Habeas Corpus, Gobbets of Gore

The founders of our nation well understood what Alexander Hamilton called the "fatal evil" of arbitrary confinement. They enshrined the "Great Writ" of habeas corpus — an individual right that preceded even the Bill of Rights — into Article 1, Section 9, of the Constitution. In Federalist No. 84, Hamilton expressed the founders' view that "arbitrary imprisonments" were "the favorite and most formidable instrument of tyranny" and that "confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government."

The National Law Journal / 10-02-2012

Yesterday Sam Rushforth sent me a link to an article just published in The National Law Journal, a strong but despairing essay written by his brother Brent and three other lawyers who represent clients currently held at The Guantanamo Base in Cuba.

http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1202573443123&Guantaacutenamo_Forgotten&slreturn=20120905113553 

It is an ongoing and despicable chapter in the history of the United States.

Last night, not able to sleep, I finished reading Brian Evenson's second science fiction novel in the Dead Space series, Catalyst, following the earlier Martyr (he also has a science fiction novel titled Aliens: No Exit).

As with the earlier science fiction books—published under the name of B. K. Evenson rather than Brian Evenson—my expectations (based on Brian's literary fiction) of exquisite form and brilliant sentences and pellucid prose had to be set aside. In return, I was given a page-turning plot involving two brothers—one fairly normal, the other schizophrenic—a Marker like the one in Martyr (an obelisk with the ability to enter minds and press toward Convergence with the help of worshipful Unitologists), and gory battle with awkward but deadly creatures summoned forth out of corpses.

I read lots of books, mysteries mostly, just for the pleasure of following a good plot. Brian's novel fit that bill perfectly, down to the inevitable but unsuspected horrific ending. But three aspects of this novel grabbed my attention in a more serious way.

1. The brothers. The obligations and connections of brotherhood. The pains of loss, separation, worry, and fear. My own relationship and non-relationship with my brother John were evoked repeatedly, often painfully.

2. The horror. Brian knows the human mind. The best parts of the book, at least for me, involve the troubled mind of Istevan, the brother who hears voices and has difficulty distinguishing between what is real and what is real inside his head. He sees patterns others don't and becomes the perfect vessel for The Marker, which organizes and reorganizes his brain in its quest for convergence. There were moments when this book simply frightened the shit out of me, and they were all psychological scenes rather than the scenes of fighting or physical danger.

3. The extrajudicial torture (that's redundant, isn't it) and rendition of Istevan to a secret prison colony where he is held with other political prisoners without any recourse left me shivering and cursing. It was, of course, our own recent American experience under W. Bush and the dick Cheney. And it continues for 169 prisoners in Cuba. 

Brent Rushforth et al end their article with this statement:

A curtain of utter darkness now threatens to fall over most of the 169 Guantánamo detainees, interned indefinitely without charge and without recourse, including our clients. Having reviled the Soviet Union for its gulags, we have, it seems, permanently institutionalized our own at Guantánamo. It is ironic but somehow fitting that we've managed to do this on the southeast coast of Cuba — adjacent to, indeed within, the territory of a despotic regime that we have opposed for several generations but now, sadly, choose to emulate in this disgraceful way.

Finally, in the dark of the early morning, light from the half-moon competing with my reading light, I laughed suddenly and loudly, a good and yet grotesque laugh, a ghastly laugh occasioned by this little poem of a sentence: "The walls were smeared with blood and gobbets of gore scattered the floor."

Narration

What is required to tell a story?

Jean Fremon's novel (novel?) The Botanical Garden, translated by Brian Evenson and published this year by Green Integer (the French original was published in 1988) answers the question: very little, if we're talking plot.

What happens in the book? The narrator gathers thoughts, his own and others', into little groups. The narrator proposes catalogues—of penises, for example—and admits to a fondness for taxonimies. The narrator relates details from the lives of an old woman, of a feared and beloved thinker, of his lover, of a camel, of a playwrite. The narrator thinks about narration:

"He said: to tell stories is to ratify the social. To take part in its game. Since childhood we have been constituted by stories that we have to believe in, take part in, that we have to reproduce, mimic. A cunning joining of stories fabricates the temporality into which we are thrown and gives to the arbitrary or sleight of hand the semblance of natural causes.

"To shatter narration is to kick against this, he said"

There is change over time, as befits a novel. The narrator's lover leaves him for the playwrite. The narrator's friend Karl falls ill and can communicate only by writing on a slate (the book is like a series of notes on a slate):

"Karl is doing better. He had them bringing him chalk and slate and that's how he communicates with his visitors now. It suits him well: he retains the initiative. No general conversation, useless to clarify.

"The slate is serene but absent. Far from everything. Today it told me: 'Values dislodge facts.'"

The camel, who has been acting in a play, gets pregnant.

There are conundrums:

"A rat eats of a consecrated wafer. Does he ingest the Real Body?

"If yes, what is to be done with the rat?

"If no, what has become of it?"

There are—and this is the fragmentary essence of the fragmentary book—lots and lots of interesting thoughts:

"It's as if the sentence were capable of extracting what happiness there is in unhappiness and filling our heart with this extract, just like how a very pure, very beautiful, very profound and very sad melody fills us at the same time with happiness and sadness, and the more profound the sadness is, the more the happiness flares up. . . ."

The narration, finally, puts us in the mind of the narrator and the plot is the sequence of the narrator's thoughts. There are lots of commas.

I read the book slowly, a few pages each morning over the course of a couple of months. The reading matched the writing—fragmentary, unconcerned, tenuous, patient, surprised, concerned, amused, uncertain, bored, delighted.

The Austrian playwrite is named Thomas Narr. Narr means fool in German. Narr is the beginning of narr-ation.

What does a story require? A kind of sly foolishness.

p.s. Thomas Narr reminded me, in a couple of places, of Peter Handke. His attitude towards literary awards given by people who misread his work for their own purposes, for instance, or his play "composed principally of insults directed at the spectators."

Jean Fremon's The Botanical Garden

Green Integer has just published, in Brian Evenson's translation, a fine little book (books in the series are 5" by 3 1/2") of exquisite thoughts, aphorisms of a sort that occur in sequence, hints of a narrative in the context of thoughts about narrative.








Just a few examples:


The phrase subverts the thing.
What is right, the word, the memory
the raw, unformed thing
And what is right?


The unfiltered true, without armature
the animal


generalized oversight


the whole as it comes


yappings of a dog, the road white with fog


its lesson: no lessons

AFFLICTION FICTION: Brian Evenson's Work

The Open Letters Monthly has just published its May edition. It includes my review of two new works by Brian Evenson in the context of his earlier work.


Click HERE to read it.

Brian Evenson's Dark Property

On May 1, Open Letters Monthly will publish an essay of mine called "Affliction Fiction." In it I review Brian Evenson's two new books in the context of the rest of his work.


As the essay developed, I cut pieces and added other pieces. A few of the cut sections here:

I watch eagerly for new books and stories by Brian Evenson. He’s got a wicked sense of humor, on display recently in the stories “Bon Scott: The Choir Years” and “Niue.” Imagine the awkwardness that ensues after AC/DC singer Bon Scott is found singing surreptitiously with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, or the comic possibilities in a story named after a tiny Pacific island nation that opens with this question: “And how is it that the brooding Johnny Hellspider, long having restricted his posts to two-word comments such as “You rock!” or “Satan lives!”, has suddenly become so loquacious?”

Evenson’s quickly expanding body of work has a darker side as well. When “The Brotherhood of Mutilation” arrived in the mail, for instance, the chapbook lay on my shelf unread. It requires a certain resolve and a reasonably stable state of mind to read Evenson’s more unsettling texts; and something about the title and the cover illustration destabilized my resolve. A few years later, I had no such trouble with Evenson’s Baby Leg, despite a white linen cover marked by blood-red prints from the author’s own hands. By that time I had also read and enjoyed “The Brotherhood of Mutilation,” expanded between handsome noir covers as the novel Last Days (winner of the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel of 2009).

Given my sometimes conflicted relationship with these books, I’m left to wonder about my fascination with what I have come to think of as Evenson’s “dark property” (the title of one of his best and most disturbing books). The reasons I read and return to these books are multiple; but they generally have to do with questions of who I am as a creature of language. Brian Evenson’s work explores and plays with and sometimes eviscerates that creature.

. . .

Lest the notions I have perpetrated here about Evenson’s grim epistemology discourage prospective readers, I should note again that he is a superb humorist. “The Prophets” is an excellent example, a story surprisingly relevant today as Tea Party readers return to texts by Mormon Cleon Skousen and ideas advocated by Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture and later Mormon prophet Ezra Taft Benson. The story is told by a Mormon named Verl who decides his Church has abandoned Ezra Taft Benson’s teachings and fallen prey to liberal ideas that threaten the whole country:

The way it was laid out to me, Ezra Taft was the last real President of the Church worth his salt. All the ones since him were liberals, people who the Lord had inflicted upon the Church for its wickedness. Ezra Taft, though, he was a good John Bircher who saw with a clear eye the importance of our Founding Fathers’ Constitution, not to mention the evils of the Federal Government. He saw like it was in broad daylight the conspiracy of the New World Order, and to top it off he supported gardening and self-sufficiency.”

So what to do? Verl drives to Idaho, steals a backhoe and digs up Benson’s corpse. Back in Utah, he tries to revivify the dead prophet, first with cosmetics and then with electricity. Insistent on the religiously constructed world he prefers to reality, Verl reads the subsequent disastrous events as meaning exactly what he wants them to mean and remains hilariously triumphant even as the physical laws of the universe run their relentless course.

Finally, a somewhat embarrassing personal revelation. I see myself as a sharp-eyed literary critic. I discovered the source for the Freemasonic conversations in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain and I was the first to notice that Rilke’s ten Duino Elegies hinge on an “ineffable site” preceded by 423 lines and followed by 423 lines. So when I realized that a one-eyed character in Evenson’s Last Days gazes at Kline’s missing hand with “eyes dilating,” I figured out I was on to something important. My musings on that singular/plural paradox can be found here (http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/2009/03/paragon-and-paradox-brian-evensons-last.html ). 

More recently, rereading Evenson’s short-story collection The Wavering Knife, I stumbled on a mistake in “Moran’s Mexico: A Refutation, by C. Stelzmann” and began to congratulate myself again. “The only reference to a so-called Rodriguez in my grandfather’s original,” C. Stelzmann writes, “comes underneath a photograph entitled Tortilla bereiteren.” Aha! I thought. This should read Tortillabereiterin—the “in” means woman. I made a note in the margin, ready to send on the correction for the author’s next edition. Then I turned back to the story.

C. Stelzmann is the grandson of the author of a travel book about Mexico that has been appropriated by its translator Moran, a man C. Stelzmann calls a postmodernesco and whose intertextual “translations” he decries. By the second page, a reader discovers that the grandson’s refutation of Moran has been translated from the original German by a translator present in copious footnotes that systematically undermine the claims and abilities and even the sanity of C. Stelzmann. For instance: “C. Stelzmann, who seems to have no knowledge of animal husbandry, does not realize the animal photographed is a cow, a female, and thus not likely to search for a wife”. Even as I chuckled at what unfolds as a literary-critical parody, I still plied my critic’s tools, counting up the degrees of linguistic remove from the original Mexico: 1) A. Stelzmann’s account, 2) Moran’s “translation,” 3) C. Stelzmann’s refutation, 4) the translator’s text and notes, 5) my notes on the mistakes in the German. Number five brought me up short. C. Stelzmann and the translator are both laughable characters, all too certain of their certainties. And so am I. Evenson has sprung the trap.

Brian Evenson, Director of Brown University’s Literary Arts Program, has produced a remarkable body of work over the course of fifteen years. There are novels and separately published novellas: Father of Lies (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998), Dark Property (Black Square Editions, 2002), The Brotherhood of Mutilation (Earthling, 2003), The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press, 2006), Last Days (Underland Press, 2009), Baby Leg (Tyrant Books, 2010), and Immobility (Tor Books, 2012). There are three science fiction novels published under the name B. K. Evenson: Aliens: No Exit (Dark Horse Books, 2008), Dead Space: Martyr (Tor, 2010), and Dead Space: Catalyst (forthcoming from Tor, July 2012). There are books of short fiction: Altmann’s Tongue (Knopf, 1994; reprinted with the addition of an O. Henry-winning story by Bison Books, 2004), The Din of Celestial Birds (Wordcraft of Oregon, 1997), Prophets and Brothers (Rodent Press, 1997), Contagion (Wordcraft of Oregon, 2000), The Wavering Knife (Fiction Collective 2, 2004), Fugue State (Coffee House Press, 2009), and Windeye (Coffee House Press, 2012). There are translations: Rafael Cadenas’ The Space of Silence (with Trenton Hickman, Pyx Press, 1995), Jacques Dupin’s Giacometti: Three Essays (with John Ashbery, Black Square Editions, 2003), Jacques Jouet’s Mountain ® (Dalkey Archive Press, 2004), Cristian Gailly’s Red Haze (with David Beus, Bison Books, 2005), Claro’s Electric Flesh (Soft Skull Press, 2006), Jules Romains’ Donogoo Tonka (FORuM Project, 2009), and Manuela Draeger's In the Time of the Blue Ball (Dorothy Project, 2011). And there are introductions to books, essays, and even a literary-critical book, Understanding Robert Coover (University of South Carolina Press, 2003). Evenson’s work has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Slovenian.

Three Pages from Bento's Sketchbook

Just finished reading John Berger's latest book, "Bento's Sketchbook: How does the impulse to draw something begin?"

As so often with Berger, this is a series of short meditations, loosely drawn together by Berger's reading of Spinoza (Bento short for Benedict) and his sketches in a book dedicated to Spinoza.

Tyranny is the subject of two of the pages I scanned, a topic I've been thinking about while working on Handke's "Voyage by Dugout" and while reading an advance copy of Brian Evenson's novel "Immobility." "You know what word I never want to hear again," a character says in Handke's play: "neighbor. Fuck the neighbor. Death to the neighbor." Evenson's book is about forced community, a post-catastrophe world in which the authorities artificially lame an especially talented person to get him to do their bidding.

Berger writes about today's global tyranny in which differences between rich and poor are institutionalized. Handke writes about Marscorporations that use international events to forge soi disant community by vilifying some group, in this case the Serbs. All three texts echo messages of the Occupy Movement.

Book Reviews

Michael's heroic summary of a wide variety of reviews of Peter's "The Great Fall" has me thinking about book reviews in general.


I read book reviews in The New York Review of Books, in the New York Times, in The New Yorker, in The Bloomsbury Review, in new Los Angeles Book Review, in literary blogs like Begleitschreiben, and so on.


And I write book reviews, reviews of jazz performances, and reviews of exhibitions of art.


It is a demanding art form, reviewing.


As a literary critic, I'm also a practitioner of a scholarly form of the art.


And as a writer of personal essay, I engage in a third kind of writing that often involves books and music and art.


It's difficult for me to keep the genres apart. The kind of writing about books and art I most enjoy is personal, is critical (in the sense of making sense of the work the way a good scholar would), and is respectful of the writer's work, even when not liking a work, because it pays good, close, informed attention.


Paying informed attention is arduous. A review I've written over the last six months involved rereading 10 of the author's books and then trying to weave something meaningful out of the strands of the work I found most interesting. Here's the beginning of the essay that will appear in the fall 2011 issue of the Bloomsbury Review:

Brian Evenson’s Dark Property

. . . we see through a glass, darkly . . .    First Corinthians 13:12

I watch eagerly for new books and stories by Brian Evenson. He’s got a wicked sense of humor, on display recently in the stories “Bon Scott: The Choir Years” and “Niue.” Imagine the awkwardness that ensues after AC/DC singer Bon Scott is found singing surreptitiously with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, or the comic possibilities in a story named after a tiny Pacific island nation that opens with this question: “And how is it that the brooding Johnny Hellspider, long having restricted his posts to two-word comments such as “You rock!” or “Satan lives!”, has suddenly become so loquacious?”

Evenson’s quickly expanding body of work has a darker side as well. When “The Brotherhood of Mutilation” arrived in the mail, for instance, the chapbook lay on my shelf unread. It requires a certain resolve and a reasonably stable state of mind to read Evenson’s more unsettling texts; and something about the title and the cover illustration destabilized my resolve.




The essay continues through horror and delight, investigating language and truth in work that surprises at every turn, surprises and disquiets, tortures and heals, excoriates and, somehow, is deeply satisfying.


So, is what I've written, is what I write, about the work itself or about my responses to the work? Perhaps I bring the same eye to each reading. Consider this final sentence of my review of Bowden's and Briggs' and Kelly's book "Dreamland" (published in the Bloomsbury Review and republished in an earlier post here):

 As a final note, as a resigned yet resolute response to a book that questions many of my certainties and unsettles my very being, I’ll add my translation of another stanza by Rilke, this time from the eighth of the Duino Elegies: “We order it. It falls apart. We order it again. And fall apart ourselves.”


This could well have been part of the Evenson essay. And another review of a Charles Bowden book, Inferno, published in Catalyst, considers the same questions of truth and language I considered in the Evenson piece:

“Supposing truth to be a woman – ” Nietzsche wrote at the beginning of  Beyond Good and Evil; “what did philosophers, at least the dogmatic ones, know about women? Weren’t the ghastly seriousness and the awkward thrusting with which they have always approached truth unimaginative and unseemly tools to win, of all things, a woman?”

            inferno, Charles Bowden’s new book (with striking black-and-white photos by Michael Berman, and with an exquisite design that values print as it does image) knows all about truth being a woman. The book’s sometimes hallucinatory, often contradictory, and always white-hot prose is a supple and sensuous organ of seduction.

            The woman in question is a patch of Arizona desert, and this woman too has had relations with William Jefferson Clinton, who, as one of his last acts as President, in response to lobbying by Bowden and others, established the Sonoran Desert National Monument. 

In Tongues, Alex Caldiero

Perhaps it's not only that I have a limited set of tools with which to examine a book, but that I am drawn to books and art that explore a set of themes I'm especially interested in. The long series of posts about Peter's new book are investigations of those same themes of language and truth. As is a review I wrote for Catalyst about a set of paintings by Alex Caldiero called "In Tongues."


[Except for the "Dark Property" essay, which hasn't yet been published, all these reviews and others can be found here: http://works.bepress.com/scott_abbott/]

Immortal For Quite Some Time and A Reasonable Dictionary: Avoidance as Anti-Teleology?

A thoughtful email today from college roommate and friend Chuck Hamaker that points out a pattern in a couple of things I've written:

Scott

I just read your piece on your brother John from "Immortal For Quite Some Time," the one posted in BEPRESS as "Our Feet Are the Same"[http://works.bepress.com/scott_abbott/7/]. I was struck by how similar what you wrote then was to what you wrote when you reported on your and Zarko's trip with Peter Handke [http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/2011/01/biography-celebrity-and-identity.html] -- the full account is here under the title "A Reasonable Dictionary": [http://works.bepress.com/scott_abbott/5/].

In both instances, though it seemed you started with a goal of uncovering something about your subject, you consistently chose not to pursue the person of interest, through declining to meet or even to talk with anyone who actually knew them. You were an accidental tourist in an intentional location.

The places you go give a structure but the content is hardly circumstantial and hardly even tangential to the ostensible subject. I don't know if that's truly what happened or what you invented, it doesn't matter.

I am struck by the similarity of the modus operandi and the extreme "staying away" from the supposed subjects of your attention.

You mention in the Handke piece that you're worried about being a sycophant. I think it's something else, but not that.

In the piece supposedly on John, but not about him in reality, you encounter and interact with people, seem to stumble through, stay out of the way or don't really look, i.e. do not intentionally interact with anyone who really might have had some history of him. Ditto for Handke.

Anyway, for what its worth.

Cheers
Chuck

It's worth a lot Chuck, especially now that you connect the two and give me a chance to think about the similarities and the reasons. Let me add a couple of lines from the opening section of Immortal For Quite Some Time that was published last week in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought:

I look back at “Autopsy,” at my first attempt to tell this story. When I described the visit to the T&A Café I said that “we” went in, that “we” spoke with the owner. But the truth is: I remained in the car while Christy and Mom went inside. I didn’t want to talk with anyone about John. I didn’t want to talk period. Still, I wrote “we” and reported what my mother and sister told me. Caveat lector.


And here are some of the lines I think you were referring to:

11 p.m. Sitting in my motel room, I decide not to call, not to try to talk with Van. It’s a feeling that grew in me while I ate dinner. It became a conscious thought just minutes ago.

Van’s accounts would divert me from the faint traces I’m following. Life moves on. The immutably described, the absolutely defined is fixed like the butterflies I pinned to felt in a cigar box, wrong even when it’s right.

As you suggest, my reason for writing has mostly to do with a wish to understand myself in order to figure out how to live a decent and productive life. While I would like to know my brother in ways his early death made impossible, and while traveling with Peter Handke was memorable in part because of who he is, I have been using those trips, those investigations as a kind of scaffolding for my own discoveries. I'm the kind of detective who will never solve the crime because the facts of the crime remind him of other things.


Which gets me to the anti-teleology of the title of this post. In my experience, it is the people who claim to know the most who know the least. And claiming to know the most often has to do with claiming to know the pattern of history, to know how things will end. As I see it, our understanding is so full of holes that our only hope for understanding is to have a sense for how little we understand. Thus my distaste for straightforward biography.


No new thought that. It's been around since the pre-Socratics in many forms, some of my favorites in the German Romantics' penchant for fragments in lieu of systematic thought, and more recently in the work of Brian Evenson (Evenson’s recent story “Knowledge,” by the way, is a description of “precisely why I have still not written my detective novel”: “attempts to substitute another way of thinking about knowledge always end up derailing the genre").  But it guides me in a lot of ways, at least one of which you've discovered here.


The sketch is one I made of the statue "Victoire de Samothrace" in the Louvre. Looking at the support structures that keep it standing despite its frailty, I was struck by how this perfect and powerful statue is subject to entropy like everything we create. Our thoughts and our works are contingent and ephemeral. And that's to be celebrated, not papered over with lies.


thanks, my friend.

Book Seven, from Seven Books of Love: Alex Caldiero

I continue to work on my essay about Brian Evenson's "dark property," so thoroughly inhabited by his characters and their stories that at times it's difficult to even imagine a world outside the covers of his books. 


Brian's creations face, or at least live in worlds without the comforts of seduction, without stories that find their narrative ways out of dilemmas.


As a result, they are brutally and/or absurdly honest. That honesty, in the context of the political and religious and even fictional rhetoric that envelopes me, is refreshing. It is, however, brutal and/or absurd, which makes for vivid dreams after reading.


For Christmas, Alex Caldiero gave me his BOOK SEVEN, from "Seven Books of Love." Like Brian's work, and perhaps like all good work, it too is brutally and/or absurdly honest. For instance:


WE PUT IT in a sack.
Drove out to the open sea.
Took a boat ten miles out.
Dropped the sack into the icy water.
This morning, there it is at the door.
We are more than horrified.
          27 Jan 00


Or:


DONT be a mind reader.
Take and accept 
what comes your way
with naturalness,
humility, and yes, grace --
You are part of the food chain.
          23 June 00


Thank you Alex. Thank you Brian. And goddamn you.

Dark Property: The Work of Brian Evenson

In an earlier post, I wrote about the blood-marked cover of Brian Evenson's Baby Leg as constituting a fetishization of the book.


Tonight, wrestling with more ideas, and more complicated ideas than I can find sentences for, fighting for a form that can hold an essay with the title "Dark Property,"I resort finally to photographing the books themselves.


As if the photo could convey the ideas. 


It conveys the book covers. And perhaps the weight of the work, the height and heft of the books themselves. For tonight, that will have to suffice.

Brian Evenson's "Baby Leg"

The literary magazine New York Tyrant recently published Brian Evenson's novella "Baby Leg" in a limited edition with finger painting by the author on the white linen cover around Eric Hanson's bronze embossed illustration.

After having just reviewed Charles Bowden's, Alice Brigg's, and Kelly Leslie's Dreamland (for the Summer 2010 Bloomsbury Review) -- a book whose troubled pleasures are made possible through the interplay of images and text as set up dialectically by the book designer, I was already thinking about books as more than places where words can be read when my copy of "Baby Leg" arrived.

Evenson's book of stories called "Fugue State" (Coffee House Press, 2009) was rich with illustrations, and even a graphic version of a story, by Zak Sally (see my post of July 28, 2009), so the "Baby Leg" collaboration isn't new. But it is provocative. A book on whose cover the author has pressed paint-covered fingers? Books already have a fetish character for many readers. This book is a fetish.

As the cover image makes clear, we're talking here about a woman with one regular and one baby leg, a woman who appears in the recurring dreams and perhaps recurring realities of the character named Kraus.

Kraus seems to be an unwilling participant in a scientific experiment run by a man named Varner. Varner's agents track Kraus down when he escapes, and search for him when he escapes again. Kraus is often drugged and has little sense for what is real and what dreamed, although he struggles to make sense of things.

Is Baby Leg his enemy or his savior? Is she real or dreamed? What is the relationship between her baby leg and Kraus' lost hand? Between the baby leg as fetish and the book as fetish?

Part One of the novella is called Then/Now, Part Two titled Here/There. And the story is indeed an exploration of time and space as phenomenological experience. How does memory relate with reality? What does repetition mean for time?

It's likely, I think, that the story is rich with careful and surprising answers to these questions -- that's the case in Evenson's earlier work. But on first reading I'm left largely with the questions, and the questions are more than enough until I return to the book with time and patience to let repetitive readings bring out patterns.

Meaningful patterns.

Empty patterns -- because they're simply repetitive, although meaning arises through repetition.

Patterns that mean that patterns can't be trusted.

Meaning and memory, time and place, sanity and insanity.

And, of course, fetish.

Baby leg.

http://www.nytyrant.com/evenson

Fugue + State: Brian Evenson

There are musical fugues and psychological fugues. Brian Evenson's polyphonic new book of psychological short stories, Fugue State, adds the literary fugue to the list.

The psychological fugue state is characterized by a loss of identity, by a wandering away from who one was into another, amnesic state. The musical fugue states a theme and then revoices it contrapuntally. Evenson's stories take the psychological meaning ("I had, Bentham claimed, fallen into a sort of fugue state, in which the world moved past me more and more rapidly, a kind of blur englobing me at every instant. And yet he had never, so he confided to Arnaud, felt either disoriented or confused. Yes, admittedly, during this period he had no clear idea of his own name. . . ." -- from the title story), and over the course of nineteen variations play with and examine the theme in various voices, voices disjunct from themselves as early as the first sentence of the story:

"Years later, she was still calling her sister, trying to understand what exactly had happened."

"For some days now, I have felt myself to be pursued by my second ex-wife."

"There came a certain point, in his speech, in his confrontation with others, in his smattering with the world, that Hecker realized something was wrong"

"I have been ordered to write an honest accounting of how I became a Midwestern Jesus and the subsequent disastrous events thereby accruing, events for which, I am willing to admit, I am at least partly to blame."

"In the end, suffering and not knowing what else to do, I left her abruptly and without warning, taking only the clothes on my back."

"I'd read once, in what book I no longer recall, a phrase that for no apparent reason came to haunt me."

"In retrospect, it was easy for her to see it had been a mistake to have sex with a mime."

"Clearly the method of elucidation I employed in my report did not satisfy the administration, and thus I am at a loss as to know how to proceed."

"Late in the year, during a trip to the Tyrol, the sky so gray throughout the day that he felt himself to be living in a perpetual twilight, Bauer lost confidence in his ability to work with plaster."

"It was a freak accident, a wire snapping off the load and whipping back to slash across his face, breaking his nose, tearing open both his eyes."

"On the night of 12 October, I was compelled for reasons I still find quite difficult to explain to kill one Alfons Kuylers, esteemed dealer in imported goods of a specialty nature, my mentor, my master in the art of philosophical paradox, my tutor in all things theological."

"Toward evening, well before Traub expected it, came a notable transformation in the face."

Traub and Bauer are characters in a similar story. Several of the stories are set in post-apocalyptic times. The loss of language or family or resemblance ("He no longer resembled me") is common to all the stories. In short, voices reporting from fugue states make up a literary fugue the likes of which I have never read or heard.

Art by Zak Sally, including an illustration for each story and a full graphic "illustration"/depiction/visual thinking of the story "Dread," add another eyevoice to the polyphony.