5 books I read recently & loved: Eugene Lim Search History, Nate Lippens My Dead Book, Ted Dodson An Orange, Fleur Jaeggy The Water Statues, Dodie Bellamy Bee Reaved

‘Search History by Eugene Lim charts the swerves that persist across our systems and ideologies. This novel, like Dear Cyborgs, addresses questions around living and thinking in relation to one another, mediated through the internet. And one of the practical results of these questions is a cascade of framing devices. There is a cyborg named César Aira. There is an AI dog that may or may not be a reincarnated friend. There are workers in a Chinese factory, an adjunct professor in the States, and conversations with a dog through an elaborate speaker system. Luckily, the effect of these shifting perspectives focuses less on voice than on being multi-vocal, and creating a sense of polyphony. By the end of the novel, any narrative corresponding to one singular voice is subsumed within a general thread of conversation that’s carried along through each section. …

‘For Lim, conversation with an urge to communicate is the wrinkle that persists through increasingly stratified systems of organization and communication. He finds moments of lyricism that say everything in the world without saying anything in particular. A father and son drink Johnny Walker and eat fried chicken silently on a botched American Road Trip to Joshua Tree. A man disassembles the American Song Book on a found piano on a busy New York City street. Perhaps most affectingly, Lim captures moments of sensation reclaimed within a Joe Brainard “I Remember” interlude in homage to his mother.

‘He writes, “I remember in my childhood my mother being slightly scared of gloves because she associated them with tales she was told as a girl of North Korean agents sent to strangle children in their sleep.”

‘Search History is a living, breathing novel. Its fascinations and enthusiasms are important yet ambivalent. Lim references reaching the age of Dante, and Tarkovsky in the period of Mirror. And it’s a comparison that applies to this work. It’s mature, without being self-serious or fatalistic. An Ode to Joy in Autotune.’ — Joseph Houlihan

 

Eugene Lim Site
@lim_eugene
Eugene Lim @ goodreads
Ten Questions for Eugene Lim
Buy ‘Search History’

 

Eugene Lim Search History
Coffeehouse Press

‘Search History oscillates between a wild cyberdog chase and lunch-date monologues as Eugene Lim deconstructs grieving and storytelling with uncanny juxtapositions and subversive satire.

‘Frank Exit is dead—or is he? While eavesdropping on two women discussing a dog-sitting gig over lunch, a bereft friend comes to a shocking realization: Frank has been reincarnated as a dog! This epiphany launches a series of adventures—interlaced with digressions about AI-generated fiction, virtual reality, Asian American identity in the arts, and lost parents—as an unlikely cast of accomplices and enemies pursues the mysterious canine. In elliptical, propulsive prose, Search History plumbs the depths of personal and collective consciousness, questioning what we consume, how we grieve, and the stories we tell ourselves.’ — Coffee House

Excerpt

It was no longer possible to understand being poor or defeated. Which meant she could no longer imagine it. This worried her because if she ever were to become defeated or poor, she would then feel like a fool – and this might somehow be more painful than the destitution. More importantly, this realization worried her because it meant she no longer felt human.

The dysthymic artificial intelligence scientist took a book of poetry off the shelf and sat on her couch.

 

What was she ushering in and what was a grand program for which she was simply helpless agent? Senseless to think about, she thought, as she sipped her diet beer with ice.

She had purposefully cultivated a taste for this drink after reading that a billionaire, who could obviously consume whatever he desired, had made it his beverage of choice. Typical of her sense of humor was the irony of the blandly effervescent flavor but also the discipline to carry out the conceptual joke to its regular daily end.

She was not on the team employed by the galactic corporation that had created a machine that had taught itself to play an ancient, spatial, seemingly impossibly open game well enough to repeatedly and decisively defeat the world’s human champions.

She was merely an associate professor in a community college, but such were the economic interest and forecasting that even her low-rung campus needed to offer courses in the field.

Twenty-five years ago, she had wanted to be a poet. Her parents had told her to be sensible, and so she’d majored in computer science at Stanford. Her classmates had gone on to form the titanic corporations that had transformed – and continue to transform – everyone’s lives, while she had listlessly spun slowly down the academic helix, plagued by both suicidal ideation and alcoholism. Her parents were now dead, and she was teaching spastic undergrads at St Francis College of Southern New Jersey.

That’s the end of that story. These paragraphs were written by a robot named César Aira.

 

The robot named César Aira was going through a relatively amicable divorce with his wife, a famous documentary filmmaker and part-time reiki healer named Onoto Watanna. One of Onoto’s clients was a gallery owner, and this gallerist had invited Onoto to an opening.

César was still living with Onoto and their two kids but now slept on the couch. It was amicable enough a divorce that they would still go out together, and Onoto invited César to the opening. The art was atrocious and consisted of white people in yellowface reading from the text of the Chinese Exclusion Act and transcriptions of ICE raid recordings. Autotune was used to have these voices sing to the melody of ‘This Land Is Your Land.’ The art was said to be by a secret collective named ‘McArthur Grant,’ but everyone knew it was the product of a famous older white artist. He was at the center of the party with his new, younger Chinese American girlfriend.

Proof that the art indeed was terrible, at least to Onoto, became evident by how much everyone at the party professed the opposite. Onoto was introduced briefly to the artist, a man of leathered complexion and gleaming white hair. He had what might have been called rugged good looks, and Onoto found him both easy to look at and reptilian. Much later she would become friends with his then girlfriend, a woman who had since broken up with him and had admitted the dalliance was pure opportunism on her part to see if she could become famous by association. It had only partly worked because she had caused a gossipy stir when, in an interview, she claimed that the yellowface performance had been her idea to see how racist a piece the art world would accept. She said the idea had been fascinatingly easy to plant in the older artist’s mind as one of his own. Of course, the older artist denied this as well as the racism; instead he claimed it was a transgressive gesture misunderstood by the self-elected tone police. Onoto was skeptical about the woman’s motivations, but she enjoyed her boldness.

Meanwhile, back at the party,

 

Meanwhile, back at the party, César the robot is going outside to have a cigarette. He finds himself standing next to a morose-looking man who has just walked outside to do the same. The man introduces himself as Kenny Golddigger, and César, in an uncharacteristic moment of dissembling, says his own name is Vanity Place. The two discuss the show, which both hated and thought preposterous, in the most glowing terms.

Kenny then says to the robot named César who had introduced himself as Vanity, ‘I’m outraged.’

Vanity takes a puff of his cigarette and says, ‘Oh yeah?’

Kenny says, ‘I’ve just found out that the daughter of a billionaire oil industrialist has started a press to publish poetry. The billionaire oil industrialist has financed wars, white supremacists, and climate change denial. The daughter is using writers of color and excellent poetry to whitewash blood money.’

‘Better than equestrian sports,’ Vanity says.

‘It’s an abomination,’ says Kenny.

‘Cash rules everything around me.’

‘It’s disgusting.’

‘Laughlin’s fortune came from a union-busting steel company.’

‘What?’

‘It’s the Wu coming through.’

‘What?’

‘I’ve a solution.’

‘Yeah? What.’

‘Write an open letter saying that in order to move the publishing enterprise’s function from whitewashing blood money closer to reparations, the press should exclusively publish climate-crisis fiction by indigenous writers.’

Kenny Golddigger laughs at this, stubs out his cigarette, and then walks back inside the party. He seems to dismiss Vanity’s suggestion. However, the idea so grows in his mind that the following week he posts the proposal on his personal website. It generates a huge spike in traffic. A month after this, Kenny is murdered in what appears to be an unrelated car accident.

‘All is,’ Vanity says, ‘vanity.’

Extras

Search History: Eugene Lim & Gina Apostol

Eugene Lim presents “Search History,” with Jonathan Lethem

 

 

_________________

‘A story I read once: Peggy Lee onstage in Las Vegas, pilled into oblivion. Her strand of pearls breaks and they scatter. She crouches down, crawls, picking pearls up one by one. An anguished and angry voice from the audience: “You were the American dream!” Her band plays on and on. Finally, she stands and steps to the microphone, enters back into the song, smooth, unruffled. Her hand, a fist of stray pearls.

⚬⚬⚬

‘A lot of my problems stem from living my life according to a declaration made by Truman Capote: “I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m a homosexual. I’m a genius.” Well, three out of four isn’t bad.
—-‘I have none of the signposts that make a life. I have no family, no children, no calling, no formal education, no accomplishments, no real career. What I do have: a former drug addiction, a history of depression and breakdown and suicidal ideation, various disgraces, and an ability to lie in bed for long stretches of time not sleeping and not waking, not daydreaming and not even really thinking.

⚬⚬⚬

‘I have many pens with pharmaceutical companies’ names on them. That can’t be a good sign. What was the medication I took last year to help with anxiety and sleeplessness? Its side effects included cloudy thinking and memory loss. Was that last year?

⚬⚬⚬

‘Life right now feels like lost film, like the placards in old movies: scene missing. But I am living the lost film.

⚬⚬⚬

‘Most days I am a mix of Rip Van Winkle, Jack the Ripper, and Rip Taylor: comatose, murderous, and frivolous.

---

‘Sometimes the chase is so convoluted, strange, errant, and ongoing, there is no way to cut to it.’ — Nate Lippens

 

@NateLippens
‘What I Can’t Carry, Bury’
‘The Universe Says No’
‘HELP IS COMING’
Buy ‘My Dead Book’

 

Nate Lippens My Dead Book
Publication Studio

‘What a blistering book—with My Dead Book, Nate Lippens has created something truly fucking great. It’s as if the storied stars of Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ overshot Manhattan and wound up in Wisconsin, broke and blue with cold and depressed beyond belief by the thought that this nowhere is now home. It’s a bitter pill, but I love bitterness, and who doesn’t love pills?’ — Derek McCormack

Excerpt

My dead friends are back. I lie in bed at night and see them.

***

It was the summer Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested and his horrific murders were splashed acrossthe newspapers. Another Wisconsin serial killer.
—-Keenan and I lived in the upstairs flat of a house on Farwell by the school. Kids on recess screamed through our morning haze. Keenan worked a few hotels downtown and I stuck to porn arcades and parking lots. He only had one rule: no heroin. Booze and coke were fine. They were for partiers and heroin was for losers. I pretended I was a partier.
—-Reporters from New York showed up, smug and awful, terrible actors pretending concern and wanting to talk with queers after the Dahmer story broke. Twice I picked up tricks carrying tape recorders. No thanks. I make my money with my mouth but not that way. It got where I could spot their shoes and the way they were pushy asking my name.
—-Keenan and I were pallbearers for the funeral of an acquaintance because AIDS had already killed most of his friends. We borrowed absurd little suits from a regular trick. Walking in the church was like stepping into someone’s rape fantasy with no safe word. We played along, bowing our heads and listening as people spoke gibberish. After the last solemn amen, we hauled the casket to the hearse, pretended to walk to our nonexistent car for the drive to the cemetery, and bussed home where a fifth awaited.
—-I see Keenan swagger down the street in his half-distracted way, checking himself out in store windows. Me, trailing, unhindered by beauty, head high, pants tight, ass out, making the best of the available light. A Jesus freak accosts us, and we laugh. We aren’t damned because we don’t believe in hokey shit like sin and God.
—-Keenan gone, what, twenty plus years?

***

For a while, Marshall was kept by a man who paid his rent and sent him money like a sponsor child. Then he had an open relationship they ran like a business: a right of first refusal.
—-Marshall followed Oscar Wilde’s dictum that moderation is a fatal thing, and nothing succeeds like excess. He didn’t succeed but he did exceed. He loved movies starring actors and actresses in their final roles. “She was dying of cancer during filming,” he’d say, sidelong, eyes on the screen. He loved disowning people, ideas, accomplishments—
calling time spent on them squandered. “The Lost Years,” he said of his time in Los Angeles. I swiped as much of his attitude as I could convincingly wield.
—-I think of Marshall’s thin fingers on the bedspread. Light moves over them as the tree branches outside sway in the wind. Circles of yellowish illumination zip back and forth, and he moves his fingers in a counter-rhythm to the light. A twitchy gesture as if the sun tickles.

***

Rudy texted that something had happened to Shane. No more information. I found the article immediately online. Shane’s body had been recovered from the shore by a bridge. Without saying it outright, it was clear: He had killed himself.
—-I sat on the steps and cried.
—-Shane and I had been back in contact, but we were not in touch. Whenever I’d heard from him over the last several years, he was texting some version of “I don’t want to be here” from parties, work, restaurants, nightclubs, gallery openings, and holidays. I agreed with him. Most of those sounded horrible. His texts were funny, but I knew he was serious. Accumulated, they showed a man who never wanted to be anywhere, who was looking to leave, then he did.
—-To have survived, to have started over again and again, then crowning fifty to have killed himself, was cruel. I want to say I can’t understand. I want to say it’s senseless, but I do understand and sometimes it makes more sense than not.
—-I looked up the weather for the day Shane died. Sunny. Seventy-three degrees. Side-step the No Pedestrians sign, walk out onto the bridge, the water below. White sun. Silence. Who knows if he steeled himself for the fall, or if it was as natural as the night we slipped out an apartment window onto a rickety fire escape and jumped from the second floor to the ground, landing in the alley imperfectly but raising our arms as triumphant teen Olympic whores? 9.5, we shouted and laughed.
—-Shane and I were out late. We might have stayed out later and made more money, but the high was wearing off and my last guy had been rough. We cut through an alley and found a man lying on the ground on his side, back to us. Drunk or asleep I wasn’t sure. Shane said we should piss on him. I saw the keys in the man’s hand. He was in a suit. A nice one. I walked over. Shane lit a cigarette. I nudged the suit with my foot.

Extras

 

 

_________________

THE BELIEVER: I’m looking at An Orange right now! The book has been such a welcome object in my house, and obviously I have thoughts about what’s inside too, but as an art-object it’s been so beautiful and sunny and it’s raining outside right now as we chat so I’m just staring at the color…

In terms of how the book and the poems “measure themselves,” I had a sense, while I was reading, of bibliography-as-poetry that feels related—naming one’s assemblage.

Each poem feels so aware of who it’s coming from, who it’s to, who it’s for. I don’t know if this resonates with you, but this feels to me like a kind of measuring, too. The book is so full of address, of poems as missives to someone. Does that hit with you at all?

TED DODSON: Yes, absolutely. It actually really does. There is an epistolary undertone to the book. I enjoy writing with a shared familiarity between myself and whomever might be reading my poems. And this is a byproduct of how I might begin a poem, which is sometimes started as more of a direct address to friends or someone significant to me that, as the poem goes along, I revise away from. The method of writing, of producing the poem, is not often what ends up being the impetus behind the finished poem, but there are inheritances of that methodology. That familiarity is embedded even if the address becomes a bit more indefinite.

This is also to say, I’m conscious of that “you,” insofar as that I know that “you” is not everybody. I’m not looking to impress my experiences on anyone else or make my experiences seem universal because I know the poems, as you said, have a strong awareness of themselves and awareness of the body of the poem. They’re understanding of their own physicality. And—this might be what you’re sensing—the address is part of the poem expressing a sculptural emphasis. What the poem exemplifies in itself, in this case a physicality, a sense of objecthood within the world of the book, it extends to the reader as well (I think of myself, in this way, as a reader of my own poems). It’s not a relatability that I’m writing toward, but a space of understanding more than anything else.

The reading experiences that I’ve treasured the most in my life are not the escapist ones where you are taken away from where you are in the moment. The reading I treasure most is where you are made aware of your surroundings so much more, like a book activates the world around you and becomes so much more vibrant. It’s not like a film where you can become so absorbed in that atmosphere that you forget where you are. Like, the falling away of the theater is part of the cinema experience. The books that I want to write are ones that try to impart a sensitivity for the person who is reading it and to extend that by example.

 

Ted Dodson Site
@tedodson
An Interview with Ted Dodson
Ted Dodson on Dhalgren, The Twits, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Buy ‘An Orange’

 

Ted Dodson An Orange
Pioneer Works/Wonder

‘“It would be too easy to say love vanished from the earth…” begins Ted Dodson’s An Orange, his thoughtful, experiential second collection of poems. It’s a provocation to which An Orange wholeheartedly responds. Dodson’s work reroutes essay, narrative, and confessionalism, detouring from criticism into bisexual desire and navigating modernity as fluently as it imagines speculative destinations for language. From the graceful realism of the opening travelogues to its final long poem, “The Language the Sky Speaks,” An Orange guides memory and affect into cosmopolitan forms: disalienating, expansive, and tonic.’ — Pioneer Works/Wonder

Excerpt

Peel an orange

and it’s more orange.

Blue is the language

the sky speaks.

The human spirit is quiet and

defeated in strokes both slight and broad, but

opposition always finds a surface

to lay its instruments on.

A resigned transition of power

cued in time with dinner.

Later, there’s a moment

to enjoy the benefits of our situation,

but who am I really talking about?

A gasp of brightness with the realization

there had been someone there all along

dragging their feet and kicking up more dust.

Synonyms undress as opposites

then a few letters are peeled back

and there’s just more language underneath.

An element is seen as fruitful.

Light reforms to sparks

no longer thrumming with nature’s routine

but data-driven and wanting the glimmer

of an answer instead. So, we took on more work

than we expected. The hours were billable

though embarrassing when I look back at it.

I’m month to month wondering if

I’ll soon burn out. This group text I’m on

wakes me before sunrise. Mere curiosity

topples whole empires of thought,

helpless in the waves of consciousness

heaped upon myself. I’ve come to

find, however, under the morning

is only more morning. Funny

how important a subject becomes

when it’s the one possible outcome

pulled out of context. Like, there’s an ethics

of leaving well enough alone as there is

an ethics of breaching a limit

though it is possible

to overextend one’s comprehension

through sheer force of enthusiasm

and miss the point entirely

unable to apprehend the thing itself

until it’s out of reach, sent

skyward with the rest of our words

for the common generosity uncovered

before the morning takes its first breath

to say criticism has a natural antipathy

with biography as if a life of the mind were

a post of unassailable neutrality. It didn’t

say that. It said nothing. Earlier, it was only morning

then. It would go on to say nothing

and even that was only morning, so it said,

“Peel an orange, and it’s the language the sky speaks.”

[Upstate, 2/5/19]

Extras

Book Launch: Ted Dodson’s An Orange

Speculative Destinations with the Poet Ted Dodson

 

 

_________________

‘In Gilles Deleuze’s essay “1874: Three Novellas, or ‘What Happened?’” he describes the novella as a form that “has little to do with a memory of the past or an act of reflection; quite to the contrary, it plays upon a fundamental forgetting. It evolves in the element of ‘what happened’ because it places us in a relation with something unknowable and imperceptible.”

‘Much is unknowable in Fleur Jaeggy’s 1980 novella The Water Statues, recently translated from Italian by Gini Alhadeff and published by New Directions. Much is overgrown, drowned, sold, lost or forgotten. The Water Statues dwells in a world of broken familial relationships and passersby. Individuals come into contact with one another through happenstance and then remain associated, held together over years like weak but persistent magnets. Everyone is longing simultaneously for solitude and for each other. Jaeggy pursues the dimly lit hallways of these interpersonal dramas with a clean and deadly devotion; domestic dynamics, grieving the loss of loved ones, and the furtive behaviors of time are but a few of the novella’s many obsessions.

‘My sensation of being in this book was akin to floating in deep, dark water and occasionally brushing up against other smooth forms; I often overheard fragments of a private conversation or turned to see a familiar face half submerged in liquid. I rarely breached the surface but remained buoyant, never wanting for air. Everything is at once pleasurable and haunting. …

‘So, what happens in The Water Statues? What comes to mind are these words in Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina: “A single tear forms, just in the corner of one eye, but it doesn’t roll down my cheek; it merely crystallizes in the cold air, it grows and grows into a second giant globe that doesn’t want to orbit with the world—it breaks off from the planet and plunges into infinity.”’ — Claire Crews

 

Fleur Jaeggy Thinks Nothing of Herself
Fleur Jaeggy’s Mourning Exercise
Excerpt: THE WATER STATUES
Wintry Moods
Buy ‘The Water Statues’

 

Fleur Jaeggy The Water Statues
New Directions

‘Even among Fleur Jaeggy’s singular and intricate works, The Water Statues is a shiningly peculiar book. Concerned with wealth’s loneliness and odd emotional poverty, this early novel is in part structured as a play: the dramatis personae include the various relatives, friends, and servants of a man named Beeklam, a wealthy recluse who keeps statues in his villa’s flooded basement, where memories shiver in uncertain light and the waters run off to the sea.

‘Dedicated to Ingeborg Bachmann and fleshed out with Jaeggy’s austere yet voluptuous style, The Water Statues—with its band of deracinated, loosely related souls (milling about as often in the distant past as in the mansion’s garden full of intoxicated snails)—delivers like a slap an indelible picture of the swampiness of family life.’ — New Directions

Excerpt

I was thinking I should get up from the bench and leave that boy. I had, for the past quarter of an hour, been subjected, and not for the first time — the previous one had lasted almost fifty years — to some interruptions. The boy’s smile hadn’t yet left his face, and another light shone on it now, who knows why the face had already changed. That sequence of expressions took on an aggressive tinge: I had become too accustomed to all that is durable, absent; to the visual traits of marble and stone figures; and the life, or incarnation of life, in the past quarter of an hour, seemed to commemorate that interval, the empty space that hangs capriciously, like a rope endowed with reason, between two, not altogether convinced, people.

The boy gazed into the distance, more so than necessary, to where the boats floated, beneath a shadow.

I took advantage of his distraction to speak to him softly, so that he could barely hear me: “You know,” I said, “my friend will come to get me soon, his name is Victor, and he likes frogs. He was surprised that one could buy such beautiful creatures, beings that bend their head back as we do, displaying the underside of their chin, and the throat; so vulnerable, almost a first fruit of decomposition. With Victor I believe I experience something of the sentiments of owning a slave (I am referring, as you well know, to that age-old, pre-Alexandrian, feeling). That man belongs to me: we play together, I am happy to be in his company, though he’s sometimes in the habit of making shrewd remarks. And I’m inclined to believe that one of the most profound relationships possible lies hidden here: I am his slave as he is mine. You might agree with me that in helping another, a friend, there is a vague homicidal passion that’s hard to corral into a less murderous sentiment, but I am a little tired today after yesterday’s celebrations. (Victor had dared to recall the distant day of our first encounter — such outpourings are always rather exhausting.) Communal life ends up draining the innocence that people who live alone possess. Take you: one can see right away that you live by yourself, that you have no parents; an orphan, I thought, always possesses what we might call a theological ability to live alone, an infallible instinct for classifying people as boring. That, you must know, is something I noticed about you right away. You saw in me a boring person, and I saw that you would rather — and I honestly can’t blame you — look at all the insignificant things moving around you, here at the harbor: the cranes, the bruisers bearing crates, the officers’ uniforms . . . as though your solitude, and the fact of being an orphan, forced you, against your will perhaps, to formulate particularly accurate observations.”

The pleasure of still finding himself next to the boy was gone and he felt, even as he spoke, as if that pleasure had been a small trace, left years earlier, of himself. When he saw the boy finally walk away, that was something to be recalled with pleasure, and as a dedicated spectator he watched the sailors go by, slow and bilious.

VICTOR: We walked slowly home, bid farewell to the harbor, to the spring that was ending, to the gullets of the wooden seagulls on the railings, to the aircraft carrier whose metallic effulgence attracted more than one eye.

Next to the canal Beeklam stopped contemplating the trash disturbing the surface of the water and the minuscule ash-colored fish: those brief walks seemed to him his last, and the list of final things seemed brighter to him, more distinct, like something sinking to the bottom.

It started to rain, and the rain never stopped in the days that followed. Beeklam walked skirting the walls, everything was in motion, the reflections of trees trembled on the canals; only a Buddha he caught a glimpse of through a window sat still through that tempest of the elements.

He recognized it, he had given that Buddha to X even before he’d gone to live in the basements. Some faces, in a crowd of child flaneurs, can be unsettling, and they remain suspended there a long time. Then little by little they fade, as though erased by a limp flannel hand. X had been an athlete and an eccentric before putting on weight. He’d grown fat around the age of fifteen, but they’d been done with one another just in time.

He walked on, saw more decorated rooms, people sitting reading the newspaper; the windows of houses proved to him how very quiet the lives of others could be, how pleasant it is to be in an armchair and to hear the patter of rain on glass panes. He was once again persuaded that his life was passing, had passed, and this made him rejoice while admiring the efforts of his fellow creatures, of the Dutch population with their firmness regarding the radiant pinnacles of domestic comfort — such home-sweet-home settings made his heart sink, so much happiness he was happier living without.

Extras

Fleur Jaeggy is great

Fleur Jaeggy : Les années bienheureuses du châtiment

 

 

________________

Andrew Durbin: Your new collection of essays, Bee Reaved, is divided into two sections – ‘Here’ and ‘Where’ – that mark the passing of your husband and collaborator of more than 30 years, the poet Kevin Killian. Can you speak a little about how this book came together?

Dodie Bellamy: Semiotexte(e) had agreed to publish a new collection of my essays before Kevin died. Kevin suggested I call the collection The Feraltern – a mashing together of ‘feral’ and ‘altern’. I came up with the term in an essay I wrote in 2013 about the poet Diane di Prima. One of the big problems with that was, as much as the title suits my writing practice, the essay on Di Prima isn’t that good, and I was dreading rewriting it to bring it up to standard.

Before Kevin died in 2019, I’d agreed to write a piece of ‘experimental fiction’ for an exhibition catalogue to accompany Christina Ramberg’s show, ‘The Making of Husbands’, at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. It seemed foolhardy, a month or two into my widowhood, to write anything at all, but the project was compelling, so I wrote about my grief in the third person via a character I named Bee Reaved, as seen through the lens of Ramberg’s art. From my experience, grief is a form of insanity, and I was totally nuts, an alien creature with only one foot on the ground. The name was inspired by a visit I made to Los Angeles right after Kevin died. I stayed with the artist and writer Matias Viegener, and all weekend Matias kept calling me ‘the beREAVED’. The silliness of that was exactly what I needed to jolt me into laughter.

AD: How did you develop Bee Reaved’s voice?

DB: There are three pieces in which Bee Reaved is the protagonist, written over the course of a year, and I was hoping that, as I returned to her over time, the writing would track the progression of my mourning. The original ‘Bee Reaved’ is so alienated that she can’t even name her dead husband. She refers to him simply as ‘the other one’. In the second piece, ‘Plague Widow’, we’re still in the third person, but Kevin is referred to by name. Bee Reaved is thriving because her tenderness has been suppressed. The piece explores the rage and violence of making do. And, finally, ‘Chase Scene’ is a 60-page intimate letter addressed to Kevin. The first person and tenderness return, but it’s devastating. Writing that piece, which took five months, nearly destroyed me.

AD: Did you return to Kevin’s own writing while you were working on Bee Reaved? As I experienced the book (admittedly, in a teary emotional trance), I kept hearing him whispering in your prose.

DB: I trawled through his writing folder on the computer, which contains poems and his biography of Jack Spicer, Poet Be Like God (1998) – among many other things. His writing was the one place where I could allow myself to be close to him. I kept returning to the cats series in Action Kylie (2008) and to the poem ‘Who’, which I saw him read many times in that campy, show-stopping way he had, and which never ceased to awe me. Much of his genius came from his willingness to make a fool out of himself, to assume a sort of visionary monstrousness. There’s so much about death in the poems, including imagining his own death, it was like he was speaking to me from the beyond.

 

Dodie Bellamy Site
HERE PLUS WHERE IS THERE?
Podcast: Dodie Bellamy’s “Bee Reaved” and Mia Hansen-Love’s “Bergman Island”
‘On Finding the Book That Returns You to Your Body’
Buy ‘Bee Reaved’

 

Dodie Bellamy Bee Reaved
Semiotext(e)

So. Much. Information. When does one expand? Cut back? Stop researching? When is enough enough? Like Colette’s aging courtesan Lea in the Chéri books, I straddle two centuries that are drifting further and further apart.—Dodie Bellamy, “Hoarding as Ecriture”

‘This new collection of essays, selected by Dodie Bellamy after the death of Kevin Killian, her companion and husband of thirty-three years, circles around loss and abandonment large and small. Bellamy’s highly focused selection comprises pieces written over three decades, in which the themes consistent within her work emerge with new force and clarity: disenfranchisement, vulgarity, American working class life, aesthetic values, profound embarrassment. Bellamy writes with shocking, and often hilarious, candor about the experience of turning her literary archive over to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale and about being targeted by an enraged online anti-capitalist stalker. Just as she did in her previous essay collection, When the Sick Rule the World, Bellamy examines aspects of contemporary life with deep intelligence, intimacy, ambivalence, and calm.’ –Semiotext(e)

Excerpt

from Chase Scene

At Market I turn right and head towards Castro. A gym has moved its machines onto the sidewalk. Friday afternoon, less than a week into our second lockdown. There is only one guy on the gym part of the sidewalk. He’s lying on his back, knees in the air – and he’s balancing a tiny barbell on his groin as he thrusts his hips in the air then back down to the ground, up and down up and down and suddenly I’m missing you. I’m sure you’d have an opinion about what was going on here, you who wrote about sex kinks I’d never hear of, rosary beads up the asshole, pull them out slowly, one by one. What do you think? Is the guy getting off on this bar bell groin thing? Or did his trainer put him up to it? Is he pumping up his fucking muscles? Thrust up, thrust down, I wonder how long he’ll keep going – it’s frustrating that I can’t just stand and gape, that I have to keep on walking like I have somewhere to go. I see so few 3D humans these days – it’s frustrating I can’t pause him, can’t rewind, can’t even cheer him on. Go you superfucker, go! I’m reminded of a story about a toddler who had been raised playing on an iPad, and so the child was looking at an image in a print magazine, and they placed the tips of their thumb and pointer finger on the picture and spread them wide, then brought them back together and spread them across the picture again, looking confused, until the adults in this story realized the child was trying to zoom the magazine image, that they didn’t understand that all of life couldn’t be zoomed. After a year in isolation, I get it. The rules of the material world seem increasingly tentative. The few times a week I leave the apartment and enter the material world, I seem to glide through it, feet barely touching the ground, head swiveling from side to side. There’s little interacting. I’m like a ghost. I’m like you. Do you have any special powers? Can you see into peoples’ hearts, zap across dimensions? Do you silently flap through the night, your bright wings reflecting the moon, stunning the creatures who scuttle in the forest below?

When I return home my heart opens. This happens frequently, erratically. Imagine a time-lapse film of a bud twirling open into full bloom. My open heart feels floppy; gladly would it brush against anything, anybody. When I told Peter Gizzi that grieving had been good for his writing, he said it gave him a soul.

Why did you have to go? It’s intolerable you left and with such a brutal end. Most lung cancer victims – I read somewhere – die not of lung cancer but of infections or reactions to chemo. I was eager to take on your dying, to totally devote myself to your sickness. It’s as if this hidden cave in my psyche opened and out flew a swarm of bats wearing little nurse’s caps. No decision was involved; my drive to care for you was instinctual as those Monarch butterflies we saw that one Thanksgiving day in Santa Cruz, that traveled vast distances to roost in those specific trees, their branches all aflutter, the limbs of an Ovidian god-beast. My urge to care repelled you, who were all about extracting the last dregs from life, who were ravenous to live and live and live, hobbling and racing around with the cane Kaiser gave you because of all the blood thinners – if you fell down it would have been disastrous – you didn’t give a fuck about my research into chemo side effects. The bag of quick dissolving mints I bought that are supposed to help with nausea, you wouldn’t touch them. When we first met, your stories/memoirs about your self-destructive youth terrified me, though I loved the writing. Your past felt surreal, like nobody was behind the wheel and you were careening. Everybody who knew you when you were young agrees – and you affirmed this yourself, repeatedly – that I saved your life, that you would have been dead long ago without me.

The chase scene has begun. You sit upright on the edge of the couch, your attention absolutely fixed on the TV. None of that messy here and there/in and out/past and present. You are right here right now, watching with the focused precision of a laser sight on a Smith & Wesson, registering waves of awe, terror, delight. Your face fragments and coalesces like a claymation character, a series of ever moving parts that twitch and bulge, revealing emotion. Grunts, gasps, laughter, inrush and outrush of excited breathing. As the world rushes in through your eyes and ears, our living room becomes the cab of the car. You’re buckled in, careening into a dangerous future.

Your hospital room was so packed with visitors I had to leave. Your friends were possessive – and at the end when I put my foot down – no, this is about family now – it was a battle. Some people couldn’t conceive there could be a private Kevin space they couldn’t access, so fully you seemed to have given yourself to them. You would have been a better widow than I. You’d suffered bravely and sentimentally – far and wide – your widowhood would inspire people, bring them together – you would convince even those who hated me in life that in death I was a saint. And then the masses, ravenous for the kindness and generosity you perfected over the thirty-three years I was married to you – from quirky, unrelatable drunk to charismatic daddy you arose, capable of melting the hardest of hearts – could absorb you.

You knew to revere the dead. You wrote that finding where [the poet Jack] Spicer was buried satisfied ‘a huge longing in my own heart because, as I hope you have seen, for a man like me there’s no closure unless I go to the grave and fall down on it, as I did to John Ford’s grave in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, and embrace spectral memory as a living thing in my arms.’ On the bathroom wall hangs the snapshot you took of Frank O’Hara’s grave that one time we were visiting your parents in Smithtown and took a trip to the Green River Cemetery in Springs. Grace to be born and live as variously as possible. Online I look at photos of O’Hara’s funeral, July 27, 1966. Allen Ginsberg on a dirt path, head cast down, arm around the shoulders of Kenneth Koch. Women in flats and low heels, one wearing an era-iconic paisley sheath. Handsome Bill Berkson in a suit. I read about the ‘violent eulogy, full of raw fury’ delivered by O’Hara’s sometimes lover Larry Rivers, in which he describes O’Hara’s destroyed body in graphic detail. Mourners groaned and yelled, ‘Stop! Stop!’ O’Hara’s mother gasped. The text of the eulogy is almost impossible to find. I googled and googled and googled and finally in a YouTube video artist Skylar Fein reads it. Here’s my notes: His skin was purple where it showed through the white gown – his body was a quarter larger than usual – sewing every few inches, some stitches straight, three or four inches long – some stitches semi-circular and longer – eyes receded into head, lids blahbxncdck – quick gasps of breath – whole body quivered – tube in nostrils – he looked like a shaped wound – leg bone broken, splintered, piercing the skin, every rib cracked – a third of his liver wiped out. Rivers: ‘What good can talking about it do? I don’t know.’ To my widow self this is poetry. The bereaved clings to all the tender details of dying. When you’ve seen the unseeable, there’s no easy return. Nothing else makes sense.

Extras

M as in Maladie: Dodie Bellamy reads from “When the Sick Rule the World”

Dodie Bellamy Reading at Small Press Traffic

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Oh, right, flash = on the spot, or can. But it was interesting? I’d be terrible at that. I need to dwell on stuff for a while before the pen hits paper. Thanks for the vibes re: my bad shit. They might be helping. Speaking of being helped, an auditory knight in shining armour! Everyone, Please emit a big yay to greet this announcement that the ‘new episode of Play Therapy is online here via Tak Tent Radio! Ben ‘Jack Your Body’ Robinson serves up Italo and Jamaican Dancehall with some jacking Dutch Acid on the side.’ If you’re not yet a PT addict, here’s your chance. Have a swell weekend, my friend. ** David, The great, excoriating Cheap Trick song ‘Taxman, Mr. Thief’ has been coming in very handy. I really liked Heaven 17 back in the day. Did they do ‘Crushed By the Wheels of Industry’? My awful situation may be being sorted, it’s hard to tell, but I think maybe hopefully soon. Thanks, bud. ** Dominik, Hi, DDDDDD!!!! Yeah, it may be being solved. Very long story shortish, The California State Tax Board suddenly took all the money out of my bank account and announced that they would remove any further money I put in there. It’s a total mistake because it was established with their acknowledgement that I’m not a California resident years ago and therefore don’t owe them any tax money. With a lot of effort, I tracked down the phone number of the guy in charge of my case. He leaves his voicemail on 24/7, so I left him many, increasingly desperate messages asking him to call me back. My accountant and my sister did the same. No response. Yesterday my accountant got me on a conference call and we left a very stern yet pleading message on his voicemail explaining yet again that it was a mistake, that my utilities are being cut off, that I have no money live on, etc. He finally called my accountant back while I was asleep last night and said he will look into it. Assuming that’s true, he’ll see that it is a mistake and will lift the levy on my account and hopefully return my money. It’s the weekend, so I have to get through it and hope by Monday the mistake will be rectified. So I’m hoping very much that happens and that nothing will get cut off this weekend, and I’m getting by on my tiny bit of remaining cash until then. So maybe, just maybe this nightmare will end in couple of days. That’s the scoop. Huge mess. Ugh. Hopefully your love of yesterday will have a delayed effect. Thank you. Love blasting this song at ear splitting volume continuously at the world, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Everyone, And today FaBlog presents a little ditty called Burn Baby Burn! ** Misanthrope, Ah, ha ha, I hadn’t thought about the ‘twink’ component. It could have been a very different post. Err, uh, I never get bothered when traveling, so it’ll probably be Rigby if you end up guilty by association. Good news about your compensating kidney. And the new doc, presumably. As soon I have any money, ‘French Dispatch’ is target #1. Enjoy the weekend. Campfires are nice. Cigarettes too *ducks* ** Steve Erickson, Hi. I explained my current situation in my comment to Dominick. I’m in a wait-and-see situation. No surprise in any way, shape, or form about the miserableness of the Lin-Manuel Miranda film. I did read something somewhere about how Andrew Garfield has the Best Actor award locked down, though?! ** Right. This weekend I present you with five more books I read recently, loved, and highly recommend to you if you’re looking for reading material. See you, I think/hope, on Monday.