The Art of Theft.

An Amazon blurb, stolen in total:

"I doubt very much that I’m the only person who’s finding it more and more difficult to want to read or write novels," David Shields acknowledges in Reality Hunger, then seeks to understand how the conventional literary novel has become as lifeless a form as the mass market bodice-ripper. Shields provides an ars poetica for writers and other artists who, exhausted by the artificiality of our culture, "obsessed by real events because we experience hardly any," are taking larger and larger pieces of the real world and using them in their work. Reality Hunger is made of 600-odd numbered fragments, many of them quotations from other sources, some from Shields’s own books, but none properly sourced--the project being not a treasure hunt or a con but a good-faith presentation of what literature might look like if it caught up to contemporary strategies and devices used in the other arts, and allowed for samples (that is, quotation from art and from the world) to revivify existing forms. Shields challenges the perceived superiority of the imagination and exposes conventional literary pieties as imitation writing, the textual equivalent of artificial flavoring, sleepwalking, and small talk. I can’t name a more necessary or a more thrilling book. --Sarah Manguso

I cited Sarah Manguso, which feels like a mistake after having read such a provocative summary. I'm putting this book on my "to steal" list.

So, what do we think of this? How do we feel about Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music?" It's not exactly open-source theft, but, like MMM, Shields' book seems to be an affront to an established norm which is the type of incendiary idea that really gets the wheels turning. Why can you reappropriate visual media into art? Why can music use samples to form a new whole, a new cultural reference point? Is it perhaps that the rap listener is less interested in the origin of a dusty old guitar lick than a literarily-minded reader is in a particularly familiar idea/turn of phrase/plot/form/etc? Why can poetry be found, but not a novel? I have to craft mine from scratch, using the same antiquated form that's been around for hundreds of years as my roadmap, and I am implicitly required hide my artistic inspiration (re: theft) as deeply in the text as possible. Why not celebrate our inspirations by savaging them, cutting them to pieces, reconstructing them as we see fit in order to express a truly unique vision out of the familiar?

I'm not of the opinion that novels have become tiresome. I can tell you this:
1) I gravitate more toward established classics than newer work. Why is that? It's not that I think new authors are not worth my time. But perhaps there is a weariness there that I have not acknowledged, and have not really explored. I don't exactly know its cause. This is an age-old argument, old vs. new. Who's the best quarterback of all time? Arguments suited for a barstool. Er, coffeehouse stool? Let's go to the bar. You're buying.
2) Short fiction is far more likely to blow my mind simply because it does not seem bound in the strict traditions of the novel. Our literary lives were built on these traditions that, even when seriously bucked by writers like Faulkner and so on, still remain pretty rigidly intact. When a tornado takes out your house, for example, you don't all get together as a community and magically come up with new kinds of houses. There's one house we know-- when the tornado passes, we rebuild the house as we knew it, and get on with life. I'm not saying the novel is a boring form-- you can put all kinds of cool stuff in a house-- I'm just saying, wouldn't be cool if we weren't limited to that structure?

But then again, to follow Shields' example, I suppose the "new" house would be simply to rip off the designs of all the best houses already out there. And that would be the new house. He shouldn't have written a book at all. He should've skywritten it or something. Broke into Mike Tyson's house and tattooed it on his face. Faked his death and had the book performed via video will by mimes. That's the new form I'm looking for-- mass fake suicides + mimed video wills. The future is today.

As a Machine and Parts by Caleb J. Ross.

Author and internet cool dude Caleb J. Ross has a new book.
As a Machine and Parts, available from Aqueous Books, can be purchased now. Click the link and do so.

From Caleb: [The] book incorporates subtle illustrations, formatting plays, and typography twists to create a story that is both bizarre and human. Though, how else could a book about a man turning into a machine--and not really caring about it--be written?

Sounds like fun to me. Visit Caleb's site to learn more: As a Machine and Parts.

Christmas.

Christmas-- it's here. Basically. What's on my list? I'll share it with you:

Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid box set: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions) – Homer (translated by Robert Fagles)
Dracula (Barnes & Noble Leather Classic) – Bram Stoker
H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction (Barnes & Noble Leather Classic) – H.P. Lovecraft
Picture of Dorian Gray (Barnes & Noble Leather Classic) – Oscar Wilde
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Barnes & Noble Leather Classic) – Mark Twain
Fog Gorgeous Stag – Sean Lovelace
Four For A Quarter: Fictions – Michael Martone
Scorch Atlas – Blake Butler
Dear Everybody – Michael Kimball
Stranger Will – Caleb J. Ross
Valis – Philip K. Dick
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K. Dick
The Stranger – Albert Camus
Dune, 40th Anniversary Edition – Frank Herbert
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Naked Lunch: The Restored Text – William S. Burroughs
Kicking Horse Cliffhanger Espresso (Whole Bean)
Fancy-Shmancy Mustard of All Varieties
Ziggy Stardust – David Bowie
Space Oddity – David Bowie
Scary Monsters – David Bowie
It’s Complicated Being a Wizard – Portugal. The Man
Pink Moon – Nick Drake

Now, let's make some observations. This list betrays a terrible secret-- I do not yet own "Stranger Will" by Caleb Ross. My only explanation is that I am a prick and care for no one but myself, though I will nonetheless go on to defend myself by saying that A) it's on my list, and B) this endless Nabokov book has ground all literary purchases to a halt for me. I have not bought a book in months. MONTHS. Okay? Even when Borders was going out of business, all I came away with was Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger because it was like, a dollar. It's nothing personal. I fully expect Caleb's book to be excellent, which is why it's on my list. Notice it's in good company. Notice who's NOT on the list-- Nabokov. Therefore it is scientific fact: Caleb is better than Nabokov.

Also, what's with all the David Bowie? I don't know. It occurred to me that I don't own any David Bowie albums, and that seems wrong, so I picked a few at random.

"It's Complicated Being A Wizard" was a title that made me laugh. And I've heard Portugal. The Man is good, but I don't own any of their stuff, mostly because I despise the period in the name of the band. It ruins any sentence in which you mention them (like the previous one), so I've resisted up until now. But the name of this blog has an exclamation point in it, you say? Well for one thing, no one ever mentions this blog, so that's not a problem. Furthermore, stylistic use of an exclamation point is less subliminal and does not look quite so misplaced in the middle of a thought. If they were looking for some alternative characters in their name, why not Portugal & The Man? That really adds a 1987-CBS-primetime-Wednesday-lineup feel to their name that's pretty killer.

Caleb J. Ross Wants to Write with the Intellectual Charm of a Mid-90s Family Sitcom.

This is a guest post by Caleb J Ross (also known as Caleb Ross, to people who hate Js) as part of his Stranger Will Tour for Strange blog tour. He will be guest-posting beginning with the release of his novel Stranger Will in March 2011 to the release of his second novel, I Didn’t Mean to Be Kevin and novella, As a Machine and Parts, in November 2011. If you have connections to a lit blog of any type, professional journal or personal site, please contact him. To be a groupie and follow this tour, subscribe to the Caleb J Ross blog RSS feed. Follow him on Twitter: @calebjross.com. Friend him on Facebook: Facebook.com/rosscaleb

Does anyone else remember Steve Urkel’s personality changing machine? For those who don’t, here’s the ridiculously brilliant premise:

TV nerd poster child, Steve Urkel, is madly in love with neighbor girl named Laura. Despite, or perhaps because of, the strange absence of his own family (strange only to the audience; I don’t believe the show ever addressed the missing family directly) the neighbor family treated Steve as a pariah, often going out of their way to express hatred for the poor kid. Quite often, episode story-lines hinged on the family’s eventual, yet always temporary, acceptance of the outcasted child. But, when Steve steps into his personality changing machine, shifting from hunched geek to smooth chic (with an equally sexified name: Stefan Urquelle) the world suddenly makes time for him. Laura loves him. The family loves him. The simple lesson: looks are everything.



Does anyone else wonder why the government didn’t seize that machine immediately? No, you don’t. The machine integrated into the Family Matters world as a perfect figurative and literal storytelling device.

That’s the fiction I strive to write. Conceptually heavy, yet contextually believable. The entire show’s premise during those episodes depended on how this single awkward element transformed the entire Family Matters world. There is a magical realism feel to this situation, in that the weird element is weird only to the audience; the characters don’t consider anything strange at all (or they are willfully ignorant to the strangeness).

Unrelated True Thoughts.

1) Salmon is a great food. If kittens were food, they would be salmon.

2) One of my favorite books of poetry is "Rose" by Li-Young Lee:

Out of the grave
my father's hair
bursts. A strand
pierces my left sole, shoots
up bone, past ribs,
to the broken heart it stiches,
then down,
swirling in the stomach, in the groin, and down,
through the right foot.

--Dreaming of Hair

3) Back to salmon-- this salmon is like falling apart on my fork.

4) I was riding my bike at the park. I was wearing a hood against the cold and thus my vision was restricted. A girl was walking too close to a goose that had its beak buried into its feathers, and it snapped at her. She danced away screaming. I witnessed this, and as I rode past, I was forced to turn my entire head to continue to monitor the amusing scene. Having turned my head so obviously in her direction, I felt compelled to speak. Laughing, I said, "Be careful." I said it in a way that I meant to sound fatherly but, in my own head, sounded somehow creepy and unwelcome. Though I could not see my own eyes I perceived them as being teary and slit. Possibly reddened. Was it creepy? No, No. I rode away. I don't speak to strangers often. I don't know why I did today. Perhaps I felt safe inside my hood.

The Short Stories of Vladimir Nabokov and Other Cheerful Topics.

So, I am thigh deep in this monstrous collection of Nabokov's stories. I had read "Despair" somewhere in a previous life, and had enjoyed it well enough to never read Nabokov again. This is not mean as a criticism-- I used to be something of a masochist when it came to reading, in that, if I found something I liked, I generally read nothing else from that author. The exceptions were Douglas Adams and Chuck Palahniuk; the former because Adams's work was a childhood friend to me (and a grown-up friend as well, which is a rare treat-- I was disappointed to find that He-Man did not age as well as "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"); the latter, because I went to college during the Age of Palahniuk, and if you weren't reading Palahniuk you weren't cool. And let me tell you: I was cool with a capital "K." (As a side note, I bet you're wondering if Nabokov relates to He-Man in any meaningful way; you will be pleased to know he does, and the matter will be addressed with bracing insight in my completely fictional doctoral thesis, "Nabokov, He-Man, and Yevtushenko's So-Called Clatter of Surgical Tools: Manhood and the Aesthetic Structure in Modern Media.")

But anyway again. These short stories are brutally weighty and depressing. Weighty in an existential way; depressing in a good way. "Terra Incognita" is my favorite so far-- the story of a doomed jungle expedition and the associated abandonments, violence, and illness. There are some fun games here with perception and ontology, if one knew what that word meant, and had subsequently used it properly. Nabokov only needs about five pages to destroy you. It's a subdued, lyrical destruction though-- a lovely autopsy of reality. The knife in this story does not rip or tear or any of that. It is a rusty blade that enters unseen and by the time you register it, it's done with.

What happens in the story? Everyone dies. I hope I'm not ruining it for you. Let me, in fact, ruin all of Nabokov's short fiction for you: everyone dies. That's not literally true of course-- some people improbably survive-- but it might as well be. Death is the overarching detail that seems to float to the surface in the 30 or so stories I've read so far. Oh, a more critical and worthy eye would find a myriad of more fascinating themes and parallels, but I am not reading this to dissect it so much as enjoy it (Nabokov himself would've been a fan of this approach). I haven't read enough (read: any other) Russian literature so as to be able to say "It's very Russian" without being supercilious, but what the hell-- life's short and you probably know what I mean anyway. This is very Russian. Blammo. Checkmate.

I've been reading the stories here and there over a period of months, and have just about hit the halfway mark. I've been reading as the opportunities arise-- in the bathroom, while waiting to have my teeth cleaned, sitting at the local Subway on my lunch hour-- and am further convinced that the short story is my favorite form. Novels are great; but this is a 65-course meal.

EDIT: "Perfection" is now possibly my favorite story so far. If you happen to read the story, and want to gallop farther along the Reading Rainbow, here's a nice critical breakdown:

Behind the Glass Pane: Vladimir Nabokov’s “Perfection” and Transcendence

DOUBLE EDIT: Only read this comment if you've read the story so I don't ruin it for you. Waiting...waiting for you to finish the story...still waiting...still waiting...still waiting...still waiting...still waiting...still waiting...still waiting...still waiting...still waiting...still waiting...still waiting...still waiting...done? Okay, so what did I tell you before? The guy dies. Everyone dies.

So Long, Abjective.

Since the kiddies may be reading, I'll keep this clean: shitballs. Abjective is done publishing. I am very sad to see it go, though I hope the circumstances were benign-- i.e. there was no massive fire, or website foreclosure, or abduction, etc. Lots of amazing fiction came and went over in those parts.

Went-- no, that's the wrong word. It implies that the fiction is gone-- it remains! Explore the archive:

Abjective.

Thanks for the memories.