Collected writings of William K Gillespie and friends

Reviews:

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

Reviews:

A posthumous lesson in How to Vote:  Jasper Pierce interviews Max Winchester
Smile Politely
September 18, 2012
https://www.smilepolitely.com/arts/a_reminder_how_to_vote_a_manual_by_max_winchester/

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.

A reminder How to Vote! a manual by Max Winchester
review by C.G. Estabrook
Smile Politely
March 15, 2016
https://www.smilepolitely.com/arts/a_reminder_how_to_vote_a_manual_by_max_winchester/

“I never read a book before reviewing it. It prejudices a man so,” wrote the English critic and clergyman Sydney Smith (1771–1845), and as usual with Smith, his witty remark has further implications. Smith knows that the real prejudice that comes from reading is the increase in the accuracy of one’s judgment of the world.

“To prejudice” is generally taken to mean prematurely to affect moral conclusions; but it can also mean to form the basis for an accurate exercise of the intellect, which has to form correct judgements. (That of course depends on the accurate notion that there can be correct opinion on moral matters, and not just expressions of taste: values are matters of fact.)

The common English meaning of “prejudice” (from the Latin prae-/before and iūdicium/judgment) is a preconceived opinion that prevents new information from being correctly considered; but an equally ancient meaning is knowledge formed in advance — foresight, presaging. In other words, the danger in reading the book is that you might learn something from it; worse yet, it may be something you already know but don’t want to admit; and worse still, it may require you to do something. The danger of a good book is that it leads to knowledge and foresight — often against what “everybody knows”. It may require a correction of your attitude (in the older sense not of feelings but of posture, how you stand, ready to act — your mentality — in regard to the world at large).

Max Winchester’s HOW TO VOTE! (the exclamation mark appears only on the cover, and not in the colophon) doesn’t tell you whom to vote for, either in the quadrennial quadrille within which the US is currently entwined, or in real democratic systems. It’s more serious than that. It tells you instead with what mindset or attitude you should approach voting. (The narrower question is answered easily: Bernie in the primary and Jill Stein of the Green party in the general election; but Winchester doesn’t bother with trivialities.). Properly attended to, Winchester’s book will change how you vote in the American 21st century.

Here’s a snippet that the author posted (or that we the living were posthumously influenced so to do):

“[I fell for the Cold War, but I now get it:] Peace was never a political agenda, now no longer even a political word. ‘Peace’ no longer means the absence of war, it means acceptance, as in, ‘Our nation engages in routine war crimes, torture, extrajudicial internment, and extraordinary renditions, and, thanks to Zoloft, I’m at peace with that.'”

HOW TO VOTE! is in fact a book of poetry (not verse). In a different cultural world (not better or worse, just different) its fifty short chapters (most less than a page) would be a sonnet sequence (“1. VOTE AGAINST YOUR INSTINCTS 2. DON’T VOTE…”); if either Bob Dylan or Phil Ochs had lived more intensely, they could have been songs.

But it’s a book more serious than much of what is published under the name of poetry today, often limited as that is to dreams of things thought to be otherwise incommunicable. It is on the contrary a book of moral exhortation, a guide to how to live politically, more comparable to other guides to behavior like Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, designed for the formation of Jesuits, on how to live.

Like all theatre, it is a performance for our benefit. It is not an election manual for this or any other presidential year; it is an act of exhortation, a non-dualistic spiritual compass, an ethical preparation. It is very difficult.

It is a vindicative (sic — not ‘vindictive’) guide to behavior, like the Divine Comedy, Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, even Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Not “vindictive,” in the sense of seeking revenge when wronged, but “vindicative” [sic], in the sense of defining the true, the good, and the beautiful against those who will not see what is common to us all.

    “…Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
    O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
    Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
    O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
    How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

I’m not sure we can, with HOW TO VOTE. Who is this Winchester, come to wake us from our winter woes? In a section “ABOUT THE AUTHOR” we read another sonnet, escaped from the sequence:

“Max Winchester (1951-2011) was a poet whose influence can be found throughout American letters. One of the founding members of the literary arts collective Brickwall Circle, Winchester was a winner of the American Poetry Board’s Younger Poet Prize. In the 1970s, he changed his focus from poetry for the page to performance poetry, sharing stages with the likes of Lou Reed, the Sex Pistols, and Captain Beefheart. He also performed in a controversial multimedia piece by Himmler Linz Kestral Krakow written especially for him. He served as managing editor of the alternative newsmagazine Globe, and wrote the unpublished book-length poem Sphere. He devoted much of his later life to teaching poetry to prisoners in Washington State…”

I showed Winchester’s opus to a learned friend; after a few moments’ perusal he handed it back, saying, “I don’t go for that cutesy smart-ass stuff.”

Curiously enough, that’s the register one falls into, in a society where critical social comments are met with a yawn rather than a punch. From Lenny Bruce to George Carlin to the contemporary French-Cameroonian comic Dieudonné, making people laugh out loud while condemning what they assume, is the best way to get them to notice what is being said. Of course in societies like France — more intellectually repressive than the US — it’s a dangerous tactic: Dieudonné has been jailed and prosecuted on several occasions.

Winchester is beyond that. But his important spiritual exercise shouldn’t be beyond us.

Editor’s note: In 2012, Smile Politely ran an interview with the author to commemorate the publication of the first edition. Now in edition 1.2, the book has been revised for this election cycle, with a different cover, new text, and new publisher. How to Vote! is available for purchase locally at Exile on Main Street and on display in various other reputable haunts. Online, you can get it from Urbana publisher spineless books.

Reviews:

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.”

 - Joseph Dewey, Review of Contemporary Fiction (Spring 2004)

Reviews:

"...frequently brilliant. Those willing to grapple with its complexities are rewarded with a remarkable work of fiction.” AMERICAN READER

“It’s useful to point out here that much literary experiment is essential playful, fun. And Gillespie’s novel, despite being about disease and the the near total destruction of mankind, has a (ever so deliciously macabre) hopeful side.” NUMÉRO CINQ

“…This is an experimental novel-chunks of poetry interrupt the traditional chapters, graphics appear throughout, and a middle section is horizontal-but the pleasure of the text is fine and true…” LIBRARY JOURNAL REVIEW

“…one of the most inventive and absorbing books I've
read in the last year…” INSIDE HIGHER ED

"…a violent, apocalyptic story told with an arsenal of narrative tropes.” BOOKLIST

"…you would have to go back to Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro to find such a purely poetic take on the unthinkable.” PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY

“…stupendous, mind-bending…” AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW

“…by turns bewildering and gorgeous, maddening
and profound…” SMILE POLITELY

“…stunning…” THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN: NOBBIE AWARDS

“The author’s foray into the inconceivable digs far beneath the trusty surface of cause and effect. He parlays his scientific familiarity to create maddening illustrations showing all we know is consistently less than what we don’t.” BOOK CORNER

“…by turns horrifying, poignant, hilarious, ugly, beautiful, mysterious, poetic, and overall, human, all-too human. Gillespie is able to achieve all this because he is an incredibly talented writer, adept at a wide range of styles, making this novel an exhilarating roller coaster of a read which I recommend without reservation.” DIRK STRATTON

Reviews:

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 18.

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. - Tom La Farge

Reviews:

We might consider Steal Stuff From Work an anti-capitalist manifesto in novel form, a call to arms whose urgency is dampened only by the malaise that washes the narrative. Debut novelist Jasper Pierce has created a world defined by worker dissatisfaction and its attendant resentment, recognizably ours but pushed a notch out of realism and into the realm of the neardystopic . That this near-dystopia hews so closely to social realism is telling, and shows a novelist hitting his mark with a strong indictment of the US labor system.

Dramatizing the plight of various characters stuck in menial jobs with no benefits or health care, the book extends this realism into the speculative, imagining what might happen if such laborers united—and revolted. The results are mixed, making for a more complex argument than simply socialist revolution as easy fix.

We follow Kemp as he moves from job to job, his fragmented narration effectively mimicking the fragmentary nature of a life lived in part-time, the uneasy feeling of losing one’s identity to multiple meaningless, disposable jobs. How to maintain some semblance of personal dignity in the capitalist workplace? Following Kemp’s logic, you steal stuff from work. He explains his MO early on: 

I’ve had jobs every day of my life since I was eight. My spirit had just about been hammered flat. Working took its toll on me, until the day I started taking my toll on it. I had become so exhausted and demoralized that by the end of the day I was no longer taking any of myself home from work. So I started taking some of my work home with me.

As Kemp moves from job to job, from dishwasher to server to telephone book distributor to bookseller to Web designer to bed-and-breakfast lackey, he swipes, or helps others swipe, the following : steaks, alcohol, a mounted black bear, gardening tools, books, records, a city bus, a hotel room, the obligatory toilet paper, and more. He collects jobs; he collects things stolen from jobs.

When he finds himself reunited with his old friend Jasper, who has made a home of his workplace , a Rent-a-Room inside the mall where Kemp distributes phone books, a revolution is hatched. Or rather, an already hatched revolution swells, as it’s really Jasper’s brainchild from the start, with Kemp putting aside his apathy to help make his friend’s vision reality. Jasper is more elusive and transitory than Kemp, his politics more radical; if this were Fight Club (1996) (and the two texts’similarities are worth noting), Jasper would be the Tyler Durden to Kemp’s anonymous narrator.

Together, Jasper, Kemp, and their cohorts found Steal Stuff From Work Day, concentrating on spreading word to disgruntled employees nationwide in preparation for the November 11th holiday. Kemp builds a website where he uploads SSFW business cards to be downloaded and printed by their network of Kinko’s employees. The group plans and pulls off (or doesn’t quite) pranks like making CDs and playing them in stores that sell CD players. “When it explodes,” the mastermind explains, “the employees go to turn off the music and find a label on the CD with a note about Steal Stuff From Work Day.” Through these kinds of schemes, the group is able to organize and execute a day of mass-scale vocational kleptomania.

Through relating these schemes, too, the novel acts as a how-to manual for the reader, its title functioning as much as a command as a description of the events its covers contain. A number of schemes are offered up as ways to blast holes in the system, ways to unite the masses. There is a note of caution, however, as the pranksters don’t always win. People get hurt. There are fires. Injuries. Citywide calamity.

As all this goes on, Jasper, Kemp, and their crew are squatting in a farm-turned-commune guarded by stolen police cars. Kemp, the apathetic foil to Jasper’s radical socialist, asks himself whether this new situation is much better. Disillusioned with the community he has helped create, Kemp wants out, and quickly leaves to fend for himself. While the novel at times veers anxiously close to Adbusters didacticism, Kemp's sustained ambivalence about the movement he's founded keeps it from reachinghe's founded keeps it from reaching that point. 

As well, Kemp's contradictory ethics are questionable, making him somewhat unreliable and thus more complex as a narrator. "I'm principled," he says. "I never steal from coworkers or customers, only from the job itself." Despite these self-proclaimed principles, he can't help but steal wine from a friend, and vegetables from the farm. Kemp's politics are earnest, but his principles breached. Who is the enemy? It's no longer clear: his kleptomania overpowers his ideology.

The novel enacts a revolution whose conse- quences remain ambiguous at the close of the book. Whether or not Steal Stuff From Work Day is a feasible solution to the problem, the problem exists: humans as workers are undervalued. The novel's great strength is its ability to proliferate parables describing this problem, and Kemp's rhetoric fre- quently sears. While his more ideologically driven moments occasionally come off as overwrought, their sheer earnestness forgives the melodrama. Structured as a progression of short vignettes, his narration is interspersed with shorter, more urgent passages rendered in italics and often using the collective "we" to abstract Kemp's story to a more universal problem. "What was wrong with us that we couldn't pay for childcare, tuition or a trip to the dentist?" he laments. "Given every chance to become middle class, we had fallen flat."

Steal Stuff From Work Day provides an oppor- tunity for the employees of the world — and by this time, the organization has made a global impact — to seize power and resources. And it works — or seems to, at least partially. The aftermath, according to tele- vision and newspaper accounts, is part apocalypse, part new world, with neither version winning out. When, in the last few passages, the point of view shifts from Kemp's "T" to second person and finally to third-person limited, there is a confusion of per- spective that seems intentional. Where throughout the novel the reader is asked to do a good bit of work filling in gaps left when jumping between scenes and temporalities, here the reader is left with a number of irresolvable ambiguities. This is less irksome than it is fitting, for, by the end of Steal Stuff From Work Day, few people, Kemp included, know what has happened. The revolution has taken place. Now what?

Milks, Megan. "Vocational Kleptomania." American Book Review, vol. 30 no. 4, 2009, p. 19-19. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/abr.2009.0110.

Steal Stuff From Work: An Interview with Author Jasper Pierce by Joel Gillespie, published in Smile Politely 2008 October 13.

Once in a while, a book comes along that makes a real impression that lasts long after you put it down. Steal Stuff From Work, new from Jasper Pierce on Spineless Books, is a great reflection of our current state of affairs, and a signal of what may be to come. Kemp, a light-fingered dishwasher at an upscale Seattle restaurant (as well as an employee at other menial jobs), steals from his employers while trying to keep his life in order. When a theft goes wrong, he loses his restaurant job and organizes others for a National Steal Stuff From Work Day. Things spiral out of control, on both a personal and societal level. It’s a moving and disorienting tale of extreme commitment that springs from roots of extreme apathy.

After the jump, Jasper Pierce volunteered his ideas on being overworked and underappreciated, his book’s roots in Champaign-Urbana, and the potential for revolution in the United States. Stick around and check it out.

Smile Politely: I really like the line, “A stitch of sleep before the alarm clock reopens the wound.” Exhaustion seems to be an ongoing theme in the book. Were you sleep-deprived during the writing of the book, or was that just a recollection of past experiences with exhaustion?

Jasper Pierce: The novel depicts characters who hold multiple part-time jobs, working more than forty hours a week, with no security or benefits, who still cannot make ends meet. Thus, exhaustion.

SP: The book is set in Seattle, but you’ve worked in Champaign-Urbana. What are some similarities to businesses or people in the book to their counterparts in real life?

JP: The restaurant Eisenhower’s as a setting is modeled after Kennedy’s, back before it became a tasteful golf course restaurant and was housed in Sunnycrest mall, dark and windowless, with an authentic aura of creepy malice. The owner Allen Strange is a conflation of numerous notoriously abusive, unpleasant, or incompetent restaurant owners in the twin cities, including Ray Timpone, Pal Bock (of the Original Pancake House), and Allen Strong (of the Courier and Silvercreek, among numerous other ventures). This part of the book wrote itself.

SP: The dialogue in the book is great, really snappy, with a lot of fantastic one-liners. Like, “That’s your rent money. You need that to buy beer with.” Was the dialogue made up out of whole cloth, or did you store away some gems that you’d heard?

JP: I made it up, but working as a waiter for many years I absorbed the quick, sarcastic rhythms of restaurant workers. Waiters and waitresses are caustic when out of earshot of the customers, in contrast to the polite, servile face they may present in the dining room.

SP: What’s been your experience with socialist and anarchist organizations? Are you a student of any particular political or social philosophy?

JP: I’m a socialist, with faith in the ability of ordinary people to manage their own government and economic institutions, and with a belief that the purpose of those institutions is to provide for the basic needs of the people. I am not affiliated with any organization at present and vote Democrat by default, sometimes with mild enthusiasm.

SP: The ending of the book reminds me a lot of Invisible Man, where the nameless protagonist is holed up in a room full of light. Was that an intentional parallel or, if not, do you think it’s a comparable situation?

JP: The character of Kemp could not ride out the consequences of his beliefs and becomes permanently alienated both from society and his former friends. The parallel to Ellison was not intentional, but kudos to you for making that connection—it’s most flattering.

SP: What is your background? In the book, the narrator’s mother is a professional strikebreaker and his father owns restaurants. Were you trying to say something about the necessity of proper parenting, or rather, something about the lack of conformity passed down and therefore less complicity?

JP: Kemp’s alienation from his workplace and the world began at home. His parents treated him like an employee, a liability, or an asset, regarding him as an uncertain economic investment rather than a human to be loved unconditionally.

SP: Was the character of Cy (a waiter whose competence is matched only by his kleptomania) based on a real person, and if so, what is that person up to now?

JP: Cy was originally based on a guy named Cy who lives in New Hampshire, but became infused with the mannerisms of Louis, who is a professional waiter at an upscale steakhouse in Cincinnati.

SP: “I wondered what kind of glue would hold the city together when money stopped working.” What do you imagine would be the glue?

JP: It would have to be compassion. Otherwise it would be blood. I believe people are hard-wired to care for and respect one another, though, as we mature, this programming gets overwritten with greed, ambivalence, cowardice, fear, and self-interest, which are all characteristics rewarded by this economic system.

SP: “Money is at most paper, no more than a bribe and threat, an imaginary negative number.” No question here, just really liked the line.

JP: :)

SP: I really liked the preventing information highway robbery announcement. Have you had jobs that passed out crap like that, except not as self-awarely? What the hell?

JP: Never have I worked anyplace with that level of self-awareness, but that memo makes explicit a characteristic of many office jobs I have held. Underachievers are valuable assets, posing no threat to the managerial class.

SP: What is the most interesting thing that you’ve stolen from work?

JP: Myself.

But the important question is not what but why. Why would you be tempted to steal from work, if you would never steal from a store or from church or from strangers? Because the work you do has no human value? Because your boss doesn’t appear to work or even know how his business is run and yet has bought many antique cars with the revenue his laborers generate? Because you have more charm and fire and education and work experience than the neurotic managing editor who assigns you his grunt work? Because there’s something innately offensive about making $10/hour to park Lexuses for New England assholes whose dogs get better health care than you? Because you got paid minimum wage to remove asbestos from a greenhouse in July? Because you were meant for something better? Because we all were?

SP: I also saw a lot of parallels to Fight Club, even in the female character passed back and forth between the main characters. Did you ever consider Jasper and Kemp being two sides of the same personality?

JP: Not as such. They both grew out of my personality to some extent, but were also modeled on real people. The characters, to the best of my ability, were meant to be complements to one another: mutually exclusive personalities, in other words.

SP: Was this set in the present-day? There really weren’t a lot of clues that I recognized. What do you imagine Kemp is up to now?

JP: The novel is set in 2011, though this is not revealed. This future world is the same as the present day, if trends (such as rising gas prices) continue. Although this is far from clear in Steal Stuff From Work, a deadly virus is unleashed on Steal Stuff From Work Day, stolen from a lab, and a plague sweeps the world. Kemp is likely to be one of the survivors, because of his total isolation in the secret hotel room. He will be one of those who gets to rebuild society, whether or not he is up to the task.

SP: Do you think there’s any potential for actual revolution in the US? Do you consider the book more of a cautionary tale, call to arms, or a bit of both?

JP: On the path we’re on, social collapse seems inevitable. There is potential for revolution in the U.S.—that’s how our country was founded. The book is a call to arms. One of the reasons it is set in Seattle was to honor the Seattle General Strike of 1919, which still stands as a model of what a united population could accomplish.

.

REVIEW BY IAIN MATHESON

If iter_ability_ marks/divides and exceeds from the start (sic:)) then iter_ation_ - caught in a lop-sided reversal of act into potential,made a sub-transcendental asymptote - never comes,can never come. Repetition then must stand a kind of difference.
          I gabble this mantra to make myself feel better about opening another /mail with apologies for the delay.:)

I think _Steal Stuff From Work_ is a little masterpiece. I'd like to concentrate on pp. 44-.
          From p. 55 a generalised redistribution - initially individual--anarchistic,tendentially (as Machiavellied by Cy's spectacular theft of a grand piano pp. 48-50) (only) a gesture: constrained by (available) stock and by financial and as it were political prudence i.e. constrained by objective pro-fetishism/exploitation - phases (freed of the first constraint but not the second) into a high-potential reformist activism; but once put beyond _both_ constraints i.e. massified: converted into (a tactic of) destruction _as opposed to destructuration_ it (said redistribution) phases once more into a lawless/feudalised (= honest:)) (neo-)capitalism - retrieving (the violent _phenomenon_ of) property relations by way effectively of a dominating/principal commodity fetishism (this the constitutive mis-recognition of capitalism itself: the homeostatification of feudal fetishism (exchange-value)),implicitly fusing the previous forces means and relations of production into an/_the_ instrument of production in a new infrastructure _itself_ - finally - the neither formal nor real subsumption by capitalism of (what counts today as) (radical) _reality_). Of contingent dialectical necessity then said redistribution's truth is _non/apocalyptically_ to _destructure_ _nothing_:

STAGE               1              2a              2b              3
  
PAGE REFERENCE      ...p.44        pp.48-50        pp.55-59        pp.62/64-
  
DIEGESIS            ...William's   Cy's            the             the
                    Kinko's        piano           meeting         janitor/
                    email          theft                           William's
                                                                   dis-
                                                                   illusion;
                                                                   general
                                                                   dis/
                                                                   integration

COMPOSITION         Redistribution Gesture          Reformism      Neo-capitalism
                    (individual--  [expressive      (collectivist: [contingent--
                    anarchist:     immediacy]       pre-rational)  necessary
                    formal)/                                       term;
                    gesture                                        contingent
                    [latency]                                      dialectical
                                                                   mediacy]

/                   |-------------------------------X--------------X
MODEL               X
                   |--------------X

Note the difficult logic of all this establishes not the contingency but the necessity of our 'dialectical mediacy'.--No doubt it is finally in something like these terms that we should understand both capitalism's 'ghostly' resilience(s?) and the historical lesson of the American Revolution,perhaps the only (founding) event by which capitalism's '''identity'''/_system(s?)_  was/were exposed - precisely in and by being assumed in practice.)
          Still there hides in 2b's warmth and in the difficult logic of the shift from 2b to 3 the transcendental blueprint of an im/mediate/interstitial utopia: reformist praxis _lived_ (thus as a pre-communism) _i.e. outwith any (constructive) 
attempt to render this pre-communism (strategically) explicit by way of destruction_,_outwith (as the first Wittgenstein might say) any attempt to _speak_ a(n only) showable/_. Because a more-than-reformist praxis carried out under the same conditions could yield yet more than a _pre-_communism.--Is that the real lesson of _Mai '68_?

Reviews:

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

Reviews:

A wonderfully specific and witful inventory of forms in all senses and sizes. This is the pro model, believe me. — Robert Creeley, 2004

The Review of Contemporary Fiction
June 22, 2007
Pg. 151(1) Vol. 27 No. 2 ISSN: 0276-0045 
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.

Nufer, Doug. "The Content of the Form." American Book Review, vol. 31 no. 5, 2010, p. 17-17. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/abr.2010.0007.

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 collection 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 marvellously fulfils every hope I (could have) had for it. As I read it: in its course the paradigmatic (as in essence meontologically the non-identical transcendental condition -- or irreal limit -- of any/all pragmatic matrice(s)) is forced to appear as meontologically the irreal repressor,(only) virtual death of various actually:) meontologically identical -- since /algorithmic or as-phonetic* -- counter-paradigms; that is: forced to appear as being unable to '''function''' juridically save in an alienated way,ontologically as the hermeneutic closure,terminal arrest,de-semiotisation of some -- N.B.: exemplary -- /instances of the syntagmatic. As I read it then Table/ brings general linguistics -- finally -- to /term by way of an unavoidable integration-dissolution of the concept of the (meontological) paradigmatic into that of its /alterior: (Heideggerean) onticity,'''signifiers''' &c. as simply ontic—heterogeneous. One putative transcendental condition collapses into a transcendental obstacle and in so doing (re-)opens the -- material -- questions of the principle and ontological consistency of the field of '''language/s'''.----This is an excellent place forward from which refreshed/schooled to be (re)going:).

—Iain Matheson, personal correspondence

Reviews:

"...a cunning piece of mimickry that manages to maintain an almost chinkless front of officialese while telling a funny, surreal, even touching story. Purporting to be a report on an ill-fated attempt by the CIA to employ civilians (including Bruce Springsteen) with a gift for ancient languages as code-talkers on a secret narcotics mission, and complete with documentary trimmings, it patches into the dynamics of rumor and urban myth to run its operation in the grey area between fact and fiction -- a project perfectly suited to the web, where grey areas abound. It also exploits the ease of internet publishing to resurrect the Victorian model of serial publishing." 

 - Shelley Jackson

Reviews:

William Gillespie. The Story That Teaches You How To Write It. Spineless Books, 2005. 79 pp. Paper: $10.00.

Apparently, the year is 1996. Forming a postmodernist, theory-driven novel is at the forefront of the ostensible author’s thoughts. The Story That Teaches You How To Write It is a logical byproduct of the mass production of fiction writers by university MFA programs. Interestingly, the program in which this novel is set encourages theoretical analysis of work, yet it never seems to venture beyond narratology. The narrator begins to construct a novel by pulling together the theoretical positions of several notable critics and authors, including Roland Barthes and David Foster Wallace, who apparently was the teacher of the workshop at which the story was constructed. The recto pages examine the pushing and pulling of narrative theories as argued during class. Diagrams, outlines, and geometry are employed to help clarify the concepts. The verso pages attempt to illustrate the theoretical discourse within the context of a particular story about two writing students whose lesbian affair is disrupted by a tryst one of them has with their teacher. Much is made of the riskiness of the unattributed dialogue between one of the women and her psychiatrist, but such dialogue remains closer to Portnoy’s Complaint than anything truly risky (i.e., non-narrative). And though the plot is presented in varying ways that are commented upon in the theory section, the Gillespie character defines story strictly as narrative, and both the recto and verso sections move forward chronologically. Implied in this is that much of the intellectual spinning that is done in MFA programs is really little more than rationalization for a pro-narrative fictional bias. Is Gillespie tacitly supporting this bias or is he satirizing the dominance of that old two-step? Underlying the identification of dialogue as a method for writing a scene in “real time” is the dominance of chronology. Not only is the superiority of narrative a foregone conclusion for the workshop participants, but other possibilities, such as “geographic achrony” are only paid lip service. No matter how fast one spins while dancing the two-step, it’s still the two-step. And despite the two-steppers’ claims to the contrary, it is not the only dance in town. Gillespie is, I suspect, satirizing narrative by supporting it with narratology to its most absurd extreme, and I applaud. When he says of his own story that it “takes place within a very small subculture: the world of graduate studies in English,” he rightly displays a narrator who has, like many MFA survivors, been duped. MFA programs are churning out narrativists as fast as Oprah-ites can swallow them. The only difference between untrained and unwashed popular writers and the so-called “literary” writers that academia manufactures is that the latter try to justify their commodification by using highfalutin’-sounding narratology as a defense, and the former just wave their dollars at everyone and give them the raspberry.

 - Eckhard Gerdes, Context

Reviews:

Dans le domaine strictement numérique, l'un des exemples les plus aboutis est Millenium or the unknown. La page d'accueil de ce site anglophone, fascinante, propose un dialogue dans lequel les personnages commentent leur projet d'écriture hypertextuelle par un procédé de mise en abyme et notent qu'il ne devrait pas y avoir, en théorie, de début, puisque tous les éléments sont reliés. C'est la fin de l'incipit traditionnel: l'enjeu n'est plus de susciter la poursuite linéaire de la lecture, mais d'aiguiser le désir d'une exploration dont l'inconnue est bien sûr le comportement de l'internaute.

-Hugues Marchal, Magazine Littéraire

I’ve known Mr. Gillespie as an early pioneer and consistent supporter of electronic literature. The grand hypertext fiction he created with Scott Rettberg and others, The Unknown, is a landmark of digital writing and one of the most inspiring products of those wild, early moments. It was the energy and vision of people like William who made that first harvest possible.

- Stuart Moulthrop

Reviews:

“C’est la fi n de l’incipit traditionnel: l’enjeu n’est plus de susciter la poursuite linéaire de la lecture, mais d’aiguiser le désir d’une exploration dont l’inconnue est bien sûr le comportement de l’internaute.”—Hugues Marchal, Magazine Littéraire

“…genuinely multisequential and massively rich in story material…”—Robert Coover

“...hilarious...”—London Independent

“…these guys can really write.”—Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune

“…a classic…”—Jennifer Ley, Pif Magazine

“a ‘monsterpiece’”—Tom LeClair, University of Cincinnati

“…a uniquely personal encounter with a medium that is usually about alienation…”—Nick Montfort, Technology Review

“…very well-written and lively…”—Neal Pollack, Encyclopedia Brittanica

“…the novel holds its own against anything in the growing genre of electronic literature…”—Brad Quinn, City Beat

“…new and important…”—Eastgate Reading Room

“…really hysterical…”—Eirikur Hallgrimsson

Reviews:

“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
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).

Their lazy campaign is like Trump 2.0 if it came from the left, and we never find out if Tinyman will take the prize. In a way, the plot is extraneous enough to be almost entirely beside the point. And plot aside, Werd’s how-not-to-run- a-campaign schtick is often enjoyably resonant: “In trying to assemble the policy platform on the Tinyman campaign wiki, Werd was cutting and pasting large portions of Warren’s and Sander’s online text,” followed by a thoughtful excurses on how most political facts are repeatedly plagiarized in the sinister act of “becoming” facts. While Werd is filled with familiar self-loathing, the narrative voice delivers some of the best bons mot as it ambiguously separates itself from Werd. Q. make’s excellent use of free indirect discourse, and it’s the blurry line between character and narrator that allows Tinyman to transcend its comic-book-paper-thin story. Such insight is a marker of Q.’s former work (presented most notably in a biological pathogen-based post-apocalyptic novel I’ve thought of numerous times since the advent of COVID). There are numerous passages that jump off the page — easily untangling from the story and floating free over the dark discursive state that currently dominates our lives. The way this often works is worth explicating. In this typical example, Werd muses upon something with his sardonic commentary:

Joe Biden was connected, somehow, to Ukraine and hackers and the deep state and he invented the novel coronavirus along with Hunter Biden as part of the plan to take your guns away so you’d be defenseless against the black helicopters. These lies swirled endlessly on Facebook like a clogged toilet.

Following this is more abstract commentary upon the example: “What’s in a fact? Is a fact loud? Fancy? Does it give away hats? Does a fact have lobbyists? Yes, if often does. But lies have lobbyists as well.” 

It is impossible, though, to recreate the impact of these insights in a review, because there are so many examples, and they are often wildly surprising and uproariously prescient. Q.’s power has also been their ability to write adjacent realities that reflect our own back to us in glorious distortion. Before Trump, this was competent and entertaining postmodernism. During/post Trump, the sentences have a way of puncturing our tenuous hold on reality. 

I desperately want to share by way of final example the book’s last paragraph, but I don’t want to ruin its impact. Instead, the last narrative page (after the paragraph) closes with a single word, centered mid page: “THP!” It’s as if Bloom County’s Bill the Cat had a reasonable chance of controlling the nuclear football. 

I’d like to say that’s a deranged fantasy, but, of course, Tinyman for President isn’t actually fiction. That’s simply what makes it so stunningly effective.