Whereas the first chapter of Carole Maso’s Break Every Rule (I wrote about it HERE) is a kind of travelogue where cities or towns in Rhode Island, New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts, as well as in France, inspire reveries on home and language, the second chapter unfolds much differently. “Notes of a Lyric Artist Working in Prose: a Lifelong Conversation with Myself Entered Midway” is a series of brilliant, and sometimes enigmatic, epigrams on writing, on lyric poetry, on the novel. These are luscious morsels that can be cherry-picked at random. At one point, she writes:

Language engenders language. Language itself presents unexpected and often extraordinary solutions. It leads you to the what next? To the how and why. To the what if, and if only.

Interspersing quotes from Jean Luc Godard, Andrey Tarkovsky, and Virginia Woolf, Maso reflects on writing her novels AVA and The American Woman in the Chinese Hat. She likens the latter to Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, because “both, as lyric novels, move image by image toward intensity. Images follow a progress through interplays and modulation until they reach a level of nearly unbearable intensity. Action is a concern, but a secondary one.” While Maso’s thoughts on her novels are intriguing in their own right, it is her expansive reflections on the lyric novel in particular that’s most interesting to me:

“The novel’s capacity for failure. It’s promiscuity, its verve. Always trying to attain the unattainable. Container of the uncontainable. Weird, gorgeous vessel. Voluptuous vessel.

“The novel as a kind of eternity. A kind of infinity. Inevitable progressions of beauty—with room and time enough for all.”

“The novel might be musically or visually conceived—pictorial relationships, symphonic turns rendered in prose.”

“The novel as a geometry of desire.”

“The novel is all potential. All what might be. All what might have been. A record of all we cannot remember, all we’ve lost—never to be retrieved.”

While I certainly disagree with Maso that James Joyce, because he never goes “beyond the self,” “fails finally to be a great novelist,”  I find a lot of inspiring thoughts in this chapter.

So what is the novel to you, for you?

(originally published by and reprinted in partnership with www.bigother.com)

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Carole Maso’s Break Every Rule is a quiet, elegant book of essays. Every sentence here is a gem. Remember that time you walked barefoot across a pebbled beach, marveled at every sea-bitten thing, picked up some bright form that warmed your palm, that had some power in it. That’s what it’s like reading Maso.

The first chapter, “The Shelter of the Alphabet,” is a series of ruminations on home, the idea of it, the concreteness it sometimes takes, how it remains elusive:

I think of all things that are outside the range of our memories or imaginations or intelligence or talent—it’s the place I suspect which is our true home. If we could get there we would finally be okay. But we can’t. We are homeless, groping, roaming in the darkness, aware of only a fraction of it.

She writes much about her travels, her peripatetic life, and how words became home for her, housed her like no other place, structure, or idea:

I am a wandering soul—but not an aimless one. I’ve learned well how to listen and I’ve gone wherever my work told me to go. Wherever my work took me, insistent, I went. I have been forced, in order to continue writing on my own terms, to leave over and over again. I who live everywhere and nowhere have built a home of language. I have been forced to create a home of my own making. A home of music and desire. I can at this point make a home wherever I go. I open my large artist’s notebook, I pick up a pen, I turn on the radio; I dream of you—the best, the most mysterious one, the most remote and beautiful aspect of self.

Reflecting on a sentence she had once written, one she considered “[d]arkly imagined” and “a splintered, troubling thing,” she writes:

It so captures my emotional state in language, mirrored, and as a result becomes company, something present, something palpable….The language construct is no longer about an emotional state for me, but has become one, and in that way I am no longer utterly isolated in it and without a viable structure. Home is any ordinary, gorgeous sentence that is doing its work.

Home for me is in the syntax, in the syllables. In the syncopations and in the silences. A movement in the mind, the eye, the mouth. Home is the luminous imagination. India haunting me after the Satyatjit Ray retrospective. Home is in Sappho’s fragments, in imagining what was there before the papyrus tore. The imagination providing a foundation, a roof, and windows that let you see forever.

Here’s another reverie:

When I write sentences I am at home. When I make shapes. When I do not, I am damned, doomed, homeless; I know this well—restless, roaming; the actual places I’ve lived become unrecognizable, and I, too, monstrous, am unrecognizable to myself. In the gloating, enormous strangeness and solitude of the real world, where I am often inconsolable, marooned, utterly dizzied—all I need to do is pick up a pen and begin to write—safe in the shelter of the alphabet, and I am taken home. Back into the blinding waves, the topaz light, the fire. Or far off into the enthralling, voluptuous dark.

When you get a chance treat yourself to this interview with Carole Maso by Brian Evenson.

So what about you? What are your ideas of home? What/where/who is home for you? What is language for you? What are words for you? Gary Lutz once called the sentence “a lonely place.” William Gass often calls it a “container of consciousness.” So what is a sentence for you? A paragraph? A page?

(originally published by and reprinted in partnership with www.bigother.com)

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To say that I’ve had a checkered history in publishing would be like saying Elizabeth Taylor had a checkered history in marriage. In the past decade, I’ve churned through three houses, and twice as many editors. I’ve pissed off half the agents in New York City, and told the other half (with unreasonable glee) to fuck off. At one point, I actually had to be physically separated from one of my publishers.

It would be easy to blame all this on my unique temperament, with its charming blend of acerbic superiority and righteous indignation. But the truth is, most of my writer friends are filled with similar feelings of despair and disgust when it comes to putting books in the world. They just have the good sense to keep it to themselves.

The saddest thing about all this, of course, is that the publishing industry is not trying to piss us off. No, the industry (and the folks who populate it) are the ones trying to help us. It’s not their fault that reading has been shoved to the margins of the culture, or that a typical American teenager now spends 95 percent of her time staring at a tiny screen and frantically thumbing shopping updates to her social network. (read more here)

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Kurt Loder over at MTV does a good job of getting me excited about the Danish film”Terribly Happy.”  In case you don’t keep up on cutting edge cinema, Denmark has been one of the top producers of interesting film lately (see: “Antichrist,” “Burma VJ,” “Brotherhood,” and “Applause”).

A Nordic Creepfest the Coen Brothers Might Admire

The movie is wonderfully warped. There are overtones of horror and noirish depravity that recall both the 1973 cult film “The Wicker Man” and Shirley Jackson’s famous 1948 short story, “The Lottery.” But “Terribly Happy,” which was Denmark’s submission in the foreign-language category for this year’s Oscars (and will soon be remade in English), has a mind-knotting fascination of its own. Working from an adaptation of an Erling Jepsen novel by screenwriter Dunja Gry Jensen, director Henrik Ruben Genz builds tension in oblique increments. We see that the downcast Hansen (Jakob Cedergren) isn’t quite right in the head himself — he screwed up in Copenhagen (exactly how, we don’t learn till late in the film), and this reassignment to the faraway village of Skarrild is his only chance to salvage his career. The troubled cop is already taking anti-anxiety medication — with which the local doctor (Lars Brygmann) is oddly eager to keep him well-supplied — and the director presents the flat, featureless landscape as an emblem of his isolation and unease. (read more)

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Louise Erdrich fans rejoice!  Her new novel “Shadow Tag” is out and it’s receiving a nice review by Leah Hager Cohen of The New York Times.

“Shadow Tag” is, as its publisher declares, unlike any other Louise Erdrich novel. That isn’t to say it’s devoid of the Native American themes that permeate her many previous books. Both Irene and her husband, Gil, are of Indian heritage. Raised by a white mother, Gil clings to his paternal “mishmash of Klamath and Cree and landless Montana Chippewa.” Irene also grew up with a single mother, in her case a political activist who “dragged her to everything Ojibwe.” Their shared culture closely informs both their careers. Gil, an artist, paints portraits of his wife, often in “cruel” or “humiliating” poses evocative of the history of whites’ mistreatment of Indians. (“She appeared raped, dismembered, dying of smallpox in graphic medical detail.”) Indeed, Gil envisions the series — which has become both famous and lucrative, and which he’s named after his wife: “America 1,” “America 2” and so on — as representing “the iconic suffering of a people.” Irene is a historian. Or she would be if she hadn’t stalled partway through her Ph.D. thesis on Louis Riel, “the depressed métis patriot.” When the novel begins, she’s at work on a new study, of George Catlin, “the 19th-century painter of Native Americana,” whose subjects, she reminds herself, “would sicken and die soon after” he finished their portraits. (read more)

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“Perhaps we should talk about fucking. Fucking and writing, fucking and talking, fucking and thinking, fucking and whatever else it is that fucking goes with…”

Jami Attenberg’s third book, The Melting Season, will be published soon by Riverhead books. It’s the trenchant, frank, poignant, tender, and, dare I say, heartwarming (one of my favorite qualities) story of a Nebraskan woman nicknamed Moonie who leaves her husband, takes a bag full of his money and drives away, heading west, toward a series of adventures, both decadent and wholesome, that surprise the reader as much as Moonie herself.

Fittingly, Jami is about to drive cross-country on a self-generated book tour, with boxes of books in the backseat instead of a suitcase full of money, and lots of fans and friends along the way to host, support, and toast her. You can find her tour dates here.

So, on the brink of her departure, I was glad to have an opportunity to ask Jami some questions. Stephen Elliott challenged us to come up with some topics not usually covered in writer interviews, so we did our best to perk things up with some bookish sex talk. (more here)

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An exceptional article by former Flatmancrooked editor, James Kaelan. The child pictured is an exceptionally enthusiastic soccer fan.

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The great English broadcaster Ray Hudson once said of the great Argentine footballer Juan Román Riquelme, “Look at him, so languid, look at him walking. He’s like a big, beautiful zombie, Riquelme. He just strolls around…like smoke off a cigarette.” Hudson values hyperbole over precision—or at least succumbs to the former—for he suffers from a sort of fanatic epilepsy when he works. Hudson told me, “When that spotlight’s on you, and you’re calling a game, you’re in the moment, instantaneous, and the selection of words, phrases, and anecdotes are improvised. There’s very little time for actual thought. There’s very little time for reflection on what you’re actually going to say.” And Hudson’s quips, spontaneous and unedited, have gained him a reputation as one of the most notorious announcers in all of sports.

Hudson made his career first as a soccer player—for Newcastle United in England, and later for various teams in the defunct North American Soccer League. But he is best known for announcing the modern game for GolTV. Commentary for a soccer match, more so than in any other sport, is like the musical accompaniment to ballet. Therefore as a broadcaster, Hudson is comparable to the conductor of an orchestra playing in the pit beneath a stage of dancers; he adds context and emotion to the drama. No wonder, then, that he often likens footballers to beautiful women. “I’m telling you man,” Hudson once said of FC Barcelona’s seventeen-year-old striker, Bojan Krkic, “this kid could be the best thing on two legs since Sophia Loren.” (read more here)

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Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times on Don DeLillo’s new novella, “Point Omega”:

“Like many of Mr. DeLillo’s earlier books, “Omega” is preoccupied with death and dread and paranoia, and like many of those books, it has an ingenious architecture that gains resonance in retrospect. But even its clever structural engineering can’t make up for the author’s uncharacteristically simplistic portrait of its hero: a pompous intellectual who shamelessly justifies sending thousands of young soldiers off to die in an unnecessary war with abstract, philosophical arguments, but who suddenly comes to know the meaning of death and loss firsthand when his beloved daughter abruptly disappears.” (read more)

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