It features a set of characters called the Roaring Boys. Above is my (reductive) depiction of one. Don’t let his jaunty gaze fool you–he’s lying. Here is an excerpt from a section called “Cathexis”: 

Lady M: I’ve walked through the gate and awoken–I feel my hands are incognito and fringed. I’ve seen all that can be called lovely. I fancy myself upon an idle fellow, boats passing and repassing with so slow a motion, all massy silver under the stiff wild vines–I roll the still boy out . . .

I tumble in the luminous musculature
of an ideology
swift and pretty,
enclosed as the edged-zest
cross-sex jut of knowledge
as Romance is French, bombastic
end-stopped, supple, passing as a tulip-shaped
end-stopped panic epistemology, legitimate
fantasy. Chthonic Machine! I’m compelled
to shun
the blue jut (gigantic gist)
“I’m torn between passion and honour.”

Nancy: Consider the swell light of the social as floral, as reflexive, as reflexive, so compelled to shun sex for the museum. the task would be to reveal the metaphoric function of the gala lining of our favourite coat. Romance hedged; swift cathexis or villainess escapes actual repertoire of gender stuck to the heart like a spurious clone.

Lady M: Don’t look away! The quiet gets me. This little thicket is my portion, my supple jacket is lined with a humming. Here’s what troubles me: erotic capital; families of women; utopic capital. When I describe shame as floral a weird little freedom is my equalizer. I’m all flattened out and swayless as if, secret and dark, birds flew in a grid at night. Erotic capital shifts, renovates the bosco. I feel as if there is so little time!

Roaring Boys (singing):

Come hither, Iron and Pearl, into the trees
Clearner and more modern than
Worked fur when fur shows up a dark bruise
Or days filled with mud-resting demons
As brushed qualms
Slipping into waxed purses shaking like milk.

******

Got any examples of sex toy in literature? Thoughts on Robertson? Silly pictures? They are due!

I submit to you, dear patient reader, the first two pages of a partial comic adaptation of Jakob von Gunten, the full series of which will appear in the upcoming issue of the online literary magazine, Narwhal.

Jakob von Gunten, the titular character of Robert Walser’s early modernist novel, is a young aristocrat who runs away from home to enroll in a school for servants. His impish and masochistic antics, to a contemporary reader, seem subtly and, yet palpably, sexual, yet few reviewers make much of this aspect, focusing instead on Jakob as a prankster and a free spirit, who makes a mockery of power and subordination rather than truly falling in love with it.

My “Lessons” 1 through 10, along with an expanded commentary, will be available when the new issue of Narwhal Magazine is online. In the meantime…

Your homework, dear reader, is to create a comic adaptation, in whole or in part, of a text. Or, as always, submit anything on this text in particular.

I submit to you, my dear reader, a visualization (click to enlarge) of the structure of Roberto Bolaño’s novel, The Savage Detectives. This is an autobiographical novel, framed by a coming-of-age story of sex, poetry and violence. But it is a biography whose subjects–a pair of dadaist poets–are always disappearing.

To explain what is going on in this picture I first need to explain a little about the structure of The Savage Detectives. The first of the novel’s three sections is the journal of a horny seventeen-year-old poet in Mexico City. At a university poetry workshop, he meets Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, the founding members of an avant-garde poetry movement called visceral realism. The two are fictionalized versions of Bolaño and his friend Mario Santiago. The young poet joins the visceral realists, dropping out of university and writing more than ever. At the end of this 120-page section, Belano, Lima and the young poet rescue a prostitute from her former pimp, the four of them fleeing Mexico City in a borrowed car, on the eve of 1976.

The second section is 400 pages long, covers twenty years, spanning the globe from Mexico to Europe to South America to Africa. In this section, we hear the voices of dozens of individuals whose lives have intersected with Belano and Lima. They describe the two poets (often negatively) but also tell their own stories. The result amounts to a group biography of the visceral realists and their friends, with many incidental stories as well.

The final 50-page section returns to 1976, picking  where the first section left off. Belano, Lima, the young poet and the prostitute drive around the desert in northern Mexico. They are on the run from the menacing pimp, but are also on their own quest to find a disappeared poet named Cesárea Tinajero–one of an earlier generation of visceral realists whose poetry has been lost to time.

I found it interesting to think of the first and last sections as a kind of frame story. It provides both the jumping off point and also a satisfying conclusion for a novel that scatters in all directions. And so in my image, the orange frame depicts elements from that narrative–the cars, the shot glass, sex and a naked ass, a joint, a table with sheets of poetry, a gun, a shirtless man with a large knife, a prostitute, an eye framed by hair, matches, a map, a cactus, a cigarette butt, an emblem signifying Mexicans keeping vigil over a body, a desert sun–all crudely sketched in a juvenile style, which while a convenient one for me, given my rudimentary drawing skills, is also justified by the youth of the narrator, and his somewhat garish exploits.

But of course, this sort of complete and engaging narrative is not what we usually think of as a frame story. At 170 pages this story is long enough to stand alone as a novel, but these sections do frame the central story. Conventionally, a narrative springs from the frame story, and I contend that that is still the case here. The point at which this sexy, gritty, and tense, coming-of-age story, departs and becomes an expansive collection of fragmentary stories across space and time, is exactly the moment that the characters literally depart–an act that is repeated again and again in the novel as witnesses around the world recount their glimpses of Lima and Belano.

This literal departure–poets fleeing with a prostitute from Mexico City with her pimp in hot pursuit–can be read symbolically, with the prostitute representing poetry. Bolaño’s writing often shows the relationship between writing and power, the tension between allegiance to art, and complicity or silence in the face of crimes. His books, Nazi Literature in the Americas and By Night in Chile, both centre on writers with questionable politics. Poetry itself does not pay allegiance to any particular politics or sense of justice. One reviewer has said that for Bolaño, literary culture is a whore. In this reading, Belano the poet is her protector.

One of the things that makes Belano heroic is that over the twenty-year span of the novel, as characters seem to scatter entropically away from each other and away from the intense passions of their youth, he never gives up writing, never sells out his art, never domesticates himself to the prevalent culture. He keeps moving, keeps reading and writing. His devotion to poetry sends him on a quest which leads him into the Mexican desert and later to Europe and Africa, in search of true poetry and the poetic life. In the desert he searches for Cesárea Tinajero’s; in the rest of the world he searches for his own.

The text in my image is a sort of Venn diagram of the “witnesses” descriptions of the two poets. The left column comprises the various descriptions of Lima, the right column is Belano, and the centre column is the two of them collectively. The text frames an outline of images of Mario Santiago and Roberto Bolaño as the young, long-haired men they were in the seventies.

The two men are absent from the picture, as they are often absent from the book. They often appear tangentially to what the witnesses recount, or they are described by strangers whose descriptions of them are vague and uncertain. As a result the narrative never brings them into sharp focus. Belano and Lima become what the reader chases. By reading the testimonies of the people who have seen them, we are cast into the position of the seeker, following the traces left by the writers, just as they followed the traces of Cesárea Tinajero into the Sonoran desert. But the novel ultimately frustrates our desire to get close to them. We never read their poetry–for that we’ll have to read the real poets, Bolaño and Santiago–but we do have in our hands one of their masterpieces.

Your assignment, dear reader, is to create an image that conveys structure of a book. As always, for an alternative assignment, feel free to contribute anything on this book in particular.

To you, dear reader, I submit a painting–my first since high school art class–inspired by the poem, “The Unicorn” by Billeh Nickerson. But, as is always the case, the translation, through both error and intention, has resulted in something quite distinct from the original.

What’s great about poetry is that it’s usually short. That’s what my students tell me and I’d have to agree. But that doesn’t mean that it wants any less of your attention.

While the title of Billeh Nickerson’s book of poetry, McPoems, refers to the fast food restaurant he worked in as a teenager, it could just as easily indicate the form of the poems themselves: fast and tasty. Some could easily be Facebook status updates, like his poem “Madonna”: “The only thing harder / than being named Madonna / is being named Madonna / and having to wear a name tag.” All of the poems relate incidents as witnessed by a McDonald’s employee. These poems could be seen as merely a collection of amusing anecdotes, but they’re also catalogue of human idiosyncrasies, a parade of eccentrics, goof-balls, idiots, the mentally ill, the desperate, the pathetic, and also the simply incongruous–like the wedding party concerned about the possibility of mustard stains on the wedding dress.

The speaker is not condescending. In fact, he empathizes with his customers, or at least humours them, or discreetly ignores them. Still he will occasionally reach out, like when he sits down to talk to the woman who’s been enigmatically writing the name Gloria in french fries and underlined in ketchup on the table tops. Even as the antics of his customers are mined for humour or poignancy, Nickerson seems to identify with them. They are fellow sufferers of the indignities of daily life: loss, confusion, drudgery, poverty, and frustration. But perhaps this is an overly dark set of words for such light verse.

The titular character in the prose poem, “The Unicorn”, is known for tromping around the restaurant with a soft serve ice cream cone stuck to the top of his forehead, until it slides off. “Sometimes the melting takes a few seconds, but other times you’ll see him sitting with rivulets of cream trickling down his face, his proud cone still intact. How can you not watch a man with an ice cream cone on his head?” The Unicorn stuck with me, not only because it is a ridiculous and striking image, but also because of the ambiguity in the poem. It seems likely that the man is mentally ill, but he could easily be a joker who doesn’t mind telling the same joke over and over to an audience of strangers.

The image I have created has a major inaccuracy, I should point out. The poem implies that the unicorn sticks the soft serve to his head with the base of the cone pointing up, whereas my unicorn balances the cone on his forehead with the ice cream on top. This would be a very difficult if not impossible balancing act, but it gives the figure the tension of a circus performance. The man stands quietly, his attention focused on the cone, as it slowly melts down onto his face; Nickerson’s unicorn walks around the restaurant, drawing stares and concern, and probably spreading sticky drops of soft serve everywhere. The man in the painting is reverent, face raised to the white, torch-like cone. He is the humble base of a ziggurat that reaches upward. (Towards what? A fast food nirvana? An exalted consumer product? The acme and intersection of manufacturing and gastronomy?) Nickerson’s unicorn, meanwhile, plays a joke on the cone and everyone in the restaurant, turning a food object into a costume. The cone no longer belongs to the set of the edible. It is just filth now. The man is walking around with filth on his face, which also happens to be the food you are eating.

McPoems is a quick read. The creation of my painting took much longer, and probably occasioned more thought about the book than I otherwise would have given it. I tell my students, when defining poetry, that calling something a poem is a way of asking the reader to slow down, to pay attention, to reread, to give more to the text. If the text gives back and makes your time worthwhile, it’s a good poem. If not, maybe it isn’t–at least not for you. To create a quick and pleasant book like McPoems is therefore a risky endeavor. By not asking much of the reader, it sets itself up to be consumed like a cheeseburger. But Nickerson’s book passes the reciprocality test: it rewards sustained reflection, continuing to give, as you spend time with it.

Your homework, dear reader, is to recreate visually, an image from a written text, and note briefly the differences in subject, tone, implication, etc. between the two.

As always, if for an alternative assignment submit something on McPoems in particular.

I submit to you, dear reader, a pair of pie charts showing the varieties of “facial expression” that appear in Tao Lin’s novella, Shoplifting from American Apparel. This ridiculously simple phrase, repeated over 25 times, never once dropping the redundant word, “facial”, is one of many signals that in this novella, the style is the story.

It is easy to hate Shoplifting from American Apparel: its narrator is disinterested and nearly monosyllabic, and if Sam, the main character, ever does, thinks, or says anything interesting, the narrator has left it out. The story skips along in a spare and breezy way. It covers two years in about 20,000 words (short even for a novella, you can finish it while someone is watching a movie in the next room) and in that time we learn much more about Sam’s eating habits than anything else. He drinks an iced coffee every ten pages.

This is a book emptied of conflict, description, character development, metaphor, symbolism, or even commentary. What it gives you is jotted down reportage. Things are said and done, but it reads like the minutes of a meeting:

Sam and Hester went downstairs into a room and sat on a padded seat. People came out of a door and smiled at Sam and Hester. Sam smiled at them and waved and they went upstairs.

“Are you bored,” said Hester.

“No, I feel calm,” said Sam. “I like Brandon.”

They went upstairs and stood in a crowded hallway. Sam stared at people’s faces with a neutral facial expression.

The entire novella is written in a terse, pronoun-shy, and concrete shorthand. It would take a certain willful ignorance to call the story “poorly written.” Its style, while suspect, is clearly deliberate and careful. It takes a lot of restraint and editing for a person to write a narrative this devoid of figurative language, this emptied of significance, this blind, deaf, and dumb to people and their real, lived, psychologies. This is anti-literary writing, though perhaps no more anti-literary than much modern avant-gardism is anti-art. It simply refuses to do what we expect a book to do.

Lin narrates an aimless existence troubled only by boredom. But what really conveys the shallowness and emptiness of Sam and his friends is the prose that never tells us what people are thinking but always tells us what they’re drinking (iced coffees: 10; beers: 5; smoothies 4; mojitos: 3; vodka and grape juice: 3; glasses of water: 2; energy drinks: 2). This is a narrator, and a main character that never fails to specify when something is “organic” or “vegan”.

Tao claims to be confused by readers who see the characters as apathetic or dead inside:

Some people are maybe thinking that just because of the prose style, or because of me as an author deciding not to include thoughts or feelings, that these characters don’t have thoughts or feelings, which is like thinking that just because a book doesn’t have any moms or dads that moms or dads don’t exist in the book.

Fair enough: just because people only say things like, “I feel weird,” and “That’s funny,” without every elaborating, that doesn’t necessarily mean they have the mental life of a clam. At times, the book does drop hints that some of the characters might actually have feelings that go beyond what can be conveyed in a single word like “confused” or “normal”, but the narrative always pulls away immediately. In one of his more introspective moments, Sam indulges in a rare, long sentence:

Sam looked around. His cup of iced coffee was empty.“I felt emotional today thinking about the past, like a year and a half ago, at Sheila’s house,” he said. “I think because I haven’t been awake in the daytime for an extended period in so long and was reminded of the last time I was in a sunny room on a computer after having been up for four to five hours, which was at Sheila’s house, I think.”

“Wow,” said Robert.

“But there was nothing I could do with the emotion really,” said Sam. “It just went away after a while.”

I want Shoplifting from American Apparel to be more than a portrait/symptom/both of empty hipsterism. The extreme minimalism of its dead-to-the-world narrative voice is daring, but Tao Lin has edited his notes down until there is nothing left but a short story whose main accomplishment should be measured in how much it doesn’t say, and how little it engages with anything at all.

Your homework, if you are willing, my dear reader,  is to create a chart (whether pie, bar, or other) showing the repetition and variation of something in a text.

Or, for an alternative assignment, submit anything else on the text discussed in this post.

One-sided version

Two-sided version

I submit to you, dear reader, a bookmark for Christopher Isherwood’s novel A Single Man, featuring the revolver Tom Ford placed in the protagonist’s hands in Ford’s film adaptation. A revolver that never appeared in the original book.

Ford’s beautifully shot film makes many audacious changes to Isherwood’s 1962 novel. Most of these changes serve to beautify. The protagonist’s home, for instance, which Isherwood describes as a cave suitable for a crazy old man, is transformed by Ford into an architectural gem. The most disturbing of the changes may be the transformation of Asian, Latino, and Black characters into white, white and white characters, respectively. Overall the movie revels in the beauty of the period, and its consumer objects, which Isherwood’s narrator rails bitterly against. But Ford does more than just make it pretty in a way that seems to contradict the novel’s style, he goes to far as to turn the protagonist suicidal. In the film, George packs a revolver. Isherwood’s George never contemplates suicide, whereas Ford’s film structures itself around his suicide: George puts all his affairs in order, laying out documents and even the suit for his funeral out for himself. In a long scene he enacts various methods of shooting himself in the head–on the bed, in the shower, in a sleeping bag. Just when he seems to have come up with a satisfactorily clean and dignified method, the phone rings, and he postpones. In contrast, the original novel is a simple day-in-the-life narrative: George wakes up, remembers that his lover has died, goes to the bathroom, looks out the window, drives to class, teaches class, visits a friend, goes to a bar, goes skinny dipping with a student, then takes him home. If there is an arc, it is his movement from grumpiness to lustiness. It isn’t hard to imagine a scriptwriters meeting in which Tom Ford discusses the changes he wants to make to David Scearce’s original script.

“Will people stay interested if they lover dies at the beginning of the movie? How about the partner dies at the end?”

“It would be an almost complete rewrite.”

“How about we set it during the Cuban Missle Crisis?”

“Okay, we’re just brainstorming, no wrong ideas, let’s keep going.”

“A gun.”

“Hmm…”

“He gets mugged? No, gay-bashed.”

“Or he wants to kill himself.”

“He wants to kill himself! He’s going to blow his head off. The audience waits in a state of dreadful anticipation.”

“Beautiful.”

“Make sure the gun is pretty.”

“Of course. We’ll find one with a bejewelled hammer.”

But is there any justification for this choice? Yes, and no.

In an interview with The Paris Review, Isherwood denied that he was George. They live in the same place, have the same job, like the same books, and both have a thing for much younger men, but no, he says, “It isn’t me at all.” George is strong; despite the loss of his lover, despite that as an gay man he is denied access to living the good life as portrayed in magazines, despite the bitterness and hatred that colours everything he sees, despite his aging and the breaking down of his own body, he fights, fights “like a badger”. Isherwood declares, “If I were in George’s place, I would think about killing myself because I’m less than George. George is heroic.”

In other words, Tom Ford has made George more like Isherwood himself, and less like what the author intended. The character has become more frail, perhaps more realistic, but in so doing takes the character further away from Isherwood’s conception of what a fictional character should be: extraordinary and singular, as opposed to complex and realistic in a well-rounded sort of way, which would be boring.

The gun is not merely a plot device then, though that may be its primary function. It’s also transformative. And so I offer this visual pun: a bookmark featuring the handgun from Tom Ford’s film, meant for use in Isherwood’s novel. But I suppose the bookmark could work in any novel–what would the significance be if the protagonist, faced with his or her struggle, chose to commit suicide? And how heroic are they, considering that they do not. Or maybe it might come in handy anytime a weighty and plotless literary novel needs an artificial injection of tension.

Here is a two-sided version of the bookmark:

Your homework, dear reader, is to create a bookmark. It should feature something which was featured in a film based on that book, but was absent from the book itself. It may be something you feel the book should have had, or something you are relieved it did not have.

As always, for an alternative assignment, feel free to submit anything on either the film or the book discussed above.

I submit to you, dear reader, a collection of 10 book covers for the fictional novels, fragments, manuscripts, and fraudulent translations that appear in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller–a book which is also a library.

These are actual covers to various editions of the Calvino book which have been photoshopped to feature the titles and authors of the fictional books he describes, including his own; hence the first cover, which might look like a faithful reproduction of an actual book cover, but like the rest it features a blurb which is in fact a quotation from the character, Ludmilla. In each section preceding the novel fragments, she describes her ideal novel. As you follows the protagonist in his readings of various books which always get interrupted, you start to notice that the style of each book was prefigured in the comment by Ludmilla. It isn’t a criticism to say that If on a winter’s night a traveller is contrived. It takes great pleasure in its own contrivance. Chapters of second person narration about the “reader” the “other reader” and a shady character dedicated falsifying books, are each followed by the beginning of a novel that the reader will not get to finish (neither you-the-real-reader nor “you”-the-protagonist) . One of the novels-within-a-novel describes a 17th century device called a polydyptic theatre “in which about sixty little mirrors lining the inside of a large box transform a bough into a forest, a lead soldier into an army, a booklet into a library.” This is just one of many metaphors for the book itself. This is a metafictional novel that seeks out the universal story, or perhaps just the universal story of reading fiction. I offer these covers to you, but also to the late Mr. Calvino, who was both a great lover of books in their complete semantic, social, and physical dimensions, and a man whose mental habits seem to tend towards autism. As I spent hours on the computer altering his covers and mimicking (often poorly) their fonts, I felt I was performing a small tribute to a man for whom I feel a close affinity.

Your task, dear reader, is to create an image of an object described by any text. As always, provide an explanatory note if necessary.

For an alternative assignment, submit any of your own notes, diagrams, etc, on this text in particular.

Here are the original covers, including a couple extra ones I didn’t use.

I submit to you, dear reader, a list of five sentences from The Five People You Meet In Heaven, (presented on an image taken from the author’s website) which I hope will demonstrate a simple stylistic principle: vague superlatives fail to impress.

Unless you are telling a bedtime story to your child, if you tend towards describing things as beyond imagination, beyond description, or beyond experience, you call into question your basic qualification as a writer. But who am I to argue with a best-seller? In the context of his novel, these sentences created an eerie echo, as again and again the author made a show of his failure to imagine. In the form of a list, some of that strange circling-back-to-a-narrative-throwing-up-of-hands-and-shaking-of-the-head-in-flabbergastery has been lost. What remains is a simple reminder that to try to wow your audience by describing something as “the most ________ ever” doesn’t work.

Oh, it spent 95 weeks on the NYT bestseller list? Okay. Maybe it does work. But not for me.

Your task, dear reader, is to create a list of no fewer than three quotations which demonstrates the failure or success of a particular stylistic strategy.

As always, for an alternative assignment, provide your own notes on this book in particular.

I submit to you, dear reader, a painting by Lucien Durey, whose explanatory note, submitted long ago to an art school English class, is now lost. But looking at the painting now in my home, I imagine it may have claimed that in “A Streetcar Named Desire”, Blanche DuBois, fluttery and dressed in white gowns, is likened to a moth—not only in that she is a moth to Stanley’s flame, but also in her fragility. A moth is so delicate that even a single fingerprint on its wing can be devastating. The moth of the painting, on a sticky red substance whose grain seems to echo the loops and whorls of a fingerprint, navigates no less precariously than the moth that approaches the flame. No less precariously than Blanche circles her own desire, shame, and self-destruction.

Your task, dear reader, is to illustrate one of the qualities of a particular character from any text. Provide a short explanatory note if necessary.

For an alternative assignment, as always submit anything else on this book in particular.