Kristina Born – Dizzying channel-surfing: They said I would be accompanied by visual hallucinations but everything I have seen is real

Kristina Born, One Hour of Television (Year of the Liquidator, 2009)

"To read One Hour of Television is to flip channels between a 50’s science film on the joys of nuclear prowess and a heist-driven road movie set in a late-imperialist apocalypse. In Born’s hands, all social code is a recipe for deadpan horror. Strained domestic tableaus are intimately wedded to carpet bombings and crowd control, and our best chances at intimacy arrive via gruesome medical emergencies. This book is in revolt against language as an anesthesia machine. It’s in revolt against an empire in which any vote you cast necessarily ends up as a vote for genocide." - Lara Glenum

"One Hour of Television’s recurring headwounds make an apt symbol for the work as a whole; urgent and insistent, the oozing gauze on an otherwise lovely skull. Would that all flash fiction be this deadly." - Amelia Gray

"It's terrifying, and goddamn, Kristina Born can write. I think the book's scariness is derived from the fact that it is not magical. Sure, there are things happening in it that defy reality, but magic is outlawed. Concrete entities do zany shit. An unmanned aircraft changes dinner. Giggling school girls wire bombs. Julia Roberts does Erin Brockovich-y things while we watch someone watching Julia Roberts doing Erin Brockovich-y things.
Born stitches sentences together in exciting and frantic ways. This creates a perilous place for the reader, a very tenuous platform where you engage with the text at your own risk. This platform could come crashing down at any moment, though, and it frequently does.
Here's one of my favorite passages:
'The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency develops unmanned aerial vehicles for use by the military. In fact I am, right now, a UAV in your home. Pyu. Watch it, lady. I am sliding terrible things into your potatoes. If I don't alter the face of square meals who will. If I don't alter your face. See if, just for fun, you can maintain a perfect unchanging expression when you explode. You asked for this: to serve me and for me to serve you. Let's do our jobs in silence. I have never been steered or manned in any way." - Bryan Coffelt

"The scenes, lectures, and digressions that comprise One Hour of Television come at you quickly, and if a pattern exists, it isn’t readily apparent. Lara Glenum’s blurb on the back cover raises the notion of channel-surfing, and that may be the best comparison for the sort of collage effect that Kristina Born’s book evokes. Cycle through enough stations and you’ll eventually find patterns; you’ll be bombarded with loping cross-sections of plot alongside aphorisms and politicized declarations and moments that, removed from any context, seem fundamentally alien. It’s dizzying, but that’s the point.
Some of One Hour of Television’s pages abound with text; others contain a handful of lines. Some have only one. Yet the book lingers: Born provides connective tissue: a trauma-filled trip to Las Vegas; a depressive recounting the plot of Erin Brockovich. Other sections hold a funhouse mirror up to American politics, like this feverish re-imagining of Cold War-era history: “In Eden dwelled dinosaurs and Communism came and killed the dinosaurs.” Given the narrative delirium, the surreal politics, and the book’s immersion in the larger scope of media, your best foothold for a point of reference may well be the the films of Alex Cox. While a cross-disciplinary comparison might seem out of order, given Born’s title and approach here, it seems entirely appropriate for this neatly unclassifiable volume." - Tobias Carroll

“I was stimulated deep in my brain and thought: yes: Wal-Mart: the cradle of Rome. And the Lottery Corporation of Canada is beholden to me. See, we have all worked very hard to put value down on paper, and I am not about to dishonor our efforts by never stealing from another man.
“I said yes to the world and I have never been told no since.”
I’m not always drawn to the kind of experimental writing where most of the interest is to be found between the lines. Maybe my attention span is too short, or maybe it’s not short enough. The thing is, it’s always sort of a surprise when I find something in this mode that I genuinely love, such as Donald Barthelme’s “The Indian Uprising,” or certain poems by John Ashbery or James Tate or Max Jacob, or, most recently, Kristina Born’s One Hour of Television.
One Hour of Television calls itself a novel but it reads more like television. Not a TV program, but television as we usually take it in: disconnected moments of a half-understood storyline that we keep returning to as we flip through the channels, waiting for something else to come on, across intervals haunted by voices randomly telling us things or selling us things.
Such a high noise-to-signal ratio might have frustrated me had the writing not been funny enough to keep me reading. And as I did the work took shape in another way, one grounded not in channel-surfing passivity but in a feeling of crisis. What I picked up on was the fact that its central recurring situation implied a narrative perspective debilitated by a life-threatening head trauma, possibly sustained in the course of an attempted robbery. “They said I would be accompanied by visual hallucinations but everything I have seen is real,” we are told at one point, and later what appears to be the same first-person voice remarks, acknowledging the vertiginous limits of that which he can vouch for, “This is how it is and who knows what it was before.” As there’s no way to draw a hard line between what does and doesn’t belong to this perspective, it seeps through all the various layers of the work, transforming its nonsense elements into the record of a desperate failure to make sense of one’s world.
The emergency being evoked would seem at the same time to be a social one. Even the imagery used to establish it instantly mutates into the geopolitical: “Jean-Phillipe’s red spot was the shape of Cuba and mine was the shape of the United States. We were about to make a historic trade agreement.” Born writes a lot about what a nation is (“A nation’s relationship with its bird has no known biological role”) and what a person is (“A person and his compounds, upon entering the food chain, are progressively metabolized to a less toxic form of person”), and even more about Erin Brockovich (“Who knows if Erin Brockovich could have happened in real life. Not just tits out to here–I mean people deceiving people on such a huge scale that it causes the deceived ones to die.”) Perhaps her most characteristic motif is to assume a voice of authority (whether scientific, medical, historical, journalistic, narrative, civic, or some mix of these) and descend sharply into dementia. Something has gone wrong with these messages, though it’s usually unclear how the problem arose. Only occasionally can a note of open satire be made out, as in the following passage:
'Superman is inert for most practical purposes. Only springing to life, as it were, under pressure of grave danger. Like, if you were making toast, he wouldn’t be Superman for that. He would be Clark Kent making you toast, and maybe his glasses would fog up with the steam or something, but that’s all. Or say a country in Africa has been without clean water for pretty much forever: he’d just be Clark Kent for that. That’s already beyond the pale.'
I’ll close by quoting another of the brief sections the work is made up of, one that is more typically oblique and, to my ear, just utterly beautiful:
'The house, house repairs, cars and repairs, whether or not to eat out, the pets, do we even have pets or did that one die, at least four nights a week away playing cards, whether or not to play cards on days when cards are not typically played, the holidays, the payments for the house and the cars and the pets and the holidays and the children, the beautiful glistening babysitter, the children, whether or not to have more children, do we even have children or did that one die.'" - Alan Horn

"How delicious it is when things come together. Think strawberries and chocolate. Think peanut butter and chocolate. Think peanut butter and jelly. These things that come together and bring new flavor, that mix unexpectedly, that create in their meshing.
Shane Jones wrote Light Boxes. It is lively and surreal and simply phrased but complex in its mood and its action and its way of dreaming a story.
Blake Butler wrote Scorch Atlas. It is a chaos, a white noise, it is a spark that starts a flame that so quickly gets out of control that we are holding ashes before we can scream fire, or help, or o my god.
Put them together, these two, their styles, their tastes, their aesthetics.
Let them influence and flavor one another.
Ta-da:
Year Of The Liquidator.
And then Presto:
Kristina Born’s One Hour Of Television.
Here:
'They say you can’t get the bends from swimming in a puddle of cat piss, but I know this to not be true. I have been on the living room floor with my head in it. I have, with my head in it, been weeping and in excruciating pain. I have had marbles crawling through my skin, I have had hallucinations, I have had my tendons seized by a sudden clarity in which they leap off the bone and drown.'
Here:
'A person is one of the few substances that expands as it solidifies. And he is not the only one. An example is that a fetus is quite liquid and a child of five noticeably less. Or that when a man is no longer a boy we allow him to run our country. He stops crying. Or that a boy, becoming a man, is seized by sudden confusing pains.'
Here:
'We will not hide our naked ambition. Our ambition is natural and we are not ashamed. We were born this way, with ambition; what could be more good or right? One day, we imagine, you will see the beauty in your own ambition. You and your ambition will walk with us and our ambition, down the street, in the sun.'
Here:
'Only trace amounts of you will ever be produced. You may think you’re fucking everything in sight but in concrete reality you are just a ghost. In fact, it is downright impossible to leave behind the volume of semen you want when your wife is determined to wash her face and wash the sheets. Clearly, though, something needs to be done.'
Born’s One Hour Of Television is this, the great coming together, two tremendous writers going editorial, unearthing a new vibrancy, their own phenomenal eyes working in tandem and bringing a third to life, this new book, this fantastic writer.
But Born too is not simply a mixture, we cannot relegate her to this role; she interjects, she mingles, she brings other aspects to an already fused and stirring storm front. She brings the surreal and the dreamlike and the chaotic and the decaying, yes, but she also adds this clever undercurrent, the wit and fervor of a politician slowly losing grip. Born attaches sleek to slick in a novella that is pushy and pulsing and wonderful in its digestion of a reader, vignette by vignette, seeping in and closing the door behind itself, locking us in the dark with nothing but words.
Year Of The Liquidator is a press that will demand and satisfy. And we should all be reading this their first title, One Hour Of Television, because Kristina Born is an angry mob contained in a charmingly droll shell, raging language inside of flash and fiction.
So think in threes instead. Think perfect triangles. Think flying-by tricycles. Think menage et tois.
Read Kristina Born’s One Hour Of Television. Support Year Of The Liquidator.
This is when lit explodes." - J.A. Tyler

"One Hour of Television is a bleeding, screaming, literary freak-beast adventure novel created by new Canadian voice-sensation Kristina Born. Told in poetic-micro-burst segments, Born transcribes a filthy world of wicked science, consumerism, bomb building, and Texas hold em. From a boiled pot of Gary Lutz, Andy Kaufman, and pure human fear, One Hour of Television is a story of mad consumption that will, through its paper, consume you." - infinityskitchen

"Kristina Born’s One Hour of Television is, above all else, a mastery of rhythm. Most times when we read books we’re not thinking of pages as being rhythmic, as carrying a time signature, yet there they are, sprawled out, numbered, and aside from Jenny Boully’s The Book of Beginnings and Endings and DFW’s Brief Interviews, I’ve never read a book which actually made use of the rhythm of pages (Boully’s because each odd-numbered-page [the ones on the right] were starts, and the even numbers [left] were the ends; Wallace’s Interviews is, as far as I know, the only book which has the evens and odds inverted, and I’m not sure what the intent was other than him starting the book with “A Radically Condensed History…” on page zero, but there [obviously] was method).
So what is this, One Hour of Television. It’s a waltz, essentially, though porous: there are three recognizable voices and, whiplashingly, they braid through the text. Are there three voices? There seem to be three voices, though I’d guess a good argument could be made for different ways to read these voices. For sure there’s a first-person narrator who, with his friend/enemy Jean-Phillipe, makes his way ultimately toward a gambling table, and whose relationship with Jean-Phillipe is the coaxing river of what-the-hell that keeps the boat up and drift. There are, along with this first-person’s voice (about whom the reader knows next to nothing—name, visage, tastes—other than he has a wife, though that relationship gets complicated because of/through Jean-Phillipe), two other voices, and though we know next to nothing about these two as well, what we do know is fascinating.
(This book, by the way, is maybe flash fiction, maybe poetry; I’m not sure. Each page features prose of varying lengths, the shortest entries featuring two words, the longest stretching somewhere not absurdly past 150 or so words. We’ll get to the writing and everything further down, but the magnificently fascinating and satisfying part of the book is, yes, certaintly, partly the writing involved, but the big oomph has to do with the ride of it, which has everything to do with narration, everything to do with the story’s rhythm. Know Brubeck’s “Take Five,” or, more recently, Radiohead’s “15 Step”? How both songs are almost mathematically addictive? How the songs beg enjoyment while also begging you to spend time/energy ‘solving’ for the rhythm, begging you to learn how to tap them out on your thighs sitting there on the couch or whatever? Kristina Born’s One Hour of Television asks a similar mathematical awareness.)
The other two voices are distinct, weirdly (weird because they’re both implacable, un-touchable). One voice is first person plural, and the ‘we’ involved seem fundamentally In Charge (of what? Of television? Of the election that’s ostensibly happening within this book [there are sections in this book: there's "The Campaign" for 40+ pages, then "One Hour of Tevision" for another 40+, then "Who Voted" for another 40+, and you see that? The triptych the text itself is structured according to? You think I'm kidding about this being a waltz [though when I say 'waltz' please in your own head hear 'fractured/scratched waltz, a waltz more scratched and darker than, say, even Tom Waits or any recognizable musician's idea: this is a waltz sung to tires from knives, hummed by every fingernail that doesn't but wishes to claw at something]). This ‘we’ says things like “On the one hand we can’t be attacked; on the other hand we try to order pizza and end up calling in a missle strike. We don’t even know where.” This ‘we’ seems fundamentally in-control and fundamentally unclear about what ‘control’ even means. Without sounding lame and airless, this ‘we’ has all sorts of power but is living someplace/some-moment in which ‘power’ as it’s understood doesn’t mean much, or at least not in any way to this ‘us’.
The third voice is harder to parse, and, honestly, I’m not sure about it (I’m sure about it as art, as it works in the book, but I’m not sure I’m ‘right’ in how I’ve understood it). It’s another ‘us’ but one more powerless, seemingly: this ‘we’ doesn’t call in accidental airstrikes; this one’s more put-upon, less acting-out. Does this make sense?
Here’s the thing: I’m not certain about One Hour of Television. He’s what I’m 100% sure about, though: It’s not necessary to be certain about One Hour of Television (to be certain about what it ‘means’ or, even, what it ‘means’; it’s a text which, in the best and most frustrating ways, does, and of course to handle a text that’s exclusively doing demands not reviews or anything else but reading the fucking thing). It’s a hard-edged book which asks sideways and gives oddly and I read it all in one sitting, flying from Omaha to Chicago, seat 20A, and I’m not a huge fan of flying and get occasionally white-knuckled at the turbulence and One Hour of Television both made the turbulence more and less. I can’t explain it, thank fuck, which, I suppose, is the whole point of reading to begin with. As in: go read." - Weston Cutter

"Liquidator present… ONE HOUR OF TELEVISION by Kristina Born — a novel of the highest order, which for me means that it is a question raiser rather than a question answerer. It opens. It suggests. It fans the flames inside your head and chest. It begs the question who are the we and I? Why the loud soft cracks of tiny prose? And where to hide? Where to shelter? When will the words burst? When will the solve of the mystery? And who remains when the cards are played? Who remains the who in the middle? And what does Erin Brockovich have to do with it? What does annihilation have to do with it? What is the why and the how of the who and the when of the what and behold the grotesquery of commodity fetishism! Don’t change the channel. Don’t look away. I, myself, could not. I, myself, wanted answers. Not all, not many, just some, just few. Just a quick dip into the mind of its creator. A brief chance to glimpse another angle. A way to hold the book differently. A way to deepen the trench of my understanding. So here you have it… a brief quick glimpse dip chance at better understanding.
First, I’d be interested to learn more about you. I know you’re 21, 5′3”, 120 lbs., and that you live in Toronto, Ontario. But I want to know about the kind of stuff that makes you the writer you are, maybe stuff like: what magazines do you look at, what music do you listen to, what television shows do you watch, what books do you cherish, what relationships are most important to you, and/or what occupation pays your bills?
- Actually, I just turned 22, I’m now closer to 100 lbs due to mysterious digestive ailments, and my boyfriend measured me against a wall and forced me to admit that I’m really only 5′2”. Such flux. Good TV for me is stuff like Carnivale, The Wire, Twin Peaks, Deadwood. New York Tyrant is the best lit mag out there period, but also Unsaid, DIAGRAM, Hobart, No Colony, Tin House. Good books are so many, but for now I will always pick out [David Foster Wallace's] Brief Interviews With Hideous Men as the most important. It changed me the most. Good music is Diamanda Galas, Neutral Milk Hotel, Fugazi, Nirvana, Radiohead, The Fugs, Nina Simone, Scout Niblett, Xiu Xiu, Erik Satie. I have an incredible group of smart, funny, pretty friends. I can’t imagine doing without them and when we play music together, it’s magic.
When you say that DFW’s Brief Interviews… changed you the most, could you say more about that? How? In what ways?
- I mean that it completely destroyed the way I looked at literature, and my writing was never the same after I read it. It shook me up. Coming out of high school, I had read lots of books that I admired and that inspired me, but Brief Interviews, I think, was the first to really kick me in the head and make me go, “This is better work than I’ll ever do. I’m not a writer yet,” which I needed. Plus I had it taught to me by an amazing professor, Kim Michasiw, who I daresay is as fiercely brilliant as Foster Wallace was. So I came to realize that you can do all these fucked things with form and voice and Brief Interviews was the first thing that started showing me how.
I really hate the terms “novella” and “novelette” because they don’t mean anything.
What was your writing process like for One Hour of Television? Where was it written, under what conditions, and how much revision has it gone through since its initial creation?
- I wrote the majority of OHT during the summer after my second year of university. I came home and worked a 10-hour graveyard shift at a local gas station. I was alone from 8pm-6am and since no one came in after about 11 or so, I had very little actual work to do. I wanted to give myself a writing project for the summer, so I decided that I would write a small story based on every element in the periodic table. I looked up each element on Wikipedia and took down a few facts that jumped at me, and wrote them in no particular order. After 11 at the gas station, the rule was that I had to write three sections, and then I was allowed to read Infinite Jest until around 3, when I mopped and started making coffee for the truckers. After about three weeks, some themes started to emerge and I realized it was a book.
It really hadn’t undergone significant revision until Blake [Butler] and Shane [Jones] got a hold of it. I knew that the ending had to be redone, but I hadn’t been able do it. I really think the whole thing would have failed utterly if it weren’t for their suggestions.
I’m interested in how you went about getting it published. Had you sent it out to other places? Were you looking for a publisher in Canada or the US or both or does that distinction even matter? How did you get hooked up with Blake and Shane?
- I’ve never been published in Canada, and I don’t particularly think I ever will, which is fine. I don’t feel much of a connection with the literature that’s being published here right now, but I’ll talk more about that later.
I sent Blake WHAT IS ALLOWED for consideration for NO COLONY, and ended up having to withdraw it a few months later because Unsaid took it. He emailed me that day and apologized for not grabbing it first, and asked if I had anything else I could send. I didn’t have a working computer at the time, and the only things I had on my work computer were THE DELIVERY ROOM, which he did end up publishing in NO COLONY, and a draft of OHT. I sent him the draft too and shortly after, he said that he and Shane wanted to put it out.
I’m interested in a different solution: a complete monopoly of mood.
One of the many excellent things about your book is the way it resists genre classification. Is it a group of prose poems, is it a collection of short-shorts, is it a novella, is it…? (To me, it’s all those things and more.) I wonder how you see it in terms of genre. Do you even think about genre distinctions?
- To me, it’s a novel. I really hate the terms “novella” and “novelette” because they don’t mean anything. It’s a short novel, that’s all. I’m not a poet and I would never describe my writing as prose poetry - which also doesn’t mean anything - and if I read something like Anne Carson’s DECREATION, which is a lot of different things, it seems pointless to me to try to classify it as plays or essays or poetry. It’s a book and it’s good.
I’m wondering about the page layout. It’s so sparse; there’s so much white space. For me, it evokes an eerie kind of silence, which plays an interesting counterpoint to the sharpness of language. Could you say a little something about that choice?
- I wanted it to be suffocating. Gertrude Stein thought (mostly in reference to her plays, I believe) that you can’t write emotional arcs, because if the reader is not in the exact right emotional state at the right stage in the arc, you’ll lose him. Her solution was to put everything on the page immediately, like a painting, and allow the reader to pick out what resonated with him at the time. I’m interested in a different solution: a complete monopoly of mood. I want to try to write in a way where the reader can pick up the book, read any sentence, and be immediately crunched down into the mood he should be in.
That doesn’t mean that there is only one mood throughout the book; there are funny parts and sad parts and what have you. What it means is, throughout all these different moods, I try to use diction to create an underlying tone that deadens the moods. So the reader, while he experiences the variable moods of the book, is simultaneously experiencing this monotonous tone, which will hopefully anchor him.
I’ve probably explained this badly.
No, that makes sense. I especially like what you say about wanting “a complete monopoly of mood.” But now this has got me thinking about your choice to write the narrative “I” from the male perspective. Did it just come out that way or was it a conscious decision/challenge?
- I almost always write from the male perspective when I’m writing in first person, whether gender is specified in the piece or not. I think I’m always trying to get as far away from autobiography as possible. I tend to get into a pretty dark headspace when I think about myself in any real way, so I avoid too much introspection when I write. Despite popular theory, it’s terribly hard to be creative when you’re bummed out. I’m trying to work around this problem with my next project, though, so we’ll see if that stays true.
I think it’s worth noting that even Anne Carson, who’s one of the few continuing to fuck language, is first a classicist.
There’s also the narrative voice of “we,” which almost seems to function as the voice of the collective consciousness of the community. Do you envision these narrative voices as separate from each other or somehow interconnected?
- Well, the collective unconscious of the community, really. The two–the conscious “I” and the unconscious “we”–are separate, but tenuously. We all have this store of weird, half-remembered information in our heads, information about who we are and how the world is, and I think that you can only break away from that so much. In the book, one of the functions of the narrative “we” is to establish the kinds of voices that the “I” might be hearing.
How do you think about this book in terms of how it fits or doesn’t fit within the world of literature? Do you feel like this book is in conversation with any other books–if so, which ones?
- OHT was written partly as protest against current Canadian literature, so it’s necessarily in conversation with the short-lived era of Canadian experimental literature from about 1965-1985. Since 1985, Canadian literature has been predominantly historical and familial, and I find it painful that no one seems to want to look forward or even attempt to address the present climate of the country. There are exceptions, of course (Christian Bök’s Xenotext Experiment, for example), but I think it’s worth noting that even Anne Carson, who’s one of the few continuing to fuck language, is first a classicist.
I don’t consider myself an especially political person, but this chronic passivity, particularly among young Canadian artists, is what allowed Stephen Harper to cut $45 million in arts funding and then be swiftly re-elected.
Call me crazy, but I get a sense that there are at least two kinds of writers who are writing prose right now: writers who consider themselves story-centric and writers who consider themselves sentence-centric. What is your take on that split? Do you consider yourself one of those two kinds of writers?
- This split seems pretty ridiculous to me. I mean, I think most writers considered to be story-centric are just linear-narrative-centric and most writers considered to be sentence-centric are just non-linear-narrative-centric, so why not say that? That actually means something. And anyone who calls himself a non-narrative writer is probably a little crazy. I don’t care if you have three dots on a page; three dots is expression, expression is a telling, a telling is narrative." - Interview with Christopher Higgs

Evan Lavender-Smith - Post-genre literature, an amazing collection of notes about family, death, drugs, sex, philosophy, football, fear, aging

Evan Lavender-Smith, From Old Notebooks (BlazeVOX, 2010)

“The book is the subject and the object of the book.” (pg. 137)
“In a certain respect, [From Old Notebooks] represents little more than the garbage can of my imagination.” (pg. 75)
"One afternoon I checked my facebook page and saw in the news feed thing a post by Evan Lavender-Smith, which included blurbs for his book From Old Notebooks. What struck me about the post was that instead of the blurbs being from other “creative” writers, they were from literary critics, and not just any literary critics, but some of the biggest names in Deleuze Studies: Claire Colebrook and Ian Buchanan, to name only two. Knowing nothing else about it, I automatically wanted to purchase the book and read it.
What follows are some thoughts, having finished it last night.
First, the obvious stuff. This book is a quintessential example of post-genre literature: it defies genre classification. It is fiction, nonfiction, poetry, theory, anecdote, aphorism, and probably a bit of whatever other thing you can think of. There is no plot. There are no scenes. It is, quite literally, a collection of notes. Most are only a couple lines long. None are longer than a page. It is exhilarating and stirring and compelling and engaging and fascinating at every turn.
Reading From Old Notebooks, I get to thinking about Derrida’s project of decentering described in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” To make the connection, recall when Derrida posits: “The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center.”
Imagine a cinematheque in which one film plays 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without repeating—as if the film was a projection of a life, but the life would not be a mundane reality show type of life, it would be a carefully assembled life composed of the choicest bits. And imagine that you could walk into the theater at any point and sit down and watch the film for a few hours and then get up and go home and do whatever it is you do at home. You would always enter in the middle and exit in the middle. There would be no beginning, no ending, no set up and no closure. There would be little by way of context, except what you bring to the experience. This is one way to think about Evan Lavender-Smith’s From Old Notebooks (F.O.N.).
Another way to think about F.O.N. is to consider it in relation to David Markson’s Author Tetralogy because of the obvious influence (the form in particular, but also the death obsession). One of the many things I admire about F.O.N. is that Lavender-Smith clearly acknowledges the Markson connections, “[The books in Markson’s Author Tetralogy] are like porn for English majors” (pg. 60). He isn’t trying to deny the connections, and he isn’t trying to be cute or clever. Neither is he trying to mimic Markson or repeat what Markson has created. Instead, he is very clearly attempting to build off of the Marksonian foundation, which is one of the (many) things that makes F.O.N. so bloody exciting! It is an experiment in evolving a form. And to be blunt, I think the experiment succeeds.
How does it succeed? What is it doing differently to elaborate on Markson’s project? Well, for one thing it incorporates more personal information, more autobiography than Markson is willing or interested in sharing. I get the sense that Lavender-Smith really wants to uncover himself, shed secrets, bare himself, confess, and reveal what should not or cannot be revealed. This interpretation could of course be way off base. One could surely argue that what Lavender-Smith presents as personal information is in fact made up, fiction, etcetera. But even so, the very fact that he includes so much information about his wife and children (even if it’s fictitious) is in stark contrast to Markson’s project, which is aimed more at constructing a writer persona through assembling anecdotes rather than juxtaposing anecdotes with personal information to reveal a constructed writer.
Another way in which F.O.N. differs from Markson’s project is that it incorporates ideas for potential works of fiction or poetry, such as the opening lines: “Short story about a church on the ocean floor. Congregation in scuba gear.” These are a real pleasure to read: very interesting and provocative and inspiring, and on a philosophical level they work as a unique porthole into the mind of the writer. They allow us to see a character (presumably the author) at his most interesting: using his imagination.
The last thing I want to point out about how F.O.N. differs from Markson’s project—keeping in mind that there are probably many other differences that I haven’t mentioned here—is movement. I noticed about fifty pages from the end of F.O.N. that Lavender-Smith began circling around the fact that the book would soon be coming to an end. As I advanced toward that ending, the notes on endings (building upon the recursive theme of death as an ending) began to pile up and reverberate at a steady pace. I thought it was really cool the way he was able to push the acceleration of the text simply by the placement of the notes and the repetition of certain themes. This isn’t necessarily something I’ve noticed Markson doing — he seems to be more interested in creating brilliant concentric circles, rather than playing with speed and slowness the way Lavender-Smith does.
Speaking of themes, what are the themes in F.O.N.? Family, death, drugs, sex, philosophy, football, fear, aging, parenthood, being a writer, being a teacher, being an American, being a brother, being a thinker, being vulnerable, being strong, and maybe above all being curious. It is certainly an ontological text: a text deeply concerned with being, in all its various guises.
I could write so much more about this fantastic book, but I’ve got obligations to attend to so I’ll end with this: when December rolls around and those end of the year lists begin to appear, you can be sure that this book will be on my best books of 2010 list." - Christopher Higgs

"Possibility #1:
Evan Lavender-Smith keeps notebooks. Old notebooks. And in these old notebooks he writes snippets: movie plots, story ideas, funny things his wife or children said, potential inventions, et cetera. Evan Lavender-Smith writes these snippets in these old notebooks and, somewhere down the line, decides that he has a dozen or so old notebooks lying around and, instead of just chucking them in a storage box or, worse yet, the garbage bin, he compiles them into a single document, culls and cuts until it is a book-sized endeavor.
There are, within these possibilities, a string of other possibilities.
And like a vulture, as I read, I wait, hoping to pin down a victim, or better yet, gleefully happen upon one’s carcass.
Absolute #1:
This is a review that contains vultures, fortune cookies, and words about Evan Lavender-Smith’s From Old Notebooks.
Possibility #2:
Evan Lavender-Smith keeps notebooks. Old notebooks. And in these old notebooks he writes little things: movie plots, story ideas, funny things his wife or children say, grammarian quotes, et cetera. Evan Lavender-Smith writes these things in these old notebooks and, somewhere down the line, decides that a book could be based on this, could be written as if it was the culled and cut scenes from dozens of these kinds of old notebooks, all pulled together into a book-length endeavor.
Here is a book that is a fortune cookie. We know there is a message inside of our Chinese dinner dessert, and we have a feeling it will be a mostly vague and generic message, something we can easily digest and connect with. But there is a fleeting moment in all of us, when that frame bursts in our fingers, and we think the message might actually be something more than that.
Absolute #2:
Evan Lavender-Smith’s Blazevox title is called From Old Notebooks.
Absolute #3:
Inside of every fortune cookie, there is a note.
Possibility #3:
I am reading Evan Lavender-Smith’s From Old Notebooks and hoping that it is a book of fiction and not a culled and cut-together string of statements made honestly from old notebooks. I want this because Lavender-Smith’s book is, if fictionalized and created, if structured to look genuine but in fact earnestly planned, it is a genius enterprise. There is an arc within the lines, there is a story in each of the related bits: We learn more about his family with each continued moment, we follow the ideas of a writer and how the craft works, we learn something more about being human, about existing.
Consider these excerpts:
“How as a child I once felt that everyone but me was an automaton. –As I sometimes feel still, except for that but me.”
“By waving my hands before my face I affect physical processes of unfathomable complexity. –As I do when thinking of nothing at all.”
“Death is the glue that holds the book together.”
“It can be a terrible feeling to suddenly remember that the sun is a star”
These are just some of the possibilities.
Vultures wait for meat. Sometimes reviewers wait for books as meat. I am typically, as a reviewer, waiting for the taste of goodness, the delicious, rather than simply a hunk of flesh to tear apart in my beak.
Absolute #4: In this metaphor, From Old Notebooks is the meat and I am the vulture.
There is a possibility that I have found a new kind of appetite.
Possibility #4:
I have opened a fortune cookie and what is inside is a message that means the world to me, a message that lights me on fire, a message that tackles me from behind and pushes my face into the earth, waking me up.
Inside some books are hands that reach out and grab us, pulling our eyes to their bodice.
Absolute #5:
Some books are terrible.
Absolute #6:
Some books are tremendous.
Possibility #5:
I have opened a book that is a fortune cookie and what is inside are a chain of simple phrases, ideas, moments of thought, and together they have made me think harder and squint my eyes into the air and furrow my reader’s brow.
Absolute #7:
These are more excerpts from Evan Lavender-Smith’s From Old Notebooks:
“At every moment life suffers the light of innumerable surrounding stars.”
“Not writing my way out of death, writing my death out of my way.”
“In a universe of infinite time, we experience an infinite number of afterlives. In a universe of finite time, we experience none.”
“From Old Notebooks might contain a number of false endings.”
Fortune cookies have messages in them. Books have message in them. We break the sweet shell of both to read their words. We digest both.
Absolute #8:
I truly enjoyed and highly recommend Evan Lavender-Smith’s From Old Notebooks.
Absolute #9:
I do not know how Evan Lavender-Smith wrote From Old Notebooks, though the possibilities are clear.
Possibility #6:
You may buy this book and agree.
Possibility #7:
You may buy this book and disagree.
Possibility #8:
You may not buy this book.
This is not a Chinese dinner, so there is no fortune cookie here. This is no book either – this is a review. And I am no vulture, though sometimes I perch as one, above a desert of pages, seeking blood or monumental tastes. Today I have not found a carcass, but a thriving animal, a beast of a book, one that I must let go, that I must release back into the world, so that it may run where others can watch its hide shimmer in the possibilities.
Absolute #10:
This is the last sentence of this review. " - J. A. Tyler

"There’s much at stake in The First Book. The first-time author wishes to make a good impression and, if things work out, to seduce the reader. The reader, for his or her part, hopes to love the book but looks for signs of weakness. Both parties are blind—there is no track record, no laurels; there is no critical lens. The writer covers up the bumps and bruises. The reader looks for poise and power. But if a first-timer appears sure and strong, most likely this is an illusion—beneath the polish, the writer, like the reader, is uncertain about the book’s performance and its fate.
In From Old Notebooks, Evan Lavender-Smith reveals what other writers, especially first-timers, try to hide: the influence, the bravado, the insecurity, the bravery, and the cowardice and the hubris of writing—all in the hope of creating something original.
From Old Notebooks is a collection of aphorisms, ranging from ideas for stories, novels, memoirs, and movies, to musings about books, sports, family, linguistics, and philosophy. At first the book seems like a notebook of jottings—from the mundane to the magnificent—revelations that hit the writer while in the car, at the library, or on the john. But as we attempt to find a narrative thread, we come to understand that the writer, Lavender-Smith’s proxy, is trying to make sense of it all, too. And from here the project emerges: the writer will turn his jottings into a book, a book which will be called From Old Notebooks. Let’s call it F.O.N.2.
The idea for the book is set, but it’s aim is unstable. The writer’s attempt to categorize the project is ongoing: is F.O.N.2 a journal? a memoir? a novel? a “memiovel”? This doubt lends the book its improvisatory feeling, turning the writer-character into a reader, a reader who must examine and interpret his own content, content that continually outpaces his own understanding of it.
The “plot” of the book is the evolution of its own creation.
At different points, the writer-character is concerned about F.O.N.2—Is this too cute or too smart? Will I finish it? Will I publish it? But he’s also a dreamer. He imagines a future book entitled The Illusion of Improvisation in American Literature from Kerouac to Lavender-Smith, wonders to whom he should dedicate the unfinished book, and schemes against his future literary executors. The sudden tonal shifts, from dread to dreams, portray this writer-character in different roles, from chump to champ. The reader’s response to all this is complex and fluid, too—the writer-character, as a personality, is elusive. Take for example the following series of thoughts culled at random, all of which deal with the writer’s family:

Will Jackson develop an aversion to books because his father neglected him on their account? Nearly every day now he grabs a book from my hands and speaks angrily, “Dada, stop reading!”

It hurts to wear my baseball glove with my wedding ring on.

To live in the white creases inside Sofia’s elbows, the backsides of her knees and knuckles.

Three things I would try my hardest to save were my house on fire: flash drive, baseball glove, first-edition Gravity’s Rainbow.

Three more: Carmen, Jackson, Sofia.

I am tempted to cut out that patch of skin from Sofia’s back containing her birthmark—crimson relief of Kauai—before it fades any further.

Jackson, pointing at a moth fluttering by: “A Life! A Life!”

The image of beauty that would instantly dispel all doubt—Jackson taking a bath, Carmen raising two fingers to her lips, empty autumn baseball field—for which I am constantly on the lookout and never able to resolve.
The writer-character, caught between freedom and family, is an exaggerator and a minimizer. He’s abstract and lucid, direct and indirect. He makes us shudder and swoon. The result is dynamic. As he wrestles with ideas about the book and his family, we reexamine our thoughts about the writer and the book. It’s a performance on both parts, a performance in which writer and reader have equal billing. Lavender-Smith isn’t afraid to let his guard down, to sit at the bottom of the tower, however long he daydreams about climbing it. He shows how a writer, like a reader, is always plodding in the muck, hoping to resolve the contradictions.
And if the job proves impossible, there are the creases and the birthmark and the son who sounds like Virginia Woolf: “A Life! A Life! ”
From Old Notebooks is many things: a meta-novel, a family memoir, an essay on form, a book about the First Book, an ode to self-reliance, a pillow book for aspiring writers. Above all, it’s a performance, a first book in which Evan Lavender-Smith plays his different roles, interprets his own lines, and practices his own voice—all in the hopes of emerging as himself." - Kevin Evers

Matthew Simmons - How is it possible that this is the saddest thing you have ever heard anyone say? You don’t know, really. You just know that it is

Matthew Simmons, A Jello Horse (Publishing Genius Press, 2009)

“Matthew Simmons has found a beautiful and extraordinary way to tell a story about the sweetness of sadness and the aloneness of loneliness.” - Michael Kimball

"In Tom Robbins’s Another Roadside Attraction, we’re welcomed to “Captain Kendrick’s Memorial Hot Dog Wildlife Preserve,” a combination hot dog stand and zoo that’s described as “a little roadside attraction sitting out in the rains of isolated Northwest America, enticing passing motorists with a sausage smile,” that has “sunshine juices for mildewed tummies and exotic exhibitions for jaded eyes.” At one point the establishment is suspected as being a front for something greater, “some evolutionary religious awakening.” While Robbins’s novel is a vehicle for a scathingly satirical attack on “churchianity” and religiosity in general, Matthew Simmons’s A Jello Horse—with novelty sites of its own — is a horse of a different color. Its “psychic frontier,” to use another phrase from Robbins’s novel, is one filled with fantastic childhood visions, Xanax-fueled hallucinations (maybe), depression-drenched reveries, and just pages of wonderful weirdness.
Like Attraction’s colorful cast of various dropouts, crazies, and a baboon, A Jello Horse is stocked with a motley crew of its own, including people enigmatically known by their three-lettered names, i.e., the troubled trio LEM, DEV, MEG, and also TAD who “is a she, but she lives mostly as a he,” and then a whole assortment of animals like a Russian bear named Boris, a Canadian caribou named Mick that makes “thundering, smacking noises with its mouth,” a snake, a lion “that sleeps next to the house, disappears, sinks into the world,” and a herd of giant antelope, the so-called royal court of ungulates,grazing on the buildings of the city. They were chewing roofs, and walking slowly north to south. They were devastating the city, eating all the tallest buildings, and then bowing low to grab at chimneys on the houses.
In the midst of all this zaniness, however, is a simple and sad story of a young man’s trip to a friend’s memorial service. At one moment the troubled hero of A Jello Horse recalls how someone mentions “the saddest thing you have ever heard anybody say in your entire life.” Reminiscent of Ford Maddox Ford’s famous opening line “This is the saddest story I’ve ever heard,” it is one of the many pitch-perfect moments in this novella. And the saddest thing?
“DEV says I’ll never be able to call him up and recommend a movie to him ever again.How is it possible? How is it possible that this is the saddest thing you have ever heard anyone say? You don’t know, really. You just know that it is.”
Simmons writes with a pellucid quality that makes you think of summer lakes, winter skies, all kind of glass: windshields, windowpanes, and whatever invisible box whose ceiling you want to shatter. Even when he’s talking about fog everything seems clear:
Raindrops cut through the fog on the window, like rivers on maps, like highways on maps. You stared out the window, watching the fog on the window disappear, watching the antelope devour Madison, and then you went to sleep right there on the floor, next to the window, with the corner of the curtain peeled back.
You get the sense in A Jello Horse that Simmons is always peeling back the curtains, that he’s giving you an intimate glimpse of people collapsing, despairing, bolstering themselves with booze and each other. And as you travel with him along the same unremarkable roads and highways, past drab buildings, strip malls, motels, fast food joints, and chain stores, and away from the heaviness of mourning to outlying roadside attractions like “Carhenge” (where supposedly a tornado threw a bunch of cars in a configuration mirroring Stonehenge), “Toadstool Park” (where he meets a desert tortoise that’s as large as a stadium), “The House of 2000 Telephones” (another magical place, where the plot—which is necessarily skeletal—twists), and other places, you can’t help but lose yourself in wonder, and agree that you too are
day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute, second after second, given choices to make, and you make them, and off you go. And also, you don’t make choices, but those possible paths move off in their own ways, anyway.
This novella is a quick read but at the end of it you will feel winded from its ennui, its anxiety, its sadness, while also feeling buoyed by its magical interludes and its end-of-the-road reaching for connection, security, and maybe even, to use a much abused word in recent days, hope." - John Madera

"I see this text consisting of a heart and appendages.
The heart = the funeral.
The appendages = the memories (of what it’s like to be a kid & of previous dating experiences) – plus the experiences at the roadside attractions.
Oddly, the heart (the funeral section) seemed to be of tangential importance. What seemed to hold the most significance, for me anyways, were the appendages. But perhaps that observation says more about me as a reader – and what I see as a tension between reality and imagination – than about the text itself.
As a reader, I generally tend to dislike conventional realism because I find it uninteresting to read a transcript of a situation that could feasibly occur in the ordinary reality in which I live: in the case of A Jello Horse it would be what I am calling the heart — the transcript of driving to a house party, playing pinball, going to a funeral, going to a health clinic, etc. And to be honest, I can’t really understand why other people don’t feel the same negative reaction to this kind of realism. I mean, we already share this ordinary existence, why would I want someone to tell me about their version of it? That would be like someone giving me a running commentary while I’m watching a Lakers game. It’s like: dude, I’m watching it with you, I don’t need you to tell me your version of it – I already have my version, which I will always value greater than anyone else’s version. What I don’t have is whatever strange imaginary things other people hide in their heads, which is one of the primary reasons I turn to literature in the first place.
So what I find most interesting is when a writer writes something unfeasible slash unordinary, be it linguistically, conceptually, formally, etc. And I think Simmons accomplishes this triumphantly in the sections I have identified as appendages. In the unfeasibility/unordinariness of The House of 2000 Telephones, where every phone works and has a separate line. In the unfeasibility/unordinariness of the Jackalope Village, and the curious conversation the narrator holds with the wife of the owner. In the unfeasibility/unordinariness of the childhood dreamscapes. These things are really superlative, really interesting, imaginative, creative, and engaging. What I find less interesting, imaginative, creative, and engaging is the transcript of ordinary reality at the heart of the text.
So this is what I’m thinking when I finish reading A Jello Horse: the heart is eh and the appendages are sweet. I contemplate writing down my initial reactions but decide to think about it for a while, give the book a chance to sit in my brain.
That was yesterday evening.
And now I’m wondering about the relationship between the heart and the appendages. Do they need one another? Would the book be more satisfying without the heart, since I’ve indicated my affinity for the appendages. My answer is: I’m not sure. Part of me wants to say that the realism gets in the way or drags the piece down. But then part of me wants to say that the realism gives the work an anchor from which the appendages can bloom: i.e. maybe craziness without an anchor might not always be sufficient. This gets me thinking more about the heart.
It’s easy for me to locate the appendages as the fun and interesting aspects of the text, sort of like how you can locate the fun and interesting aspects of a potential lover. But sooner or later, if that lover is going to become anything more than a lover, there needs to be something substantive. Maybe this is the role of realism in A Jello Horse. Maybe the text needs that anchor, that substance, that realism, to give it a kind of gravity it would not possess if all were appendage, if all were unfeasible, if all were imaginary.
I’ve decided to reconsider my initial reaction. I think the heart is important and vital to the complexity of the text and without it something important would be missing. I still don’t think the heart is the most interesting part of the text, but I think the fact of it being there actually works to make the appendages as interesting as they are.
The heart as counterbalance.
And in the case of A Jello Horse, I have to commend the counterbalance for resisting the contemporary urge toward hipster irony. That is one really strong aspect of the realism in this text: it feels honest and sincere. For that I am ever thankful. None of the characters are trying to be cool. None of the characters are phony (as Holden Caulfield would say). They are just people. Not remarkably interesting people, but then again so few real people are remarkably interesting.
One final thing I wanted to mention was the choice of using the second person. I think the most productive thing a critic can do is try and explain how the text is working without judging its effectiveness, on the basis that if the critic can explain the mechanisms clearly then a potential reader can deduce the efficacy for themselves. For my part, I see the second person working as a way for the narrator to distance himself from the story. Maybe it’s a way of saying “I” without admitting culpability. Maybe it’s a way of being in the world without admitting that one is in the world. Or maybe, because of the reminiscent (nostalgic?) quality of the text, it is functioning as a tool of/for memory. By saying “You” the narrator can address a former version of himself. Like how if I were talking about the 21-year-old version of myself, which feels nothing like the 31-year-old version of myself, I would call that Chris “You” because he doesn’t feel anything like “I” feel. Maybe that’s it. Maybe it is a way of showing that the narrator is telling a tale that transpired many moons ago, to a version of himself far removed from the version who is actually typing the words. At any rate, I think the use of second person in this text is interesting and important and shouldn’t be dismissed as gimmicky. It’s not for nothing that he chose to use the second person. It’s not for nothing.
In the end, I appreciate the challenge Matthew Simmons presents: combining the feasible and unfeasible, the ordinary and the unordinary, reality and imagination; and I believe reading and thinking about A Jello Horse has pushed me toward becoming a better reader and thinker." – Christopher Higgs

"Dear Matthew Simmons,
I am writing today to ask you a question about your book, which I read with great pleasure: what is it? Forgive the directness of the question, but after reading A Jello Horse I feel as though I know you a little bit. Of course, I realize the “person” I have come to “know” is not you per se but a construct, a protagonist. That said, your use of the second person is clearly a ruse meant to throw the reader off: “You’ve taken a lot of road trips, most by yourself, some with friends, and this just feels like a road trip like any other. Like you’re going out to see a roadside attraction. Like you’re not going to a funeral.” When you say “you,” you mean “me” (meaning you), right?
Nevertheless, your story about taking a trip across the Midwest to attend the memorial service of the brother of a close friend feels honest. I say this in perfect sincerity, but I really have no idea if it’s honest or not, honesty being a word we use to describe prose that faithfully describes the human experience. After a declarative sentence or two the reader starts thinking: This writer knows road trips; I know road trips. This writing feels real; ergo, it must be honest. How then do you explain the giant desert tortoise, “large as a minor-league baseball stadium”? Or the herd of humongous antelope “grazing on the buildings of the city”? Or visits to clearly fictional roadside attractions like Jackalope Village and the House of 2,000 Telephones?
The animals are introduced as childhood fantasies, then when the protagonist is stressed or overtired or poleaxed by grief, they reappear. So are they real, or the hallucinations of someone who has been driving too long? I think the title is the key to the book’s slippery relationship between fact and fiction: gelatin is mythically derived from ground horse hooves, so if I construct the likeness of a horse out of Jell-O, I’m making an image with materials that contain the essence of the thing being represented. You seem to be saying that my story may be strange, but its raw material is the truth. Am I way off here?
It would help clarify things if I knew what to call your book. Postmodern picaresque? Neo-magical-realism? Meta-memoir (with jackalopes)? Yes, I saw the disclaimer: “All details are drawn from the author’s imagination,” but nearly all books say that now. We live in an age where fiction is lawyered up and fact-checked.
In spite of my confusion (or perhaps because of it), I was drawn to the way the narrator questions his grief. The tragedy of his friend’s brother’s death isn’t his own, so he’s at somewhat of a remove from the inner circle of suffering. This is what happens when people die. The ones left behind are thrown together by the terrible event, and everyone sane enough to think rationally wonders if they’re behaving appropriately. It’s a fascinating problem for a protagonist: it’s his story, but the story doesn’t belong to him, and who hasn’t been there?
When the affairs of the dead consume the living, the line between “fact” and “fiction” gets, well—let’s be honest here—there is no line. It gets obliterated as we relinquish the dead to that fiction-making machine called memory. Would knowing that you lost someone, that you found someone, or that the someone who was lost and found was you, Matthew Simmons, really make a difference?
I think I just answered my own question.
All best,
—Jim Ruland"


"At a recent reading at the College Inn Pub for A Jello Horse, someone in the audience asked local author Matthew Simmons how much of his novella is based on real experiences. It's a tough question for any author, and it was especially tough for Simmons: Horse is a road story about a young man taking a trip through Wisconsin and Kansas, with Seattle looming on the edges of the book. Simmons is a young author who lived near Madison and is at least fairly conversant in the roadside culture of Kansas. The answer took a little while to stumble out, and people in the audience fidgeted with their just-purchased copies of the book while they waited for the answer.
Horse should be read in one sitting. It's a tiny slip of a thing (only 67 pages, with generous margins) composed of a delicately constructed monologue; an interruption could well explode the story into senselessness, and you only get one shot to make the experience work. Told in the second person—Simmons, who has an MFA in creative writing, admitted during the Q&A that the book was an attempt to do everything that his teachers had told him not to do—Horse's painfully blunt internal monologue careens around the weird tourist attractions of middle America. The protagonist refuses to listen to a song that a former lover wrote about him: "You know that you deserve this song that says bad things about you, so you will avoid it to live with the possibility that it is a nice song. This is how you get by. It is not perfect, but often it works." Instead of confronting his issues, he diverts himself by contemplating jackalopes and pinball and wondering what he should do with his life.
But the people who attend readings want to know: How much of it is real? Simmons would only admit that the climactic House of 2,000 Phones that appears in Horse is based on a House of 1,000 Phones that used to exist in Kansas. "The rest of it is made up," he said. That's probably a lie, but it was a polite answer to an impolite question, and none of it mattered: The reading quickly turned into a drunken pinball competition, anyway." - Paul Constant

"Matthew Simmons’ delicate prose in his book “A Jello Horse” is a wondrous read on a quiet night within an hour of lying around relaxing. After reading each pretty paragraph, going back and reading it again out loud is recommended to add to the magic of listening to the unraveling of a heart-touching story of a man dealing with a traumatic suicidal event affecting himself and his closest friends. On the road, we observe his recollections of past love’s failures. We are also exposed to his vivid perceptions of the world through the mind of a child who has grown; who continues to grow through death, disease, and empathic observation. His search for absurd beauty between nights in cheap hotels and pinball, takes us through stretches of dreamlike images from an imagination filled with fierce but friendly creatures: the famished antelope grazing city rooftops, slack-eared Jackalope in a Village discovered by roadside billboard, and a flying lion named Richard--all melting into the stark contrast of circumstances in the human condition. “A Jello Horse” is an inspiring coming-of-age tale which is well-worth reading repeatedly." - Sabra Embury

"Ooo, just finished consuming Matthew Simmons’ A Jello Horse, and I really liked it. I saw a review that went gaga for the quirkiness of the novella, but I think the real power comes from the way Simmons uses "familiarity"--that sounds boring, so yeah the book is quirky as hell. It’s not a scary book, but it’s loaded with uncanny imagery. Oddly, the best parts are when the narrator is least interactive with the characters who know him, who have prior history with him. It’s when he is alone, or encountering new characters, that the book hits its highest notes. If that's too vague, how about this: there are BIG ANIMALS in it. I hear it’s going into a 2nd printing.
So a lot of interest in the Vips on very short fiction blog, and I’m delighted to say that new entries are forthcoming from Tim Jones-Yelvington, Michele Reale, Lauren Becker, Tiff Holland, and Molly Gaudry (if she doesn’t implode). Other contributors are more tentative—turns out real editors don’t stalk/pounce on people via Facebook chat. I think would have a tough time being a real editor, simply because I want to post EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW. As opposed to delivering new content in a measured, sane fashion." - Laura Ellen Scott

Christopher Higgs - Would you orchestrate everything down to the color of the dishtowels, teacups, and magnets?

Christopher Higgs, The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney (Sator Press, 2010)

"Exegesis as genesis. Metapostheartenism. No—this novel is stunning, a sublime attack on cultural and critical institutions, a lyrical song of self, a brutally candid confession and admission of not-knowing; it's an emotional trip that is unparalleled in my mind. I could not be more excited for you to read this book in paper or digital form, and listen to the incredible and multi-sensual audiobook." - Ken Baumann

Page 243:

"Do you read upside down on the couch with your feet in the air and chocolate milk there by your side? Can you say the Czech alphabet backwards while juggling eggs over a thirty story balcony? Have you ever hotwired a car in downtown Berlin with a safety pin, a screwdriver, and a metal emory board, with the heat encroaching? Are you the sort of person who folds while holding a royal flush just to give the other person a win? Would you ever purposefully misappropriate syntax? Would you orchestrate everything down to the color of the dishtowels, teacups, and magnets? Have you ever not paid your taxes? Do you ever obsess over numbers? Ever set your alarm clock to an even number? What kind of deodorant do you wear? Is it masculine? Can you name a city in France you haven’t been? Are there places in the north of Spain that you have never seen? Have you ever planted a tree? Have you ever forgotten a friend’s birthday? Ever been caught in a lie and forgot what version of the truth you previously spilled? Have you ever raced across the countryside on a horse in complete rhythm? Ever challenged an anteater to a duel? Ever made your loved one go running? Ever parked on the wrong side of the road? When was the last time you bought a lottery ticket? Watched television? Bought clothes from a thrift store, a shopping mall, or on eBay? Would you even recognize the secret password when it mattered most? Would you leave town? Would you try to dig a tunnel to Japan?"


"Marvin K. Mooney left strict instructions detailing his desired method of organization for what he frequently referred to as his “Complete Works.” (Humility was never one of Mooney’s strong points.) He presumed the popularity of his work would surely grow exponentially following his death.’
Authorship is the heart of Christopher Higgs’ debut novel The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney. In its 352 pages, Higgs and Mooney are a tandem of writers working in collaboration to disappear, to relinquish all responsibility to the word, to the title, to the notion of authorship as a whole.
Sator Press, literary newborn from writer / editor / actor Ken Baumann began its walking legs with this first title – but before that there was a simple splash page and a posting on the esteemed htmlgiant simply asking – ‘what is this?’ Months later Marvin K. Mooney began appearing in blog post commentary, enticing writers, readers, and the like to ‘join him’, that they ‘were needed’. The links of these posts led to a Marvin K. Mooney Society webpage (themarvinkmooneysociety.com), which housed very little information but several videos of static laden scenic views or unintelligible groups in seeming prayer or chant. This dialogue opened even further when on the final days before the book’s release many top lit blogs like htmlgiant or bigother were engaged in conversations about the aim or validity of these Marvin K. Mooney publicity stunts. And then, on a day like any other day, the Sator Press website went live and announced The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney by Christopher Higgs – the first official mention of his authorship and the release of the title in paperback, audiobook, and ebook formats. All of this, and the book was not even at our doorsteps, was not yet opened to page one, where the destruction of authorship begins in earnest.
‘This is nothing like my real life. I did not base this story on myself or anyone I know. I used something children call imagination. Past the age of eleven, most people don’t have one, so I understand if you’re one of them. But unlike you, I still use mine. Instead of recapping tidbits of my boring real life, like most fuckwads who call themselves writers, I sit and imagine stuff and that’s where the “story” comes from. There is never any truth in anything I type. My name is not Marvin K. Mooney. In real life, my wife is nothing like the man’s wife in this story. My wife and I never visit the cave anymore. To be honest, I haven’t seen my wife in months. Goodbye cavelight.’
The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney masquerades as exactly what its title describes, a collected framework to reference a single author: Marvin K. Mooney. Composed of notes from Mooney, blurbs and mentions about him from other writers, last pages and guesswork on his disappearance as well as philosophical statements, cut and past lit theory and recovered or re-published stories from Mooney’s supposed literary career, The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney is a book to wade through. By page ten my cuffs were wet, and by the mid-point, my belt was missing underneath a sea of textual scatter.
‘ “Hey, what’s that you’re reading?”
You could answer a number of things, one of them being: “It is a new work of creative nonfiction by Marvin K. Mooney.”
In follow-up, you may be asked:
“What’s it about?”
To which you can safely reply: “It is a text about itself. It is a pretentious, egomaniacal, megalomaniacal, and hardly worth my time; but for some reason I continue to read it – perhaps I am being forced to at gunpoint, perhaps I am slightly enjoying it” ’
And this is what is most fascinating about the book: how it manages to discuss, to live within, and to subvert the notion of meta-fiction, all at once. There are shouted moments to the reader, enticements and goads to us, followed by three-part fictional narratives and prefaced by philosophical interjections and the planting of literary theory seeds. And Higgs, playing at Mooney (and sometimes at himself) does a tremendous job finding the exact moments of lull, of hush, where the text threatens to overwhelm itself and collapse, and uses those exact moments to change the pacing of the text, to break into a new dialogue, or to switch to another mode.
There are places where the wading through of The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney is deep or rough or super complex, where it takes something other than a simple read to find Higgs’ meaning and willingly subvert the text alongside Mooney, but in the end, the mud-stuck footsteps through the lake of this book are worth it, every page, to come out with Mooney or Higgs, or without them perhaps, on the other side of literature." - J. A. Tyler

"I have just finished what someone named Christopher “The Zoologist” Higgs is calling your complete works. He is either stupid or misinformed (and likely both) as the book makes reference to pieces that are not included, and can’t even decide who it’s written by. What kind of title is The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney for a book that’s primarily interested in making a diaristic sort of product that refuses to draw a line between product and process, author and character? It offers two title pages (inverting title and author info) in the format of title pages, though one could imagine that Higgs wants us to view every page, if not every sentence, as a kind of title page, reintroducing us to the book over and over again. It brings up questions of unity early, after all. Higgs may want us to believe that the only suggestion of unity here is the fact that all of it is bound together—or binary-coded together in the case of the digital edition.
Higgs also claims you have disappeared, then speaks as if he were you to confuse the nature of this disappearance. It’s fairly simple, really. You vanished as soon as he saw you, like a star in the corner of his eye that he’s now trying to look at directly. He’s got his rods and cones all mixed up. [You can't invent a fiction unless it disappears.]
Here’s my utilitarian feedback on the digital form. Sator is a new press, and digital readers are a new tool for information delivery. You might expect some hiccups. I read the digital version on a Sony eReader pocket edition. The default text size was small—too small. So I hit that button with the magnifying glass and the plus sign on it. This demolishes the format. Words break in the middle, page numbers get squished into positions where they don’t belong, and, worst of all, white space (I’m a poet, so you can imagine my horror at this) is abolished. This is likely more a fault of the good folks at Sony than the good folks at Sator, but I think it’s worth mentioning. I don’t know enough about the technology to suggest a fix. As someone interested in how technology affects our reception of information, and literature in particular, I was deeply troubled by this. I found myself shrinking and magnifying the text constantly to notice any discrepancies, especially since there were places where form and space seemed significant. However, I don’t think that Monsieur Higgs and his history (or yours?) of the circus particularly suffer from this discrepancy in format. In fact, there are places where the shifting form due to magnification may be enhancing his point. I suspect he may even do this on purpose in the future.
It’s a brilliant piece of work, Mr. Mooney, whatever it is. Belles-lettres? Does that still mean something? According to Wikipedia it does, but I’ve been taught to distrust all my sources no matter how agreeable they seem. Even this book tells me to stop reading. Does Higgs really want me to stop reading? Does he enjoy making me feel rebellious and James Dean-y as I defy the book? [If ever there was a rebel without a cause, it is anyone who reads this book after it tells them to stop.] Is this some small tribute to Choose Your Own Adventure novels, highlighting that every book is choose your own adventure—keep going or end it now? Or does he simply want me to ask all these questions? Knowing Higgs a bit, my best guess is that he wants us to ask the questions, regardless of the answers. I also think he’d be pleased that we keep reading, not only because it pleases most writers to be read, but because he’d prefer a reader who challenges the text. He tells us that plot, character, setting and theme are the enemies. And aren’t they the enemies because they force us to obey, to reach the same conclusions as the writer? If we labeled them tyrants, would we be wrong? This book can’t even cohere enough to force me to read one page after another. I could skip around and open it anywhere and be on the “right page.” I’d miss everything and I’d miss nothing. It’s not a paradox; it’s a deliberate construction of consistently enjoyable work. You don’t have to read it all to feel its finished. And you can read the whole thing before you feel it’s actually begun. That’s kind of the point.
See what he has done? He has caused me to draw conclusions and respond. I’m not merely satisfied with reading it and having coursed it through my brain. It’s caused me to begin writing something of my own. This is good work.
The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney is probably worth reading more than once, though it’s possible this will never be done. It’s intellectual without being snooty, funny without being insulting, and paradoxical without being cryptic. [Though some of the more experimental passages may come across as cryptic, the reader will benefit from reading them the way a musician might read finger exercises. Don't expect a melody to emerge. Find some level of discipline or pleasure that gets you through it. The passage may simply be asking you to calculate your own attention span; it may be trying to distract you from everything but its own rhythm by not allowing you to engage; it may be laughing at my suggestion that it be "doing" anything.]
Here are some of the questions, Mr. Mooney, that Higgs makes me ask myself:
What is the difference between lying and making art?
Where is the line between author and character? And is a made thing ever natural? (The Garden of Eden was a made thing, wasn’t it?)
Does literature about literature become part of the work?
One reviewer has written (before reading the book, oddly enough), “I’d like to take a class on this book.” Already, it has entered the mind that for our experience of the work to be complete, we must have more input from additional sources. The author’s own input is not enough. The Complete Works addresses this question by opening the novel with essays and reviews about your works, Mr. Mooney—both positive and negative, both thoughtful and inflammatory.
Not too long ago, our access to information was more limited. But I hardly need to point out that now if we want to know what ten “Top Critics” and 10,000 other people thought of Shutter Island, we can go to one website and introduce ourselves to additional views on the topic. It’s more difficult to find a copy of The Waste Land without footnotes than a copy that includes them. Classic works of literature are released almost invariably with essay introductions that explain and/or explore the historical context and value of the work you’re about to read, as well as its themes and plots. Higgs knows that art exists for its reaction. It likes to be looked at/taken in. It wants those people out there in the dark to engage. That’s why it makes us make it. And The Complete Works seems to suggest that the author alone makes nothing, makes only a search for some sort of identity, a new someone to engage with. So The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney could not be complete without responses to that work.
Until now, I always thought of the blurb as a marketing tool. It is, of course, but I recognize that it’s effective because it is evidence of engagement, which is the enlargement of the work. It’s already bigger than the author, the book, and the me that’s picking it up. There’s an other who picked it up, too. This is more attractive intellectually than physically, as it’s now making me consider the collection of skin oils and bacteria on the books I pick up. Of course it disgusts you, Mooney. If you had ever thought that your writing would lead to so much illness and overpriced antibiotics [and the resultant resistant strains of bacteria and more illness] you would never have begun. You would have been happy to grind glass or race Formula 1 cars against Danica Patrick.
Possible blurb: This is a book so good that it can’t simply end. It requires an encore. [This will make no sense as a blurb. You have to read the book, nearly to the end, before you understand this. Blurbs need to help us sell books. This will only confuse people. Confused people don't buy books. They're too confused. They go home and watch dinner and eat TV. See how this could be a problem for us?]
If you decide to read the book, as you must, be prepared for the shifting forms. One minute it’s an essay, the next it’s a story, and then it’s a drawing of France or California (who really knows the difference?). It’s sure-footed, then dissociative and self-conscious. It will remind you of Seuss, then Stein, then Derrida, then Pynchon. It calls itself both a novel and nonfiction (it also calls itself American even though it devotes several pages to “defining” Paris and seems particularly knowledgeable of French cinema, while it makes no mention of Chuck Norris, chicken fried steak, or the bolo tie). As I said before, I’m not sure if this Higgs is misinformed or stupid, but he’s made something that is label-defiant, like that peanut-butter/jelly in one jar gook, or comfortable lingerie. (If you put a label in it, it’s no longer comfortable.) He’s at least pretending to be legitimately confused about whether he’s him or whether he’s you, so he’s not sure it’s all fiction. It is, which is just short of saying it’s BS, and I know Higgs won’t mind me saying so. It’s supposed to be BS. If it were anything more than that, according to his own book, it’d be the artistic equivalent of a crapper. The world needs more crappers, as evidenced from the apparently constant lines that ladies deal with in their lavatories, but I don’t think Higgs’ goal with this work is to supply them. If so, he’s failed miserably.
Mr. Mooney, I recommend this book. I also recommend that you sue Christopher “Master Plan” Higgs for fraud and libel.
Sincerely,
Tyler Moore"


“If everyone were not so indolent they would realise that beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted as classic.” – Gertrude Stein, Composition as Explanation

It’s difficult to know how to start a review of The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney by Christopher Higgs because (disregarding that ironic ‘complete’) the novel itself feels like a succession of starting points, a corridor of departures and disappearances. A novel where it doesn’t feel strange to read the sentence, 50 pages in, “This is the first sentence in this novel.” A novel that ‘ends,’ then has an ‘encore’- for which the reader is instructed to clap - and then a preface. But to start with the beginning of the book in fact takes you further back, outside the book, before the book. Not only because Higgs and his publisher Ken Baumann engaged in an extensive pre-publication publicity campaign in which a mysterious character calling himself ‘Marvin K. Mooney’ started commenting on lit-blogs, but because the title character (author?) of Christopher Higgs’ boldly experimental debut novel takes his name from the children’s book Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now! by Dr. Seuss, first published in 1972.
Seuss’ book is basically a silly rhyme in which a fictional character called Marvin K. Mooney is asked to leave in many different ways and by any means possible. So it, too, is a series of proposed departures.
Just go.
Go.
Go!
I don’t care how.
You can go by foot.
You can go by cow.
Marvin K. Mooney will you please go now!
You can go on skates.
You can go on skis.
You can go in a hat.
But
Please go.
Please!”
Seuss tells us almost nothing about Mooney’s personality, except perhaps that he stubbornly hangs around where he’s not wanted, but the poem turns up the interesting theme of identity. Seuss’ is an evasive and enigmatic text because it sets up at least one other character (the speaking one who is asking Mooney to leave), about whom we know nothing. And while the poem continually points toward Mooney’s absence by asking him to “please go now,” it simultaneously and repeatedly confirms his relentless presence. The character of Mooney hovers between presence and absence throughout the poem, a vibrating, swaying neither/nor that is mimicked in Seuss’ sometimes perfect, sometimes awkward rhymes. Certainly, Mooney ends up having a much greater presence in the poem than the other speaker. The poem’s engagement with ‘identity’ is further enriched because Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now! is aimed at very early-level readers, readers not yet capable of reading The Cat in the Hat. It’s a text, therefore, for readers starting out, for readers getting to grips with language, when the conventions of narrative form are something new and unfamiliar. Given the youthfulness of its target-readership, it’s also a text that overtly confronts the identity-shaping properties of language. ‘Marvin K. Mooney’ is less an ‘everyman’ and more a ‘hollow man,’ an empty vessel without any of the personality traits to make him a realistic figure. This person without a personality becomes interchangeable, most famously, in 1974 when Dr. Seuss sent a copy of the book to his friend the political columnist Art Buchwald in which the name ‘Marvin K Mooney’ was crossed out and replaced by ‘Richard M. Nixon.’ Buchwald reprinted the altered rhyme in his July 30th Washington Post column, just nine days before Nixon resigned. Above all, Seuss’ Mooney is an unabashedly fictional character. But how much more fictional, for that matter, is Mooney than Dr. Seuss himself, the penname of Theodore Seuss Geisel, who also wrote under the names Theo LeSieg and Rosetta Stone?
Higgs’ novel is soaked and dripping with questions like these, of the nature of authorship, fiction and identity. The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney is arranged as just that, the collected writings (Mooney never completed a novel, we’re told) of a disappeared writer, a figure like Weldon Kees or Bas Jan Ader. Higgs and Mooney are interchangeable and interdependent, concealing themselves one behind the other, whilst simultaneously stepping in front to take centre stage. In a conventional sense, it’s difficult to clearly define Higgs as the author of this novel. Mooney (because of his history) is not Higgs’ creation. The book is filled with quotations recycled from other writers, artists, philosophers and critics. Some portions of the book that are presented as part of Mooney’s complete works have previously been published by Higgs under his own name, with no mention of Mooney. Meanwhile, the book has two title pages, calling itself ‘The Complete Works Of Marvin K. Mooney: A Novel written by Christopher Higgs’ on one and ‘The Complete Works of Christopher Higgs: A Novel written by Marvin K. Mooney’ on the other. On top of all of that that there are fake commentaries from fake scholars about Mooney’s work that hilariously and expertly pastiche literary criticism, criticism that might just as well be written about Higgs’ book, like this one from ‘Dr Phyllis Salzburg, Narratologist’:
“How can this even be considered a novel? That’s the question I struggled to answer after the editor of a small literary magazine sent me the manuscript to review for an upcoming issue.”
Meanwhile there are repeated objections from Higgs that he is not Mooney. Or are they objections from Mooney that he is not Mooney?
“This is nothing like my real life. I did not base this story on myself or anyone I know. I used something children call imagination. Past the age of eleven, most people don’t have one, so I understand if you’re one of them. But unlike you, I still use mine. Instead of recapping tidbits of my boring real life, like most fuckwads who call themselves writers, I sit and imagine stuff and that’s where the ’story’ comes from. There is never any truth in anything I type. My name is not Marvin K. Mooney.”
And elsewhere: “I am not who I was just a moment ago.”
Higgs provides no neat resolution to these and many other questions and paradoxes. The book is anything but neat. It’s a hodge-podge, an amalgam, a collage. It’s a collection of pieces of writing that feel as though they’re left deliberately incomplete. It’s an elaborate fiction that doesn’t bother to maintain its conceit. It’s a novel with no plot to hold its tummy in. On the second page of the novel, Mooney’s oeuvre is described as a ‘Rhizomatic Assemblage.’ It’s a tempting seed to plant, one that is immediately buried in the soil of a humorous refusal to elaborate and present a ‘univocal argument’ or a ’specific hypothesis pertaining to its relevance vis-à-vis the work of Marvin K. Mooney.’ That is to say, the strand of thought is momentarily severed. And yet, reading the novel, the writings of Deleuze and Guattari on the ‘rhizome’ were the theoretical lollypops I felt most like sucking. With it’s radically collaged structure, its refusal of closure, its embrace of paradox and its series of fruitful points of departure that are simultaneous points of disappearance, Higgs’ novel, more than any other I’ve read recently, seems to inhabit a tubing, branching, underground network of rhizomes, which are characterized by their all-over fertility, i.e. any part can be broken off and start as a new starting point. All of which takes me rather irritatingly neatly and circularly back (forgive me, Mooney) to where I started this review, worrying about starting points and how to set off. If I had to write a one-word review of The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney, I’d unhesitatingly choose ‘frustrating’; deliciously, excruciatingly frustrating. I loved it." - Colin Herd





Christopher Higgs, Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously (Publishing Genius Press, 2009)

Read it at: http://www.baltimoreisreads.com/higgsgenius.pdf

"BUTLER: One of the most immediately exciting things about this text I think is the way it plays with and mishmashes syntax both syllabically and structurally. There is a certain tone about the ongoings that you manage to establish in the very first sentence: a way of speaking that sounds wholly new. Can you talk some (a) about the state in which you approached this, or (b) how you began to write it, and/or (c) what outside influences or impulses led you into the mode, if any?
HIGGS: I approached the construction of Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously in two ways:
1. By remixing previously written texts
2. By process of what André Breton called “automatic writing”
In the case of #1, (“Lonely…”; “Escape…”; “Of Her…”) I wrote these texts in a straightforward manner while in graduate school at U Nebraska (2004-2006) as pieces of conventional realism with beginnings, middles, and ends. I liked them okay, but they had no real oomph. Like most works of conventional realism, they were boring, so I kept them stashed away figuring maybe someday I’d do something to make them interesting.
In the case of #2, (all the other pieces) these texts were written more recently (in the past year or two) and came from sessions in which I sat down and allowed the voices in my head to speak through my fingers without censorship. These voices tend to speak in rhythmic/sonic ways rather than narrative ways.
In terms of outside influences, there are gobs (Gertrude Stein, Gary Lutz, e.e. cummings, Jean-Luc Godard, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, etc.); but one I would like to mention specifically is a short piece by Darby Larson called “Journal Entry: 2-13-03” [http://ir.interserver.net/stories/story83.html] which appeared in the online journal Insolent Rudder. I remember reading that while I was in my first year of graduate school at the University of Nebraska and going: oh hell yes—this is a style I must try to expand upon!
BUTLER: Would you say that any one sentence in this text could signify the whole, i.e. could “Complain nor explain a single lie and that is true.” in any way speak for the whole here? Can a text be reduced?
HIGGS: That question makes me think about Alice Fulton’s concept of fractal poetry. She borrows Mandlebrot’s model of “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole” to describe a poem in which each sentence acts like a representative of the whole (you can find out more about this in Fulton’s brilliant collection of essays titled Feeling as a Foreign Language).
Even though I think her ideas are fascinating, especially when she suggests we should “look to chaos and complexity theory as touchstones for contemporary aesthetics,” I don’t purposefully construct fractal poems—i.e. I’m not an adherent to her methodology—and Colorless was not constructed in this manner.
I do, however, wonder about how each sentence fits into the community of sentences that encompasses the text. If you think about a text as a community of sentences, then you can think about each sentence as a citizen in that community. One citizen can’t express the totality of a shared community, but nevertheless, one citizen does reflect similar (inherited and simulated) cultural values, behaviors, beliefs, dreams, and characteristics. For example, I can’t possibly encompass the entire concept of America. I can’t even encompass my local community here in Clintonville, Ohio, even though I share the experience of living in these communities, am part of these communities, and help to construct these communities. Individually, I believe each sentence in Colorless contributes to both the heterogeneity and homogeneity of the text, same as how each citizen contributes in a community. I also believe each sentence both represents aspects of the text and differentiates itself from the text, same as how citizens both reify and reject aspects of their community.
BUTLER: In some way, some of the tone is a mishmash of what seems like an instruction manual, and a series of observational reports, some of which, in another way, seems like a great long apology for the present and the future at once. A philosophical spit up of “what the fuck have we done?” Do you consider this a political document? A personal document? Is this a document?
HIGGS: I am resolutely apolitical: I don’t believe in politics and I abhor the use of politics or the application of political theory in literature. Art is art because it is useless. As soon as art becomes useful it becomes decoration or propaganda or something else other than art. A good analogy would be sex. As soon as sex becomes useful it becomes procreation. To say that a piece of writing should have a purpose or should be about something or should convey something or should do something is akin to saying sex should have a purpose, that sex should produce a baby. (Here we can see the connection between conventional realism and crazy fundamentalist Christians, not to mention product-obsessed capitalists.) I humbly disagree. For me, sex is valuable in-and-of-itself. Art, too, is valuable in-and-of-itself.
I really like your idea of Colorless as a philosophical spit up.
In terms of it being personal, I would say it is personal by virtue of being written by me. However, the content—which is always secondary to me—is completely fabricated. I revel in falsification. This whole notion of “honesty” or “truth” or whatever it is conventional realists find so appealing about “writing what you know” or “keeping it real” makes me gag. To me, the attempt to replicate reality in literature is as much of a complete waste of time as the last season of Battlestar Galactica. Mimesis is no more relevant today than bloodletting: you could do it, but why?
BUTLER: I found it interesting that you labeled and set off sections within the text. Did this occur as a series of creations that were then strung together? Or was it written as one long piece?
HIGGS: I sort of answered this in question #1, but what I left out was the fact that the final published version is significantly different than the original version I constructed and submitted to PGP. When I sent Colorless to Adam Robinson [Publishing Genius’s publisher] it was twice as long. Once he sent the proofs, or whatever they’re called, we looked at it and we both agreed it was too long. I chopped the hell out of it and rearranged the hell out of it. Some days I think I made the right choices, the right cuts, the right configurations; and some days I think I should have done it differently.
BUTLER: Please tell me about your creative process, how you approach the desk, how you sit at the desk, how long, what interrupts you, what you let in, what you do not let out while you are writing.
HIGGS: I write on my laptop, most of the time while listening to music. I only allow myself to be interrupted by my two true loves: Caitlin and Beatrice.
BUTLER: You are very concerned with music, can you tell me about the influence(s) of any music(s) on you during this period, or on the text directly?
HIGGS: Because the text was written in two different time periods, over the course of three years, I couldn’t possibly remember what I was listening to when. But I do know that the Wu-Tang Clan’s double disc album Forever has always been a source of inspiration. During the sessions of automatic writing that I mentioned earlier, I would listen to that album and attempt to ride the beats with my fingertips. Sometimes I need hip hop beats to fuel the words, sometimes I need abstract sounds like Meredith Monk or Sigur Rós, sometimes I need the calm of Erik Satie or Glenn Gould.
BUTLER: Please tell me about the title, a Noam Chomsky quote, and how it spoke to you as the leader for the text, how you came across it?
HIGGS: The Deleuzian in me loathes Chomsky’s grammatical hierarchies. But he is certainly one of those thinkers I see as a productive adversary. If you watch or read the Chomsky/Foucault debate you can see what I mean.
Straight away, I should admit that my main areas of research are experimental literature and critical theory. I am not a linguist nor have I received formal training in the field of linguistics. What knowledge I have acquired on the subject comes from independent inquiry, which is my way of saying that I approach this subject as an armchair enthusiast. To shed some light on my position vis-à-vis generative grammar (i.e. Chomsky) I’ll briefly point out two (of the many) issues I find particularly problematic. First, generative grammar is predicated on the binary assumption of Either/Or: a sentence is either correct or incorrect. To this I would counter with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a rhizomatic grammar predicated on multiplicities engendered by the binary Both/And. I should think this distinction would be particularly appealing to anyone in the creative arts. Either/Or is limiting and creates negation. Both/And is open and
creates affirmation.
Second, the “generative” aspect of generative grammar refers only to the surface structure of a given system, based on the assumed existence of an inalterable deep structure. In essence, what Chomsky’s generative grammar proposes is a finite system of possibilities (again, a limiting approach), which is to say that difference, according to Chomsky, is a superficial attribute. AsDeleuze would argue, difference is not merely cosmetic; difference is the constitutive element of individualized assemblages.
Aside from those two issues, the title just felt right from the beginning because the project for me was about form, about grammar, about syntax, about exploring the interstitial landscape between sense and nonsense. I wanted to see how far I could push a sentence before it broke, before it lost all semantic value—which is something I’m not sure is possible.
BUTLER: Please tell me about one (if any) of the things you have hidden in any one sentence here. A joke you might not have meant to be seen. Please let me see it?
HIGGS: After I read this question, I went back and reread the text to see if such a secret existed. I’m afraid I came up relatively empty. I think this is because I don’t write from myself or from my life, in other words I don’t code reality into my work. I begin with words as things, removed from personal connections of signifier/signified and proceed from there. But now that I’ve written that, I think maybe personal elements seep in: there is a repetition of smoking or attempting to quit smoking, which rings confessional. There is also an overwhelming sadness and loneliness in the text, which I suppose could describe my years in Nebraska (save the companionship of my super cool brother, Matthew). But particular word-level or sentence-level secrets were not encoded purposefully.
BUTLER: How did you get involved with Publishing Genius, and how did it come about that you put Colorless out with them?
HIGGS: I actually learned about Publishing Genius when you published Pretend with them. I remember reading your chapbook and thinking how cool it was—I don’t think I’d read an e-chapbook before then. I went and read all of the other chapbooks Adam had published and loved the hell out of them.
Colorless was/is a section of a novel I have just completed, The Collected Works of Marvin K. Mooney. I knew I wanted to try and get more parts of the novel published before I went looking for a publisher, so I began to toy with the idea of pulling out sections and submitting them as chapbooks.
I went searching for potential places and when I read the Publishing Genius submission guidelines where Adam writes: “What is coherent? Why do we think we understand something while we think something else is nonsense?” I knew it would be the perfect place for Colorless. So I sent it to him and he dug it. We clicked right away. It was a great experience working with Adam. He’s smart, sincere, understanding, and truly invested in promoting innovative literature. BUTLER: Why are chapbooks important? What is it about chapbooks that influenced your perspective of chapbooks or books as an enterprise separate from any other form of printing?
HIGGS: I think chapbooks in general are important because of the function they serve: bringing work to life that doesn’t necessarily fit in the profit-oriented framework of the publishing industrial complex. I like the ethos of chapbooks. They feel anarchic to me.
I think the specific chapbooks that made me go “whoa! chapbooks are awesome!” are the ones that Octopus put out a few years ago to commemorate their eighth issue. The designs were amazing, the artifact itself felt good to hold, and the diversity of poetry was killer.
BUTLER: How do you see the future of electronic texts and the work of ebooks/echapbooks in relation to traditional print distribution?
HIGGS: This is tricky for me because I am in academia. For academics, the internet is considered (at best) a second-class citizen. Internet publications don’t matter, don’t count, and are not considered prestigious by any measure. Academia seems only to care about centers of established credentials, which, at this point in history are predominately in the print medium. As a member of academia I am forced to play by their rules, to publish work in “respectable” journals, if I wish to advance my career.
That said, as a writer I am all about electronic publications. The number of people who read work online far outnumber those who subscribe to literary journals. (This is one big disconnect between academia and “real life”) Also, I believe the prestige aspect will come for electronic publications when the generation of people who grew up on the internet rise to power. As it stands, the establishment is skeptical of the internet like how any old person is skeptical of any newfangled thing.
BUTLER: You also curate an e-museum-esque blog that documents some of the web’s most interesting art/media/texts/oddities/etc. What made you begin this blog, and how do you come across the items you feature, as in: what draws you to the pieces or kinds of pieces that you include on Bright Stupid Confetti? How does BSC influence your writing?
HIGGS: Wow, this question could be its own interview! I’ve been doing BSC for maybe four years now? It is something I look forward to every day, but I’m not sure it influences my writing any more or less than any other aspect of my life.
BUTLER: The response so far to Colorless has been interesting, in that certain people have made a point to express befuddlement with it, in the face of so much other potential texts, and yet many others also have expressed a wonder in that befuddlement. Would you talk about, perhaps, the experience of writing such a challenging text as this one and the way your level of expectation of its reception has met with the actual reception, and perhaps even talk some about the community of writers/readers that seems to have burgeoned among certain strands of the internet?
HIGGS: This is a big and troubling question. Obviously, I wish more people would dig what I’m doing, but I feel like people who respond negatively or who respond with befuddlement do so because of their conditioning. I don’t blame readers as much as I blame Aristotle. He is my chief enemy because he is responsible for establishing the conditions from which contemporary readers approach literature, whether they know it or not. When a reader fails to engage a text, any text, one of the primary reasons is because they have determined the text to be lacking in some aspect of what they believe a text “ought to be.” So at a very basic level, it has to do with assumptions.
Just look at the concepts people use to discuss literature, especially what is called fiction: the necessity of a protagonist/antagonist, the necessity of conflict, the necessity of a beginning, middle, and end, the necessity of unity of time, place and character, the necessity of moderation of excess and deficit, etc. These all come from Aristotle (see: Poetics, Rhetoric, and Nicomachean Ethics). Readers assume a text should contain these elements for no other reason than because Aristotle told them they should (or more likely because a teacher indoctrinated them with these values). My claim is that although these beliefs have become doxa, they are not evidence of truisms nor are they proof of necessary conditions for literature. They are simply outmoded beliefs that need to be reevaluated.
Colorless is an attempt to take up this challenge.
BUTLER: Here’s a funny/unfunny one: why do you write?
HIGGS: I write because I had an amazing high school teacher named Diane Panozzo who encouraged me." - Interview with Blake Butler