On Your Markson

Just finished reading THE LAST NOVEL by David Markson, described in one otherwise praising review as "geriatric postmodern fiction." Damning praise, that is; the book is actually another vital narrative assemblage of literary anecdotes, sketches, fragments, and feuilletons by David Markson, which echoes and helps form the subtle trajectory of the "Novelist." This character is at once the author's alter ego but also a general cipher for the universal questing creator. The various shards and mini-annals elucidate the anxieties of literary legacy, mortality, the unusual fates of artists, the under-illuminated tensions at heart in artistic creation. Markson is a master and I hope his career belies the title of this wonderful book. I look forward to THE NEXT TO LAST NOVEL, out of sequence, adjacent to the last but after it, and continuing Markson's stunning literary achievements. CURLEY

No Laughter, Only Forgetting: Where's Kundera?

On this Memorial Day weekend, one wonders: how does a country that has/suffers from chronic historical (and ethical) amnesia celebrate the holiday? I've no answer and am worried. Memorize your past and present, dear country, and stop listening to music by Erasure...
KATY O'FARRELL

Enough, You Realists & Pop Historians

Ian McEwan, Jonathan Safran Foer, Clair Messud, Don DeLillo, etc., on September 11, 2001,
John Updike on Terrorist(s)...the cottage industry about Islam and Muslims, East and West,
U.S. imperialism, reading Lolita in Nabokov....

...oh, how the modish can be menacing; not only does it show how lacking our cultural literacy and awareness had been, but just how susceptible we are to engrossing ourselves repeatedly in the au courant, the sensational, the most mightily media-disseminated stories and images...and the mediation is seldom deep. Why are the writers not diversifying their accounts and expanding their horizons AND getting such acclaim for being so narrow, so myopic?

Piously, they comb out psychological motives and means, engage the subjectivites of this and that subject regarding modern disaster, foregrounds and backgrounds gleaned from current events, but is it all viable? Are they necessary? MARTIN SCRIBLERUS (sorry for being out-of the-loop)

Collaboration Nation Station Day!

James Boswell, Dr. Johnson's biographer, died on this date in 1795 (Oscar Wilde was released from jail, too, in 1897, but that's another matter). That eccentric opus, that auto-, almost, auto-auto-biography, LIFE OF JOHNSON, reveals as much of Bos as it does the goodly Dr. One could say that their friendship, this tome, is not only a record of friendship's mutuality, but truly active artistic collaboration. In this spirit, I urge all of you artistically tendentious to go and converge with one of your fellow artists and commit great acts of collaboration (preferably in mixed media formats-- check out www.sidebar.net for some thoughts) or even collaboracide (even a dually destructive effort in which doubling leads to troubling is a redeemable practice).
Come on, text and image, paint brush and DVD, sculpture and FM radio frequencies, you know how to collide and connect....j. curley

Again and again

I have watched her die so many times
since this afternoon. The mandala of blood.
The small ruination: her shopping scattered,
oranges rolling slowly towards the sewer grate,
a shoe that had somehow landed by the payphone.

I saw her, in that last instant when
shopping lists and street signs mattered to her.
I saw her become unjointed and undone.
I saw her body pressed flat to the street
as if she were afraid she’d slip and fall off the earth.

But tonight, the mill of my dreams will work at her.
She will wake for me in a field of blooming poppies,
and I will watch her kick off her shoes
and dance towards those far groves
overdone in sunshine.

Mark Aiello

Shakespeare's Synthesizers

Why ferfuckssake do more and more writers start wielding guitars and think they can get
revving on musical instruments of their choice, and that the result will be worth their while or ours? Oh, it may be all so artful, blithely ironic, whimsical, tongue-in-cheek, or "cute" (argh!) for a best-selling novelist or crackerjack poet to plug into a Marshall stack and caterwaul in a musical alter-ego but is it necessary? Do people find that "supergoup" of Amy Tan, Stephen King, Dave Barry (and a few other media-ocres) interesting? Hmm...In any case, continuing this performative transvalutation, acclaimed Irish poet Paul Muldoon (whose new collection, HORSE LATITUDES, does not exactly rock) will be reading at The Bitter End (147 Bleecker St. betw. LaGuardia Pl. and Thompson St., NYC) and then...and then...playing with his band (!), Rackett.
I'm sure they'll go platinum soon...check them out, I certainly will. MARTIN SCRIBLERUS

P.S. Curley's day job is putting him out of commission for posts of late, but he wanted me to tell you that novelist Harry Matthews will be reading at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, 131 E. 10th St., NYC). If you recall, Mr. Curley had written here about Matthews's interview in The Paris Review and raved about his latest novel, MY LIFE IN CIA. Go, OULIPO!!

Stephen Shames & the Black Panthers

Last week I swung by Steven Kasher Gallery (521 West 23rd St., Chelsea, stevenkasher.com) and had the opportunity to marvel at rare black and white photo prints of the Black Panthers. Incredible images to match their inimitable voices. The militancy is on view but so are private moments, lighter moments, really giving a sense of dimension to these courageous men and women. A book of the photographs, published by Aperture, is on sale at the gallery for $35--and it's worth it. Stop by, take it in, get inspired.
Martin Scriblerus

Cultural Society! Dos Madres! Spring Has Sprung Rhythm!

Springtime is time for idylls and the modern version for me in the urban demesne is poetry. The Cultural Society, of which I'm co-editor, has just released THAT ABRUPT HERE, a powerful collection by Joel Bettridge. Tender, callous, despising and despairing, Bettridge's lines aspire to metaphysical uplift but find their trajectories faltering, spirits diminished, and perplexed. Wonderful work-- you can order it at www.culturalsociety.org.

Dos Madres Press, a small press in a small town--with large ambitions and sundry splendid publications, have just released acclaimed poet Michael Heller's EARTH & CAVE, a memoir of
his time in Nerja, Spain during the sixties, under Franco, amid the grandeur of the natural landscape. The book fuses memoir with memoiristic poetry--a thoroughly delightful book that comes with a CD of Heller reading. Also from Dos Madres--Burt Kimmelman's THERE ARE WORDS, a poetry volume that also includes a CD. Kimmelman is to my mind the most gifted of the post-Objectivist lyricists for whom minimalism is not a fault but a miraculous control. These spare poems are grand gestures. You can track down both volumes at www.dosmadres.com. Enjoy this spring thing immersed in verse!~j curley

Hey there, Harry!

Whatever changes The Paris Review has undergone since George Plimpton passed away, the Interviews have sustained their depth, delights, and insights. The new issue has a giddy, engaging interview with Harry Matthews, the only American member of OULIPO, the Workshop for Potential Literature. What a life, what a man! His most recent novel (advertized as an "autobiographical novel" (!)), MY LIFE IN CIA, was published a little over a year ago and it's another bravura performance. If you live in NYC, there are a few copies of the "novel"
on the remainder table of St. Mark's Bookshop, 31 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10003....
Katy O'Farrell

PEN, Words, Swords, 'Zounds...

Can someone explain the virtues of international and, for that matter, internationally acclaimed, authors getting together to discuss literacy, computer culture, elitism, human rights violations, et cetera? Yes, there is the 'pure good' of this kind of discourse but the gab emitted from these writers' mouths often obscures the passivity of their buttocks (not to mention the hot air of some of their emanations and backsides). Where are the real activist women and men? True action-eers as well as auteurs? From the sidelines, it seems, the focus can be clarified. But can the issues under focus be fought for and fought against? Collective activism--whatever form it could take-- and not independent voices into thin air, might be one of many answers. I write this as the New School for Social Research in Manhattan hosts the PEN International Writing Conference. The white noise, yes, I can hear it cascading across the Village, across the East River, and into mine own ears...
Martin Scriblerus

Roberto Bolano Redux

Wonderfully, the newly translated novel of Chilean demi-god, Roberto Bolano, The Savage Detectives, lists his dates as simply the following: "1953-" Yes, Bolano died four years ago but his work lives on and the designation of his life unended is an unintended symbol of his immortal presence. The pen lives, so too does the man. -curley

Elision

This is what it means, I think – remember
that drunken cab ride and what you said about the fiction
implicit in the neatness of any border, any boundary?
The pretence that Belgravia ends at the traffic light
where the map says Pimlico begins, as if
one street corner was obviously different
from the one opposite, or the change in postal codes
was a tectonic rift, something you could trip over
at the halfway point of the crosswalk, when instead we know
that neighborhoods unfold themselves more slowly
than a taxi meter could ever measure.
And then we found ourselves suddenly at Paddington,
unable to recall the names of the sad hotels we’d passed,
or how many corner shops, or pubs, and the park itself
had been just a blur of black fence posts,
each an uncounted gradation of our progress.

So it’s more than any trick your tongue does
within the word “Wednesday”, more
than any shortcut through “Baltimore” or even
“Toronto”. It’s how your memory folds an ending
back into its beginning, and makes every minor transition
you’ve gone through along the way seem both additive
and inevitable.

Or maybe it’s more like that time in Nice,
how each day the sky bled lilac
long past dinnertime and we could never quite say
what moment marked the end of the afternoon
and which was the first gatepost of the night.
And after our walk back to our humid hotel room
we were all unions and junctures,
and even the skin of our bellies clung to each other;
maybe that’s the meaning that gets skipped over
inside that one odd word.

Mark Aiello

Oh, Oprah! Killer Cormac & the Crazy Ladies

So, as everyone knows, Oprah has just endorsed Cormac MacCarthy's most recent novel, THE ROAD, an allegory of the apocalypse as I suppose it will occur in the modern world (funny how doomsayers are now religious evangelists or novelists lacking ideas). Well, altho' I'm a woman,
I'm neither middle-class nor middle-aged nor interested in the middling entertainment and advice of Oprah and her audience. But I'm intriqued by the prospect of Oprah's minions reading Cormac's backlog, titles like SON OF GOD and BLOOD MERIDIAN. These fine tomes contain visceral scenes of bodily mutilation, masturbation, necrophilia, and, well, lots of viscera. Guts and grimness abound, they do. Will some of these housewices adopt the fine art of scalping, have heart attacks, or lose their minds? I look forward to the results...KATY O'FARRELL

International Roberto Bolano Day

Today, April 3, 2007, Farrar Straus Giroux releases the late Chilean novelist Roberto Bolano's
The Savage Detectives, an English translation of his 1998 masterpiece. The publication of this volume is a milestone for literature. Read it and be astonished. curley

Thank You, Dr. Johnson

One can never find the mot juste for "le monde injuste," but perhaps phrases can encompass and not compress a historical age. I find the following quote to be an apt comment on this larval stage of the millennium. It is from Dr. Samuel Johnson's A JOURNEY TO THE WESTERN ISLANDS OF SCOTLAND: "To be ignorant is painful; but it is dangerous to quiet our uneasiness by the delusive opiate of hasty persuasion."

I think the good Doctor's musing is not only eloquent but precisely utilitarian: how many quotations do you know can be applied so generally in the current world without becoming a generalization?
Martin Scriblerus