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Naked Lunch by William Burroughs 50th Anniversary Edition

You enter the moment of the “naked lunch” when you realize just what that is quivering at the end of your fork. We’ve been staring at that living, gelatinous mass for 50 years now – and we still don’t know what it is.

It’s a novel. It’s a poem. It’s (as one shrill Amazon reviewer has it) the ranting of a LIBERAL ATHEIST JUNKY. It’s (drug-induced or not, take your pick) stream-of-consciousness. It’s the first prose cut-up. It’s pornography. It’s the end (or beginning) of (post-)modernism. It’s The Bomb, it’s a how-to-be-a-writer manual. Here’s the definitive answer to all that: Yes, it is. Naked Lunch is all that and more.

Naked Lunch is one of the most written-about books of the twentieth century. It’s up there with Ulysses and The Wasteland for the title of “book most likely to generate a graduate thesis.” That’s because, like those other two, it’s an open text: you’re quite likely to find there precisely what you go looking for.

Everything, that is (as a different Amazon reviewer complained) except stuff about lunch and nudity: “doesn’t anybody like to eat in the nude?” Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone by Eduardo Galeano

When Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez gave U.S. President Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s 1971 book Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, thousands of Americans bought the book, pushing it to the number two slot on Amazon.

Although Galeano’s trilogy, Memory of Fire, was published in English (and a couple dozen other languages), he has enjoyed only a cult following in the U.S. Memory of Fire will hopefully now receive a wider readership, perhaps carrying with it some of the other great but ignored writers of Latin America.

At once grand in scope but full of close-up details of the most personal kind, Memory of Fire traces the history of Latin America — the continent, its people, gods, plants and animals — from its origins to the present day. Galeano eschews the grand narrative tradition with its fascistic master tropes in favor of the strategic vignette, which opens for both writer and reader contemplative freedom in a vast landscape of possibility. For my money, Galeano’s approach is the honest one, and his latest book, Mirrors, proves why. Read the rest of this entry »

Parody is now a crime? Tell it to the Yes Men or anyone else in the long history of literature who has issued a critique through this tried and legally true form.

In an effort to raise money against the outspoken freshman Democrat [Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida], a Republican activist named Angie Langley has launched “mycongressmanisnuts.com” — a Web site that parodies Grayson’s re-election site, “congressmanwithguts.com.”

via Slashdot and FOXNews.com

This post is especially for Zoe over at Zoe in Wonderland. If you haven’t checked out her site (it’s in Puck’s blog roll), I highly recommend it as a source of wondrous, fantastical art and writing.

There’s a new paper on the sources of inspiration for the famous works of the mathematician Charles Dodgson — better known to most of us as Lewis Carrol, author of the Alice books.

In an article in New Scientist, doctor of philosophy student and literary scholar Melanie Bayley proposes that Dodgson wrote his books as an attack on the new-fangled mathematics making headway in his day. Dodgson was a conservative geometer, Bayley claims, who was deeply upset by the seemingly arbitrary manipulation of numbers and, especially, figures:

The 19th century was a turbulent time for mathematics, with many new and controversial concepts, like imaginary numbers, becoming widely accepted in the mathematical community. Putting Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in this context, it becomes clear that Dodgson, a stubbornly conservative mathematician, used some of the…  scenes to satirise these radical new ideas.

Bayley points out that, surprisingly (though not really, considering the great divide between the arts and sciences), there are few critical works on Dodgson that take into account the fact that he was a mathematician. Bayley goes a long way toward remedying that situation. Her piece should be a model for literary scholars who turn a blind eye toward science and math when commenting on literature.

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

It’s the winter of 1969 in Gordita Beach, a mythical beach town near the Palos Verdes peninsula. The Summer of Love, never really alive in Southern California, is still a “great collective dream that everybody was being encouraged to stay tripping around in. Only now and then would you get an unplanned glimpse at the other side.” Pot smoke and nearby Long Beach petroleum refineries thicken the air. The Manson Family arrests and trial burn broadcast bandwidth. Larry “Doc” Sportello is on the trail of… Something. Something big. Maybe. If only he could quit smoking long enough to remember how to answer the phone.

It’s something completely different and it’s Thomas Pynchon’s best novel ever. Inherent Vice is Pynchon’s second novel to feature cannabis as a more or less primary character (the earlier being Vineland, which locale, being a mythical Humbolt County, more or less, gets a passing mention here). In Inherent Vice a joint (pinners, fatties, “that new Thai stick,” Humbolt sinsemilla, PCP-laced boiler makers) gets lit at least once in every chapter. (If memory serves. Which it may not. Who really knows these things?) Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just learned that writer Ray Federman passed away. I spent a delightful quarter studying literature and creative writing with Ray in the mid-1980s at UC San Diego. My friend Shawn Rider, who studied with Ray at the University of Idaho in the early years of this century, created a code poem tribute to the beloved novelist.

Ray Federman

review by Brian Charles Clark

Blindness

Imagine everyone in the world goes suddenly, inexplicably blind – what would you do? More importantly, how would your government and social services agencies react?

That’s the premise of Blindness, the 1995 novel by Nobel Prize winner José Saramago. Originally published in Portuguese, the novel was widely translated and critically acclaimed. The film version’s reception has been entirely different.

Considered an unfilmable novel, the movie Blindness has been roundly panned by both viewers and critics alike. In fact, though, the film is brilliant in all respects. Don McKellar (Last Night) has done a great job of adapting the novel; his screenplay is true to the original while nicely condensing the novel long-winded philosophical digressions. Director Meirelles (The Constant Gardener) pushes hard on the action, never letting the film sag into didactic maundering, the way the novel does. The photography is stark and beautiful and the acting wonderful – no mean accomplishment, that, as all the parts are played by sighted actors.

Read more at Curled Up with a Good DVD…

review by Brian Charles Clark

The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley

The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley

Simon Critchley admits up front that writing about how philosophers died is, well, odd, and that reading about such things is perhaps even odder. Then again, there are lots of good reasons to write and read about death. It’s inevitable, after all, the one truly irremediable cipher confronting each of us. We know nothing about death (though plenty about how it gets caused), or would say so if we were truly honest about the limits of our cognitive abilities.

And of course we’re fascinated with ciphers, mad to construe their hidden meanings and to make sense out of what, so often, is a devastation for those of us who go on living.

Besides, philosophers are especially good at dying. Not all of them, of course, but the good deaths (the ones that fascinate, the ones that cause the brow to crinkle, the ones that cause us to splutter, wave the storyteller away and take drink with a secret, hidden smile lurking on our lips) tend to be remembered, to be passed on down the line of storytellers. A good death becomes a point of imaginative departure. Here are snippets from Critchley’s wonderful vignettes on my three favorite philosophers. Read the rest of this entry »

On Joanna Russ

On Joanna Russ, a new book of essays on the great lesbian-feminist science fiction writer and to which I am a contributor, has just received a great review in The Village Voice:

Mendlesohn brings 17 writers (including eight men) to her critical enterprise, which picks up where Jeanne Cortiel’s 1999 Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ/Feminism/Science Fiction leaves off. The essayists all believe that Russ’s career trajectory has much to teach next-generation feminists. And all approach Russ’s seven novels, three nonfiction collections, and three short-story collections impressed by how each book bristles with epistemological invention. Her fiction twists the most shopworn genre conventions—like time travel, sword-and-sorcery, or all-female planets—into scenarios that intentionally subvert stereotypical expectations. Comparing these texts against copious amounts of analytical opinion from her various interviews, letters, book reviews, and pedagogic essays, Mendlesohn’s team constructs a fascinating picture of this pioneering “scholar/practitioner” as visionary cultural critic.

It's... a book!

Sometime in 2002, I responded with a proposal to a call for papers on Joanna Russ from British science fiction scholar Farah Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn accepted the proposal on the condition that I not write about The Female Man, Russ’s most famous novel – and pretty much the only thing of Russ’s anyone reads anymore.That was fine with me, and I proceeded to write a paper that touches on pretty much everything but The Female Man.

It was a long road, full of switch backs and revisions, but On Joanna Russ has finally been published Wesleyen University Press. Edited by Mendelsohn, contributors include Samuel R. Delaney (it’s too bad he and Russ never conceived a child), Tess Williams, Gary Wolfe, myself and a host of others.

My essay, the last one in the book, is called “The Narrative Topology of Resistance in the Fiction of Joanna Russ.” In a nutshell, I try to show that narrative is a space of gendered topology; in other words, that fiction is a landscape of cocks and cunts. Russ certainly resisted that landscape. Her writing is a macrophage ravaging the immune system of mainstream science fiction. I tried to take a snapshot of the action (a highly academic one) to capture the lesions, superations and oozings of consciousness through space that I found in her work.

Thank goddess I had Delaney’s great essay to guide me. After the book is available, I’ll post the essay.