On Michael J. Seidlinger's The Sky Conducting

I was sitting at a bar with a friend and when I went out to smoke he looked at my copy of The Sky Conducting.

After I came back in he said, “There are a lot of good lines in this.”

I agreed. The book is formed from one-sentence paragraphs that pile on top of each other, much like you might see in Nietszche, Wittgenstein, Markson, Noah Cicero, or Sam Pink.

It begins with instructions regarding how to read the book, like you would get for a piece of modern technology. Seidlinger seems to be saying that that novel can be “modern” too — it can be complex and advanced enough to require instructions. After reading this book, I couldn’t agree more.

The instructions discuss breathing while reading the text. This reminded me of the art piece “Body Pressure” by Bruce Nauman. Are the instructions to be followed, or broken, or both?

At first, I found some of the messages to be not very subtle. The premise of this book is that America “dies” . . . literally, like its collective heart stops beating. But then I realized there was a lot of playing around with the semantics of the abstract, ideological words that pervade our culture.

Similarly, I initially wondered about the “good” aspects of American culture that were being overlooked in the text, but this passed as well, because as the book progresses we get less abstraction and more humanity from the main characters, who are mostly all American (no pun intended).

The novel allowed me to reflect on how we are part of a stationary mimesis. The post-apocalyptic premise serves as a sort of metaphor for the nihilism/pessimism/stasis of the recession. Our dreams are equally hope and fiction, inspiration and irreality.

One of my favorite lines: “After all the talk about the end of the world the grand irony was that it actually happened.”

There is a lot of confronting the reader. Everything about this novel is confrontational.

A lot of times post-apocalyptic shit can be bleak as fuck, but Seidlinger balances both humor and humanity.

Sometimes technology has agency in this novel, and that gave me headaches. Of course, another one of my favorite lines was, “Headaches are good because they mean the mind is still working.”

There is a lot of black market trade in this book, and yet somehow it all seemed calmer and more humane the everyday American market we know. It seemed people related to people as people more, and that they were more direct in their relationships, in this book, whereas in the “real-life” marketplace people relate to cashiers and salesman and producers and consumers and customers and managers and middlemen. In today’s legal, and increasingly digital, markets we seem to relate more to abstractions than to humans.

By the end of the book the past tense takes over, there is no more present tense. This is how America is becoming. We can’t talk about the future, because we don’t know if we can believe in it.

Something About KA-BOOM: An Interview with JA Tyler and John Dermot Woods

Stories, like the universe, are born of conflict. Electrons combine and collide, energy is born, KA-BOOM. Characters shout or sexualize, murder or meddle, KA-BOOM. As readers, we yearn for the KA-BOOMy climax. We lose ourselves in 800-page novels, needing to know what happens next. That’s narrative.

Sometimes a conflict is born off the page, between the reader and the words. The reader doesn’t quite comprehend what’s written, stops reading, thinks, and then, KA-BOOM. The reader emerges victorious over the un-understanding.

Like this, conflict makes us smarter, too.

So — here’s a Picasso quote with which I found myself conflicted:

“Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.”

I opened No One Told Me I Was Going To Disappear believing all art forms equally valid. But, like Picasso assumes above, still in conflict with each other. While painting beats writing for Picasso, most writers, I believe, will disagree. Because — KA-BOOM — writing is the most versatile of forms, a kind of code that worms into the hard-wired emotions. No matter how beautiful the painting or song, language can match (or exceed) it. (As a writer with no talent for drawing and deeply imperfect pitch, I have to believe this).

But in this extraordinary piece of art, JA Tyler and John Dermot Woods refuse the matter. No One Told Me I Was Going To Disappear combines writerly with painterly, harnessing the energy of a natural formal conflict and resolving it toward the common purpose of so much art—the love story. No One Told Me I Was Going To Disappear tells us a great deal. Not only do we find a story in which to lose ourselves, but a lesson in the nature of story-telling itself.

KA-BOOM.

*

Over the last few weeks, J.A. Tyler and John Dermot Woods were kind enough to elaborate.

JOSEPH RIIPPI: You likely won’t be surprised that what I want to begin asking about regarding No One Told Me I Was Going To Disappear is the relationship between the text and artwork. Can you talk a bit about that relationship with regards to the writing of the book? How much did the art inform the text, and vice versa? Were the artwork and prose created simultaneously or responding one to the other? What can you say with regards to your being “co-authors” as opposed to author and illustrator?

J.A. TYLER and JOHN DERMOT WOORDS: No One Told Me I Was Going to Disappear is a novel composed in art and text where each individual piece of art is a new chapter in the story, and each individual text is likewise a new chapter. But in terms of how the book as a whole was created, it was very much a dialogue between artists. Once we had struck a deal to do a project like this, which mostly consisted of a few emails saying “Want to do this?” and “Hell yeah,” John composed the first piece of art, the opening chapter, and sent it to J. A. Tyler. Tyler then wrote a piece of text as a response or conversation with that piece of art. When Tyler was done, he sent that text to John who would then compose a new chapter of art as a response to Tyler’s words. We did this, back and forth over the course of nearly a year, and the result was a co-written novel, a book that we believe is pretty unique in that it isn’t illustrations for a text and it isn’t a graphic novel, it is a collaborative narrative told in two mediums, by two authors, one chapter at a time.

JR: There seems to have been a conscious decision on your part to keep the artwork on equal terms with the text, too. The first and last chapters of the book, for instance, are pieces of artwork. Can you talk about that decision, to introduce your reader via artwork as opposed to language?

JATAJDW: It wasn’t exactly conscious to begin and end with art. John started the story and he decided to draw something. We also found an end in a chapter that happened to be drawn. We were interested in the narrative possibilities of words and images working together, but not in the more organic mode of comics in which they occupy the same space. Once we finished the book, we were pleased at how complementary the two storytelling approaches are. There is certainly no impression of ‘illustration’ or ‘captioning’ in this novel. It does seem that despite our increased ability to interact with non-textual work, images still largely work as inessential elements of literature (as ‘added bonuses’ or as a marketing element). We’re glad that No One Told I Was Going to Disappear functions as story told in words and told in pictures.

JR: Many independent presses are known for taking a great deal of care in the production of their books. Jaded Ibis goes even a step further with their fine art and sound editions. In the fine art editions for this, the reader has to make a decision between destroying the artwork to get to the words, or destroying the words to get to the artwork. Doesn’t this in some way contradict the “normal” edition of the book, where the text and artwork mingle? Are the fine art and “normal” editions meant to stand alone, or should they be considered equal parts of the larger artwork?

JATAJDW: Debra DiBlasi (our publisher) might be able to answer this question better than we can, at least in terms of her idea of doing these editions for all of our books. But, for us, we wanted an edition that basically indulged the obvious fault line that we had left in our work. Our collaborative method of composing a whole novel together, but sections independently, leaves the scars of our work showing. By not combining words and pictures in single sections, the separation, and hopefully tension, between these two methods of storytelling remains obvious. We wanted the fine art edition to irritate this threat that the words might overtake the pictures or the pictures might consume the words, and basically force our reader to do just that.

JR: The jacket copy describes the book as both “horror story and love story.” In my first read, it felt much the latter, perhaps because that’s the kind of story I was looking for at the moment. But in a second read, I found myself more drawn to what I guess one would call the “horror” aspects, the moments of separation. (Maybe it’s the same reason). The tension between the images and text, and the tension within the images and text themselves, seems to draw from this simultaneous coming-together and ripping-apart, emotionally. I’m curious if you find or found yourselves falling one way or another in your own emotions for the book. Does your own unified voice (as in these answers) come from equal-and-opposite forces, or parallels?

JATAJDW: Wow, Joe. I think the answer is “yes.” You described our exact experience. As we passed the story back and forth, the constant challenge was to invent (change) but by harnessing what had been given to us. The fact that this novel ended up being a story about the absolutely terrifying nature of love — the fear of loss, both of self and the person or thing that you can’t control — seems to be a likely result of the way we worked together.

Don’t Let Your Reason Get the Best of You Today: A Review of Seth Fried's The Great Frustration

This world is crazy weird. People are out doing wild and unexplainable things, living and dying in wild and unexplainable ways. The madness is a religion and I want awe to be my practice. Seth Fried’s stories make me want to stand up somewhere, somewhere high where people will see me, and let rip a wild, wild scream that rattles my body and shatters the windows. Because maybe, just maybe, all this sanity and order is only a veil. Beneath lies a bizarre world and bizarre lives that we are dutifully marching through. It pays to take notice.

Seth Fried’s collection, The Great Frustration, is a series of distinct stories. They aren’t bound together by theme or character and, with the exception of the final story, they are all very short. They are mostly narrated by some unexplained observer and there’s a gaping absence of characters. Fried’s dry wit and comedy has a way of being dark without quite realizing it, and for my money that’s the brilliance that shines through the stories. They are somehow intensely personal, human in a way that transcends a character. They are asking big questions that, at first, seem small. They are grim and profound and full of lots of human truthiness. And still you are laughing, just to yourself, at how ridiculous the whole thing is — this life, the world, and us in it.

My favorite of the collection is the title story, which I felt so compelled to read out loud to my boyfriend on the Metro. I might add that I’m not the sort of person to read out loud on the train, but I can’t say that I had a choice – the story made my senses crawl in such a way that I had to read it out loud to get it outside of myself. This story, The Great Frustration, takes us through a host of animals in the garden at the dawn of creation. The animals are discovering and fighting their very imperfect urges to maul and eat one another. The parrot sees a cat perched beside him on a tree branch and believes the cat to be jealous that it can’t fly. The cat wonders at his urge to feel the snap of the parrot’s neck between his jaws. A mite scales the hills and valleys of an elephant’s crotch and wonders if there’s nothing more to life.

I read this collection months ago and, for all these months, I have been telling everyone that I loved the stories without being able to explain quite why I loved them. After months of distilling, it has come down to this: a heart-aching longing. The emotion that these stories have drummed up inside of me is the pure and human longing for something that is just out of reach. In each story, we are grasping for ways to close gaps, to get a little bit of everything, to reach that thing we so desire. Months after reading the stories, I still feel an uncomfortable twinge, a memory, an urge that I can’t explain, a desire for something.

And this longing is bound up and tied in the final story of the collection, titled “Animalcula.” We, the readers, are young scientists falling in love with a host of microscopic creatures known as animalcula. We are looking deeper and deeper still, clicking the dial on the microscope, magnifying again and again. With little prodding, we become completely enamored with these creatures — a love doomed to be unrequited. “That is: All animalcula are so small that, though they are all around us, it is as if they exist on a different plane than our own, one impossibly distant.”

So we are left with this longing, but it is an honest longing. It is not the kind that makes you despair; it is the kind that makes you realize you are human. So pull back the veil and take a look.

An Interview with J.P. Dancing Bear

KMA Sullivan: Recently I had the very good fortune to talk with J.P. Dancing Bear about his new collection Family of Marsupial Centaurs released by Iris Press. This mesmerizing collection of poems originally emerged from a desire to respond to friends on their birthdays and grew to a year-long project producing over 1400 pieces that offer a gifted poet’s integration of visual art, biographical information, and personal remembrance. Let’s take a look at the work and a few of Bear’s thoughts on the collection.

Saint HelenaAugust 10

you hear  the voice of  Federico Garcia Lorca  weeping: in every guitar: which are always of two minds: one searching for the strumming hands of a musician: the other desiring to  sing for everyone: and  does not care if it is discovered by the clumsy feet of a Galapagos turtle: which reminds you of Napoleon Bonaparte: in exile: where he took to standing on the back of a turtle: (one sailors had brought to solve the entire loneness of the Atlantic Ocean): because the turtle was so adept at ravaging the emperor’s vegetable garden: Napoleon had finally reached a compromise with something: he rode standing on the shelled back: in windswept mornings: hand in vest: reading the great philosophers: to his reptilian companion: at night: after the turtle would eclipse in heavy underbrush: then trundle over to forage the garden: the emperor would weep: having lost everything: again: even the slow moving turtle moon: with its wide O-mouth: mimicking the singing face: of a weeping guitar

 —for Mark Doty

KMA Sullivan: I have to tell you that because you are the only person I know who I address as “Bear” and because you show up in my email as “Dancing,” I declare your name: Best. Name. Ever. But I feel compelled to ask — what does the J.P. stands for? If you get asked this all the time or don’t like the question feel free to ignore!

J.P. Dancing Bear: I do get asked it a lot. Jerold Pierre. Just a mouthful. I used to just go by “Dancing Bear” when I first started, but there was a singer-song writer in Santa Cruz who used that name, and another poet on the east coast who apparently did so too. And then people who didn’t know me, kept calling me “Dancing” and I just decided that adding the “J.P.” at the beginning made things easier for everyone. Although, I still get the occasional address “Dancing” . . .

Tristan and IsoldeFebruary 27

together they marry: she is always reaching out: he, with his dandelion head, is afraid of weather: in their uneven seams of shadow small animals have made a home: first mice: he has a pair of entwined trees for an advocate— roots snaking this way and that: she believes in the power of wheelbarrows: she is a strong supporter of underbrush: many birds move into her hair: there is a storm on the horizon: light breaking everywhere: and then he realizes that she is not reaching but positioning her hands to protect him from a gust of wind 

—for Oliver de la Paz

KMA Sullivan: These poems are described in your introduction as at least partly ekphrastic. Could you talk about the role of visual art in the emergence of this collection? How do you think of the ekphrastic elements of the pieces as being in relation to the personal reflections about the friends whose birthdays are the springboards for these poems?

J.P. Dancing Bear: I used the artwork as the backbone. What would happen is on the occasional days where the writing workload was not too much, I would spend a few hours looking at art and would say have a feeling that it might be something I could use. I liked the various movements of surrealists best, probably because they were more malleable to the project at hand. So I had a bank of hundreds of paintings and sometimes photos.  Then I would go to each friend’s Facebook wall and read their recent statuses, their hobbies, their interests, favorite music, movies, and quotes. Then I would take my notes and find a piece of art that would best go with the them. This meant my idea window for writing was something of about 20 to 30 minutes. I would generally do this in the morning, then reread in the afternoon before posting. I would say this worked about 300 days out of the year. The other 60 I would struggle harder with the work, but the idea of loosing the challenge I had given myself would finally motivate me to finish.

Floating Away at NightMay 26

you see a boat: almost too white in the night: as if the universe had forgotten to tell it to dim: its reflection ripples and drifts back to where you are: and now this feeling of needing to be on it: as it noses further into the dark: beyond the few visible white crests of waves: and it’s not for the leaving that makes  you want to be onboard: not because you feel entrapped: it has nothing to do with escape or freedom: it is that brightness: slipping into the unknown: casting light where only the blackness of night is expected

—for Martin Vest

KMA Sullivan: In your introduction you mention settling on a form for this collection that you first encountered in CD Wright’s work. I am intrigued by your use of prose poem blocking while employing colons to separate thoughts. It feels as if you are imposing a type of lineation on an intentionally unlineated form. I love the tension you create with this choice. Could you talk about the ways in which this form supports the poems in your collection? What were you trying to accomplish through the form and do you feel you achieved it?

J.P. Dancing Bear: First off, the prose/colon blocking was probably about 90% of the poems; there were some straight-on free verse poems and a few gacelas, but they are not in this collection. At first, when I started the project I wrote mainly traditional prose pieces. I was satisfied completely with the end-result. Prior to this process, I wrote mainly free-verse, with an occasional venture into rhyme and meter or prose poetry. I’m not sure why I remembered two C.D. Wright poems “Song of the Gourd” and “Crescent”, it is probably because I had heard her read these poems and (because I generally consider sound above all else in my work) the form seemed a good way to build more sound into the prose work I was doing. I was instantly satisfied with the result and the style took over. When I was in the editing process, looking to submit work to journals, I rewrote a lot of the earlier prose poems into this form. I still use it to write some of my new poems.

Still Life with MandolinMarch 28

sound hole of seeds: a thumbnail moon to strum the strings of a lyric body: nourishment and lullaby: blue curtain night: greensleeves on greenleaves: ear twitch: god tonight the animals want to sup on the tender flesh of music: sprout tune: vibrate: glisten: blossom and root: fill the room with acoustic aroma: tart sweetness: seed queen: lean into lyric wondering: tendril and pluck: the musicians gather: fruit heart: they bow: they plead play in the new day

 —for Ada Limón

KMA Sullivan: While the poems you created are not entirely biographical in nature, they were inspired by specific birthdays and you have mentioned using biographical information such as hobbies and interests posted on Facebook, as starting points for the different poems. Did any interpersonal issues arise as a result of this? How much license did you feel comfortable taking in the service of the poems? And did anyone respond negatively to the poem written for their birthday?

J.P. Dancing Bear: In the total 1408 poems I wrote, there were two people who responded by saying that they didn’t think the poem accurately captured them. The feeling I felt is very much the same as when you give a gift to someone that’s “wrong.”  It’s a little more than embarrassing and I guess I should count my good fortunes that it didn’t happen more than that. The main reaction that I got from the poems were a lot of people were really thrilled by their poem and I still get messages from people thanking me for the gift. I think this has brought me closer to a lot of the recipients, as mutual fans, contemporaries and friends.

Nautical Still LifeAugust 11

you are watching on the breezeless deck: as though you have stumbled upon a still life: a square is mocking another square: because  it has  found a  life  boat: canvas bunches to make the outline of a face: you say quit casting shadows: but only more lines fall: you call out: the aura of oars: but they stand straight-faced: not a hint of laughing: even the flags are twisting: they dream of becoming boomerangs: almost  free enough to soar away: you test the rigging: yes—taunt enough: the oars are jealous: of the lifeboat’s rudder: everything is so anxious in its aspiration: you can see the sun starting to sink: red skies—those damn lucky sailors

—for Dana Guthrie Martin

KMA Sullivan: Could you take us through the process you employed in taking a set of over 1408 poems and cutting that down to 82 in the finished book? This seems a mind-bending task. Did some of your thoughts about the collection shift during the editing process?

J.P. Dancing Bear: I didn’t actually go back and begin editing the originals until I was half way through the project. At that point I started pulling the poems that I felt best about and began the normal editing process of evaluating word choices and phrasing. Then some of the decision process was made by poems being published and some of the responses I received from those published poems. When I was contacted by the publisher, I had a group of about 160 poems that had gone through the editing process at least once. I then read through them and picked the ones that I thought went best together. I’m still going through the birthday poems and editing them now, and more have been published since then. I now have a second manuscript of birthday poems put together and ready.

By DesignMay 17

someone  is  always  crafting  something: an  animal  built for travel: retractable wings: rudder: engine room: and wheels: here you  say love is the possibility of shapes: down a hallway and you are following ribboning lines: and you think about language: being fluid: flowing: here you say a language without love would surely die: someone is stitching fabric to a couch: one they have  imagined: framed: cut from wood: here you say love is building a place where your friends can relax—stay a while—and talk

—for Patty Paine

KMA Sullivan: The strict parameters you set for yourself regarding poem generation within this project are striking. Has that working process influenced your current creative process?

J.P. Dancing Bear: YES!  Since the birthday poems project ended, I started a Facebook group that has a weekly ekphrastic challenge. And so once a week, at least, I usually can sit down and write a poem to a painting. The birthday poem project also made me realize that writer’s block is a mental block writers imposes upon themselves for whatever reasons.

SymbioticSeptember 30

the woodpeckers are in love with  your new look: ruff of a burl: ball dress of wood: you prefer peacocks: the eyes of Argus: look out: o look out: for the predators of burrowing birds: nesting near hoops: in knotholes and grains: they flap at all intruders: you feel safe in their graces: this family of beaks and quills: you watch after the  fledglings:  when the parents forage: they nuzzle  in tight: under the eaves of your collar: sometimes the adults bring you a bouquet of dandelions: pulled out by the roots: you’ve developed a common language of life: you help preen their speckled bodies: they stencil your gown: in a pattern: percussing a code: a code: a code: of love

—for Julianna Baggott

KMA Sullivan: Can you tell us something about what you are working on now?

J.P. Dancing Bear: I just finished a year long project of 52 love poems based on a lot of surrealist artwork. And I’m still working in the Facebook Ekphrastic group, and out of that group I’ve realized a sub-project of “days” which started last year when I wrote a poem titled “Labor Day” and one titled “Father’s Day”. I’ve written four more since then and now I’ve realized what it is, I’ll finish it out. And I have a second manuscript of birthday poems now compiled.

KMA Sullivan: Thank you so much to J.P. Dancing Bear for offering his time and his poetry. Let’s finish with one more from Family of Marsupial Centaurs.

WritingNovember 19

today you sit down to write in long hand: you dress the part: in garb from another century: quill pen and inkwell: but this is only for mood and ambiance: you work through the process slowly: you build stanzas: intricate metrics and geometry: tiered lines: words with angles: each as valid as the other: spheres orbiting refrains: edges are created: sections are not X’ed out: so much as an exit to begin new ideas: you embody the poem: taking on its features and angles: or it becomes you: bringing to light those curves and corners you had not realized are there

—for David Yezzi

Identity Schisms: The Space Between Desire and Fulfillment

Earlier this year, budding Virginia poet Gabby Gabby released a new e-chapbook in .pdf format. First impression: Pretty Flowers is brief. Very brief. Discounting the cover, a postscript and two small illustrations of Virginia, the .pdf only has twenty pages of text (a mere 65 sentences) in a very large, peach font. The poem’s meaning lies compacted into so few words but with some reflection and re-reading, it expands outward like a haiku.

The chapbook begins with the declaration that the poet would like to visit every state fair:

I want to go to every statefair in the United States.

I donʼt think I really likestate fairs but I like theidea of being the type ofperson that likes state fairs.

I think if I tried hardenough I could really bethat person.

From this simple premise, the author touches on a variety of issues revolving around the concept of identity. She admits to feeling the angst of missing out on life, the need to travel in order to feel fulfilled. She ponders whether or not she would break her vegan diet for the sake of eating a corn dog, the staple food of state fairs. She confesses that she does not like state fairs, but likes the idea of being someone who does.

In a brief set of nine stanzas, the author’s self has already begun to unfold with some its complexities: let’s take, for an example, her vegan diet, which is inarguably trendy, and also a diet typically prone to questioning and prodding to determine authenticity – non-vegans seem to always know just enough about veganism to interrogate their vegan counterparts and find flaws in their adherence to the diet. In mentioning her veganism immediately contrasted by the need to eat corn dogs for the sake of ‘completing’ an image, that of the state fair-goer, Gabby has awoken this disparity between what we are and what we try to be in an interesting way. Just as non-vegans will ask vegans why they don’t crave meat when they’re at a diner, friends pressure you to be in the mood for a corn dog just by virtue of being at a state fair.

The questions of identity that the text poses are expressed in a very direct language, one that quickly progresses away from that initial intent to discuss state fairs into examining the relationship between space and fulfillment. A brief interlude wonders about the contentment of Michiganders, dealing with the division in their state:

I thought about howpeople on one side ofMichigan must really missthe people on the otherside of Michigan.

She also posits that Michiganders would likely know whether or not they were lonelier than, say, Mainers, regardless of having ever visited Maine. Here again we see the disparity between actually knowing what a label entails and what we expect of it. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been to Maine or can feel the essence of the adjective ‘Mainer’: based on pure geography there is an expectation that we take as real and defining in terms of that category’s fulfillment.

Gabby then discusses Midwestern states and what their “square” shape implies about their identity. This geographical meandering progresses until we land in Virginia, the poet’s home state. Gabby externalizes her general discontent in life into the identity of her state, claiming it is outdated and boring. She envisions a more exciting life for herself.

Sometimes when I tellpeople that I live inWilliamsburg I let thembelieve that I live inBrooklyn.

I try to imagine myself inBrooklyn.

For some reason I amimagining myself passedout and almost nakedsomewhere in Brooklyn.

For some reason I thinkthat is a very ʻBrooklynʼthing to do.

It is also a very ʻGabbyʼthing to do.

We’re slowly working forward and unwrapping layers of questions about identity, namely, the disparity between who we are and who we would like to envision ourselves as being.

Despite its brevity, Pretty Flowers encapsulates one of the most complex problems in dealing with autobiographical writing: the distance that exists between the narrator of the text and the writer herself. We typically determine the level of intimacy or authenticity in a work based on the brevity of that distance. When the author effectively closes the gap between their real self and the persona of their narrator, we deem a work to be “authentic” or “intimate.” This is what is strived for in journals, diaries or confessional poetry.  If we determine that something in the text is not a substantiated fact of the author’s life, we cry “inauthentic” and demerit the work.

Gabby, however, is not just writing about her own life, but rather about the crisis of identity itself. As she projects the “Gabby” that she would like to be, she consistently reminds us of the fact that this projected “Gabby” is inconsistent with the real one, the one living behind the keyboard. The poet’s penname itself indicates a constructed identity: she has replaced both her legal first and last name with a repeated, disyllabic nickname that comes off ludic. What’s more, she incorporates that nickname into the text when she says:

It is also a very ʻGabbyʼthing to do.

The inscription of her own name into the text would constitute what Derrida designates the signature de la signature in his critical text Signéponge. As opposed to the signature proper, which expresses identity and serves as a written source of veracity (think of authorial rights, the name on the book cover), or the signature of style, that is, the use of a “set of idiomatic marks” that stylistically points to the author, the “signature of the signature” is the embedding of the author’s name into the text itself.  In this act of self-inscription, the writing becomes a reminder of the inherent schism I mentioned earlier.  As readers of poetry (particularly confessional poetry), we unconsciously bought into this narrator’s identity and left behind the question of authenticity; now we stumble upon a replica of the name on the cover inside of the text, and we remember that a real person, outside of the text, exists – one that perhaps does not conform perfectly to the narrator we’ve “bought into.”

Pretty Flowers pivots around this concept, constantly reminding us that these projections of what the “real” Gabby would like to be never manage to become anything more in the text than just that: projections. Rather than fictitiously portraying herself at those state fairs, eating corn dogs, or stripped bare on a bed in Brooklyn, the only literal action in the text is Gabby sitting at a keyboard imagining other realities for herself. The height of this game arrives when the author inscribes herself in the text, a signature that, according to Derrida, serves to remain and disappear at the same time — a mark that serves to affirm identity but also blur the lines defining it. 

Even on a linguistic level, the penname is built upon two syllables that position themselves on opposite ends of the vocal chart: the open ‘a’ and the closed ‘i.’ This cohabitation of opening up and closing off, the double motion of an identity that projects itself outward but also negates that projection in acknowledging the separation that exists between its potential and its fulfillment: that is what sustains the concept of ‘Gabby’ in the text.

Towards the end, we see the realization of this fusion of opposites. Gabby apologizes for the lack of “pretty flowers” in the text, a segue into a wrap-up where she discusses her romantic life. The ties between geography (that is, appearance) and qualities return in the form of the question: is Virginia a downward sloping or an upward sloping state? In simple terms, if you see it as a downward slope, you’re a pessimist; as an upward slope, an optimist.

Sometimes I look at a mapof Virginia and think that adownward slope could bekind of fun.

Kind of like a slip and slideor the side of a cardboardbox pressed up against agrassy hill.

Maybe I am an optimist. Atleast for today.

Identity is never simple. Optimist or pessimist? Our poet is both.

Stories About Scars: On Peter Grandbois's The Arsenic Lobster

For my thirtieth birthday, I had a storytelling party. When no one knew what to talk about, I asked for a story about a scar. Even though I cringe through them, even though I cover my mouth, even as I gasp and violently shake my head and fall just short of shrieking, I love them. Stories about scars give me an experience I could never otherwise have.

My own scars are uninteresting. Surgeries. Tattoos. Stupid adult mistakes. My only scars I find interesting are the ones that precede my memory. I’ve got a straight line down my bicep a couple inches long. I’ve had it “forever,” but I haven’t a clue what happened. I’ve got a flat slug under my chin, gnarled and white and mysterious. I wasn’t born with it — something happened to me. It happened one time and it stayed with me, living in my skin all the way to now.

Back when it first happened, I was a different person. It was anyone’s guess who or what I’d become. At some point, it was possible that I could’ve been the sort of person who sought out scars. I could have decided that stories weren’t enough. Self-sabotage is attractive when dressed up as experience. Undoing, erasing, or ruining your life becomes a viable prospect when the alternative is never doing anything: a life of inexperience. But even after you’re experienced, self-sabotage stays with you, just like a scar. And you wind up fighting every person you’ve ever been.

So it goes in Peter Grandbois’s book, The Arsenic Lobster. Labeled as a “hybrid memoir,” I found myself wondering how much was true — did the second person narrator really swim for miles in a rancid canal? Did he really chase down a six-foot boa constrictor? Did he really hang off the top of his friend’s car while his friend tried to send him flying with his own recklessness? Of course he did. And of course it’s true. The physically dangerous decisions we foolishly made in childhood — especially a suburban childhood like Grandbois had (and like I had) — were easier to accept because, when you’re just a body, you don’t care what happens. You’ll heal eventually. But after you become a mind, a conflicted, oversensitive brain, decisions become harder to make. It becomes more difficult to accept what you’ve done because you’ll remember it, because experience is permanent. Grandbois exploits the transition between body and mind, between childlike faux-impermanence and concrete, selective amnesia:

“The further back you go, the more shadows you find. You catch glimpses beneath the surface of memory: Kids alone in their house sniffing glue. Do you want some? Another kid takes a baseball bat to a parked car. Do you join him? Another tells you to distract a clerk while he steals the Dungeon Master’s guide. Do you go along? Another pulls down his pants and asks you to suck his dick. Do you? Another hits a defenseless kid. Calls a kid a faggot. Calls a kid a queer. Do you stop them? Many, many kids drinking, taking shrooms, smoking pot, disappearing in rooms. Images flash through your mind, but strangely, your part in these memories remains in shadow. Flicking in and out like the old TV show, The Outer Limits. Don’t adjust your vertical hold. There’s nothing wrong with your television set. You stand on the edge of memory, always observing, wondering when, how, if ever, you participated.”

Upon reaching adolescent self-awareness, Grandbois taps into hyperawareness, watching everyone watching him. So he takes up fencing, a spectator sport that scars him physically and emotionally, breaking his hand, ending his first marriage, making him both more and less noble than he would’ve been otherwise. He describes his life away from fencing as a dream, the sort you can’t wake up from. He is most alive when fighting, be it with himself, or with an imagined self. He risks those selves each times, but they always seem to multiply, just like choices. With the right amount of perspective, anything is possible, but then, how do you choose? It’s no easier than choosing who to be. While Grandbois is himself, always, he is only one of many selves, with each self becoming more dominant, more permanent, more willing to sacrifice another part to be the real you in the end. And even in the end, still taking risks, abandoning dreams both likely and remote, he imagines the future, wherein he’s still fighting and still collecting scars and making new possibilities and imagining the self that will get to win out, the one that hopes “when he is that age, he will be able to look in the mirror and whisper to himself, Go to hell.”

My most unmysterious, pre-memory scar comes from a mirror. I first discovered it when I was twenty-two. I shaved my head, making me look very different than the person I’d been before, and about four inches from my forehead, there was a length of sickly white skin where my hair didn’t grow. I remembered an inconsequential story my father once told me about a mirror that had fallen on me when I was very young. Apparently, I caught the corner with my head. In my invented recollection, it happens one of two ways. Either I see a baby, which I understand is me, and the mirror falls and hits my head and there’s a bit of blood, then it’s over; or I’m very short, but not a child — that is, I’m me, only smaller, and the mirror falls toward me and breaks before it makes contact. Neither is true, but I don’t really think it matters. Like any experience, I can’t go back and undo it. And, like the experience I borrow whenever I hear a story or read a book, it’s difficult to imagine a mirror that doesn’t hold a dozen selves.

Péter Nádas's Parallel Stories

How does one encapsulate Parallel Stories by Péter Nádas? Where does one even begin with this nearly 1,200 page monster? I wonder, even, if it makes sense to recommend it, as many will probably hate it. Hate it, even, for all the reasons I love it and can’t stop thinking about it.

Starting at the beginning: I’m a huge fan of Joshua Cohen, especially his novel Witz andA Heaven of Others, and so I sort of Internet-stalk his every move, but don’t tell him. And so I came across his review / interview with Péter Nádas. I had never heard of Nádas and my only experience with Hungary was my cancelled trip to Budapest back in the spring of 2009. But, reading Cohen’s piece, I had that strange and surreal feeling when I know a book was made for me, all the more strange since he began writing it around the time that I began living.

And it was for me, and I love it, and even five months since finishing it, I’m still talking about it, thinking about it, pushing it at people, trying to get them to just read even a few pages, trying to figure out how he did the things he does in this novel. He does so many things, and so many of them shouldn’t work, shouldn’t even be possible for a book so large with so many character. But he does and I truly believe Parallel Stories is the most impressive novel I’ve ever read, more than Ulysses or The Waves or The Magus or Moby Dick or even — and it almost hurts to say — The Brothers Karamazov.

And it’s an unlikely love, even though I expected it to consume me. Nádas speaks frankly and at great length about sex, and especially about the physical mechanics of sex to such expansive and minute detail that the act becomes almost absurd and grotesque. And, if you know me, which some of you reading this may, you probably know how boring I typically find sex in literature. It really is my least favorite aspect of most books, though that’s a discussion for another day, but what Nádas does is almost beyond comprehension. This disturbingly detailed description of sex, the way he stretches a single moment over forty or eighty pages is somehow — against all reason or probability — mesmerizing. He turns sex into so much more than an act, ejaculation so much more than a biological function.

And this level of detail exists throughout the novel, past sex or personal ruminations, making a short and awkward drive to the hospital gargantuan in scope, where the past and present bleed together, where every breath and word and pause becomes significant to an almost comical degree, and you’re burning through the pages, at the edge of erupting in frustration and gasping at how perfect every sentence is, and the effect makes you weak in the knees, slack in the mouth, and embarrassed in whatever muscles allow you to write, because you know you can’t do this. You can’t even begin to try.

It’s the relationships that push you on, and the prose that carries you. Parallel Stories‘snarration crosses time and space, diving in and out of characters at a sometimes dizzying rate and you’re swimming as fast as you can just to stay ahead of the current that keeps sucking you in.

But what is this novel about? I don’t even know if answering that makes sense here. It’s about so many things, from Nazi eugenics to masturbation to Jewish and gay and German and Hungarian identity to choosing one’s underwear. Stretching from pre-WWII Germany and Hungary to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, covering genres from mystery to romance all in that modernist style I feel was made for me, this novel is massive in scope and density, but, perhaps it’s not really about any of those things, not even about the people, so carefully wrought, who populate its pages.

If I had to say one thing that it seems to be most about, I’d say it’s a war over what it means to be Hungarian.

If this novel were an animal, it would be a giant squid, its tentacles stretching in all directions and somehow never reaching a conclusion. And, for me, that’s part of its perfection, Nádas’ fearlessness, his willingness to, as Cohen says, build a grandiloquent cathedral and leave it incomplete.

And though the narrative threads end abruptly without resolution, Parallel Stories is a deeply satisfying novel. And, for me, about as perfect as novels get.