Walking down the middle of the street, in the middle of a summer night, slightly drunk, arms spread wide open (in homage)

I'm walking down the middle of the street

and it is dark out

and it is summer time so I am in shorts and a t-shirt

the t-shirt has a picture of a guy with a cigar on it

it says "King of the Philistines".

And my arms are spread wide open.

And every house I walk by has a television on

Like literally every fucking house.

Whatever.

But on a night like this people should be out

Dancing in the streets

(Especially those wrinkly ass old folks.

I imagine whipping out a megaphone

and delivering a message to the wrinkly ass old folks:

"You have approximately 15 minutes of life left

C'mon. Lets go. Start dancing")

The streets are silent

Which is frightening

(there are just so many quiet people here)

but also beautiful

in its own way.

I imagine I am king of the street

Not in the crackhead way

But in the eternal king of the silent night street way.

It 's a good feeling.

A car comes.

The feeling fades.

I move to the sidewalk.

I blend darkly with the trees

and the trees' shadows

I am king of the shadows

I walk past a power box.

I buzzes softly

Day in and day out

Whether or not I

or anyone else

is by it

this box buzzes

for itself

without emotion it just buzzes

That's what it is there for

To buzz 

for one guy

walking down the middle of the street,

in the middle of a summer night,

slightly drunk.

7 views of the apocalypse

                Three days of released passions were enough to take this city to its knees
The wild and destructive parties began with drinking and dancing,
                ended when the last gas station was set ablaze.
"Destruction is a form of creation" was our rationale,
               questioning the philosophy marked you as the next sacrifice.
No one minded if one of their loved ones was caught in the blaze
              ("Some losses are inevitable...Not everyone can live to see the glorious dawning future.")
=

           "Its a tense situation" she said
and I believed her in light of the two cars, mutilated, smoking in front of us.
           "Look the metal's still hot."
           "Mmm" knitted brows.
 A distracted, thoughtful affirmation.
           There were gouges in the concrete before us two inches deep
that acted as an Eshkol-Wachman notation to the prelude of the sculpture before us.
           Two oblique and sweeping marks coming from the north,
three straight marks from the south
           a curious gap separating them.
=
           Crushed rock falls on my head
listen the ocean speaks with a honeyed voice
           Somewhere a fire is burning, I can feel it within me
when the wind blows our bodies are picked up in dance
           This chasm is as wide as my ignorance
we only need one chance.
                                                                                                Jump.
           I'm stuck, the mud has wise fingers,
this line thoroughly bisects me.
                                                                                                Now I am multitudinous.
            This dampness, the cave's dampness permeates me fully
what are we but a confluence of holy modulations?
                                                                                                Even your lies are lies.
            Steadily forward! The horizon is glowing.
My breaths are labored, they leave me shattered.         
=
             Peeking through boughs at gnawed knots of wood
these tulips of ordeal are blooming wildly at our feet
             Chunks of concrete rain down leaving hungry divots in the earth,
giving us good reason to cover our heads.
             "I don't know what you're thinking or what you've seen"
"My own memories just seem to get in the way most times"
              "Tricky bastards, stumbling block before the amnesic"
Phantasmagoric recollection spins me around, misty eyeshade that builds walls and builds wall and builds...
=
Here's broken wood and its army of splinters
Here's burning herbs and its huge host of sinners
Here's a shattered window pane that's paid my list of wishes
Here's your list of hated names compared to all the winners
=
           This flag waves mighty in the ever blowing winds
 these winds that touch my ears with a muddled accent and flourish of pine
          These winds that bring back stale thoughts and onerous obsessions
So the grass always trembles, day in and day out submitting to the wind and the will of ash
           Did I mention the burning cities?
=
          Under the sun a thousand flowers bloom,
soil songs rising in plumes that break at the beck of a radiant body.
          Each shoot is a prayer, each shoot is symbol and sign.
The soil is a sleeping womb and at each pulse breathes cool winds of life into these frail tendons.
           Unseen the waters move with unstoppable force under electric pressure and capillary presence.
Unseen the waters move.

[END]

      What a great subject: "Apocalypse". Such an obsession with some, predicted by so many for years yet one has never been witnesses and there is no evidence that anything like an apocalypse will happen for perhaps billions of years. Yet apocalypse IS always around the corner. Is it because every tragedy is a personal apocalypse? An old world collapsing in on itself? Yet with every personal apocalypse a new world forms. A literature founded on mortality and fear.

Review of "The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis" by Mark Gluth

         Devastatingly beautiful. Devastating and sad and immensely beautiful. Mark Gluth's debut novella will grip you with its terse, declarative sentences, pull you along with its wandering domestic storylines and make you feel the crushing burden of the seasons, love and being. It will make you long for your loved ones who will one day die and make the world around you stand out in significant beauty simply because it is present and real and exists.
        As in life the events that occur in The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis are driven by chance, have little meaning behind their causation: tragedy occurs, words are said, life goes on. Events happen, many without reason, but which have far reaching effects. Gluth is masterful at writing the main events of the novel off the page, this keeps the narrative's focus away from unnecessary distraction and on the emotions of the characters.This simultaneously shows great restraint on his part and maintains a detached feeling throughout. The events that occur to the characters are sad, insidiously and hopelessly sad and the only force that holds the characters together are the love which they share with each other. Young couples, old couples, humans with each other and humans with animal companions. Love is the quiet central theme of the work and by hiding it beneath layers of tragedy Gluth makes love appear that much more beautiful. Gluth shows that love is fleeting, mortal and insulates us from entropy.            

             Much of Late Work is a study in the connections between dreams, art, love and death. Every character whose profession is mentioned is an artist: sketcher, writer, photographer, playwright. Some are more talented than others but art is universally portrayed as a source of freedom and a way to connect with love after death. Many of the character's works are referred to or written out in full in the novella. Late Work bridges an all to common chasm in literature between pathos and intellect, Gluth combines them remarkably well.There are steady but understated threads of Borgesian recursion and metarecursion which overlap enough (but not too much) and provide the novel with satisfying verisimilitude along with an air of the supernatural. I found that the novel takes on extra dimensions when the nested layers of works described in the novel are mapped out.
            Late Work can be read in one (intense) sitting and yet packs force greater than, say, one of Marquez's tomes.  I can think of one other work for me that has had the same effect per page as Late Work but the intense overwhelming sadness of this novel places it light years beyond. This is in the "Little House on the Bowery" series along with Cows which I reviewed a few months ago. The novels' subject matter is world's apart but both share a particular visceral writing style. I'm almsot sorry to do this but the basic, chained sometimes ambiguous sentances reminded me of Lin at first. I had pegged this style as inherently emotionally detached but Late Work has swayed me to believe quite the opposite. Late Work was Gluth's debut and came out in 2010 but all I have found from Gluth since are some online music reviews. He is from the Pacific Northwest and is certainly one of the most interesting writes I've heard about from up here lately.

Reflection on "The Recognitions" by William Gaddis

           So there is quite a bit of history around this book which is summed up for the most part here. Because of this I've chosen not to write a review which has been too many times already and which would imply some sort of an attempt at objectivity but will rather be writing a reflection of my own experience with the book. So this will be highly subjective, opinionated and heavily YYMV.
          The book is broken into three parts and the first is by far the easiest. I blew through it quickly and it is consistently entertaining, engaging, well paced and appropriately complex. The second part becomes considerably more complex: Gaddis begins to deliver his philosophies and views and the writing really kicks into gear. With these changes the entertainment value becomes less consistent with higher highs and lower lows. You really need to pay attention to seemingly minor, fleeting details (which I did not) to get everything Gaddis puts into the second part out of it but it is still very much worth reading. The third part gets a little sloppy and offers the least redemption. It consists almost entirely of characters dying, going psychotic, and listening to stupid tourists. The third part has the least impact and cohesion and I found myself reading mostly to just get it over with. During the first two parts I looked up some of the references but by the end I just let them go as my interest had waned. The ending however is a spectacular display of great art ( and ignorance) consuming itself and the book does finish on a rather strong (if exhausted) note.
           I would be hard pressed to recommend this book to most people. While not overly complex as such it is highly allusive, there are boatloads of characters and the pace of the book has been described elsewhere, and very accurately, as "glacial". Gaddis' never spoon feeds the book, and you will often need to determine the setting, characters and mood through hints which are not always immediately apparent. This is not awful in itself (and by no means as distracting as some other authors) but he expects you to be a bit more in his head than others and so the book can take a bit of effort. In addition Gaddis does  not consistently reward the work you have to put in. This isn't to say the book isn't rewarding: his sense of humor is dry and caustic (I laughed out loud at multiple points) there are dramatic sections which stand apart in how imaginative they are and the complexity of the story can be very pleasing, but again the rewards never feel "spoon fed". This issue seems to be at the heart of about half of the complaints surrounding the book the other half being that the dialogue is difficult to follow. While I can't argue against complaints regarding enjoyment of the book (The Recognitions simply appeals to a specific taste...) Gaddis always provides clues to who is speaking, you just need to pay attention for them.  It is definitely a book that begs multiple reading to get the full effect and I may feel ready a few years from now. Interestingly many sections (especially descriptive ones) are just as, if not more, striking when read outside the book than within its confines.
         The plot it described in most reviews as being about a painter in New York in the 50's who sells his soul and produces counterfiet paintings. This is a little like saying Ulysses is about a school teacher with a mood disorder or Star Wars is about a father-son relationship. In case I'm not being clear a WHOLE LOT is going on in this novel, at least three major plot lines and maybe a dozen smaller ones. Many plots intertwine in brilliant and satisfying ways, some pop in briefly then disappear only to be alluded to significantly 300 pages later. Suffice it to say Gaddis creates a whole world which closely mirrors our own 50 years ago but which has slightly different rules. The majority of this world fits within the New York art scene over the course of late December in the mid 20th centure but also stretches back to the 14th century Dutch and out to contemporary Central America, Spain and new England. Some characters are borderline insane, and some of those cross the border into full on psychosis. One character's protracted religious ravings are simultaneously confusing, obscure and frightening and after reading these sections felt myself to have slipped briefly into a altered state. While not very enjoyable these sections are a strong testament to Gaddis' writing ability and demonstrate how much power an author can wield over the reader.
       For the most part the novel is satirical and large portions of the book are taken up describing late night parties among groups of intellectual wannabes and has-beens. These sections predictably consist of context free snippets of speech: posturing, malapropism, misunderstanding, and pretension which buffer more coherent sections of drunken drama, ignorance and anxiety. Gaddis portrays the party scene as lonely sad people coming together to keep the harsh outside world at bay though drinking and puffing themselves up. It's at once hilarious and depressing and these sections go on and on and on. These scenes are contrasted by heavy religious imagery and allusion which, like the party conversations, usually end up going no where. Gaddis sticks mostly to Puritan and Catholic imagery and texts and wanders in Mithradatism, Islam and Judaism breifly. Intimate knowledge of these religions is not necassary but I did feel at times like I was missing some subtle cues by my lack of religious knowledge.
       The Recognitions in itself is obviously above average (especially for a first novel) but lacking at too many points to achieve any sort of transcendence. Put into historical context (as occurs in every review and which I will touch on out of necessity) the novel attains greater significance. The Recognitions is pinned as a direct forerunner to Pynchon, Wallace, and the whole bevy of post-modern/maximalist/hysterical realist writers. He isn't quite as far out as any of these other writers but he was one of the (if not THE) first authors to write in this general style. In hindsight he showed incredible care and restraint in how he pulled off the novel slipping in a funny names here or a multilingual joke there with out shoving it in your face every other line like some others. His novel also has heart, a certain sadness, and more depth to the characters than some of the typical post-moderns to follow. His later novels (J.R., Carpenter's Gothic et al.) are apparently more concise and brought him much acclaim.
      I'd like to end by mentioning his writing style. Since the content of his novel is unique, and the effort required at times to unravel it so great, many readers and critics seems to completely ignore Gaddis' style. It is (much like the content) at once unique and highly inventive yet understated. His word choice can be pleasingly unusual and his descriptions, while sparse, can be sublime. He takes great care in describing the sights and sounds of his environments and the way he describes them made me stop and reread multiple times simply because I had never thought of descriptions in the way Gaddis writes. He often anthropomorphizes the sky, sound, the air, a crack in a wall, and other scene items which literally brings the surroundings to life. Again it is often subtle but it is one of Gaddis' great strenghts and what sets him apart from many others.
                I'll recommend this book to:

• Those who won't mind reading the same book hours a day for more than a month.
• Those who like to be exposed to classical art, music and ideas.
• Those who find intellectualism, scene politics and city dwellers artificial and pretentious.
• Those who enjoy Pynchon's style and attitude but want something more subdued.
• Those interested in the history of 20th American postmodernism.
• Those looking for a moderately challenging read.
• Those who can keep various small character details in their heads for hundreds of pages.

1 Poem

speak through me in vision of flames
speak through me in a fecund tangle of vines
speak through me as the rolling head of clouds
above a tunnel of wind
speak through me as the force that flattens and builds

Purchased recently/ to be reveiwed soon

Still working through The Recognitions (should have a "reflection" by the end of the weekend)

Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust. Third volume of the seminal and interminable work of modern fiction (will not be reviewing this)

Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. Not sure what to expect. Non fiction, scientific, very highly regarded. (will probably not be reviewing this)

The Late Works of Margret Kroftis by Mark Gluth. "Little House on the Bowery" selection. "Daydreamy" by a writer from Bellingham.

Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Wandering, apocalyptic work which launched this Hungarian writer to a certain stardom. Hoping to read it then follow up with watching the (seven hour) screen adaptation by Bella Tarr.

Chromos by Felipe Alfau. Considered a forerunner to all experimental and maximalist writing of the 20th century. From the Dalkey Archive.

Also hope to have another little fiction piece up here soon.

Also please! If you read this and have suggestions for books to review or would like me to review your book: please let me know! I would love to do it!

City on the hill (Keely and the church)

           They never knew Keely went to church. Her abrupt wanderings were common enough behavior for her that no one took notice that she was gone every Sunday morning. Most of the time everyone was asleep or hungover anyways. She didn't attend any church but frequented a particularly conservative outpost 45 minutes outside of town for which the flock was overwhelmingly those on the tumultuous edge between middle age and elderhood: the women uniformly fat, the men stringy and hard eyed. She was always very quiet, sat in the front yet never took communion. Just watched, basked.  She had never gone as a child, thought of attending rather as a social event she needed to experience similar to the desire of certain well off youth that arises like clockwork around their 20th year that propels them to visit third world countries. She began to go regularly but if asked (and she never was) Keely would have been unable to provide a rational reason for why she went to church. She had no sense of duty, and enjoyment played no part. It was simply a pull, a habit almost. Supernatural. During her first few visits she was eyed menacingly from eyes residing deep within folds of flesh but as the months then years wore on she was tentatively accepted even invited to lunch on an occasion by one of the congregations more timid and lonely widows.
      Sandy drove a late 80's Oldsmobile whose maroon interior provided a nose of stale cigarette smoke with a smooth round finish of canned fish. They drove without speaking for what seemed to Keely like a long time and pulled up to a creaking rambler at the end of a long unpaved driveway.
       -You know I go there because Pastor Roger preaches with such fire in his heart Sandy told Keely, smiling, as she held her Kinkaide mug before her face (tree's crimson spray above a smoking cabin). The mug filled with mass market tea and a haphazard handful of sucralose packets, years old, which Sandy kept stashed to the brim in a large drawer, faux wood peeling. -You truly feel the lord in his presence! Don't you? Keely nodded falsely. Keely drank slowly out of polite necessity. Later a sort of pasta dish mixed with ground meat was served, soiled doilies laid under their bowls. Not having the heart to decline Keely remembered this as the first time in twelve years she had eaten meat and it heartily reinforced her conviction for the remaining portion of her life.
       After eating Keely viewed a large collection of painted collectable plates and porcelain clown figurines her feelings towards which began as a mild trepidation then shifted to a genuine interest then (as the detailed history of the third shelf of figurines was explained) apathy which segued imperceptably to a deep dread for this woman and all of humanity, this being a new dread to which even Keely (dread hardened Keely) was unaccustomed. Finally after two and a half hours had passed (Keely was sure it had been closer to five, at least) the woman drove her back to the church and spent an unusually long time hugging Keely as she departed. Keely sat in her car for a long time after the woman drove away, the vacant church behind her, rubbing her temples. The day had started clear and cold but now a layer of clouds had settled and a low steady wind had picked up causing the swings in the playground to begin to arc on their own rusty chains, rattling with each pass. 
        Keely drove back into town slowly unable to shake from her thoughts the world of the woman: living alone and everything in the house (counters, food, tea, car, art) a pale mockery. Fake. The life the woman spun around herself over so many years without thought imply descending the path of least resistance. Offered her belongings in newspaper pullouts and television commercials, acquiring them slowly at first then with fervor. Dwelling on this Keely began to cry softly, knowing. She wanted to help this woman, give her something real, friendship, love, but she felt hopeless, as if nothing she could do could wrest the woman out of her porcelain pit. Keely arrived home as the sun was setting, the house was empty and a little cold. She hadn't been tired but got into bed and pulled the covers over her head, her imagination of the woman's life swirling in her head darker still: the woman's loneliness her loneliness, the woman's shell her shell, the woman's death her death.