At the National Book Critics Circle’s blog I talk about how I decide what to read next:
And, at The Laughing Yeti I ramble on about reading, among other things, in “The Whatness of Our Whoness: On Reading”:
You are what you read:
My Review of Jane Unrue’s Life of a Star
Check out my review of Jane Unrue’s Life of a Star in the Brooklyn Rail’s July/August 2010 issue. Here’s an excerpt:
Immersed in these wrenching scenes, where Unrue’s melancholic lyricism overflows, it’s easy to feel like her narrator who, after reminiscing about kissing her lover says, “This was a moment when the image and the words collide, the kind of moment people live for.” At one point, the narrator, embroidering, compiles a wish list of all the things she needs for her craft. This list could also serve as the best summation of how this novella was put together for it, too, is a “catalogue of patterns, stitches, backgrounds, combinations and suggestions, useful bits and pieces, images.” Unrue’s imaginative precision gives way to indeterminacy, clarity to tentativeness, cohesion to dislocation. The events and images in this world are delivered in a sensuous prose that harkens back to Carole Maso, another accomplished master whose prose belies great intelligence, insight, and a willingness to submit to the seductive power of the sentence. Think of Life of a Star, then, as an illuminated viewfinder, one where parallax, ambiguity, blur, and discontinuity may impede immediate recognition, but one which still impresses through the sheer power of its startling imagery and commanding poetics, its accretion of clues and repetitions. In the end, all of the fragmentary, floating images in Life of a Star finally cohere into an enigmatic portrait of a burned out visionary, an object lesson on the fleetingness of desire, of the perpetuity of pain, on the doubtful, but nevertheless worthwhile, possibility that language may bring meaning to life, or, at the very least, help one to endure its vicissitudes.
My Interview with Lance Olsen Is Live!
Check out my interview with the incredible Lance Olsen at Rain Taxi: Review of Books. Here’s an excerpt:
JM: When I think of collage in the visual arts or in music, I think more of overlap and mixture, where the edges of the disparate elements are blurred. In Head in Flames, as well as in some of the print novels you mention above, the disparate elements are usually placed, as you’ve described, in juxtaposition, rather than overlap and mixture. In other words, unless the typography itself is dealt with visually—that is, overlapped, inserted, interwoven—then the collage element isn’t necessarily experienced in a visual way. So then, what are the “different strata” you see of literary collage? What are the particular ways that Head in Flames uses collage? And how does the reader of your novel (and works like it) put it all together?
LO: My sense is the notion of collage can be used literally or it can be used metaphorically in fiction composition. That is, collage fiction can be deeply, actively appropriative in nature, cutting up previous texts to create new ones at the level of phrase, or even word, as in, say, the work of Eliot (think of The Waste Land) and William Burroughs (think of his cut-up technique). This impulse stays very close to the original French root of the word: coller, i.e., to paste, to glue. But it can also be used simply as a structuring principle—not only as a juxtapositional combination of ready-mades, then, but of just-mades, as in, say, the work of Milorad Pavic or Julio Cortázar.
Summer 2010 Issue of JMWW Is Live!
It’s my first issue there as Senior Flash Fiction Editor. Check it out HERE. From my introduction:
I really enjoyed putting together this issue of very short fiction. To have stories like these floating into my inbox or the submissions “pile” proved to be the highlights of my reading these past few weeks. For part of the time I had been reading these stories I was also in the midst of reading William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, the thorough command of narrative technique of which was as daunting as it was inspiring, and I’m happy to say that the stories I’ve selected here measure up to this mammoth text, packing imaginative rhetoric and style in a necessarily much smaller package.
JOHN MADERA—Writer, Editor, Publisher 