Curtis White — Metaphysics in the Midwest [1988]

Anti-mainstream, anti-middlebrow, anti-corporate culture critic Curtis White, author of The Middle Mind and The Science Delusion, continues to entertain in his non-fiction with contrarian and iconoclastic views. Before becoming a culture critic, White was a practitioner of rumbustious comedic fictions leaping over the boundaries of historiography and good taste, as evidenced in this second collection of short stories. The stories are set in Illinois, where White was raised and professored, where now he raises and professors, and each mingle local history, cultural references, taboos, and surreal humour with varying degrees of success. The titular story concerns a Professor Feeling, a crazy scholar of metaphysics who each night visits a boy called The Commissioner to talk about baseball. In ‘A Disciplined Life’ an Italian immigrant finds himself locked up prison upon arriving in America, and his wife and chlild housed in the prison warden’s home. In ‘More Crimes Against the People of Illinois’, an office typist attempts to perpetrate a rebellion by baring her breasts in the office, before being arrested for her protestations of office prostitution. ‘Howdy Doody is Dead’ finds a puppet seeking vengeance on his evil double. ‘Critical Theory’ describes a road trip between Horkheimer and Adorno in America after fleeing from the Nazis. White captures the vernacular of the region and sends it up at the same time in bawdy stories like ‘The Order of Virility’ and ‘Malice’. These summaries fail to capture the sort of freewheeling antics at play in White’s often cruel and sexually lurid stories, so take a dip into the White waters. His strongest works are the novels Memories of My Father Watching TV, with the rare boast of a David Foster Wallace blurb, and Requiem, which I consider his masterpiece.

Editions:

Hardcover, Sun & Moon Press, 1988.

Paperback, Sun & Moon Press, 1989.

Bibliography:

Novels:

Anarcho-Hindu, FC2, 1995.

Memories of My Father Watching TV, Dalkey Archive, 1998.

Requiem, Dalkey Archive, 2001.

America’s Magic Mountain, Dalkey Archive, 2004.

Short fiction:

Heretical Songs, FC2, 1981.

Metaphysics in the Midwest, Sun & Moon Press, 1988.

The Idea of Home, Sun & Moon Press, 1993.

Madeline Gins — What the President will Say and Do!! [1984]

Madeline Gins, a recently expired (1941-2014) artist, architect, and poet from New York, made her mark through her architectural work with Shusaku Arawaka, husband and lifelong collaborator, and produced several books of exploratory prose and poetry throughout her bustling existence. The first, Word Rain (or A Discursive Introduction to the Philosophical Investigation of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says), has long vanished (in spite of this blogger’s frustrated attempts to procure a copy, prices fluctuating from £10 to £1000), was described by Richard Kostelanetz as a “touchstone of innovative prose”, meaning part of the “concrete” scene to emerge in the wake of John Cage. Mr. Cage, in fact, provided an acrostic blurb for this collection, spelling out the author’s name in a vertical strip across his lines of praise, alongside Robert Creeley and Ed Sanders (author of Shards of God). Is it prose, is it poetry, is it, in Sasha Sokolov’s term, prosetry? The answer is both—or neither—or the first—or the second—or a chimpanzee’s armpit. This is a book of nonsense, in essence, and as a champion of nonsense (all nonsense is comedic), I praise the chutzpah of the author and publisher for unleashing it upon the world in the name of Art. Language is twisted and womanhandled beyond recognition for the duration to satirical effect (the opening ‘Presidential Poems’ are idiotic footnoted versions of ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ authored by various prezzies), and the titular centrepiece of the book comprises capitalised lines of nonsensical and hilarious things such as “FILL THE OCEAN WITH COTTON!” or “COLLECT BOTTOMS NON-DISCRIMINATORILY” or “PREVENT A CONGESTION OF TRIANGLES”, a showcase of the absurd on a par with the Pythons or other comic manglers of language. The remaining pieces are short “fictions” written in faux-medical and mathematical modes, or in the form of lists, chronologies, and instructional matter, concluding with a patience-testing although more coherent “essay” on the word THE in fiction (including examples of the word THE being used in fiction). Perhaps there is meaning to be found in that piece, or perhaps an octopus is mating within the ventricles of hope. Co-creator of the Reversible Destiny Foundation—a collective of architects and artists who take a corporeal approach in the creation of art—Gins is also responsible for designing parks and buildings, among them Bioscleave House and the Reversible Destiny Lofts (according to Wikipedia). Might one label this material, excuse me, “pretentious?” Perhaps. But the spirit of play, the pleasure in taking apart and reconstructing language, the skill in forcing the reader to re-question the act of reading: these are hallmarks of some of the most vital works of literature of our time. WtPwSaD!! is a mere curio. However, if chanced upon in some university library, or progressive artists’ commune of some sort, I would recommend having a flicker through to be amused and baffled in equal measure. Fans of the nonsensical might also like to read Kenneth Gangemi’s Corroborree: A Book of Nonsense. Or, you know, Edward Lear or Spike Milligan. Let’s ride a balloon into the purple sponge. Peace. (Read excerpts here).

Editions:

Hardcover, Station Hill Press, 1984.

Bibliography:

Fiction:

Word Rain (or A Discursive Introduction to the Philosophical Investigation of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says), Grossman, 1969.

Intend, Tau/ma, 1973.

What the President Will Say and Do!!, Station Hill Press, 1984.

Helen Keller or Arawaka, Burning Books, 1994.

Paul West — Colonel Mint [1972]

Prolific Derbyshire-born novelist, memoirist, poet, and critic Paul West changed tense on October 18^th (2015). His vast corpus is intimidating for the newcomer, and no fervent Westites exist at present to help us navigate the five decades’ worth of fiction and non-fiction. The Review of Contemporary Fiction published an issue in 1993 on West and Alexander Theroux, after which West penned ten published novels (and various unpublished ones), however, this might help the reader to find a footing. I chose Colonel Mint as the cheapest out of print West available (a large swathe of West is oop), and this proved a fortuitous selection. West’s first two decades seem to have been spent writing verbally dextrous comic fiction of a surreal nature, from the Alley Jaggers trilogy (West’s “British” period), to novels with fantastic titles like Caliban’s Filibuster written after West’s lifelong exile to America. This hilarious and shocking comic novel concerns the titular hero: an astronaut who witnesses the sighting of an angel from a spacecraft’s window. Upon his return he is isolated and interrogated by Lew R., whose task is to expunge the sighting from Mint’s mind. Among his techniques include the assassinations of two fellow astronauts, lowering Mint into a “five-foot-high tea-chest full of thick black ooze reeking of rancid fruit, cowsheds, and drains”, a sequence of violent sexual encounters with Connie Langoustine, a series of staged hallucinatory episodes, and continual poking from a strange taser-like gizmo named the Brabazon. The star of this novel is West’s athletic style, which compliments the surreal and baffling sequence of scenes presented: in terms of humour, we are closer to the overt sexism of Terry Southern and his ilk (each male character has plentiful sex with the unprotesting Connie), however, the satirical message here is sound: the Colonel could not tell the world he had seen an angel in space, for the implications for America and the world would be too large. The novel never strikes a tone of pathos, remaining in its frenetic comic mode throughout, but West plants this pip of pathos in our heads regardless. If one can excuse the period humour, Colonel Mint is a raucous and outrageous entertainment with a point in there somewhere (never too important). West moved into historical novels for the remaining two decades. In 2003, he suffered a severe stroke, from which he recovered (an experience chronicled in his wife Diane Ackerman’s One Hundred Names for Love), publishing two non-fiction titles but not finding a home for the novels he wrote in the period. Here is the excellent obit in the New York Times. And here is West’s one appearance upon KCRW’s Bookworm. And here’s to more plundering of his works!

Editions:

Hardback, 1972, E.P. Dutton.

Hardback, 1973, Calder & Boyars.

Bibliography:

Novels:

A Quality of Mercy, 1961, Chatto & Windus.

Tenement of Clay, 1965, Hutchinson.

Alley Jaggers, 1966, Hutchinson.

I’m Expecting to Live Quite Soon, 1970, Harper & Row.

Caliban’s Filibuster, 1971, Doubleday.

Bela Lugosi’s White Christmas, 1972, Harper & Row.

Colonel Mint, 1972, E.P. Dutton.

Gala, 1976, Harper & Row.

The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, 1980, Harper & Row.

Rat Man of Paris, 1986, Doubleday.

The Place in Flowers, Where Pollen Rests, 1988, Doubleday.

Lord Byron's Doctor, 1989, Doubleday.

The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper, 1991, Random House.

Love's Mansion, 1992, Random House.

The Tent of Orange Mist, 1995, Scribner.

Sporting with Amaryllis, 1996, Overlook Press.

Life With Swan, 1997, Overlook Press.

Terrestrials, 1997, Scribner.

OK: The Corral, the Earps and Doc Holliday, 2000, Scribner.

The Dry Danube: A Hitler Forgery, 2000, New Directions.

A Fifth of November, 2001, New Directions.

Cheops: A Cupboard for the Sun , 2002, New Directions.

The Immensity of the Here and Now: A Novel of 9.11, 2003, Voyant Publishing.

Short fiction:

The Universe and Other Fictions, 1989, Overlook Press.

Graeme Gibson — Perpetual Motion [1981]

Graeme Gibson was one of the novelists at the helm of the Canadian avant-garde scene of the 1960s and 1970s (there being no scene thereafter), alongside his wife Margaret Atwood, Chris Scott, Steve McCaffrey, Gail Scott, Audrey Thomas, and numerous others. His own output is slim: four novels and two non-fiction titles on birds and wildlife, plus one collection of conversations (Eleven Canadian Novelists). Five Legs from 1969 is the seminal modernist opus, utilising the then-popular stream of consciousness lark (with Communion its partner). This is Gibson’s third. A remarkable and bizarre tackling of the historical novel, Perpetual Motion concerns Robert Fraser, a man from Mad River, Ontario in possession of a mastodon skeleton obsessed with creating a perpetual motion machine in spite of his banausic (a word that recurs often in this novel) background. Mixing poetic description and close character narration, alongside a more ponderous tone (with strange shifting of tenses), the style here is unique, refusing to allow the reader to sink into the familiar furniture of the conventional historical novel and keeping him or her perplexed and concerned as the focus and timbre shifts over 280-odd pages, from 1860 to 1879. The Fraser clan is the focus, alongside the cast of oddball characters that populate the father’s life, among them the Irish creep Rochefoucault Hackett, the unprankable Eddie Shantz, and the eccentric Prof. Carruthers, whose tale of a Royal banquet inside the Iguanodon provides some the funniest material in the novel. The depressive and disturbed materfamilias, the robust daughter Annie, amd feral son Angus provide the familial baggage and heart of the matter. Set-pieces include a startling hanging scene, a mass cull of wild pigeons, and the bone-rattling finale when the machine is tested to a packed crowd. The rumbling of the industrial age, the harshness of the rural life, the bawdy backchat of the barrooms, and the psychodrama of the family are rendered vividly by Gibson’s brilliant hand in an elliptical and fabulous work. The character name Robert Fraser is reused in his final novel, Gentleman Death (perhaps mirroring the use of Felix Oswald in his first two novels), where he appears as a novelist. Praised by Annie Dillard, Alice Munro, and Timothy Findley, this novel is one of the better ways to spend six hours. Gibson retired from the fiction-writing biz in 1996 (Atwood, however, is still at large. There is no God).

Editions:

Hardback, McClelland and Stewart, 1982.

Hardback, St. Martin’s Press, 1982.

Paperback, Bantam, 1984.

Paperback, Penguin, 1988.

Paperback, New Canadian Library, 1997. Reissued 2010.

Bibliography:

Novels:

Five Legs, Anansi, 1969.

Communion, Anansi, 1971.

Perpetual Motion, McClelland and Stewart, 1982.

Gentleman Death, McClelland and Stewart, 1993.