On Peter Markus’s Bob, or Man on Boat

I’m usually late getting to books, because I have this dramatic assumption that books are responsible for finding you. I might have stolen this idea from the Lester Bangs of Almost Famous rather than the Lester Bangs who I used to want to be. I didn’t like Almost Famous but at the time it came out I wrote music reviews and interviewed bands for the now defunct Salt for Slugs, and I would read old reviews by Bangs and Hunter Thompson, in the hopes that, I don’t know, I could grow up to be somebody.

Yesterday I read Peter Markus’ Bob, or Man on Boat. It’s as thin as the skin of a blister, and as warm as cigarette’s cherry. It’s a fish tale. Moby Dick is referenced — “Call me Bob” — there’s a fish who should be caught. There are relationships that pulse and jangle, bob as though on the water.

I’ve never read the word Bob so many times, and not got offended. It’s a peaceful name to me now.

There’s a scene in Great Expectations where Pip discovers Joe can’t read. That, while Joe often sits by the fire with a book, he is merely finding the letters of his own name. If there is a Bob out there, with a similar condition, this book is assuredly for him.

But there is a greater quality to this work than this. A repetition fantastic. A rose is a rose is a rose. A fish is a fish is a fish.

Markus’ story telling is elegantly out of focus. The aperture of his imagination is wide. The characters in the scene are seen, but all else on the perimeter is blur. This is unique for a story that takes place outside.

The river is a river. It’s not a ribbon of wet green slung between to hills as though a length of rope dangling from the branches of a tree.

The fish is a fish. It is not a shiny fleck of flesh beneath the surface of the choppy water, smiling mildly with the flash of sun.

Or some shit.

There is an agenda: to catch a fish.

There is a complication beyond that: families buckle beneath the strain of addiction to river.

After that, there are lovely muted hues. Blues and greens, yet somehow piquant with emotion.

The story stretches on beyond the 133 pages. The conclusion is in absentia.

What is it then?

A fish tale, where the fish is not gutted.

A story about two men on one river hunting to find a thing they know they’d only throw back.

So what are the 133 pages: a fish on a boat, naked in the absence of water, its gills fumbling for something to breathe, its eyes wild with fear.

But nothing is greater than almost dying. And while Markus might not produce a carcass with this thin novel — or a trophy well mounted — he allows us to catch and release the moments in our own way. He gives us a story to hold.

On and Off . . . The Road to Somewhere

I’ve been driving legally since I was 15. Back in those Iron Age days, a mere learner’s permit was all that was required to haul my indolent arse to a minimum wage ($3.10/hr.) gig at the local multiplex. Since then, I figure I’ve easily slapped on over half a million miles on the myriad vehicles I’ve owned, leased, or rented. Unlike the romantic, quintessential literary version of the “American writer” finding himself on this country’s back roads and small, rural routes, my traveling experience has come wrestling with the brutality of our ill-paved, Eisenhower-era highways.

In the 21st Century, trekking across America’s deteriorating thoroughfares is harsh business; not only on the machine itself (hello $175 front wheel alignment + labor!), but on the psyche as well. I crossed this vast country twice in my 20s; both winter trips made solo in a standard VW with no heat, power windows or steering, armed with only a mix tape of Steel Pulse tunes to keep me anchored in reality, sanity, and emotional warmth. Continuing my numerous East/West, North/South adventures since, I’ve withstood a relentless barrage of psychological warfare and propaganda dished out via billboards and AM Talk Radio. Propaganda which either tried to bully me into consuming chemically tweaked burgers, fries, and other mechanically separated chicken parts, or decreed my certain damnation unless I embraced the power of Jesus and cleansed my soul like some glazed-look Aye-aye in urgent need of salvation.

You can imagine my vindicated sense of brotherhood when I read James Reeves’s generous offering of his own, similar experiences in The Road to Somewhere. Aha, I screamed: finally a fellow writer who shuns romanticizing America’s highways in favor of the truth.

“What does it mean to be a man in the 21st Century?” is one of the questions Reeves asks in this personal and emotional memoir, and love/hate affair with The Road. And does one really find anything within oneself on the savage highways of America, like Kerouac and Cassady did back in the ’50s?

Examining Reeves’s account and literally witnessing his vision of our country through wonderful, personal photographs (Reeves is an educator, a photographer, and a designer as well) as it enters the new millennium in a chaotic, almost dismembered condition, only further obfuscates the (declining) force that is a complicated America. And that is a good thing. It’s one of the truths evident. Through his search for his own answers, contemplating family history and expected societal roles, James reveals the partitioned state that is our country, at times unveiling its Philistine, fundamentalist tendencies for maintaining status quo, at others underscoring its inventive, modern, innovative, and optimistic drive into a new era. At the core of these dueling forces we find . . . people.

Reeves personalizes The Road with profile slices of those who inhabit it, who hitchhike it, who love or loathe it, who defend it. In reading this book I found my America quickly slipping away from me; I found I know no more of it now than I did thirty-two years ago when I came to it as a refugee from a totalitarian regime. And as strange as it may sound, that should stand as a credit to this country — rapidly moving either forward or tragically backward.

Within his expansive, several-thousand-mile journey, James reveals the profile of a young, travelling man fighting to understand ideas passed down through his culture and familial rituals, and how they intersperse with the mentation of his own experiences, in his own time, as a man in America. I love this book because of its balanced helping of melancholy and brutal truth of what The Road means and how it has defined this country—both in the past and present. I love this book because it presents The Road as it is: a laborious, 15-round bout with Ali or Frazier; a ferocious ballet.

At the Top of My Voice in the Middle of the Main Square

Dear Ana,

I’m happy to let you know that A Megaphone has arrived. I spent the whole afternoon yesterday reading it, enjoying most of all the fact that this book of essays on the position of female poets in the society includes several essays by Croatian authors. I also remembered how you and I had started working together. At the time, I had been trying to persuade several Croatian poets to write on this topic, I wanted to publish their texts in the journal Tema and then send them on to you, for your research. I recalled how difficult it had been to persuade the poets, but still, I had managed to collect about twenty essays and publish them in the special issue of Tema: “Women Poets.” Later on I had sent them to you and gradually forgotten all about that. After a while you had told me that a book was in the making, texts being selected and translated. The editors Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young had chosen the essays by Croatian authors who, with the exception of Vesna Biga, had never been included in literary anthologies. They had picked those they had considered the most interesting. Later on, it turned out not to be easy to explain the choice. A lot of questions had been raised: Why those particular authors? Who were they to decide? Etc.

But, all of that doesn’t matter now. A Megaphone is in my hand. I impatiently leaf through the book, looking for the explanation why this title. And here it is, I’ve found it. Poetas de Megafono (Poets of the Megaphone) is a group of feminist poets who work on the literary fringes of Mexico City. They meet at a café and read poetry through a megaphone. We usually associate megaphones with public protests, but what’s the point of reading poetry through such a device? The point is that in the social sphere women are usually unseen and their voices unheard so this way of reading poetry is the poets’ attempt to be “heard”, to attain a space of their own and to mark it with their art. Poetry spoken through a megaphone resounds like a rallying cry, goes beyond the expectations of polite recitation, becomes akin to protest speeches of disenfranchised workers. . . .

Poetry as emancipation — or is it merely a utopian inscription? I’ve recently received a book from Germany, titled Forgotten Future: The Politics of Poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was written in English by a young Bosnian theoretician Damir Arsenijević. His main premise is that poetry has a re-politicising potential, since poetry, as Arsenijević points out, “lends voice and establishes relationships between alternative models of subjectivisation (feminist, gay, queer) and new, mutual solidarities, while at the same time opposing their exclusion.” Arsenijević constructs the notion of  poetry of difference, i.e. the poetry that acts as a critical voice in relation to a dominant ideology, since male and female poets who voice an excluded element’s position consequently create a new community, while simultaneously creating, as the author emphasises, a politics of hope which opposes the dominant model of manipulation through trauma, in Bosnia and Herzegovina either denied, or mythologized, or medicated. Poetry as an emancipative discourse, says Arsenijević, is above all the poetry written by women, who develop their voices and create a social space for women, but also — which has never occurred before in Bosnian and Herzegovian poetry — for homosexuals. Still, in spite of this poetics of hope, is not a poet, as Faruk Šehić writes, “a tumour on the healthy tissue of a techno-maniacal capitalism”?

I find the name of a friend of mine in A Megaphone, Dubravka Đurić, a poet and critic from Belgrade. I met Dubravka at Women’s Studies in Belgrade nine years ago. She gave me a book then, a collection of poetry and essays by women who reflected on their poetic position called Discursive Bodies of Poetry: A New Generation of Women Poets’ Poetry and Autopoetics. That was my first glimpse into the female poetry writing in Serbia. For a long time Dubravka had organised poetic workshops at the Women’s Initiative Association. During the war both male and female authors who thought of poetry in terms of activism and collective work gathered there. It had been a kind of sanctuary in those not at all poetic years, when young people had become hostages of aggressive politics, unable to travel anywhere as their country had been boycotted. In a rented flat in the centre of Belgrade they had not read their poetry through a megaphone, they had no connection whatsoever with the city’s cultural life. Completely marginalised, they had been reflecting on and revealing links between poetry and politics, those two usually disparate notions. But, as Maja Solar, a young poet from Novi Sad remarks, isn’t any place of speech by definition a political space, therefore, is it at all possible to take poetry as mere transcendence or aesthetic game?

I think about all of this while impatiently leafing through A Megaphone. It is warm in the room, I can see dark clouds through the window, there’s going to be a storm. They aren’t rare here anymore, dear Ana. The days of light drizzle are gone, instead we have brief outpours and in the background, like stage settings, thunder and wind that can uproot a tree or at least blow a few tiles off roofs. But I’m no longer scared of such “storms,” they have become predictable just like the threatening sound of sirens used to be during the war, they don’t yet alarm of chaos, although they announce it. I remember people started ignoring those general danger alerts after a while, because in our parts they didn’t signal attacks or direct aggression. I somehow feel that in recent years people have been trying to forget the nineties, like they never existed, that some even wish to label them as obscene years. I find it strange, I don’t like it when people renounce their former passions, when they try to erase memories. Sometimes everything seems so simple — everybody’s the same, we are all the Balkans barbarians. But what about Americans and all those superpowers, isn’t it possible that were we just pawns in their games? I’m giving it a lot of thought, because lately I’ve felt like the nineties were back: people protesting in squares, shouting through megaphones messages to the “unjust world” which passes judgment on and sentences our generals while the crimes committed by superpowers remain unsanctioned. Our independent state doesn’t in fact exist, it’s been sold out, all that is left are the memories of the dream of independence and a bitter aftertaste.

I think of the great poet Boris Maruna and his beautiful poetry about the loss of the dream of a state, about disillusionment. His poetry is so very different from those cheap, sentimental little patriotic ditties, which haven’t survived anyway. Unlike the authors of patriotic pamphlets, Maruna stresses:

“But a Croatian poet has a right
And a patriotic duty
To say what’s bugging him.”

Another Croatia he so passionately depicts in his verse, imagining it at the end of the world, powerful above graves, equivalent to the Good and Love – there is no such Croatia today. The metaphorical sea upon which it was supposed to rest has withdrawn and Croatia got stranded. As well as the illusion of justice and pride. How to reawaken hope and enthusiasm? Poetry as the politics of hope. . . . Today poetry is read in closed circles, at poorly attended recitals. The lovers of poetry don’t read it through a megaphone but withdraw into the intimacy of their homes. Squares are no longer agorae. Can this be changed, even though we have already lost our pride? Maybe there remains the strength to take a megaphone, to show our dignity and defiance?

I read Celan writing about black milk and black flakes: “There isn’t anyone anymore to mould us of soil and clay, to talk of our dust. . . .” Ana, I feel like quoting so many poems by so many poets, I feel like saying them at the top of my voice in the middle of the main square, among the crowds of people carrying bags with groceries. While I’m closing this letter, the sound of a commercial comes through the window, spoken through a megaphone. Cheap fried fish and fun in your town, come, come, says the voice that drowns all others on this Sunday afternoon, alluring through the megaphone.

Well, Ana, all I’ve wanted to say is that the book has arrived, and look where it’s led me. To the true reality. Maybe that’s for the best. Both the calm before the storm and the storm have ended, the roofs are intact, the books are waiting, not yet read, but new meetings can be glimpsed.

Take care,
Darija

AJS’s Work Here Is Like An Acidic Trance

Anna Joy Springer’s The Vicious Red Relic, Love is a grotesque, deteriorating castle. A self-made castle that like the resilience of outlying sheds remains as it (and the life it is describing) is falling apart.

AJS calls the book “a fabulist memoir” and I agree that in it there is the esteemed norm of “memoir”-tone being turned by choice or necessity into something beautifully disgraceful. There is a rigor of bends in this book. Bounties of fracture: “Scar[s] on the mouth of a cave.”

In addition to other very exciting aspects, the book exceeds many of the usual limits of book and bleeds into the heat of contemporary gender and identity. This is one of the reasons that this book has made itself a primary for me. “I’m not a woman and I’m not a man. So, no matter what I do, I lose. But I want my loss to count” or “we had sex and she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and the wise whore (as all whores are), and me the dumb hermaphroditic girl /  boy, and I was jerked off and devirginated by this whore because I was going to learn how to be a boy whore” or “femininity is wounded masculinity.” I mean, really? This writing just turns me on. The blatantness. The naming. The pain of becoming and being revealed by way of the prurient requirements of our relations. The viscosity of the gaps and the radicality of “things made hybrid without their consent.” This writing is entirely bodily even as it taxes and puts pressure on current political identities (ie: “queer”) in order to progress them.

In AJS’ brilliant book we are sucked into a new kind of nature. If not new it is a nature that has been underground or out of normative view. A nature where violences of many kinds are mandatory and once they are engaged act as a sort of respite. “After practicing my violence so often, the practice seemed to tilt toward virtuosity.” Here stimulation and violence slowly become synonymous.

AJS’s book is mixed media in every facet of the term. There are collages, sketches and snippets from synopology articles. There are old diary excerpts and fragments of myth. There is an origami tin foil friend / confidante / guru often referred to as “winky.” There is “Gil” the bindery-needing lover. There is fear of aids. There are feminist declaratives and extravagant “conceptual-emotional experiences” of many kinds. AJS’s work here is like an acidic trance. “Let them ride through the nights on the backs of bright smears.” A kicking queer king becomes us by way of this amazing beast of a book!

Death Envelops This Book Like A Turtleneck Sweater: A Review of Jim Krusoe's Girl Factory

Girl Factory starts with an incident to which we can all relate. Jonathan, a lowly employee at a yogurt shop, frees a dog from the pound and it immediately kills a boy scout. I hate when that happens.

In Jim Krusoe’s world, every decision we make is life or death. I was thinking about Girl Factory a few weeks ago as I stood behind a moving car and calmly told the driver to go ahead and hit me. In that moment, it was crucial that I stop this car from stealing the parking spot I was saving for my brother. For a brief moment, I was the kind of guy that was prepared to get flattened over something really, really stupid.

It turns out that Jonathan is the type of guy who will forego his own future to save six women trapped in suspended animation in the basement of the yogurt shop where he works. Warning:  This book contains naked women immersed in giant cylinders of yogurt. It’s also laugh out loud funny and very dark.

Jonathan is looking for a cause, something to believe in. In the opening chapter, he reads about a genetically enhanced dog that is being held at the pound. (Later, this same dog will help a blind man count cards in Vegas.) Jonathan doesn’t consider any options before deciding to rescue him. In his rashness, he releases the wrong dog and we already know what happened to the boy scout.

We learn about Jonathan’s old girlfriend, who may or may not be one of the women in the basement, and their college group honoring extinct animals. We meet a strange cast of characters including the owner of the yogurt shop (who is beaten to death) and Jonathan’s neighbor Captain Bloxheim (who dies alone in his apartment). Death envelops this book like a turtleneck sweater.

By now you’re probably wondering: Why are women submersed in yogurt in the basement of the yogurt shop? You might even be wondering why the yogurt shop has a basement. In Jonathan’s search for meaning, these questions are irrelevant. All that matters is that he save the women. And this involves a very elaborate process of getting them out of the yogurt cylinders and into a solution of water and liquid detergent in precisely the right amount of time. It’s so crazy that it almost makes sense.

With the whole death being a turtleneck sweater thing, you’re probably able to guess the success of Jonathan’s efforts. In one of the most telling moments of the book, he imagines he’s talking to the customers coming into the yogurt shop:

“You think you are looking at a contented employee of a comfortable suburban yogurt shop, but you are wrong, wrong wrong. Because the person you are looking at has been given only one thing to do, out of the countless things people can accomplish in life, and guess what? He can’t even do that.”

Despite all of the strangeness, Krusoe hits these moments of human frailty perfectly. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to save women floating in yogurt or a parking spot for your brother, every action is an opportunity to find out what you stand for. What if Jonathan had rescued the correct dog at the beginning? It would have been him that took Vegas for four hundred thousand dollars with a card-counting canine instead of that blind guy. And maybe his boss wouldn’t have been beaten to death before he could explain the women in the basement to Jonathan. And just maybe, he would have never found out about the women in the first place. The most trivial decision you make could change your whole life.

Or you might kill a boy scout.

Morocco Is Not A Noun

Knowing both Kendra and Matthew knowing parts of their history together knowing them individually knowing them personally is a pleasure. Knowing the color of their eyes knowing that one likes to lean back while the other sits up during a conversation on Skype knowing the way either of them smokes a cigarette knowing the regular tones of their voices. Being a part of their history their history of their love their history together and how that history came to be and what that meant and what that means and what that will mean. With Morocco they offer that to anyone they offer a written history that shows pieces of their similarities that shows pieces of their differences from each other and from us. That they wrote poems to each other while living in different cities that they wrote poems to each other while together in the same city that they wrote poems to each other at all is important to their shared history is important to our shared history. Redefining seemingly insignificant moments in the story of their history is how their Morocco begins to surprisingly form.

i’ve been trying to
watch children walk
lately, to see exactly
what you meant
by that

Many histories of love start rapidly they start so fast that they will always finish. They start too fast and then they finish and that is the end of that particular history of love. Morocco is a history of love that has an end but not a finish. Morocco is a history of love that starts gradually that started more gradual than most other histories of love that finish fast. Morocco is a history of love that ends without a finish. Defining the space between them is how Kendra and Matthew make their Morocco the story of their history is made from instants that most others would let go would let pass un-noticed.

the moment we moved beyond
whatever we were
to whatever we are now
happened when you pushed
on my bladder
and i fell down

Many histories of love have been written before. Many written histories of love involve stories of love written from within stories of love written around stories of love. Many written histories of love have been remarkable and such stories of love are the exciting ones. With so many histories of love written before writing a history of love seems an easy thing to do. Writing an exciting history of love is not an easy thing to do. In their history of love Kendra and Matthew write a history of love that makes a history of love that is exciting and that is interesting. Their history of love shows many stories of love some that have been written before and many more that have not. Some that may seem familiar to us and some that may not. Their written history of love is interesting because we do not know necessarily which person is writing their history of love at any given moment within their story of love. Their written history of love is exciting because we come to understand how each of their histories of love is entwined to make one mutual history of love. Kendra and Matthew take their own history of love take their own histories of love and make one complete history of love. From many histories of love they make one a very remarkable and exciting one. Such a history of love is what is needed now and always.

it would be a pity if i ended up
murdering you in your sleep

“The false wall resounded with arpeggios of curses and shrieked bitches.”

Rediscovery is an odd compliment. When somebody says, “Dalkey Archive Press has rediscovered a forgotten Modernist with their new release Stories and Essays of Mina Loy”, what they’re really saying is that Mina Loy was forgotten for many years, but now a dedicated team of literary detectives has unearthed her from obscurity. This sounds good and adds some life to an important book, but Loy was never forgotten. There has never been a time since 1920 that groups, however small, haven’t flocked to Loy for sustenance. But we like to feel like we’re doing Loy a solid, so the bookish world pats itself on the back by proclaiming we’ve found treasure. So. . . .

Dalkey Archive Press has rediscovered a forgotten Modernist with their new release Stories and Essays of Mina Loy. Never before published in this form, this collection of narrative work contains fiction, theatre, and critical essays that range from meditations on Gertrude Stein, fairy tales, tawdry interludes, early 20th century feminist thought, and a ballet. Loy is known primarily as a poet, Lunar Baedecker is and will be her most read work, but with this collection we can see that she was an incredibly diverse and prolific writer. A writer’s writer, she is not to be taken lightly. A pure High Modernist, Loy’s writing, although colloquial and familiar even to a contemporary reader, is particularly concerned, and interested in itself as Art. By that I mean that trickery abounds.

Her tricks show up as a didactic, pragmatic style that lulls you into a false sense of security, and then the text sucker punches you with an impossibly subtle complexity. Muhammad Ali once said that he could never be knocked out by a punch he could see coming. Faulkner, Auster, or Milton, couldn’t knock out Ali, but Loy would have him down and out in the first round. She’s the punch you don’t see coming.

With over 400 pages and 37 separate pieces, the collection can seem a bit daunting and is difficult to define in anything but the most-broad terms. I’ve provided the broad look above. But books don’t come to me on broad terms, they come to me in sentences. Mina Loy’s sentences are wonderful. In a hilarious and disjointed short story (it’s actually the first piece in the collection) “The Agony of the Partition” Loy writes: “The false wall resounded with arpeggios of curses and shrieked bitches.” Has there ever been a more wonderful sentence? I say, no. Well, maybe, but today it’s my favorite. This mixture of High (arpeggios) and Low (false wall) creates a natural friction that could only be described as “shrieked bitches.” Everything that Modernism set out to be, Loy accomplishes in this one sentence. Even after considering the failures of so much early twentieth century literature, we can still point to a couple truths and say Pound was a grand teacher, Stein a deft guide, Joyce was the bold mistake that changed everything, and Eliot was the talent, but this most wonderful sentence came from Mina Loy, and it shows why she belongs, too.