Author: DC (Page 981 of 1103)

 

‘Literary trickster, Walter Abish, was a late bloomer. His first novel, Duel Site (1970), did not appear until Abish was turning forty. His second novel, Alphabetical Africa (1974), cemented his reputation. Each chapter of that book played pseudo-alliterative rules: the first chapter began with each word beginning with the letter a, the second would add the letter b, the third c and so on, until chapter 27 when a letter was taken away until chapter 52. A brief flurry of publishing through the 1970s was followed with relative silence through to the present day. So far Abish has only published three novels, three collections of short stories, one book of poetry and one autobiography.

‘How German Is It is perhaps his most celebrated novel, and certainly his most complex. It is a novel that probes Germany’s recent past through the brothers Ulrich and Helmuth Hargenau, whose father defected against Hitler in the last days of the Second World War and was killed by firing squad. As the title infers, Abish is interested in the question of how uniquely German the Holocaust was, and how its people could have committed such an act. But this is not a novel wholly interested in Germany’s past – it is interested in its present, with the rise of a terrorist group, whose activities mirror the Red Army Faction.

‘As in Abish’s former works, How German Is It is enamoured with verbal tomfoolery, of which the cumulative effect is to constantly wrong-foot the reader, making us as wary of modern German as both Abish and his characters seem to be. Ulrich Hargenau, the novels ‘hero’, is a successful writer, estranged from his wife, Paula, a female terrorist, whom he saved from prison by testifying against the other members of her group. Ulrich, returned to Brumholdstein (named after Ernst Brumhold, a Heidegger-type philosopher), begins to suffer occasional death threats and attempts are made on his life. His brother, Helmuth, a successful architect who designed the police station in Brumholdstein (only to see it blown up by the terrorist group operating in the area), begins to suffer from similar concerns. The Hargenau’s – a very Americanised family – represent modern Germany, in a very old German town. Brumholdstein was the site of a notorious gas chamber and concentration camp, now buried beneath the modern facade.

‘About half way through this novel teacher Anna Heller is discussing with her primary school students the concept of familiarity. What is familiar? What qualities is it that makes something familiar? This is a question Abish’s novel returns to frequently, with the word ‘familiar’ a recurring motif. In the end it seems that nothing is what it seems and that the familiar can pave over deep secrets – just as the paving stones outside the familiar bakery conceal a mass grave – and just as the familiarity of marriage can hide seething resentments.

‘“Sunday: This is the introduction to the German Sontag. This is an introduction to the German tranquillity and decorum. People out for a stroll, affably greeting their neighbours. Guten Morgen. Guten Tag. Schönes Wetter, nicht wahr? Ja, hervorragend. A day of pleasant exchanges. A day of picnics, leisurely meals, newspapers on the sofa. Franz sitting in their small garden, reading his Sunday paper, his back to the noisy neighbours next door, his back to the familiar scene of the neighbours playing cards, his back deliberately turned to their Sunday.”

‘Only those who have embraced knowledge of Germany’s past and reached some form of reconciliation with it – as Franz the waiter, who is building a scale model of the concentration camp has – can see the hypocrisy under the surface of the familiar. Their only reaction is to turn their back on it. Only the present will not let them.

‘Ulrich, the subject of death threats, is shot in the arm, but has the mayor of Brumholdstein tell him to “forget it.” The mayor also panics that there will be bad publicity for his town when news of the bodies breaks, and wishes he could simply forget they were there. Towards the end of the novel Ulrich is witness to the terrorists biggest act to date – the blowing up of a bridge (the second bridge blowing in the Penguin Classics so far, and I’m only eight books in!) that connects the mainland with the island town of Gänzlich (or the two faces of Germany, the modern mainland and the remote islands that still cling to a past, wary of strangers, united against them. This act forces Ulrich to face up to his responsibility and to himself, and leads to the devastatingly satirical end.

‘For Abish, How German Is It is a novel that questions the very identity of a nation in transition, trying to face up to its troubled past. As Abish writes of the naming of the town:

‘“Without access to the intricacy, the nuances, the shades of meaning in our language, the visitor’s ability to understand and appreciate the complexities of our customs or the manifestations of our creative impulse will be severely limited…. In adopting the name of Brumhold we have also, in all seriousness, embraced his lifelong claim to the questions: What is being? What is thinking?”

‘The answers Abish finds to these questions are not always satisfactory, if only because Abish himself was uncertain of them. In 2004 he published Double Vision: A Self Portrait which speaks of his time in Germany following the publication of How German Is It. He asks himself, “At what stage in the reconstruction of Germany, at what point in this tremendous effort will the turbulent past fade, enabling the visitor to Germany to once again view the society with that credulous gaze of a nineteenth-century traveller?” If Abish, with the novelists gaze, cannot reconcile the two faces of twentieth century Germany, what hope has the country of rebuilding the familiar? More recent novelists have turned their attention to this question with equally unsure conclusions: Christa Wolf with Das Bleibt (1990) Rachel Seiffert in The Dark Room (2001), or Bernhard Schlink with The Reader (1995). But then questions of how to comprehend the atrocities of the Third Reich will trouble novelists for eternity. To this conundrum Abish adds much with his cinematic prose, prefigured by the quote from Jean-Luc Godard that opens his book: “What is really at stake is one’s image of oneself.” The very image of a nation is at the heart of this work.’ — Blogging the Classics

 

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Further

Podcast: Walter Abish on NPR’s Bookworm
Sentimental Re-Education
Notes on Proceduralism, Part 1 – Walter Abish
ANALYSIS How German Is It
‘The Second Leg’, by Walter Abish
Walter Abish @ goodreads
Arrests in Poland
Death in Iran
POST SCRIPT UM: AN INTERVIEW WITH WALTER ABISH
THE TOPOGRAPHY OF THE FAMILIAR
99: The New Meaning by Walter Abish
Alphabetical Africa (Opening)
Walter Abish’s “How German Is It”: Representing the Postmodern
Abish’s Africa
Familiarity and Forgetfulness in Walter Abish’s Fiction
Constraints, Concealment, and Buried Texts: Reading Walter Abish with Georges Perec and the Oulipo
UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL?
In So Many Words (Walter Abish’s In the Future Perfect)
Walter Abish: Plotting a ‘Terrorism’ of Postmodernist Fiction
Alphabetical Africa’s Relationship Between Language and Meaning
Buy ‘How German Is It’

 

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Quotes

 

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Interview
from Tablet

 

Most of your writing, while profoundly autobiographical in some sense, is not autobiography at all. In fact, your best-known work—How German Is It—is famous for being non-autobiographical: You’d never been to Germany before you wrote it. Why write a self-portrait now?

I began writing it in 1980 during a two-month stay at Yaddo. I had just finished How German Is It and didn’t as yet have another project. I decided to write an autobiographical piece, a self-portrait, but I decided to put it aside. At the initial stage, I think I published short snippets, a mention of China, of my family, maybe Uncle Phoebus. They were little vignettes: the Chinese policemen kicking the dead child back and forth, and my feelings about that and my response. I wanted to deal with the personal and I wasn’t quite sure how to. I wasn’t quite prepared to. And so I worked at it for some time and again put it aside.

In the 90’s I decided finally it was time to pick up the manuscript. By this time I had settled on a structure. I had also spent six months in Berlin. The German Jews who play an important role in the writer-to-be section serve as an ideal counterweight to present-day Germany.

At one point in the book, during your first trip to Germany, you’re taking photographs—

You’ll notice that I haven’t included any of my family. I felt that the photos would mislead. I wanted to leave it to the imagination. Incidentally, when How German Is It appeared in Germany the reviewers, not knowing how to react, did what people would do elsewhere. They read me instead. They explained me. No problem there: Vienna, fled the Nazis, they’ve got the whole story—why read the book? And there’s a review in the Houston Chronicle, some professor at the University of St. Thomas, and he writes that I end up in America and that’s a happy ending. People really bring their own history to it. Many books do not invite that.

To people who say to you: you’ve been doing all this stuff—these formal experiments—and here you are writing a very direct book. There’s a sense of that in some of the critics—and John Updike does that in The New Yorker—that you had been cheating them previously and that now you were delivering the goods.

I didn’t get the sense that he was implying that.

Obviously he’s been an admirer—a somewhat unlikely admirer—of yours all along. What I mean is that certainly American readers, gorged on memoirs that are very different from yours, recognize that the methods you’re employing in Double Vision are direct in their own way. They’re vignettes you carved out from hundreds of pages more.

I deleted a number of characters and their history, because it would prove difficult for a reader to absorb so many details. I couldn’t have written Double Vision earlier, in 1980 for instance, because I didn’t possess the insight into what I now describe. And I think if you were to rephrase the question—

Go right ahead.

And link it to How German Is It, it becomes more pertinent. Let me give you a brief account. I left Israel in 1956 for England, where I wrote my first play. I was influenced by Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. My verse drama was set in China, 1949. All the characters are Chinese. The action takes place in a monastery overlooking the Yangtze, which at that time of year has flooded the village at the foot of the monastery. The principal characters, in addition to the monks who remain undecided on how to respond to Mao’s conquest of China, are three individuals fleeing from Shanghai. One is a bar girl, one is a con man, and a prostitute. I’m sorry, a poet.

I always mix them up, too.

Though I was unaware of it, I’m already at this early stage toying with the familiar and defamiliarization. I’ve never lived in a Chinese village—I may have visited one. I’ve never been to a Chinese Buddhist temple—all this is foreign to me. My next play, The Burning of the Misfit Child, an unfinished play, is set in the Midwest in a town in which everyone is in one way or another connected to the mental institution, the town’s largest employer. People fear it, they fear ending up there. What they most fear are the mentally ill, the unstable, the misfits. It’s my first impression of America.

In the seventies I went to see a film, Ich liebe dich, ich töte dich (“I love you, I kill you”) by Uwe Brandner, an interesting writer living in Munich. A very fascinating, complex, homoerotic film that influenced me to write “The English Garden.” When that story was singled out in The New Yorker and The New York Times, I wrote “The Idea of Switzerland,” which in turn led to How German Is It, in which many of the elements that are important to me are at play.

Since How German Is It came out there have been a number of historical revelations that I want to ask you about. At the time, some Heidegger societies objected to your portrayal of the philosopher Brumhold, whom they nonetheless recognized as the embodiment of their man. How have you felt about the things that have come out about Heidegger?

Delighted. I retain a love-hate relationship to Heidegger. It’s difficult to dismiss the questions he ponders: What is being? What is language? His relationship to Hannah Arendt is revealing. His relationship to Ernst Jünger and to Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt is even more so. He was, I think, politically a naïf; it was Ernst Jünger who influenced Heidegger politically. Jünger was aware of the mass extermination of the Jews. He writes about it in his wartime journals. Though he fails to mention that his farm, to which he retreats at the end of the war, is only a short distance from Bergen-Belsen. In 1942 and ’43 Jünger reads Josephus and Jeremiah contemplating the fate of the Jews, as if it is somehow disembodied. After the war, though he continues to keep a journal, he never mentions the word Jew again. They have literally ceased to exist for him. He stated something to the effect that the Germans who lived abroad—clearly, by that, including the Jews—should not be the ones to judge Germany’s wartime conduct. That should be left to people who experienced the war from within Germany. Heidegger clearly took Jünger’s injunction to heart.

This is a hard question to ask, but in what sense do you think of the book as a direct, Proustian evocation of this lost world—or found world, however you want to look at it—in terms of your parents? It’s not something people would expect from you.

Well, in the book I refer to Proust. I compare Walter Moses, one of what I call my German fathers in Tel Aviv, to Baron de Charlus. I write of my determination to have Proust as my influence. I think I am being consistent. I can distinguish between a rich literary past and nostalgia. I’m not trying to recapture the past. I’m called experimental. The word carries less and less weight. I see everything I’ve written as somehow connected. I once wrote a paper on the familiar and everyday life and literature. I had certain ideas that proved erroneous. I believed that the familiar was something to be mapped. It’s nothing of the kind. We familiarize the world unless that instinctive need to familiarize is blocked, stunted. I don’t know if that sheds any light on Double Vision.

There were a few things that really struck me about the Mayan scribes, whose complicity in the sacrificial violence that defined their society you describe at the end of your book. One was that you wanted to ensure your book couldn’t be read as a kind of Goldhagen-like criticism of Germans, although people seem to be doing this anyway. Why did you feel this was necessary? I mean, this is a funny question since it’s already happened: Updike responded so personally, started talking about the German line in his family, like you had somehow accused him of participating in some way.

Or of my animus to Germany. Animus to me serves as an energizer—it is not the generator. Why did I introduce the Mayan scribes? Now that scholars have deciphered the script, what scholars took to be tranquil religious communities turn out to have been warring states. The scribes were privileged members of the royalty whose task was to enhance the stature of their king. They created a kind of usable history. They didn’t oppose bloodletting or sacrifice.

Like Jünger?

It was their society, their culture. Look, I feel people are manipulatable and I’m intrigued by how societies devise rules and develop a logic that drives and charges their society. So it seemed appropriate here, to focus on the role of the writer. Furthermore, during the Mayans’ decline, the scribes remained consistent, falsifying history. The scribe’s dilemma must have been, how to oppose, and what risks could he take without having his fingers chopped off? I can identify with them.

 

___
Book

Walter Abish How German Is It
New Directions

‘The question How German Is It underlies the conduct and actions of the characters in Walter Abish’s novel, an icy panorama of contemporary Germany, in which the tradition of order and obedience, the patrimony of the saber and the castle on the Rhine, give way to the present, indiscriminate fascination with all things American. On his return from Paris to his home city of Würtenburg, Ulrich Hargenau, whose father was executed for his involvement in the 1944 plot against Hitler, is compelled to ask himself, “How German am l?”––as he compares his own recent attempt to save his life, and his wife Paula’s, by testifying against fellow members of a terrorist group, with his father’s selfless heroism. Through Ulrich––privileged, upper class––we confront the incongruities of the new democratic Germany, in particular the flourishing community of Brumholdstein, named after the country’s greatest thinker, Brumhold, and built on the former site of a concentration camp. Paula’s participation in the destruction of a police station; the State’s cynical response to crush the terrorists; two attempts on Ulrich’s life; the discovery in Brumholdstein of a mass grave of death camp inmates––all these, with subtle irony, are presented as pieces of a puzzle spelling out the turmoil of a society’s endeavor to avoid the implications of its menacing heritage.’ — ND

 

______
Excerpt

 

 

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p.s. RIP Sean DeLear, Holger Czukay ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! No, thank you! Yesterday was a long one, and I came home too brain dead to approach SCAB with the proper joy, but I will preserve my brain today and dive in later! I can not wait! Lazy days are nice. I already miss them, ha ha. Yesterday was all about sound work. Yesterday we spent all day organizing the files, which we have to do before getting into detail work. The only really productive thing we did was replace two stand-in explosion sounds with the real ones. We have to submit the film to Sundance tomorrow, and those were the two things we absolutely had to improve, and which are the only things we have time to fix before submitting the version with ‘rough’ sound to the festival. How was your today? ** Steve Erickson, Hi. No, I haven’t heard the Bug vs. Earth album. Curious combo. I don’t like Earth at all, which is obviously my problem. They’re Gisele’s favorite band, but I find them to be a snooze for some reason. But, yeah, I’ll check that album. Good, I look forward to your writings on Ghost. Everyone, Go here and read Steve’s thoughts on the band Ghost. To quote Steve, ‘although it gets way more general into my thoughts on Christianity and the way it’s been weaponized against LGBT people.’ ** David Ehrenstein, Oh, right! Thanks for the Anger interview! ** _Black_Acrylic, Thanks for speaking to the unknowable one. Definitely getting all the advice, opinions, expertise on your YnY venture is an excellent, wise idea. ** Shane Christmass, Hey, man! Nice to see you! Oh, of course using encryption in my GIFs is a heavenly idea, but I’m an ignoramus and klutz when it comes to actually making GIFs. I’ve only made one, and it took forever, and it sucks. But please do it. So I can squint and luxuriate. ** Misanthrope, Thanks for the big up and words to our mysterious guest-host. Oh, Hornet, right, not a Lantern at all, sorry, my space out. I saw that ‘Green Lantern’ blockbuster, I think. Yeah, I vaguely think it wasn’t so hot. Thats interesting about the Americans in the US Open. Gosh, I would addict myself if I wasn’t elsewhere all the time du jour. ** Okay, quiet, well, … The other day I remembered the novel featured today for some forgotten reason. And I remembered that, one, it’s very good, and, two, that it was kind of the big ‘it’ novel in the early 80s amongst my crowd and how it seems like no one ever talk about it anymore, a fact which intrigued me, so I thought I’d bring it up and see if it toots any horns. See you tomorrow.

 

“An awe-inspiring tour de force, a circuitous thanatopsis, a maze that constantly reiterates its structure until everything it contains is subsumed within a new ulterior obfuscation. McCartney not only shows us that death is a language unto itself, but also provides us with a dictionary with which to parse it.” —Mark Gluth, author of No Other

“Engrossing and reverent, The Disintegrations strangles death. A philosophy of the concrete and a reckoning of the ethereal, this novel dreams of all that has become lost in a world of remainders. We who remain may not find relief, but it leaves us dazzled and astonished and brutally satisfied with a gratitude for living.” —Lily Hoang, author of A Bestiary

“I know nothing about death, absolutely nothing,” asserts the narrator of this inventive autobiographical novel. Yet he can’t stop thinking about it. Detached from life in Los Angeles and his past in Australia, uncomfortable around other humans, he researches death on the Internet, mulls over distant and intimate stories of suicides, serial killers, and “natural deaths,” and wanders about LA’s Holy Cross Cemetery. He’s looking for answers, all the while formulating his own disquieting philosophies. Within this dizzying investigation into the mystery of death is another mystery: who is the companion igniting these memories? This enigmatic novel blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction, story and eulogy, poetry and obituary. Wry yet somber, astringent yet tender, The Disintegrations confronts the impossibility of understanding death and the timeless longing for immortality.

 

MORE PRAISE

“A book that takes possession of you right from the opening and will not let you go. Challenging and gripping, a rumination on death and memory that speaks eloquently to our sense of loss, both personal and communal. The writing is exquisite. In the best possible sense, I know this book will haunt me for the longest time.” –Christos Tsiolkas, author of Barracuda

“An uncanny and mesmerizing study of the dread and terror in contemplating death as both remembrance and disappearance, and an intimate reveal of how our fears of erasure are a ghostly double for our awe at being alive.” —Manuel Muñoz, author of What You See in the Dark

“In this long-awaited second novel, a narrator’s fascination with the geography of a nearby cemetery becomes a map of the losses and disappearances which have defined his own life. As he sorts through half-memories of deaths both notorious and obscure, a composite emerges of violent light and seductive shadow, a Book of the Dead –and a Book of California.” –Joyelle McSweeney, author of Dead Youth, or, The Leaks

 

 

Alistair McCartney is the author of The End of the World Book, a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award in Fiction and the Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White debut fiction award. His writing has appeared in 3AM, Animal Shelter, Fence, 1913, Gertrude, Lies/Isles and other journals. He teaches fiction in the MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles, and oversees their undergraduate creative writing concentration. Born in Australia, he lives in Venice, California.

 

Inspirations for The Disintegrations:

FILM:

 

Robert Bresson’s Le Diable Probablement

 

Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life

 

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives

 

Robert Bresson’s Four Nights of A Dreamer

 

Joachim Trier’s Oslo, August 31st

 

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendor

 

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma

 

Robert Bresson’s Diary of A Country Priest

 

Gaspar Noe’s Enter The Void

 

David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows

 

Jean Rollin’s The Iron Rose

 

BOOKS:

 

Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

 

JD Salinger’s The Catcher in The Rye

 

Rimbaud’s The Illuminations

 

Moby Dick

 

Blanchot’s Death Sentence

 

Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer

 

Sontag on Bresson

Bresson on Bresson

 

The Bible

 

Dostoyevsky’s White Nights

 

Dennis Cooper’s The Marbled Swarm

 

VISUAL ART:

 

Costica Ascinte’s photographs

 

Banks Violette

 

Alice Neel’s Portraits

 

Marlene Dumas’s Measuring Your Own Grave

 

Elizabeth Bishop’s Tombstones for Sale

 

David Dupuis’ In The Potters Ground

 

El Greco’s View of Toledo

 

The Devil’s Hole

 

MUSIC:

 

Coffin Trick by Atlas Sound

 

Marquee Moon by Television

 

Brando by Scott Walker + Sunn O))) + Gisele Vienne

 

Spread your Bloody Wings by Smog

 

Black Angel’s Death Song by The Velvet Underground

 

All the People I like are Those that are dead by Felt

 

Into Distance by Var

 

Eulogy to Lenny Bruce by Nico

 

Les Voyages De L’Âme By Alcest

 

When People are dead by The Gobetweens

 

Jackie by Iceage

 

Your Ghost by Kristin Hersh

 

Til’ I die by the Beach Boys

 

Killer by Salem

 

Attic Lights by Atlas Sound

 

Artifacts and Clippings:

 

This Lighter

 

Cemetery Map Side A

 

Cemetery Map Side B

 

This Guy

 

The California Section of the LA Times

 

The Author

 

Book 1, Book 2, Book 3

 

Events:

Alistair McCartney will be reading from and discussing The Disintegrations at Skylight Bookstore in Silverlake, Saturday September 16th, 500pm. In New York he’ll read from it in the Dixon Place Lounge, Saturday October 21st, 900pm. Back in LA, he’ll read at Antioch University in Culver City, Tuesday November 7th, 630 pm.

 

Links to Some Other Things:

Excerpt in 3:AM magazine: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/my-coffin/

Thoughts on the Music that Inspired The Disintegrations: http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2017/08/book_notes_alis_1.html

 

Excerpt:

 

The Dancing Corpse of Jill Yip

A corpse is a dead body, usually human. Though in Middle
English it just meant body, human or animal, alive or dead.

I’ve only laid eyes on one corpse. The corpse of Jill Yip. Jill was a dancer. A dancer is someone whose body moves.

Jill’s body stopped working. She died from an intestinal obstruction. This is when an abnormality blocks the intestines and the digestive system stops functioning and then everything breaks down. You can see X-rays of this condition on the Internet. There is a soft and hazy quality to the images: the bones, the dilated loops of bowel, the obstructions in question.

From what I heard, Jill had been experiencing pain, cramps, spasms. She thought the pain would pass. She went to the emergency room, near her apartment in Alhambra. They didn’t x-ray her. They must have been busy that night. They looked her over and gave her some pills and then sent her back home.
—-I imagine Jill tried to get some sleep. The pain woke her up; it will pass, it always does. But this was a new form of pain and she sensed something was wrong as her body went . . . haywire.

I believe Jill’s roommate was out at the time but was the one who later discovered her corpse.

There was some speculation that the harsh discipline of dancing had led to Jill’s death. One of the definitions of dance is to bring to a particular state or condition by dancing; e.g., she danced herself to exhaustion. Dancing is hard on bodies and on the internal organs. Dance forces the body to do things it isn’t necessarily designed to do.

I’m increasingly aware that death forces language to do things it was not designed to do. Language breaks down; it experiences cramps, spasms.

I saw Jill dance a handful of times. She danced with a company, but once I saw her perform a solo. Her only solo. I think it was called Pirate Dance. It was one of those dances with talking; Jill talked as she, her body, moved. She told a story about her past. A story is a series of sentences that move.
—-When Jill was a small girl, her family fled Vietnam on a boat. The journey was long and arduous. Pirates came on board and raped the women and children, threw some men overboard, left them to drown or to be eaten by sharks. Jill had to drink seawater. You could tell she was leaving all sorts of things out.
—-For the performance, Jill wore a pirate’s hat made out of newspaper. She wore a black eye patch, a belt around her waist, with a silver plastic pirate’s knife in a gold plastic scabbard: a child’s Halloween costume. She said the men who came on board wore fake paper hats, like they were pretending to be pirates, but that everything they did was real.

Jill and her family survived the journey and reached America.
—–At school, Jill said, wielding her fake knife at members of the audience, when my teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I told her I want to be a pirate.
—-The dance ended with Jill intoning these lines again and again: I want to be a pirate. I want to commit atrocities. I did not succumb to the pirates. I escaped them.

I have no memory of the actual dance, the steps, the gestures, and even if I did, I would be unable to explain it to you, because it’s my belief, a belief that borders on the category of the spiritual, that the body moves outside of language.
—-There was no music, I can say that. Sometimes Jill would stop talking and dance silently, with a delicate and controlled violence. She would start to talk about what happened to her on that ship, but her words would sort of . . . drift off, and she would replace them with the ragged sound of her breathing and the clomping sound made by her feet.

When I learned of Jill’s death—Tim told me, one of the other dancers in her company had called him, he came into the kitchen to convey the news—it struck me as very . . . unjust.
—-What bothered me was not that Jill was twenty-nine, a month or two older than me, not even the hospital’s oversight, but the manner of death. Jill had overcome all those dangers as a child, made herself sick from salt water, come all this way, only to die . . . like this.
—-Somehow, I thought, staring at our kitchen walls, which are a bright Mexican blue, it would have been better to die at the hands of those pirates.
—-Jill’s cool, clipped voice ran through my head: I did not succumb to the pirates. I escaped them.

Jill Yip’s corpse was situated in a funeral parlor in Alhambra. Tim and I drove out there with our friends Danielle and Tre. Danielle’s a redhead; Tre has jet black hair. Though apart from Jill, who cares what any of us look like.
—-We all dressed in dark colors. The car was cramped and the day was warm and dusty.
—-The funeral parlor was on a street lined with factories—bed manufacturers, primarily—and other funeral parlors. A funeral parlor is a kind of factory; it makes death on a mass scale, through a process of maintaining. A parlor with a crematorium is also a factory, one that doesn’t produce anything but destroys things.
—-Yet reducing a body down to an urnful of ash—you’re still making something.

From The Disintegrations: A Novel by Alistair McCartney. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. © 2017 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.

 

 

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p.s. Hey.  This weekend is a joyous occasion for the blog because it gets to help usher the new novel by the incredible writer Alistair McCarney into visibility. Alistair has kindly put together a very entertaining and telling post to help the blog maximize its hosting duties, and you have a wonderful couple of days ahead of you. As always, please inflect your comments with your thoughts about what you’ve seen and read up above and share them with with Alistair. Thank you. And thanks so much, A., for the great pleasure and honor! ** Armando, Hi. Cool, sweet dreams. Oh, thanks for the note. Everyone, just a late breaking but important note that Armando’s album is rather only available at discount until September 12, and the codeword is ulalume. Thanks, man. ** Steve Erickson, Hey. Well, we’re hoping to avoid an all-nighter before the Sundance deadline, but I would imagine we’ll end up having one. I think maybe a case could be made that Perry’s girl-power message, as simplistic as it may be, could have more of an impact than it might seem, especially on her youngest fans. Sometimes a powerful inspiration can be or seem quite slight at the source. I don’t think ‘cultural appropriation’ is the black and white thing that it’s so currently trendy to knee-jerk generalize about and demonize. Hm, I’d be curious to see that Novo documentary. I’ll look for it. ** Nick Toti, Hi, Nick! Really nice to see you! Oh wow, if I had found that GIF you used, I would definitely have grabbed and employed it. Nice one. Thank you so much for the good words and thoughts about the GIF stack. That’s so nice to hear. How are you? What’s currently going on? ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Well, I certainly will be excited if they accept the film. I’m assuming the chances aren’t that great, but hey, you never know. Yes, the subtitles are now in place. This weekend will be all about creating the titles and end credits, and apparently we have to put together a ‘package’ for the Sundance submission: logline, synopsis, statement of intent (ugh), etc. Lots to do. Ha ha, yes, those mysterious ‘moments’. I hope you have a whole batch of them this weekend. The trip will be worth it, for sure, but I totally understand the anxiety. Anxiety is the worst and a very tough opponent. The sound editor meeting went very well, yes. He’s prepared, and we’re close to being prepared, and we start work at 10 am on Tuesday. Oh, sad that Anita is going away. Denmark is awesome. I loved it when I was there. Where is the hostel? One more long, anxiety-provoking trip to visit her for you to steel yourself for maybe? Have a very lovely weekend, and let me know how it all went. ** Chris dankland, Hi! Ha ha, I kind of think it’s safe to say that fidget spinners are just dumb, addictive fun, but … I think I’ve said this here before but apparently I’m an extremely good candidate for hypnosis. When I was a teenager, it was a common thing for one of my friends to hypnotize me for everyone’s entertainment when we got bored. I’m really glad you’ve gotten your mind reattached to your writing and projects. God, it’s just so serious there. It really feels from the outside like a completely unprecedented disaster, so huge and complicated that it’s hard to imagine how long and what it will take to return any sense of normal life there. I’m so glad you’re okay, and it’s obviously really great that you’re doing what you can to help others. ** Jamie, Jamie! Man, it’s great to see you! I’ve been concerned about you as you can well imagine. Oh, yeah, everything has been okay here. I’m fully thrown into the film work. I’m awfully glad that your health is upswinging. And, yes, I want to help celebrate Hannah’s birthday and see you as soon as you guys can sort out when. My address … I’ll mail it to you. Gosh, thank you, man. You could also just wait and give it to me if that adds incentive to your plans to return. Stay in bed if bed is the answer, man. Give your body all the time it needs, okay? My weekend will involve a bunch of film stuff, and it should be very occupied and hopefully a success. Take incredibly good care! May Bambi show up at your door this weekend with a skyscraper of French pastries on her back. Even more optimistic love, Dennis. ** _Black_Acrylic, Ha, what were the odds. I’m very glad the roundabout venture was a success, and that your arm did the right thing and cooperated. Framed, awesome! That’s a gorgeous work. Photo, yes. Cool about your involvement in the Sophie Lisa Beresford show. She’s terrific. Why do you think your involvement will entail? ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. Ha ha, great that my statement made it through. Cookout, cool. No, I wasn’t into superheroes at all. I never read comic books as a kid, and that’s basically the only place they lived back then. Well, I did like the 60s ‘Batman’ show, I used to watch reruns of the old ‘Superman’ show. No, I don’t have any interest in or feeling for superheroes at all. I end up watching the movies and sometimes they charm me a little, but it’s just like looking at particularly entertaining aquariums or something. ** James Nulick, Hi, James! Good to see you, buddy boy. Huh, you’re the second person to spin possible conspiracy theories about fidget spinners. What a strange world were living in at the moment. Yes, we’re at the end credits, but they’re not the end. We need to do them now because the sound work, which will be the last thing other than making a trailer and the poster and stuff, will be too consuming to allow for other work. Sundance taking the movie would be cool, yes. It’s a crapshoot. Well, if that happened, I would certainly imagine Zac and I would attend, and hopefully we would be invited to on their dime even. My favorite Duvert is ‘Strange Landscape’. Have a weekend of creative exploding and general excellence. ** Okay. Please return your faculties to exploring and pondering and purchasing and (and so on) Alistair’s book, which, having read it, I can absolutely assure you is really great. See you on Monday.