8/30/13

Debbie Hu - Well if everybody is everybody then maybe baby can be a nipple too? Baby looks. Inside is stuff. Baby decides. The inside stuff can be milk too. Baby tries to be a nipple of milk too. // "almost but not white" // "why won't you let me show my nipples"




Debbie Hu, AIRY BABY: AN EQUAL TO THE ATE NIPPLE?//I worry/I don’t/Believe in Books/or do owly///. Perfect Lovers Press, 2013.

areyouoverityet.tumblr.com/

Debbie Hu wants you to think about baby, but all I can think about is what baby means for poetry. Mac Low starts off his 17th dance with the realization/instruction, “Someone has a baby or seems to have one.” Yes, obviously, we are always having some kind of baby. Notley—to whom Hu gives a much necessary shout out—once questioned, “Do you think women & men have kids in order to become immortal?” Why baby and why now? Are we making baby or is baby making us?  Is it baby or the process of baby? Poets used to have babies now they have the Internet.  Poets today let their babies do unfathomable things and leave their tiny baby lives in shambles. Contemporary Poet Jennifer Pieroni’s baby is primarily unlucky. In “Unlucky Babies,” she locks her baby out of the car and does not even allow for it to learn to type. Contemporary Poet Chelsey Minnis puts her baby on secret trial: “A baby on 9/11 was definitely in love with me and the parents did not know.” Hu’s baby lives in a similar place. It is part voyeur, part chauffeur, and part Gucci waiting in the wings.  She writes:
Baby has no laundry machine, only a writing conceit. The baby thoughts of
the baby writing
machine, uploading a picture of herself on the internet, looking suburban.
Baby tries hacking her
relationships with words like love letters like the write combination will
crack the chains & change
a mind & minor upheval. But the effects are weird on the heart. So baby
goes back to writing
words for baby eyes only.
Hu’s baby has been taught to type because Hu’s baby is sometimes herself. Most often, though, baby is more of a symbolic bystander than a conduit. Baby is not always the most important thing but this book seems to be baby’s own creation. Perhaps it would be best to say that Airy Baby, is a kind of intertextual baby book; for the gentle omnipresent-omniscient baby, there is Ke$ha. There is charming organizational risk AKA formal chaos. There is the political as it battles with the personal. There is Cantonese then New Zealand. There are penises or shame. The narrative voice is distinctly cohesive yet polyvocal in a very necessary way.
Hu switches between the hyper casual and the “large idea” casual. She goes from “I wore a candy stripe dress / To the General Assembly and my pleaseface until I / Become a pop star my pleaseface is a dontrapeme pleaseface becuz / stay away my cunt smells terrible” to “it wounds me to read that she craves solitude and no / accountability, I feel like I am all despicable money” in just one page. She is sometimes Gurlesque transgressive in a blunt way like Ariana Reines, but most often a very idealistic type of gross-delicate, something that makes me think of Jenny Zhang’s first collection. Feng Sun Chen, from whom Hu quotes extensively, also comes to mind.
While very much composing a “poetry” book, the pieces are sometimes epistolary fragments and other times stolen bits from the pages of some tangentially yet brilliantly related thing. Airy Baby has titled sections, but they’re largely irrelevant; demarcations and page numbers become nobody’s business. Pieces start and stop wherever they’d like—pick back up then quit again.  Baby, itself, operates similarly, waiting in the background for its opportunity to be the savior or the disgrace. To be the distraction. Baby is present for pages then not at all; it vanishes.
There are epiphanies laced throughout but, much like the emotional content of the book, these realizations are muted. The writing is laced with a certain sense of overwhelming comic unhappiness—the kind of thing that surfaces with any period of introspection. Hu jokingly alludes to David Foster Wallace in the book’s preface, and, like Wallace, uses footnotes to distract and “confuse” the reader. Here, though, it would seem that Hu employs these asides to soften the intensely emotional or personal. We are always returning to humor because humor is the only way to comprehend humanity.
In the final pages of Airy Baby, Hu offers one last reflection on baby:
Baby finds everything boring
Baby feels like everything
Baby identifies with baby tyrants
(Is baby a baby tyrant?)
Baby is a moody baby
Baby is a gendered baby

Is baby just Kathy Acker or Ariana Reines?
Poets love baby because baby is the blank slate thus perpetual new beginning. Baby is everything then nothing then everything again. We can live vicariously through baby, watch baby grow, and then leave baby to nothing. Thank god for Debbie Hu who has chosen to–in all of the chaos of life’s frustrating ambiguity—let baby live. Cassandra Gillig



all yr hurt flows
after Anne Boyer
“Intellectual women who have feelings like THE COW.  Gay men like THE COW.  Men who like to have sex with women who have a lot of feelings like THE COW.  People who like things with good style and no typos do not like THE COW.  I can sympathize with them, but those people are not my problem.” - Ariana Reines
Some people don't like my writing.
Intellectual women who have feelings don't like my writing. Gay men do not like my writing. Men who like to have sex with women who have a lot of feelings do not like my writing. People who like things with good style and no typos do not like my writing. I can sympathize with them,
But I'd like to know why I feel people's eyes glazing over when I say things like “I'm oriental.”
For some reason that makes people feel like they don't need my story.
            & in the weather pattern
            made
            by your guilt or
                                                curiosity piqued by
                        my LOVING de-formed alienation
I'd like to show that alienation is a writing prompt
I want to not be afraid of the reserves of alienation I hold
            in my body
I want to listen to it and let it come out like music
I dream poetry that colonizes the internet like a wound
Where nothing goes viral like discontent
Spreading from eyes to stomach to heart to head to mouth, to each mouth
So that whenever one opens their mouth in shock or horror or disgust or outrage
That there are words
ready, words to give speech to the speechless & phrases for tears
words for the numb
I want people so open & porous to each other
that a shock to one body
is a shock to the entire network,
where the things that get amplified
are cries of injustice
(Can the People's Mic accommodate everything?)
(Mother, I have within me
voices and visions.)
It will be so much of everything all the time.
It will be over over overwhelming
            and de de de destabilizing
And all the things you thought you wanted or needed
            will come to seem strange,
                                                                                                stranger than bad writing, or good writing,
                                                                                                            writing that's more than good
Questions of craft will be made irrelevant
& the hungry
            will be
                        given food, just to make the
                                                            shock
                                                                                    stop
& the hatred of rapists & abusers & bullies & war makers will be visible & known
there will be an enormous transmission of public anger
when the public is so angry that it becomes a real war against those who hate us
when the sick are so loud in their neediness that every spare resource is given for their comfort
and when the babies cry we do not enjoy their song but we respond because their cry has lodged inside of us
& laughter, too, will spread as earthquakes spread –
we will especially laugh when things are true.
                                                It is not difficult to get the news from poems.


            No poetry but in lives.
Poetry becomes the sublimely useful tool
I remember when we came out in public and found
that we each bore
important messages.

(What “we?”)


THE HATE NIPPLE

you wanted to sit in the sun & because you are unfit-
fully my Muse I
"where did the sun go?"

you wanted to sit in the sun so we sat on a bench.
I loved it, there was even a butterfly,
& on the next bench
a suited woman gone limp &

"that reminds me of this thing."
you have so many things
"that reminds me of this thing my friend Lorraine told me about called Paris Syndrome."

it is May and I am fit, I am full,
I am faithfully glowing
in the basin parts of me for you, still
still, "there are two kinds of conversation people have"

you gave me a duty-
free cigarette I
throated
it.

in 2010 I met you & we drove out from Chicago together
our car broke down in a place I called Eunoia
& eventually I threw away the pad
that had been collecting, for days, my blood.
what a period!
yesterday I texted you back that I was on day one of my period &

fifteen minutes later I said,
"Cat, Dick is withholding text messages from me!"
I showed her the timestamps.
I was hungry and bleeding and my mother is in Shanghai. I spilt some Cheerios then texted you again but everything autocorrected to, "I suck."

today we are walking down 5th Avenue.
I am half-thinking of conversation topics but none of them seem that fun.
"what are you thinking of?" you ask

I am thinking about racism and money.
I am wondering what music you've been listening to. but I say,
"none of the things I am thinking about seem that fun."
your impishness seems a little slower than usual when you say,
"well, I only like to talk about fun things, so..."
and I spit back,
"I'm not necessarily worried about YOU having fun!"

because really I just want to be totally blissed-out and I say as much.

in the movie of this there would be cuts of lust filled fantasies but I am just sleepy and bored of your friend Eugene, my breasts are heavy and I felt embarrassed when you knew I wasn't wearing a bra when we hugged each other through thin shirts, that was sexy.

and sometimes the page becomes just like you and I don't know how to put things down in Complicated Simplicity (which was the name of my first blog).

no I want to write this again to reunderstand it though I am tired and sort of sunk, you know? is it already time to cook broccoli?

(writing it again)

THE HATE NIPPLE

you wanted to sit in the sun and because you are fit-
fully my muse I
"where did the sun go?"
you wanted to sit in the sun so we sat on a bench.
I loved it, well I have always
known there was something ugly about
white men
& you are one & you want to be a good feminist
& also fuck women well I want to fuck
(but I don't trust) you because you are
a bad feminist.
charismatic men are inevitably bad feminists.

and you are no exception
though charismatic men inevitably seem like exceptions.

but, as Lauren Berlant says, love is
The Amnesia You Like

also, you're wonderful
have I mentioned you're wonderful?
I've only seen you six times
but every time I see you I take home a basket of softly glowing anecdotes.

also (who knew this poem was going to be about my mom?)
today is Mother's Day.
my mom emailed me yesterday, after she had somehow found her way into my poem Shanghai is, like, 12 or 14 hours ahead of New York so it was Mother's Day over there I guess even though it's an American Holiday and she sent me an email called, "thinking of you on mother's day" and the body of the email said,

Dear Debbie,

I was reading this quotation and thinking of you today:

"The most important thing I learned over the years was that there was no way to be a perfect mother and a million ways to be a good one."

Hope to see you soon, and we love you!

Mom

the incrimination of the email, the incrimination of me & her self-incrimination & her self-forgiveness & also her forgiveness of me, in sending the email--
it was too much
or I am too American
for this. I love terribly across
time differences.

every girl I meet has something
she wants to write about
but is afraid of being stigmatized
for. where is the article called
"I was Raped at Occupy Wall Street by Your Friend, [Name]"
"I was Raped by an Anarchist at Occupy Wall Street"
"I was Raped by a 99 Percenter at Occupy Wall Street"
"I was Raped by a Serial Rapist with a Foreclosed Home at Occupy Kansas City"
"I was Raped by a Revolutionary During the Revolution"

I don't care if you're having fun.

Over 20 percent of rape complaints were recently dismissed as "unfounded" by the Oakland Police Department, which did not interview many, if not most, of the women involved. Not coincidentally, the vast majority of the complainants were Black and poor; many of them were substance abusers or prostitutes. EXPLAINING THEIR FAILURE TO PURSUE THESE COMPLAINTS, THE POLICE REMARKED THAT "THOSE CASES WERE HOPELESSLY TAINTED BY WOMEN WHO ARE TRANSIENT, UNCOOPERATIVE, UNTRUTHFUL, OR NOT CREDIBLE AS WITNESSES IN COURT." - [from a source cited in kimberle crenshaw's "intersectionality," 1990]

[...]

I'm too tired to keep writing this poem
I know nothing except that I will go to sleep
unsatisfied, unless I write myself inside-out
first. it seems hard to put your "all" into poetry.
just peeing out words at this point.
marie calloway liked my essay on tumblr--
so I have to write something awesome now, if only for her
and jackie wang and nathaniel otting

if you wake up late enough in the day
someone might have already sent you some pee over email
especially if you sent them pee the day before
I think my writing might be more with it than i am--it is living out there and being admired on widely-read tumblrs

I feel like people would always want to text back "To Heartbreak Hotel"

today I ate shit. I ate an Asian pear and two pieces of bread with peanut butter and then nothing for hours, I fell asleep because I felt like such shit & I know that this is ordinary but I have to write it

because after I woke up I ate a grapefruit & I don't know why I picked this moment to continue writing when obviously I just need to GET FUCKED preferably by the 2 or 3 ambient crushes I have

"Heartbreak Hotel" is just like me,
it is getting liked by popular white girls.
OOH OOH OOH.

And Cat said it's weird that I draw with dark lines but I really think that the lines have to be strong and true when you start or else they'll never become strong and true.

THE HATE NIPPLE

the ambient nipple
i wanna slurp it
yup i wanna sublet that nipple for the summer
the mosquito bit my cheek
my mosquito bite turned into a nipple
yup if I'm good enough for Dick to brush his arm against unsteadily then I"m good enough for his
penis to go into me
unsteadily
I relied on Hannah Manshel to make Heartbreak Hotel
I relied on JR Martin to make Heartbreak Hotel
and now I'm getting all this social capital
and I don't even know what social capital means!

feeling weird I turned on my phone and typed the following poem to Austin:

AMBIENT MOM

ambient mom
ambient homesickness
ambient heterosexual males
ambient desire
ambient fear
ambient regret
ambient nipple
ambient hate crime
ambient racism
ambient obviousness
ambient obviousness
ambient oviousness
ambient internet
ambient lena dunham
ambient empire
ambient compassion for the working class

ambient class analysis
ambient defeat
ambient urgency
ambient waiting
feminist waiting
feminist insomnia
feminist lagging
feminist itching
feminist failing
feminist wandering
feminist crushing
feminist texting
feminist reaching out
feminist feeling neglected
too erotic
what
too neurotic
what
too erratic

SHE'S GOT ME SPENDIN'
OOH
SPENDIN' ALL YOUR PRIVILEGE ON ME

like a girlfriend I am going to seduce you with my whimsy and bomb you with my depression I'm going to make you listen to me talk for hours
my depression bomb will make a crater in your body
and I will fill it with
all of my neediness
and all of my emotional baggage
until you can barely walk with the weight of it all
and you are going to feel guilty
and you are going to try to avoid me
and I will know why
and I will seduce you again
and you will love me again
and it will not be good for you
no it will not be good for us
because I am a bad girlfriend.
NO MORE GOOD GIRLFRIENDS.
only bad girlfriends, marie calloways, lesbians, and sex workers.

but that too is only a fantasy because who is the bad girlfriend bad for if not mainly herself? and men always have their WORK that they are able to escape into, the world of men that holds them, the philosophers who speak to them and help them forget their misery.

[...]

I had a dream about the Golden Gate Bridge,
which I have looked at with Google Street View.
there was a ring of NO TRESPASS signs in the middle of the bridge
it was causing so much congestion

AND SPENDING TIME ON ME

suddenly, there you were in the middle of the signs
standing up, dusting yourself off
you'd been lying in the sun on the Golden Gate Bridge
i dreamed my way into how that must have felt:

your whole body pressed against warm concrete
suspended between sky and water
and your ears and nose filled with car sounds and car smells
and like what if you died

i don't know i just want it
i want your stinking sun

THE HATE NIPPLE
(subtitle, courtesy of Jesse Darling: compulsive and wounded)

Chen Guangcheng is coming on the right day!
To go through the authoritarian state,
a hero. By appealing to the Premier Wen Jiabao...

I can't tell, if he has extreme poverty or
extreme wealth of imagination?
Oops sorry I'm being mean

New York is filled with lovely people and
I am one of them??
writing out of what definitely looks

like a mood.

I'm on the L train
a girl is lip-synching
so fresh

copying my poems over again
reading my poems over again

oh no a girl is vomiting
everywhere
it's acid fresh

to be a poet is to be the poorest
of artists how little
words can do

bourgeois people
looking at me for
bemused solidarity re: vomiting girl

yuck yuck yuck
splash

goes
the vomit
on
the floor

are you amused yet
by what I"m leaving?
and
we talk on the phone for 7 hours
incredibly, a ghost rides through
the chocolate center of the cake on
the back of the other ghost
while you masturbate!!!!!!!!

i wish words made
                            interesting patterns
for stoned people to look at.
yup yup
we are walking all over st. mark's place looking for restaurants
and every boyfriend has to listen to me talk

they really do.
they really really really really really do.
are you still listening?

i remember me when i was still delightfully shy.
now i'm publicly bored.
how many lives have you lived, debbie hu?
and are you still relieved when you're able to shed it all?

clever hypothetical scenarios trolley
and this poor girl keeps vomiting
and i'm not going to describe what she looks like
i told austin that i never want to be physically described

to a white person,
ever.

i don't want them to use the word "chinese"
and i don't want them to not use the word "chinese"
and rob horning has already gotten me mixed up with jane hu

i am anxious to pee every last thought

(on the day where we began this poem, you were telling me about how you've been getting into
trouble for wanting to have nonmonogamous relationships with girls. recently you began getting
serious with a girl, and you said to her, "i'll be monogamous with you if that's what you want, but
that's not my preference, and also i don't care if you see or sleep with other people," and she got
upset.
there seems to be a community feeling that you're an asshole, and you were wondering if it's
kind of the equivalent of getting slut-shamed. you said, "like, i really feel like i *am* a slut, like

interesting patterns

i'll meet a girl and i'll just want to be her little slut, to please her, so if pleasing her involves like
acting like her boyfriend, i just fall into doing that, and then it's weird when she realizes that that's
not actually who i am."

i said, "maybe the problem is that the way you attract women is by being a charming straight
white male, and people have all sort of fucked up desires and expectations surrounding straight
white maleness," and you said, "well, i kind of think that that's not my problem."

thinking more about how you see yourself as a slut, i said, "maybe you're just a
heartbreaker."

"yeah, but for every heartbreaker there is an equal and opposite heartbreaker."

"what do you mean?"

"i mean, there's always someone who can break my heart."

"right, maybe that's what happens at the end of your movie."

"...or the beginning of my movie."

"..."

"or maybe the end of one movie and the beginning of the next one.")



Essays
To Heartbreak Hotel*
Slow Mood Movement*
money money money money*
why writing for moonroot is scary and anxiety-inducing but also a stressful site of possibility.

Douglas Watson’s debut story collection is chock-a-block with deaths, births, sea and land voyages, excursions to the library, philosophical asides, and things like wolves. People fall in and out of love, walk in and out of buildings, take two steps forward and two steps back. Futility is a theme of the book, but so is the necessity of trying.




Douglas Watson, The Era of Not Quite, BOA Editions, 2013.

douglaswatsonfiction.com/

Douglas Watson's debut story collection is chock-a-block with deaths, births, sea and land voyages, excursions to the library, philosophical asides, and things like wolves. People fall in and out of love, walk in and out of buildings, take two steps forward and two steps back. Futility is a theme of the book, but so is the necessity of trying.

"Watson lards his metaphors with specifics."—Kyle Minor

“Herein find fiction full of whimsy, wit, hurt, and terror. Wicked, as in wickedly funny, is in the mix, too, along with a prose style both seductive and sly. Any one of Doug Watson’s first collection of stories, The Era of Not Quite, can mend a broken world.” -Christine Schutt

“Once upon a time, an acquaintance of Kurt Vonnegut, having read all of the writer’s books, accused Vonnegut of putting bitter coatings on very sweet pills, and I am here to level the same charge against Douglas Watson. Yes, this collection is a relentless catalogue of frailty, folly, and mortal misery, but if you look beyond the cholera, the neck wounds, the burning feet, the bleached bones, the voids, the caves, the deaths at sea, the stillborn babes, the senseless yearnings of the heart, the grief and despair and profound loneliness, then what you will find, reader, is a tender, lovely, elegant celebration of the very idea of life, of living. These are vital and exceptional tales. -Chris Bachelder

Excerpt from "When the World Broke"


When the world broke, a certain farsighted county commissioner announced a storytelling contest.
     “Whoever can tell the story that fixes the world,” she said, “shall be a hero to the people and shall receive a hero’s pension for the rest of his or her days.”
     The county commissioner sighed, for the word days belonged to the unbroken past. Since the breaking, there had been only twilight, a perpetual neither-this-nor-that. Schools of thought had arisen to argue whether the world was getting imperceptibly darker or lighter, but the county commissioner had closed the schools down. The world didn’t need another argument—it needed a story...


If, as the book Hal Walker returns to the library in the opening scene of “The Era of Not Quite” suggests, the Era of Not Quite has been “running continuously since the dawn of human history,” it would explain a lot. In fact, it would explain everything: from unrequited love to a man’s brain in the street. For what it means to live in the Era of Not Quite is to reach for a thing, and not quite seize it. And then to keep reaching.
Watson is a very smart writer, and unlike many uses of that word—“smart”—in this context, I mean it here as a compliment, not a way to dismiss a work as technically clever but lacking heart or sincerity. Watson’s thoughts on this tension illustrate his sensibility as a writer: “I do think heart, or ‘heart,’ is important to my fiction—or any good fiction. Of course, you need blood too, or ‘blood.’ Can’t have one without the other. The mysterious stuff of life, in other words.”
Thus, on one hand, The Era of Not Quite is a stunning example of Barthes’ notion of the “writerly text,” a text that challenges the reader by constantly calling attention to its constructed nature (think Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”). Some of the greatest pleasures of Watson’s collection are the jokes he plays on the reader. For example, there are two distinct characters named “Douglas Watson” in The Era of Not Quite, and in the middle of the book, there is a…story? (one wonders what exactly to call it) titled “Special Advertising Section,” in which the marketing division of the Estate of Douglas Watson apologizes for the fact that The Era of Not Quite is not a novel.
On the other hand, because everything in the collection is in tension with its opposite—especially play and sincerity—this is a book in which literary criticism literally kills and the clever theories of music critics lead one narrator to complain, “Talk about missing the point.” This is because for Watson, the smart stuff isn’t about technical or philosophical bravado—it’s about fun. When I asked him about maintaining this tricky balance in his work, he called in an answer from Playland: “Well, the best way to strike a balance is to stand on two feet. If you stand on just the play foot, you’ll fall over into Playland. And if you stand on just the sincerity foot, you’ll tip over and be completely lost in Sincerityland, which is an even worse place to be than Playland, believe me.” Then suddenly he was serious: “My mother, who loved words and was better at them than I am, once approvingly quoted someone—I don’t remember who—as saying that anyone who thought words were mainly for communication was a fool. I’m paraphrasing. The best thing to do with words was have fun with them, the person said. Maybe it was even a quote on the Scrabble box, for all I can remember. My mom and I played a lot of Scrabble, and I’m happy to say that she won more than her share of our games, even toward the end when she was really very sick and didn’t have much energy.”
Watson isn’t much of a self-promoter, and he’s a fairly private person. He was open, though, about the way his mother’s recent death inevitably affected many of the stories in the collection: “I wrote The Era of Not Quite at a time when I was confronting death and loss and grief for the first time—I mean in a big way, in my immediate family. So I didn’t have patience for the small stuff. You know: ‘Bill drank a glass of milk. It made him think of milk paint. He’d been wanting to change the color of his living-room walls, but the question was, Which color was the right one?’ What I would say to Bill is, Who cares? Don’t you know you’re going to die? Get outside and get some exercise or something.”
This urgency pervades all of the stories in The Era of Not Quite. Most are quite short, and if the main character isn’t dead by the end, it’s probably because they’re talking right at you (one of the best pieces in the collection, “What I Did on My Summer Vacation,” is a dramatic monologue delivered from a cynical teacher to her alternately inattentive and smart-alecky students). Some of the stories read like fables and accordingly cut right to the chase: “Long ago, when fate governed the lives of mortals, there was a lad whose lot in life was to love a girl whose lot in life was to be abducted by a fearsome dragon.” Note: if you’re a bit put off by characters named “lad,” “girl” or “boy,” don’t be. For here, appearing where it shouldn’t, is my thesis, in two parts: 1) you can’t forget that a character in a book by Douglas Watson is just a character in a book by Douglas Watson, and 2) you’ll care about that character anyway.
The best way to test this thesis is to read “Wolves,” previously published in The Journal Issue 35.1, a story that uses structural innovation for profound emotional impact. The story left me so stunned, I had to ask Watson about its genesis. He said, “I wrote ‘Wolves’ in the year after my mother died, so there’s a direct tie-in. But I just wrote the thing—for a workshop I was in, actually—and then other people pointed out that I was dealing in symbols. Rather heavy-handed ones at that. And I said, Huh, you’re right. But I’d had no idea. But I mean, there’s music, there’s a church, there’s a library. None of them provides any comfort or any answers. And then the wolves come at you. That’s what it’s like to lose your mother.”
At the same time, Watson emphasizes that the story isn’t autobiography: “The autobiographical stuff might partly explain how I came to write it, but the story is not a coded message whose true subject is me. A story can mean many things to many people, and that is one reason I prefer fiction to nonfiction. And books to life.”
Of course I’d be remiss not to remind you that there are twenty-two more stories like “Wolves” waiting for you—wolf-like—in Watson’s collection. For like his character Jacob Livesey, the experimental composer, Watson’s best stuff “evoke[s] the twin longings that t[ear], although not asunder, the inner lives of many of his contemporaries: the desire for repetition” (that’s “heart,” the stuff you nod over, weeping) “and the hunger for something—anything—new” (and that’s play).

Enjoy. - Elizabeth Zaleski

What’s the point of reading a book when, regardless of the book’s brilliance, you’ll still eventually end up dead? In his award-winning debut collection of twenty-three fabulist fictions, The Era of Not Quite, Douglas Watson takes up this question by knocking off characters left and right. In one story, Watson tosses a luckless schmuck into the void. In another, he flattens a thoughtful library patron with a dump truck while the patron’s daughter contemplates wonder. In the penultimate tale, a seven-year-old girl, poor dear, is bucked from a newly invented breed of miniature horse. Deaths stack up, morbidity becoming its own joke as nihilism loops back on itself again and again. The result is absurdity, hilarity, heady contemplation, and killer prose.
Of course, there’s nothing like a good literary offing to cleanse the palate, and this book offers deaths galore. But Watson’s stories run deeper than clever premises and guillotine giddiness. In this first book, winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize, Watson adds his unique voice to postmodernism, joining the ranks of Barthelme, Beckett, and Calvino and holding his own. With playful experimentation and linguistic prowess, Watson mocks the conventions of fiction, making us wonder what stories really are for in this post-literate era when the masses can read but literacy fails to deliver us from unexceptional lives. Before you can lose hope, though, Watson shifts away from farce, showering us with moments of linguistic sublimity that remind us why fiction endures.
Watson drops us into folkloric lands of kings, wolves, and dragons as readily as he places us in nondescript contemporary landscapes of billboards, busses and, yes, libraries of all things. Then there are stories where Watson muddles time, inserting props from commercial culture into the sparse world of the fable. Take the story “When the World Broke,” where a golden-haired peasant boy living in a remote village on the edge of a forbidding forest fills a water bottle—ubiquitous thing—before slinging a bag of oats over his shoulder and venturing off through valleys lit by thousands of electric lights on a quest to save his beloved ailing mother and the world. It’s as though Watson is saying, hey, this is the realm of fiction, an artificial space, no? Fairy tale setting? Depressingly realist small town complete with Unitarian church? What’s the difference when neither really exists in a book?
Into these confused and anachronistic settings, Watson focuses his gaze on down-and-out characters, friendless, discouraged, but not without hope. Take Hal Walker from Watson’s title story “The Era of Not Quite”:
[…] It was a fine day on which to risk everything. / Everything, in Hal’s case, was not much. Although he had a bungalow and a great many books, Hal had no friends, family, lovers, admirers, or even detractors. Also, he no longer had the first half of his life. He did, though, have a job with the local telephone company, deleting from the telephone directory the names and phone numbers of people who had died. It was not a very demanding job (25).
Portrayed with charming deprecation, Watson’s characters are antiheroes for the new millennium, rivaling TV’s despondent office cubicle plebes for honors in futility. Watson’s characterization also has a touch of the metafictional in it. He makes us aware in every detail of the artifice of character construction. In stories such as “The Death of John O’Brien,” for example, Watson pokes fun at our contemporary lust for quirky characterization in describing the soon-to-be-dead library patron’s offspring:
[…] his eleven-year-old daughter, Hannah O’Brien, who could already say ‘shit’ in three languages, might one day appreciate the ironic humor that kept Independent People from being too impossibly bleak a novel. She might even appreciate it in its original Icelandic, for all John O’Brien knew (21).
Here, Watson includes us in the fun of conjuring up ridiculous people, the punch line being that these literary puppets are not so very different than those who populate our own reality, which might itself be a fiction, constructedness inescapable in a culture that layers text upon text.
Then there are stories like “Special Advertising Section,” where Watson throws metafictional subtlety out the window and ridicules the very endeavor in which he engages, the act of writing a book. Watson writes:
Well, here you are, halfway through Douglas Watson’s first and last book of stories, The Era of Not Quite. What do you think so far? Too many words? Too many deaths? Now might be a good time to take a break, maybe step out for a breath of air or head up to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes. Or perhaps you would prefer to press on, to get the book over with. Either way,  before you read any further, know this: the book you hold in your hands offers few of the pleasures of a novel […] (73).
Too gimmicky? It might be if what Watson did were simple. If all this story amounted to was the realization that the author is addressing the reader to pan his own book, then yes, this story would be droll. But here, Watson addresses the absurdity of what the entire literary world has become with a self-awareness that makes us laugh out loud. In a mere four pages, he mocks the celebration of the novel over the lowly story collection and the necessity of  superstar blurbers who serve as literary gods in an industry whose fans worship their heroes not for the sake of their souls or the goodness of mankind but so that they might join the ranks of the worshipped themselves.
Is Watson writing only to writers? He might say, yes, of course; that’s what our tiny insular literary ecosystem has become. And while this collection certainly is writerly, it isn’t only for the insider club of MFA alums. Anyone who loves language will devour this book because linguistically, Watson does things with a sentence that are so subtle and masterful, you find yourself startled by their effects. Take this first sentence from the title story:
The sun shone, if only to be polite, on a town whose residents were all indoors murdering, by one method or another, the hours of their too-short lives (25).
Here, Watson mixes world weariness with startlingly formal diction crossed with a jolt of something bright and intense. Watson performs these syntactical acrobatics again and again. It’s like Cirque de Soleil for book nerds. Just look how those sentences bend.
Here’s one more. The opening of “Against Specificity” goes like this:
The trouble: You want Thing A but are stuck with Thing B.
Shit, you say, turning Thing B around in your hands. Look at this thing, you say. It’s as dull as a bucket of dirt. It’s not half as interesting as a sculpture of a dog pissing on a dead man’s shoe in the rain, and you don’t have one of those. You don’t have Thing A, either.
Hell, you haven’t even seen Thing A. You’ve only heard about it from your neighbor, who works down at the Thing Exchange. What he or she said: Thing A shines like a gold tooth in the mouth of Jesus. Thing A is rounder, fuller, faster, zestier than Thing B. Thing A is perfect—it’s what you need. Why, it even smells good, like waffles (9).
Of course, this tale of materialistic desire is a commentary on capitalist consumption, but such a summation completely misses the fun of the ridiculous similes, meta-absurdity, and wryness of the voice. Watson’s work flips easy summations on their heads. Go deep, dear critic. This textual thing that Watson’s concocted has layers you could unpack until the cows hang up their udders and stumble home.
And when the cows are tucked away and you’ve fully mulled over Watson’s first book, don’t fret. You won’t be lonesome long. This Watson fellow’s on a roll. In April, he releases a novel from Outpost 19. And the title? Wait for it, folks—A Moody Fellow Finds Love and Then Dies. We’re surely in store for more postmodernist hullabaloo.
We don’t often hand out trophies for metafiction and humor, but shine your brassware, world. This debutante’s got stuff to say and the way he says it sparkles so loud you’ll erect a trophy soon for Douglas Watson-ness: the not-quite-cracked-or-lucid-rendering of life-ishness-in-fabulist-fashion Award.- Tessa Mellas

Summary: Douglas Watson's debut story collection is chock-a-block with deaths, births, sea and land voyages, excursions to the library, philosophical asides, and things like wolves. People fall in and out of love, walk in and out of buildings, take two steps forward and two steps back. Futility is a theme of the book, but so is the necessity of trying. -- BOA Editions

I should probably preface my review of THE ERA OF NOT QUITE by Douglas Watson by telling you that I "know" the author. He is a close friend of my brother-in-law's and I've met him a few times over the years, but I really wouldn't call him a friend -- more of an acquaintance. At a party a little over a year ago, he told me that his first book was being published, and (the book geek that I am) I mentioned that I'd love to read it.
A few months ago, Doug emailed me asking if I'd take a look at his book THE ERA OF NOT QUITE. He described it as "vaguely absurdist, death-haunted short stories." Of course, I jumped at the chance but I admit that I was a little concerned that this book was outside of my normal reading fare. I remember him telling me that this book isn't for everyone, and I was under no commitment to read it, review it, or even like it!
So it was with a little excitement and a little trepidation that I picked up THE ERA OF NOT QUITE. THE ERA OF NOT QUITE is a collection of truly original short stories that deal with a little bit of everything -- life, death, and love. But it's also about the living -- both the ups and the downs, the good and the bad. I realize this description sounds pretty vague, but it is difficult to summarize this book in just a few sentences. I will just say that this small book covers a lot... and packs a powerful punch.
THE ERA OF NOT QUITE also has some unique characters who experience some extremely unique situations. I'm not going to lie to you -- this book is a little bit weird! It is unlike any collection of short stories (or books for that matter) that I've ever read. But I absolutely adored THE ERA OF NOT QUITE -- and it has absolutely nothing to do with "knowing" the author. These stories were entertaining and often times surprising, and I actually found that I couldn't put the book down because I couldn't wait to see what was around the next corner.
Naturally, there were stories that I enjoyed more than others, but I can honestly say that there wasn't a dinger in the bunch. Even those stories that didn't exactly resonate with me provided me with a great deal of enjoyment. I found myself laughing constantly at the absurdity of the characters and their actions, but I also found myself blown away by just how smart this book is. I promise you that each story will at the very least surprise you and cause you to think. And I always say that if a book can make you think, then it's a winner. (I think Oprah says something similar but her words hold much more power than mine!)
There is no doubt that Doug Watson has some mad writing skills. THE ERA OF NOT QUITE has already won the BOA Short Fiction Prize and a few of the stories have appeared in Tin House (online), Sou'Wester, and Fifty-Two Stories. But he also has a slightly twisted mind and that's evident in the originality and brilliance of these stories. In fact, THE ERA OF NOT QUITE is so smart and witty that I actually scratched my head that one individual could create them.
However, I think what impressed me the most about this book is just how "different" each story felt. Of course, there are recurring themes throughout many of the stories gave the book a feeling of continuity, but each story almost seemed as if it could have been written by a different writer. Some were almost like fables, while others were dark and depressing, and others were almost whimsical. THE ERA OF NOT QUITE is truly a special and extremely well written book!
If you are looking for something a little different than what you ordinarily read, that's smart and funny and insightful, then I highly recommend reading THE ERA OF NOT QUITE. www.bookingmama.net

8/27/13

Mário de Sá-Carneiro - His short stories depict madness, death, erotic jealousy and fin de siecle decadence in fragmented and luminously synaesthetic prose


Mário de Sá-Carneiro, The Great Shadow (and other stories)Trans. by Margaret Jull Costa, Dedalus, 1996.

"Sa-Carneiro was only 26 when he committed suicide in Paris in 1916. His short stories depict madness, death, erotic jealousy and fin de siecle decadence in fragmented and luminously synaesthetic prose. Almost anticipating Kafka, he describes a scientist killed by the machinery of an invisible parallel world, and a poet, whose verses fly to the stars leaving blank pages in their wake." - Scotland on Sunday

Excerpt:
Myself the Other
12th October, Lisbon 1907
I am a golden dagger whose blade has grown dull.
My soul fits me tightly, it vibrates with the desire to burst forth. Only my body is heavy. My soul is imprisoned in a narrow hallway.
I am not a coward when it comes to fear. I am only a coward about myself. Ah, if only I were handsome...
I feel ashamed at my own feelings of greatness.
I am so great that I can only tell my secrets to myself.
I never had any doubts. I have always felt cold.
1st November
The open windows remain closed...
13th November
It's terrible the way I spend all my time wandering. In myself and amongst others.
I always stayed on, I never moved, even when I lost myself.
Sometimes, even now, I decide that I will leave. And I do. But I never manage to go through with it. If it is not my fault, then it is the fault of the others who beckoned me on.
If they did beckon to me, it was because they assumed that I would never follow them; they did so because they wanted to suffer. And since I did eventually respond to their gestures, they became disenchanted with me and they fled, mocking me. I detached myself from them.
I am only allowed to be happy on condition that I am not.
2nd December
It's unbelievable!
Almost everyone is quite contented with themselves; they are fulfilled. They live and they progress. They start families. People kiss them.
How disgusting! Not even to have enough genius to want to be a genius!
Poor wretches!
30th December
... And the open windows are still...still closed...
I have run aground inside myself.
I can no longer imagine myself.
20th June, Rome 1908
Ah, cities, cities!
I exhaust myself with activity. It's the only way I can get myself to close my eyes.
I have been travelling around Europe for six months now... I stay nowhere for longer than a week. That way I manage to keep one step ahead of myself...
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
But alas, I soon catch up...

12th October, Paris 1908
The grey ruins of golden statues; blind, purple sphinxes; thrones without steps and the great marble staircase carpeted in sackcloth!...
But why do I look at myself like that, why?... It is this longing to go deep into myself that causes evening to fall inside me. And yet I feel so proud to have made that crossing...
Ah, if only I were who I am... What a triumph that would be!...
13th October
What it comes down to in the end is this: I am too much for myself.
15th November
Perhaps I am a whole nation... Can I have become a country?...
Possibly.
One thing is certain, I feel that inside me there are city squares.
16th November
That's it, that's it!
I have become a nation...
...Vast deserted roads...trees...rivers...bridges...
a lot of bridges...
I cannot fill myself. I am too much for myself. I rattle about inside.
14th December
My spirit slipped and fell.
I overstepped the mark.
I stand coldly face to face with myself and I am almost happy.
22nd December
Peace...peace...
5th January, Paris 1909
Today I met him for the first time.
It was in the café. I suddenly saw him sitting opposite me... The café was full. That's why he came and sat down at my table.
But I didn't see him sit down. When I noticed him, he was already sitting opposite me. No one had introduced us and yet we were already chatting to each other...
He's so handsome!
And what about the triumphal look that lights up his lean, gaunt face? His long hair falls in ringlets. His hair is reddish blond. I felt like kissing him hard on the mouth...
Yes, he would know how to be me.
10th January
We meet every night now. We spend long hours together.
I don't know who he is nor where he came from.
We constantly misunderstand each other. We never agree. Again and again he humiliates me, shakes me. In short, he puts me in my place.
He doesn't see anything the way I see it.
He is a different colour entirely.
His company is a torment to me. Yet I seek him out everywhere. When he fails to appear at the meetings we arrange - which happens often - an infinite sadness fills me.
The odd thing is I have never seen him arrive. By the time I realise he is there, he is already sitting opposite me.
Sometimes he arrives very late. When he does finally turn up, I feel terribly tired, exhausted, as if I had just made a huge physical effort.
I have never heard his footsteps.
He told me that he is Russian, but I don't believe him.
18th January
Our conversations cover all kinds of topics, but we spend most of the time talking about our souls. I reveal mine to him entirely. And he seems to believe me.
He has such long, long fingers...
27th February
For the first time since we met, I went a whole week without seeing him.
Only then could I assess what it is that binds me to him.
It isn't affection, although I do sometimes long to kiss him. It is hatred, an infinite hatred. But it's a glorious hatred too. That's why I seek him out and why I am only truly alive when I am with him. That's the truth: I am only truly alive when I am with him.
12th March
My friend is becoming truly unbearable. He makes me his plaything. He takes every opportunity to show how he despises me.
Every day his opinions are more repellent and more beautiful.
28th March
Today someone told me terrible things about my friend.
3rd April
Yet how powerful he is!
He may be perverse, but he is worth more than all the others put together.
He is all intensity, all fire.
When I am with him, I see what I would like to be, what I also, coincidentally, am.
If I were him, I would not be too much for myself.
Basically, his opinions are mine.
It's simply that I do not wish to believe what I think. I have my pride. That is perhaps what he lacks.
I am greater than he is. But he is beautiful.
He is as beautiful as gold and as vast as the shadows.
The open windows only opened up for me within him.
15th April
Should I kill him?

30th April
I should do something. I feel I am losing my personality.
Little by little my soul is shaping itself to his.
I have genius enough to admire him. This may be my perdition.
Let us at least be ourselves.
Let us suffer, but let us be ourselves.
I no longer believe in my sufferings...
5th May
He talks a lot to me about his lovers, but I have never seen his lovers.
I don't know where he lives.
18th May
I can never forget him. His words always come back to me.
What I can never remember is the sound of his voice.
As for his footsteps, I have yet to hear them.
12th June
I am definitely going to run away from him. Enough is enough.

19th June
At last! The spell is broken... I am leaving this morning.
20th June, Lisbon 1909
I'm back. But how everything about me has changed...
22nd June
My friends say that I have changed a lot. They say my voice is different, my attitudes, my physical appearance.
I return home filled with fear.
I look at myself in the mirror...
And to my horror I discover on my face, as if in a caricature, the rictus of disdain on his face.
I say something out loud...
And for the first time I remember the sound of his voice...
I stride around the room...
I'm trembling all over!
For the first time I hear his footsteps...

30th June
I must rid myself of this obsession.
1st July
My God, my God, I no longer have the same gestures, the same thoughts as I used to have! Everything about me has changed. Everything about me rings false.
And everyone looks at me oddly...they all flee from me...
All of them... I hate them... I find them utterly inferior...
But he, yes, he is great! He, undoubtedly, is great.
20th July
This hallucination of mine is such torment.
I no longer know how to defend myself against it.
I speak. And suddenly my words diverge from my thoughts.
When I speak, it is he who is doing the thinking...
25th July
I sit down at my work table.
I am going to begin writing something I have pondered for a long time.
I write the first lines.
Disillusioned, I get up.
I cannot accept my ideas.
They seem commonplace to me.
I don't believe in what I write.
I doubt if I am, in fact, an artist.
The other is right.
If I were an artist, I would be beautiful.
And I would have long fingers.
And I would be pale.
And I would never know what time it is.
I tear up everything I wrote.
I feel sickened by myself.
26th July
Before, I used to kiss myself in mirrors.
2nd August
Today I wrote a few pages.
These pages I do believe in.
They are true works of art.
I read them out loud, glowing with pride.
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
Then I suddenly fall into a rage.
I tear them up too.
They are not mine.
If I had never met him, I would never have written them...

6th August
He used to wear a strange gold ring on his left hand.
One day he told me that he had found it in the sea, when he was a child.
And that he was kidnapped by sailors on a schooner.
20th August
I am surrounded by the ruins of myself.
Golden threads draw me towards the abyss.
25th August
But I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to!
2nd September
The truth, the terrible truth is this: hour by hour I am slipping away from myself. I overflow my borders.
I suffer so much.
8th September
A mystery!
I did not give him my address; I did not tell him where I was going and today - yes, today in my house - I received a telegram from him. He arrives tomorrow.
Damn him!
9th September
This is what happened:
I decided to shut myself up in the house, giving orders to the servants not to open the door to anyone.
But a terrible fear gripped me.
I went out...
And suddenly he was walking by my side!...
10th September
What is to become of me? What is to become of me?
15th September
He never leaves me...
18th September
My senses are beginning to change. Sounds have different smells now. I feel colours in quite different ways. The light pierces me.
26th September
How I have struggled!
27th September
Ah!...
28th September
The end!
I no longer exist. I have hurled myself into him.
I have lost myself.
We have ceased being us. We are one now.
I knew this would happen; it was fated...
Ah, how I hate him!
He sucked me in little by little.
His body was porous. He absorbed me.
I no longer exist.
I have disappeared from life.
I have formed a cyst inside him.
Ruins!
2nd October
The most painful thing is that he does not even know that he has absorbed me because he has no respect for me.
If he had, I would have been the one to absorb him.
6th October
I want to run away, I want to run away!
Can there be any greater torment?
I exist, but I am not myself!
I am another... I am the other... The Other!...
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
8th October
Where he goes, I go, but I never know where he is going...
His ecstasies are my ecstasies, but he alone does the possessing.
His ideals are my ideals, but he alone realises them.
How can I free myself?
12th October
The wretch!
17th October
Anything but this! Anything but this!
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

13th January, St Petersburg 1910
At last, success!
I have made a decision.
I will kill him tonight...while He is asleep...
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
Lisbon, November 1913


Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Lucio's ConfessionTrans. by Margaret Jull Costa, Dedalus, 2009.  

"It is an enigmatic love triangle riddled with madness and jealousy, set in fin-de-siecle Paris and Lisbon, and its translation reopens a rich vein of fantastic literature." - Christopher Fowler in Time Out
A decadent, enigmatic jewel of a novel which will delight readers of fin-de-siecle fiction.
Written in 1913 this is a thoroughly decadent story of an unusual menage a trois which ends in a killing. It's filled with poets and artists and those special problems that sensitive people have ('Do you hear that music? It's like a symbol of my life: a wonderful melody murdered by a terrible unworthy performer.') The last word on this magnificent period piece - bejewelled and opiated and splendidly over the top - belongs to one of its characters: 'It seems more like the vision of some brilliant onanist than reality'. - Phil Baker inThe Sunday Times
Febrile, intense and innovative. - Nicholas Lezard in The Guardian
An enigmatic love triangle riddled with madness and jealousy, set in fin de siecle Paris and Lisbon, and its translation reopens a rich vein of fantasy. - Christopher Fowler in Time Out
Written by one of Portugal’s greatest Modernists, Lucio’s Confession is a short novel that defies a logical explanation of its plot. The narrative purports to a confession in which Lucio, recently released from jail after serving ten years for murder, decides to tell the truth; Lucio maintains that he is innocent and that now he will state the facts of what really happened when his friend, Ricardo, died, even if those facts defy reason. And so begins a mind-bending story about art, literature, love, sexual obsession, deceit, madness and guilt.
Lucio is a struggling artist in Paris in 1895 when he meets the poet Ricardo de Loureiro. Their friendship quickly turns into a secret obsession for the timid Lucio, who admires the lively Ricardo. Trouble steps in when Ricardo, who seemed unable to ever devote himself to a married life, suddenly introduces his wife to Lucio. This changes everything between the two, but Lucio believes things can still be the way they were before.
This all seems very banal until the facts in the novel start contradicting themselves and the protagonist starts running out of explanations for the inconsistencies. Slowly it becomes obvious we’ll never know the whole story, and we’re drawn into a world of fantasy and madness for a fascinating ride through a shattered mind.
This elegant prose nightmare was written in 1914, just two years before the author committed suicide in Paris. - World Literature Forum
It is, in this sparkling new translation by Margaret Jull Costa, a fabulous testament to fin de siecle Paris - the story of an enigmatic and unusual menage a trois, with a strong homerotic subtext, set in a world of fantasy and madness. - Keith Richmond in Tribune
Excerpt:
Around 1895, quite how I do not know, I found myself studying Law or rather not studying Law at the University of Paris. I had been something of a drifter since adolescence and, having tried out various 'goals' in life, only to abandon each in turn, I was gripped by a desire to see Europe and I decided to take myself off to its capital, Paris. I soon became embroiled in various vaguely artistic circles and Gervásio Vila-Nova, whom I had known slightly in Lisbon, became my constant companion. He cut a curious figure, that of the great artist manqué or, rather, of the artist doomed to failure.
There was something disquieting about his tall, gaunt, angular body, with its dual and contradictory suggestion of both a hysterical, narcotic effeminacy and a sallow asceticism. When his long hair fell back from his face to reveal a broad, firm but terribly pale brow, it evoked images of hairshirts and extreme abstinence; yet when it fell forward in waves over his forehead, it evoked only tenderness, the troubling tenderness of golden ecstasies and subtle kisses. He always dressed in black, in long jackets that had a touch of the priest about them, an impression reinforced by the type of collar he wore, narrow and close-fitting. When his forehead was concealed by his hair or by a hat, there was nothing enigmatic about his face at all, quite the contrary. Oddly enough though, there was something mysterious about his body, something that made one think of sphinxes, perhaps, on moonlit nights. It was not his actual physiognomy that etched itself upon one's memory, but rather his strange personality. He stood out in every crowd, he was stared at, talked about, although, in fact, at first sight there seemed to be nothing very remarkable about his appearance: his clothes, albeit of a slightly exaggerated cut, were black, his hair, though long, was never extravagantly so, and his hat, a woollen beret, whilst certainly odd, was no different from that worn by many artists.
The truth is that Gervásio Vila-Nova had an aura about him. He was the sort of man you look at in the street and say: he must be someone important.
Women utterly adored him. They would watch in fascination whenever he wandered, tall and arrogant, into a café... But they looked at him more the way women look at some exquisitely beautiful and bejewelled member of their own sex.
'You know, my dear Lúcio,' he often said to me, 'I never possess my lovers, they possess me.'
When we talked, his flame burned even brighter. He was a brilliant conversationalist, lovable despite his many solecisms, despite his mistakes which he would defend passionately and always successfully), despite his repellent but nonetheless glorious opinions, despite his paradoxes, his lies. He was a superior being, there was no doubt about it, one of those people who remains engraved on our memory, who troubles and obsesses us. He was fire, pure fire!
However, if you examined him with your intelligence, rather than with your emotions, you would see at once that there was, alas, nothing beyond the aura, that his genius - perhaps too brilliant - would consume itself, remain unsublimated into work and end up dispersed, fragmented, burned out. And that, in fact, is exactly what happened. He avoided failure only because he had the courage to destroy himself first.
It was impossible to feel affection for someone like that (although deep down he was an excellent fellow), and yet even today I recall with nostalgia the talks we had, the nights spent in cafés and I can even convince myself that, yes, the fate of Gervásio Vila-Nova really was the most beautiful of fates and that he was a great artist, an artist of genius.
My friend had many contacts in the artistic world: writers, painters and musicians from every country. One morning, he came into my room and announced:
'Yesterday, my dear Lúcio, I was introduced to a most interesting American woman. She's fabulously rich and lives in a mansion she's had specially built - on Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, if you please - on a site previously occupied by two large buildings which she simply ordered to be demolished. She's an enchanting woman. The man who introduced her to me was that American painter with the blue-tinted spectacles. Do you know who I mean? I can't remember his name... Anyway she can be found every afternoon in the Pavillon d'Armenonville. She takes tea there. I'd like you to meet her. You'll see what I mean then. A fascinating woman!'
...................................
A month went by. I had already forgotten all about the flame-haired woman, when one night, Gervàsio suddenly announced to me:
'By the way, that American woman I introduced to you the other day is giving a big party tomorrow and you're invited.'
'Me?'
'Yes. She told me to bring some friends and she mentioned you. She likes you a lot. It should be interesting. There's a performance at the end - apotheosis and dance or something... If you don't want to come, don't. I know how that sort of thing bores you...' As usual, I protested, like the idiot I still was, and declared that, on the contrary, I had every intention of going with him, and we arranged to meet the following night at ten in the Closerie.
On the day of the party, I regretted having agreed to go. I felt such an aversion to society life... Quite apart from having to put on a dinner jacket and waste a whole evening... Oh well...
When I reached the café, I found, much to my surprise, that my friend had already arrived. He said to me:
'We still have to wait for Ricardo de Loureiro. He's invited too. And I arranged to meet him here. Look, there he is.'
And he introduced us:
'The writer Lúcio Vaz...the poet Ricardo de Loureiro.'
And we, in turn, said to one another:
'Delighted to meet you.'
...........................................
Along the way we struck up conversation and, from the very first, I took a great liking to Ricardo de Loureiro. His Arab-dark face, with its strong lines, revealed a frank, open nature, illumined by intense, dark brown eyes, bright with intelligence.
I spoke to him about his work, which I admired, and he told me that he had read my volume of short stories and had been especially intrigued by a story called 'João Tortura'. Whilst I found this opinion flattering, it also made me feel even more warmly towards the poet, perceiving in him a nature that might understand my own soul a little. For that story was far and away my own particular favourite, but it was the only one that no critic had ever mentioned, and one that even my friends, without actually saying so, believed to be my least successful.
The artist's conversation was both brilliant and captivating and, for the first time, I saw Gervàsio, who normally dominated every group he was in, fall silent and listen.
At last our coupé pulled up outside a magnificent mansion on the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. It was fantastically lit from within by a blaze of light filtered through red silk curtains. A large number of carriages stood at the door, an odd mixture of shabby fiacres and a few splendid private carriages
We got out.
At the entrance, a servant took our invitations from us, as if we were in a theatre foyer, whilst another immediately ushered us over to a lift that whisked us up to the first floor. There an astonishing sight awaited us: a large elliptical room, the ceiling of which was a lofty, glittering cupola supported on multi-coloured columns crowned by splendid volutes. At the far end of this room, resting upon bronze sphinxes, stood a strange stage from which down a flight of pink marble steps you descended into a large semi-circular swimming pool full of translucent water. There were also three tiers of galleries, so that the whole room looked exactly like some fantastic, sumptuous theatre.
Somewhere a hidden orchestra was grinding out waltzes.
When we went in - inevitably - every eye fixed on Gervásio Vila- Nova, looking priestly and exceptionally handsome in his black waisted jacket. The American woman immediately rushed up to us to ask what we thought of the room. The architects had only put the finishing touches to it two weeks before. This lavish party was being held to celebrate its inauguration.
We all gave loud expression to our astonishment at the marvellous room and she, the enchantress, smiled mysteriously and said:
'I want to know your opinion about what happens later on...especially the lights.'
The American woman was wearing an extraordinary dress, a kind of tunic made from a most singular material, impossible to describe. It was like a closely woven mesh of metallic threads - made from the most diverse metals - that fused together to produce an appearance of shimmering fire, a fire that contained all the colours in the world alternately colliding in shrill harmony or merging to produce whistling, starry tumults of reflected light. Her tunic was colour gone mad.
If you looked closely you could see her bare skin through the mesh of the fabric. The nipple of one breast poked through, firm and golden.
Her red hair was arranged in disorderly coils threaded with precious stones, which clustered like stars amidst flames, throwing off rays of transcendent light. Emerald serpents curled and bit about her arms, but she wore not a single jewel upon her deep décolletage. She was like a disquieting statue to serpentine desire, to platinum depravity. And what emanated from her skin, in that blue penumbra, was the dense aroma of transgression.
After a few moments, she slipped quickly away to greet other guests.
The room had filled up meanwhile with a strange and extravagant multitude. There were foreign women in daring ball gowns that left them almost naked and men with suspicious-looking faces above the unisonous black of male evening dress. There were red-haired, hirsute Russians, palely blond Scandinavians, stocky, curly-haired southerners, a Chinese man and an Indian. It was the quintessence of cosmopolitan Paris - brilliant, opulent and gaudy.
The guests danced and talked until midnight. Up in the galleries people gambled furiously. But then supper was announced and we all went into the dining room, which furnished us with yet further marvels.
Shortly before, the American woman had come over to us and whispered confidentially:
'After supper comes the show - my Triumph! I've tried to summarise in it all my ideas about sensuality as an art. Lights, bodies, smells, fire and water - everything will come together in an orgy of flesh distilled into gold!'
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

When we came back into the large salon, I, for my part, felt afraid and shrank back.
The whole scene had changed, it felt like a completely different room. It was filled by a heavy perfume, tremulous with passion. A mysterious breeze blew through it, a grey breeze blotched with yellow - I don't know why but that, for some strange reason, is how it seemed to me, a breeze that made our skin prick and shiver. The most astonishing and remarkable thing, however, was the lighting. I feel quite incapable of describing it. I could only, with great effort, attempt to explain its singularity, its languorous power.
The light - electric light of course - came from an infinite number of strange, round glass lampshades in a variety of colours and designs and of varying degrees of transparency, but in particular from the waves of brilliant light that blazed forth from projectors concealed in the galleries. Now these torrents of light, all focused on the same chimerical point in space, came together to form a maelstrom, and it was out of that meteoric maelstrom that the beams of light, ricocheting one against the other, were projected back onto walls and columns, were scattered about the room, transforming it.
The light in the room was, in effect, a projection of itself, it was still light, of course, but the truth is that the marvellous thing illuminating us did not seem like light. It seemed like something else, some sort of new fluid. I'm not rambling here, I'm simply describing a real sensation, for we did not so much see that light as feel it. And I do not think it would be going too far to say that it did not so much affect our sight as our sense of touch. If our eyes had been suddenly torn from us, we would still have been able to see it. What's more - and this is the most bizarre and splendid part - we could breathe this strange fluid. It's true, we drank in that light together with the air, with the purple perfume of the air, a light which, in a moment of iridescent ecstasy, of dizzying elation, flooded our lungs, invaded our blood, suffused our bodies with sound. Yes, that magical light actually resonated inside us, enlarging our senses, filling us with harmonies, flowing through us, dazzling us... Under its influence, our flesh became open to every sensation, every smell, every melody!
And we, our senses honed by long exposure to culture and art, were not alone in feeling overwhelmed by that shimmering mystery. For it was soon clear from the confused faces and troubled gestures of everyone in the audience that, engulfed by that light from beyond Hell, by that sexualised light, they were all transfixed as if under the spell of some flame-red sorcery.
But suddenly the light changed, became an arcing fall, and another tremor ran through us, milder this time, like a flurry of emerald kisses after a series of bruising bites.
In this new dawn, a vibrant music jingled forth in strange rhythms - a slender melody in which clashing segments of crystal lay submerged, in which sword-sharp palm leaves cooled the air, in which moist sequences of subtle sounds evaporated...
In short, we were all on the point of swooning in one final spasm of the soul...but they had sustained us this long only in order to prolong our pleasure.
At the far end of the room, the curtain rose on an aurora stage. The light that had so troubled us was extinguished and we were lit only by torrents of white electricity.
Three dancers appeared on the stage. They wore their hair loose and their upper bodies were clothed in tight scarlet blouses that left their breasts tremulously free. Tenuous strips of gauze hung from their waists. There was a gap between blouse and gauze - a stripe of bare flesh on which symbolic flowers were painted.
The dancers began their dance. Their legs were bare. They span, jumped, then merged into one, entangling limbs, kissing one another hard on the mouth.
The first dancer had black hair, her skin was resplendent as the sun. Her legs, seemingly moulded out of golden dawn, stole forth into the radiant light, to reveal, near her pubis, a mordant flesh one longed to sink one's teeth into.
But what made the dancers so exciting was the limpid nostalgia they evoked for a great blue lake of crystalline water where, on moonlit nights, they would plunge in, barefoot and tender.
The second dancer had the look of a perverse adolescent. She was thin, though with quite developed breasts, and had dull blonde hair, a provocative face and a turned-up nose. Her legs, knotted with muscles, were hard, masculine and aroused in everyone present the violent urge to bite them.
The third and final dancer was the most disquieting. She was ice- cool and slender, very pale and gaunt, her skeletal, devastated legs evocative of mysticism and disease.
Meanwhile, the dance continued. Their movements grew gradually faster and faster until, at last, in one final spasm, their mouths met and, with all the veils torn away - breasts, bellies, vulvas all uncovered - their bodies lay entangled, dying in a frenzy of desire.
And the curtain fell returning us to that earlier luminous placidity...
Other admirable scenes followed: naked dancers chasing each other in the pool, mimicking the sexual nature of the water, strange dancers scattering perfumes that lent an eerie darkness to the already fantastical atmosphere of the room; apotheoses of bare bodies piled one upon the other - sensual visions of vivid colour, vortices of ecstasy, symphonies of silks and velvets whirling about naked flesh.
But, however perverse, none of these marvels aroused in us lubricious or bestial desires, rather they stirred up an extraordinary and delicious longing in the soul that both burned and soothed.
An impression of excess passed only fleetingly through us
But it was not only the lewd scenes that provoked the ecstasies stirring in our souls. Far from it. What we experienced created in us an all-bracing sensation identical to what one would feel when listening to a sublime suite performed by an orchestra of virtuosi. And the sensual tableaux were simply one instrument in that orchestra, the other instruments being the lights, the perfumes, the colours... Yes, all those elements fused into an admirable whole which, by expanding the soul, penetrated it, and which our souls perceived as a distant fever, a vibration in the depths. We were all soul. Even our carnal desires descended to us from our souls.
However, this was as nothing compared to the final vision.
The lights became denser, sharper and more penetrating, falling now in torrents from the apex of the cupola and the curtain drew back to reveal a vaguely Asiatic scene... To the sound of heavy, hoarse, distant music, she appeared, the woman with red hair.
And she began to dance.
She was wrapped in a white tunic striped with yellow. Her hair hung down, wild and loose. She wore fantastic jewels on her fingers and her bare feet glittered with precious stones.
How to describe her silent steps, wet and cold as crystal; the stormy surges of her undulating body; the alcohol of her lips which - a brilliant touch this - she had painted gold; the evanescent harmony of her gestures; the whole diffuse horizon tenuously evoked by her whirling figure?
Meanwhile, on a mysterious altar behind her, fire burst forth.
In slow degrees of abandonment her tunic slipped from her body until, in a spasm of restrained ecstasy, it fell at her feet. Ah, at that point, confronted by the marvellous sight transfixing us, we could not help but cry out in amazement.
Chimerical, naked, her rarefied body rose up solemnly amidst a thousand fantastic coruscations. Like her lips, her nipples and her vulva were painted gold - a pale, sickly gold. And, in her desire to give herself to the fire, her whole being swayed in the grip of a scarlet mysticism.
But the fire drove her back.
Then, in a final act of perversity, she put on her veils again and hid herself, leaving only her golden vulva uncovered - a terrible flower of flesh moving in convulsive magenta spasms.
She was all victorious, all fire.
Then, naked again, fiery and fierce, she jumped into the flames, tearing at them, ensnaring and possessing them as they twined drunkenly about her.
But, at last, exhausted after all these strange convulsions, she landed, in one prodigious leap, like a meteor - a flame-haired meteor - in the lake that a thousand hidden lights painted an ashy blue.
Then came the apotheosis.
As the blue water received her body, it grew red as burning coals, troubled and burned by her flesh which the fire had penetrated... And in her desire to extinguish that fire, the naked, possessed creature plunged in, but the deeper in she went, the brighter the light about her.
Until at last, mysteriously, the fire faded into gold and her dead body floated, heraldic, upon the gilded waters - now calm and dead as well.
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
Normal light filled the room again. Only just in time. Women flailed about in the grip of hysteria; men with flushed faces made incoherent gestures.
The doors opened and we, lost and hatless, found ourselves once more out in the street, aflame, perplexed. The cool night air beat about us, forcing us awake, as if we had just returned from a dream all three of us had dreamed. Dumbstruck, we looked at each other with troubled eyes...
The marvels we had seen had made such a powerful impression on us that we hadn't the strength to say a word.

8/26/13

Eugen Egner - An anarchic, surreal and zany novel which reads like Kafka rewritten by Monty Python



Eugen Egner, Androids from MilkTrans. by Mike Mitchell, Dedalus, 2001.

A surreal, time-bending odyssey. A freak show owner sends Reuben Hecht-who has been stuck at age 17 for twenty years - and Edwina-who can switch age at will-to a mysterious Colony to recover androids. Stuck in a house that is not his home, Ruben is beaten by his mother for procrastinating on his homework for the Holy German Paintbrush Distance Learning Academy; his father has taken to his bed to hatch a dwarf. He goes to a concert by the rock group, The Flesh-eating Fetish Bitches, and decides to run away, pursued by the parish priest who wants to put him in a children's home, since he will never come of age.


Having mysteriously remained 17 years old for two decades, the dopey Rueben Hecht gives new meaning to the term psychosocial moratorium and that's just the beginning of his problems in Eugen Egner's comic, insanity-riddled Androids from Milk, translated from the German by Mike Mitchell. Rueben's parents have apparently committed suicide, his doctor wants to put him in a kids' home and Rueben and his age-shifting sidekick, Edwina, must embark on an "android-procurement" mission that will uncover dark and surprising family secrets. - Publishers Weekly

Androids from Milk was not recommended to me, nor had I even heard of it or its author Eugen Egner. This was simply a case of going into a shop, checking out the back cover, and getting on with reading it. In retrospect I should have been sharper, and noticed that the obligatory "Funniest thing I've ever read etc etc" comments by literary critics were entirely absent. Perhaps they will put my review on the back of future pressings, or then again, maybe they won't !
The storyline in Androids from Milk is undoubtedly odd. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing, take examples such as Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett, who manage to weave intricate stories full of puns and in-jokes to make the reader chortle away. In fact, in the hands of a better writer, there is plenty of good material for something of this sort. Our main character has been seventeen for twenty years, one of his travelling partners is a woman who can change herself to any age that she likes, his father has become addicted to drinking UHT milk and at one stage decides to retire to his bedroom for several years to give birth to a dwarf. There is the reoccuring appearance of the rock band "Flesh Eating Fetish Bit***s" and a transit van of blondes who take great pleasure in imitating them to the consternation of our hero, a woman with leopard skin style birthmarks with an amazing ability to power lightbulbs, and a type of grass which (when smoked) turns males into females.
I am not saying that any of the above are good sensible issues on which to build a novel, but they do give a writer plenty of space in which to create something of a well structured, but surreal nature. However, here Egner fails comprehensively as he, rather self-satisfyingly dawdles in large amounts of silliness, going away from the plot into rather meaningless wordgames or side issues. The result of this is to lose any degree of momentum built up in the storyline, and also to lose the interest of the reader. The book is really quite short, but I found that it still took a lot of self discipline to complete it.
However, back to the storyline. Our "hero" who is a student of the Holy German Long Distance Paintbrush academy (or suchlike) goes to a concert of the Flesh Eating Fetish Bit***s, at which he encounters a doctor and a priest who tell him that his parents have died, so it is their job to put him in a childrens home. Luckily, a group of bikers batter the priest and doctor so hard that their both their names and identities have to change (Are you still following ??). Our hero then continues his adventures, constantly followed by the pair. Along the way he meets the Flesh Eating Fetish Bit***s in person, travels to the Colony, is hired by the owner of a Freak Show, smokes himself into a woman (Are you still with me ??)and finds out how he wants to spend his future.
All of this conducted in a world which is dominated by an unlikely, but highly physical, warfare between the Bus Drivers and the Long Distance Lorry Drivers.
The title of the novel comes from the discovery by the Freak Show owner that Androids have been created from UHT milk in the Colony, and which causes him to send our hero on a mission to bring one back, our hero little realising that he is far more closely involved in the history of these beings than he realises.
The erratic, unpredictable and ludicrous nature of this novel will most probably be reflected in this review. How can you properly review a novel which has a central theme of regular competitions on buses to work out which driver is driving ? (Yes, the others are just pretending !) I suspect that translation may be partially to blame, as the novel was originally written in German, and I do suspect that it would be difficult to translate this sort of genre. However, there is a very fine line between the entertainingly surreal and the self-indulgently silly, and I am afraid that Androids from Milk spends far too much time in the second of these sections. Added to the fairly singular inability of the author to tie up many of the strands of storyline this becomes a very unsatisfying and disappointing read.
During one of the five or six prologues (yes, the silliness starts early!) Egner claims to have written the book in two hours. Frankly, I would not be totally surprised if this claim is true, and I just wish that he had spent slightly longer as then he might have produced something worth reading !www.epinions.com/


Excerpt:
The bus-stop, a regular bus-station-with-soup-kitchen-attached, was a reasonable distance from the family home. A quiet and inconspicuous gang of bikers clad in black leathers were standing beside the bus-shelter. The women among them were as beautiful as Snow White, and as pale. When Reuben walked past in his pointed shoes they raised their crash-helmets politely. Immediately opposite, its doors wide open, the number 48 with its beer-cellar was waiting. At that moment the bikers' leader came clattering up the stairs, accompanied by three bus-drivers.
'Right,' she squealed in a jolly, girlish voice, 'one for the road with you lot and then it's off to the concert.'
So they all turned on their heels and went back down to the beer-cellar. The whole bus wobbled while they were drinking their beer. Reuben was pleased to be in such an interesting place instead of sitting at home with his problem parents, spending the evening drawing. It was the best thing that could happen to a seventeen-year-old, no more and no less.
But every silver lining has to have a cloud. As Reuben was standing there enjoying himself, he heard Dr Rossman's iron snow-shovel scraping along the bus-station tarmac. The sound was getting nearer. Suddenly Rossman came round the corner of the bus-shelter.
'Hands up,' he shouted, when he discovered Reuben. A moment later his bosom friend, Prümers the parish priest, appeared from the same direction.
'Reuben Hecht!' screamed Prümers. 'Is this the company you keep? Shame on you to bring such disgrace on your poor, poor parents!'
'Even in death they are not spared,' added Rossman.
'Come and repent,' cried Prümers.
The medical officer of health was getting worked up. 'Just look what you've done!' he exclaimed.
'But I haven't done anything at all,' protested Reuben, flabbergasted. 'I've no idea what you're on about. My parents know I'm going to the concert this evening.'
'To a concert!' squawked Prümers. 'To worship the devil, you mean! And with your parents laid out at home, cold and dead!'
'Cold and dead!' repeated Rossman, at which Prümers yowled, 'Amen, amen, amen.'
Reuben was beginning to feel ill. His irritable bowel syndrome had been aroused and the point fell off one of his shoes. What on earth were these two lunatics talking about?
By now Rossman was foaming at the mouth. 'And you weren't at home to lend those to whom you owe everything — I repeat: everything — your aid in their hour of need! Instead you're hanging around the bus-station!'
'That can cost you your eternal bliss, no problem!' exulted the priest. 'You didn't honour your father and mother, you shit! You should be sold off to a laboratory where they do animal experiments.'
'He has to be sent to the children's home, as it is,' Dr Rossman declared, referring to Reuben's inability ever to come of age.
'What do you mean?' Reuben asked. 'What is going on? What are you trying to tell me, for God's sake?'
''For God's sake'! Just listen to the sinner!' Prümers expostulated. He hit Reuben in the face, but his aim was poor.
'Oh, come on now,' said one of the leather-clad bikers. The others huddled closer together apprehensively. Reuben regretted he had no firearm with him.
'You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in your mouth!' hissed Prümers. 'Especially not you of all people!'
'You want to know what's going on, do you?' Rossman bawled at the boy. 'I'll tell you what's going on. After all, I am the doctor who signed the death certificates. Your father strung himself up and your mother was so fed up with the whole business, she just dropped down dead.'
Reuben went pale with shock. 'It must have all happened very quickly,' he said. 'I've only been away for fifteen minutes at the most . . .'