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‘I wanted to write with a total continuity and total disjunction since I experienced the world (and myself) as continuous and infinity divided. That was my ambition for writing. Why should a work of literature be organized by one pattern of engagement? Why should a “position” be maintained regarding the size of the gaps between units of meaning? To describe how the world is organized may be the same as organizing the world. I wanted the pleasures and politics of the fragment and the pleasures and politics of story, gossip, fable and case history; the randomness of chance and a sense of inevitability; sincerity while using appropriation and pastiche. When Barrett Watten said about Jack the Modernist, “You have your cake and eat it too,” I took it as a great compliment, as if my intention spoke through the book.’ — Robert Gluck
‘You heard of Robert Glück? You should have. He basically started this thing called the “New Narrative” which started in the late 70s and is not so easily defined. Some say it’s gossipy but I think they miss the point with that word. It definitely is locked to sex and to the body and establishing a relationship with the reader. Of course, all books must establish a relationship with the reader in order to succeed,but maybe think of New Narrative as if the writing wants to establish a sexual relationship with the reader. This writing wants to fuck you and then tell all of its friends about what it was like fucking you. So, this is Robert Glück’s thing.’ — Vice Magazine
‘Robert Glück is the author of the novels Margery Kempe (Serpent’s Tail, 1994), Jack the Modernist (SeaHorse Press, 1985; Serpent’s Tail, 1995), and three collections of prose and poetry: Reader (Lapis Press, 1989), Elements of a Coffee Service (Four Seasons Foundation, 1983), and Denny Smith (Clear Cut Press, 2004). He lives in San Francisco and teaches at San Francisco State University, where he is an editor of the online journal Narrativity. Through his own writing and a workshop he taught at San Francisco’s Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center in the 1980s, Glück helped shape what became known as “New Narrative,” a movement that included his friends and colleagues Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Kevin Killian, and Dodie Bellamy.’ — Clear Cut Press
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Further
Excited & Lonely: The ‘Jack the Modernist’ Website
‘Shocks of Recognition: Robert Gluck’s Scandalous Narratives’
RG’s ‘Experimental Writer Gets Sucked Off in a Field’
RG’s ‘Long Note on New Narrative’
RG interviewed @ Lodestar Quarterly
RG @ Project for Innovative Poetry
Audio: RG’s readings @ PennSound
Buy Robert Gluck’s books
Robert Gluck @ Facebook
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Media
11/16/2015 — Robert Gluck
Robert Gluck « 851 in Exile
Robert Glück « The Other Fabulous Reading Series
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Interview
from EOAGH
For a voice level, say something.
My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense.
Keats?
The first line of “Ode to a Nightingale.”
Wow. I would not have expected you to quote one of the Romantics!
Keats is where I got my start. He’s my guide in a sense: his enameled surface and below that the longing and loss. That combination of polished language and harsh emotion—I have never abandoned it. Words resoundingly in place—with a sense of inevitability even, that 19th-century idea of Poetry—and loss and incompletion riding underneath. For me, that’s what Keats is. In high school, I memorized Keats’s poems and then wrote them out, just to see how it feels to be writing those lines. It was a gestural experience.
That you were calling the poems to you.
That’s right. (Laughs).
Were your earliest writing attempts in verse?
Oh, yes, entirely. My first poem was a sonnet. I had the classic wonderful high school English teacher who got me reading and writing poetry, Marjorie Bruce. For me, poems were something to be fabricated. I started with the sonnet not because I felt that I had something important to say, or that I had to burst out and tell the world my feelings. Rather, I wanted to make a beautiful object with language.
Has that impulse been sustained in your work?
What beauty might be seems more complex, but I still think of my books as three-dimensional objects, globes, and in fact, at the end of the novels there is always something revolving.
At the end of Jack the Modernist there are a series of heads coming out of a body.
Right.
And there’s a scene in the beginning of the book that is loosely repeated at the end—a scene where the narrator watches Jack hug someone and wishes he could get a hug like that, only to realize when he does it’s not what he imagined it would be.
In college, in Edinburgh, I took a year-long Conrad seminar. He thought of his books as spherical. That’s where I got the idea. I recognized at once that it applied to me.
More of an understanding that this was your conception for your work all along?
Yes. I am dyslexic and dyslexics tend to think globally, rather than linearly.
Could you give me an example of that?
For a dyslexic, understanding comes in images rather than words or narratives. A lot of dyslexics are visual artists, which I was initially studying to be.
A traditional narrative suggests a syntax of action, a particular order to experience.
Whereas global suggests that experience is one, and that you take it in all at once, even though you can plug into it at different places. I think of my books not as temporal sequences but as incidents that occur on a globe. So it’s not as though one goes from one thing to the next thing to the next. Instead, all those moments, images, and tableaus make one object. There may be different elements but they exist in a sculptural relation to each other.
There are two huge groups of dyslexics in society, one in museum studies and visual arts, the other in prison. Trouble with reading will lead you into a visual field, or you become so alienated that your relationship with society is compromised.
The first pieces of literature you produced were verse poems in traditional forms. You say you were consciously trying to make beautiful things. As I look around your house, I see beautiful art pieces. Your connection to the art world is still very much with you, and you often reflect upon it in your writing.
I have a long, complicated relationship with visual art. In some way, I’m a frustrated visual artist whose medium is language. So, that’s another way of thinking about writing as an object. Add to this, my boyfriends, for the most part, have been artists…
So there’s an erotic dimension.
Perhaps a narcissistic aspiration (laughs).
Often in your work there appears to be little distinction between what some might consider a prose poem, an essay, or a short story. How do you make these distinctions?
I don’t. My way of dealing with it is to not make the distinction. But I don’t really like the term short story—and yet I have story collections. I simply call them stories. Or pieces. The short story has a history I do not feel especially related to. Other traditions are more important to me.
Such as?
Well, the modernist writer Blanchot made fictions called conts (tales). In these conts, which I admire tremendously, there’s a pressure brought to bear on language itself, and a porousness. By porousness I mean that one sentence doesn’t necessarily pick up where the last one left off. So you find a kind of air between the sentences. They can take any direction at any time. It’s composition by the sentence. These are things I think about, and one could talk about some prose poetry that way, as well as lyrical fiction.
I teach a class in prose poetry, and I teach the different modernisms through the genre: cubism, negritude, surrealism, symbolism, and so on. This inspired me to write my own prose poems, as opposed to what I call prose pieces—those one paragraph prose blocks.
The world of the short story is a world of psychological insight. The classic short story hunkers down into certain plot moments. I want to be lyrical, I want to draw away into historical perspective, or move closer into an intense sensory event. I have nothing against moments of psychological insight, and I hope plenty of them occur in my writing, but that’s not the sole purpose of my work.
Do you see yourself as an eclectic?
I assemble as much as I write. It’s rare for me to just sit down and write something from beginning to end. My old boyfriend Nayland Blake had a retrospective in New York. He asked me to be part of a night of readings where writers respond to his work, so I sat down and wrote what I felt was the trouble with our relationship (laughs). My piece was about bunnies—he uses bunnies in his work—two bunnies who are both bottoms sitting in bed not knowing what to do. They love each other but they don’t know what to do…
They want to fuck like rabbits but can’t?
That’s right! And I talk about diffidence, or even nausea, before the act of creation. I weave those two concerns together.
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Book
Robert Glück Jack the Modernist
Serpent’s Tail
‘Set in the early 1980s, Robert Gluck’s first novel, Jack the Modernist, has become a classic of postmodern gay fiction. Bob is excited and lonely. He meets and pursues the elusive Jack, a director who is able to transform others without altering himself. Bob goes to the baths, gossips on the phone, goes to a bar, thinks about werewolves, has an orgasm, and discovers a number of truths about Jack A paean to love and obsession, Gluck’s novel explores the everyday in a language that is both intimate and lush.’ — Serpents Tail
‘In this book self-exploration is so precise it becomes impersonal.’ — William Burroughs
‘Robert Glück, in writing the story of Bob and Jack, writes about two individuals whose on-again, off-again affair rivets the attention of the reader. This postmodernist work requires readerly effort, but we are rewarded. Jack the Modernist makes gay people complicated, instead of the cartoons we usually are in fiction. Glück surprised me on every page with his language and his perceptions, his humor and his ironies. Do I want to be Bob? Or Jack? No. But I want the taut energy that leaps off the page whenever they appear.’ — John Treat
‘Robert Gluck has found a new way of making fiction passionate. This novel is a strange, exhilarating love story rich with invention and observation.’ –– Edmund White
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Excerpts
One sleepless night my mother said, ‘Think about happy things.’ She sat down on the edge of my bed with a tired exhaling sound. That sigh added to my list of worries– I did not want to outlive her. She was anxious to get away, to enjoy herself, word out after a day of children, fearing the expense of a demand for intimacy. My sole drawing card was misery. Happy things? I pressed her– what specifically did she have in mind? Apparently she also drew a blank (there I felt we were united) because she finally replied Mickey Mouse. I thought the answer dismissive and contemptible– did she think I was going to trade real misery for a cartoon mouse? I loved her more than anyone and I assumed she loved me that way: I still want her love, it’s a design in me as structural as grain in wood, an imprimatur. Didn’t she know me at all? If she didn’t know me, who did? She was treating me like an abstract child: I was set adrift.
*
Oh I’m the guy they call
Little Mickey Mouse.
Got my sweetie down
In the chicken house:
Neither fat nor skinny
She’s the horses’ whinny,
She’s my little Minnie Mouse–
So far so good; a ballad in Mouse falsetto. With a few deft strokes Mickey proposes as desirability itself the beauteous Minnie, Beatrice to his Dante– not fat not, skinny, Mickey characterizes the shapely mouse (in daring leap from mouse to horse) as a whinny, a low and gentle neigh, perhaps a call or greeting that presages further developments in the song. These terms of respect and admiration do not mask the possessive nature of Mickey’s attachment. Minnie is a sweetie that Mickey has ‘got’; he sings, ‘She’s my little Minnie Mouse’ (italics mine). We may condemn Mickey’s patriarchal attitude toward women, or we may simply note the generic use of possessives in romantic ballads. But I would like to suggest a third interpretation: Mickey and Minnie are so meshed, so unified in their love that they literally do belong to each other and use the possessive with the same authority as, say, Tristan and Isolde. Mickey is not insensitive or unconscious but merely responds to a fact, indeed the central fact of his existence.
But to digress a moment: as I recall Mickey sings his tribute while steering a ship up a river. This ship captain has a strangely bucolic image bank, typified by chicken houses and horses. Perhaps Disney wanted to include many walks of life in the figure of Mickey in order that his experience appear ‘universal’; perhaps Disney wanted to set the rapture of the Mouses’ interior lives against the awkward social realism of their trades. But Mickey makes the boat toot and whistle, he transforms it into a wind and percussion instrument; the landscape is not unwilling, it can be pummeled and drawn out like taffy, trees shimmy and spasm, the banks of the river heave and convule with sympathetic vibrations. (The conventional French seventeenth century made a map of the land of love, La Carte de Tendre. My map includes Jack’s apartment, Leadville, Colorado, and the Mouses’ River and Farm.)
MICKEY: When it’s feeding time
For the animals
They all howl and growl
Like the cannibals,
But I turn my heel
On the hen house squeal
When I hear my little Minnie–
MINNIE: Yooooo Hooooo
So Mickey and Minnie transcend the exigencies of commerce, which Mickey characterizes as the ‘howl and growl’ of cannibals (a racist image in keeping with Disney ideology). The whole getting and spending world weighs less than Minnie’s call to love. In the figure of Mickey we recognize Count Mosca from The Charterhouse of Parma, a man whose informing quality is capability, an intelligent man who creates a brilliant career, yet comprehends that power is a bauble. As easily as a light finger on a chin pivots a head, passion turns him away from his past and present; he abandons them in a simple gesture towards happiness when he hears his love’s preemptive Yooooo Hoooo. This is Minnie’s first entrance– how beautiful she is, with her eyelashes and stylish shoes. She shakes out her truck garden like a blanket; fertility. Now we see that Minnie is the root of Mickey’s Georgics; and for Minnie speech is about rivers? Everything comes alive for them– communication sails forth– the world is at hand when Minnie Yooooo Hooooos in wild rapport.
*
Feel better? I lie back on my bed and let my breath out. There is not so much sensation as you might think, a subtle emphasis marks the borders of my body– hands, feet, crotch and asshole more emphatic, more receptors, more expectation. I try to picture my dead self hosting the irrepressible life of worms and maggots but my own life returns as a shadow that only makes me more aware of feelings in inner mouth and tongue, my face pushing out, itchy skin above ribs, nipples like two pots gently stirred. Small pains and irritations begin to assert themselves, dull eyestrain and a throbbing above my right eye, itchy scalp. My right ball aches a bit. Lips and toes slightly prickly as if asleep. Soles of feet tingle and I hear/feel intestinal sounds like people moving around a house avoiding each other. I sort out the fretful noises– bird, heater, parents, electrical– before dismissing each as having nothing to do with me. I also feel/hear my pulse, my heart through my body as it continuously gulps mouthfuls of blood like a pious cannibal. Finally the high woodwind of empty room air arches between my ears. I wear hearing on the sides of my head. Does air have anything to do with me? Inhale. My first breath has the heavy lift of an airplane taking off. I try to locate some joy there but instead it is sluggish and unwilling– my breath does not satisfy me. Could that be true? I find that if I contract my neck muscles I can follow a stream of breath past my face and throat into my lungs where it releases a sparkle of pleasure. Can that be true? The pleasure is akin to the tension of being drunk, the body reaching toward further intoxication, but the fealing is localized and after all, pretty faint. Still, there would be an accumulation. I let out my breath again and the pleasure remains, a tension in the form of a deep hum that takes place at the same level as my breathing only next to it.
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*
p.s. Hey. ** liquoredgoat, Hi, man. Cool. Wow about your friend being married to Gomez Peña. I’ll see what I find about La Pocha Nostra. I haven’t seen his work in decades. Thanks a lot. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, sir. He was also quite a fantastic cinema maker himself. ** Sypha, As a fellow list maker and juggler, I naturally encourage you. I have never read W.H. Pugmire’s fiction, which is something I plan to correct, but I knew him from zines he edited and made, especially the great Punk Lust. A sad loss. ** Count Reeshard, Hi, Count! A rare and wonderful pleasure to see you! Ah, you studied with him at Buffalo. How fantastic. My friend Brandon Stosuy did as well. I really love his films. A gallery here did a mini-retrospective of his films maybe year before he died, and that was a total revelation. What an extremely interesting and so welcome remembrance of him that you gifted to us. Thank you so much! It’s always a boon to get to see your words. ** KeatonsPussy, Sum 41, ha ha. That singer guy is a wreck now. He looks like a cross between a munchkin and Albert Einstein. Definitely a fellow work hard believer, although it’s not so much belief as a compulsion or something. Did you tell him? I need a ton of caffeine. I just got into Gunpowder Green Tea. Man, that stuff works! I need to go out in Paris at night more. ** schlix, Hi, Uli! Wow, great to see you. Yeah, I really want to see that Conrad doc. I need to find it. Very belated regrets for not managing to hook up with you on Zac’s and my theme park road trip. It ended up being done in a rather chaotic, disorganised way that made planning ahead difficult. But we did get to Tripsdrill, which we totally loved. And Phantasialand, which has shot into the upper echelons of my very favorite theme parks. I hope you’re doing well. What’s up? ** Steve, Hi. What happened to your last name? Thanks a lot! Lucky you to have seen that gig. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Thanks, man. I think the cinema where PGL is playing is associated with and/or near/part of the University of Glasgow? I’m not sure. Yeah, I agree about Brexit as of yesterday, but, at the same time, I’m feeling increasing dread that May’s Brexit plan is going to pass. I hope not, but … urgh. ** Kyler. Hi. Yeah, gotcha re: ‘Zazie’ the movie. The novel’s great though. Ace about the reading. Have somebody make at least an iPhone movie. Definitely best to be as chill as possible around book releases. There’s so much that’s out of your own control, and it’s easy to lose track of that. The book will live long and prosper, I am totally sure. I should have the NYC/Brooklyn PGL dates very soon. Thanks! ** Okay. I thought I would turn the blog’s spotlight on a favorite novel by a favorite writer and fellow New Narrative scribe aka Mr. Robert Gluck. Please have at it. See you tomorrow.
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