black metal. The rooms where certain kinds of men have lived with their minds before performing certain acts on other bodies. Etc.

Or it is a just a room.

Here the narrator finds himself moving in “orbit” from the story’s center, his loved, moving in a series of locked spirals that he can not bring himself to exit, and that, eventually, in the reckoning of the concept of an actual hole he must find in his terrain, his mind simply drops out of its own awareness⎯a raw spot in the narration where we can not even be sure what happened there between.

The text embodies its hole; carries its hole; is its hole.

Around the hole its strange meat: what we read around that weird terror void, the flirtation of which is what truly burns the blood⎯as it is in texts of films or other that would try to name or have that whole contained within them held that ultimately, psychically and sublimely, fail.

Like the path leading to and from the house where ‘Desire with Digressions’ begins and ends, itself a mirror both looping the narration and reflecting the innards of the story, and the hole, back into itself⎯“…I walked up the dirt road and then up the gravel road and then down the paved road until…” (46) coupled against “…walked the rest of the way up the paved road, down the gravel road, down the road. The house looked just as I had left it…” (52).

Though there may be in Fugue State more distinctive rooms, more divisive in their aiming, I can not imagine that the direct spiritual reckoning of the body and unnamed face of terror here contained could be more fully wielded⎯but with Brian Evenson, I wouldn’t put it past him.

Preorder ‘Fugue State’ here.

Next up, the 6th story, 'Dread,' which I believe will be guest posted elsewhere, and then the 7th, which is already online, if you feel like skipping ahead, at Robot Melon.

please chew my face

What dis?

YEAR OF THE LIQUIDATOR

I dunno. You tell me. What dat?




Have now read 90% of all entries. I believe there are 10 finalists, a handful of additional considerations, and etc. Lots of really impressive, interesting, innovative work, it is going to be really hard I think to judge in finality. More info as this parses, but should have contest results by the end of the week. Check back.




Big ups to my man Matt Bell on Keyhole picking up his collection 'HOW THEY WERE FOUND' for release next year!!

Things are happening to people.




Seems like I can't concentrate more than 3-5 minutes without being interrupted in one of 50 different forms during the day. At night at least it is much more quiet but by then my brain is often gone.




New Robot Melon has lots of good new words, including another of my Brian Evenson 'Fugue State' reviews, this of 'Girls in Tents' which originally appeared in Conjunctions, and is so far the book's most calm, reflective, and yet somehow still ultimately tense sections.

Also has many friends and pleasures in enjoyment Iredell, Lovelace, Berghoef, Young, Smith, in good light. Thanks to Stephen Daniel Lewis for the make.




Dudes outside the window again. I am going to go lay in the street.

I went up north uh and got some holy

Derek White wrote one of the sentences in EVER.

If someone guesses correctly in one guess which sentence it is, I will send that person a custom made mix cd of musics for you to enjoy and a book that you will probably like or something.




The 4th post in my series of posts about every story in Brian Evenson's Fugue State is now up at Corduroy Books, a look at 'Mudder Tongue' which originally appeared in McSweeney's.




Filthy Gorgeous Things is a sexy website about being sexy, it has naked pictures on it, it published my brief essay in their new issue: The Female Body as Conduit: Fleshy Corridors in the World(s) of David Lynch.




'This is not not a Contest' received more than 100 entries, I have yet to count the final count. I have read about 15% of them so far. I have marked two of those for consideration as finalists. I will try to complete this and have results by the end of next week, hopefully.





I just ate refried beans off of a large, white, plastic mixing bowl spoon.




I am very tired I still haven't slept right in about 2 weeks now.




I only want to type short declarative sentences starting with the word I from now on.




Look, me reviewed Andrew Zornoza's 'Where I Stay' from Tarpaulin Sky Press.




Me think you should watch this cool documentary on the making of U.S. Maple's amazing ACRE THRILLS album (might wanna skip to 4:30, as the beginning is just jacking around). Al Johnson's vocal recording techniques make me want to rent a hotel room and sit on the nightstand. Go read dude's lyrics n whatnot. Google U.S. Maple lyrics. It's fun.



Musics.scs.

Story by Story: Brian Evenson's 'Fugue State' (3) 'Mudder Tongue'

3rd in 'Fugue State' comes Evenson's 'Mudder Tongue,' which originally appeared in McSweeney's.



From the two word couplet of the title we're inculcated immediately into Evenson's strange knack of archaic-sounding language, such as that of his 'Altmann's Tongue' years, a title which, after the story is read, will become even more strange and resounding in a different way than it seems to at first glance: a great application of titling, taking it beyond.

'Mudder Tongue' is the first definite instance so far in 'Fugue State' of Evenson's extremely singular black humor, which in the context of this piece seems to work as a counterbalance to what is a man in a dire and ultimately confounding situation: his losing the ability to control his mouth. He finds himself, without will, beginning to insert uncommon words into normal speech, a condition that grows in extremity and discomfort as the story progresses.

Instead of milking this straight, though, Evenson of course continues to build the narrator's disarray in slightly increasing strokes, amplified mainly by his relationship with his daughter and her growing concern (and simultaneous lack of full understanding of) his condition.

It is the realm of many of Evenson's fictions to take a situation like this, that is inexplicable in nature, and to continue to build it in slow, tight loops of worsening. While here the event is comic, the overall effect is that of an increasingly narrowing field of vision from within the protagonist's head, though kept at bay, if in a strange way, by the distanced language (the use of third person limited), and the posture of the even tone, even in the face of such horror. Evenson's choices for words that the protagonist inserts over others work well to simultaneously milk that horror and relieve it, causing strange jerks of both humor at the slip ups, but increasing awareness that something here is going very wrong. His sentences are clean and forward moving, yet voiced in such a way to make the impending seem even more potentially eruptive: it is a pacing kind of silence, a build: and clearly, as with many things in life, it is the anticipation of the eruption, instead of the eruption itself, that is the truly pleasured and fevered form.

If anything, one major lesson that any author interested in the macabre could learn from Evenson is his immaculate restraint, his careful plodding and use of space and uncertainty, to counterbalance the sense of impending horror (which sometimes never even comes, or when it does, might come in glimpses, as we've seen in the first two stories here.) It is at once cold and warm, hard and soft, waking and awaking. In this way, using subtle, well conceived strokes of familiar unfamiliar over the usual horror traps of over-the-top or ridiculous (even in the presence of a conceit that is not, technically, familiar to most, if any, humans), the narration becomes claustrophobic as it opens up, instead of more raw, like a rope tightening around the neck.

The positioning of the protagonist in odd and uncomfortable situations among his body, among other bodies; his growing inability to make that body perform in reflection of how he wants: it all comes in a way that concentrates the laughter more on the shake of the body than the pleasure of it.

And it is Evenson's unique sense of humor, voiced and aimed in a terrain where the jokes are not jokesby themselves but also further amplification of the story's center, its condition, making them not anecdotal or amusing, like much of fictional humor can be, but further nodes, further fire: this is his great key. Getting a person to laugh in the midst of such discomfort is the sign of the real doors being opened, the right walls coming down. This is a worm that is going to feed.

The story's ending, which I will not allude to here for those how have not read it, is perhaps the ultimate example of that final door opening, leaving the reader stunned and off-balance at the same time, in a way completely unexpected. The last paragraph of this story is among my favorite of all last paragraphs in a story that I can recall.

In the context of the book, this story is so well placed, in that it opens on the recursive fear and inward paranoia of the first two stories, and turns them on their head, inflicting an even weirder, at once more comfortable (because you're laughing) and uncomfortable (because you're laughing) twist of the ideas at hand, setting up already that this book is not a 'collection of stories' by association alone, but clearly a reflection of a singular text, a body.

Story by Story: Brian Evenson's 'Fugue State' (2) 'A Pursuit'

Spent a nice two day weekend driving to Florida and back, during which much of the time, in my silences, I found I could not stop thinking about 'Younger,' and its infections. My notes of ideas birthed in thinking about it fills a whole page I wrote while driving at high speed, or typing into text messages to myself. 'Fugue State,' one story in, is already the kind of book that reminds me why I love to read: not only for the pleasure of sentences and the stories themselves, but for what they stir out of me, light my mind.

The second story in Brian Evenson's 'Fugue State' is 'A Pursuit,' which previously appeared in Ninth Letter.

This story is one of the handful collected here that I had read before reading in the book itself, and yet in revisiting it, particularly as a story following the lead-off, 'Younger,' found it even more surly and disturbing in its pitch, as now that I knew the tale's outcome (which is surprisingly surprising in its relay, particularly for Evenson's work, and in its pointing).

In a story with such tension as this, in which, like his 'The Installation,' it easy to allow the pacing and weird folds of the story's mystery to overtake the sentences and the patterns of logic that herein are so strong, and so definitive to Evenson's tone: it almost demands an immediate reread to find the many loops and curlings that are hidden in the unfurl.

One of the things that Evenson is so amazing at, in these kinds of fictions where 'questionable' narrators are quite common, is that the voices he constructs are not only questionable, but also pleasing, almost pleading, in a way that you want to believe the narrator as if he is a person much like yourself (and therefore, of course, not so sick as all that, because you aren't sick are you?), and therefore become invested, and then in some way trapped, in siding with ill, left with some of the blood (what blood?) on your hands as well, beaming.

The effect, then, becomes not only that much more pervasive in the reader's mind, investing them, but also leaves those amazing holes and doors open for the pervading mind to continue to weave in the space the fiction creates, and again, as before, the spaces the fiction intentionally circles but does not enter. The doors are wide and dark and many here: reigned not only in the slowly locomoting force of the main narration, but the many asides of the narrator: his dreams, his delusions (are they delusions?), and in this story in particular, scenes which could be exploited as incrimination, but instead are left, nearly literally, with the blood on the hands.

I think it's important here to note Evenson's odd mix of high (a mash up of the discursive and suddenly creepy texts of Thomas Bernhard and Robbe-Grillet) and the supposed low (detective pulp novels, Hitchcock-isms, noir), which in their combination are often a great part of what makes Evenson's work so singular, and so simultanesouly disorienting and powerful. This mash of style is particularly rampant in 'A Pursuit,' mixing French jargon and bluntly familiar and defamiliar coins like 'multitude of irrititations' and 'trinity of ex-wives,' and at the same time pushing the meat of the story forward with indirect and quite abstract chains of thought, (i.e. 'Days shaded into weeks at some point, but I could not say when.') here delivered by a narrator, which in weaker hands could amount to rattling on.

In Evenson's, though, as always, the layering of odd phraseologies against the common, the slow and subtle build up of memory-dirging musings on the behalf of a narrator becoming more and more lost inside himself, against the wall of the definitive puzzle image on which the story centers, and the endless circling of the narrator around it (literally driving his car in circles where the landscape seems to shift, as does his pursuer): all of it utilizes to its maximal point the effect of latent energy, the intoned, the non-consummation of countless doors inside a puzzle where you are just as sunk in the narrator as he is in himself, and so on, to the point that the whir of the story's lines themselves are just the doorjamb, the precursor, to the real meat of the eating, left to stay at large, which is yet another reason Evenson's texts and situations end up seated so hard in my mind and in my head (both, two).

I would be lax to not mention also the way this story, coming out of the immediately prior 'Younger,' sets up a kind of amazing parallel of mental strobing. Interesting again to see the central image of the story in both cases a thing only mentioned, and then intentionally skirted by the narrator, using that massive blip in the rug to act not as a plot crux, but as a dark needle in a whole suit made of such needles. More...

See also my selected sentence from this story at my post on htmlgiant

Next up, the third track, 'Mudder Tongue.'

Story by Story: Brian Evenson's 'Fugue State' (1) 'Younger'

(Thanks to everyone who is spreading the word on the contest, prizes are insane and still getting added, please submit, more info and updates soon, but in the meantime, more new...)

In concurrence with sentence related posts on HTML Giant, I thought in the manner of reading/reviewing the new collection from Brian Evenson, 'Fugue State,' from Coffee House Press, instead of just writing about the book as a whole I would write on each story one by one, not breaking them down but discussing whatever elements of the story particularly struck me on a craft or creative level, beyond simple 'spoiler' style summation or expository review.



Having been effected so much by Evenson's work, particularly (if I had to pick just one) his last collection 'The Wavering Knife,' which to me is among the top 5 of all text art objects on a sentence and style level of all time, I realized it would likely do me a lot of good to savor each this time, thinking about each piece on its own, rather than tearing through books in my want, as I often do, which will be a good test of self control, and hopefully be worth reading here as I go along.

As a matter then, of this being a book that isn't out yet, I'll do my best to keep from giving away the stories in themselves, but more in the manner they reflect, and how they propel, and will hopefully let this reviewing stretch into the book's release in July, where others can join in as it comes.

To kick off the book, then, is 'Younger,' a 9 page story that originally appeared in Conjunctions.

The tone is immediately surprising, perhaps, if not totally, in the hemisphere of Evenson's past work, in that it does not utilize present action, and is more the reeling of a woman inside her body, looking for semblance in a defining moment of her life, a moment she can not figure out particularly why it is defining.

What is so amazing about this story is not what is said, perhaps, or even what is not said, but how things are said around other things, that then give illumination to both in the contrast, and by the leaping of implication and potential energy.

As in: in this story, moments loom. They are present, even given a frightening edge, but then allowed to bubble, to lock, and remain crystallized, beyond the idea of resolving, or even moving on from unresolved, a potent moment.

In a brilliant reflection of the actual propagation narrative of the piece, the woman attempting to figure out a moment in her childhood that she has not been able to move forward from even years and years later, the language of the story manages to trap the reader in that moment as well, gifting the reader not with the understanding of why that moment affected her, but how it felt to be affected in that way.

The result, then, is much more potent than the simple recreation of scarring childhood events, an awful thing that happened, etc., but a much more visceral and psychic kind of terror, which of course is the much more potent and everlasting kind, and in Evenson's crystalline and ultimately visercal to the point of being in-brain sentences, resounds so much more than it would have had it simply walked on the brunt of its imagistic impact or brutal feat. It is a psychological study akin to the subtle moments I love most in Lynch and Poe, and other brooding masters.

If this story is any kind of indicator of what we're in store for here with 'Fugue State,' which I am beyond 100% steel that it is, this book will prove to be another monolith in black, cerebral and yet ultimately wholly enthralling fiction, another change in the game of what text can do.

For my favorite sentence, or at least most representative sentence, from this text, check out my sentence-based counterpart in post at HTML Giant.

Next up, in a few days most likely, 'A Pursuit.'

In the meantime, more info on ‘Fugue State’ here.

Preorder ‘Fugue State’ here.