Category: Uncategorized (Page 356 of 1088)

 

‘After Days of Heaven, five-foot-two Linda Manz played Peewee, a diminutive tough in The Wanderers (1979); she was cast in the TV film The Orphan Train and a handful of other early-eighties roles, and finally in Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen, as interpreted for Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre. It’s a shame and a mystery that more parts didn’t come her way then. “I kinda got lost in the shuffle of being in the movies because I didn’t have an agent at the time and things were slow and . . . I dunno,” Manz said in a Village Voice interview with Nick Pinkerton in 2011.

‘In the intervening years, she moved to California, married cameraman Bobby Guthrie, and had three kids. In 1997, when Harmony Korine brought Manz back on-screen for Gummo, her performance was weird and fearless and funny and gruff, a jumpstart moment, reintroducing her to a new generation. Korine rightly called her “one of the top five screen presences of all time—right up there with Lillian Gish and Gena Rowlands.” But after Gummo and David Fincher’s The Game, Manz disappeared from the public eye almost as quickly as she’d reentered it.

When I tracked her down in 2014, Linda Manz was living in a small community in the mountains north of Los Angeles, a shrimp-puff-cooking young grandma with rebellious irreverence intact. She didn’t make it into LA much. She told me she was teaching her three-year-old granddaughter how to tap dance the way she had been taught as a child (“a tomboy learning to tap dance!” is how she remembered her own first lesson), the way she had done in her movies. “We were tapping all over the place yesterday!”

‘A Chihuahua barked in the background. She was surrounded by her movies. “I got ’em all right here,” she said proudly. She could still recite her best lines. From Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue, playing the Elvis-worshipping Cebe (pronounced CB), hollering at passing trucks: “Subvert normality!” or “I saved your life today.” “How?” “I killed a shit-eating dog.”

‘So much can be said of Manz’s voice, but she was an expressive and captivatingly physical actor too. When she visits her father (Hopper) in prison, she presses her face to the glass with such intense feeling and force you imagine she could launch herself through it; when Richard Gere’s character is shot in Days of Heaven, an uncontrollable shake courses through her body like an electric shock. In her best scene in Harmony Korine’s Gummo, tough and bizarre and tender, she descends into a junk-strewn basement in hot pink short-shorts, pulls a gun on her silent, unyielding son (“If you don’t smile I’m going to kill you!”), tap dances and chicken struts and poses in too-large men’s shoes.

‘Of all her characters—that tap-dancing mom, the tiny gangster Peewee in The Wanderers, the wannabe “mud doctor” Linda of Days of Heaven, and others—Out of the Blue’s Cebe remained her favorite. (A new restoration of the film was set to debut at South by Southwest in March.) When filming wrapped for Gummo, she gave the custom jacket she’d worn in it, embellished with Elvis’s name on the back, to costar Chloë Sevigny. She modeled Cebe after James Dean, she told me. “James Dean, James Dean, James Dean, he was it for me! I’ve always been a tomboy. I’d wear jeans, white shirts, rolled up with the cigarettes right under the sleeve!”

“How much of Cebe was you?” I asked her.
“Probably 100 percent.”
“How so? Would you have described yourself as punk?”
“Not at all, I was into disco!”
“But Cebe’s whole mantra is ‘Disco sucks’!”
“Hahahaha!” I loved Linda’s laugh.
“So maybe you were 99 percent Cebe?”
“Hahahaha!” she cracked up again.
“’Cause Cebe was into Elvis, Johnny Rotten . . .”
“I loved disco. Donna Summer, the Bee Gees! I loved Barry Manilow! Barbra Streisand!” Manz said. “I used to go to discos all the time. I went everywhere. I went to Studio 54 . . . I got in because they got me in.” She didn’t recall who “they” were, but around this time pictures appeared of her with Brooke Shields and with Matt Dillon (who’d just made his own debut as sleeveless punk Richie in the suburban teen rebellion movie Over the Edge). Her version of punk—what she transferred to Cebe—was a feeling: “Attitude,” she said. “Just strong-willed, strong emotion.”

‘When Linda added me as a friend on Facebook, I felt a little starstruck and was compelled to log in more often. Sometimes we exchanged messages there. She reliably posted songs by Barry Gibb, but Barry White was another perennial favorite, as were Al Green, Laura Branigan, and clips from Soul Train—dance music. On her profile she listed her education experience as the School of Hard Knocks, and the University of Life, and I could picture her laughing as she did it, and it was also true. She was online frequently, but having a physical copy to hold in your hand still means more and she asked if I could send her the piece and I said I would. I made color copies and mailed them to her address in California. I imagined maybe I’d get to meet her there someday.

‘Sometime after that story, the director Jeffrey Peixoto asked if I could put him in touch with Linda for a music video he was making. That video never came out, but he sent me footage he’d shot, a brief dazzle of Linda’s family shooting off fireworks in the yard, Linda holding a grandchild and smiling as embers dance past. She was in her midfifties by then; she looked older, but also timeless. By then, he said, she relied on both cigarettes (no judgment) and an oxygen tank, and gamely joked she should voice the part of a Disney witch. This would have no doubt thrilled her grandchildren, not to mention the rest of us who miss her tremendously and, in the wake of her too-early death at fifty-eight, rewatch her brief, blazing output.

‘I knew Manz had become sick and had some emergency hospital visits earlier this year. She was open about some of the heartaches in her life, especially the recent death of one of her sons, in a motorcycle accident. Still I thought she’d outlive cancer, as she had so many other things. “I’ll always be that character,” she’d told me of playing Cebe. “I’m just a tough little rebel, I guess. A survivor, that’s what you’d call me.” I imagined her escaping too, in some version of the way the Linda of Days of Heaven does, the classic knotted-bedsheets-out-the-window move. In the film, it’s cast as an inevitable event. This kid is half raised in open air; she’s just seen fire and plague and murder and she’s expected to go to boarding school? This time she brings along a young rebel comrade who lights a smoke, speaks as tough as Manz (“fuh” for “fur”). Outside, Manz cartwheels down the gray streets, instantly at home again on the railroad tracks, her words mingling with Morricone’s score as they liberate themselves, disappearing into a gray but widening horizon.’ — Rebecca Bengal

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Linda Manz @ Wikipedia
Linda Manz @ IMDb
Linda Manz obituary
‘I’m a tough little rebel’: Linda Manz, Hollywood’s anti-star remembered
Subvert Normality: The Streetwise Voice of Linda Manz
Though her credits were few, she left an indelible mark on film culture.
Linda Manz (1961-2020)
Linda Manz @ MUBI
Linda Manz: Out Of The Blue And Into The Black
Film Community Remembers ‘Days of Heaven’ Star, Dead at 58
Calling Linda Manz
R.I.P. Linda Manz
MANZ ALIVE!
Linda Mana @ Letterboxd
ON THE VOICE OF LINDA MANZ
My small tribute to Linda Manz
Why Chloë Sevigny Is on a Mission to Save the Work of Linda Manz
Secret Style Icon: Linda Manz in Days of Heaven

 

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Extras

Memorial reel

Gone With The Pain – Linda Manz

DAYS OF LINDA (published at MAI Journal, 2020)

LOS GINKAS – LINDA MANZ

 

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Calling Linda Manz
by Nick Pinkerton

 

A swaggering, compact wild-child with a fine-featured, scar-chipped face, Linda Manz was a kid star who wouldn’t get past security at Nickelodeon. With Dennis Hopper’s 1980 Out of the Blue beginning a week-long stand at Anthology Film Archives, New Yorkers can see her in her signature role.

Manz, raised on East 78th Street, today lives amid the orchards of California’s Antelope Valley, 49 years old, mother of three grown sons, two hours and a world from Hollywood (not to mention a lifetime—20 years—away from New York). Not much for phones, she took my call at a friend’s house. Her hostess even popped on the line: “I’ve seen the movies, they’re great! She was a helluva little actress!” I agree.

Manz disabuses me of the notion, easy to believe given her total veracity and lack of affect on-screen, that she was a latchkey prodigy who wandered onto a film set: “My mother had an idea of me being in movies—I never had an idea of me being in movies,” she says with a smoker’s laugh and still-strong Dead End Kid accent. “She was a cleaning woman—she worked at the Twin Towers. Yeah, she always put me in drama classes, she put me in dancing schools, talent classes, she put me in Charlie Lowe’s professional whatever-it-was. . . . I think Elliott Gould went there, too. They taught you how to sing, how to dance, how to improv . . . stuff like that.”

Manz was discovered during casting calls for Days of Heaven (1978), eventually playing Richard Gere’s little sister, “Linda,” in Terrence Malick’s Texas Panhandle–set period piece. When Malick couldn’t find his 70mm epic in the editing room, he had the crazy-brilliant idea to let his 15-year-old starlet lead the way: “This was later on: They took me into a voice recording studio,” remembers Manz. “No script, nothing, I just watched the movie and rambled on . . . I dunno, they took whatever dialogue they liked.” Laid over the images, these extemporaneous monologues abut God, the Devil, and some kid named Ding Dong (“I just made that up”) gave the movie its perspective—and a surreal humor Malick never matched.

Days led to roles in the cartoon Bronx of Philip Kaufman’s The Wanderers, as a boxcar kid in TV’s Orphan Train, and then Out of the Blue, Hopper’s head-on collision with the brick wall of nihilist rebellion he’d been staring at his whole career. “I think I was Cebe,” says Manz of relating to her character, a punkette growing up in the blue-collar Northwest who goes out with a bang. Manz, however, faded away, never graduating from juvenile to ingénue—though the scene in Out of the Blue in which she confronts her father (played by Hopper) looking like a Balthus model makes you wonder, “What if?”

Of her early retirement: “I kinda got lost in the shuffle of being in the movies because I didn’t have an agent at the time and things were slow and . . . I dunno.” Though happy enough to recount her film career, the subjects that Manz today speaks about with the most enthusiasm are her first grandchild, three months old, and her recipe for clam bread (see below). She knows that Malick’s latest, The Tree of Life, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but hasn’t seen any of his movies since Days: “I’m not a movie buff, I don’t go to movies. . . . I haven’t been to a movie in 20 years.” (She’s been in a couple, however—playing the mother in 1997’s Gummo in a brief comeback—before withdrawing again.)

There’s a prophetic statement by the casting director who found Manz for Days in a 1979 Time profile: “I suspect that Linda wouldn’t feel bad if no more acting jobs come up.” And she really doesn’t seem to—but, oh, the difference to us.

IN HER OWN WORDS: LINDA MANZ’S CLAM BREAD RECIPE:

“Clam bread—this has everything. You take a loaf of French bread, and you hollow it out, and you save the pieces you take out and you cut ’em up like for dipping pieces. . . . And in a saucepan you put one cube of butter, two cubes of cream cheese . . . say two cloves of minced garlic, and you melt it until it’s smooth and creamy, and you pour that into the hollowed-out bread shell. You get two cans of minced clams—after you got it all stirred up, you drain the clams and you dump it into the mixture, stir it up, and then put it into the bread and bake it. Wrap it in tin foil, put it in the oven for like 15 minutes and heat it up—everyone’ll be wanting clam bread. I make it every time for Thanksgiving, Christmas, any holiday, and there’s none left at the end of the day. It’s gone. That and shrimp puffs.”

 

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11 of Linda Manz’s 14 roles

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Terrence Malick Days of Heaven (1978)
‘On set, Malick would later confess, Manz had often eluded him. “I feel like I have not been able to grasp a fraction of who she really is,” he said in a rare 1979 interview. But Malick’s instinctive way of working—the magic-hour shoots, his method of directing the crew to suddenly shift gears and film, say, a flock of birds passing overhead—was in so many ways not so different from Manz’s. She’d forget her lines, but she would also transform them, marvelously, revealing the surreal ironies within them just as Malick’s spur-of-the-moment noticings led to some spectacular cinematography. (“Every time I gave her new lines, she interpreted it in her own way,” Malick said. “[W]hen she refers to heaven and hell, she says that everyone is bursting into flames.”)

‘At an impasse two years into editing the film, Malick called in Manz and let her riff, recording as the film unspooled. He was drawing on a voice-over technique he had previously used in Badlands, which features flat, diaristic narration from another precocious teenage girl.

‘Manz’s narration, raw and direct and dreaming, supplied him with the story that was missing, its necessary humor, its fatalistic wizened edge. It pulls Days of Heaven down to earth but also hovers above it, floating in and out of the action, sometimes in the midst of it, often omniscient enough to glimpse the hidden dangers lurking on a sky-blue horizon, the fire behind the sunset, the ghosts that only a child can see. Malick regretted all he left on the cutting floor, but the result is a remarkable edit.

‘Transcribed, it amounts to less than twelve hundred words—a standalone oblique and haunted monologue that lies somewhere between the bloodshot verse of Arkansan poet Frank Stanford and the no-nonsense delivery of Mattie Ross, the young, hard-bitten heroine of Charles Portis’s True Grit. Threaded into Malick’s sublime skies and wheat fields, it becomes something else, intuiting the terror below those ecstatic surfaces. Manz knew the world and the people in it were torn (“You got half devil and half angel in you”) and she ad-libs delightfully, inventing a guy named Ding-Dong whose Rapture vision she recounts: “The mountains are going to go up in big flames. The water’s going to rise in flames. There’s going to be creatures running every which way, some of them burnt, half their wings burnin’. People are going to be screamin’ and howlin’ for help.” Her words lurk beneath idyllic footage of elk herds and clouds, but when the fires and locusts arrive, you start to wonder if maybe Ding-Dong is vindicated.

‘Sometimes the voice is pure hobo poetry, matched to Malick’s Wyeth-esque lonesome houses and fields. “I got to like this farm,” Manz says. “Do anything I want. Roll in the fields. Talk to the wheat patches. When I was sleeping, they’d talk to me. They’d go in my dreams.”

‘“In all my movies I’m just being myself,” she told me. “I just ad-libbed everything. With Days of Heaven, I came in and did all the voice-overs. I made all that stuff up. It wasn’t hard, there wasn’t any pressure. I was just having fun.”’ — Criterion Collection

Excerpt

Excerpt

DAYS OF HEAVEN – Linda Manz Interview

 

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Philip Kaufman The Wanderers (1979)
‘Manz had a small but significant role as Peewee, the girlfriend of a New York street gang member, in Philip Kaufman’s 1979 comedic drama The Wanderers. The film was a solid success with critics and audiences, serving as a springboard for the film’s lead, Ken Wahl. Manz received no such career boost from the film’s good fortune.’ — Awards Daily

Trailer

 

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Stephen Verona Boardwalk (1979)
‘In 1979, Linda Manz appeared in a curio called Boardwalk that starred Ruth Gordon and Lee Strasberg as an old married couple facing urban blight in Coney Island. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it “a movie of unrelieved, unexplored gloom.”’ — Vanity Fair

Trailer

 

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William Graham Orphan Train (1979)
‘In 1854, there were living on the streets of New York City over 10,000 abandoned orphaned children. Out of this desperate situation was born the orphan Train. This is a fictionalized account, based on actual events.’ — MUBI

the entirety

 

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Dennis Hopper Out Of The Blue (1980)
‘With its dark depiction of a family mired in abuse of all kinds, the picture practically fireballed into 1980’s Cannes Film Festival, where astonished, booing audiences ensured it would slip through the net of history in the years to come. If the raging nuclear family at the movie’s core seem hell-bound, Out of the Blue has been obscurity-bound.

‘For those who did manage to see the film, Manz’s performance has been an inspiration, even a lifeline. For Chloë Sevigny, writing on her Instagram last month, Cebe is “arguably one of the best teen actresses ever portrayed on screen”; interviewed by Paper magazine back in 1995, she even said she wanted a career like Manz’s. “As for acting, I’d like to have a career like Linda Manz. She’s my favourite actress. She did three movies and all of them are masterpieces, except for The Wanderers. Now she lives in a trailer park with three or four kids, I think. But I’d rather do that than do ten movies and make millions of dollars and have them all be trashy films.” For Natasha Lyonne, herself a child star, watching Cebe as a teenager helped her feel less alone. “The world at large doesn’t always make sense to me, and there are safe havens,” she told Interview magazine in 2013. “Linda Manz in Out of the Blue is one of them.”’ — AnotherMag

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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E.W. Swackhamer Longshot (1981)
‘You know this 80s cheese: a couple kids… a chance to make it big… a few set-backs… and… tournament-level foosball play. Yep, this is an attempt to invest table soccer with stakes and excitement, but finds the actual action of playing the game completely uninteresting until the very last (ridiculous) shot of the film. Which isn’t really surprising given the material. Fortunately Linda Manz (seeing her in something other than Days of Heaven brought us to Tubi for this) as the 14-year-old foos-shark runaway is pretty great, and the whole comes together as fairly adorable fluff. With a lot of original songs that sound like knock-offs of middle-of-the-road 80s pop (several sung by lead Leif Garret) and, somehow, a surprise appearance by Oingo Boingo.’ — Rock Hyrax

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Gustav Ehmck Mir reicht’s … ich steig aus! (1983)
‘The intelligent Linda, daughter of Joseph and Jane, takes a critical view of her parents’ marriage. Her father’s dominant behavior and her mother’s indifference become so unbearable to her that she decides to run away. She manages to persuade Jane to accompany her.’ — FGC

 

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Harmony Korine Gummo (1997)
‘After Out of the Blue, Manz, at around 20, stopped acting and didn’t return until Harmony Korine cast her as the mother in his surrealist 1997 film Gummo. “I kinda got lost in the shuffle,” she told the Voice in 2011, and claimed at the time she hadn’t seen a movie in 20 years.’ — Jordan Hoffman

Trailer

Gummo Trailer (rare alternate version)

Excerpt

Excerpts (w/ audio review)

 

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David Fincher The Game (1997)
‘Retired actress from the late 70s and early 80s, Linda Manz, had a small part in Fincher’s ‘The Game’ as “Christine’s Roommate Amy”.’ — IMDb

Trailer

 

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Mark Hanlon Buddy Boy (1999)
‘Dark and quirky film about a real introvert that stays home to take care of his mother. He’s extremely lonely and frustrated by his life and spends his time spying on his attractive neighbor. Sounds like a creepy film and it is but Susan Tyrrell who plays his mother is just terrific. Her performance elevates this film from a throw away to a real curio! Tyrrell has made a career out of playing these incredibly offbeat roles and no one does it better. One of the frustrating things about the story is when Emmanuelle Seigner’s character is somehow attracted to Aiden Gillen and he doesn’t seem to appreciate it. Then his paranoia starts to take over and he thinks she’s a cannibal. Film has one of those ambiguous endings and its up to each viewers taste as to how you’ll react to this. But Tyrrell is a standout. Former child actress Linda Manz (Days of Heaven, The Wanderers) appears in the film as well.’ — rosscinema

 

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Nick Ebeling Along for the Ride (2016)
‘Whether or not you’re already a passionate defender of Dennis Hopper’s commercially doomed 1971 Easy Rider follow-up, The Last Movie, which long ago acquired cult status, first-time feature documentary-maker Nick Ebeling’s Along for the Ride will surely make you curious. This rip-roaring tribute to a maverick artist trips along like a surreal odyssey, punctuated by lively reminiscences, choice clips and superb photographic material. The whole enterprise seems remarkably true to the spirit of an anarchic life often driven by booze, blow, women and guns.

‘Blue Velvet gets its due as one of the films that revived Hopper’s career as an actor, with David Lynch praising his work ethic while acknowledging that something inside Hopper made him spark to the character of sexually twisted sociopath Frank Booth: “Dennis was Frank. He knew all about Frank.” But of the handful of later films Hopper made as director, only 1980’s Out of the Blue receives much attention, via recollections from Linda Manz, who played his daughter.’ — Variety

Trailer

 

 

*

p.s. RIP Vin Scully. Genius. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Thanks, pal! I’m sure I’ll be passing along what’s going on with the film when it goes on. Túró Rudi sounds extremely interesting. I’m going to do a google search and see if there’s anywhere in Paris where I score one. Surely there’s some Hungarian-inclined patisserie out there. Yeah, I reminder when I was hypnotised, my friends would say, you know, ‘Sing a song’ or ‘Do a striptease’ or whatever, and I was just, like, ‘No.’ I remember that when hypnotised, I had no sense of humor. I’m usually kind of humorous guy in person, but under hypnosis I was very calm and robotic. The memory thing was weird. Also one time my hypnotist friend gave me a post-hypnotic suggestion. It was the late 60s, and he said that when I heard a song by King Crimson playing I would think it was Pink Floyd. (I knew those bands really well and wouldn’t have mistaken them.) Then, sure enough, later on when I was post-hypnotised, he played King Crimson’s ’21st Century Schizoid Man’ and what I heard was Pink Floyd’s ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and identified the song as that. Strange. Do you know anyone who’s had a tongue split? I had a friend who had that done back during the ‘Modern Primitive’ fad in the ’90s, and, boy, is he sorry now. Apparently you cant really undo that modification. It’s going to be 36 degrees here today so for the next 24 love can be anything he fucking as long as he’s ice cold and cuddles with me, G. ** Misanthrope, Glad you enjoyed. He’s great. Mm, I suppose it’s not impossible that Alexander’s secretly buried there. That sure would completely alter history yet again. And, let’s face it, history is starting to get a little predictable until you’re a conspiracy theorist. How or why did you get the nickname Dodgie? With an ‘ie’ even. ** JJ Stick, Hi, welcome! Thank you for coming in. Me too, re: Mathews. What’s your favorite of his? Mine kind of shifts around but fairly often it’s ‘The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium’ for some reason. Take care! ** _Black_Acrylic, Yes, indeed, I agree. I’ve never heard of ‘The Voids’. Huh. I’ll seek it out, sounds fun. Thanks, buddy. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Well, right now we’re about to make cuts and trims to our budget to get it down the amount we have. We have to cut 50k out, which is quite a lot considering our small budget. When we have our final budget, we’ll know what we can pay people and can start hiring them. Then Zac and I will go to LA, either in late August or very early September, and do early pre-prod work. There are some people we’ve Zoom auditioned for the crew who seem really promising, so we’ll meet with them. Same with some potential actors. We need to nail down the film’s main location where 85% of the film takes place. There are prospects, but we need to visit them to be sure. So that’s next, and hopefully by the end of that trip we’ll be at least fairly prepared. Then we’ll travel back and forth to LA a few times to work and nail down the cast and rehearse, etc. before we shoot the film probably right after Xmas. Thanks for asking, man. Yeah, I cant say Lovato holds even the tiniest interest for me, but they sound very market savvy. Interesting to write (and read) about at least. ** Okay. I’ve never done a Linda Manz post, and obviously I should, so I did, and now I have, and there you go. See you tomorrow.

 

‘Reviewing Harry Mathews is an onerous task, for the review is a taxonomical genre, and Mathews defies classification. Perhaps it is best not to assess his writing but to process it. One could leaf through it using one of his own devices, such as “Mathews’s Algorithm” – a literary machine he invented which recombines given elements according to a simple, elegant procedure. Indeed, Mathews’s texts- which include Oulipian exercises, poetry, translations, reviews, short fictions, memoir, and novels – read as if generated by an algorithm with a few bugs still in it. Mathews has characterized his singular prose style as “thorny,” “cranky,” and “stony.” Yet this writing also possesses a ruthless efficiency; Mathews insists that “in fact it just fits the space it’s taking up. I’m obsessed with getting rid of words.” The resultant work bears traces of an Al Gore rhythm – somewhat monotonic, deceptively bland – but it always remains decidedly, designedly off-kilter. These novels (Tlooth, Cigarettes, The Journalist), which have recently resurfaced thanks to Dalkey Archive Press, unfold in sequences of mechanical, nearly inevitable configurations, while remaining utterly unpredictable.

‘It seems fitting that Mathews’s membership in the Oulipo has always constrained the reception of his work, because even though Cigarettes is Mathew’s “only ‘purely Oulipian novel'”, these books bear shifting, intriguing relations to constraint-based writing in ways that illuminate the very idea of such a practice. Mathews’s work should be situated just to the side of Oulipo, a little “off” from the world of constraints, because it combines an abrupt exactitude with total idiosyncrasy. This merging of the quantitative and the quirky in Mathews’s writing was noted aptly by his famous friend, Georges Perec:

There is something fairylike in Harry Mathews’s novels – I use the word not only in reference to fairy tales (the heroes of these stories attain their goals by means of ordeals similar to those of fairy tales) but to what are known as the “fairy” types of chess, in which players agree to use irregular chessboards, or follow unusual rules (in “Marseille” chess, each player makes two moves at a time), or dispose of new kinds of chessmen (the unicorn, the amazon, the black knight). It is undeniable that the first impression given by Mathews’s books is that of a narrative world determined by rules from another planet, rules that with agreeable liveliness undermine the conventions surrounding our concepts of fiction in general and the novel in particular.

‘Perec’s characterization certainly fits Tlooth to the t not found in Mathews’s name. The blurb on the Paris Review edition deemed the novel a “picaresque account of a bizarre quest for revenge,” but the conventions tagged there explode in a display of discontinuity and incongruity. The tale is told by a seemingly male, then revealed-to-be female, finally possibly androgynous narrator, who seeks revenge on Dr. Roak, who amputated two fingers from the narrator’s left hand, thereby ending his/her career as a violinist. Tlooth begins with a baseball game in a Russian prison camp; after Dr. Roak is released, the narrator tracks her through an otherworldly rendering of the world: from the Russian camp to Kabul to Venice to Milan to India to Morocco to Rome to France. The globe and novel alike become a labyrinth worthy of Daedalus.

‘A synecdoche for the text so viewed is found in the elaborate artifice of Hapi, the vehicle entered in the “‘home-made animal’ race” which enables the narrator’s escape from the camp. The shell of Hapi has a mock-gnostic iconic inscription on the front, a “textual maze” on the right side, a diamond-shaped maze on the back, and “the true text of the maze” on the left side – a text whose directions for navigating the maze conclude, “Then, no matter which turning you took, and it did not matter which one you took, you will have reached the entrance, for the labyrinth leads nowhere but out of itself.” Like the novel, the vehicle is a contrivance built out of operations: superimposing graphic plans and textual instructions on one another yields an itinerary – in the sense of both a journey and its record – which remains identical only to itself. Just as the labyrinth’s user’s manual only sends you back to the labyrinth itself, the plot is resolved only inconclusively, and the text ends with a stark image of shells and rockets exploding: “The labyrinth of their colors sets a dense clarity against the blankness of the night.” Labyrinthine clarity set against blankness: precisely the type of textual configuration Mathews scratches on the empty page.

‘Perec imagines Mathews’s novels being determined by “rules from another planet.” However, the itinerary here seems shaped neither by an alien nor an Oulipian procedure, but after the manner of a Raymond Rousselian textus ex machina, where some association or pun or allusion moves the text from one site/cite to the next. The generative principle brings to mind a scene from Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual: Winckler wants to sort a collection of hotel labels from around the world into some distinct order; having given up chronology and geography as constructive principles, Winckler “would have liked …to link each label to the next, but each time in respect of something else.” Whatever the algorithm underlying Tlooth may have been, it no longer exists; Mathews has admitted that a “hidden pattern” underlies most of his work, but “once the work is written, the pattern becomes irrelevant and of no use in reading the work…it is in no sense the point of the work”. Retrospective detection of the algorithm would prove futile; we would end up like Winckler, who, looking over his labels, realizes that “if you leave the labels unsorted and take two at random, you can be sure they’ll have at least three things in common”.

‘Necessarily ignorant of the novel’s constructive principles, critics seek to categorize Tlooth. For instance, Eric Mottram has compared the novel to Poe’s Pym and Brockden Brown in its use of false documents, puzzles, diagrams, and quasi-learned allusions, and because “the prison/labyrinth/puzzle trope is so fundamental.” Re-viewing it now, it could also be seen as a cross between The Crying of Lot 49 and Wim Wenders’s Until The End of the World – a nested set of stories disrupting a quest underwritten by a revenge plot which wanders across the globe.’ — Paul A. Harris

 

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Further

Harry Mathews Site
‘Tlooth’ @ goodreads
A neverending challenge to the reader: the originality of Harry Mathews.
A Conversation with Harry Mathews By John Ash
The 2462nd greatest fiction book of all time
Harry Mathews, The Art of Fiction No. 191
Harry Mathews’s Al Gore Rhythms: A Re-viewing of Tlooth
Fearful Symmetries
On Harry Mathews
The Many False Floors of Harry Mathews
An Interview with Harry Mathews
His Own Man | Harry Mathews
Bringing Harry Mathews to PennSound (and you)
Agent Provocateur: Harry Matthews with Johannah Rogers
Harry Mathews – – The Reading Experience
Our Man in the Underworld
Always at play: an appreciation of the late author Harry Mathews
Harry Mathews: man of mystery and lover of words and language

 

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Oulipo: Official Group Portrait (1985)

 

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Extras

Harry Mathews La Traduction

A Tribute To Harry Mathews | The New School

A reenactment of the introduction to Harry Mathews’ novel Tlooth

Reminiscing about Harry Mathews’s The Conversions, Tlooth, The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, and Oulipo Compendium.

 

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Harry Mathews interviewed by Lynne Tillman
from Bomb

 

Lynne Tillman I’m intrigued by your idea that “reading is an act of creation for which the writer provides the meaning.” I wonder how this directly affects your writing?

Harry Mathews I don’t really know that it does affect it, except in some mysterious way that comes out of my experience as a reader. I know, as a reader, that language really doesn’t work representationally. And that it’s very hard to get away from the idea that it is some kind of representation. I think that probably I only can make use of ideas like that once I’m in the rewriting stage.

LT An active reader allows a writer. . .

HM It gets a writer off the hook of subject matter. Many writers think they’re not being significant or important unless they’re writing about things which are that week or year supposed to be significant. One decade it’ll be politics, the next, something else. We have a tendency to feel that the subject matter ought to be big, and often a “big” subject may not be appropriate for a particular writer. The point is that you can write wonderfully about anything. It’s very hard, unless one takes a lot of time as I did in that essay, to show how that works. But, for instance, right now we’re talking about a particular subject, and I seem to be communicating to you about that subject. By the end of this conversation you may notice that something has happened that has nothing to do with the subject. Probably what really will have happened is some kind of alteration or transformation in the relation between us. We seem to have been having this discussion where I’ve been talking about my writing or whatever you choose to ask me about, but in fact something else has been going on. I think it’s the same in books. Writers should go with what subject matter appeals to them, with what tickles them because that probably will be the kind of subject matter that will give them most access to the process of discovery; of what they are, or the world is, or language is. You must have had that experience as a writer yourself. As you rewrite something, nothing in substance is changed and yet it’s not just that you’re making it neater or more elegant. It’s become something totally different in the third draft. And, in fact, that’s what you wanted to say. Even though all the material was there in the first draft, and you got it all down, it wasn’t doing what you wanted it to do. Rewriting is so extraordinary, it’s where writing, not always, but very often, takes place. That’s when the writer becomes the first reader. Becomes a creator. If the reader is the only creator, the writer gets to share and in fact participates in that act of creation in the stage of rewriting. That’s when the writer can play creator, too. The old idea is hard to get rid of, that the writers have something to say and the readers are there to get it. I don’t think things work that way at all.

LT In that sense, the author has always been dead.

HM That’s right. There’s never been any authors. There have only been readers. The authors are first readers.

LT The characters Morris Romsen, the art critic, and Lewis, the would-be writer, have, in Cigarettes, a physical sado-masochistic relationship that parallels, in my mind, the relationship of Allan and Owen in which the two men are playing elaborate games with each other that mean, somehow, affection and attention.

HM I always love to have people find parallels like that. You mentioned earlier that 63 was the reverse of 36. This is news to me, and I’m sure that one could discover an interesting numerical system going throughout the entire book which would also be news to me. It reminds me of my great friend Georges Perec’s explanation of Tlooth, my second novel. When he translated it into French, he imagined a semantic palindrome running through it. That is to say, some kind of hidden series of statements that could be read forwards and backwards and that he thought determined the course of the book. One piece of evidence he produced was a switch of the letters “m” and “n” in one chapter: bombe atonique (a soporific spray) and formication (meaning ant activity). I told him, you’re absolutely right. But I had been totally unaware of doing this. Things like that make me feel that whatever I’m doing must be right, at least as it allows this kind of connections or similarities to manifest themselves. That’s a sign there’s a whole lot of thought going on of which I’m unaware.

LT Tlooth seemed the most overtly political of all your works, with its sects, groups, with Jacksongrad being the name of the camp, like a play on Stalingrad, or on a concentration camp or a gulag. But the book begins with a baseball game that also places it in and refers to the United States, spreading the political spectrum left and right.

HM I’m sure politics is at least implicitly involved, but really the substratum of those first three novels is a religious one. Obviously, in The Conversions where there’s a sort of white goddess legend. She’s black actually but it’s still a matriarchal goddess cult. But even in Tlooth religion is lurking in all the corners.

LT The names of the sects, Fideist, Americanist, Defective Baptist, Resurrectionist.

HM That’s right. Elsewhere there are various forms of Christianity, including the Nestorian heresy, which is described in the chapter “Spires and Squares.” And then in The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, my third novel, there is Buddhism as well as Catholicism. Certainly politics are present too—it was the middle of the ’60s, after all.

LT I thought about religion in regard to Tlooth and then in relation to your work generally. I began to think you were saying that faith in language, as a way to communicate, is like faith in religion. That you have to believe in language, you have faith that you can communicate, even if you’re not really able to communicate, as you have in a religion.

HM I’m very moved by that. Did you know that was how Perec felt?

LT Really?

HM I’m glad to know that I ultimately agree with him, having had many arguments with him about the question of how communication actually works in language, of whether communication is possible at all. For Perec, writing was a kind of salvation. It was justification by works. You know that expression, much discussed during the Reformation? And Perec, I think that if he hadn’t felt that writing was a vocation in the absolute sense of the word, a calling, like a priest, he would have died even sooner that he did.

LT When did he die?

HM In 1982.

LT Perec was, like you, a member of the OuLiPo. Could you say what it is and give its history?

HM Thank you. Anything else?

LT You may want it to be the last question.

HM Well, you’re opening—it’s not a can of worms, on the contrary—it’s a jewel case full of pearls but there is so much to say about the OuLiPo, especially in connection with Perec, who introduced me to it and through whom I was elected to the group.

LT Who started it?

HM It was started by Raymond Queneau, who is by now fairly well known in America in translation, and Francois LeLionnais, a great friend of Queneau’s and like him, very interested in mathematics, an extraordinarily versatile and brilliant man. The OuLiPo was created to satisfy their mutual needs—LeLionnais’ case, to form a workshop of experimental literature, in Queneau’s case, to carry him through to the end of this extraordinary book he was writing called A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. The book consists of only ten sonnets in which any first line can replace any other first line, any fifth line can replace any other fifth line and so forth which means that it’s 10 to the 14th power, there being 14 lines in a sonnet.

LT Because of the permutations.

HM The creation of the OuLiPo accompanied his bringing that work to a conclusion. The OuLiPo has had as its purpose the invention and rediscovery of what the French call contraintes and we call, for want of a better word, constrictive forms. Rediscovery of forms like the palindrome, the lipogram. The palindrome is something you can read backwards and forwards, the lipogram is writing in which you leave out one or more letters. In both these cases Perec did the most extraordinary work. He wrote a palindrome which is several thousand characters long, in which he describes Perec writing a palindrome—he was a real virtuoso in his language. And he wrote this extraordinary novel called La Disparition, “The Disappearance,” but it can’t be translated that way into English because, like the rest of the book, the title excludes any word that contains the letter “e,” a letter that is even more frequent in French than it is in English. Leaving out the letter “e” would mean that the opening sentence of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past — Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure would have only two words left. Not only did Perec do this tour de force writing without using the most frequent letter in the language, he also turned this deprivation into the subject of his novel and wrote about it brilliantly and funnily and entertainingly.

LT That’s an amazing feat. From what I’ve read about Perec, his life was forged from deprivation, a World War II experience, parents killed in concentration camps, loss of native country. So that absence and lack were central to his existence, and his choosing to write a book that leaves out something essential like the letter “e” parallels his being left without parents and country.

HM You got it. Instead of having to deal with this anguishing problem of having had his tongue cut out by history, he deliberately gave up an element which makes writing normally easy, and imposed an extremely harsh rule on himself which he then was able to triumph over. He did it so well that some critics didn’t notice. But they weren’t very attentive critics. Let me add that in the OuLiPo we also invented a great many forms of our own.

 

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Book

Harry Mathews Tlooth
Dalkey Archive Press

‘This novel begins in a Russian prison camp at a baseball game featuring the defective Baptists versus the Fideists. There is a plot (of sorts), one of revenge surrounding a doctor who, in removing a bone spur from our narrator, manages to amputate a ring and index finger, a significant surgical error considering that the narrator is, or was, a violinist. When Dr. Roak is released from prison, our narrator escapes in order to begin the pursuit, and thus begins a digressive journey from Afghanistan to Venice, then on to India and Morocco and France. All of this takes place amid Mathews’s fictional concern and play with games, puzzles, arcana, and stories within stories.’ — Dalkey Archive Press

Excerpts

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Long story short, the needed amount of funds were not raised, as we expected, but we have just enough to make the film with some painful cutbacks and much more difficulty, so that’s what we’re going to do since we have no other choice. At least that awful fundraising period is finally over, and we can start working on the film, and onwards and upwards. Are there Hungarian food items that don’t really reach outside the country that you think are pretty great? I wonder if there’s a Hungarian grocery story in Paris? Oh, when I was a teenager, my friends and I discovered that I was unusually susceptible to being hypnotised, so, when we got really bored, a friend who knew hypnosis would sometimes hypnotise me to entertain everyone. The thing is that it does have a real effect. It does feel odd, and you know you’re hypnotised, but you don’t change your personality or anything other than being more passive, and you won’t and don’t do things that you wouldn’t do normally. So it’s not like being hypnotised would actually turn some guy into a masochistic sex slut or anything like that. I think people who say it works that way are just people who use being hypnotised as a cover for doing things they like but are too shy or embarrassed to do normally. The most interesting thing for me was how it effected my memory. Like someone would read a list of, like, 100 numbers to me once, and then, hours later, after I wasn’t hypnotised anymore, someone would ask me what the numbers were, and I could immediately rattle them off in perfect order. Things like that. Nagy Zoárd is a nice name. At least to look at, and I’m sure it sounds luscious. Love as a Metalhead twink living in Tehran who is the lead singer of an Iron Maiden cover band called Iran Maiden, G. ** Billy, Hi. Yeah, like I told Dominik, I only know hypnosis from the hypnotised side, and it just seems like a parlour trick cheap fun sort of deal. Recon manages the neat trick of being hell and really boring at the same time. Which isn’t really such a dichotomy now that I think about it. Ha ha, I’ll watch that ‘Egress’ video thing when I’m done here. Curious. Thanks! Big up to you! ** David Ehrenstein, Ha ha, well, that was a most unexpected Ehrenstein-ish video side trip. Nice. I too, of course, thought of ‘Some Trees’ and almost tried to find a way to get Ashbery in there. ** Tosh Berman, Me neither, but it does put tragedy in my heart when trees get cut down. They become, like, friends or something at that moment. You can see the Observatory from your window! I can walk to the Observatory from my LA pad. Sure, I end up there a wheezing, profusely sweating mess, but I can do it. ** Bill, Yes, Ted! Wait, you don’t like your butt vibrated?! Zoom with you at the new time of tomorrow! ** _Black_Acrylic, Not a one? Not even distantly out a window? Man, we gotta get out of that place. Keep me posted, for sure. Crunching time with my mind. ** RYAN, Hi, Ryan. No sweat, time is relative here. Well, not for me, I guess, but otherwise … I’m sure your interview will go spectacularly today, but luck you need it. And hook us up when it’s ready to be imbibed. ‘Hollaback Girl’! I have a guilty love of that song. Wait, there’s nothing to be guilty about. It was a killer single. Interested to hear that, duh. Everyone, You want to near a new song by the mighty RYAN that he compares to ‘Hollaback Girl’? Surely you must. Here. The film is just exiting the endless fundraising phase and about to enter pre-production phase, which is good news. I’m better now that the fundraising is over. I’m fine. I’m okay. Love back, naturally. ** Svartvit, Hey! Good to see you! Oh, nice, about the Penone show. What’s the current show at your museum? Did you already tell what you museum you work at? If so, I’m spacing. I’ll go find the Giacometti tree. Thanks a lot. Excellent day to you! ** Steve Erickson, We didn’t actually have a meeting given the volatile atmosphere, but we got a report, and, as I told Dominick, we have just enough to make the film. It’s going to be tough, but we can do it. So, considering the situation, that’s good news under duress, very good news even. Thank you for asking. Everyone, Harken! Here’s Mr. Erickson: ‘Gay City News published my latest music round-up, covering They Hate Change, Perfume Genius, and King Princess, over the weekend. I’d hoped to write about both Demi Lovato’s new album and a Coil reissue in August’s, but I haven’t been able to get a hold of either yet.’ Thanks, man. ** Misanthrope, Not even a fake obelisk in the town square? Ah, who cares, right? Although the citizens not dressing in Colonial garb is a bit unforgivable. Yes, I’ve seen no let up in the incautious hunger for sex, at least as expressed online. Odd. Dude, I don’t know how you can call yourself a man if you haven’t drunk a megaton of piss. Or maybe you’re like me and don’t call yourself a man. ** Right. Today the blog spotlights a wonderful novel by the great Harry Mathews, and you should check it out, I’m serious. See you tomorrow.