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Just finished reading an absolutely amazing book, EUROPEANA by Patrik Ourednik. At AWP at the Dalkey table I asked Jeremy Davies to recommend me a couple of titles that I should read that I had not yet. He pointed at EUROPEANA and asked if I'd read it, I said no, he said, "Pick it up and read any page." I read half of one page and bought the book.

That kind of confidence: that literally any page in a book could make someone want to buy it: is perhaps all too rare thing in books, and yet with EUROPEANA, it could not be more true. Labeled as 'A Brief History of the 20th Century,' this book is essentially a tour of the grotesque and absurd elements of that period in the world, focusing on concentration camps, consumerism, fucked art movements, psychologies, inventions, and other compilings of the stranger auras of human life. Though the book is still rendered in fiction: if anything, it is Ourednik's even manner of reportage and interjection in the outlaying of such horrors that make it literally almost impossible to want them to stop. Ripley's Believe it or Not could only beg to have half of the resonances here.

Here, I am going to turn to a page and type a couple lines at random:

Engineers called radio wireless telephony, and some elderly people thought that radio was like the telephone and they had paid in advance for someone to telephone them and let them know where a war had broken out. And when they first watched television, they thought it was like the kinetoscope that they had seen at the world fair, and that someone in the building, such as a daughter-in-law or grandchild, was turning a handle and making fun of them. Some elderly people were also in the habit of replying to the questions asked by television or radio presenters, such as when someone on the television or radio said AND WHAT DO YOU THINK HAPPENED NEXT? they would say WELL, I REALLY DON'T KNOW, or when someone on the television or the radio said AND WHAT DO YOU THINK THE WEATHER WILL BE LIKE TOMORROW? they would say IT'S ABOUT TIME WE HAD A DROP OF RAIN, OR IT'LL PUT AN END TO THE HARVEST. Great achievements were also scored in the field of hygiene, because before the First World War people bathed infrequently and when they did, the whole family bathed in the same tub, or the whole family and the neighbors, etc.

The book goes on like this, in short bursts of knowing, often much more brutal and concerned with ideas like phone sex and genocide and communism and bastard children and etc. It is the best 122 page book I have ever read, and does more in those 122 pages than most books of any length, and is a surprisingly smooth and fun and funny read despite its heavy subject matters.







Derek White wrote a long and really excellent post about reading Wittgenstein's Mistress on the beach.






Rereading Johannes Goransson's Swedish issue of Typo makes me want to write more, in power. What an amazing collection of work. I really love the first poem by Gunnar Harding here.







Can I say I love Rauan Klassnik? He has a new ebook out, RINGING, from Kitchen Press, that does new things for ebooks, both in form and content. (a) the book has its own url rauanklassnikringing.com, which I love, and the book is offered as html text only, a printable version, and in flash with illustrations by Ron. Two innovations for ebooks there that make this project exciting before you even begin to read.

The content as well is classic Klassnik, with brash sex and convulsive imagery. I am going to walk around for the next few weeks repeating the line: "Birds like planets——all ripped up." like Rain Man.

He seems to make these little aggressive forts inside of words, half throw-uppy and often childish, half ornate and/or sublime. The closest artist I can think of to compare to Klassnik is Pasolini, for their carcrash sex powerlight and their clear care among the 'profane'.

Here is a page from the book that exhibits this to me:

Curled up against each other we licked and sucked till we came splashing in each other’s faces. A chimp’s running down through the streets in the rain. Suddenly he pulls into a doorway where a woman’s undressing. We must have looked so cool——arched back, waving. Columned. Spired. Domed.

I like how this works in shifting between high and low, gross and high, etc.

Another wonderful read from someone doing something new.






I think I have more things to say about things in a thing way but I am going to save it, it is raining here and the rain makes me want to turn off and go roll under something, I am going to try to focus on reading soon, I have been reading several things at once and though I rarely do that, I am enjoying it.



Coming next week, Thursday March 5 I am reading with Gary Lutz and Robert Lopez for EVER release at Word Bookstore in Brooklyn, if you live in town and have interest please mark the day, I will say more about this later.





There are several big-medium to large sized things in occurrence proceedings, which will be elucidated soon, I hope.




Going now to edit this very long novel I am halfway finished with editing a second draft of.

BLOCK VUND

Why I love Diane Williams:

What is this thing I have made? Here is a mother in a rage because she cannot get sexual gratification from the idea that her son might be killed. How did I get to that? This is horrible, this is horrible. Well, then we get pornography. I was really distressed as Diane Williams, the hopefully nice person in the real world. Should this be literature? Is this my business—to produce this? Is this right? Is this really what I want to be doing? And then this certainty that yes, this is exactly what I want to be doing. I am far from the only one who believes that experience teaches us that when you speak a nightmare and speak it to its limit, whatever it is, then that speech has a healing force. And if it’s speakable, if the configuration of feeling can be manipulated, can be produced, then it’s a true feeling, shared by many, and it’s the sort of feeling which should be utterly revealed. But I must say that for me—the respectable version of myself—there’s still fear, and a great deal of disgust when I see that story. Then I have to reassert myself as an artist, and say no, this is exactly my business.

Why I love Johannes Goransson:

As Walter Benjamin points out in his famous essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Dada and Surrealism sought to "shock" or "distract" the reader out of that contemplative space. Often that "shock" is misread as the Hollywood shocking of giant sharks and such. But it's more of an electrical shock that charges you up and exhausts you. Breton said he felt "charged" from going to the movies with Jacques Vache. And I think Aase's poetry in many ways is a more extreme version of this kind of electric shock: to damage the reader out of his or her numbness. To charge us back to electricity. The "healing" can't start until after the fox-drubbing. The "healing" might be comparable to the exhaustion people reported after coming out of the movie theaters in the 1910s.

The paradox of the way I'm putting this is that the "aliveness" is the compulsive pleasure of jouissance that comes from the death-drive. To go back to Plath, her speaker is scared of opening the bee box because she senses the horrible pleasure of the contents, which is death.

I am figuring something out.

Like when you are sucking an ice cube right out of the freezer and an air pocket pops against your teeth.

Ian Curtis killed himself immediately after watching Herzog's Stroszek and listening to Iggy Pop's The Idiot.



Who was

'Real Fiction' sorry, who gives a shit, what

I've gotten I think 3 personal rejection letters in the last few days, all three posing a similar question: how is this connected to the real world?



I am not phased in any way by rejections anymore, if anything I like them, honestly, especially when they say things.



One of the letters said this: "... the general consensus here was that it was a thing with too many layers, layers upon layers, and the process was more of a process of peeling them away to get to the meaning. Not a bad thing in itself, of course, so long as it's part of a process of meaning... "



Process of meaning. Meaning. I don't know. Why did the dog shit into the cantaloupe in this scene? What does the dog shitting into the cantaloupe say about our lives, in this day now?

Equally: What does a guy going to a store and meeting a woman mean? What does a character realizing he has cancer mean? How directly should a layer be connected to another layer in order for the idea to be clear?





A better question: why does something in a book have to be speaking to our lives?

What if the author doesn't know and doesn't want to know?

What can be said that isn't speaking to a life in some way, outside of pure aasdhfoasydoriuaoduri gibberish?

Though I honestly have felt affected by asiodfhjasidfyoaiudyfiu more than, say, books where every action has a reaction and each move is eventually understood.

I think too many movies and Flannery O'Connor prize winning books and so on have milked the idea of text as life replication object or motive opener into something very restrictive and dangerous really, at least in certain forums.

I'm not talking about 'experimental' literature here, or making an argument against narrative, per say, but more wondering what certain types of motives and expectations are for in fiction.



Is the reader working to connect the 'meaning' bad?

Is unclear meaning, rendered well, not desired?


Layers upon layers








Recently, when Johannes Goransson read here in Atlanta, he read part of a text that said, specifically, 'NARRATIVE = DEATH,' referring to tag line for a Godard film in the poem. The other reader who read with Johannes, Chris Bundy, a more narrative-interested guy who seemed a bit edged by reading after Johannes (who wouldn't?) specifically referred to that moment before he began with his story. He asked Johannes if that's what he'd said, and Johannes agreed, adding 'I didn't say I was right.'

Chris's story then ended in several people in the narrative dying.





I don't believe the idea that 'every story has been told,' I've never read a story about a hermaphrodite with lesions over his eyes opening a bakery in Cabbagetown GA and starting his own branch of young female club to compete with Girl Scouts, while in the evenings going to a bridge parlor to expose himself to old women. I also feel, though, that if that story, as ridiculous or 'irreal' as it is, isn't told using words that do something in and of themselves, 'sentences,' then you aren't saying anything at all.

And yet, too, there can be things that happen, tangentially even, in stories or what have you, that have no referendum, no ulterior zoning, etc. They are words, the words themselves, as fractal moments or as ant heads in an enormous anthill, say something in a few words that open only for there, then, and are finished. And that is all they should be, to expound on them would be to beat their cheeks.







This second letter excerpt is from a friend, so I feel slightly attenuated in posting it, but I have absolutely no hard feelings, so hopefully the editors won't either, the piece that was sent was an excerpt from a larger thing that probably did not stand alone, and regardless, it doesn't matter, I am just thinking aloud here:

"For instance, when the birds become pillows, what does this really offer the reader? It's a lovely image, but what real-world parallel is there for us to come away with?"

I don't know, what does the birds becoming pillows offer? What else should be said?




Why can't a bird made into a pillow just be a bird pillow?







Why can't a forehead be slathered in bacon grease while the narrator stands in the hotel mirror with the three babies on the bed behind him, without needing to know that the narrator is undergoing chemo and feels an emotional ennui?



It is dangerous and reckless I think to think that all narratives, or even realistic or connective narratives, are ones that have a palpable link to real life, real moments, the real.

I say this completely outside my own writing, my own taste even, I think.









Like, what is really real brah?




Like, what is human n shit?









'Ulysses posted the photos of his mother's liver surgery to his blog and turned around to touch the bright blue sore on the window through which the morning had begun to splatter glue.'









I am excited about the upcoming issue of Unsaid, it seems like an answer to some of this, it has some really recent surrealist stuff from me, and I have noticed several really incredible others that will be in it: Scott Garson, Rachel B. Glaser, Peter Markus, Kristina Born (K. had sent the piece to No Colony also we were about to accept it, it is amazing, fuck). It seems like the issue will be big, like the other issues, that could be laid on an operating bed and young children sent in to see the book.










I started off to write this blog with a clear point but then having a clear point about writing fiction that doesn't have a clear point seems pointless and like a dick in the eye.










Here's something real that happened to me on Monday: In the cemetery down the street from my house the other day there was a grave that was swarmed with daisies, I mean the plot was big as a king sized bed and the daisies had grown up waist high on it, covering every inch of the plot, there were hundreds of bees.

I want my headstone to say something like 'He dun fucked up.' or 'This would be a good place to take a piss.'

That is my wish.











Seriously, I know, fuck me.



** On Tuesday I will have a big announcement **

What year was it when we still had to go away

Tonight in Atlanta we are launching the first reading of Solar Anus reading series, flagstone spoken into by the magnificent JOHANNES GORANSSON and local novelist CHRIS BUNDY, the event is an early one 6 PM at Beep Beep Gallery off Ponce, this will be a monthly thing from here on out though future extension will be likely at a later time and at a more regular venue. If you ever want to come to Atlanta or are coming to Atlanta and want to read, we'd likely love to have you.






The trains outside my apartment today are really loud, it sounds like something metal is being ripped to shreds.

After I typed that the sound stopped.





All I have been able to think about lately is Ricky's Anus. The book is at 31k words now, I think the current section I am writing, Ricky's Blood, is going to be one very long unbroken graph that will maybe last 1/3rd of the book, this book is going to be long, I am sorry I mentioned I was thinking about deleting it, that probably wouldn't happen, I am not massive in that sense, I am done thinking about it outside the moment. I feel really strangely electric and I am not sure why and I will keep it that way by shutting my mouth quick.









I randomly happened on rereading William Gass's afterward to one of my favorite books OMENSETTER'S LUCK, I had forgotten there was an afterword, in it Gass discusses how he had written a different version of the book which had been stolen, and so he proceeded in despair to reconstruct and rewrite: the afterword also contains meditations on his 8 years of rejection before publication arose, grappling with a text's destruction, the feeling of 'why the hell am I going through all the trouble for this?,' and a lot of other things that have seemed central to my mind lately. It is a fantastic little essay.

Here is a section on his rewriting the book:

During the months that followed, I rewrote Omensetter's Luck as if in a series of trances which I almost systematically entered. I sometimes felt I was recovering the lost text exactly, not by trying to remember what it had been originally or how I'd written it, but by becoming weary--weary and unthinking, weary and unfeeling too--eventually so deep in the mine of my past work that the mine worked me.

Wearing, unthinking, unfeeling: it's funny, why does that seem to be a fruitful state? I am deep in something, I'm not sure

You can read the brief Afterword in whole here on Google, and I recommend OMENSETTER'S LUCK as highly as I can recommend something.








I am reading THE LONG TRIAL OF NOLAN DUGATTI by Stephen Graham Jones, according to the acknowledgments I think he wrote the book in 72 hours, it is about a man who works at a helpline for a video game no one ever plays and whose father wrote him a series of suicide notes, failed, I should go finish the book, next I am reading Eugene Lim's FOG & CAR which I am excited about after WASTE and having read the first few setions of FOG & CAR in anticipation.









Interior layout on EVER is in study-mode, we are reaching finalization periods, I hope to spend the rest of the weekend proofing and proofing and proofing, there is something about the final stamp of what words a book will be made of that makes me both anxious and excited and maybe nervous some, like I am going to miss something that I will see the first time I read the book in print that will make me cringe, it seems no matter how many times you look at something over and over and over something new wrong grabs you, I don't want to feel that, I will keep working.













i had a dream about babies being destroyed the past two nights
i should stop talking shit about babies when i am awake

Johannes Göransson's DEAR RA

When Burroughs died in '97 it was the summer after I finished high school. I had just gotten the internet on a computer in my room, I had my first email, I had saved pictures of naked women on my hard drive and knew where to look at them. That was some summer then. In his last trilogy of books Burroughs wrote about a sex propelled virus that destroys humanity. Burroughs had written this before AIDS was discovered. Burroughs had birthed in his male uterus the perfect virus that by replicating to paper he shat straight through the earth.

I read a lot of Burroughs, I read him over and over, I read NAKED LUNCH before I knew a lot of things after I bought it from the only independent bookstore I'd ever been in, where the ideas on the pages seemed profane and new already to me: the first poetry reading I ever went to when I was like 16 there were guys with long hair who got tired of reading their own shit and so they got NAKED LUNCH and started reading their favorite passages from it, they didn't stop to take a breath even when the train went by and you couldn't hear what they were saying anymore. I read THE SOFT MACHINE and THE TICKET THAT EXPLODED back to back on a bad in a basement room that had no windows.



YEARS AFTER BURROUGHS DIED I STARTED THINKING ABOUT WHOSE BODY HIS MIND HAD ABSORBED INTO AT HIS DEATH

There never seemed anyone for years. I think I read the most during my undergrad blur at a major technical college spending my library hours masturbating in the bathroom or staring at texts I knew no one had really written on the massive databank computers in the library, walking around in circles. I don't think I believe in rebirthing, maybe I do, but I definitely believe in invocation or attachment, or consumption via layering.

If anyone has been infected as the heir of the mass-apocalyptic Burroughs language virus megaburden, it must be Johannes Göransson.

I realized this while reading his new DEAR RA, out from Starcherone Books now THIS LINE DELIVERED TO YOU VIA TELEMARKETING UPLOAD.

I don't know whether how he would take this idea (though the Burroughs surname is layered in the book along with other loaded refs like offhanded shotputs), if you've ever spent any time reading Exoskeleton you know the man is made of some kind of multipolymer plastic that glows in no light, but I still think the transcription is illuminary, at least for me, in that no one else since Burroughs seems as capable of inveigling such mass hysteria, hyper-sexual anti-sex mutation, cultural whitewall, rhythmic jargon, and just plain ravaged flesh language in such tangible, tasted bursts.

Though at the same time, Göransson is too made of himself to be just an infection, even one so now-real.

DEAR RA is like 89 hyper-prose pages, stuffed with white space, though here the white space is as loaded as the floor of the Tangier hotel covered in black muck where Burroughs was discovered in a daze with the pages of NAKED LUNCH strewn all around him. These are letters to the sun god, though some might say now this god's replacement is a florescent lamp, a tanning bulb, a whoops. Göransson's text is the kind that slips past spam filters and makes you consider the dick surgery. Göransson's mind is the kind you feel breathing behind you while you're watching that slightly more filthy than usual porn download that you will delete from your web browser's history when you are finished even though no one ever looks at your web browsing history because one day motherfucker you will die.

The most important books, I think now, are the ones that you either can't read because of where they touch, or that you can read in 30 minutes because they are so cleanly chiseled and short, to the windpipe.

This book is still stuck in my windpipe.

This book made Breton cry because Breton knew he never had such glimmer, and Breton is very dead.

This book is much bigger than it feels with its slick cover and its quickburst easy-on-the eyes, and though I want it on my nightstand, the fucking thing keeps crumpling under the weight.

I am going to open the book to a random page and quote the first line I see, because the pages of this book were cut from a rotting tree and made white enough for you to lose your eye-tint regarding, and still they have the wound layered in them enough that no matter where you are inside it, you will be infected:

No, the interviewer asked me something about you, and 'moths' is how I replied.

As I typed that, I accidentally typed 'mothers' at first where 'moths' is, and I felt the paint in the room around me on my face and a new McDonald's opened right down the street and everything was okay.

DEAR RA knows more than it knows it knows, and the channels can't quite control their color.

Göransson, if he's not shotgun/cathair infected, is at least here an associative kingkong, stirring up Göransson's already hyperattended vocabs (sternum, animal, thievery, problematic answers to unasked questions, orifices, fucking, drive-bys) into little things that might sliver your balls hairs into new ball hairs. Then you'd have some hair ass balls and you'd wake up earlier and go places you didn't see despite having walked past them 1500 times doused in gasoline.

I would say Göransson is the Tupac of tonight's slurfest, but Tupac isn't dead yet and I don't want him coming off that island to cut his wiser, buzzheaded brethren where he breathes, because then Tupac would have the Göransson blood gushing all over him and he wouldn't be able to record his next posthumous clubjam without spitting the realest realest shit he ever wrote, and I don't think those fratkids are ready for that yet, and I want one more weekend to sit and slurp my own saliva before we go past empty to negative neon. This is a new node on a lexicon that will not let itself be lexiconned.

Did I mention J.G. has among the finest gloss of craniums in our wordland? You kind of want to kiss it.

See how I've been infected?

What am I saying: this book is worth your while, you will read it in the bathtub or on the shitter, you will remember, you will be glad.

DO A BUY FROM THE PRESS

OR BUY THROUGH SPD

'Live in a Hive of Sex Rooms and Flickering Blue Movie Cubicles'

JOHANNES GORANSSON has a new hybrid-form novel (almost) out called DEAR RA from Starcherone Books, who also recently released Zachary Mason's THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY (which I am reading now and loving quite a bit).

I read Johannes's last book, A NEW QUARANTINE WILL TAKE MY PLACE and was absolutely ripped by it, what Johannes is doing, a kind of multihanded-in-one-mind movement towards a new brutal surrealism in quick pleasure bursts. QUARANTINE was one of my favorite new books so far this year, and I am excited to read DEAR RA. A review will be forthcoming, but in the meantime, if you are interested in new surrealism, Johannes is vital, order yourself a copy of both, you will not regret it.



*******************

Thank you to everyone who has preordered and/or blogged re: NO COLONY issue 1. I am excited.

Jereme Dean bought 4 copies and is giving away 3 of them in THIS POST ON HIS BLOG. He is having a comment contest and will select 3 winners to get free issues. Jereme Dean is a king, I love this idea for promo, more people should do this, more people should try to be as killer and real as Jereme Dean. Go enter his contest and get a free issue and if you don't, maybe buy'n?

Seriously, thanks Jereme.

UPDATE: Matthew Simmons has pledged to reward 3 more entries to Jereme's post with free copies.

That's wha I'm talkin boutz.

*******************

Today I am focusing on sending out my newer novel to as many open appropriate places as I can find. There seems a bit of a dearth of open free submissions of book-length manuscripts, especially the kind I am sending right now: often bleak, brutal and surreal.

I finally got to unbox my books and it was weird to see them breathing on the shelves again. I spent a while last night looking at my books trying to find ones that seemed of a mind with what I'm doing that I could send to. Particularly the very surrealist and multiformed one I just finished, which I still can't decide between the two titles of, though I think for sending out I will use HOW MANY FLOORS DOES THE NIGHTMARE HAVE?

I realized also that the novel takes a lot from all the imbibing of William Burroughs's novels that I read so often 5-6 years ago. Reading over the passage I had underlined in THE SOFT MACHINE, I realized how much that language and imagery bank had cut into my brain. If there's any major precedent for NIGHTMARE? it is him: his jump cuts, his blabber layering, his brutalism and his sense of recording of moment.

Where would Burroughs publish those books now? If he were new? (He still could be.)

What press would have put out THE WILD BOYS? I don't know more than a couple possibilities, I really don't. That's scary.

Here is an embedded manifesto from THE SOFT MACHINE:

There is the work of getting it off the shelves and that is what I do. We are not interested in the individual models, but in the mold, the human die. This must be broken.

I also found another title I want to use from this line:

Grope movie and walked in on the wrong room warmly. Exempt light and lungs.

GROPE MOVIE: that may have to be the title now.

It's a weird state, this state.

TUPELO PRESS is now open to fiction and nonfiction, but they charge a $45 reading fee, and you're only allowed to send up to the first 100 pgs, and if they like they'll ask for more. $45? Really? What, are you using diamond encrusted page turners? I understand certain reading fees, but that just seems ridiculous?

Maybe I'll get desperate.

I don't feel desperate.

OH!: Lily Hoang's Lamination Colony ebook THE WOMAN DOWN THE HALL, will be out probably by the end of this week. Look out, it's a doozy.

Here's a preview image of the front page: