Books

2002: A Palindrome Story in 2002 Words

2002: A Palindrome Story in 2002 Words, is a collaboratively-authored palindrome, composed and published in 2002.

Review:

Palindromic Criticism:

Now Bob sees Otto's sad nadir, sign I: Reno forever of one ring is rid and ass Otto sees Bob won! -Will Thomas Saga on moody doom? No, a gas! -Ross (Essay Assessor) Eckler

are you geniuses? then, so long, it's my time this time. my, it's long. so then, geniuses you are! -Rene Rowland

Oulipian Criticism:

2002 is not only a marvel of ingenuity: it is also funny, sexy, and full of surprises. -Harry Mathews

20:02 20/02 2002 Notons que lors des précédents triples (10:01 10/01 1010 et 11:11 11/11 1111) nos systèmes de numération des temps ne s'étaient pas encore imposés : ils sont donc passés inaperçus. Notons aussi qu'il y aura bien encore un triple au cours de ce millénaire et ce sera 21:12 21/12 2112 (mais nous ne serons pas tous là pour le célébrer) et après il n'y en aura plus jamais ! ! ! Notons enfin que notre triple s'est déjà produit à l'Orient et va encore se produire à l'Occident. Attention ! le record du monde du palindrome littéraire, détenu par Georges Perec (environ 1500 mots) depuis 1973 vient d'être battu par Nick Montfort et William Gillespie : un palindrome en 2002 mots. On peut l'admirer à http://spinelessbooks.com PP, JPJ & alii -Paul Braffort et al

Read it online

Eclectic Seizure

How to Vote 2016

Review:

How to Vote, the last book written by legendary poet Max Winchester before his death, has been edited by Jasper Pierce and published by Urbana's Spineless Books. Here is an interview with Max Winchester conducted by Jasper Pierce, one of Winchester's poetry students, and author of the novella Steal Stuff From Work, also locally published by Spineless Books.

JP: The passage about shooting your boss confused me. The obscenities and profanity confused me. I mean, I understand those things. But they confused me mainly because there is an ineluctable, nubilous, almost utterly absent thread of hope and nostalgia running through the book.

MW: Are you sure about that?

JP: (laughing) No. Not really.

MW: Well, maybe you’re right. If all the people who hate America for all the right or wrong reasons really hated it, they wouldn’t bother hating it. For example, I hate spiders, but I don't drive around in a truck with a Raid bumpersticker or wave my fist at the Insect Channel or wear a holstered flyswatter. There must be something about the idea of America that somebody still believes in. Or else they'd just ignore it.

JP: There's an Insect Channel?

MW: Don't ask me.

JP: When was the last time you voted, like in an election, not in all the metaphysical ways you describe in your book?

MW: I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, because I suspected correctly that Al Gore would win the election. What then happened was more than enough to erode all the fin-de-siecle utopian yearning I had amassed during the previous eight years of decent rock, a prosperous economy, and the thrill of having a president who was sexually active, a bad liar, and winkingly disingenuous about whether he smoked pot. Like me. But what was even worse than Al Gore winning the election in 2000 was voting for the mannequin John Kerry in 2004. That was humiliating. And then he lost. Against Bush and Cheney for a second term. That was humiliating. Embarrassing at best, terrifying at worst. Like losing to the Cubs, if the Cubs had fangs. I voted for Obama in 2008. That felt pretty good, actually.

JP: I was expecting to get some good, concrete instructions on How to Vote, but THIS IS A BOOK OF CYNICAL, SELF-CONTRADICTORY ADVICE. Did you ever have any intention of teaching me How to Vote?

MW: Did you mean how to physically punch the thing, or which pro-war candidate to select? Wait, is that bit in all-caps literary criticism or a telegraph? The thrust of my instruction manual falls outside, or between, the lines. Which thrust is to think of the White House as your own beating heart. Yes, the Red House, pulpy, slick, and fibrous, every hour pumping a surge of four hundred million dollars of bloody money into the capillaries of the nation, trickling life-sustaining nourishment into the schools, hospitals, libraries, playgrounds, and soup kitchens of America.

I want you to so vividly feel how things could be different that they actually become different such that Mitt Romney addressing a convention hall full of balloons becomes not Darth Vader on the bridge of the Death Star but Daffy Duck in a laughable cartoon universe that doesn't even intersect the world in which you are a bitter, underpaid dishwasher in a country that you own as surely as taxes are withheld from your feeble paycheck. Vote to meet your country halfway; say, "I'm going to go to your little post-Halloween party, but there's something I'd like in return."

JP: You say "To vote is to love hate." That's a tongue-twister. But, more to the point: is to love hate to hate love?

MW: I wish George Harrison were still 27--he could answer that for you.

JP: You have some fairly kind words for Obama. How disappointed would you be if he lost next year?

MW: Crushingly, achingly disappointed and sad. Obama, you can believe, would actually read the best letters from his constituents, before giving them back to his handlers to send a form reply. Romney, inconceivable.

Republicans keep lowering the bar. In the past half-decade, the central bipartisan debate seems to have descended from the legality and morality of abortion to the legality and morality of contraception--what sick brilliant think tank mind came up with manufacturing this non-controversy?--and, as if the dragging knuckles were't already shooting sparks, Steve King and Todd Akin are busy redesigning the female reproductive system and the word "rape." The gap between reality and their policies is so immense that they have to retool reality. These apes not only debunk, but discredit the theory of evolution. We're witnessing an intellectual, moral, and political backslide of about one half-century per year.

Incidentally, if Republican intellectuals are going to position a crypto-misogynist ideology against science, why do they choose the battleground of evolution--one of the best-supported and most lucid scientific claims since spherical-earth theory. Why don't they rail against the Higgs boson, which almost nobody understands or would miss, and which irritates even us left-wing intellectuals. Republicans keep lowering the bar, and the Democrats keep limboing down to follow, but they are hamstrung in the race to the bottom by their addiction to logic, compassion, a modicum of class, facts, and an outdated, classical idea of maintaining a consistent policy from one speech to the next.

JP: What's an anarchist to do with an election like this, aside from writing a book about it?

MW: Vote for Obama, but don't let the Tea Party frame the debate. Remember, the question does not have to be "when to attack Iran," the question can be, "is war murder?"

Ignore Sarah Palin. Be local. Secede. Smile politely.

JP: "America is a word, and the president is just a font. FUCK FONTS." That seems strangely anti-typeface for a poet such as yourself. What do you have against fonts?

MW: What? Need I remind you of the colophon in How to Vote?

"This book is set in Kennerly, a type that saved my dog from drowning. Distinctive for its awkward formality and stiff elegance, Kennerly is an uninspired imitation of an unpopular metal type by an unrecognized founder. This font was never completed to the satisfaction of its inexperienced designer, was distributed for free, and spent many years on drink menus in low- level taverns throughout Europe and North America, due to its exaggerated serif and likable, if unconvincing, pretensions of old school class. With its long extenders, the capital W was able to plunge into the river and extract my dog Wagner from the half- submerged canoe in which she had become stuck. For a type with such soul, and a certain unlucky streak we can all relate to, certain kerning problems, including an unusually hapless hyphen, are in the end endearing."

Fonts saved my dog's life.

—Published in Smile Politely

..... https://www.smilepolitely.com/arts/a_reminder_how_to_vote_a_manual_by_max_winchester/

Johnny Werd hardback

Review:

Review of Contemporary Fiction (Spring 2004)
 Reviewer: Joseph Dewey

Every generation reinvents Holden Caulfield, the misfit resisting the onset of complacency and banality, the lost cause locked on pause, sahdowed too early by the absurdity of inevitable mortality. Johnny Werd, unable to commit to his education, haunted by a sister’s suicide, intrigued by the energy of setting things aflame, ia a post-Gen-X Holden, the generation nurtured by television and sugared cereal, their myths drawn from Star Wars and their humor from the Simpsons, their childhood defined by Sesame Street, their adolescence by the cool lure of recreational narcotics—each channeled by Johnny’s “voice,” itself an unsettling ventriloquism that splits point of view into points of views. Although this slender experiment riotously spoofs traditional narrative, it is nontheless unsettling. Holden at his loneliest had the refuge of his own narrative, the comfort of an unfolding plot, the reassuring stability of his nnarrating voice, the block of chapters and the rhythm of sentences, and always a sympathetic reader. Not so here. Johnny Werd is left without a real-world environment—he thrives within the fuselage-world of his own language constructions in a “narrative” itself dismissive of storytelling. And, in the end, he is left lonelier than Holden ever could be: the isolate comforted by the kinetic tapping of his own keyboard. We eavesdrop, we read—although our invitation is presumptive, our presence intrusive. This is finally an exorcise/exercize of words, a desperate/exuberant, private act of revisiting form. Plot collapses into paragraph premises, characters are word-chords, sentences explode into Joycean sonic events, sinuous patterns of exotic diction and unrestricted syntax. But there lurks a strained uneasiness over the performance, a terror over a depthless world that has justified such audacious refuge. A narrative so given to the pyrotechnics of language closes with a most unsettling concession: “Give me some text with silences in it.”

.....

The essence of rock and roll, June 24, 2005 Reviewer: Mark Twain
This book is pure rock and roll--should the werds be connected by an ampersand? Is it okay not to capitalize? I don't know much about music, but the publisher of this crazed psychological journey, whose equally intense radio show I once listened to, and which can be found at www.spinelessbooks.com along with many other fine examples of trenchant fun (that is, of the cutting-edge literary variety), promised me a copy (at a discount because I'm spiritually bankrupt) and I must say, Q rocks! Let me mix some, I mean metaphors, and say that the book is not only an admirable sampler, but a screaming meta-ride through an existential rollercoaster park built on a palimpsest of despair. The coaster pretty much never rides on track and does not just coast, but supplied with the inexhaustible intertia of the Q fire: does the freefall ride in reverse, quaffs all the water from the flume, rips holes through the walls of the funhouse, sneaks in and out of the park for trips to the local liquor store, and even stands in line for its own attraction. For those of us who are prompted by little else, it dares you to climb on board, despite the fact that the tallness yardstick is sure to be over your head.

.....

Underrated, October 10, 2002 Reviewer: Arthur Danto
Johnny Werd, the Fire Continues is the most outrageous, most intense and in a certain sense the most significant young prose in America, indelibly sad, unforgettably beautiful, witheringly funny, grotesquely comprehensive, grimly smart, and so wrenching as to be moving, infinitely readable, a grand monstrous powerful thing, shadowy yet redemptive, unreflectively entangled in crimes of demarcation, original and audacious, a vast comic epic and a study of the postmodern condition, hilarious, appalling, moving, subtle, wise, witty, gritty, startling, memorable, multilayered, precisionist, enigmatic, in this book lifelong themes of love and anger, family politics, sexuality, and the body of the city can be seen gathering in power and clarity. In its complexity, its scrutinizing and utterly unsentimental humanity, and its grasp of the subtle relationships between domestic drama and global events, it develops a freedom and psychic energy born triumphantly of well-wrought pain and determination, all in a new architecture, a wholly new voice, and a new chemistry of words and images. Vital, heartfelt, and even profound. It is to laugh.

.....

Tortured cogitations of adolescent gazing over abyss of adulthood, May 21, 2003 Reviewer: A thoughtful reader
Synopsis purees English into smoothies of beauty. Tastes funny though.
Not enough sex, November 28, 2000  Reviewer: A reader from Las Vegas
This is kind of like a cult novel that doesn't have a following.
Yet.
Worse than the movie, November 13, 2000  Reviewer: A reader
I'll admit that I'd never herd of Werd before the movie, but I'm incredibly glad I found out it was a book first. This is an amazing piece of fiction. I agree with one of the previous reviewers in saying that I wish I had read the book before seeing the movie, but what the hell, they're both awesome. If you don't know anything about the story, there's this guy (called, mostly, Johnny Werd) who blows up the world in junior high then goes on to be a temp worker. It's a really quick read, but it's awesome. The movie is great too, but if you haven't seen it yet, read the book first. The movie follows the book pretty closely, although the endings are different.

J. Werd: The X-Generation's Very Own Holden Caulfield?, November 2, 2000  Reviewer: Chandra Vega

Q.Synopsis dazzles us with wordplay the like of which we haven't enjoyed since Finnegan's Wake in a novel (unlike FW) as hilarious as it is experimental. I heard that Q.once read it to a writing workshop whose members told him in one voice: You shouldn't write like that. Thank God, he has. If we dare to refer to J. Werd as the Holden Caulfield of the X-Generation, it is because under the pyrotechnical display of Werd words, a contemporary tragedy is played out as J. Werd bids an emphatic good-bye to childhood by using his chemistry set to ignite toys,room,house,neighborhood, the earth,and verily even the waters of the earth,only to find nothing to replace them except for a lightbulb sealed in the cellar which burns unseen, shedding light on absolutely nothing and no one. The fire burns on; our best and brightest cannot find any meaning in an MBA-dominated world beyond absurdity and the destruction of absurdity with more absurdity. Depressing it would be, except that it is an absolutely wonderful read. Q. Synopsis is not only a philosopher but a brilliant humorist. We look forward to a sequel in which J. Werd gets his own MBA and takes over the universe, if it hasn't totally burned up.

A groove that satisfies, August 15, 2000  Reviewer: Joseph M. Futrelle

Synopsis is, ironically enough, virtually impossible to synopsize. As experimental as he wants to be, he lays down some gone changes in this psycho-epic coming-of-age comedy of forms. Scathing, riotously funny, lyrically ornate, dangling from a narrative thread, this novella is as much a head-scratcher as it is a page-turner. Lest that deter you, casual surfer, let me qualify that Synopsis was hypertext before hypertext was cool, and that the excesses of intertextuality and internal cross-reference in this frantic early writing of his (dating back some ten years) should delight every netizen's inner channel-flipper. I write this review based on earlier, pre-publication editions, which seemed to change even while the author was printing them out, but I don't have a shred of doubt that this handsome edition will be ideal for Xmas gift-giving.

Esemplastic!, February 20, 2002 
Reviewer: Q. Synopsis
Mr.Synopsis may be introspective, but he is no critic: unspecific and antianalytical. His review gushes with overweight and flatulent praise for that incomprehensibly silly novella he hails as "the pinnacle of humankind's ascension through the clouds that obscure heaven into immortal splendor: this story is why Darwin invented evolution." Is this gaseous exaltation exhalation deflated by the obvious fact that Mr. "Q" Synopsis is actually reviewing HIS OWN BOOK? Is it possible that this book squarely overlaps the reviewer's tastes in books because HE WROTE IT?! It is important to consider important considerations like these when one is reviewing any review.
Despite the fact, however, that the review is a clumsy and insincere attempt for Mr.Synopsis to carve a pedestal for himself where he can artfully pose and bask in his own admiration and appreciation, the writing is just plain lousy. This guy needs to read some Hemingway, drink less coffee or something. When Mr.Synopsis says that Mr.Synopsis "creates a metaphorical metaform: a form he uses to refer to forms while, in the process, discarding the form form usually takes. The result is an unformed form that deforms the various forms it takes on in a malformity of formality..."... What the hell is he talking about? Is he insane or uninformed? He is hoping that in my attempts to follow the questionable transitions of his logic I will get lost, and, in the process, get lost. What an arrogant asshole!

Anyway, his review is doodling compared to this one. A glance will inform: this is a review worthy of review. This is masterful criticism. Perhaps reviewer Q.Synopsis would care to take a crack at reviewing this review of his review, in a reflexocursive cycle doomed to frustrate his only reader: me. And not for long. I can find better things to read. Hell, I can write better things to read. I can't believe I have the same name as this guy. What an embarrassing coincidence.
Werd

Letter to Lamont

Review:

William Gillespie. Letter to Lamont. Spineless Books, 2005. 83 pp. Paper $10.00.

Apparently the year is 1993. Forming an epistolary, digressive novel is at the forefront of the ostensible author’s thoughts. Letter to Lamont is a logical descendant of the work of Laurence Sterne, whose Tristram Shandy was noted for propelling itself forward associatively rather than chronologically. Chronology, the underlying tool of narrative structure, is only one method of organization for fiction. Unfortunately, its “organization” is little more than a gang of thugs knocking off anyone else who threatens their turf. Notice how narratologists argue for one homogeneic fictive structure: Freytag’s Triangle, a nineteenth-century variant on the Aristotelean curve. Notice how non-narratologists argue for a heterogeneous, pluralist view of the novel: many approaches are valid. Or, to paraphrase Hassan I Sabbah, “Where nothing is true, everything is permissible.” Yes, even narrative fiction! It is perhaps the fault of our flawed educational system that we are not taught how to read nonnarrative fiction, but let us not blame the advanced writer for our own ignorance and bigotry. What Gillespie has written is a novel as thoroughly steeped in tradition as any narrative novel. The traditions he calls upon, though, are far more rare and more interesting than the narrative: the epistolary novel form, digression, multiple points-of-view, the novel-within-a-novel, the nouveau roman, improvisation, and linguistically propelled fiction based on homophonic and homographic connections between words and on the musicality, rhythm, and quantitative duration of sounds are traditional. The fact that these traditions are rarified is a strength. We should rejoice in each new nonnarrative novel with the energy we lose yawning through narrative novel number nine million. What is of particular interest in Letter to Lamont changes with each reading—notice how the point of view shifts from narrator to described object to secondary character to abstract concept (the section written from the point of view of the abstract notion of money is particularly refreshing); notice how the object of desire, the absent Lamont whose physical arrival is imminent—why the narrator rushes to complete the letter: he wants to give it to Lamont when he opens the door to her (yes, Lamont is a woman)—remains constant; notice how gender ambiguity plays throughout the novel. This is a novel by a writer who has clearly learned his chops well. [Eckhard Gerdes, Context]

Out of the Cellar: A review of William Gillespie’s Letter to Lamont. Providence, RI: Spineless Books, 2005. 83 pages. $10. Review by Tom La Farge

Letter to Lamont can truly be called an underground novel, for William Gillespie wrote it in a cellar. He wrote it in 1993 in Providence, Rhode Island, and published it with his own imprint, Spineless Books, in 2005, having in the meanwhile learned just how hopeless it was to submit this book to ordinary channels and the prescribed reading practice of literary dopes.

H. P. Lovecraft, also from Providence, never had to live in a cellar but would have made a different use of it if he had, writing us into the cellar, its walls and the bones in them, the further subcellars hidden inside those walls. Gillespie works to write us out of the cellar, which is a poor place for lovers. Letter to Lamont thus initiates the genre of Notgothic. Gothic creates a monstrous edifice of narrative in order to displace secret guilt into horror, but Gillespie seems mainly to feel shame, which he expresses without too much displacement: for the death of his gerbil, Jean le Necre, for instance.

I found him today upon returning from a feed store with 10 pounds of fresh cedarshavings and .5 pounds of sunflowerseeds. He and I were going to spend our first afternoon together in months and I was going to let him be warmed by sunlight, cooled by breezes, overwhelmed by grass twice his height filled with weird stuff to eat and be eaten by.… I could have been a better father to him I admit. (57)

As for architecture his book has a snailshell’s, spiralling outward till it meets the walls of a cellar. He senses something outside it, a world where a woman named Lamont ranges, doing what has to be done. Gillespie hasn’t constrained her to act or be in some way that meets his needs. He merely wants to join her.

That’s when he saw Lamont. She had just been thrown out of a bookstore for asking why the area marked LITERATURE was not instead marked MEN’S STUDIES. The tattooed bouncers had flung her in the snow where she now sat reading a stolen The Wall Street Journal. “They really butchered my article …” she muttered. William gave her a funny look and went over to sit in the snow with her. (12)

We understand the funny look, since what free woman reads the Wall Street Journal, much less writes for it and sees her work in print? And then has to steal a copy in order to complain about the editing? While sitting in the snow? This Lamont is evading any sort of frame we might use to compose her.

Publishers don’t care for this sort of thing. “I don’t think you’ve completely understood your character, Mr. Gillespie,” we can hear them say. “I can’t identify,” they repeat. Publishers wish to identify; rather, to issue identities easily grasped by tired readers. Well, they have their own work to do and must get on with it. They won’t find time for the randomly assembled details of a relationship with one Lamont Perkins, who might be a woman and lover or might be a drug: “Someone handed me a cup of punch. It turns out there was Lamont in it. Nobody told me. I’ve been up for three months. It’s this Lamont. It just won’t quit” (48). Or she’s a figure apostrophized as follows: “You are four inches tall and sit at a small desk atop my computer.”

I’m on page 2 and am askingmyself: Why can’t she be the sort of adventurous woman, ballsy but beautiful, shown searching her body in the mirror to let us know what fine breasts she has? In the case of such a protagonist I can identify and, imaginatively, fondle. But how am I to smack my lips over a Lamont who seems to hold the place occupied on my desk by the magnetic hedgehog bristling with binder-clips? How am I to use the headlong voice and shifting point of view of this “William”? He may be a white male, yet he shirks his work, inventing a discourse less hegemonic than hedgehoggic.

This word must serve to define a prose that knows how to do one thing and do it so well that the reader’s satisfaction is overreached and recast as delight. “Spineless,” Gillespie calls his press, but what that means is that the spine of writing has slipped from its function as fixed structure, one that constantly goes out of alignment because of the dead weight of autobiography it must carry. It has instead extruded itself in quills that shoot to any length and in every direction to stab at objects. These it brings to our bemused attention in an order so inconsequential, so innocent of subtext and of any calculation of a reader’s interest, that we are reminded of what chance means in life.

You can’t consume writing like this. All you can do is watch your attention span bulge, morph into a living creature bristling with pointed particularities.

I want to be the woman while you be the man: I’ll be Tinkerbell you be Peter Pan. You could interrupt me, fail to introduce me to your friends, dismiss my ideas, refer to me with condescending monikers referring to youth animals and my appearance, act as though all my emotions are symptoms of hysteria or menstruation, explain economics to me with harsh unclear impatient descriptions, put me on a pedestal, watch wrestling matches or discuss philosophy while I cook an elaborate vegetarian dinner for your friends which they will reject in favor of hamburgers, accept credit for my childrearing with a smug glow of authorship, or even say that it is time my gender solved all the problems your gender has instilled throughout the centuries by electing me to offices in your existing hierarchy in order to justify your continuing oppression of me with this staged failure. (31)

This book is built in riffs of roleplay, I and you never the same character twice.

Being a star seems nice and warm, really bright and industrious, till you grow cold and collapse. Then when the gravity is so strong not even light can escape, the other particles start to get really irritating. (53).

The result is to encourage disidentification, to expose “identity” as a commodity and possibly a fetish, impossible not to desire, but far beyond our means.

“Look,” he said, “I have feelings for you which in the English language can’t be given but only sold. So I’m suggesting we write a language together which is relevant to us.” “Yeah, okay,” she replied absently, skimming the editorials. William sighed with relief. Lamont looked up. “Wait, what do you mean?” (12).

Gillespie has some ideas about this.

In the composition entitled Letter to Lamont one method he has toyed with without so far understanding very clearly is the Point of View Transfer. This can be used to shift the perspective from which a scene is being witnessed. Essential to the technique thus far is transferring the point of view to an inanimate object, an abstraction, a very large scale, a very small scale, and though selfreflexivity revealing the scene as a scene. (33)

We need to know that our cellar is a cellar and palpate its walls to feel their solidity, since, like the Abbé Faria digging his way out of the Chateau d’If,

I’ll have to knock down walls to fit these characters into the letter I’m writing.… I want to knock down some walls, they have channeled my thought into a maze of relevancies that will never touch paper. (51)

Yes, those relevancies, that detailed attention to lifestyle and identity have found their way to paper already through other writers’ pens. Someone must not-write that; Gillespie steps up to the plate. But he will write. How?

How does one escape from English in English? Where is that language to be found? If the cellar is built from the stones of a literary discourse laid by a community of readers, teachers, editors, publicists, bestowers of grants and prizes, reviewers, and critics, all increasingly locked inside the cellar of commercial publishing, how can a writer escape it, and how to survive outside?

William Gillespie knows about one way to go about it. He administers the Fitzpatrick O’Dinn Prize for constrained literature, that is, writing that accepts unusual formal constraints, what Gilbert Sorrentino called “generative devices” in the famous writing class he taught at Stanford, and which have been codified (and many of them invented) by the French group OuLiPo, founded by a writer, Raymond Queneau, and a mathematician, François Le Lionnais, to impose mathderived algorithms on writing. Georges Pérec was a member; his La disparition (A Void in English) is a full-length novel written without using the letter e. La vie mode d’emploi (Life: A User’s Manual) relates the stories occurring in every apartment of a ten-storey Paris building by circulating among them according to the constraint called the Knight’s Turn, a chess move whereby a knight visits every square of the chessboard without landing twice on the same one. Many of Italo Calvino’s novels were written in similar ways. The constraints were not always as complex as the Tarot-deck narrative The Castle of Crossed Destinies. For his novella The Baron in the Trees, Calvino simply followed out the rule that his protagonist must never touch ground.

But in order to see how to escape English in English the best Oulipian text to go to is Harry Mathews’ early trilogy The Conversions, Tlooth, and The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium. The principle becomes clear; it’s simple enough and as old as rhyme or fixed form in verse. The constraint compels you to say things in a different way from what you would choose. Behind this is the idea that we don’t always choose how we say things. The first sentence out of our mouths is usually a piece of the hegemonic discourse, dictated by the powerful pattern of assumptions we call normality. This was Greil Marcus’ point in the Prologue to Lipstick Traces:

The Sex Pistols made a breach in the pop milieu, in the screen of received cultural assumptions governing what one expected to hear and how one expected to respond. Because received cultural assumptions are hegemonic propositions about the way the world is supposed to work – ideological constructs perceived and experienced as natural facts – the breach in the pop milieu opening into the realm of everyday life…. (3)

To overcome the constructed voice that fits us all, that comes to us most readily, we need to find another, contrarian voice. Marcus finds it in Johnny Rotten’s howls and curses, which he links back to voices from Dada and the Situationists, tracing the “secret history of the twentieth century.”

Oulipians find it in constraints. Interestingly, it is a voice less for writers than for readers. Writers do not turn to constraints in order to “find their own voice,” as they say in the schools. They use them to grow language-crystals so weird as to force the reader to make uncommon sense of them. To read a text in which every noun has been replaced by the noun seven places after it in some dictionary (the famous “N + 7” procedure) is to be confronted with the task of fitting words into a syntax never designed to contain them, to follow the text where it leads, however strange. Constrained writing is thus a letter to the reader, but one enfolded in a curious envelope that deforms normal speech and challenges the reader to get the letter out of it in one piece.

Gillespie does not use this sort of constraint. There is no secret formula more algorithmic than Point of View Transfer behind Letter to Lamont, about which he has told me:

The formal considerations of [Calvino’s] books seem to overrule the author’s personality. So I meant for Letter to Lamont to follow its own rules, to be written by its own private author, whether or not I would consider those rules now or at the time to be ‘constraints.’” (personal communication, 21 April 2006)

Either way, the effect is the same, to have the book “follow its own rules,” to bring into being its “own private author.” Writing this way involves following directions from somewhere besides the hegemonic propositions. It’s harder to follow the directions generated from the text itself by reading your own last sentence and letting it direct the writing of the next one, in its turn the springboard for your next plunge. It requires a certain speed, a certain wildness, or the language can’t escape the backward pull of “the writer’s voice.” Gillespie’s writing is fast, wild, and dense. His letter flies out of the envelope.

So Gillespie takes up the work that no one else will touch, I mean the clowning, the vagabonding, the traipsing through an endless fugue state, his sentences so many highly verbal viruses fanning out along vectors of infection, stealing here and there bits of the American language of information sharing or product placement, highly infectious, and planting it where it will breed unintended consequences of great, sometimes lethal comic effect.

More urgently, how can I express the extent of my foolishness with a mere 26 letters predictably capitalized and punctuated? Well? Give up yet? The next paragraph is 3-D and you will need special glasses to read it! But wait that’s not all! Be careful when you turn the page because this is a Pop-Up letter! That’s right there are paragraphs in different planes but that’s not all! This next sentence has scratch’n’sniff nouns. Be careful—this letter has real stainedglass panels. Every fabulous letter of this fabulous letter can be yours! (65)

It’s the commafree hurtling style, it’s the abuse of the typefaces and endmarks devoted for emphasis, it’s the bunching of new monsterwords, it’s the mimicry of the huckster’s voice that marks this prose with the voice of the American Fool.

As such, Gillespie launches his fluency at the barriers, and it escapes, though “William” never makes it out. Lamont is still beyond the cellar; the letter may reach her, but William can’t pull off Keats’ “viewless wings of Poesy” trick, can’t mail himself in his letter, because Lamont exists only outside the confines of prescribed wanting.

You were on the outside of the bulletproof glass and we spoke through a phone line being monitored by guards. You were telling me that you had baked a typewriter inside the cake you brought for me so I would finally have a weapon. (75-6)

Only her simulacrum is inside, her eidolon, an occasion for writing. Since he cannot speak to her face to face, having only English instead of a language freed because mutual, there is no way for this book to end, unless as his reimagined ending of another great love story:

… [A]nyway like then Romeo kills himself by ingesting a poisonous substance but like in my production he ingests fake poison right so then when Juliet wakes up and sees him lying there like asleep right she kills herself too but like she ingests fake poison to so like then a couple of hours go by then like Romeo wakes up and sees like yknow Juliet kinda lying there and he goes wow man shes dead id better kill myself again and then a couple more hours go by and then when the audience starts getting sorta restless Juliet like yeah you got it wakes up and discovers Romeo and and the whole thing repeats like one of those thingamajiggers whatchamacallit thingamabobs… loops. (74)

Towards the end we begin to feel Lamont’s approach, or the intensification of William’s wish, and as she gets nearer, the scenarios of their meeting become more and more overdetermined, the characters more and more overdressed (“You were wearing that dress, you know, the one with the periodic table of elements. Or was it the one with the tessellation of Escherlizards?” [79]), so that they must constantly change uniforms. The scene builds towards a meeting, anticipates the pleasures of an elaborate Italian meal, a civilized smoke, a kiss, a courtship dance, the scream of a power tool, a phonecall from the office, mushrooms frosted with psilocybin… the revery turns dark before it is cut short by the closing salutation (80).

In the postscript William is heading for a Mexico City with no discernible Mexican content. To get there he must erase his citizenship in Cellarland; he must, for instance, be “walking out the door right now and realize with a sniff that I left the oven on and the pilot light isn’t lit” (83). And he must make some important changes in the intervening geography: “…and then I will rent a car and drive across the Gulf of Mexico—I’ve always wanted to do that” (83). A fantasy to close with; fantasies are usually false escapes, but this is one of that rare kind whose substantiality has been earned by the honesty with which realities have been displayed; a Notgothic fantasy no longer in the service of narcissism, since there is no face in that mirror; a fantasy that lingers like a trail of smoke in a cellar that someone just fled. We can use it to read our own flight.

Newspoetry

information

Sure Do Wish You'd Get You One Of These Here Taters

Review:

This is a thoughtful, illuminating, deeply resourceful reading of a "difficult" book. Gillespie has a lot of useful things to say about Suttree, to be sure, but his essay also speaks eloquently about the ways we approach books, and how we come to inhabit them. — Warren Motte

Table of Forms hardback

Dark blue paperback and hardback. Collection of experimental, ludic, constraint-driven poetry; puzzle book; and writing manual. Hardback cloth version includes extra material.

An exploration of new poetic form & constraint-driven literature . Collection of experimental, ludic, constraint-driven poetry; puzzle book; and writing manual. Hardback cloth version includes extra material. Cloth: ISBN 0-9724244-6-6 $25. Paper: ISBN 0-9724244-7-4 $25. 6 by 9 inches. 136 pages. Distributed by Ingram. 12-31-2006. 

Review:

A wonderfully specific and witful inventory of forms in all senses and sizes. This is the pro model, believe me. — Robert Creeley

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Book review by Joseph Dewey
DOMINIQUE FITZPATRICK-O'DINN. TABLE OF FORMS. SPINELESS BOOKS, 2006. 113 PP. PAPER: $12.00.
Upon seeing an exquisitely wrought statue of, say, a horse, most would see the horse, few would see the marble. So it is with sounds, crude if musical, audaciously coaxed into words. Here is a gathering of language exercises, poems that constrain language by preset obligations, intricate, inventive, demanding directives (words juxtaposed within a line must share a vowel; each line must contain all 26 letters; each successive line must contain one additional letter); here is, in short, an intemperate delight in the marble. The volume--there areno editors listed and the author's "name" is a glorious fabrication--provides a glossary should the careful eye fail to perceive the imbedded patterns. If the challenge is to uncover the design, the glossary may seem intrusive, like a tacky magician distributing a lame handbook of magic tricks to patrons during a show; but in practice the guidelines only help clarify the exotic designs (among them, liponymns, haicoups, and pangrams), like taking a backstage tour of Disneyworld.Of course, language so precisely sculpted must struggle against appearing oppressively clever--a poem that "must" use all the consonants once before repeating any can seem a sterile thing. Only news poems collaged from current events even acknowledge the real world. What we are given, rather, is the compelling it-ness of language liberated from the tedious expectations of mimesis and narrative, language played with brio and elegance. Language thus constrained may depress some readers, like seeing some magnificent jungle animal caged. These are acts, such readers sniff, but not art. But language here is far from restrained--it is disciplined, wily, animated, resourceful, in turn nonsensical and musical, but supremely vital, dazzling to confront ("read" is not quite the verb), sculpted lines smeary with fingerprints, stunned by the audacity of their own construction.-Joseph Dewey, Review of Contemporary Fiction

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Even though few books provide such thorough explanations of their principles of composition as this book does, Table of Forms revels in deception. It is, to begin with, a Spineless Book with a spine that has nothing on it. The author, Dominique Fitz- patrick-O’Dinn, is a patently fraudulent pseudonym for William Gillespie. The “fourth edition,” with a 2006 copyright date, is the first fully revised edition, and was released in the spring of 2007. Anyone who has noticed Spineless Books, with its 2,002-word palindrome story 2002 (2002) by Nick Montfort and William Gillespie and its Fitzpatrick-O’Dinn Prize for rule-driven literature, might be prepared for this audaciously ambitious and beautifully realized col- lection of poems written by formal constraints, and yet even the most devoted followers and practitioners of such work may cringe at the prospect of having to deal with procedural poetry. Formal work poses two problems: will the forms overpower the poems, making these pieces more interesting as puzzles than as works of art; and, will the act of reading be reduced to a guessing game, in which the reader must solve the puzzle behind the poem or feel stupid at being left out of some joke perpetrated by the poet? Gillespie solves the latter problem by providing a glossary, with definitions and etymology of the methods he uses, and identification of which poems follow which methods. Even when the forms are traditional and obvious (sonnet, sestina, palindrome), this is an essential key, particularly when so many poets take liberties with certain forms, such as the sonnet, as to defy definition. Relieved of having to play the guessing game, I found myself going back and forth from glossary to text, but even- tually the elegance and panache of the poetry kept me from checking the glossary until later. Although formal constraints have been around for centuries, Gillespie works in a contemporary tradition whose foremost practitioners are members of the Oulipo, the Paris-based group of writers and mathematicians founded in 1960 by Raymond Que- neau and François Le Lionnais. Gillespie’s poetry can seem as feverishly wrought as some works of Ian Monk and at other times as stylishly refined as some works of Harry Mathews, but Table of Forms more resembles Queneau’s 1947 classic, Exercises in Style, where he retells the same vignette in different ways, branding each version with the rhetorical device he uses, as well as the recently re-released Oulipo Compendium (2005) edited by Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie, with its definitions and demonstra- tions of a wealth of formal devices. Occasionally, Gillespie’s terms and definitions vary from what other rhetorical guides offer, but these variations, along with their examples, amplify rather than con- fuse the issue at hand. As Georges Perec, particularly in his novel Life: A User’s Manual (1978), seems disinclined to limit himself to using “only” one constraint at a time, Gillespie often uses more than one form at once, sometimes combining them, such as in the following heimlich (haiku plus limerick). Maneuver Newspoem 16 March 2000 there is a forest on fire, flames spreading higher and higher. do I stand around, while it burns to the ground, this deadly maniacal pyre? For that matter, the entire newspoem series not only introduces another layer of constraint to many of the poems here, but also addresses a complaint poets often hear when forms are as evident as content: by forcing readers to adjust to an unusual mode of expression, the writer is being effete or hermetically self-indulgent. Using reports of current events, Gillespie began writing newspoetry in 1995, and from 1999 to 2002, he and Joe Futrelle edited a newspoetry site at http:// www.newspoetry.com that offered a poem a day. These poems show that a level of personal engage- ment with the world at large is more moving and effective than the emotional slop political feelings too often inspire. After all, using their own table of forms, “embedded” journalists that call mercenaries “contractors” render events in an authoritative cant that is more intent on protecting the status quo than with revealing what really happened. A writer using formal devices can emphasize the insidious linguis- tic patterns people have come to accept, whether it comes from the newspaper of record or some broad- cast of fair and balanced propaganda. The advantage of working with a variety of demanding rules is not that you get to say whatever you feel like saying, but that you get to say whatever the rules allow. Using the pantoum, Gillespie retells the story of people sent to prison for protesting the School for the Americas in “Dan and Doris Sage.” As the second and fourth lines of each stanza become the first and third lines of the stanza that follows, the pattern high- lights the pathetic absurdity of the protesters’ plight, as they are trapped in the government’s scheme of justice. In another pantoum newspoem, Gillespie and Andy Gricevich commemorate a presidential encounter with a former adversary, but in “Clinton Does Vietnam,” the form takes on a breezier, hilari- ous tone as it plays with the mode of speech of a consummate politician. Many of these poems express a certain personal stake, either in political or social matters, and many do not express a stake in anything Gillespie or his pseudonym might care to reveal. The advantage of working with a variety of demanding rules is not that you get to say whatever you feel like saying, but that you get to say whatever the rules allow. The freedom such restriction allows can lead the writer to write works she or he never would otherwise think of writing. One disadvantage of working with a variety of demanding rules is that the objective of meeting the demands of the rules can overpower all other con- cerns. I don’t mind if the forms take over the poem, but some of the poems here (e.g., “Joey Zoey” and “Poetry Class”) strike me as more interesting in the ways they follow their rules, while others, such as the above-mentioned newspoems, reach out to readers to make them alternately forget and appreciate the rules of their construction. One danger of working with rules is the rule of taking a constraint to the limit. That is, to tap the potential of a particular constraint, a writer tries to test all of the possibilities such a constraint offers. After spending time on a project, it’s tempting to publish the outtakes as well as the more refined work. Gillespie avoids this pitfall. If he sometimes provides only brief illustrations of constraints that others have applied to more fully realized projects (why attempt lipograms, after Georges Perec wrote a novel without using the letter “e” and Christian Bök wrote a long poem in univocal sections, practically exhausting the words that contain only one kind of vowel), his facility at combining constraints sets and meets additional challenges. Rather than repel readers by cloaking its procedures, Table of Forms invites anyone to participate. This is a generous and welcome addition to the literature of constraints.-Doug Nufer, American Book Review

Table of Forms paperback

Paperback edition of Table of Forms.

Tinyman for President

Review:

“Back during the turbulent 60s, faced with the threat of nuclear holocaust, racial and cultural unrest, political assassinations, and the Vietnam War, American artists Stanley Kubrick (in Dr. Strangelove) and Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) responded by inventing absurdist satiric fantasies so outrageous and compelling that they exposed the nightmarish logic underlying our nation’s collective peril—and kept us laughing even as they cut most deeply. Q. Synopsis’s hilariously disturbing and deeply informed novel about the 2020 American Presidential election, Tinyman for President, is that same kind of ambitious satire—albeit one whose off-the-grid creative impulses have the ability to channel moral outrage into the literary equivalent of Never Mind the Bollocks. Wake up, Americans, and…  Make America Tiny Again!"— Larry McCaffery,  editor of Storming the Reality Studio,  Expelled from Eden,  and Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation

.....

The New New Journalism
Davis Schneiderman (bio)
Tinyman for President
Q. Synopsis
I-BeaM Books
https://shop.spybeambooks.com/product/tinyman-for-president
150 Pages; Print, $20.20

That this anonymous novel’s price is that of the vexed year it covers is one of the many small details lovingly girding the body of this metafictional text. Another is the name of the purported author, a pseudonym for a small-press writer whose impressive work has been seriously underappreciated, even while maintaining a those-in-the-know impressiveness for those, well, in the know.

In fact, it was because an ABR editor approached me to review a work by this specific author under their real name that caused me to agree to write this review. Only when Tinyman for President arrived in the mail did I discover the nom de guerre; after corresponding with the editor, I was told the author would prefer I review the work “as a novel by ‘Q. Synopsis’ rather than mentioning that ‘Synopsis’ is one of his pseudonyms” (though he added, “if Davis feels comfortable doing it this way”). Since I’ve long ago given up any sense of comfort, I agreed, although the preceding sentence suggests this is not the first Kierkegaardian identity our intrepid author has deployed.

That I started writing this several days before the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and a mere week and change after the insurrection at the Capitol that provides a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction for Tinyman, it’s also true that the book manages to carry more than enough insightful surprises. These hold water during a period where everything about the United States is leaky. Or maybe air filled, as the Tinyman cover shows an untethered balloon with American flag design (foreground) about to be popped, optical illusion style, on the tip of the Capitol dome (background). There’s no middle ground anywhere.

Q’s frame — diametrically opposed to the QAnon cult and its role-paying-game paranoia — is one part New Journalism (see the back cover comparisons to Hunter S. Thompson) and three parts questioning of a “what the actual f*&% is going on?” mode. Put those in a blender with a bit of barely credible comic-book backstory, and you have a satire not for the ages but for this age. This now. This muddle. Let me explain.
In the novel, Tinyman is the most pathetic type of self-involved superhuman, in a world that has more than its fair share:

Not a maniac, but endowed with superpowers with which a true maniac could cause severe mayhem…Tinyman was not tiny. In socks and sandals, he stood about 5’8 3/4”, 98 pounds. Though he was obliged to fight crime, he had a nonconfrontational disposition and social anxiety, insecurity, hypersomnia, and his supersenses were prone to hallucinations…. Also, unlike his many glamorous supercolleagues, his entertainment properties were slim, and amounted to a three-issue comic book run, long out of print.
Q. runs with the joke, as Tinyman takes on various public- and self-deprecating aspects that collect against the dominant narrative of omnipresent superhero stories. In a world without The Tick, The Boys, etc., this might be enough of an animating spark, but it’s precisely the sense of imminent deflation (cue soon-to-be-popped cover balloon) that make Tinyman work so strangely compelling.

It’s not the plot, which is deliberately simple — Tinyman and his team try to get him both elected and not elected as President, and he persists nonetheless; there’s a Watchmen (1987) like chill over the proceedings, as heroes are forbidden from using their powers, and the ambiguous toggle of Tinyman’s un/electability proves an acerbic commentary that exists both narratively and as a seeming act of meta-narrative omniscience.
In any event, Tinyman doesn’t want to be President (or does he?), and the while the enterprise benefits from the Bartelby-like ambiguities of the titular here, the novel’s crypto-protagonist is his hapless campaign manager Johnny Werd, who works for Tinyman precisely because Werd doesn’t really believe Tinyman can win (and despite their mutual disdain for Trump...

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