We’re Getting On
We’re Getting On
by James Kaelan
1st Edition | 98 Pages | Novella | Signed by the author
Cover: Hand-pressed Seed Paper
Interior: 100% post consumer, collectors-quality
List Price: $19.00
Pre-sale Price: $15.00 (no shipping and handling)
“James Kaelan’s We’re Getting On was the last book to remind me why I love books so much. A collection of two long and two short interconnected stories, this text challenges the very notion of progress by evaluating the roles of technology and imagination in a modern, ecologically unsustainable society. The vision is undaunted and as clear as skies must have been before the industrial age.”
“The focus of [We're Getting On] is kept tight, and this claustrophobic tone allows the dynamic between the…characters to heighten to a beautifully chilling conclusion. The characters in these stories are ‘getting on’ with each other and with their lives, but just barely.
- Pank Magazine
“When I set out to write We’re Getting On, the better part of a decade after threatening to cloister myself in the forest, I had the nebulous goal of telling a story where the characters were retreating from technology. We’re surrounded by machines, so to speak, and we rely upon them to see, eat, and communicate. I’m not interested in condemning the digital world permanently; that would be silly. I wrote this article on a computer, and I’ll Twitter and Facebook the hell out of it over the next week. And yet, I have to question the wisdom of being perpetually connected. The world we live in is dense with information, and as a test, perhaps above every other impulse, I’ve wanted to pare down my life, first through fiction, and ultimately through practice. Near the end of my book the protagonist (or antagonist) is lying on a rock in the desert. ‘Language is the last technology I have to rid myself of if I’m going to start over,’ he says, then continues:
Although a new beginning seems beyond my grasp. I’ve gone too far in the other direction, and this isn’t a circle or a cycle, but a spectrum at the ends of which are two terminal extremes. How should I go about this? Were pronouns the right parts to start with? Maybe I should have begun by paring down my vocabulary more generally. I’ve left myself with I, as well as that and this and these. Let me hang onto those for a moment, and those as well… I’ll consider objects around me without assigning them qualities. The sky, I’ll think… I don’t need to inquire… I do not need to inquire anymore. Some repetition to ensure everything gets eliminated. I lie on the ground. The sun. A single cloud. No water. No one pursued me. I must end on the right word. The deer leaps. The goat’s hooves clatter sharply on the rocks and it slips, he, or she falls, down the shear face of the red cliff, or did it? I had to. That was the last outburst. I will not again.
“Whether or not I’ve succeeded, by writing this I wanted to get to a place, conceptually, where nothing existed. Of course, Beckett tried to do this three times consecutively—first in Molloy, then in Malone Dies, and finally in The Unnameable—and we know how well that worked for him (“…it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”). Nonetheless, feeling surrounded by a superfluity of objects, ideas, and words, I’ve desired, like most writers, to understand why I’m adding to the world more objects, ideas and words. Is it simply the creative impulse, or is it ego?”
- James Kaelan discussing WGO for Electric Literature
