A vintage postcard from Panama (image via moodyscollectibles.com)

Varamo is only the sixth novel by the Argentinian writer César Aira to be made available in English, but the premise already sounds like an Aira-parody: one night in Panama in 1923, a government employee without a literary bone in his body composes a future masterpiece of Central American poetry and, as often happens, never writes another word again.

Billed by the narrator as “an experiment in literary criticism,” Varamo documents the goings and doings of its eponymous hero — “a living cliché — a textbook case” — in the hours leading up the moment of composition. Varamo, a third-class clerk, finishes work and receives his salary only to realize, with horror, that the bills he’s been given are all counterfeit. Too timid to object at the outset, he spends part of the novel feeling like a character in a story by Kafka: “Of all the people in the world, why me?”

What ostensibly happens is this: Varamo leaves work, goes home, has dinner with his mother, goes back out, is persuaded by three pirate publishers to write a book about embalming animals, goes back home and, inexplicably inspired, writes “that celebrated masterpiece of modern Central American poetry,” The Song of the Virgin Child.

Now, because this is an Aira novel, and because Aira writes without revising the previous day’s work (he just pushes on to the next page, a method he calls “la fuga hacia adelante,” or, the flight forward), it goes without say that a lot of weird things happen that seem incidental to the main thrust of the narrative: Varamo spends a few pages amateur-embalming a fish which his mother then cooks for dinner; on his way to a café the newly minted poet witnesses a freak car crash that may have been a botched assassination attempt; at the apartment of the mysterious Góngoras sisters, he notices that the room is jammed with golf-clubs in expensive leather bags. At one point the narrator also seems to be commenting explicitly about Aira’s strange method of composition: “Pulling something out of nothing, straight after having pulled something different from the same teeming, variegated nothing … And so on, different every time, to keep it moving forward.”

A photo of César Aira.

There’s a catch, of course (there’s always a catch with Aira, isn’t there?): Varamo is not strictly the document of events preceding the composition of the poem; the novel deduces the events preceding the composition of the poem from the poem itself — hence the ‘experiment in criticism’ bit. But don’t worry, the narrator explains it all:

“The course of events that preceded the composition of the poem can be deduced from the text, in even greater detail, as one reads it over and over again. Perceptual data is recovered in this way, but also psychological binding elements, including memories, daydreams, oversights, uncertainties and even subliminal brain flashes. The treatment of the external conditions should be similarly inclusive: the succession can be progressively enriched with particles of reality, down to the subatomic level and beyond.”

What this amounts to, I gather, is a kind of extended joke on the idea of the autonomous text. The narrator defines avant-garde art as something that “permits the reconstruction of the real-life circumstances from which it emerged.” The more you can say accurately about the historical moment in which the work of art was conceived, the more avant-garde it is. Simple as that. In the case of Varamo’s unlikely masterpiece, the enterprising critic simply has to “translate each verse, each word, backwards, into the particle of reality from which it sprang.”

Ironically, Varamo’s own historical moment is reconstructed pretty sparingly; there’s some talk of the youth of the Panamanian nation (it gained its independence from Colombia in 1903), the construction of the Panama Canal, the importance of Rubén Darío, the father-figure of modern Latin-American letters. Beyond that, its pretense towards being a “strictly historical document” is skewered by the strange, improbable imagination of its author. Because in the end, for all his metafictional fronts and flings, César Aira is a wildly enjoyable teller of tall tales, a smart-ass Borgesian with a Balzac-complex (he’s written somewhere in the vicinity of seventy or eighty novels). What other writer do you know who can riff on “free indirect style,” the fate of Chinese immigrants in Panama, and the details of cooking a fish, all within the space of two pages in a novel that consists of just ninety?

César Aira’s Varamo (New Directions) is available on Amazon and other online booksellers.

A thoroughly modern figure, yet one who, when confronted with the complexities of modernity, retreats into books and reveries about Dante, Murphy epitomizes the passive tense: always acted upon, never acting. In the last pages, he’s blown to bits by a gas explosion (accident? suicide? Beckett is deliberately unclear) in his garret. His ashes end up strewn about the floor of a bar. This is not, to paraphrase evangelist/huckster Joel Osteen, anyone’s best life. It is, however, one lived consistently. Murphy remains — he always remains — true to his own inclinations: ceaseless self-inquiry, self-evisceration, and equivocation.

The first two sentences aptly set the stage for this story, if you can call this 300-page ode to stasis such. And it is precisely this bittersweet morsel that I return to again and again: The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton. The familiar typeface, the wide spacing between words in the right-justified text, the ball-point check-mark unfaded after thirty-five years.

Distinctly oracular, the first sentence; its tone unmistakably biblical. Ecclesiastes: “Then I looked on it all, and behold all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.” Beckett echoes these verses, but not what follows — the biblical preacher’s call to faith. The passage in Ecclesiastes’ invokes emptiness in order to predicate more substantive redemption; Beckett’s opening line is a call to … just emptiness.

“The sun shone, having no alternative.” Off-handedly epigrammatic, this is Beckett’s encompassing idea about existence, about the universe. Things are simply here. Atoms, rocks, planets, the sun — each proceeds in its cycle lacking agency and more importantly, the author implies, without purpose.

Left, the first edition of Samuel Beckett's "Murphy," and right, the author's copy.

Of course, the dearth of agency is no surprise. No one expects self-determination from inanimate matter, but Beckett’s formulation still evokes an irreducible fatalism. The lack of purpose strikes a sharper note: “Having no alternative” refutes our admitted belief or unspoken hope that the sun shines because it (or god, or a beneficent cosmos) wants us to be warm, wishes us to revel in its splendors, to see all the world around us. Instead, our solar system’s star is defined by a negative — we are told it has no choice, and thus the question is raised: How dare we think we might have any choice ourselves?

The next phrase, “on the nothing new” involves us. We are the “nothing new,” our births and deaths, trials and triumphs. It’s all shopworn. Old hat. So the sun, fixed in an inescapable chore, shines on the ceaselessly repetitive doings of humans. Sunshine at the outset of a tale usually bodes well; Beckett’s having none of that.

Crucial here, I think, is the article’s particularizing effect; all that’s not new is presented as an entity, the nothing new. More than the mere sum of worldly stuff, it’s a concept. An abstraction more real than factories, stones, or ironing boards. The sounding of this fastidious, faintly academic note is, for me, the comedy I’m seeking when I fetch Murphy down from the high shelf (those “B”s on the very top!) risking a fall as I totter on my swivel chair, of course, too lazy to grab a step stool from the closet.

The next sentence introduces our un-hero. And he arrives with considerable promise: “Murphy sat out of it” we are told. Yes, Murphy has escaped this awful mess. He’s no deterministic cipher. The verb choice is revealing, though. He’s not bursting out of it. Hardly dashing. Or even stepping. He’s sitting out of it.

Then the twist — “as though he were free.” So, it turns out, Murphy has not escaped. He may think he has; he may look like he has. Ah, what a fool. What fools are readers to raise hopes even the slightest. Murphy, it turns out, cannot sit out of himself.

But he isn’t special, no different from you or me. Not an existential exemplar or symbolic figure. He’s the fellow down the block, the guy around the corner. He’s “in a mew in West Brompton.”

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton.

In little more than two dozen words, Beckett articulates a worldview, a theology, establishes an Everyman, probes his soul, and gives him an address. And whenever I return to those sentences — bored, duties in pursuit — I feel like it’s my address. Or at least a place I would like to live, if only for a while.

Luc Tuymans' "The Secretary of State" (2005) in the 2005 Tuymans monograph (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

The David Zwirner Gallery is located in Chelsea and known for its expansive “historically researched” exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. Zwirner, like other high-end galleries, maintains a publishing program that produces exhibition catalogues, monographs and artist books.

On my first trip to New York City, as part of a graduate class about the art world beyond Richmond, Virginia, I remember lining up to buy my first gallery publication. It was a thin but beautiful book published by the James Cohan Gallery, filled with the colorful sculptures of Folkert de Jong, and available for only twenty-five dollars. A smart way to promote a gallery’s artists, these books are affordable and specific to a certain gallery, artist, exhibition and date. Monographs are a little like buying postcards of an exhibition, but they have more depth, scope and historical value than a simple keepsake.

Though the books that accompany large-scale museum exhibitions are beautiful, heavy enough to be used as a doorstop and commonly run you about $60, a collection of small monographs could eventually be more satisfying to a particular art viewer’s tastes and interests. Instead of having the same books on the same artists and exhibitions as everyone else, you could have a collection of slightly more obscure artists from much smaller shows. Sometimes a gallery’s books are more interesting than the artwork they regularly exhibit, and you can peruse their best artists and exhibitions from the confines of a well-constructed catalogue. Zwirner’s publications cater to a particular artist and exhibition, from which the monograph is generated.

Zwirner’s monograph for the work of the well-known and respected Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, published in 2005 for the exhibition Proper, is a good example of an overly explanatory catalogue. The press release, included in the back of the book almost as an afterthought, is all the description needed for Tuyman’s muted and haunting paintings. I don’t believe that art or artists always need to be explained and sometimes even a short press release gives away too much; all you can see afterward is what that author suggests you should. Context, however, is always a good thing, and writers sometimes forget that telling viewers what they should see in a work of art is different than telling them who made it, when and how.

In the catalogue for Proper, each of Tuyman’s 10 new paintings, exhibited for the show, are both described and explained in wordy detail by Gerrit Vermeiren, almost like an art historical text. Reading Vermeiren reminded me of that painful task art historians undertake, where they dissect and analyze each and every object within a canvas to mine it for cultural significance. While this is a prerequisite for understanding artwork from centuries ago, is it necessary to explain the significance of our current culture to such a detailed extent? Tuyman’s paintings describe murky and foreboding moments in our contemporary society, and with “anemic hues” he paints ballroom dancers, the face of Condoleezza Rice, a dust cloud from a toppled building, the perfect table setting for the perfect non-existent and absent family — these are all activities, icons, actions and ideals with which everyone today is already familiar.

The 2011 Marcel Dzama monograph.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the catalogue Behind Every Curtain, for a 2011 show featuring the more youthful New York City-based artist Marcel Dzama. Aside from the dedication at the beginning of the catalogue, which reads “in memory of Luis Miguel Suro,” a young Mexican artist who was shot and killed during an armed robbery at his family’s ceramic factory in Guadalajara in 2004, there is no other text. A perfect bound book the size of a small pad of notebook paper, it’s filled cover to cover with Dzama’s drawings, dioramas, sculptures and photographs. Dzama is known best for his ink and watercolor drawings and for how his childlike style of mark making is married to his gory and ghoulish subject matter — his drawings resemble a fairy-tale that somehow turns into a dark nightmare.

In Behind the Curtain, Dzama branches out and brings his two-dimensional drawings to life, first in cluttered dioramas filled with pale, paper people grinning almost stupidly in bright red lipstick, and again in his William Kentridge-esque black & white photographs that feature his costumed and masked characters dancing and performing.

Because this catalogue lacks any kind of explanation, Behind the Curtain, as the title might suggest, is all the more playful and engaging, like the work itself. It’s clear that there are no “answers” to Dzama’s drawn narratives, no decipherable stories behind his photographs and yet we still engage with the work as we try to understand his mysterious characters and puzzling situations. Text enters into the catalogue in the form of comic book drawing strips and tiny, scribbled text in multiple languages layered behind the drawings. Because the text describes such complicated situations, and switches back and forth between French, Spanish and English, it feels as if it’s not meant to be read. Dzama’s catalogue seems to prove that sometimes monographs are helped, rather than hindered, by little to no explanation.

Raoul De Keyser's "Steek 1" (1987) in the 2005 monograph.

Recent Work, Zwirner’s 2006 monograph for the abstract, Belgian painter Raoul De Keyser, rests somewhere between the previous catalogues mentioned and is what most monographs should be; the perfect combination of text and images, giving some explanation and context without overwhelming the work itself.

The monograph begins with a concise and compelling short essay by Wendy White, who first places Keyser into the context of his contemporaries, and then slowly lifts him away from them to highlight his unique perspective and style. She describes Keyser’s work as “accessible yet wholly ambiguous” and though she admits he’s a “painters painter,” she claims that at no point in his paintings does an “art historical trope or pseudo-conceptual framework trump intuition.” Regardless of whether or not you agree with her claims, her essay Iconoclast leaves you with enough information to form your own conclusions about the artist and his work.

It’s a shame then that the work of Raoul De Keyser is utterly bland and even boring. Sometimes painting with vivid shades of primary colors, Keyser’s canvases are sparsely populated with continent-like floating shapes. At other times they are black and white compositions of lines, dots and shapes, beautifully composed if not terribly compelling of any sort of visual meaning. Certainly his work, stylistically speaking, has historical value within the context of abstract painting and modern art. As a contemporary artist looking for relevant voices, however, this particular catalogue is about as far from ideal as you can get.

A good collection of monographs should contain the artists we already know and love, the artists we happen across and wish to learn more about and the artists whose historical relevance we should study and remember. Zwirner’s monographs, if you are visually interested and conceptually stimulated, even a little bit, by the gallery’s represented artists, are as good a place as any to begin a collection of books on art.

All of the publications mentioned in this review are available for purchase on the David Zwirner Gallery website.

John Ashbery (left) and Rimbaud (right) (via raintaxi.com)

So how did Ashbery find common ground with the proto-punk who, had he lived his life out to a ripe old age, could have been the famous literary lion of Ashbery’s own teenage years? Maybe it was possible because poetic time is not that of the calendar and poetic life is not the one chronicled by biographers. In poetic terms the intransigent young voyou Rimbaud was already ancient by the time he wrote Illuminations — it could almost be a “late work” in the sense that T.W. Adorno and Edward Said used the phrase — while the poetry Ashbery is writing today is hardly unacquainted with either childlike wonder and adolescent frustration. In his Preface to Illuminations Ashbery writes of “the simultaneity of all of life.” His maturity is not the weary illusion of having gone beyond all that. It’s what he already knew more than forty years ago when he wrote “Soonest Mended,” that:

Tomorrow would alter the sense of what had already been learned,
That the learning process is extended in this way, so that from this standpoint
None of us ever graduates from college,
For time is an emulsion, and probably thinking not to grow up
Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate.

Reading those lines of Ashbery’s, or ones written much more recently or even earlier, one would never think to say that his tone has anything of Rimbaud’s about it. And yet one of the delights of Ashbery’s Rimbaud is how clearly one hears Ashbery’s idiosyncratic intonation in it without ever feeling that he has manipulated Rimbaud’s poetry to make it more his own. Simply by trying to find the right words and phrases and lines to communicate the sense and tone of Rimbaud’s poetry, he has discovered something a bit like his own. Suddenly Rimbaud is a direct precursor of Ashbery — or more strangely still, Ashbery a precursor of Rimbaud.

Of course this Ashberyan tone or flavor is all a matter of very specific word choices, like rendering the “niais” of “Parade,” “Sideshow,” as “nincompoops” rather than the “dimwits” or “fools” we find in other versions, or the “subalternes” of “Villes [I],” “Cities [I],” as “flunkies” rather than “underlings.” Perhaps the most Ashberylike of all the Illuminations is “Vies,” “Lives,” in which the poet confess, “I don’t miss my old role in divine merrymaking.” How far other translators seem from this wild ruefulness, as when Wallace Fowlie reduces it to “I do not miss what I once possessed of divine happiness” — which just might work, I admit, if pronounced with a Nawlins accent by an actress playing the part of Blanche Dubois — or Martin Sorrell to “I do not regret my erstwhile share of divine gaiety,” which wouldn’t do even for an academic on his deathbed looking back on his too-many sherries with the English Department. And at the end of the same poem, compare Ashbery’s “I’m really beyond the grave, and no more assignments, please,” with the same two translators’ versions: “I’m truly from beyond the grave, and completely unbeholden” (Sorrell) and “I am really from beyond the tomb, and without work” (Fowlie). Ashbery’s Rimbaud knows he’s putting in a performance, while those of his predecessors are just mumbling to themselves. Not to belabor the point, but allow me one more example, this time from “Villes [I],” “Cities [I].” Fowlie: “For the foreigner of our day, reconnoitering is impossible.” Sorrell: “For the stranger of our time reconnaissance is impossible.” Ashbery: “For today’s tourist, orientation is impossible.” A pedant might object that Rimbaud’s “étranger” is certainly a foreigner and in that sense a stranger but might not necessarily be a tourist — but surely this very slight heightening of specificity on Ashbery’s part amounts to a tiny tweak of Rimbaud’s sense that gives this version a huge gain in immediacy.

Rimbaud’s translators are legion. I’ve briefly indicated Ashbery’s superiority to a couple of them but am I ready to call his translation the definitive Illuminations in English? Ah, but you won’t lure me into that trap! I know full well that “definitive translation” is an oxymoron. And I’m certainly not going to give up my old copy of the Illuminations as Englished by Louise Varèse. Though her niais are merely simpletons, her subalterns subordinates, and her étranger a stranger, still, her Illuminations, which first conveyed the Rimbaldien spirit to me back in the day, still seem to me to do so far better than any of the other versions I’ve read since then until now with the appearance of Ashbery’s. But from today forward his is the one to read first—above all the one to give to anyone who doesn’t yet know anything of this transporting poetry, but also the one, perhaps, to convince a longtime reader that these poems still contain much that is not only “absolutely modern” but absolutely new.

Not only is The Source a major literary statement for our post-secular age, but it is also a necessary intervention in the current poetics of conceptualism. “I undertook this project,” said Gordon, “in order to investigate whether or not constraint-based, conceptual writing might have a spiritual dimension. It is now my belief that rigid and systemic modes of writing can embody an emotionally charged engagement with the world.” An “emotionally-charged” conceptualism, indeed, seems like heterodoxy especially if we consider Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith’s recent anthology Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (2010), whose very title foregrounds an anti-expressive and presumably anti-emotional poetics. In “The Fate of Echo,” one of the two introductory essays that preface Against Expression, Dworkin says, “Frequently, we had to admit that works we admired were not quite right for this collection because they were simply too creative–they had too much authorial intervention, however masterful or stylish that intervention might be.” Likewise, Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman’s Notes on Conceptualism (2009) privileges a so-called “pure conceptualism,” which — because of the conceptual plenitude of the work’s idea — obviates the need for attending to the work’s textual intricacies. In short, if we can speak of a reigning orthodoxy of conceptual poetics, then it is a poetics of strict citation, of uncreative plagiarism, of radical mimesis. In contrast, The Source is a work of stylish intervention, a work of not just copying but skillful collage, a hybrid work that rewards both a conceptual “thinkership” as well as a readership that is steeped in a romantico-modernist tradition. A work like The Source is, in fact, an index of the vitality of current conceptual writing as we are now seeing conceptualism follow a variety of surprising trajectories. If I am making the more high-profile practitioners of conceptualism sound overly doctrinaire, I’d like to point out that Dworkin and Goldsmith’s intention was “to offer a snapshot of an instant in the midst of an energetic reformation, just before the mills of critical assessment and canonical formation have had a change to complete their first revolutions.” Conceptualism is, of course, in flux and The Source should be recognized as a key text within this “energetic reformation.”

From the nearly ten thousand page 26s that he “ambiently” encountered in the Denver Public Library, Gordon culled “bits of language, which … [he then] fused together, altering some nouns to read ‘the Source.’” Through these intricate processes of selection, fusion and substitution, Gordon was able to stitch together a logopoeic text impressed, quite remarkably, with his own particular brand of discursive lyricism, and I’d like now to explore The Source’s linguistic texture so that we might appreciate his craft alongside his concept.  Here is a particularly striking sentence:

To cover the cost of attendance, to list one’s impressive lovers, to wear a little blue linen dress, these will not still its [the Source’s] mystery, replace the mirage of imagination with that of memory, the time a bullet takes to travel a dozen feet with its true vast and complex architecture — for the Source builds towers of smoke with the stuff of our lives, the anonymous, unwritten music that comes from beating, scraping, and shaking naturally sonorous materials.

A look inside "The Source" (photo by the author)

The repetitions, the consonantal/assonantal music, the baroque syntax, the fluid and surprising appositions, the layering of metaphor, the oblique logic — all of this (and then some) amounts to a deliciously slippery and seductive rhetoric. And as can be expected from such a conceptual project, this passage is highly self-reflexive, acknowledging the “unwritten music” taken from now “anonymous” sources (Caroline Bergvall might call them, in the spirit of collaborative language, “&onymous”). To give just a small sense of the kinds of sources Gordon used (so far, I’ve tracked down citations from writers like Jacques Derrida, David Sedaris, Edgar Allan Poe, Jed Rasula, Albert Camus, Daniel Defoe, Thomas Dekker and Novalis via Susan Sontag) and to highlight his peculiar knack for defamiliarizing juxtaposition — the phrase “towers of smoke with the stuff of our lives” was taken from Octavio Paz’s An Erotic Beyond: Sade, and the ending phrase, “comes from beating, scraping and shaking naturally sonorous materials,” was plucked from Ottó Károlyi’s Traditional African and Oriental Music.

Another one of the particular pleasures of reading Gordon is the way he drops in a startling and luminous particular in the midst of abstraction: “Some special, subtle charm of chastity and sanctity draws us to the opposite quality of each; this leads to friction, aspects of our interconnectedness that a butterfly seems to have left a little of its colored dust upon as it alights and pauses … ” (the butterfly conceit is lifted from Arthur Symons’ description of Whistler). Or the way Gordon deploys a koan-like rhetorical question (this one is adapted from a statement from Thomas J.J. Altizer’s The Self-Embodiment of God) so we can dwell in theological paradox: “Can we respond to silence in the presence of speech by saying: the Source has no beginning?” Or the way Gordon incorporates cleverness and humor, such as when he, in breaking off a question, answers it in the process (rhetorically, this is an example of anapodoton): “Are the sentences whole or fractured, and if the latter, on purpose or … ” In this case, the source is Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Novels like a Professor, which Professor Gordon parodically reads in turn.

While much of The Source consists of prose, there are some strategic lineations that reflect Gordon’s sensitivity to visual pacing and the mise-en-page:

A new house in the piney woods.

The lovely quiet of the dunes.

A neatly folded studding-sail.

Such images abound in the Source, but plain statement is better, as if a telephone call causes anger to abate, leaving only a brief description of the course itinerary, followed by a detailed one of precisely what you sought — some indication of what your own vocabulary might one day be:

a crowded afternoon of insect life
in ditches and swamps.

What I’ve been calling Gordon’s “deliciously slippery” rhetoric is apparent here too. The disavowal of imagery in favor of the so-called “plain statement” is, itself, disavowed as the sentence slyly unfurls into an “as if” clause and extends into greater syntactic complexity. This contradiction reminds me of that exhilarating moment when Stevens says, in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” “[t]he sun / Must bear no name, gold flourisher.” Indeed, The Source luxuriates in what Stevens memorably called “the intricate evasions of as.” Neo-Oulipian commonplace book, conceptual prose poem, a “portrait of the artist as collage-text” (to quote a chapter title from Marjorie Perloff’s study The Dance of the Intellect), elliptical lyric essay — whatever one calls The Source, it is filled with superb writing even if it is writing that is orchestrated rather than actually written.

The Source is triply dedicated to Sommer Browning, to Gordon’s family, and to “all the world’s librarians.”  Such a dedication recalls Ezra Pound’s first “Thrones” Canto, which he fittingly calls “[a] memorial to archivists and librarians.” To include such archivists and librarians into the conversation, Futurepoem Books is posting reactions — there will be 26 in all — by poet-librarians to page 26 of The Source on the blog Futurepost.  In the spirit of this collaborative project, I want to end my thoughts on Gordon’s book with a reaction of my own. I took language from page 26 of The Source and spliced it together with one paragraph from Borges’s classic short story “The Library of Babel” and one paragraph from Foucault’s “Fantasia of the Library,” a provocative text which proclaims, “The Library is on fire”:

The [Re]Source: An Exegetical Collage

Our solar system (which others call the Library) is composed of infinitesimal fragments, among which grows, interminably, an indefinite distribution of orbital time. In vast shafts formed by the blessings of experience, dormant monuments may sleep (and even dream) standing up. Here, among long galleries of shelves, which bear the black and white fruit of enclosure, one can see the upper floors from which a zealous mirror sinks abysmally into the void and, with closed eyes, soars upwards in incessant spirals of duplication. From this, men usually infer that a longer, more assiduous spiral is writing the universe.

The Library, it is true, is infinite — as a ceiling is only the transversally placed wakefulness of the sky. Thus, there is no book that is not faithfully polished by tradition or hushed by daily incongruities of thinking. In the remote distances, hexagonal voices are turning into a higher frequency of babble. One speaks many constant but respectful vows to part the spherical surfaces of desire and rest carefully in the summoned interstice. Between the creative urge and one’s fecal necessities, a new imaginative space can transmit columns of imaginary books grounded only by uncertain dreams of what is contrary. Perhaps the Source is performing its commentaries, identical to a repetition that only happened once. But no: it comes from the past to exact its accuracy. In the library of nature, we’ve counted the now and reduced it to an infinite feeling of attention. Phantasms no longer liberate the closets of impossible worlds. Henceforth, the visionary experience arises within the confines of a normal bookcase, amassing loved facts unknown to the sleep of reason. It signs its name on the invariable surface of all appearances; it treasures the actual clamor born between an illusory book and an illusory lamp; it is surrounded with infinite distance; it evolves when the singularly modern sun opens and passes through the scarcely closed interval of a nineteenth century night; it expresses the phenomenon in which matter duplicates spirit to form tight, image free documents, reproductions of reproductions aligned with the power of impossible compensation.

The heart of the Source takes shape in the domain of its untiring recensions. It evokes a flight of fantastic books expressed in a minute of reading. Its subject, no longer a property of reality, has shaped large railings of erudition, possibly responding to the narrow hallway that leads to a fantastic yet insufficient stairway in the air. Why this denial? The journey stands before us. The Source now resides in forgotten words deployed in vigilance, dusty words printed relatively in light.

Noah Eli Gordon’s The Source: an investigation in constrained bibliomancy and ambient research (Futurepoem Books, 2011) is available at futurepoem.com.

“I’m sure the people of Iraq are looking forward to your poem about Franco and his economy,” Isabel tells the main character, Adam Gordon. Since the death of the self, the author and painting, the desire for significance has led to a daily slew of preposterous claims and downright silly statements. Ben Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, which is less than two hundred pages long, observes this condition of disconnectedness and hyperbolic response with a sympathetic, fresh-eyed clarity. Although Leaving the Atocha Station might come off as a first person, autobiographical novel about the author’s time in Spain, the primary motivation behind its existence is the consideration of the individual’s relationship to experience and language. Lerner’s alter ego, Adam Gordon, a young poet who is in Madrid on a prestigious literary fellowship, is “worried that [he] is incapable of having a profound experience of art and [he] had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone [he] knew.”

Gordon is a young man who believes in poetry or, at least he thinks he does, but has no idea if his belief is genuine or even valid, especially since he states on a number of occasions: “Poems aren’t about anything.”

By refusing to align himself with the any of the modernist, postmodernist, or nostalgic strategies regarding the gap between the individual and experience, Gordon is left to recognize the constant and seemingly increasing state of disconnections that currently exist between the self (or its non-existent shadow) and the other. The deep-seated solipsism of daily life, which the inherent solitude of writing either underscores or tries to ignore, is what Gordon repeatedly bumps up against:

“Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.”

II.

In addition to being the title of a disjunctive poem by John Ashbery, “Leaving the Atocha Station” refers to the central train station in Madrid, where, on March 11, 2005, a terrorist bomb went off, killing more than two hundred people, many of them immigrant workers. Gordon describes both his experience of Ashbery’s poem and the event. They mark the far limits of his time in Spain, art and the experience of history.

After walking to the Atocha Station shortly after the bombing and witnessing the aftermath, Gordon goes back to his apartment:

“I went back to my apartment and refreshed the Times; the number of estimated dead was now around two hundred, at least a thousand injured. I considered walking back to Atocha, but instead I opened El Pais in another window and the Guardian in a third. I sat smoking and refreshing the home pages and watching the numbers change. I could feel the newspaper accounts modifying or replacing my memory of what I’d seen: was there a word for that feeling?”

Midway through the book, and before the bomb goes off, Gordon tries to characterize Ashbery’s project:

“The best Ashbery poems, I thought, although not in these words, describe what it’s like to read an Ashbery poem; his poems refer to how their reference evanesces. And when you read about your reading in the time of your reading, mediacy is experienced immediately. It is as though the actual Ashbery poem were concealed from you, written on the other side of the mirrored surface. And you saw only the reflection of your reading. But by reflecting your reading, Ashbery’s poems allow you to attend to your attention, to experience your experience, thereby enabling a strange kind of presence. But it is a presence that keeps the virtual possibilities of poetry intact because the true poem remains beyond you, inscribed on the far side of the mirror: ‘You have it but you don’t have it/You miss it, it misses you/You miss each other.’”

If, as Gordon claims, he thought about the experience of reading Ashbery’s poems, “although not in these words,” the reader is left to wonder, in what words did he think them then? How and where does one overcome the disconnections that have infiltrated every part of our daily life? Is there a word for having your memories replaced by newspaper accounts? Has language, and its capacity for meaning, died along with the author and the self?

III.

Although the main character (Adam Gordon) and the author (Ben Lerner) have lots in common – they both grew up in Topeka; have a mother who is a psychiatrist and a feminist; are poets and translators who went to school in Providence — Leaving the Atocha Station is not another conventional, autobiographical novel told in the first person. For one thing, Gordon is too unreliable and self-lacerating, too given to exaggeration and lying, too addicted to prescription pills, and often too stoned to be considered remotely trustworthy. He falsely tells a number of people, including the two women he is closest with, that his mom is dead. Not surprisingly, this lie leads to other lies; his mom isn’t dead but dying, his father is a fascist, a tyrant. Do these lies lead him closer to authentic experience or further away? Even when Gordon is being repentant, he can’t quite bring himself to tell the truth. Meanwhile, the reader has the sneaking and oddly delicious suspicion that any gesture towards repentance is just a phase, and that the narrator knows that, in an age that has declared the self to be all but dead, true repentance is as impossible to achieve as genuine self-enlightenment. One is forever out of touch with one’s self and the everyday world. This is the state of uncertainty and distance that Lerner registers in precise and often funny calibrations.

“Whenever I was with Teresa, whenever we were talking, I felt our faces engaged in a more substantial and sophisticated conversation than our voices.”

At various other points in the book, the “I” becomes “he” (“He would take my siesta then.”), or the author watches himself, as if through a telescope or microscope: “I saw myself as if from the yard, amazed.” It is in this unstable domain of constant dislocations and slippages — the postmodern world — that Lerner (or is it Gordon?) maintains a wry and knowing distance from all the familiar modes of self-disclosure synonymous with coming-of-age, autobiographical novels.

In different ways — including a beautifully realized section that consists entirely of instant message texts between Gordon and his friend, Cyrus, who is in Mexico with his girlfriend, Jane — Leaving the Atocha Station interrogates the familiar claim to sincerity that propels autobiographical narratives toward their Chrysalis Moment, where the narrator, the “I”, experiences a cataclysmic realization on the road to Damascus (or Darien), and emerges a changed being. Such writing presupposes that the “I” — both inside and outside the book — is stable, that its experiences are genuine and its feelings sincere, with the inside and outside of its existence as seamlessly connected as cable TV. If this “I” ever existed, it is one that Gordon, Lerner and this reader at least have seldom if ever, experienced.

Thankfully, while Leaving the Atocha Station is not a conventional autobiographical novel, it is also not a conventional experimental parody of the Chrysalis Moment or “realism” either. It isn’t a copy of a copy, which has also become a familiar representation of the pervasiveness of the inauthentic, the commonplace of mediated experience, and the death of the self. This is why you should read Leaving the Atocha Station. Without being escapist and retreating into a world without terrorism or inequality, and without making outlandish claims regarding significance, Leaving the Atocha Station is fresh, funny, disturbing and, perhaps best of all, a pleasure to read as it meditates on language, poetry, the internet and the unavoidable dislocations, which is to say our shared but deeply isolating experience of everyday life.

For more information about Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House Press, 2011) visit Coffee House Press.

The cover of "Strom of the i," an "artobiography" by artist and graphic designer Tina Collen (2009, Art Review Press) (all photos by the author)

Boulder Bookstore owner David Bolduc said of artist and graphic designer Tina Collen’s “artobiography,” titled Storm of the i (2009) and published by Art Review Press, “I’ve been in the book business for thirty years and have seen a lot of books. But I’ve never seen anything like Storm of the i.”

I agree with Bolduc that Storm of the i doesn’t look like other books, but Storm’s uniqueness is also what hinders it most. The book defies traditional design and layout, like a watered down, less haunting version of American author Mark Z. Danielewski’s popular House of Leaves (2000). Storm of the i is also a confusing book formally and conceptually. It vacillates throughout all three hundred pages between various different styles — photo album, scrapbook, self-help, personal memoir, maudlin diary, autobiography — and none of them seem to help its author’s intent.

A foldout from "Storm of the i"

Creating the term “artobiography,” Collen tries to tell her personal life story through the prism of art. She does not present her life as the life of an artist, however, but rather from the perspective of a life lived by an artistic methodology; she approaches and describes life as an artist would approach a new project. This aspect of Storm of the i is the most unique, truthful and interesting idea Collen’s book explores. As she writes in her book, “art is essentially serendipity and editing, as is life.” Interwoven into her story of personal discovery and familial drama, centering on unresolved issues with her father, are interesting stories of creativity.

Collen's "pornage," a name she coined to describe her technique of creating floral images out of collaged scraps of pornography (click to enlarge)

In her book, Collen recounts stories about starting numerous different businesses, from selling her handmade jewelry early in life, to her more successful silk plant arrangements for the offices of various corporations. In the early 1990s she bought, destroyed and rebuilt her own home, living inside during the reconstruction and overseeing the every aspect of the building. She had a brief foray into the art world with her “fleurotica” collage work, floral images made from assembled scraps of pornography. Her “pornage,” as she named the technique, is humorous and provocative, and earned her an exhibition in Paris. Even the manner in which Collen relates to and engages with her children reminded me of the way my own artist mother let us play in her ceramic studio. Somehow Collen seems to turn the mundane in her life into short-lived, creative adventures.

Through Storm of the i, Tina Collen also explores the uncertainty and confusion she felt about herself and her family. She questions who she was, who she is and how those around her, mainly her father, husband and two boys, shaped the person she has become.

The book is written with heavy sentimental and motivational overtones, some examples of which include listing of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” and quotes like “every person must choose how much truth he can stand,” and, “it’s never to late to be what you might have been.” Collen states that writing this book helped her make sense of much about her family that had always alluded her, making the act of writing her story self-help in the truest sense of the word. Though Collen works with the universal theme of self discovery, Storm of the i struggles to find a context outside of its author’s own particular life, and the book’s relevance for its readers wanes as the story moves from childhood through adulthood and into middle age.

Images of Collen's silk floral arrangements from "Storm of the i"

Collen’s “artobiography,” designed by the author herself, a professional graphic designer, seems to intentionally break the rules of good graphic design. Collen changes font, color and style more often than the reader can keep up with, and the book is chock-full of family snapshots, photographs, artworks, both hers and other artists, quotes, pop-ups, foldouts, lists, scans, photocopied notes and hand-written, almost illegible inserts of text.

Her overuse of drop shadows, demarcating something personal in nature like a letter to her father, a photograph of her siblings, or an old business card from one of her many ventures, rob the book of any formal sophistication it could have had. In desperate need of some self-editing, it’s really a shame Storm of the i was never edited enough to become a poignant memoir.

Despite Storm’s obvious formal and narrative faults, it’s hard to dismiss anyone’s life story, regardless of how little me might know or care about it. Everyone’s story does matter, but to whom? Reading Storm of the i forces you to question the importance of personal narratives and the need, relevance and place for autobiographies by the non-famous. I firmly believe in the idea that the personal is universal, that highly specific personal experiences can speak the best about universal experience. It’s a delicate balance you need to strike, however, to turn your story into a story that means something for someone else. Tina Collen valiantly reaches for the universal in Storm of the i, but she never does find it.

Storm of the i (Art Review Press, 2009) is available at the author’s website, www.tinacollen.com.

Louisa Boyd, "Flock" (2009)

Equally wild and soft, the book art of UK artist Louisa Boyd is an animated discourse on the distress and destruction of analogue media. She breaks and reconstructs books into sculpture, wondering loudly with the rest of us, what’s going on with the world of print? In a book lover’s nightmares, libraries look like the modern car-yards of Detroit, empty and steaming, with ruins of pages and pages flipping open in a breeze. Where are we headed?

Louisa Boyd, "Paper manipulation 1" (2002)

Boyd’s book-art asks this question sculpturally. She makes work with water-colored landscapes, folded birds flying from the print. Others are furry, exploratory works of chipped paper. All are mysterious and delicate, haunting and harsh. Her method of chipping away at book pages is jarring. In her series titled Paper Manipulation, thinly sliced guts stream from the heart of a book.

Louisa Boyd, "Landscape image within a book" (2001)

Alternatively, some of her sculptures are actual hand-bound artist books, folded to form intricate circular shapes with finely brushed watercolor details. These painted accents make the shapes look like they are at once aging and crying or, mirroring stained vistas on a postcard — vintage and beautiful.

Boyd’s work is part of a growing creative trend in building sculptures out of books, much of the interest of which, was spawned by memes circulating on Twitter nearly a year ago. Most popular seem to be the sculptures which feature huge mutilated texts (encyclopedias, dictionaries) that are worked on with scalpels to reveal a poem or inanimate shape, like a haunted house or clock-workings. Brain Pickings recently compiled their list of the internet’s most fascinating book sculpture.

But I found Boyd’s work different in that she actually hand-makes the books that she then tears up. Her process of art-making is detailed. She experiments with paper: tearing, cutting, molding. First, she tests it’s fragility and unpredictability. Then using bookbinding techniques to shape the pages, she creates one-of-a-kind artist books, choosing to leave them cover-less, exposing the books and their message to the true vulnerability of analogue anything.

“It requires patience, concentration and practice, but it is calming and rewarding. The hand-bound book stands out in an age where we are used to fast results and machine-made objects,” she said in an interview with Hyperallergic.

Louisa Boyd, "Take Flight" (2009)

Also distinctive is Boyd’s use of earth imagery. Much of her sculptures are marked by symbolic birds flying from the binding and broken landscapes that peek out of curved pages, some shaped like a nautilus shell. According to Boyd, this theme stems from a response to the paradox between rural and urban environments. Her interest was piqued during the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic in the UK, which quarantined large parts of countryside. This edge between country versus city and modern technology versus ancient technologies form the backbone of Boyd’s beautiful work.

“I am not standing against the advances we have made, only wanting to recognize the importance of what has gone before. In such senses (for me) the process of bookbinding has become as important as the sculptures themselves and the concepts behind them,” Boyd says.

Simply, these book sculptures are lovingly animated, delicate examples of bindery and paper-experimentation. Like other book sculptures, her work is fascinatingly fragile, illustrating the fragility of analog literature itself. And uniquely, Boyd’s work illustrates the fragility of nature and the (lost?) art of bookmaking.

More information about Louisa Boyd’s book sculptures, and book-art can be found on Facebook, Flickr and at her website.

Soliloquies, furthermore, is actually a page-turner. It’s the type of book you intend to pick up for a moment, perhaps because the image on the cover grabs your attention; it’s an old family snapshot taken of the author by her mother, a grainy portrait of a 3-year-old Ayala, a large German Shepherd and her father, all lounging on a picnic blanket with a handgun resting across dad’s exposed midriff. After opening Soliloquies, and passing the mysteriously lovely dedication to “you, at last,” you realize you have been reading the little book for much longer than you intended to. I picked it up for first time planning to leaf through, get a sense of what it was and where it went, only to realize that I had read all of it. It is also the kind of book you should read twice before you consider it read.

Ayala Sella, born in Israel, grew up in the United Sates, and now travels back and forth between the two countries, creating lives in each place that seem independent of the other. Soliloquies, made up of poems Sella wrote between 1995 and 2011, emphasizes the nomadic nature of her adulthood; Soliloquy, “the act of talking while or as if alone,” and crosswalker, together create a lovely image of a pedestrian on a solitary journey. The title implies that Sella’s poems are self-narrations, and from those exclamations, sentences, and words we speak out loud to ourselves in the absence of others, she creates concise poems. One hundred and seven pages long, containing more than one hundred poems, Soliloquies is a book by a prolific author, and the product of a great deal of effort. Well edited and organized, a book in four parts, her poems are sparsely worded, direct in tone and quotidian in subject.

In the first two sections of her book, titled “but nothing else happens” and “and all she does is smirk,” Ayala Sella has compiled the type of poems that describe a simple moment or situation. With only a few lines, and with poems forty words or less, she evokes images of sharp poignancy. These two sections are snapshots of life and contain poems that tell of the ordinary things that compose it. Her work conveys the highs and lows the everyday. “A mix of the sweet and the sour,” John McCaffrey writes in a recent interview with the author, adding that Ayala shares an “underlying message that the harshness of life need not consume its beauty.”

In “defeat” she writes with a tinge of mysterious sadness:

I have never known defeat before now,
although I thought I did
hundreds of times before

In “a perfect match” she describes a moment of idiosyncratic love:

today it was your dirty
elasticless socks
that you left
by my bed
they weren’t a perfect match
and when I woke up
I was happy.

Stepping away from her descriptions of personal moments and memories, in the latter half of “and all she does is smirk” Sella explores less obvious narratives. She offers us small descriptions that remain slightly beyond the grasp of our understanding, but that somehow feel within the realm of our knowing. Though we miss the specifics because of Sella’s abstract use of words, we feel them nonetheless through the tone and attitude of her voice.

In “dosage of tiger” she writes:

I can never
make it part of my
reality even when the
rest is the imagination
of crap  

The poem “the fourth leg,” is written with the same puzzling but intriguing tone.

We are all
like a Degas
painting
all of us
drunk and stoned
and not knowing
where
the fourth leg is

The third section of Ayala’s book, aptly titled “from another direction,” contains Sella’s longer, more serious, and strongest poems, most of which are set in Israel. Sella’s poems about living in Israel, being Jewish, and her long absence from the country convey a strong connection with the place she lives and the culture that surrounds her. It’s this life, rather than the one she leads in Brooklyn, that she seems most connected with, as she describes in detail scenes that she observes and people she talks to. These poems encompass the society surrounding her, and they feel less self-referential and indulgent.

In a section of the poem “java,” she references sad remembrances of history:

and buying some
coffee is an
old lady
with a number
still tattooed
on her left
forearm

Working as a hotel receptionist in Israel, she humorously and rebelliously describes, in a section of “cats at the holiday village,” the Americans who pass through:

and then this Christ worshipper says
you’re a mess
you’re a troublemaker
which needless to say
i take as a compliment
and wonder what the Lord
himself would’ve thought.

The impressive manipulation of words into a vivid image is what can make poetry such an amazing and unique medium. Poems are descriptions, and we tend to think of descriptions as the tedious pages of a book we have to wade through in order to arrive at a more eventful place in the plot. Good poets, like Sella, with only a handful of words, give us great descriptions that linger long after we have finished reading the poem itself. I hope Ayala Sella publishes another volume of poems in sixteen years, a hundred more pages of those things she mumbles to herself as she wanders through the streets of her cross-cultural life.

Ayala Sella’s Soliloquies of a Crosswalker was published this year by Wasteland Press.

"The Spiderboi Files: Volume I" by Jai Arun Ravine (all photos by the author)

Jai Arun Ravine’s The Spiderboi Files: Volume 1 is a careful, intentional work of book art with themes that reverberate delicately through the book’s physical structure. Its content rattles a cage of constructs: commercialism, California and gender identity.

Ravine is a trans-identified, multi-disciplinary writer, dancer, visual and performing artist of mixed race who has previously published and presented work under the names Alysha Wood and Woo Wood. I was mailed Ravine’s 1-inch by 2-inch book by a favorite mentor. “Love this,” she said. And I do.

The book is a sandwich of zigzagging brown paper pockets that are stuffed with glossy paper panels — five in all. The 5×11 paper panels are folded 15 times each to the size of small rectangles that slide in and out of the pockets. The whole composition itself resembles the fanning construction of a “Jacobs ladder” wooden toy. Opening a panel is the literal unfolding of story, the story of Spiderboi, a gender-riffic character that draws from the power of spiders and their web — a riff off Spiderman.

Spiderboi’s story is colorfully penned on the five panels in hand-drawn pictorial poems, not so much comics, as maps. One installment, “Rodent,” trails in a stream of consciousness through the storyline of superhuman involvement in mundane daily experiences: on the computer, on the train, hungry.

Ravine writes:
Miss Sir
Miss Sir
Mister
Angry
Angular
Achy
‘violent pariah of
death.’ Maybe even wanting to
get to know my environment.

A pull-out panel from "The Spiderboi Files: Volume I"

With four more panels to pick from, and five total pockets to put them in, the book is a play on “options.” Ravine created the Spiderboi Files to read in whatever order and form that the reader decides. “I wanted to explore the idea of “choice” in relation to gender (versus sexuality) by placing that choice in the hands of the reader in the exact places in which those choices were difficult for me,” writes Ravine on their website.