5 books I read recently & loved: RE Katz And Then the Gray Heaven, Jace Brittain Sorcererer, Renee Gladman Plans for Sentences, John Waters Liarmouth, Lev Parker & Penny Metal A VOID 4: MAGAZINE OF MASS HYSTERIA

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‘Beautiful and tragic, RE Katz’s novel And Then the Gray Heaven embodies “the whole blessed void: a vast field of care” as it recounts the gradual process of laying the dead to rest.

‘Jules, a queer kid who “no one was watching to make sure … survived [their] childhood of humid horrors,” feels that it should have been them who died. But instead they lost B, a brilliant installation artist, revolutionary museum exhibit rehabilitator, and their person, to a steep ladder, a sharp fall, and the garage’s cement floor. Jules spirals out as they narrate, tracking the couple’s mutual descent and ascent in ravishing terms.

‘This near-perfect novel calls “bullshit on romance and beach condos and Florida itself … for people who lived [there] and got heat-stroke and sea lice and picked oranges for fifteen cents an hour” as Jules betrays how a great love and a geographic place can shape the bones of a person.

‘Not just another coming out story, the novel is infused with a lived-in queerness. It captures the dimensional nature of both nonbinary gender and queer sexuality, layering both into Jules’s and B’s relationship, their mutual history, and their found family in a way that’s inescapable, essential, and that captures all the safety that queerness offers and which “straight people don’t have a word for.”

‘Like Florida, novels about grief have “a reputation for being both uninhabitable and too overgrown with life,” but RE Katz’s beautiful novel And Then the Gray Heaven is eviscerating. It proves that “Downpour and decay are a part of life, and in fact, the very things that tell us we’re involved with the world and not just here.”’ — Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers

 

RE Katz Site
RE Katz @ Soundcloud
RE Katz @ Twitter
Critical color theory
Buy ‘And Then the Gray Heaven’

 

RE Katz And Then the Gray Heaven
Dzanc Books

‘When Jules’s partner B passes away suddenly, the harsh neon Florida stripmall swamp of their early years in the foster care system returns to haunt them. Jules is separated from B during the last days of their life in the hospital and then exiled from their family mourning, causing them to reach a breaking point that shimmers into a big idea. As final tribute, Jules takes the small remainder of B’s ashes with them on a cross-country romp to each significant place B worked during their strange and inspired life as a diorama artist. Jules’s burial adventures bring with them a pastiche of new friends, old chosen family, and a golden heap of B’s stories, daisy-chained together in Jules’s own grief fugue.’ — Dzanc Books

‘At once darkly hilarious and surprisingly heartbreaking, RE Katz’s debut novel defies genre expectations just as its protagonists defy the gendered, artistic and relationship constructs that surround them. And Then the Gray Heaven reads like a series of pearls slipping off a necklace—a series of stories, images, moments, songs and poems that at first appear absurd, then shocking, then brilliant, then, finally, divine.’ — Steph Post

Excerpt

Extras

And Then The Gray Heaven – RE Katz and Michelle Dotter

 

 

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You put a lot of pressure on the lyric, hoping the story moves by means other than narrative. Why resist narrative? What does the story gain from the lyric?

I wasn’t necessarily trying to resist narrative, rather trying to think through tendencies to narrativize. From my earliest drafts, Felix’s mind and voice have been precariously associative, and with each thought that slips away in the vehicle of its metaphor, the web of associations gets dense and denser. Something dreamily similar to narrative comes alive as the reader counts the recursions. Though, of course, orderly progression is out the window here. And I think something lyric comes out of the resistance to ordering the narrative activities. There’s an instability to any single image, and my own impulse as a reader is usually to make sense of all the sensory noise and nonsense bubbling under any image or word.

We also learn a lot about snails. I will never think the same about the stuff we expectorate from our lungs and how much that expectorant is like snails/slugs. What is the metaphor you’re working on here ?

And we’re in luck (or maybe in denial) because I think that speaks to how metaphors are working in SORCERERERER. There’s a kind of blurry line between vehicle and tenor, and it is a two-way street. Each carries the potential of the other in its buzzing little molecules. Felix is a snail, and he isn’t. His spittle and sputum are always in the process of becoming slugs, accruing those traits—and vice versa [purposeful non-period here]

In Sorcererererer, we are introduced to Felix, a man suffering from the consumption in a unspecified time and place–why leave those two elements unspecified?

JB: And yes, time is fuzzy in this one, but there is at least one specified place (perhaps a small concession toward clarity!): an old sanatorium in Elysian Park / Echo Park in Los Angeles. And that specificity is there as part of a critique running as a more directed stream under the piece against the paranoid instability of historical narrativizing, of the heliotropic myth and the west/rest cures and westward marches and of being entrenched in bogus destinies [purposeful non-period here]

If you’re in the area with a little free time, those old grounds presently include an active respiratory hospital abutting a few scenic paths up in the hills above Dodgers Stadium—take a stroll and put your newly slimy associative mind to the test. [purposeful period here]

 

HOBBY HORSE ANATOMY: BAWDY AND BODY IN THE BINDING OF ISAAC
Poems @ Dream Pop
EXCERPTS FROM PERMEABLE FORTRESS
Doublt
Buy ‘Sorcererer’

 

Jace Brittain Sorcererer
Schism Press

‘O! I loved this feverish yarn set in the cartilaginous environs of the ear and/or the mucilaginous environs of the Menlo Sanitorium, where patient Felix has collapsed on the footpath, attended by a clutch of snails. Part speculative Walser biography, part fan-fic of the Schumann-Brahms-Schumann love triangle, part dime-store mystery about a lost volume in a spooky library, part late-nite documentary on the lives of snails, this batty, brainy book has something for everyone.’ — Joyelle McSweeney

‘Sharp, grimly comic, vertiginous, extraordinary in its myriad misbehavings, Jace Brittain’s Sorcererer celebrates the illegibility of the body, the mind, and language within a librarial architectonics designed by Borges and described by Beckett to Leslie Scalapino on a stroll through Heraclitus’s garden, or, as one of its protagonists proclaims: ‘stay vim stay vigor.’ Brittain’s un-novel announces the arrival of an important new voice in the post-genre wilderness.’ — Lance Olsen

‘Jace Brittain’s thickly spare, indelibly sticky prose spirals at the “final edge of heliotropic civilization,” gooping the horizon line between history and illusion. All across Sorcererer’s pages, the ailing body of western knowledge coughs up its secrets and myths, its fatal false promises. This is an unbecoming book, a book of slime-enciphered messages, language fluxing from the sentences’ cracked shells. Read Sorcererer with the slowness of snails, with your feelers, backwards and forwards. Leave your own oozy traces on the patterns you find.’ — Joanna Ruocco

Excerpts

dreamt as mountain i

The degree to which isolation and seclusion aren’t synonyms. The songbirds of predawn aren’t politically suspect but as some person starts a gramaphone to sing, Felix rushes his eyes to form and drags uphill. The record loses steam before. And soon in silence the same light burns and exposes invisible streams from clinging packets of snow, pathetic thin ice barely covering the absent puddle already slipped from. Cadaverous the piles that hope to be flowers revelling in cold mud Elevation which returns to him something that.

The crackling paper of that thin ice, the foot and the crackle they make among the trees ghastly sentinels So Felix too From here down on the sanatorium as a
dollhouse The others even more diminutive. That whine in the air again Breathes Felix.

 

dreamd as mt ii

Clean, cold, pure, toxic, cursed, stinging. Insufficiently respiratory. Just what I.

A deep breath of evil. Tomorrow crisp, healthy, restorative, lift a piano above my head. Mighty toss the record player into the canyon. Clattering pathetic horn of a downed and false herald. Don’t shoot the is maybe only after. So. Don’t shoot the messenger later. Rotting clarion dissected in equity by this mountain’s scavenger democratic chaos cult, detritivores learning the tune, inheriting the wonders of the moldering folds and reeds. Discords. Unflattering untraceable dissolution We should all be so Even eat so lucky.

 

drempt as mtn iii

Other spring, other mountain, the building coiling long hallways tight, unlike the statics tell her the circle in the dew cold grass and the clapping and song but Os won’t believe in the discovery of kindness. Also Os recalls how easy for some to find kindness out here. Im Wald. Out Under the. Hidden. Deeply A Static she knows to be cruel laughs and claps and shares a spectacular gesture and How easy to lose one’s eyes in that swirl of limbs and free command to some childhood melody.

 

traumed as mountn iiii

Os from a grassy edge lifts gossamer ice so careful or it softly shatters or with fortune wetly drapes a virgin shroud over her hand Melts as a death mask and she lies down out and under. The mist too and everything is gauze Yes To be disembarrassed of life.

 

dremd as mt v

Citing the Fiduciary but what They can’t abide is a joyful disembarkment Let me die Os screams as. Like a hospital the hospital slides discretely from the hills and toward the sea.

All gross abatements begin at the.

Extras

2nd yr MFA Reading of Jace Brittain

1st Year MFA student reading @ The Pool, Jace Brittain

 

 

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‘In Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax a Style, she writes:

Prose is linear. It is read and is said to move. It must by nature, therefore, generate a symbolics of spatial or temporal movement widened by its context beyond the limits of the actual sentence read from left to right in so many seconds. In whatever context, the movement may resemble accumulation or attrition, progress or other process, even stasis, or any one of these interrupted, turned, reversed. In space or time or both, it can go in any direction as continuous or repetitive, accelerated or retarded, smooth, halting, or halted.

‘This is the most comprehensive description of what prose does that I’ve thus far encountered. It allows for nearly every kind of prose practice imaginable without a sense of hierarchy or judgment. The only absolute phrase is the first one—Prose is linear—which I will attempt to complicate in the last part of my talk, but for now I will allow its usefulness in describing how language moves across a page: that is to say, how the sentence is a line. Nonetheless, Tufte’s definition offers “enormous variety” in how language can and does behave within the architecture of prose. Yet, as a practitioner and connoisseur of prose, something for me remains unsaid in the above. What I’m missing is perhaps unsayable. It has something to do with the title of my talk: “The Sentence as a Space for Living,” something that wants to get at an emotional or bodily register in relation to prose. In this next part I will try to elucidate this feeling of being in the sentence. When I say, “the sentence as a space for living,” what I hope to conjure is the idea of language as a three-dimensional space, traverse-able by the body; a space one enters, moves through, exits. It is not possible that I mean the physical body, because language is abstract: it does not exist properly in the world. What I mean is something like one’s reading body, the one that stands before a word and gapes at it, marveling over its beauty or mystery. That body of mine that feels excitement when it encounters a semi-colon used perfectly, or when it enters a described space that hovers just above visibility. I suppose an alternative title for this paper could be “The body in prose.” But, this isn’t quite right either, because to say that there is a “body,” however abstract we allow it to be, is to place something between the mind and language that isn’t there. And, it’s this absent thing that becomes as I read.’ — Renee Gladman

 

Renee Gladman Site
RG @ Instagram
Dwelling Places: On Renee Gladman’s Turn to Drawing
The Sentence as a Space for Living: Prose Architecture
Buy ‘Plans for Sentences’

 

Renee Gladman Plans for Sentences
Wave Books

‘”These sentences—they—will begin having already been sentences somewhere else, and this will mark their afterlife, and this will be their debut.” So begins Renee Gladman’s latest interdisciplinary project, Plans for Sentences. A tour de force of dizzying brilliance, Gladman’s book blurs the distinctions between text and image, recognizing that drawing can be a form of writing, and vice versa: a generative act in which the two practices not only inform each other but propel each other into futures. In this radical way, drawing and writing become part of a limitless loop of energy, unearthing fertile possibilities for the ways we think about poetry. If Gladman ascribes to any particular type of poetics, here in Plans for Sentences, we are sure to find that it is robustly grounded in a poetics of infinite language.’ — Wave Books

Excerpts

Extras

Renee Gladman Q&A

Prose Architectures Flipthrough

 

 

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‘“People say, ‘Why don’t you retire?’” Waters scoffs. “I’d drop dead if I retired. I jump out of bed every day to go to work.” After six decades of productive perversity, slowing down would pretty much require shutting off his brain. “I have to think up something weird every morning!”

‘Maybe it isn’t so surprising that Waters is more in demand than ever. In some depressing ways, we live in an America his movies anticipated—with charlatans, extremists and malignant narcissists crowding the public square, as constant altercations break out between a repressive far right and a radical-chic far left. The same day I spoke with Waters, Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene gave a bizarre interview decrying “Nancy Pelosi’s gazpacho police” that immediately went viral. (She meant Gestapo.) If you didn’t know better, you might think Greene was a character played by Mink Stole, the Waters lifer who specializes in snippy villains.

‘The difference between his outré work and the hysterical pitch of our current public discourse—besides, of course, that no one’s drafting laws based on his absurdism—is that his intentions are always playful and good-natured. Waters likes to poke fun at what he still calls “political correctness,” not because he’s joined the self-serious war on wokeness or cancel culture or any other term pundits invoke to protest the march of progress, but because he thinks humor is the best route to social change. He wants to see liberals form mock “pronoun police” forces and hand out tickets. So you want to upstage the insurrectionists who relieved themselves in the halls of Congress? “Maybe we should form fecal flash mobs,” he chuckles.

‘Liarmouth is very much in this punkish tradition. A road novel with an outrageously Watersian attraction at every rest stop, the book follows self-styled criminal mastermind Marsha Sprinkle and a doting accomplice as they grift their way up the East Coast. (Scammers may be trendy right now, but they’ve been a staple of Waters’ oeuvre since 1970’s Multiple Maniacs cast his friend and muse, drag queen Divine, as a freak-show impresario who robs audiences at gunpoint.) “I think it’s the most insane thing I’ve ever written,” Waters says.’ — Judy Berman

 

Dreamland
John Waters Page @ Facebook
‘Liarmouth’ @ Goodreads
John Waters Is Ready to Defend the Worst People in the World
Buy ‘Liarmouth’

 

John Waters Liarmouth
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

‘Marsha Sprinkle: Suitcase thief. Scammer. Master of disguise. Dogs and children hate her. Her own family wants her dead. She’s smart, she’s desperate, she’s disturbed, and she’s on the run with a big chip on her shoulder. They call her “Liarmouth”—until one insane man makes her tell the truth.

‘John Waters’s first novel, Liarmouth, is a perfectly perverted “feel-bad romance,” and the reader will thrill to hop aboard this delirious road trip of riotous revenge.’ — FSG

Excerpt

Marsha Sprinkle has always been glad she’s self-employed. She’s her own boss and that’s the way it must continue to be. She can’t imagine having regular office hours, punching time clocks, or paying taxes. Fellow employees are impossible for her to picture unless she can dominate their every move. Marsha is better than other people. She knows that. Smarter, too. Maybe not about the needless crap they tried to teach her in school, but about important stuff like how to put things over on other people who think they have the right to speak to her before being spoken to first. The ones who make unashamed eye contact as if it were their God-given right to invade her privacy. Marsha just feels everybody else on earth is … well, too familiar. Common. No one has the right to know her.

She knows she still looks good. Forty years hasn’t dented her sexual magnetism. Not that it matters to her except when she can use her appeal to punish. To trap. To enslave the clueless men who actually believe they will one day penetrate her. Thrust their filthy member into any of her openings above or below the waist. Especially into her own mouth, the oral cavity that refuses to tell the truth unless it is whispered privately for her alone to hear. Marsha won’t even imagine sex. All that moaning and thrusting and humping with another human. Sweating. Drooling. For what? That’s what Marsha wants to know. For what?!

Oh, she knows how to walk the walk, thrust out her natural-born tits and effortlessly swivel that still-well-rounded behind while ignoring men’s panting gazes, just to frustrate them, torture the lamebrain bastards who even for one moment think they could invade her insides. Like the moronic Daryl Hotchkins, her crime partner, her fake “chauffeur,” her sexual slave, who actually agreed to work for her if he could have sex with her just one day a year. That’s right. Once. Every 365 days and not one more, and Marsha made sure Daryl understood this. Divide all that lust time up hourly and you sure as hell get a low minimum wage, yet Marsha feels she is still overpaying Daryl. It has been a long haul to Marsha Sprinkle’s vagina, but today, Tuesday, November 19, 2019, is that day, the end of his one-year journey. He doesn’t know it yet but there’ll be a detour. A dead end. Marsha Sprinkle is no man’s used-up calendar.

But first things first. It’s a workday and she has to concentrate. She has always felt safe in whatever foreclosed McMansion they’ve squatted in. “Squat” is a word she dislikes, so homeless, so housing crisis. Daryl knows how to fool the neighbors, showing them fake leases he’s typed up and jerry-rigging the electricity so these rubes pay for not only their own home’s power but Marsha and Daryl’s, too. They aren’t squatting, they have taken charge of a house no one else could control.

Marsha likes how impersonal the interior design is in this “starter castle,” as she once heard a real estate agent refer to her current unlawful occupancy. She needs empty rooms around the ones she deigns to inhabit, voids she’d never enter but needs to know are there, sadly existing but not benefiting from her presence. And of course, the countless other giant bedrooms with full baths are the perfect dumping grounds for the thirty or so rifled-through, picked-clean suitcases she and Daryl have appropriated from the baggage-claim carousels at Baltimore/Washington International Airport.

The ridiculous cathedral ceilings give Marsha the required headroom respect she needs to feel one with the house’s vacant hauteur. Rich yet possessionless, fancy but hardly to the manor born, a style no one could call their own. The overpriced and oversize furniture left behind had failed to flip this white elephant of a house, and that suits her just fine. It can’t compete with her. She’ll never let the plush sectional sofas, the neoclassical mirrored tables, or the ludicrous Mediterranean chandeliers forget that she’s the boss. Marsha is like a McMansion herself: too big for the land underneath it, defying both nature and the environment, and daring anyone to move inside … her.

Extras

John Waters reads from Lady Chatterley’s Lover at City Lights Books

John Waters reads CARSICK

 

 

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‘In the Temple of Surrealism’s fourth annual bulletin, we bring you news that the human race is in grave peril due to the mutation of a common virus we identify as MASS HYSTERIA. Also known in medicine as Mass Psychogenic Illness (MPI), MASS HYSTERIA sweeps through all societies that do not heed the calls of our LEADER, and the messages and attitudes of the SURREALISTS.

‘It may surprise you to learn that until the Temple’s landmark enquiry into the subject, commissioned especially for A Void #4, there were no immutable laws of MASS HYSTERIA. Many “experts” could not even agree on basic principles, such as whether the disease is fundamentally ethereal, psychic, psychosomatic, biological, or if it exists at all.

‘After only a couple of hours researching the current global outbreak, however, our genius managing editor and head of experimental research at the Temple, Chairman Lev Parker, had the mind-blowing revelation that there are common properties that can be observed in all outbreaks of MASS HYSTERIA: The more severe the hysteria, the less willing a sufferer will be to accept a diagnosis of MASS HYSTERIA. (This shall henceforth be known as the Iron Rule of M.H.)

‘MASS HYSTERIA can only be transmitted via the medium of abstract symbols: written and spoken language, and visual signs communicated by other humans. (Our trials with saluting monkeys yielded inconclusive results.)
Since transmission takes place on the symbolic plane of representation, folks who are not sufficiently educated in abstract thought are more vulnerable to MASS HYSTERIA.

‘Babies and the severely mentally impaired are unable to perceive or process language so they are, mercifully, immune to it.

‘Narcissistic personalities are particularly susceptible to MASS HYSTERIA due to their inherent inability to think on a level above the personal. The narcissist is a more likely spreader and intensifier of MASS HYSTERIA, since the narcissist is biologically programmed to draw attention to himself via the contaminated symbols of the hysterical group’s cohesion.
Not all cases of MASS HYSTERIA are symptomatic. It is possible – indeed, common – for passive or ostensibly neutral members of a community to unwittingly infect others with poor thinking habits.

‘When cases of MASS HYSTERIA are reported, those who resist a diagnosis of MASS HYSTERIA are most likely to be infected next, if they are not already contaminated.

‘On the plus side, MASS HYSTERIA is hardly ever fatal in isolation. The symptoms are largely psychological/ behavioural, and include irritability, paranoia, panic attacks, and new superstitions appearing out of nowhere. The more MASS HYSTERIA there is in a society, the stronger this disease becomes. The larger the pool of infected recipients, the more powerful its grip over individual minds. The more hysterics there are in a society, the more they are likely to display symptoms such as uncontrollable shouting, random acts of cruelty when they think nobody is looking, and taking an active role in mob justice.’ — A Void

 

Morbid Books
THE OTHER ZONE
DEAD SEXY
ASK A SHAMANIC COMMUNIST
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Lev Parker & Penny Metal A VOID 4: MAGAZINE OF MASS HYSTERIA
Morbid Books

‘When a population reaches a critical mass of hysteria, it can achieve “herd immunity” to vaccines. By this point, symptoms will include the fetishization of power and authority, and the total subjugation of individual will to the energy of collective passions. The more irrational and cruel a society becomes, the more logical, kind and morally right its population will believe itself to be. The only way to flush out MASS HYSTERIA from such a society is by forcible extermination, psychological warfare, and/or waiting and hoping that future generations are less hysterical than their parents.

‘Given our frightening discoveries, this anthology will educate you about the dangers of the deadly virus before we all go mad. A Void #4 therefore serves as a learning pack that gives you a brief history of the deadly mind plague, presented with deliberate ambiguity, from obscure angles, alongside artworks by the sensible and sane. While there is no definitive test for MASS HYSTERIA at present, we present you with a handy, yet convoluted diagnostic tool to help you determine if you or one of your loved ones is coming down with the “Idiot Flu.”’ — A Void

Excerpts

Extras

Want Your Freedom Back?

A Void magazine issue 3 Orgasmic Literature

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Oh, cool, about your appropriate brother. Bonus. I can only imagine: the annoyance. Well, I can do more than imagine because the same thing happened constantly back when I was editing my lit. zine Little Caesar. I doubt if it still exists, but there used to be this book, a kind of directory you could buy that listed every literary magazine with its address and a very brief description, and it was common for poets to just go through that book and just seemingly randomly pick magazines to send their poems to, and that was a constant drag. Oh, no, I hope your love of yesterday wasn’t an embodiment of you, but I fear it was? Eek. Multiple choice: Love or love or love, G. ** David Ehrenstein, I have the vaguest memory of Les Paul and Mary Ford popping up on my parents’ TV. ** Bill, Hi. Cool that the Brian Weil book hit home. Right, I think I met him back in the days, possible even at an Act Up meeting, I can’t remember. Have a lovely weekend, Mr. Hsu. ** _Black_Acrylic, Me too. I had a Les Paul as a teenager for a brief time when I was in a high school rock band. The same model as Jeff Beck, gold and sparkly, who was my rock guitar god back in the Yardbirds/Jeff Beck Group days before he turned into a fusion dude. Nice that your future home looks liveable and promising. It doesn’t come with mass amounts of built-in book and record shelves?! ** Nick Toti, Hi, Nick! Good to see you! i’ll do my investigative duties re: Sigmund Snopek III. Nice name, obvs. Things are good, a little too busy, but I’ll take it. Yeah, at the moment we’ll shoot in/around LA in October assuming things remain in place. I wish you were there too. How’s your stuff, man? ** Clayton, Hi, Clayton. Really good to meet you, and thanks for coming in here. I assume you dig being a college radio d.j.? I was one when I was briefly in university, and I loved it, even though they thought my tastes were too weird and stuck me with the dreaded 6 – 9 am slot. Thanks a lot about my novel. What’s going on with you? I mean, obviously, if you want to come back and hang out and talk, etc. anytime, feel more than free, that’d be great. Warmest greetings in any case. ** T. J., Hey, T. J.! Oh, easy for me to say, but of course I love your idea of setting up that film series. If there hadn’t been such things in LA when I was in a formative phase, I would have been cooked. But, yeah, that was LA. I know that the writer and blog.l. Jeff Jackson set up an experimental film series in North Carolina, and I think it was shockingly well attended if I’m remembering right. But, yeah, I hear you. ‘Mike’s Murder’, wow. My cousin is one of the actors in that film. Brooke Anderson. They were shooting it in LA back when I was running the reading series at Beyond Baroque, and one night my cousin, Bridges, Winger, and John Travolta showed up at a poetry reading I was hosting. Caused quite a fuss. Anyway, yeah. I plan to do what it takes to have a non-boring weekend, and I hope yours is like the good aspect of the 4th of July, which, in my head, means the fireworks part. ** Okay. As you have already seen, I’m recommending five recent books to you that I’m hoping you will take a gander at and possibly even find something readable amongst. See you on Monday.