‘With Christine Brooke-Rose’s last novel, with the nouveau novelist reflecting the old, and vice versa, Brooke-Rose has found her paradoxical form. The death of the author is proof of the life. “La representation est la morte.” Brooke-Rose quotes Derrida in her essay “Id is, is id?”. Of course, Life, End of begins its final “representation” in an intimate impersonality, a tonal state of oxymoron, an absence of presence. Someone is not looking in a mirror. Or rather, a mirror is not being looked in. Instead, “the head top leans against the bathroom mirror so that the looking glass becomes the feeling glass. But what does it feel? The position is for body balance during the brushing of teeth and the washing of face neck arms and torso”. A stream of consciousness at once acute and numbed tells us what it means to get up and get dressed with great difficulty. A page later in the flow of it, the question about feeling returns: “but who feels what?”. Another page on, “does steel or glass or napkin or ground or earth or universe feel? Humans invent gods of various kinds to think so”. A meditative mind, connected and disparate, ponders and enacts what it means to feel in the light of an absence of feeling, to see the self in the light of an absence of self.

‘The story is very simple. A woman (a “doctor in mere Language and Literature” – a character? a narrator? the author? all three?) is getting older. Friends visit, people care, or don’t. Things worsen. She has a couple of falls; “the author collapses, into the character again”. A table with wheels is bought, to make things easier, and it causes a raft of new difficulties. She likes to write, “just for fun, for therapy, for the happiness of wordplay, the deep joy of sentences creating other sentences”, but writing is getting more and more difficult as time passes.

‘A play of light and shadow, depending on the time of day, projects the protean faces of the great artists, thinkers and mythical characters who have been part of the woman’s life on to a stone wall outside. Mozart, Beethoven, Athena and Christ are nothing but shadow and light on stone. Nothing much happens, other than “the swift dismantling of a lifetime’s independence”. It feels epic. In a flurry of hilarious and crushing selfishnesses and unlooked-for generosities, the world closes in – “the armchair, the world” – and the old person fluctuates between being just another dismissible and invisible old person and a crucial centre of consciousness.

‘A “hip-bone” used to balance a body carrying a tray across a room becomes a vital means of “articulation”. But articulation is going, the way of all flesh “‘even languages die, like species, thousands per century” – and nothing is simply personal in this helpless leave-taking, because at all points the meditative narrator/non-narrator comments on a mirrored set of goodbyes and hierarchies in the larger world. A bigger dying is happening: “so the world doffs its ozone hat and says goodbye”. The import is much wider, the personal is always political: “modern powers, like old monarchies, don’t hear the people till they flood the streets of the whole world like blood in blocked arteries. Can we marginalise three-quarters of the world population and get away with it? Can we imagine the other?”.

‘The narratorial consciousness, daunted, sharp and utterly contemporary, comments on its own fading progress, on the rhetorical closedness of contemporary rhetoric, and then on the empire-building acts of the “Unilateral States of America”. Life, End of is about all sorts of critical reductions. In a discussion about what creates an “. . .” and a “you”, and what it means to write anything for publication in an era when no one is much interested in anything other than “the author’s tooth-ache, sex-life, quarter-hour of glory” at the expense of being interested in “the writing of fiction and its problems”, it critiques its own readers, in all their possible generosities and closednesses. Or is this, after all, only a story of social graces? Its increasingly likeable, grumpy old lady holds forth.

‘Good manners are timeless, spaceless, classless: simply the ability to imagine the other. As an intelligence officer learns to do, if efficiently backed and not corrupted, experiencing a whole war from the enemy viewpoint. And as a novelist does all the time, creating characters. And actors.

‘In a fusion of weariness and sprightliness, Life, End of becomes its own thesis on creativity in action. It suggests at all points that really, creativity lies in imaginative selflessness, in an openness to connectivity and empathy or “the ability to imagine the other”. The “performance” here, given with a formal distance reminiscent of Greek tragedy, is one of voice and inferred response to voice. It is a question of dialogue. “Who’s talking to whom?” The narratorial voice is a fine creation, funny and “intelligentle”, bolshy and consumed by a fetish for identification and categorization, which it knows is its own doom.

‘It divides people into T. F.s (True Friends) or O. P.s (Other People, or “Old People, Over-sensitive People, Otiose, Obdurate, Obsolete people . . . Omega people. Omega. The end of the alphabet. The end of life”). In this last fictional Brooke-Rose opposition, “other” becomes the opposite of “true”, and anyone un-able to be empathetic is inviting a falseness. This “ability to imagine” is pressed formally even further, when the reader is asked, politely of course, to enter (and therefore create) a lived text -via writing which is as fluid and closed/ open as another’s thought process. In fact, the reader of Life, End of is always being conjured up and interrogated, simply because this novel’s narratorial self is such a measured avoidance of the first-person. Its mode is stubbornly, ingeniously immersed in the difficulties of grammatical and real-life passivity.

‘It never simply says, “I can’t pick up an object”, but instead up-ends such a structure: “objects also have trouble being picked up”.

‘This asks the reader both to accept this passivity and to be active, to make the personal (and by inference larger-than-personal) connection, to allow for all that goes on slalom-like between intelligent people, all that is written, read, sung, pictured, thought. A discourse that zigzags like blood pressure, changing registers, personal one moment, metaphysical the next, philosophical, catty, humourous (sic), technical on the disciplines shared, frivolous, rhetorical, witty, political, historical, personal again.

‘It is up to its reader to notice how words and images accrue meaning in context, and how the recurring image of a mirror, or “mouroir” might reflect into and out of the text, with “old age a mirror of childhood . . . the child trips towards its mother, the old towards Mother Nature, looking into a glass darkly”.

‘Life, End of is rarely dark. As you might expect with Brooke-Rose, it is gravely playful and connective, so that even at its most hopeless, even when it most closely courts an end, it refuses its own darkness. Its end is plain and lyrical. “The time, the time for everything is gone.” But the synapse connections, from word to word, word to book, book to reader, person to person, never actually stop. How can a discussion of the removal of the self – which is what this novel is, formally and substantively – be so full of the evocation of self? How can a novel about ends be so full of overtures, so that almost every unexpected connection between a word or a thought, a phrase or a sentence, becomes a possible new start? Is it possible to outface meaninglessness with so much determined meaning? And who dies first, the character or the author? “Ah, identity again”, the narratorial voice sighs, caught up in the dialogue between life force and death force, exhausted and relieved. In the play of the mind regardless, in the very recording of the process of dying, through this lovely, playful, heartbreaking, wise, angry and endlessly moving novel which even in its last line is still punning on language, literature and ends, there is, of course, an ending, and yet there is no such thing as death.’ — Ali Smith

 

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Further

‘Christine Brooke-Rose: the great British experimentalist you’ve never heard of’
‘On Christine Brooke-Rose’ @ Bookforum
The Christine Broke-Rose Papers
CB-R @ goodreads
‘Flinch Wince Jerk Shirk’
‘The life and work of the late, great experimental writer, Christine Brooke-Rose’
‘Where Do We Go from Here?’
‘THE CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE SOCIETY SYMPOSIUM’
‘WHOSE AFRAYED OF CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE?’
‘The Criticism of Christine Brooke-Rose’
‘The Lunatic Fringe’, by Christine Brooke-Rose
‘R.I.P. Christine Brooke-Rose’
‘Christine Brooke-Rose, for whom Cooking Metaphors Don’t Fry’
‘Literature’s Ghosts: Realism and Innovation in the Novels of Christine Brooke-Rose’
Audio: ‘Red Rubber Gloves’, by Christine Brooke-Rose
‘The Secret Code Language of Bright Kids’
‘Place and Space in Christine Brooke-Rose’s “Life, End of”‘
Buy ‘Life, End Of’

 

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Extras

Manuscript for Christine Brooke-Rose’s ‘Xorandor’

 

Pages from Christine Brooke-Rose’s ‘Thru’

 

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Interview
from The Review of Contemporary Fiction

 

Q: In your essay “Ill Iterations,” which you wrote for “Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction,” you mention the difficulties experimental writers face when they are male, but you say also that the differences are compounded when the experimental writer happens to be a female. Will you talk about those difficulties for the woman writer?

CBR: Yes, although it took a long time to become aware of them. Once in Paris, quite a long time ago, Helene Cixous rang me up and asked me to write something about the difficulties I’ve had as a woman writer. Naively, I said, “Well, I haven’t had any difficulties as a I “woman” writer. I’ve had difficulties that “any” writer would have; can I write about that?” And she said, “Oh, no.” She wanted something feminist. I was a bit antifeminist in those days, in the early 1970s. I didn’t consciously feel that I had had any difficulties. My later revision of that feeling came from genuine experience. As I look back over my career I realize that, in fact, I did have difficulties, but I took them for granted, as part of the nature of things. From the moment I went experimental, however, when I wrote Out, and my then-publishers couldn’t understand it and turned it down, I did actually start having difficulties. And when I wrote that essay for you, I started looking back and thinking about it, trying to fathom it out, and I became aware that the woman experimental writer has more difficulties than the man experimental writer, in the sense that, however much men have accepted women’s writing, there is still this basic assumption, which is unconscious, that women cannot create new forms. They can imitate others, they can imitate their little lives, tell their love stories and their difficulties and so on, and they do it extremely well. I’m not downgrading that kind of writing. But if by any chance they dare to experiment, then they are imitating a male movement, and usually one that’s already dead. In my case, I always get the label “nouveau roman” in English because “nouveau roman” is, from the English point of view, safely dead and no one talks about it anymore. In other words, all one is capable of as a woman is to do what the men do, and not so well. There is an unconscious refusal, really, to look at what I’m doing in any kind of detail. Whereas men experimenters or innovators of any kind do get that sort of attention.

Q: What does the phrase “utterly other discourse” from “Amalgamemnon” mean for you? Do you feel that you are writing “utterly other discourses”?

CBR: In Amalgamemnon, it doesn’t actually mean that. It doesn’t refer to the writing, it refers to the woman reading and thinking quite other things until she has to switch back to talking to the man. In fact, though, I do feel that my writing is differen
t. I haven’t actually seen other writing quite like mine, but it is very difficult for me to say how “other” it is, or even whether it’s any good. I can’t really judge it, so I can’t really answer that questions. I do what I want to do.

Q: But you did make a conscious decision at one point in your career to write the indeterminate novel, rather than something realistic?

CBR: What a strange opposition. The realistic novel has its own indeterminacies. But anyway, it didn’t happen that way at all. It was much more negative than that. I was simply dissatisfied with what I was doing. I had written four novels, which are really quite traditional, satirical, comic novels. I did experiment with time in one of them, which was written backwards, for instance, so that in each chapter the hero gets younger and younger. But that was still classical irony. They were basically traditional modern novels, if I can use such a phrase, in that the main concern was, like most novels, epistemological, concerned with reality and illusion. But I felt it was too easy. It was great fun, but it wasn’t what I wanted. Originally, when I was very young, I used to write poetry every day, but I soon discovered that I was not a poet; but that urge to write poetry . . .

Q: But you are a poet.

CBR: Perhaps, but I had to get around to it in a very different way. I then thought I had found myself as a novelist, but after those four early novels I realized it still wasn’t what I wanted. So eventually—yes, I do now write very poetic novels, more deeply poetic at any rate than the poems I was writing every day. At the time of this dissatisfaction, I suppose it was Nathalie Sarraute’s The Age of Suspicion, and her putting the modern novel in question, which was the first turning point for me, much more so than her novels, for although I like them very much, I can’t say there’s a direct influence of Nathalie Sarraute on what I write. Whereas Robbe-Grillet did have a direct influence, at least on Out. But I soon got out of it. So it wasn’t a decision to write indeterminate novels as such. It was simply a decision not to go on writing as I used to write. But the other thing that happened was much more important. I had a very serious illness, lost a kidney and had a very long convalescence. I fell into a semi-trancelike state for a long time. I was very much thinking of death as the meaning of life. And I began to write Out, which is a very “sick” novel. I think one can feel that. I imagine a time when the whites are discriminated against; the whole color bar is reversed. But the reason the whites are discriminated against is because they are sick, dying from this mysterious radiation disease to which the colored people are more immune. My protagonist is a sick old man who cannot get a job and cannot remember his previous status. This exactly reproduced the state of illness that I was in, so in that sense of protection it was still a very mimetic novel. But I wasn’t consciously trying to do anything different. I started writing a sentence and fell back on the pillow exhausted. I didn’t really know where I was going, and it took me a long time to write it. I was groping. So I don’t think it was a conscious decision. But then with Such I really took off on my own. I don’t think there’s any more influence of Robbe-Grillet on Such. I would say that Such is my first really “Me” novel, where I don’t owe anything to anyone else.

Q: Can you characterize that “Me-ness”?

CBR: I think Such is more imaginative, for one thing. It’s still, of course, concerned with death since the man dies and is brought back to life. Again, I don’t explain why. I get much more interested, in fact, in the impact of language on the imagination. I suppose it’s really with Between that I discovered what I could do with language. With Such it’s still a fairly straightforward use of language, but very much in another world with this slow return to reality as the man comes back to life, but he then sees the stars as radiation. And having hit on that idea but not really knowing where I was going, I then had to do a lot of work, learn something about astrophysics, for example, since I was using it as a metaphor for the world. It’s in Such that I discovered that jargon, of whatever kind, has great poetry. For instance if you take a scientific law and use it literally, it becomes a metaphor. Of course, this is a schoolboy joke. If the teacher says, “Weight consists of the attraction between two bodies, ” everybody giggles. But if you take it further and use more complicated astrophysical laws about bouncing signals on the moon, for instance, to express the distance between people, then it becomes a very active metaphor. Yet it’s treated as ontological in the world of the fiction, like a sunset or a tree. So this sort of thing, you see, isn’t a conscious decision, it’s a discovery.

Q: Is that how you would define the experimental novel?

CBR: Yes, in a way. People often use the term “experimental novel” to mean just something peculiar, or as a genre in itself (on the same level as “realistic” or “fantastic” or “romantic” or “science” fiction). But to experiment is really not knowing where you’re going and discovering. Experimenting with language, experimenting with form and discovering things, and sometimes you might get it wrong and it just doesn’t come off. When I discovered that there is great beauty in technical language (and this comes into its own in Thru where I actually use critical jargon as poetry), I also discovered that there’s beauty and humor in confronting different discourses, jostling them together, including, for instance, computer language. In Such it’s astrophysics and in Between it’s all the languages, the lunatic, empty speech-making of different congresses, political, sociological, literary and so on, and of course, actual languages, different languages, all jostled together, since my protagonist, who’s a simultaneous interpreter, is always in different countries. Discourse became my subject matter. So discovery is one meaning of “experimental,” and this would be, to answer your earlier question, my “utterly other discourse,” where the actual language is different from the language you and I are using now, or that I find in other books. The second meaning is to see how far I can go with language, with vocabulary and syntax, and this is much more conscious. In Between, for example, a sentence can continue correctly, but by the end of it we are elsewhere in time and space. And I chose an imposed constraint, not using the verb “to be,” just as in Amalgamemnon I decided to use only non-realizing tenses and moods like the future, the conditional, the imperative.

Q: Your work, for many readers, is extremely demanding. Although novels like Amalgamemnon provide realistic details as a frame for the abstract elements, it’s often difficult to separate them. In fact, the text seems quite porous as the abstract and realistic commingle. One must read in a new way, so to speak.

CBR: I don’t apologize for that at all. One of my aims in writing the way I do is to teach people to read. They have forgotten how to read. I want what Barthes calls the writerly text as opposed to the readerly text—the readerly text is the consumer product, which can be flicked through. I’m not against that—to read on the train or in the bath. But where is the pleasure of reading if, in fact, you’re just going to skip through description? The very word “redundancy” comes back here because, as you know, structuralists did a lot of work on this—what is the description, what is the effect of the real, how is the effect of the real provoked, and so on. There is a vast amount of redundancy in the realistic novel which the reader skips. That was the point, swelling the detail to fantasy pitch, the fetish object. But today people get that from other media and read just for the plot, for the event, and they don’t really want to know what the writer is doing. I think this is a tremendous loss. So what Barthes calls the writerly text is the text which the reader is writing with the writer—I want to share my writing with the reader. Of course, that means the reader has to wake up and see what I’m doing. All the writers of the postmodern movement are doing this; I’m not the only one. Many people say that my novels are difficult; indeed, a lot of people complain about it, but when my fans say that, it’s a compliment. They go back and see that I’ve done this, or that. They say my books are slow reading, and consider this a pleasure. If I achieve that, then I am very pleased.

Q: Your two most recent works, Amalgamemnon and Xorandor, seem, in many ways, more readable than some of the earlier works—also innovative, but more accessible. Are you doing this intentionally?

CBR: Probably, yes. It’s a little exasperating to be told all the time that one is difficult and unreadable, but also don’t forget that my path had to go through Thru, which is a very special sort of unreadable book. I had to write it because—there I was teaching narratology and being a writer. The contradiction, the tension, was such that I had to write Thru, which is a novel about the theory of the novel. It’s the most self-reflexive novel that it’s possible to write. It’s a text about intertextuality, a fiction about fictionality. But it is very difficult and I knew that I would be rapped on the knuckles. Still, I needed to write it, I needed to send up the structuralist jargon, also to use it as poetry, to use the very jargon on narratology as metaphor, in a way, to deconstruct it. It’s a very Derridean book. In fact, all the things it spelled downwards in the beginning, announcing certain themes acrostically, are straight out of Derrida. I was influenced by Derrida at the time, but I didn’t want to do just a deconstruction of realism. . . . Yes, that really is a very difficult novel. It was almost written tongue-in-check for a few narratologist friends. I never thought it would be accepted. It was something I had to do. My publisher loved it; at least my editor loved it, the publisher was perhaps not quite so pleased, and of course, it didn’t sell. And after that I did realize that I had probably, career-wise as they say, done myself a lot of harm because I was really dismissed as completely potty, doing surrealistic tricks and typography, and so on. It’s written for people who understand narratology and the crisis of representation. If you like, it’s a little bit as though I wrote a book entirely on engineering that only engineers could understand.

Q: However, many readers, particularly American readers, know narratology in fairly superficial ways, and they probably could follow much of Thru—more than you might think.

CBR: That’s good, because I had so accepted the fact that people found it unreadable that, I suppose, with Amalgamemnon I really did make a big effort. There were many versions of that. It took nearly nine years to get it right, although I did produce a critical book as well. It took me so long to get it right, partly because of this question of tone, because the future tense can sound very portentous, and I didn’t want that, but also because I wanted it to be readable, and the first versions were not. They were kind of thick and dense. So yes, there has been a conscious effort. I don’t know. Perhaps it’s also come naturally. I’m more at ease, and I’m happier in my writing, as you pointed out yourself. Perhaps I communicate better and have simply learned my trade. It’s taken me a long time! But it’s true that in Xorandor I went back to telling a story, though I still had to do it in this way, with the kids quarreling about how to tell it themselves. Yes, I quite agree. The two novels I have in my head that are to follow will probably be easier to read. But I still think that people should take pleasure in reading, that it is up to the writer to write in such a way as to direct the attention of the reader to the richness of the possibilities of language. Because otherwise we’re just going to lose language, this sloppy, almost un-English English that everyone is talking. People are just not aware of the solidity of their language. It’s sliding away. Of course, something always comes to replace it, but I still think that unless we do something the whole reading and writing capacity is going to just disappear. Do what? Well, all one solitary writer can do is to fight against this consumer-product attitude, to make people enjoy working with you.

Q: Then can we assume that we do not need to worry that you’re moving towards realism?

CBR: Were you worrying? Well, I might be, you know. I have nothing against realism. Why not? I think I say somewhere in “A Rhetoric of the Unreal” that realism may come back, but in a new form, refreshed by all this. We already have magic realism and hyper-realism after all. Fantastic realism. The real made unreal and vice versa. Sometimes there is a period of tremendous experiment, and then somehow the old thing comes back again, renewed by all the experimenting that’s been going on. That may be the only useful purpose of such an experiment, I just don’t know. But that doesn’t concern me too much. I also think that the way “experiment” is set against “realism,” the way I and others are said to be working against the “realistic” novel, is a great oversimplification. Even the most experimental, most postmodern writer is still basically realistic. They may not be “imitating” reality, in the sense of reproducing a familiar situation, but ultimately they’re representing something. There’s always a representative function simply because language is representative. There have been very naive attitudes towards representation, and we’ve all become much more self-conscious about it, but I don’t think we can actually get out of representation.

 

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Book

Christine Brooke-Rose Life, End Of
Carcanet Press

‘She is eighty. Facing death, she becomes ‘a cruising mind’, lost in sequences of unabstract comic detail, in – as the title implies – a kind of index, rigid, arbitrary, pointing backwards into the lived text. The head top leans against the bathroom mirror so that the looking glass becomes a feeling glass. She is getting worse day by day, and yet she goes on, deeper into meaning, into non-meaning, with a kind of wry eagerness. She is not disappointed with her life. In order to distract herself, to place herself, she attends to what the media say about the world as if what they say was actually the world. She reflects on her own career, on her experiments with narrative, and on the narrative she is writing here: therapy, fun, but anything else, anything more? What is its purpose, and what the purpose of the life that lives it in the writing? She discovers how, as in fiction, as in any form of experiment, the difficulty for the handicapped is less the handicap than other people, and they too have their lives and handicaps. She becomes like them, she becomes one of them, an other person. Reasserting herself, at the centre of the book, in a mock-technical lecture from a character to an author who is not interested, she comes to accept that her experiments in narrative are like pain-killers, and that they no longer matter, like life.’ — Carcanet Press

 

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Excerpt

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** JM, Too true. Awesome, I look forward to seeing and maybe even meeting Adam. I don’t know ‘Calendar Girls’. I’ll check. My mom used to take me to see musicals sometimes, but not that one. I saw ‘The Music Man’ with Dick Van Dyke, and I liked it! Best of all luck with that. Big lush day! ** David Ehrenstein, Christophe’s play involves the ghosts of a number of French artists of different stripes who died of AIDS meeting up and talking about, well, AIDS and dying mostly: Demy, Guibert, Serge Daney, and others. And its mostly a comedy. ** kier, Hey, hey! Ha ha, you caught that. Well, there’s always a very small chance they’ll renig at the last monent, but the huge chances are that, yes, PGL’s French poster will be a drawing (maybe two) of yours, maestro! We’re supposed to finish it before we leave for the US on Thursday, and, if we do, I’ll send you a jpeg. And of course grab you an actual poster. Well, the first poster was in English, and also the French distributor didn’t really like it. We like it okay, but it was far from our decision or first choice. So we don’t mind, obviously. We’d actual proposed a poster with your art originally back then to our international distributor, but they said no because they thought people would think it was an animated film, ha ha. Fabeldyrene was actually there for quite a long time, but it was near death when we visited Kongeparken. I got in touch with the guy who designed it, and he says it’s safely in storage. No, no Norway news yet. We’re nervously watching our email. I don’t think there’s a problem, but I do hope we get firm positive news soon. I’m pretty sure I can get you into ‘Crowd’ if it sells out. I’m good. Just in pre-trip mode, and trying to get things done, meaning a bit stressed and out of sorts. Hooray about the nearly finis MFA! Snowy, sigh. We might get some snow today or tomorrow, but all that’ll mean is it will be more of hassle to go to the airport, so meh. So good to see you, pal! Hopefully Oslo news and poster very soon! ** Grant Maierhofer, Hi, Grant. Ooh, that video looks tasty. I’ll hit when I’m done here. Thank you! ** Dominik, Hi! Yep, it was sweet: London. Mm, to be honest, I wasn’t so into ‘Sorry Angel’, although I do like Christophe’s films. People liked it, or some did. Personally, I think there are other films of his that I’d recommend watching first. The play was a bit mixed for me. It’s part of a trilogy of projects about AIDS that he just completed. There are things I liked about it, but it was also really conventional theater-like and sentimental in a way that didn’t get to me so much. Cool that the Schroeder left a mark. I leave for the West Coast very early on Thursday morning. I’ll be doing the p.s. off and on while I’m away. I’ll explain how that’ll work tomorrow. You have an amazing week … well, I was going to say ‘too’, but mine will likely be a bit stressy and then swamped by jet lag. See you soon! ** Steve Erickson, The only thing I can suggest, which I’m sure I’ve suggested before, if what my host suggests to those having issues: Either clear your cache or trying accessing the blog in a private browser window. I’m sorry. Oh, shit. I hope the arm thing turns out to be something easily solveable. They don’t have any clue what’s causing it? ** _Black_Acrylic, I don’t think I knew about Flamingo Land, which is odd since I’m such a wannabe expert. Cool. Wow, you send your zine to the printer so soon? I didn’t realise it was that close to reality. Excitement central! ** Nik, Hi. Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride is truly one of the most genius things to exist on this plant we call Earth. I like thrill junkie parks. Six Flags Magic Mountain is one, and it’s a heaven on earth candidate. I’ll look up Houdini’s Great Escape. Promising moniker. That definitely helped, thanks, man. Six Flags Great Adventure is firmly on my to-do list. Great about the first day! That Rimbaud line is interesting because every translator seems to totally reinvent how it works, sign of a great original sentence, I guess. I’ve never been to Joe’s Pub. It’s pretty legendary. No, sorry, I haven’t gotten to the email yet. I’m scrambling to finish stuff before I leave. I’ll try to get to it before I fly away on Thursday morning if I can. If not, I will as soon as my jet lag dies. You have a great day, and great second day too! ** Misanthrope, Kings Dominion has Twisted Timbers which is highly rated among roller coaster rankers. Tomorrow … means today? If so, I reroute my best wishes to the here and now. Fuck, man, yeah, let the doctor have at you. Enough of that shit. ** Jay, Hi there! Great to see you! Oh, that’s interesting about the evolution (devolution?) of your relationship with coasters. Yikes. Well, me, personally, my great love is dark rides, so hopefully you still have those to indulge in. No souring whatsoever. All things park-related are manna on my front. Take care. ** Corey Heiferman, Hi, Corey. I like kiddie lands and rides too. it’s frustrating to be told one is too old, i.e,. large to ride them, although kiddie rides are often better from relatively afar, except, well, if you’re a kid. Oh, never mind. I want to go to Shanghai Disney bad! You guys should go. You really should. ** Okay. Today … oh, yeah, I decided to throw some more light on the work of the great Christine Brooke-Rose. One of those ‘doesn’t get enough due’ greats, in my opinion. Check it out. See you tomorrow.

‘As a poet, filmmaker and critic, Josiah Morgan possesses a singular and captivating perspective. His work reveals unique conviction and a passionate fixation on the relationships between content and form. His range of influence is impressively far-ranging—Morgan shows commitment to avant-garde filmmakers like Peter Hutton and James Benning, and to a wide range of literary figures, from James Joyce to Stephen King to Rainer Maria Rilke. To encounter his work is to engage with an explosively creative mind—many of his ideas feel radical, most of them are surprising, and all of them are fascinating. ’ – Mike Thorn, author of ‘Darkest Hours’

‘Not sure if uncultured enough to get this, or you are trolling me.’ – preisman, Letterboxd (“Triptych From Napoleon”)

‘For a few moments, […] Josiah Morgan shows the world we leave behind. In and out again. In and out again. Round and round, eternal cycles. Presence and ever more pronounced absence.’ – Tom Sheridan, Letterboxd (“the five and a half minute hallway”)

 

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Interview with Adam Cloutier

AC: What is the intent of writing this as it appears visually (to me the reader) – and in this instance I’d ask about the three act structure – I mean to ask about the intent of the three act structure…

JM: I see “Inside the Castle” as a transient piece of work, sculpted by the time spent with it, making it, receiving it. Act One is very much representative of a presence and now-ness, act two is deeply rooted in reproducing the past (through the photographs and images hinted at in act one), whereas act three was my attempt to break free from any predestined aesthetic purpose, to build an aesthetic in words and not syntax.

AC: Given the appendix,: what is the importance of the artwork of others to you writing what you have?

JM: Inside the Castle is the culmination of three years of thinking and feeling that has largely been guided by an awakening inside the homes of texts by James Joyce, Dennis Cooper, William H. Gass and a few others. Most of those awakenings actually come directly from your recommendations, Adam: your insistence on a search for aesthetic as opposed to narrative unity has directly burrowed its way into intense import in my writing. Inside the Castle is referential to other works, yes: I actually see this as part of the ongoing cipher. I view the appendix as an added piece of the puzzle that in part should complicate the text – the only real text that can be used to decipher Inside the Castle is Inside the Castle. In the appendix, I’ve added a citation for the ‘slave andy’ tumblr porn site. The key: “there is no awareness of my personhood.”

AC: We must always remember to paraphrase Beckett and Federman’s paraphrasing of Beckett that language is what helps us get to where we are going and prevents us from getting there – I bring it up to ask about what you find most interesting in writing in a visual manner (outside of the necessity of it)? is it the freedom to sculpt your own form, the ability to both throw readers off and help them understand, or is it all of this and more?

JM: Important too, to paraphrase Beckett when asked to explain his own work; to drill a hole into language and find what’s behind — I am interested in aesthetics because the prison of a text is the binding it’s held inside. My words are held within the structure that binds them on the page. Anybody can use the word “eats” but its manipulation as a visual body belongs entirely to me in its transmission to the reader. I do believe there is a responsibility on the behalf of the creator to make any work as clear as possible. That doesn’t mean I’m interested in my work being easy, but once you find the key to the work it should be easily penetrated.

AC: The difference (and similarity) of the refined and the raw is something i’ve always been interested in and I;m a big fan of how Inside the Castle feels often like both at once or both juxtaposed or any other iteration that involves the two of them, where I find many artists work with one or the other. Does this observation have any relevance in how you see your work as a final product (rather than solely the knowledge of your work on it to make it what is)?

JM: Oh, fuck, I love this question. My artistic home is in the theatre, as both actor and director. I fully believe that the most interesting theatrical work is that which provides a fine line, a risk of failure constantly. I am uninterested in theatre that is perfect, I am interested in the moment a mistake is made that can’t be renounced, and how the performers then act to save themselves – when I direct, I build traps into our rehearsal and staging process for the actors to organically fall into every night.

Effectively, I am uninterested in competency. I want to fail hard or fly hard and do this through rejecting rules. Anyone with a decent vocabulary can write coherently if they use grammar correctly. I’m uninterested in ‘correct,’ and more interested in what we can find when we stray from ‘the right’ path. For what it’s worth, Chuck Palahniuk is a great example of competency and Don DeLillo is a great example of a perfectly honed balancing act.

[Some time passes in which we discuss William H. Gass and Jeff Witscher among other great artists].

AC: Do you mind if we switch to a conversation type mode?

JM: You are a great conversationalist.

AC: I noticed no Poe or Baudelaire in the appendix. You are clearly not a fellow countryman.

JM: I have to admit I’ve never read Baudelaire. Poe is a master but Schmidt did all the referencing one could possibly do. On the Schmidt note, one of the rejection letters for my writing asked me “is there really a need for so much ejaculation?” I think a lot of that comes from a place of a social fear of sex.

AC: My questions haven’t even touched on it explicitly but I guess this could be phrased into one, how essential is the explicit description of sex to your writing not just in its final form but how it plays into your forming it?

JM: I don’t think my work is about sex as much as sex is a key element to my work. Inside the Castle is, in broad terms, about the translation of mind to body, the translation of fiction to non-fiction, the translation of youth to growing up, but sex becomes a key element in all realms.

AC: I like that you use translation rather than the perhaps more popular transition because it successfully shows that these are two related but separate things.

JM: I’m not necessarily interested in easy. I think sex should be very, very hard, and incredibly honest. And honesty is hard. The trick is then to translate that honesty into an honest text. My body does not lie when I fuck, and I don’t want my words to lie either – but no text is honest – so whilst my words tell the truth, they tell their own truth and form their own body, their own very, very hard sex.

AC: Text is as false as all other images but that doesn;t stop us from using likeness and claiming citations from above just as we can say it comes from ourselves…

JM: The key to all fiction is in its likeness to non-fiction. Can I ask you a few questions?

AC: Sure.

JM: What art are you interested in?

AC: Art that recognises image for its falsity and plays with it, and to a lesser degree art that recognises narrative for its falsity and does something with that recognition (especially playing with it, in the sense of Raymond Federman or Tsui Hark).

JM: Are you able to provide a framework for why you avoid narratives in your own work?

AC: It is mostly out of my complete lack of interest in creating something beyond the images (words included) I make when I feel there has been relatively little done in the sole interest of images (text included). The need for dependance on nothing but the ghost it is because when it has been done it is nothing short of perfection.

JM: As for Inside the Castle, what do you think it accomplishes? I’ll sit out of any response to your answer to this question, because it’s mostly narcissistic.

AC: Inside the Castle accomplishes what it intends to and what it didn’t but now does, if I want to be vague. If I’m being specific it both convulses and examines these convulsions without making demons of them while confronting all ends on itself only stopping when it needs to.

JM: To close, how have you been?

AC: Doing pretty well and it’s hard to complain about anything but the want of time (especially when i get to see the clouds move for 30min on lunch and know that’s my allowed vision for the day if I’m closing which I usually am. I’d like to start brewing beer but it’s hard to want to do that on top of making art and buying beer from so many people who do it so well especially when there are two of the best breweries I’ve ever been to within five miles of me. All of that takes a lot of time.

 

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Josiah Morgan’s film criticism (and sometimes just play)
JM’s My [under-used but functional] website
JM’s goodreads incl. literary criticism

 

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Numerous films that JM has made are on his youtube, three favorites below…

They Tried Fixing The Sky

WE SHATTER(ed the c)LOUD(s)

the five and a half minute hallway

 

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Inside the Castle

‘“This is a burned book. Adam’s stuck between its teeth. I’ll take a sick day and still run away. Fuck this, my sinuses are thrown overboard – dirty spa, eating cars, shoeshine. Mixed signals. Interrupted messages. How “the mind” (concrete, abstract, unsolid) works drunk, high, watching Mad Max on breaks (fifteen minutes) while working fast food (fifteen months).”’

Inside the Castle explores the intersection of reality, memory, identity and fiction in the context of a loose narrative not easily decoded. It is Josiah Morgan’s debut publication.

Buy Inside The Castle
Josiah Morgan on Instagram
Adam Cloutier on Instagram

 

 

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p.s. Hey. This is an awesome weekend because the blog gets to help christen the spanking new and first book by not only an amazing new writer but a guy that this place gets to call a distinguished local aka JM. Please spend your local weekend investigating the post and Josiah’s book, and you are highly urged to get yourself a copy before they vamoose because Amphetamine Sulphate’s books don’t always keeping rolling out forever. And please say something or other to JM before the weekend is though. Thank you, and huge thanks and mega-congrats to you, Josiah! ** JM, There you are! So happy to be able to add the blog’s two cents to your book’s birth! Hm, interesting, and thanks for spreading out your opinion on French cinema. I think I understand what you mean, certainly in Truffaut’s case. I’ve never been a big fan of his. I do really like the Jean-Pierre Leaud films, but essentially because I love Leaud, and I remember thinking ‘Jules and Jim’ was pretty great, but I haven’t seen it in ages. I guess it’s what you think about when you think about when you hear/see the words ‘French cinema’. I immediately think Bresson, Tati, Godard, Rohmer, Resnais, Akermann, and other (to my mind) pure and great auteurs. Off the top my head, I don’t think I agree with you about Rivette. But, anyway, yeah, got it, and respect. And, yeah, happiness incarnate about your book’s big arrival! Enjoy your whole weekend! ** h, Hi. Yes, what a huge loss. So huge it’s hard to get one’s mind around it. ** Amphibiouspeter, Hi, man! It was so great to get to meet you at the screening! No, I didn’t hear the about that little record player. Ooh. Record Store Day in Paris is so shit it barely exists. Anyway, thanks a lot, and have a swell weekend. ** David Ehrenstein, FaBlog time! Everyone, Mr. E has updated his FaBlog, and it looks, at a glance, like Roger Stone is its current culprit. Here. ** Bill, Hi. Yes, it’s one of things where one just illogically assumed Mekas would live forever. I get the vinyl thing, although not enough to buy a French turntable. My vinyl acquisitions are visual artworks. Ha ha, well, we were only there 1 1/2 days, but yeah. Yes, I know, new Evenson, whoo-hoo! ** Keaton7, I’m trying to think of a great song that has the word ‘name’ in the title, I don’t know why. I think there must be tons, I don’t know why. I haven’t gotten Brussels’s vaunted charm yet myself. There’s this kind of dissonance and constricting that happens to the sound of music when it’s played from vinyl that I can’t describe but do like. And then there were a bunch of great records that seem like they were produced specifically to be heard on vinyl and that really haven’t made the transition to mp3 or even CD with their powers in tact, like, oh, ‘Psychocandy’ and ‘Locust Abortion Technician’ are the first that spring to mind. ** Dominik, Hi, Dominik, old buddy! Oh, well, everything about the London screening was wonderful. It was a packed house, and a lot of artists and people I respect were there, and, afterwards, the response was so enthusiastic and smart and understanding of the film. Zac and I are very proud of the film and confident about it, but it’s an amazing and joyous thing to have so many people express such pleasure and admiration for it. So, yeah, it was really rewarding. David’s non-fiction, and I think ‘A Supposedly …’ is probably his best non-fiction collection, is so funny and brilliant, as good as his fiction, I think. I think you’ll enjoy it. My weekend … seeing Christophe Honore’s play ‘Les Idoles’ tonight. Zac and I need to finish finessing the French PGL poster and hopefully the French trailer. Starting to get ready for the big trip to the West Coast next week. See how big the protests are today. This and that. Ah, it sounds like a pretty nice cocoon, though, so enjoy the hell out of it because you’ll probably miss it when you get busy-ed up again. Let me know how it transpired. See you soon! ** _Black_Acrylic, Yeah, right? I saw Jeff Mills do his thing once, and, yeah, it was pretty spectacular. ** Tyler, Hi! Okay, should we email? I’m denniscoopeer72@outlook.com. I’ll also be in LA for a while starting on the 5th. Oh, do come see the ‘PGL’ screening on the 7th if you’re free. Anyway, that sounds intriguing. Let’s see what we can figure out. Thanks! ** Kyler, Hi. I miss my turntable, which still works, I think, but is in LA. No, I don’t have Medicare or SS. Certainly not here where I’m not official. But I don’t I have it in the US either since I’ve never had a real, proper job in my life. The ‘senior’ status thing is so fucking weird. I still try to evade the discounts and things whenever possible. It’s too spooky. ** Right. Return to celebrating Josiah’s book’s emergence into our consciousness, please, and give him some kind of shout out. See you on Monday.